AttorneySync Blog

A critical aspect to getting your law firm more visibility online is a sound content strategy. This wasn’t always the case. There was a time that you could put up a static website, a site that never changed and never had new content added to it, optimize the pages, build some links and get found through the search engines. That time has passed.

What Does A Content Strategy Include?

A sound content strategy has a few major components:

• Consistency – You need to add new content to your site on a regular basis. Whether you are adding blog post articles or more permanent pages doesn’t matter. The important thing is that you are doing so on a regular basis.
• Make It Topical – It is important that you are adding relevant content to your practice. This may seem like a no-brainer, but I have seen many law firm blogs that stray too far from the basis of their practice. Your law firm blog, if you intend to use it to drive more potential clients, should be topical to your practice. You may be interested in writing about Twitter and Blogging for lawyers, however if you intend to use the blog as a vehicle to get more clients this shouldn’t be the primary focus. Of course a post once in awhile about something you like is great and gives your blog a personal touch, just don’t make it the majority of your content.
• Use Keywords – It’s a good idea to do some research and find out the types of keywords searchers are using to find your services online. Integrating relevant keywords into your writing, in an elegant way, helps to get your content found more easily. There is a free SEO Blogger extension for the Firefox browser you can use to help with this.
• Unique Content – Make sure you are writing unique content. Duplicating content will get your content de-indexed by Google. If it doesn’t show up in the search results than it doesn’t do you a whole lot of good.
• An Easy To Use Content Management System – Make sure your website or blog is setup on a system that is easy to add content to. There are an abundance of terrific, free systems you can use so that adding content is as simple as typing it out and clicking publish. We prefer Wordpress, but there are many good ones out there. If you have to hard code your content and manually upload it, you are making your life far more difficult than it needs to be.
• Make It Interesting – Your content should be helpful, educational, and engaging. No one wants to read about how great your firm is. They care about themselves. Give them useful information and show them that you know something about your field.

What Does A Good Content Strategy Do For Me?

A good content strategy can do a number of things for you

• It can help build links to your site which will give your site more trust and authority in the eyes of Google (which will get you ranked higher).
• It engages your audience making them more likely to take an action such as calling your or filling out a form on your site.
• It increases your site’s footprint on the web. Each time you add another piece of content, you are creating another outlet for a potential client to reach you.

What If I Don’t Have The Time?

There are services that can help guide you in the right direction, supplement the content you already produce with additional content, and create content for you. One of our favorites is We Do Web Content. Feel free to contact us for some advice or strategy ideas regarding content for your website.

Free Guide: Writing Content For Your Law Firm’s Website Want to learn how writing content for your firm’s site can help bring in business? Download AttorneySync’s Free Guide On Writing Web Content For Lawyers.

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I encourage every lawyer to understand some basics about how search engines work. In fact, we have made it a priority to provide several educational materials for law firms on the subject of search engine optimization. However, the question of do-it-yourself seo vs. hiring a professional continues to circulate throughout the web.

As the saying goes, “He Who is His Own Lawyer Has a Fool for a Client”. Is the same true when it comes to seo for your law firm? The answer, sometimes.

There are many basic seo tasks that most relatively web-savvy attorneys can probably handle on their own. Optimization of title tags, use of images, and headings, etc. just to name a few.

Free Guide: Getting Your Law Firm Found On Google Do You Want To Know How To Get Potential Clients To Find Your Law Firm On Google? Download AttorneySync’s Free Guide On Getting Your Law Firm Found On Google.

And there are some additional methods, that are vitally important to generating results, like link building, that aren’t necessarily complicated, as much as time-consuming.

Free Guide: How To Build Links For Your Law Firm Website Want to learn how to get your law firm website more trusted, authoritative, and in front of more potential clients? Download AttorneySync’s Free Guide On Building Links For Your Law Firm Website.

However, there are a whole lot more that require more technical web knowledge than most attorneys would ever care to have.

The truth is that the decision of whether or not to hire an seo consultant really depends on your web marketing goals and the level of competition in your segment of the legal services market.

Let’s face it, if you’re a Chicago personal injury lawyer, law firm internet marketing competitive landscape is saturated. Having an experienced law firm seo consultant is essential.

On the other hand, if you’re an intellectual property lawyer in Boise, you may find that you are able to produce some significant results on your own.

The decision of whether or not to hire a professional shouldn’t be taken lightly. Costs associated with law firm search engine optimization can be pretty steep. Also, due to the disparity between what most lawyers know about seo, and the low barrier of entry to becoming an “seo expert”, there is a lot of “snake oil” in the market.

Generally speaking, hiring an seo is a lot like hiring a lawyer. You can avoid a lot of headache by researching your law firm seo, talking to their clients, and simply by searching for them on Google. Let’s face it, if they can’t generate business for themselves on Google, how are they going to generate business for you?

Free Guide: Hiring A Law Firm SEO Consultant Are you looking to increase your visibility online but are feeling overwhelmed by the number of service professionals promising the world to you? Download AttorneySync’s Free Guide On Hiring A Law Firm SEO Consultant.

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There was a great post by Seth Godin I read recently called The Wordperfect Axiom. Seth tells us:

When the platform changes, the leaders change.

Wordperfect had a virtual monopoly on word processing in big firms that used DOS. Then Windows arrived and the folks at Wordperfect didn’t feel the need to hurry in porting themselves to the new platform. They had achieved lock-in after all, and why support Microsoft?

In less than a year, they were toast.

When the game machine platform of choice switches from Sony to xBox to Nintendo, etc., the list of bestelling games change and new companies become dominant.

When the platform for music shifted from record stores to iTunes, the power shifted too, and many labels were crushed.

Again and again the same rules apply. In fact, they always do. When the platform changes, the deck gets shuffled.

Law Firm Marketing Online

If you are reading this blog, there is a good chance you already recognize a change in marketing platforms for law firms is occurring. The days of taking out a full page, yellowbook ad and watching the clients pour in are long gone. In fact, with the staggering amount of new lawyers entering into the work force each year, reliance on referrals and local recommendations is a tough way to drive significant revenue for a firm.

I recently talked with an estate planning attorney that said he has no interest in investing in the internet because his clients are older people that don’t use it. While there may be some validity to the fact that an older generation isn’t using the internet today as much as other sources, do you really believe that it will remain this way? Do you think the baby boomers aren’t going to be researching estate planning online? If you need to be convinced you can attract estate planning clients online then you clearly aren’t ready to invest what it requires to have a successful online strategy. You are Wordperfect in my opinion.

The reality is that the internet is the new marketing platform. The law firms that understand this and invest accordingly will reap the benefits. They will be the new generation of law firms leading the way. The ones that fail to get on board will be playing catch up at best and won’t be around at worst.

Photo by Larry Page

Free Guide: Hiring A Law Firm SEO Consultant Are you looking to increase your visibility online but are feeling overwhelmed by the number of service professionals promising the world to you? Download AttorneySync’s Free Guide On Hiring A Law Firm SEO Consultant.

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The All Powerful Linkerati?

Back in 2006, Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz fame, cleverly invented a term for one of the most crucial components to search engine optimization. His term, “Linkerati“, describes the concept of identifying potential linkbait targets.

With all the “to-do” about content being king, the concept of identifying linkerati is often overlooked. You see, not all visitors and users of your website are likely, or even capable of linking back to your content.

For example, let’s say you maintain a legal blog. You know that content is important so you try to post something every day. In fact, let’s assume that you’re a rather talented legal blogger and your content has a relatively strong following. Comment discussions on your blog are robust, and your articles are frequently the subject of tweets and re-tweets. However, you can’t understand why you receive so-few links back to your blog. The answer, you’re not reaching the legal Linkerati.

Legal Bloggers – Legal bloggers have a lot of incentive to link to your content. They are usually very interested in the subject matter, they are active in the legal blog community, and most importantly, they want links to their own content. Legal bloggers are one of the best sources of relevant links.

Law Firm SEOs – While this may come as a huge surprise to some legal blog professionals, there are a large number of lawyers who don’t have the time, or frankly the desire, to moderate and administer links on their law firm websites and legal blogs. Talking to the law firm seos that handle these tasks on behalf of their lawyer clients, is a great resource for new links.

Legal Web News Writers – Tough to get, but exceptionally valuable, these folks control the legal news outlets on the web, including places like Law.com and other online legal news portals, etc.

Legal Journalists – Online or offline creators of “legal news” are probably the most valuable of all the legal linkerati. A reporter for any major news publisher can generate extremely valuable links back to your law firm website.

So who are your legal linkerati?

Free Guide: How To Build Links For Your Law Firm Website Want to learn how to get your law firm website more trusted, authoritative, and in front of more potential clients? Download AttorneySync’s Free Guide On Building Links For Your Law Firm Website.

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Google Local Business Center Listing

Getting your law firm found in Google is all about local search results.  One of the free tools that Google provides for local businesses is their Google Local Business Center listing.

Optimizing Your Listing

David Mihm has put together a fantastic report to help you better understand the local search ranking factors for your LBC listing. In his own words:

Participants were asked to rate the importance of 49 criteria with respect to their influence on rankings in the Google and Yahoo Local “Universal” search algorithms (those that drive the 10-pack, 3-pack, and authoritative onebox search results; NOT the standard organic algorithms)

This is the second annual report and you can read it here.

Free Guide: Getting Your Law Firm Found On Google Do You Want To Know How To Get Potential Clients To Find Your Law Firm On Google? Download AttorneySync’s Free Guide On Getting Your Law Firm Found On Google.

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As followers of our blog probably notice, when it comes to getting found in Google, we often cite what Google has to say. It’s sort of a “know your enemy” philosophy (obviously, we don’t consider Google an enemy, for now). One of our favorite resources that we put to work for our law firm seo clients is The Webmaster Central Blog.

This past Tuesday (March 2, 2010), Google released its SEO Report Card. It was reported as an effort by Google to “improve their products’ pages using simple and accepted optimizations”.

Whoa. Google is intentionally optimizing pages to influence their rankings? Then again, maybe not:

“These optimizations are intended to not only help search engines understand the content of our pages better, but also to improve our users’ experience when visiting our sites”.

Ah, it’s just to help the users. I see. As they put it, the optimizations listed are definitely the most “simple and accepted”. Nonetheless, these on-page optimizations serve their purpose and are an important foundation upon which to build your law firm search optimization strategy.

If you’re looking to get started with on-page optimization, check out the Webmaster Central Help Forum and Google’s SEO Beginner’s Guide.

On the other hand, it’s important to keep perspective that doing these simple on-page optimizations alone will not allow you to compete in the highly competitive online legal marketing industry.

I for one, just appreciate the fact that Google not only uses search engine optimization in its vernacular, its also purposefully implementing seo strategies on its own pages. I just can’t wait for Google’s guide to link building… For now, we’ll just have to rely on our own.

Free Guide: How To Build Links For Your Law Firm Website Want to learn how to get your law firm website more trusted, authoritative, and in front of more potential clients? Download AttorneySync's Free Guide On Building Links For Your Law Firm Website.

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We’ve heard about how Google is making changes to make search more personal. But what effect does personalized search really have when it comes to your law firm internet marketing results? Virginia Nussey shares how search queries are frequently imprecise and how personalization can help fill in the gaps.

So what does this mean for your law firm? Actually, a lot of the same principles hold true. Having success isn’t about ranking well generally. The key is to rank well for the legal service consumers who are likely to hire you. The practical effect of personalized search is that your firm will be less likely to compete with the whole search universe. However, you will be more likely to compete with your local search universe.

For example, searches for “lawyer”, “attorney”, and “law firm” are more likely to return law firms in the geographic area from which the search is performed. One of the advantages is that if you’re local, you’ll be less likely to generate visitors from search that aren’t looking for lawyers in your geographic area.

For the most part, the traditional rules apply, write good content for users and not search engines. It is also worth noting that you can control personalization for your searches. Here’s a browser search plugin that does just that.

It will be interesting to see the impact of personalization on link profiles. For example, we know that getting links from geographically relevant domains is advantageous. Will personalized search increase the importance of geography in your link profile? My guess is yes.

Free Guide: How To Build Links For Your Law Firm Website Want to learn how to get your law firm website more trusted, authoritative, and in front of more potential clients? Download AttorneySync's Free Guide On Building Links For Your Law Firm Website.

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AttorneySync’s newest free guide, How To Build Links For Your Law Firm Website, is available for download.

In the world of search engines, links TO a web page equal votes for that page. But not all link-votes are created equal. A link from CNN.com is much stronger than a link from a site that you just set up today. In this sense, links are the “currency” of the web. Any successful search marketing campaign involves link building.

This Guide Will Give You A Proper Introduction To Building Links To Your Law Firm’s Website Including:

• Common Strategies For Building Links
• Why Having A Content Creation Strategy Is Important
• How NOT To Ask For Links
• Types Of Websites You Want Links From
• The Importance Of Having A Diverse Link Profile

Download your free guide: How To Get Get Links For Your Law Firm’s Website today!

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There is an interesting post at the Predictably Irrational blog that discusses the author’s troubles he had recently while playing squash. He tells us that he enjoys playing squash as it not only provides exercise, but is also a game of strategy. The strategy comes in as each player tries to build an advantage over the other by positioning the next shot just so. He goes on to tell us:

Anyway, I have not played for a while so yesterday when I played I was out of shape. But what was interesting was that I realized that my thinking ability was also diminished. Usually I try to plan my moves in advance, and think about where my opponent will move, what I will do next etc – but being out of shape made me think very myopically, and focus just on making the next shot. This of course was a very bad strategy and to my delight of my opponent I lost badly.

Perhaps the larger point is that being exhausted (and maybe also being under stress, physical exhaustion, sleep deprived, etc) makes people focus on the short-term and ignore the long-term – and this way become more susceptible to making mistakes….

How This Applies To Lawyer Internet Marketing

Marketing your law firm properly is a time intensive and strategic task. Just as in the squash example given above, there is the execution of your marketing strategy (actually hitting the shot and placing it where you wanted) and strategic planning (thinking about where the next shot should go). One of the problems that I see as an SEO consultant is that firms become so entrenched in their current marketing and getting short-term results, they forget to explore new ways of marketing. They lose focus of the long-term marketing strategy for the firm. Their strategy is focused on just connecting with the next shot, instead of thinking strategically where the next shot should be going.

A good example would be a firm where the entire marketing plan consists of spending money on advertising. The appeal is that by investing money into advertising, you get immediate results. The problem is that advertising costs will rise and if you want more leads, you have to pay more money. I’m not insisting that advertising is bad, it’s just that it doesn’t provide a sound, long-term strategy. You are simply “hitting the next shot”. You are not building equity in something you own that will continue to produce for you even if you stop paying money tomorrow. This is why it’s important to complement your advertising campaigns with other types of marketing avenues that position you for the future such as SEO, name recognition, social media strategy, networking, referrals, etc.

Make sure you are focusing on both your short-term and long-term goals with your marketing plan. Think about where you want your next shot to go in addition to how you’re going to actually hit the shot.

Photo by flydime

Free Guide: Getting Your Law Firm Found On Google Do You Want To Know How To Get Potential Clients To Find Your Law Firm On Google? Download AttorneySync’s Free Guide On Getting Your Law Firm Found On Google.

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Remember these?

Recently, there have been some interesting results from using “Mad Lib” style forms. In fact, some users of this style form have seen conversion rate increases of 25%-40%. Should we be surprised? Take a look at this example:

As with almost everything else online, the more engaging the better result. Audience engagement is area of law firm internet marketing where there is great room for improvement. Early attempts at lawyer videos, commercial pop-ups, and various other interactive web strategies have been, well, lacking.

In my experience, the trick isn’t so much about wowing visitors with fancy flash, rather it’s about implementing relevant and creative ways to allow the visitor to take action on your site. That is the secret to the Mad Lib form’s success. It draws the user into interaction with the lead capture form.

Free Guide: Law Firm Websites Done Right Want to learn some simple and tangible considerations that should be on your mind when you’re setting up your law firm's website? Download AttorneySync's Free Guide On Law Firm Websites Done Right.

While the Mad Lib form strategy is particularly clever, all aspects of your website should be developed with this principle in mind. This includes your content. When you write to engage visitors, you increase your visitors’ average time on your site and pages per visit, while decreasing the bounce rate. In the end, this will mean higher conversion rates, potential client leads, and eventually revenue for your law firm.

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