Legal Practice Pro» Online Marketing For Lawyers

The Long Tail Of Search Engine Optimization – RIP

Jay Fleischman — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 18:04:08 +0000

Google uses Instant Search, social signals and freshness to rank websites. Panda kills the content farms and low-quality sites. Is the long tail dead? This infographic seems to think so.

Infographic by SEO Book

Does Your Online Legal Marketing Or Lead Generation Company Pass The Sniff Test?

Jay Fleischman — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 06:00:37 +0000

Would you work with a legal marketing company or lead generation service that also works for industries that oppose yours? That funds causes in which you don’t believe are right and just? That clash with your moral fiber?

If you’re marketing your law firm online, you know the goal is to get prospective clients to call you. Some lawyers take the time to learn about email marketing and lead generation, but others decide to just hire a company to do it for them. At a flat rate this company will send you all inquiries to their website for people who need help in your area. They bear the responsibility to get people to visit their site, and you pay only when someone needs you.

If you’re looking at a simple way of marketing your law firm online then you know there are a few lead generation companies that offer this legal marketing service. Some perform well, others … well, not so much. Make your decision according to how your chosen vendor performs. Easy business decision. If the marketing pays off, stick with ‘em.

But beneath the surface, there’s a hidden layer you want to know about. Namely, whether the lead generation company is really on your side.

As a bankruptcy lawyer, I’m not so fond of debt settlement companies. Clients come into my office with tales of how they paid out a bucket of cash to a company only to find out that none of their debts got settled. Some have gotten sued during the settlement process, others have successfully handled only a few credit cards but not the rest – making the process useless as a way of handling their bill problems.

If I were looking for an lead generation company for my bankruptcy practice, I’d want to be sure that it wasn’t also feeding the debt settlement industry. Not that there’s anything wrong with debt settlement folks using a lead generation service for their marketing – I’d be shocked if such a service didn’t exist – but rather because I want my chosen vendors to share my point of view.

Same thing if I found out my pre-bankruptcy credit counseling company was working with racist organizations. In my mind that’s are just plain wrong.

There are marketing companies – lead generation, website development, search engine optimization and the like – that cater to most fields of law. I work primarily with consumer protection and consumer bankruptcy lawyers. It’s what I know best, so it’s a natural fit for the lawyers I work with.

Though I recognize that the forces that seek to undermine the value of consumer bankruptcy have their own business interests, I don’t see a need to help them out.

How does that sit with you?

Image credit: mind on fire/Flickr

Online Legal Marketing Begins With The Right Word

Jay Fleischman — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 13:11:48 +0000

You’re about to launch your online legal marketing efforts – whether it’s a blog, a static website, or social media marketing strategy (ideally, it’s a combination of all three – but that’s another post for another day). Where do you begin? A domain name? A hosting account? Installing WordPress? Hiring a web developer or a graphic designer to make your online home look all swanky?

Nope. You begin with a word. The right word. Actually, the right words.

And I’m not talking about your pearls of wisdom, either. I’m talking about your keyword terms, those words and terms that you want to rank for on the search engines. Pick the right words and you’re well on your way to online legal marketing success. Choose the wrong ones and you’re dead in the water, floating on page 48 of the search engine results page.

Bear in mind that you need not – indeed, should not – pick only one word to work with. Pick 10, 20 even 50 words and phrases at the start; once you conquer them, you can move onto others.

If you’re marketing a bankruptcy law practice and are located in Cleveland, you may want to focus on “Cleveland bankruptcy lawyer,” or “Cleveland bankruptcy attorney.” Depending on the traffic those terms get, and the competition on the search engines, these may be good or bad ideas as a place to begin.

Choosing Keywords For Your Online Legal Marketing Efforts

First, you want to play word association with yourself, doing everything you can to brainstorm. Think about the words people use when they talk to you. Ask clients if they searched online for a lawyer and, if so, what they plugged into the search engine.

Next, you’ll need to do some legwork to determine the relative volume of searches done for each search tool. There are a number of free keyword search tools online. In no particular order, some of them are:

Wordtracker: Free Keyword Suggestion Tool
SEO Book: Keyword Suggestion Tool
Keyword Discovery: Free Search Term Suggestion Tool
Google Search-based Keyword Tool
Google AdWords Keyword Tool
Google Insights for Search
Google Trends

Third, you’ll want to hand-pick some of the keyword search terms on which to focus your efforts. If you’ve got a relatively new site or are redeveloping an existing site from the ground up (i.e., a gut renovation) then you probably want to start off with the long tail keywords. These are keywords that don’t get a ton of traffic individually but get a good amount in the aggregate. By focusing on the long tail, you can pick up some traffic without as much competition.

Once you’ve chosen a bucket of keywords and search terms, you’ll be able to begin your online legal marketing efforts with gusto. Of course, this is just the first step to climbing the search engine results page. But without this critical first step, you’ll never get the success you seek.

Photo courtesy of Feuillu.

Online Legal Marketing – 6 Ways To Reduce Your Bounce Rate

Jay Fleischman — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 20:30:51 +0000

You’ve committed to marketing your law firm online. Your bankruptcy website is getting 10, 20, 50, 100 or more unique visitors each day, which is pretty good. After all, the site hasn’t been touched in months (if not years) and it doesn’t cost much to keep it online. Even if you’re a regular legal blogger, it still doesn’t take anything but elbow grease and some time to maintain your site.

Any clients who come to you from your online legal marketing efforts are freebies, so you’re not paying much attention to the disparity between visitors and clients.

Let’s step back for a moment and say you’re getting 25 unique visitors per day. Not a ton, but still 750 people each month.

Out of those visitors, you’re getting 20 new clients from your online marketing efforts. If you’re charging $1,000 for an average case, that’s $20,000 a month. Cool, right?

Not so much. How about all those people to surf to your website and leave, vanishing into the ether?

They’re gone, off to another lawyer. Worse yet, they’re off to no other lawyer.

Maybe people are getting to your website and realizing that there’s no compelling reason to stick around. Maybe they read a bunch of pages and then go elsewhere. How do you know?

The key is to studying your website’s bounce rate. To my mind, it’s a critical aspect of the data you should be looking at closely.

What Is The Bounce Rate?

Avinash Kaushik, the Google employee who lives website analytics, defines bounce rate as, “I came, I puked, I left.” More technically, he defines bounce rate as, “single page view visits divided by entry pages.” Avinash goes into a bit more detail on the Official Google Blog.

In other words, the percent of people who land on your site, do absolutely nothing whatsoever, and then close the window and head for somewhere else.

I call it the failure rate. Someone came to my website, took one look at what I was talking about, and decided that is had absolutely ZERO value.

The Intersection Of Bounce Rate And Online Legal Marketing

When you’re marketing your law practice online, you are looking to create a connection with your audience. Whether it’s a blog or a static website, you understand (at some level) that it’s tough to make any lasting positive impression on someone if they stick around for only a few seconds. therefore, one of your goals is to give people a reason to stick around as long as possible.

What’s A Good Bounce Rate?

The short answer is, “I have no clue.” Do you want people to come to your site and surf for a bunch of information? Do you want them to land on the site, get your phone number and call you? Do you want them to get lost in your site, delving deeper and deeper? Or do you want them to log on, find your Facebook page, and then go there to become a fan?

Your ideal bounce rate will depend based on your motives. But suffice to say, if you’ve got a 60% bounce rate then you’re definitely not engaging your visitors. It probably explains why you’re getting 20 visits per day and only 1 phone call from a new client.

6 Ways To Improve The Bounce Rate On Your Law Firm Website

Know What You’re Dealing With. Figure out the bounce rate per referring site and keyword search term. You will find that some sites give you good traffic (i.e., traffic with a low bounce rate) and others not so much. In addition, you’ll find that some search terms result in a high bounce rate. This means that your content may be optimized for the search engines (i.e., people see your site when they search for a specific term) but not for visitors (i.e., once they get to your site they realize they’ve been short-changed).
Next, concentrate on getting more referrals from the good sources. Maybe people who come to your site from Facebook stick around whereas people who visit from Twitter bounce out a lot. Send more of your links to Facebook and take the time to test what other types of tweets might encourage more people to visit and stick around happily.
Spruce Up Your Site’s Navigation. If people can’t figure out how to navigate around your site, they’re going to leave fast.
Update Your Website Content. If I come to your site today and see the same stuff I saw yesterday, I’m not going to have a reason to stick around.
Create More Internal Links. Internal links are hotlinks on a page that go to other pages on your site. When you create internal links it encourages visitors to move from one page to another more easily. A good thing to do is create a link from legal terms to pages with definitions (in other words, link the word “discharge” to another page that has a definition for that term). It’s good for users to get clarification when they don’t understand something.
Use Visual Cues To Draw In Visitors. Eye-catching pictures and video content encourages people to stick around for awhile longer.

Your law firm website’s bounce rate is important, and tells a lot about what appeals to your website visitors. Work on reducing your bounce rate and you’ll find that your site’s effectiveness rises exponentially.

Photos courtesy of Kevin Steele and p@r@noid.

Should Lawyers Fear Google Sidewiki?

Jay Fleischman — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 14:02:59 +0000

Google WHAT? Before we get into the whole “fear,” thing, let’s talk about what Google Sidewiki is and is not.

Sidewiki is basically an add on to the Google Toolbar that lets you comment about any site, directly on that site, via the Google Toolbar. Once you download and enable Sidewiki you’ll see a little bubble on the left side of every web page. It looks like this:

See that little note bubble in the corner? That lets you know that Sidewiki information is available. If you click bubble or the >> tab, the Sidewiki panel opens up like this:

Check it out – what you’re looking at are comments placed onto the web page. But not all comments are shown, and the ones that do show up are denoted by a special Google algorithm. For example, some of the signals that Google uses for ranking comments are (according to our friends at Search Engine Land):

Use of sophisticated language: “This page sucks” isn’t sophisticated; think complex sentences and ideas. Apparently, Google has a language sophistication detector now, and one that works in the 14 different languages that Sidewiki supports.

User’s reputation: Are your comments being voted up or flagged down?

User’s history: How long have you had a Google Profile? How long have you been commenting?

So Should Lawyers Fear Google Sidewiki?

Sidewiki is a powerful way for people to comment on websites even if there is no place on the actual site for comments to be put in. That means a lawyer with a website may be deluged with negative comments from clients and other members of the public. What’s even more interesting is that the lawyer won’t even know about it unless that lawyer has installed and activated Sidewiki on his or her own computer.

Without having Sidewiki installed and activated on your computer, you won’t know if a site has any Sidewiki comments. So if you keep your head in the sand, you may miss the opportunity to see and respond to negative comments on your online reputation.

For more information, check out this video on Sidewiki:

Marketing Your Law Firm With Paid Ads Misses 84% Of The Web

Jay Fleischman — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 13:57:23 +0000

Using Google AdWords to market your law firm? If you’re paying for ads and ignoring your organic search engine placement then 84% of web surfers will never click on your ad. Even worse, only 8% of all internet users will account for 85% of all clicks.

Shocking, huh? Well, these are the stats according to the most recent “Natural Born Clickers” study from ComScore and media agency Starcom.

The number of people online who click display ads has dropped 50% in less than two years, according to the report. Quite a fall from grace, I’d say.

Clickers only represent 16% of U.S. internet users, according to ComScore data from March. The study initially found that 32% clicked on display advertising in July 2007. The 2008 study found half of all clicks come from lower-income young adults, so prizing clicks ignores the vast majority of internet users, especially the types of users lawyers who use paid ads to market their firms want to reach.

Of course, if you’re a major brand then the study offers a ray of light – display ads, regardless of clicks, generate significant lift in brand-site visitation, and things like that.

But you’re not a brand, and nobody really cares about you. One lawyer in a sea of millions, it’s hard to imagine a law firm being elevated to the level of, say, Toyota.

So what’s a lawyer to do when trying to increase their exposure to people who might need them? If paid ads don’t work, what will become of the poor lawyer who only wants to get people to visit his or her site?

You need to optimize your website’s content so that you show up higher on the organic rankings. Create useful content that is attractive to the people you want to work with; bringing them to the site is important, but Google also looks as user behavior once on the site as a signal of how to rank you. How long the user stays, what they do, whether they view a lot of your content or merely one page … things that indicate whether your content is actually useful or just a rehash of the same old stuff found in a bazillion other places online.

You need to create a tractor beam, a way to get someone’s email address (and, ideally, their name) so you can continue to educate them over time on the benefits of working with you and how you can solve their problems.

Your site needs to look like it was designed sometime after 1999, and it needs to render properly in all browsers.

You need to actually pay attention to your website and making it as useful as your potential client needs it to be – not only as useful as you want it to be.

In other words, you don’t want to be lazy with this. Your online presence is more important now than ever before – don’t squander it.

Here’s the AdAge article about that ComScore study.

A Victory For Online Legal Marketing Efforts

Jay Fleischman — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 18:18:58 +0000

Lots of consumer bankruptcy lawyers have been caught up in the Zelotes v. Chern matter. The case, if you haven’t been following it, speaks to whether a pay-per-lead online advertising business model is tantamount to paying illegal referral fees.

You can take a look at some of the articles from around the blogosphere here, because I’m not inclined to go into it in full again.

Is TotalAttorneys Complaint A Total Joke?

Ethics Complaint Tests Internet Marketing Method

One of the things that Mr. Zelotes relied upon was the Virginia State Bar Standing Committee on Legal Ethics draft Legal Ethics Opinion 1851, which

generally addresses whether a lawyer may ethically participate in a third party Internet website or organization that invites a prospective client to submit case information and then automatically forwards that information to a very limited number of participating lawyers if the service: 1) charges a fee based upon either an agreement to an exclusive geographical listing for the lawyer; 2) charges a fee based upon very strict limitations on the number of participating lawyers in each geographical practice area; or 3) charges a set fee per referrals or client contact.

Well, looks like the good guys have scored a victory, as least in part. The Virginia State Bar has announced that is has withdrawn proposed legal ethics opinion 1851, Participation in a Third-Party Internet Website for future consideration.

I know this isn’t the end of the case, but it’s a ray of sunshine – and proof that at least one state bar association recognizes that online legal marketing demands a dose of reality rather than more heavy-handed regulation.

Thanks to Ben Glass for the heads up. A copy of the opinion case be found here.

Can A Backwards-Looking Profession Embrace The Future?

Jay Fleischman — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 18:07:33 +0000

I’m in the process of putting together a panel discussion for the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys regarding online marketing and social media for lawyers, thinking about the need for more lawyers to get online. The question that always comes to me is about whether I’ve found clients on Twitter (I have) and Facebook (yes, there as well).

But by answering this question, a lot is left on the table. After all, it’s like asking someone if they picked up much business as their neighbor’s house party. Or if they scored a big client at that cocktail party at the Rotary Club. Or if that trip to the NACBA convention resulted in any new bankruptcy clients for them.

Those questions are ordinarily absurd, though in all of those situations some lawyers come up with an affirmative response. But the key is that these social media platforms allow the lawyer to “get out there,” (gosh, I do so hate that phrase) and interact with other people. Some of those people are potential clients, some are fascinating human beings, some are sources of information that would not otherwise be uncovered.

Just like any networking event, social media allows us to interact on a real-time basis and get to know one another. It’s not about diving in for business, but about connections – making them, learning from others, building community. And especially for solo and small-firm lawyers, that community can be a source of inspiration and change.

There are lists of lawyers to follow on Twitter, ways to find people with similar interests and in your local community, real-time search engines to see what people are talking about that may interest you, and a host of other resources.

But still, that list of lawyers numbers in the sub-1,000 range. Why?

There are lots of possible reasons, from the fear of new technologies to the sense that it’s a time-suck in a world where time is at a premium. But this isn’t just a Twitter issue. Look at the number of law blogs and compelling legal websites – not so many. In fact, only 2 percent of lawyers are blogging, according to the ABA (see this post by Carolyn Elefant that sheds some light on the statistics).

Here’s my take on the matter – the legal profession refuses to see the value in maintaining an active online presence on the whole because we as lawyers have been trained to look to the past rather than the present or future. That translates into our marketing efforts, which continues to rely heavily on outmoded media such as Yellow Pages, newspaper ads and the like. When we do venture into the online world we look to technologies and platforms that are similarly outmoded.

Lawyers are taught the value of precedent, and the wisdom of looking to the past as a guide for the present. We rely on judicial decisions dating back to the birth of our nation. We are educated in a fashion derived from Socrates. Our law school education demands that we adapt our thinking to use the past as our crutch.

And that’s not a bad thing. The past has much to teach us, and the legal system is precedential in nature. But when it comes to marketing, promotion and networking (both social and business) that’s a liability that must be overcome. The legal profession hasn’t even been permitted to advertise or otherwise promote our services to the public for very long (about 30 years or so), but we’ve always been allowed to schmooze and network. Social media is nothing more than a new platform, a new tool for doing that which we’ve been doing since … well, forever. Of course, there are no cocktails or golf clubs involved on Twitter.

We can talk all day about educating lawyers about online platforms, but the reality is that there just aren’t many heretics out there to follow. In fact, one of the self-proclaimed gurus uses multiple spam Twitter accounts (featuring the obligatory stock photos of beautiful women) and prohibits comments on their blog – both of which go against the very nature of social media and online conversations. This person is not building a community, not building trust, not establishing authority, but using a social platform as a tool of constant self-promotion without more.

The teacher is misinforming the student and setting an outrageously bad example. It’s like going into a party and being accosted by someone who wants only to talk about himself, his business, and how he can help you (without knowing anything about you) as he reaches into your pocket for your wallet.

But on some level we can’t blame this guru. Nor can we blame the lawyers who relentlessly tweet, “If you’re looking for a [insert niche] lawyer in the [insert area] area, call [insert firm name] at [insert phone number].” They are, after all, looking back at their own precedents. It’s wrong, it’s painful to watch, and it horrifies me to realize how many other lawyers will follow their lead. But I can’t pretend to be surprised by it given the source of our knowledge.

I don’t know the answer to my own question. What I do know is that as the next generation of lawyers enters the profession, those who are already here will suffer tremendously. These new lawyers have grown up with adaptive technologies, with Google, with Twitter and other social media platforms. They are coming online every day, and are used to the level of authenticity and transparency the medium demands.

My hope is that their law school education does not beat their curiosity and adaptability out of them. And that those already in the field take their cue from the rest of the world.

What do you think? How can lawyers break the cycle? How can we as a profession move forward in the way we interact and communicate? Leave a comment with your thoughts.

Photo courtesy of 7-how-7.