domain names — Legal Practice Pro

Your First Law Firm Blog Is Just A Baby Step

Law Firm Blog Baby Step On July 6, 2006 I, along with my good friend and colleague Jay Jump of Kent, WA presented a free teleseminar to our fellow consumer bankruptcy lawyers. We didn’t have much of a plan at the time, and figured we’d just do something fun for everyone; we’d just come off a heady panel discussion with Kurt O’Keefe and Alan Ramos at the NACBA convention in New Orleans, and I guess we just wanted to keep the party going.

I registered the domain name www.BKPracticePro.com for the occasion, figuring it had a nice hook to it. The thinking was to do a teleseminar and see what happened.

What happened was a lot of fun. Then we both went back to work. That is, until I got bored on August 19, 2006 and published my first blog post dealing with Windows XP shortcuts. It was all uphill from there, as the site morphed into what you see before you – a full-fledged business built around a blog dealing with online legal marketing, technology and managing a law firm.

Each one of those first posts were mere baby steps towards the current incarnation of this blog, done with tremendous hesitation and no small amount of trepidation. What if I got it wrong? What if I failed?

There were, however, a few things that gave me no small amount of freedom. A freedom, I realize now, that is bestowed upon all of us who begin a law firm blog.

Marketing your law firm online can be a struggle, especially where you don’t know where to begin. One of my students calls it, “analysis paralysis,” and I like the alliteration. But it’s true.

The domain name you choose for your law firm blog or website is like the color of your home’s front door. It says something about who you are, what you stand for, and where you want to position yourself in the marketplace.

Too often, lawyers will choose their firm name as their domain name. They think they’re branding their firm when in reality they’re just obscuring the truth about who they are and what they do.

Let’s say you’re looking for a lawyer to handle a nasty dog bite case in San Francisco. Like most Americans, you’re going to hit a search engine to begin your search. You enter in your search term and it comes back with the following:

Which website are you going to click on? The one that stands out, if you’re like most people. And the things that stand out most are the title, the description and the domain name.

Why? Because Google puts in boldface your search terms. So if you search for “dog bite” then anywhere those words appear they will be in bold. The goal is to help draw your eye to the most relevant search results, and it works darn well.

To be sure, the title and description are also critical to drawing the eye to your website. But the domain name is the single thing you can begin to get a handle on immediately when setting up your website.

Marketing your law firm online requires you to use every single tool to your advantage, and the domain name is clearly one of them. Every other lawyer in your area is going to look to that holy grail of a keyword search term, which is why it’s doubly important to pull out the stops.

Will your domain name be the single thing that catapults your law firm website to #1 on the search engines? Not at all. But getting a leg up surely isn’t a bad idea.