internet — Legal Practice Pro

How Vulnerable Are Your Online Legal Marketing Efforts?

August 12, 2010 By Jay Fleischman

Even if you’re at the top of the search engines, you’re vulnerable to new competition. Go to sleep at #1, wake up at #4. Is this a risk you’re willing to take when marketing your law firm online?

A few days ago, I was semi–involved in a debate that was raging on an e-mail discussion list in which I am a member. One person asked a question about marketing your law firm online with a blog, and a lawyer started touting the fact that his website ranked at the top of the organic search engine results for his chosen search term. The lawyer in question does no blogging whatsoever, and essentially stated that blogging was worthless to his efforts at marketing his law firm online.

Of course, this being a marketing discussion group, chaos ensued fairly rapidly. The resident legal marketing professionals jumped all over this poor guy, and basically proclaimed him to be full of shit.

But here’s where it gets interesting. Not only does the lawyer in question do no blogging, he produces no content on any of its websites. They’re all extremely thin, and none of them stand out whatsoever. They’re all filled with the same trite, empty language that is so pervasive on law firm websites. To him, marketing his law firm online didn’t require any content production strategy. And his results were, to his mind, proof that his theories worked.

If I were to hazard a guess I would say that the attorney has ensured his high rankings based on off–page search engine optimization. By that I’m talking about massive numbers of back links to his site from other sites, with appropriate anchor text tied to his chosen search term.

Assuming this to be the case, and further assuming that there is no funny business or “black hat” tactics being employed, then I applaud this attorney for his efforts. Undoubtedly, he gets a tremendous amount of traffic and, I would assume, quite a bit of business as a result of his efforts to market his law firm online.

So, you see, this stands as proof of the fact that you need not blog in order to attain a high search engine ranking for a single term. I would go so far as to say that you don’t need to blog in order to do well for any term whatsoever.

The fact, however, doesn’t mean a thing. We all know that Google and the other search engines reward websites with more content over those that are thin. We also know that people who visit your website are more inclined to hire you after seeing the depth of your expertise reflected in your blog posts.

So even if this attorney ranks very well for a narrowly-defined search term (which may or may not get enough traffic to sustain him), it’s unlikely that he’s able to capture a tremendous percentage of those site visitors and convert them into paying clients. People are searching for information, and won’t stop looking for answers until they find them. If they happen to find them on the top–ranked site that matches their query, then they will go no further. However, if their first click does not result in an informative answer to their question then they are likely to move to the next site presented by the search engines.

I’m sure that my colleague does very well now, but his attitude with respect to his efforts to market his law firm online makes him an easy target. If one of his local competitors establishes a new website and continually adds content that is relevant, in formative, and optimize for the search engines as well as for human visitors then the likelihood is that this new site will quickly rise to the top of search engine rankings with very little effort.

How about you? Are you willing to take on this sort of risk when marketing your law firm online?

Image credit: mlhradio (Flickr)

Filed Under: Legal Marketing Tagged With: blog, engines, internet, internet marketing, law, law firm, law firm websites, Legal Marketing, marketing, marketing your law firm, online, Search Engine Optimization, search engines, vulnerable, web search engine, website ranking, world wide web, your website

5 Ways To Capture Ideas For Your Legal Marketing Efforts

June 6, 2010 By Jay Fleischman

Ever have a great idea about something while doing some random chore or activity? Try as you might to remember it later, it eludes you. Frustrating, no?

We’ve talked about how important content creation is in your legal marketing efforts. We agree that inspiration can come from a variety of sources, and that you should always be on the lookout for legal marketing ideas. How you promote your law firm’s offerings can come from the subtle way that a waitress gets you to order a second piece of pie, or a headline in an ad that convinces you to buy that doo-dad.

My head is always running in a million directions. How to help my clients, an observation about how someone is doing business the right (or wrong) way, or a random thought. One minute it’s gone, the next … poof.

When Marketing Your Law Firm Online, Remember The Lurkers

May 18, 2010 By Jay Fleischman

When marketing your law firm online, your focus is on the prospective clients who take action to contact you – either through a form, a phone call, or email marketing opt-in. But that ignores a whole segment of valuable readers.

When I started blogging as a part of my online legal marketing plans, it was as if I was shouting down a sewer in the middle of Manhattan. All around me there was noise, but my shouts brought back only echos of my own voice.

For months I blogged (and produced a podcast) about issues central to my field of practice, news of the day, and other things that would be important to anyone who was interested in the solutions I provided.

And for months, nothing happened. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Legal Marketing Tagged With: blog, communication, internet, law firm, legal advertising, Legal Marketing, marketing your law firm, online legal marketing, phone calls, take action, Yellow Pages

Blogging For Your Law Firm? There Is No Middle Ground.

March 11, 2010 By Jay Fleischman

Marketing your law firm with a blog is a romantic notion in a certain sense.

Law firm marketing folks – heck, all marketing folks – extol the virtues of blogging. Create a law firm blog and your business will soar, setting you apart from the competition and bringing you accolades of all sorts. Your law firm marketing efforts should center around a blog, they say.

Actually, that’s not true. Creating a law firm blog as part of your marketing efforts will set you apart from the competition, but maybe not in a good way.

Blogging is a content marketing mechanism that’s designed to provide useful information and show your stuff. By creating a law firm blog you build trust your prospective clients and the public, enhancing your reputation. It’s also terrific for search engine optimization, which exposes your words and thoughts to a wider audience and increases the reach of your message.

But unless you’re adding content on a regular basis, you’re not going to look so terrific to people to visit your law firm blog.

I’m not telling you to create content every day because I know it’s not realistic for lawyers to take that kind of time. But would it kill you to put down something on your law firm blog once a week, something valuable and helpful?

There’s a lawyer in my area who, in a fit of “I want to market my law firm,” went out and hired a designer to do two new sites for his bankruptcy law firm. The sites are beautiful, and very easily navigable. And they both have blogs.

OK, I can see someone creating more than one law firm blog – in fact, I have more than one. The problem is that both of the blogs cover exactly the same topic, with the only difference that one site allegedly covers New York City and the other covers Long Island (a distance of under 60 miles).

Since he launched these beautiful sites over six months ago, he’s suffered from a bit of over extension.

On one blog he’s done 10 posts since September 2009, which is respectable.

On the second blog he’s done 2 posts since September 2009. And one of them is a duplicate of a post on the first site.

A failure of consistency tells a visitor that you’re not serious. And if you’re not serious about this aspect of your marketing, how reliable are you as a service provider? Your law firm blog signals a commitment to provide information and share knowledge; your lack of consistency signals a failure to live up to that commitment.

In addition, failing to consistently publish content onto your legal blog will lower your site traffic. If there’s a blog I like, I’m going to visit it more frequently (as much as I love it, I recognize that RSS readers never really caught on with the masses). Once I show up a few times and see nothing new, I’m not visiting anymore. It’s like when I turn on the television every week to catch Big Bang Theory (which you should watch), I expect to see Sheldon in a new episode. If all I get is repeats for a few weeks I’m going to find something else to do on Mondays nights.

So, too, with your legal blogging activities. If you’re going to do it, understand that you’re in this for the long haul. If you’re in that’s cool. And if not, you need to go find some other way to market your law firm.

Filed Under: Blogging For Lawyers, Legal Marketing Tagged With: blog, blogging, computing, content marketing, internet, law, law firm, law firm blog, law firm marketing, Legal Marketing, marketing, marketing your law firm, Search Engine Optimization, social information processing, technology

How Content Drives Law Firm Marketing

March 9, 2010 By Jay Fleischman

Law firm marketing used to be so simple. Slap up a few ads, buy up some television time, and call the Yellow Pages representative to pick up a fat check.

But somewhere along the line it got more difficult. Prospective clients started wising up and asking questions. They realized that there was no early way for them to differentiate between Lawyer A and Lawyer B based on a 30 second commercial spot or a full-page Yellow Pages ad. The problem was that they didn’t know exactly how to tell the difference.

So they did what we all do when we shop for a new car – we peek under the hood.

First they turned to the Better Business Bureau, not realizing that lawyers didn’t utilize that venue. So they moved onto Martindale-Hubbell, the grand-daddy of lawyer rankings. But M-H was stuffed to the gills with huge law firms that looked down on helping people with their problems in favor of billing big corporate entities.

Some lucky few could ask their friends and family members about lawyers, but when it came to things like bankruptcy and divorce it was a little stickier. Who wants to approach their uncle and say, “Hi Uncle Bob. I can’t pay my bills. Do you know a good bankruptcy lawyer?”

So they turned to the Internet. At first there was no way to find a reputable professional, so the public just bumped around in the dark. But eventually lawyers started getting websites, those online brochures with pretty pictures. Lulled into peaceful slumber, people started equating the best website with the best lawyer.

But something happened along the way. Blogging came around, and some folks started thinking that it was a darn easy way to add information to their website. It sure was a lot faster and cheaper than paying the web guru to update the site every month.

Blogging didn’t take off for lawyers for a long time. In fact, there’s a good argument that blogging still hasn’t taken off for lawyers. But with blogging evangelists like Grant Griffiths leading the way, inroads have been made over the past few years.

When you’re talking about blogging, you’re talking about the entire world of online marketing. Every industry has marching orders to get blogging and get it done now. Every media channel has a cadre of super-successful people who also happen to be blogging their brains out. You can’t get away from it.

Consumers have been trained to ask questions online, to query Google and Bing and the rest in an effort to get answers. The answers to their questions float to the top of the search engine results page and, in so doing, the site on which those answers reside gain the most loyal followings.

Follow someone long enough and you come to trust their intellect and insight. You rely upon them for good information. You get to know them to an extent, and feel closer to them. And when you need help, you turn to that person over all others.

Chances are pretty good that you’re not creating content and, in fact, don’t know where you’d put it or what you should do to get people to notice it. If so, you’re not alone. In fact, most of your competition isn’t doing anything either. They’re watching the world pass them by, caught up in the day-to-day grind of being lawyer and entranced by the notion of cutting a fat check to some “SEO Mastermind” to turn their 3-page website into a Google magnet.

Good luck with that.

So here’s what you need to do, right now. Take out a pen and a blank legal pad and start writing. Anything at all.

We’re going to keep talking about this. Because your future depends on it.