Search Engine Optimization

Online Legal Marketing 101 – Be Original

March 1, 2010 By Jay Fleischman

When marketing your law firm online it’s important to remember that originality is key. And I’m not just talking about the design of your law firm’s website or your point of view – it should be obvious that you need to be different so as not to blend in.

What I’m talking about is the originality of your online content. The words you use, the way you put your thoughts together, and the way it all reads. It’s all got to be original or your online legal marketing efforts will fail. And not because they won’t resonate, but because they won’t be seen.

Case in point, with names changed to protect the innocent. A colleague of mine is a bankruptcy lawyer who relies almost solely on his online legal marketing efforts to keep his doors open. He’s a good lawyer, a good guy, and smart. But he got a little careless when he built his current website.

His law firm’s website is gorgeous, filled with video and lots of pages of content. He’s got his picture up on the site, his contact information, and all the bells and whistles that we want to have in place when marketing online. Reads well, designed well … but all was not well.

His site was placed at the top of every single relevant search term for quite some time. Until one day he noticed it wasn’t there anymore. Like, at all. Gone from Local Search, gone from the index … poof. Even his Google Profile was deactivated and blocked.

So he did what I would have done. He freaked out. Sent emails, called his web host, tried in vain to contact Google’s search team. He got back cryptic emails, all essentially telling him that his law firm’s website was somehow a bad apple.

Finally, his SEO people started digging around and were told of the problem. His website was filled with content found elsewhere online, on sites for his law firm as well as on sites for other lawyers.

In other words, his site was unoriginal. And that was a problem for two reasons:

First, Google has been clear that duplicate content isn’t the best way to go. Duplicate content is defined as:

substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar.

In fact, the Google Webmaster Blog says:

Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don’t follow the advice listed above, we do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results.

What does it mean to be deceptive and manipulative? Well, that’s tough to say. But if your site is so clearly filled with content that’s found elsewhere, the chances are good that Google’s going to find that your intentions are less than honorable.

Why does Google hate duplicate content? Because Google’s primary business is to delivery the best possible search results; in doing so, it ensures that people will come back to Google again and again when they want to find something. If the search engine lists a ton of different sites with the exact same information, where’s the value add for the searcher? It isn’t there at all, which is why the search engine will cull out the duplicates and show only a single instance of the content – and that single instance will be on the domain that has the highest PageRank, relevance and trust scores overall.

Second, duplicate content isn’t worth your reader’s efforts and time. Let’s say I can pick up the exact same book in a bunch of different libraries. Why would I look to one as a better library than the others? I wouldn’t – unless one particular library has a bunch of different books on the same subject. In that case, one is better than the others.

So, too, with your web content. Your law firm website needs to have something relevant and unique to say, something that sets it apart in the eyes of the visitor in order to spur that person to take action.

How do you avoid the duplicate content problem in your online legal marketing efforts? Speak in your own words, as if you were talking with a client or prospect. Be genuine, be honest, and be yourself. If you’ve got any passion for what you do, this will come through easily. That’s it. No magic potion.

And if you’ve hired someone to develop your website copy, take the time and a few bucks to run it through Copyscape. That’s a service that will go through a web page’s content and ensure that it’s not a duplicate of another site. Well worth the money.

Photo courtesy of SpiritMama.

Filed Under: Legal Marketing Tagged With: bankruptcy lawyers, content, copyscape, duplicate content, law firm, marketing online, online content, online legal marketing, Search Engine Optimization, search engines

10 Legal Marketing Tips For Slow Times

November 26, 2009 By Jay Fleischman

Thanksgiving begins the strange time of year when most lawyers don’t have much new business to handle. People are more concerned with their holiday shopping than with their legal issues, so the pipeline dries up a bit. You can rattle around in your office surfing the Internet all day or you can take some action to make sure your legal marketing efforts continue to roll on once people come back to reality when the ball drops on January 1.

Here are 10 of my legal marketing tips for slow times:

Review your business card: Your business card is for many people the first impression they have of you. When you hand it out, the recipient often puts it into a pocket or wallet and forgets about it until later. Does your card show your field of practice? Your direct dial phone number? Your website address and email account? If not, get cracking on an update.
Update your website: When you’re busy, your home on the web goes stale. Check the bio section to make sure everything is fresh and up-to-date. If you’ve spoken at an event, had a decision published, or done something interesting then you need to make sure it’s online. One more thing – if your picture wasn’t taken in this decade then it’s probably a good idea to replace it with something more current.
Look at title and description tags: The title and description tags for your web pages are critical to your search engine optimization success. Take a look at them and make sure they’re optimized with your keywords and other critical information to create not only better placement in the search engines, but also to spur searchers to click on your listing rather than someone else’s.
Install Analytics: Google Analytics is simply the best way to track your website or blog traffic. It provides a mess of tools and data to help you keep your site on top of the search engines.
Prepare Client Satisfaction Surveys: Whether you survey your clients online or by snail mail, getting feedback is critical to improving your processes. You’ll never know how to do a better job for your clients than asking them. Caution: send them out after Christmas or they’ll get lost in the shuffle of holiday cards.
Brainstorm blog post topics: One of the reasons you don’t blog is because you don’t have time to think of stuff to write. Well, now you’ve got time. No excuses!
Call a colleague for coffee: Making a human connection is the cornerstone of getting referrals. Go out and meet a colleague for an hour – not to talk shop, but just to talk. It’s the original social networking platform!
Hop onto Twitter and start playing around: 140 characters never seemed so intimidating. But the good news is that you can’t break the Internet. Sign up, log on and poke around a bit. Listen and learn, then dip a toe in the water.
Clean your office: That mess in your office isn’t going to get any prettier when the new clients come flooding back in January. Clean up – it makes a better impression on people who are deciding whether you’re organized enough to be trusted with their legal issues.
Relax: This lull in business isn’t going to last for long. You’ll need all your energy if you’re going to do good work for people when they show up asking for your help.

Photo courtesy of sfllaw.

Filed Under: Legal Marketing Tagged With: internet marketing, legal blogging, Legal Marketing, marketing, marketing your law firm, Search Engine Optimization, slow

Online Legal Marketing Begins With The Right Word

October 23, 2009 By Jay Fleischman

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.

Filed Under: Online Marketing For Lawyers, SEO For Lawyers Tagged With: keyword research, Search Engine Optimization, SEO

Google Doesn’t Care About Your Keyword Metatags

September 22, 2009 By Jay Fleischman

One of the things I teach my lawyer students is search engine optimization, and how to increase their position in the search engines. After all, where you show up in Google is a critical element of your online legal marketing efforts. Optimize your website properly and you’re way ahead of the game – focus on the wrong stuff and you’re spinning your wheels.

One of the wrong things that most lawyers focus on is the concept of “keyword metatags.” Those are the words that you stick in the top of the website’s code to (theoretically) let Google and the other players know what the site is all about. Lawyers obsess over the keyword metatags in their law firm websites and blogs, they hire expensive search engine optimization “experts” (and I use the term lightly) for thousands of dollars a month to help in their efforts.

They spin their wheels.

Meanwhile, my websites and blogs contain the most generic keywords. Why? Because I’ve long maintained that Google does not use the “keywords” meta tag in its web search ranking. Red herring, says I.

Now, Google comes out with the truth. And I’m pretty happy to report that I was correct all along. On the Google Webmaster Central Blog, the definitive statement (there’s a video to go with it) is as follows:

Our web search (the well-known search at Google.com that hundreds of millions of people use each day) disregards keyword metatags completely. They simply don’t have any effect in our search ranking at present.

…

About a decade ago, search engines judged pages only on the content of web pages, not any so-called “off-page” factors such as the links pointing to a web page. In those days, keyword meta tags quickly became an area where someone could stuff often-irrelevant keywords without typical visitors ever seeing those keywords. Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag.

So next time some fancy-pants legal search engine optimization “expert” corners you at a convention or bombards you by phone, remember – it ain’t the metatags that do the trick. It’s the content.

Photo courtesy of Danard Vincente.

Filed Under: SEO For Lawyers Tagged With: Google, Search Engine Optimization

How to Use Content to Build Website Traffic

May 20, 2009 By Jay Fleischman

If you’ve been marketing your bankruptcy practice online for any time at all – in fact, if you’ve been marketing any type of law practice at all – you’ve probably hear the adage that “content is king”. It’s no secret that informative, timely, relevant content will help you build an attentive audience… but getting people to your website or blog in the first place … well, that’s another matter.

Ever wonder how Google and the other search engines know which websites to list when you conduct a search?

Here’s a secret – nobody knows the exact answer to that. If I knew, I’d own all of Manhattan and would summer in the south of France (which I’d also own). That’s how much money the information is worth (give or take a few bucks).

I do, however, know some of the important things that Google looks for. And one of those things is … Google looks for stuff that matches up with the search.

In other words, Google looks for specific phrases within website content – phrases that match your search – to find sites and pages that will likely give you what you’re looking for. These phrases are called “keywords”, and they’re the subject of much discussion, confusion, and frustration.

That’s because most people – even seasoned website owners – don’t know how to use them properly.

Out of every ten websites or blogs you visit, you can safely guess that maybe one will be run by somebody who understands how to use keywords to bring in traffic. The rest are just throwing words against the wall, hoping some of them will stick.

This is where you can leverage a bit of internet marketing knowledge to put yourself far ahead of 90% of the other bankruptcy lawyers out there who are trying to market their practices online. The funny thing is, after you’ve learned how to use keywords correctly, it’s pretty easy to rocket past your competition.

The most important thing you can do is stop thinking like a lawyer, and start thinking like a potential client. Put yourself in a consumer’s shoes for a minute… you’re sick of creditors calling you day and night; you’re tired of worrying that you’ll wake up to find that your car has disappeared from your driveway; you’re frightened that the bank is going to repossess your house if you can’t cough up your mortgage payment soon.

In short, you need a solution… and the quickest way to find anything these days is to search for it on Google (or a handful of other, arguably less important search engines).

So you pull up Google’s home page, and type in… what?

See, as a lawyer, you probably would have guessed “bankruptcy”. And that’s not a bad guess… according to Google, about 3 million people search for information using the word “bankruptcy” every month. The problem is, there are nearly 59 million other web pages out there that contain that keyword. That makes it pretty tough to make it to the top 20 results for “bankruptcy” – and as a veteran internet marketer, I can tell you that the top 20 results are the only ones that matter.

Now, let’s look at another keyword – “debt consolidation”. It gets about 1.9 million searches a month, and there are about 22 million pages using this keyword. The odds of getting into the coveted top 20 for “debt consolidation” aren’t great, but they’re better than for “bankruptcy”. Can you think of ways to write about “debt consolidation” that are relevant to your practice? How about comparing it to bankruptcy as a solution for crushing debt?

On to lower-hanging fruit – Google reports that “foreclosure stop”, for whatever reason, gets about 100,000 searches a month. The number of web pages using this keyword? Less than half a million. “Foreclosure stop” might be a little harder to work into a blog post, but you’ll stand a much better chance of grabbing some traffic with this phrase than you will with a high-competition keyword like “bankruptcy”.

Thinking like a consumer, and finding out how your potential clients are searching for information, gives you a valuable advantage over your online competition. Sprinkling your articles and blog posts with the right keywords will help you attract interested visitors to your site… and convert them into paying clients.

Of course, it helps to have the right tools if you expect to figure out what potential clients are looking for. Google’s Keyword Tool is an excellent (and FREE!) resource for finding low-competition keywords to use in your content, so you can start bringing traffic to your website.