AVALANCHE: The Lawyer Marketing Group

Blogs - are they right for you?

We have found that blogs have been useful marketing vehicles for some of our clients. The reason? They are inexpensive, easy-to-find, and readership is increasing.

Some background for those of you new to blogs:

“Blog” is a term that is short for “web log,” or a journal on the web. The idea behind a blog is that without knowing the technical side of web publishing, a writer can publish new information regularly. And with the advent of easy-to-use tools, blogging has caught on as a popular medium.

From the reader’s point of view, a blog looks like a website with dated entries or articles.

Relative low cost to blog

In addition to the many great blog hosts and tools that make it easy to blog, the cost is much lower than many other marketing options. For the big names in blog hosting, businesses pay up to $150 a year for blogs. And many services offer free blogs.

The higher expenditure is your time. Because the key to a successful blog is adding new entries often, you need to write often and dedicate time to updating your blog.

Search engines love blogs

Because blogs are updated often, search engines are good about crawling and adding that new information to search results. In the world of increased search engine ranking importance, this can really give your firm a boost. Potential clients will find your firm more easily if you have a regularly updated blog online.

Blog readership is increasing

According to comScore’s August “Behaviors of the Blogosphere” report, 50 million US Internet users visited blogs in Q1 of 2005. That’s a big increase from the 34 million of 2004.

With blog readership increasing, and business blogs becoming more popular, it is a good time to attract clients with a blog.

We have found that blogging works best for those practices that have constant changes to communicate–product liability, class-actions, and pharmaceutical litigation are a few areas that can give up-to-the-minute information to clients and potential clients.

Areas that will have success with blogs are increasing

Any attorney that wants to establish a relationship with potential clients can do so by sharing their expert knowledge, and publishing insight and tips to the public.

What will you write for your potential clients?

Listing your site in link directories

Here’s another soft spot with me: Owners of sites whose content is comprised of links and advertisements are constantly soliciting link partnerships.

You might hear that search engine rankings are based on having other sites linked to your site. This is not entirely true.

Yes, search engines include ‘link popularity’ as a factor in determining rankings. However, the links are weighed. If the content of the site linking to yours is related to that of your site, it gets a substantial weight. If not, it may get a lighter weight, or, it may give you negative points.

Because the goal of search engine marketing is to help searchers get to pertinent information, I advise our clients that these lists of unrelated links are a waste of time. Don’t include your firm in a site whose name (and URL) says they sell quality DVDs.

Adding your URL to such a site could hurt you more than help you.

Primarily, you are associating your practice with a site with unrelated content. That does not boost your rankings. Links to sites with related content boost your ratings.

Next, some search engines blacklist sites of links and advertisements. That definitely won’t boost your rankings.

In addition, search engines may lower rankings of your site if they think you are using “schemes” to boost your rankings. (Those search engines that do not have this in their current algorithm will add it, as they see their own search result usefulness decline, and users switch to more reliable search engines.)

Furthermore, you may be associating your firm with a company that has unethical business practices or a company that is ignorant and is marketing themselves as such. These are both minor points, but in the grand scheme of things, you want your quality of service to show on many levels, so such associations aren’t the most valuable to you.

Keep in mind that there are directories that are legitimate and that would be useful to you. Directories of lawyers, community directories, and association directories are all great places for you to establish your link popularity. And they may also be useful to people trying to find a lawyer.

Should I exchange links with other sites?

In my inbox this last week was an email offering a link trade with some used car website. The email read,

“…The site was established to provide link popularity to sites…The site is very old and established in all the search engines…When I link to you from the above site, your site will perform better in search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo.”

Search engines use complex algorithms to give search results based on keywords that searchers type. The goal of search engines is to provide searchers with information they are looking for. They do so by evaluating a combination of data to rank sites in search results. The data includes links from sites with complimentary or related content.

A used car site and a lawyer marketing site are not complimentary and share no related content. People searching for used cars are searching for used cars, not lawyer marketing.

There are good partnerships to have in link exchanges, though. They are the same partnerships that are good to have for your practice in general—legal and community associations, places with information that will allow your clients to do some self-guided research, and links to the actual text of laws that apply to your clients. These are all good resources for your clients, and a link to your site from any of these sites would both increase your business and your search engine rankings.

So, remember that if you are considering exchanging links, your first priority should be to point your customers to useful information, and have customers at other sites be pointed to you, if your information may be useful to them. Only after this first requirement is satisfied should you employ a link exchange to increase your search engine rankings.

What is the best search engine marketing plan?

There's no straight-up, easy answer to that question. Because a search engine marketing plan is long-term, all sorts of factors go into deciding on the best course of action.

What you must do, is keep in mind the goal of search engine marketing:
Allow people to find your site (and your phone number) through search engines on the web. These include Google, Yahoo, AOL, AskJeeves, or any other general web search engine that potential clients may use.

When you launch a new website, or a redesigned website, you want to encourage the search engines to find you.

Your website design should include copy that is optimized for certain keywords that the search engines like. There are tools that you can purchase to help you find target keywords. And then there are agencies with experienced people and professional-grade tools to select target keywords. Though more expensive, it often pays off to have experienced people help with the optimization that goes into the design of your site. So far, no software can keep up with subtleties in language the way a human can.

When your finished site is live, submit your URL to the search engines.
Submission asks the search engine spiders (applications that crawl the web indexing all pages of all sites) to look at your site, highlighting your keywords. Again, you have options on how to go about doing this. Your evaluation should include pricing and effectiveness.

• You can submit to each search engine individually, by finding the submissions (sometimes called suggestions) page on each search engine. Make sure to include all the search engines, because the affiliations between them change often.
• You can buy software to submit to all search engines in one fell swoop. Frequent software updates will allow your submissions to stay current with the ever-changing search engine metrics and affiliations.
• You can hire professionals to submit for you. There are agencies that do only search engine marketing, agencies that include search engine marketing as part of a complete web design and development package, and there are full-service marketing agencies that include search engine marketing in their list of services. Whatever the case, go to someone who knows about search engine marketing. They will have the best possible combination of submission techniques. They will have high-level tools for submissions, and will know when it's best to submit directly to search engines due to engine-specific rules and regulations. In addition, search engine marketers can analyze your rankings on a regular basis, and adjust your site to continually boost your rankings.

Paid Search Engine Advertising
Because it can take up to eight months to get crawled by all the search engine spiders and get your rankings up organically, I often recommend that my clients consider the idea of paid search engine advertising in the first couple months to both get hits and push for faster organic rankings.

Following are some paid search engine advertising options:

Google AdWords
Google AdWords is a search engine marketing tool in which advertisers pay each time a user clicks through the ad to their website. This is often a successful way to jumpstart a new website, until organic search engine rankings are up. Any clickthrough will also improve organic rankings on Google, as it will associate your keywords to your site.

Google AdWords are included on many sites and search engines, including AskJeeves and AOL.

How it works:
Advertisers pay $5 to set up an account, and then set a daily and monthly budget, with no minimum fee. Advertisers select keywords to target, and set a maximum amount that they will pay per click (PPC - when a user actually clicks on the ad) for ads that come up on in the paid advertisements section of a Google search results page. Any Google searcher that clicks on an ad and goes to that site generates a charge to the advertiser.

AdWords PPC advertisements are ranked using a combination of click-through-rate (how many users actually click on the ad), cost-per-click (CPC) (higher price bids will get a better chance here), and relevancy of ad text to the keywords.

Google also has a pay per impression (PPM) option for advertisers who want to choose which member sites their ads get placed on. The budgeting is set up the same way.

Yahoo Sponsored Search
Yahoo Sponsored Search is another pay per click (PPC) search engine advertising option. Again, this is a possible short-term vehicle to get customers to your site as organic rankings improve.

Yahoo comes in at a close second to Google in search engine use, and as such deserves consideration.

How it works: Advertisers open an Overture account and maintain a minimum balance of $50, and spend a minimum of $20 per month for the PPC sponsored advertising. (See Google AdWords section above for more details on PPC.) The advertiser selects relevant keywords that will trigger the ad in a paid results section on Yahoo and participating sites and directories.

Yahoo Sponsored Search PPC ads are ranked by cost-per-click, which means that the highest bidder gets the top slot of ads that use the keywords. Note that if an advertiser does not get $20 worth of clicks through per month, he is still charged a minimum of $20. This might provide impetus to review an ad campaign and raise a daily budget or cost per click bid.

Yahoo Sponsored Search is also known as Overture and includes placement on many sites and directories including MSN.com.

Yahoo Directory Submit
Yahoo allows advertisers to pay $299 to submit their URL to the Yahoo Directory. This does not guarantee that the site will be linked in the directory, just that the directory spider will assess the site.

If a site is accepted in the Yahoo Directory, there is a $299 annual fee to maintain the listing.

In general, this is a low cost marketing vehicle, but I have found that it has not generated enough business for my attorney clients to pay for itself.

National Legal Directory Paid Submission
Check to see which directories and associations you are already a part of - your bar association? Your local community directory? Use these to your advantage. Most important in these directories is linking to your website(s). I cannot stress the importance of linking to your sites. Relevant links (links that come from sites with related material to yours) will both generate traffic and boost your search engine rankings.

FindLaw - findlaw.com
Lots of attorneys are familiar with FindLaw. This makes FindLaw a good resource when marketing to other attorneys. That most non-lawyers are not familiar with FindLaw makes it a non-cost-effective tool to market to the general public.

Because lawyers are familiar with this site, it would be worthwhile to consider FindLaw a viable option for Lawyer to Lawyer marketing. Note that negotiations can be made with the FindLaw sales staff as to the price of advertisements.

Thompson Legal Record/West Legal Directory
This also appears to be a directory that attorneys are familiar with, and as such may use to find services from other lawyers. I recommend that my clients keep their information on this site updated, and include a link to their site(s). The link is important here, as organic search engine rankings include relevant links in the determining algorithm. Links from well-known legal directories are valuable both for generating clicks, as well as for search engine rankings.

For attorneys that already have entries in this directory, so there is no additional cost for this marketing vehicle.

Martindale-Hubbell - martindale-hubbell.com, martindale.com
Another well-known resource for attorneys, attorneys are listed in a directory by practice area. It is worthwhile to consider paying for inclusion for both the potential clients that may come from this site, as well as for the links that will boost your search engine rankings.

Associations
Consider joining national and local associations to boost search engine rankings.
Use your current memberships to state and city bar or trial lawyers associations to both drive traffic to your site and boost those search engine rankings.

American Bar Association - abanet.org

Association of Trial Lawyers of America - atlanet.org

YourState Bar Association

YourCity Bar Association

YourState Trial Lawyers Association

After all that, what's your best plan?

Marketing with Search Engines

Search engines are huge. They're important. They're useful.

Let's start with what I'm talking about when I say search engines. Search engines are web applications that crawl the web indexing text. Search engines allow users to search the index by keyword, and provide links to matching resources.

Directories are also lists of internet resources, but they are manually entered by a person (rather than the automatically crawled by search engine spiders). Directories also allow users to search an index by keyword.

Because people use directories in the same way as search engines, they are often lumped together as search engines. There is also confusion because Yahoo started out as a directory, but added crawl-based search in 2002.

The business of search engines is fascinating.

The race in the search engine world is going faster and faster, with the giants adding new tools and services left and right.

Google just launched a new cost-per-impression and targeting for Ad Words beta, and a personal search tool in beta - allowing users to keep a detailed history of their past searches. Yahoo launched My Web in beta on Wednesday (4/27), boosting their personal search history service. Google's IPO was the hottest news in technology since the 1990's.

And the usefulness of search engines is mesmerizing.

According to the January, 2005 Search Engine Users study by Pew Internet, 38 million American adults use a search engine every day.

We use search engines to find definitions too modern to be in the dictionary.

We use search engines to find an exact address.

We use search engines to research geography, history, and astrology.

We use search engines to see photos of landscape designers' prior work.

We use search engines to learn all about Britney Spears.

We use search engines to find a lawyer when we have no referral.

People often like to do a little reading about an attorney to establish an image of who the attorney is. We want to see what kind of a relationship we can have with the lawyer before calling with him or her.

This is a good reason to have a website. And a good reason to market with search engines, so people can find your site.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) has many parts - advertising (sponsored links and pay-per-click ads), directory submission (paid or unpaid), and search engine optimization (SEO - where your site's copy, design, code, and structure make it easier to get higher results in search engine queries).

Each of these factors of SEM is valuable, but you need to evaluate your business goals to see which are right for you.

Paid advertising is often a good way to jump-start your search engine rankings.

There are a lot of attorneys on the web, and attorney directories have been marketing on the web for a long time, so they hold the highest organic rankings. Findlaw is everywhere.

It takes time to get organic rankings on search engines, and in directories.

While directory administrators are reviewing your submission, and before the web crawlers have found and indexed your site, you might use sponsored links and pay-per-click ads to get your site to be listed on the first two pages.

And since most users don't look at results past the second page on a search engine (iProspect's Search Engine User Attitudes Survey), you really want to be on the first two pages.

If you provide valuable information (and my first recommendation is that you do - include links to resources, for example) you might even get a link or two from an outside site. And those links boost your organic rankings on many search engines.

Submitting to directories can not only allow your site to appear in directory results, but some search engines also use directory listings to determine the rank of their crawled results. Some directories allow you to submit your site to them for a fee, some simply require that you do your research and submit to the proper category.

Within your site, there is a lot you can do to boost your organic ranking. You can optimize your site's copy to utilize competitive keywords for your practice, so crawlers associate those keywords in their index with your site.

You can optimize your sites design, code, and structure, to enable those spiders to crawl through your site quickly and efficiently. Building search engine optimization into your site is becoming standard, but it's best to make sure your web designer is on top of it.

Using search engine marketing, you can help get your site on search engines so people who need you can find you.

Designing for your Users

In the web world, we refer to people going to a website as "users."

In lawyer marketing terms, your "users" are your potential clients, current clients, and jurors.

Your website should be designed for your target users. If you provide the information they're looking for, they are likely to call you.

People go to your site (either led there by a search engine or your marketing materials) looking for an attorney, or wanting to know more about you and your practice specifically.

People researching you as an attorney might have different levels of experience with computers. They may or may not already know something about the law in your practice area. They may come from various races and religions, and they may span socioeconomic groups.

You know the background of most people who can use your services; you know the clients you are targeting. Use what you know about people to make your website design more effective for them.

People go to your site to find out who you are, what you do, and how you will interact with them.

Design your site to let them get this information quickly and easily by doing the following:

1. Make the navigation easy to use.
   
   • Use language common to your users. "Mea culpa" is basic for lawyers, but is not intrinsic to all automobile drivers.
   • Group like ideas or information together and stay consistent across the site. People like systems - they use them every day: alphabetized files, color-coded traffic signals and street signs.


2. Use images that convey who you are, what you do, and that you know who they are. Images are a great way of reinforcing your experience:
   
   • Photos of you in action in the courtroom, if you are a trial lawyer
   • Photos of you communicating with a couple, if you specialize in mediating amicable divorces
   • Photos of people you represent photos of people working in warehouses, for workers' comp law
   
   Be selective with images and optimize them so they load quickly.


3. Use fonts that are both easy to read and reinforce your image. Comic Sans may not convey much confidentiality in your professionalism.


4. Include your background, your experience, your location, and your phone number. These are standard content that everyone will want to find.


5. For a bonus, give away some free information.
   
   • Give links to support groups for people with brain injuries.
   • Define the types of bankruptcy and what each generally entails.
   
   

If you follow these usability suggestions, your users may become your clients.
:)

Good Design Feeds Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) hasn't changed the definition good web design. No. It has reinforced the definition of good web design. A site that is designed well enables optimization.

SEO has gained importance over the last few years. But the goal of websites is the same as back in the dotcom days: we still want sites that communicate business goals to users - be they perspective clients, potential referrers, or jurors.

The new angle, with the addition of SEO, is to allow people to find our sites (and thus our information) quickly, using search engines.

My background is in web usability and information architecture, where the objective is designing from the user perspective. This dictates that the site design must enable people to access the information they want.

The goal of SEO is the same: people use search engines to find websites that will give them information they need to make a decision. In our case, that means finding an attorney to help them. By giving people useful information on your website, you begin to establish a relationship, earning their trust, and getting them to call you for help in evaluating their case.

Good web design and SEO can be broken down into four parts. Effective use of these parts will drive clients to your site, and subsequently to your services. The parts are as follows:
* Relevant, useful content, targeted to optimal users
* UI and graphic design (intuitive navigation, readability, sitemaps & breadcrumbs to reinforce place)
* Clean code
* Information architecture (site & directory structure on the server, category organization)

The content of your site needs to be relevant to people who need to hire an attorney.
* Provide information about how you can help.
* Briefly write about your qualifications and your experience, to show people who you are.
* Show that you know how to help people by sharing some of your specialized knowledge -the process of filing a claim, or how settling differs from going to trial.
* Use keywords to steer people to the answers they want.
* It's great to give away resources for research people can do on their own - empowering people builds a trusting relationship.

It's important to keep your copy succinct. No one wants to read your entire biography online. Link to your blog if you want to philosophize and theorize. (BTW, blogs are a great web marketing tool, but we'll address that in another entry.)

People want quick points to see who you are and what you do. Can they trust you? Can they have a relationship with you? If you ramble on and on in your web copy, you are communicating that you are a better talker than listener. And right now, coming to you without a referral, your potential clients need to know you will listen to them.

So all this keeps users on your site, and entices people to hire you, but how is it helpful for SEO?

Succinct, relevant web copy works threefold to assist in high search engine rankings. First, the keywords you were focusing on to steer users to answers they were seeking weigh in high on search engine results. Second, providing useful information may get people to link to your site. Link popularity is a factor in search engine results. Third, short copy is easy for the search engines' spiders to go through when searching for keyword phrases. All the content requirements for good web design match those for SEO.

The design of your site is there to allow users to get to relevant information.

Graphic design reinforces your general message - professionalism, experience, authority, and compassion are often what people look for in an attorney. These are shown with fonts and images that convey these messages.

The user interface (UI) has to be designed so that people intuit where to go for specific information. Where are resources for injured people? Where have you described how you work with your clients? Your experience? Your phone number? How people navigate around your site and knowing their location in a site's structure are big usability issues.

Using old standbys like intuitive navigation naming conventions, breadcrumbs, and access to text navigation and sitemaps makes search engines happy, too. Spiders can quickly crawl through the links on your site unobstructed, which means quick indexing, which means you're optimizing.

On the technical side of things, clean code is a best practice for any website.

From the user perspective, clean code means a quicker download time. This might not be apparent on a high-speed connection, but it may still make a difference on dial-up. And spiders, built to sort through code, like that code to be clean.

I hate to sound like a preachy geek, but the fact is that WYSIWYG web editors (those applications where you see what the web page will look like while you type in your copy) still don't generate the cleanest code.

Same holds true for sites with cookie-cutter designs that a hosting service might provide you - creating a site that a non-technical person can update with a simple interface requires lots of code that spiders have a hard time crawling through to get to your keywords.

Going deeper into the background is setting up an information architecture that is usable - again for both people and search engines.

The information architecture sets the blueprint for how all your content is organized, how your files are named, and the structure on the server.

Usually we group similar information into categories. A common category is "About Us" on a website; this category usually contains info such as attorneys' bios, case results, and firm philosophy.

People find information more easily when it is categorized into smaller groups. Info presented in one big lump is overwhelming. Likewise, a web crawler for a search engine likes a good structural organization. A spider can systematically go through pages faster when it encounters a logical organization system. As file-naming goes, some search engines weigh the words in the URL of a given page, so a good structure helps you here, as well.

So there you have it. Get good web design and optimize your site for search engines in one fell swoop. My advice? Choose web designers who have SEO know-how and capability; choose marketers who have web savvy. The combination of skills make your website successful.