Law Firm Internet Marketing Blog | Attorney Search Engine Optimization SEO | News & Tips

New Google Places Charges Will Have Little Impact On Law Firms?

2011-11-10T13:47:00.005-05:00

New news broke out of Google land that next year Google is planning on charging high volume users of their Google Places listings: http://www.gpsworld.com/lbs/google-charge-high-volume-users-map-use-12285.

As the story currently goes, Google plans to charge an excess impressions fee for companies who have more than 25,000 impressions per day. Most law firms rarely reach 25,00o impressions daily since more attorneys searches are more practice area specific and parochial in nature.

The question however becomes how does Google plan to define a "company" in their system and how are their totals calculated? Are the totals discussed based on ALL Google Places listings in one account? This would seem logical as the only way to connect the dots here. Or is this based on the total volumes for each listing - no matter where they reside? Since they will likely bill from your Google account, questions remain.

Again, most law firms needn't be concerned about this but the firms with multiple locations and are in higher volume search practice areas should take notice. We will keep tabs on this and see what is the best course of action here...

Optimizing Website Title Tags For Improved Google Places Results

2011-11-03T16:59:00.006-04:00

When Google first introduced Google Places (formerly Google Local) listings in their search results, the phone books were officially added to the endangered species list. Historically the old phone book companies that would proactively contact attorneys each year make sure their listing were up to date and made the process easy to update and renew. With the advent of Google Places, attorneys must now proactively claim their listings, optimize them, and make sure they are working properly with their attorney websites. To further complicate the issue, Google has now blended the website and places listings into one result for the most common attorney searches online.

Google’s Previous Problem Managing Firm Names

For those who have searched over the past few weeks, you will notice that the displayed results have changed…again. Google has now placed the address and phone to the right and more importantly the way the company name is displayed in the blended results listings. Historically, Google would pull the company name (or attorney or firm name) directly from the Google Places name. Naturally, this created problems for Google since people would, despite Google’s policy to the contrary, change their firm name to better present themselves and increase conversions for specific searches. This worked fine for a while until Google started validating their listings (finally) and suspending accounts that violated their policies.

Google’s Most Recent Display Changes

Ironically Google is now doing through their results page what many attorneys previously had tried to do themselves: provide better conversions and targeted results for their Google Places listings. In the example to the right, you will see the listings for the “Omaha real estate attorney” search. Notice how the top two listings display details about the attorneys (Highlighted: that are not the firm’s name in Google Places) while the others do not. What is displayed in the first two listings are from the Title Tag of the home page from each website. Also notice how the title tag displayed is only relative to the search query. For example in this search, Omahabankruptcy.com is displayed as “Patricia Geringer, Bankruptcy Attorney” but if we change the search to “Omaha bankruptcy attorney” we see that not only is Patricia’s position improved but the title tag of her website is also now displayed.

What You Can Do To Improve Your Google Places Search Results & Conversions

If you are an attorney, you need to identify your practice areas of concentration. If you only do bankruptcy work, this is easy. But if you have multiple practice areas, you need to understand your concentrations and narrow them down to 2-3 for the home page optimization of your website. A good law firm marketing consultant will be able to assist you with this.

Once you have identified your 2-3 areas of concentration, go into Google and do searches within your targeted geography and identify those search results for your targeted practice areas that display blended Google organic and places listings as used in the example. If no Google Places are displayed for specific searches (i.e. “Omaha Land Zoning Attorney”), then you know you are too narrow in search.

Once you have claimed and complete your Google Places Optimization, make sure that you review the SEO elements of your website and in this case – the title tags on the home page of your website. MAKE SURE that the home page title tag contains the keyword search terms that are most important to your practice areas of concentration (as discussed above). Again, a law firm SEO consultant will be able to assist you with all of these steps.

It is CRITICALLY IMPORTANT that attorney websites have the proper on-site optimization and nothing is more important than creating the correct title tags. Just ask yourself how many books you have purchased that had the wrong titles and you will quickly realize the significance of good title tags on a website. If you would like to learn more about how law firm search engine optimization can help your practice online, please contact the SEOConsultantFirm.com today…

Top 5 Tips To Maximize Attorney Referrals Online

2011-10-14T17:49:00.005-04:00

We recently worked with a very prominent attorney who for years said that he didn’t need a website and if anybody wanted to see anything about him, they could just Google his name and see all the results. This all changed when we finally received a call from the client saying that he now wanted a website. When we asked him why he changed his mind, he had indicated that the night before he was at a dinner party with a major celebrity who had not retained his services. When asked, the celebrity indicated that he did not choose our client because he did not have a website and he was impressed with the other attorney referrals that did.

The Opportunity Cost of Managing Your Legal Business

Most attorneys look at legal marketing expenses as what they gain by taking action. This includes building up referral networks of other attorneys and formal clients, advertising on TV, radio, in print publications, directories, etc. This also includes the visibility you can receive (or not receive) through the use of a legal website. In 2009, the ABA Journal found that 65% of people indicated that they now start their search for an attorney online. But what is important to note is that attorney searches also begin at the point of referral. Since most attorneys give out referrals in numbers (which most malpractice insurance coverage companies encourage), people are increasingly looking up and researching their referred attorneys online BEFORE they decide to contact them.

The Power of Controlled Content

Without a website that you can control, you as an attorney are at the mercy of the alternative websites and directories that will ultimately end of controlling your image online for you. If you don’t have a optimized website (or no website at all), try Googling your name and look at the results. These will likely include attorney directories, ratings agencies like AVVO, news, press releases, case summaries, etc. You may even see Google Places listings with customer feedback (positive & negative) about you. Even though you may not be aware of these things, your clients and referral clients are. In most cases, you have little or no control over these sources of information about you – especially if you don’t have a plan to manage them online.

What Your Referrals Want To Know About You

When people receive attorney referrals, they want to know information about you in order to determine if you are the right attorney for them. Traditional sales psychologists indicate that the average person will go through three stages during a sales process: Needs, Proof & Risk. Clearly in the case of the referral client, they seem to have a need which is what led them to you. At the point they receive information about you, they are considering questions dealing largely with Proof & Risk which includes questions dealing with:

Does this attorney have the experience and expertise to handle my case?
What results has this attorney received for other clients and does he/she have a solid track record?
How much will this attorney end up costing me and what value do I get in return?

Because of these questions, it is little wonder why I typically see web pages dealing with results and/or testimonials at the top 5 most trafficked pages on a good attorney website.

Top 5 Tips To Maximize Your Legal Practice Online For Referrals:

Make sure your website is fully optimized for attorney searches. Go on Google and type in your name along with lawyer and/or attorney and your location and see what comes up in the search results. If your profile on your website is not ranked #1 for this search, you need to contact a legal SEO consultant to help change this for you. It important to point out that the #1 ranking in Google gets 36.4% of the clicks on the first page so your goal should always be to achieve that position. If you don’t have a website today, get one now – waiting will only make things worse for you.
Design your website to appear more professional than your competition. Studies have shown that most people will make a decision on the quality of a website within less than a second. In short, you have a very short window to impress your referral clients online BEFORE they decide to let your competition do the same. If you know who are commonly provided as other attorney referrals along with you, take a look at their websites and see how you stack up. If you are unclear of your competition, simply ask your referral clients on a regular basis and take note of who else is commonly mentioned to them.
Utilize social media with an active content strategy. Since most attorneys get business from client referrals, what are you doing to actively keep you in their minds? Marketing experts agree that you need to be in front of people 7-12 times a year for them to actively remember you WHEN THEY NEED YOU. One of the best ways to do this is to create an active content strategy so they will see you on a consistent basis when they are on Facebook, LinkedIn and/or Twitter.
Claim and optimize your Google Places Listing. If you have no idea what I just said, then once again you should rely on a legal marketing expert to help you at this point. This is critically important when people do searches for you by name and also include where you are located in the same search. Google will make this connection and in many cases, will propel their Google Places listings at or near the top on the results. Once claimed and optimized, these must then be monitored, controlled, and improved upon by encourage customer testimonials and removing or displacing any negative comments as well.
Monitor and edit third party sources involving your name. In addition to your website, you will still have other web pages displayed for searches involving your name. There are three things you can do to best manage these third party sources:

Try to edit any third party attorney profiles that appear on the first page of Google. Some of these like AVVO will allow you to claim and edit for free while other sources such as Martindale may require a fee to claim and modify these listings and/or to make them more comprehensive and complete.
Promote positive third party search results to higher positions on the first page of Google. Do any of the search results involve newspaper and/or TV articles about major case wins? How about positive press about an award you may have received or something else that positively reflects on you? Through the use of targeted inbound link building, you can actually help promote and improve these search results by creating targeted citations from other web properties.
Remove and/or diminish any negative results or articles dealing with you. If somebody has said something negative about you in a blog, in a news article and/or other content sources, you may have little recourse to have it removed if any of that information may be factually correct. If you cannot have them removed, you next best option is to simply diminish their visibility by promoting other positive web sources to appear above them. In short, you can push down bad results by promoting positive results above them. Again, this involves targeted link building strategies which a good legal SEO consultant can help you with.

If you would like to learn more about how you can improve your marketing online to better promote attorney referrals and conversions, please contact the SEO Consultant Firm today to see how we can help you better grow and promote your practice online. www.SEOConsultantFirm.com. Free CLE New York

Integrating Social Media and Law Firm Websites

2011-10-03T19:25:00.012-04:00

A lot has been made of lawyer marketing and the addition of social media in your marketing plans. It is hard to deny that 93% of Americans want companies to have a social media presence (Cone Business In Social Media Study 2008) but does have a social media presence alone for attorneys accomplish this? No – and here is why…

Social properties like Facebook Pages, LinkedIn Pages, Twitter Pages and the like are simply a way to potentially connect with and have people follow your law firm…that is if you have something important and frequent to update them with otherwise they are billboards in a cornfield.

Marketing experts commonly state that you need to be in front of your potential customers 7-12 times a year for them to remember you WHEN THEY NEED YOUR LEGAL SERVICES. This is what is called frequency marketing and why you see commercials of polar bears drinking Coke every Super bowl when you already know what a Coke is. The problem is unless your social media is frequently updated with content; there is nothing new pushing you in front of your potential customers (and referrals) on social media.

Most attorneys do a poor job of promoting legal social media properties to their prospective clients and referral partners. They fail to do this on a consistent basis with their business cards, legal marketing materials, networking events, emails, and yes: especially their websites.

Here are a few ways you can better promote your social media on your website/s:

Place a Facebook Page “Like” button on your website. No matter what the user thinks they are liking, ultimately they are clicking a button to have your information on Facebook in their news feed every time you publish information. This is like having a free newsletter to your customers who almost never change their mailing address and they only have to click on the button once to make it all happen!

Place Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter icons prominently on EVERY page of your website so no matter what pages a user will possibly enter or exit your website, they will always be able to quickly access and follow you on social media.

Place all of your social media links next to your phone numbers, on your contact us pages and on your contact us confirmation pages. Since most law firm websites fail to provide a “call to action” on the contact us confirmation pages, this is a perfect pace for users to see a “next step” after initially contacting you.

Do you offer free initial consultations and/or case reviews? Why not ask the prospective client to click on your Facebook page “like” button as part of your providing a free consultation for them. Since you are giving your time for free, why not ask for something as simple as a click in return?

Place a stream of your social media postings in a column on the home page of your website. What better way to display the usefulness of your social media postings than by prominently showing them to your website viewers.

Add your social media links, buttons, and Facebook page “like” buttons prominently on your law firm blog. I am amazed at how many attorneys will work hard to drive customers to their blogs only to not giving them an easy way to continue to follow future blog posts by simply following the law firm on social media properties. Since the blog is the heart of your active content strategy, it only makes sense to help distribute your content to as many places as possible.

Clearly there are many more ways to help integrate and promote your social media properties on your websites and blogs so if we missed something, please feel free to share and we will gladly add to this list…

If you would like to learn more about how best lawyer search engine optimization practices can help your law firm succeed online, please contact the SEO Consultant Firm today…

Do Online Legal Document Services Provide High Quality Work?

2011-08-12T11:10:00.005-04:00

It is hard these days to turn on the TV and not see ads for various online legal document services – especially for LegalZoom. But recently another company, Rocket Lawyer has been making waves and according to Compete.com has recently surpassed LegalZoom in total unique visitors.

Rocket Lawyer recently raised and investment round of $18.5 Million and according to Forbes has around 70,000 users per day. A recent search in Google also shows that there are around 429 Million results for the search term “online legal document forms” and 90.6 Million results for “online legal document service.”

What about Quality?

One of the biggest questions surrounding the use of these low cost alternatives to legal documentation is how good is the quality of work? Consumer reports recently went out to three of the leading online document service providers (LegalZoom, Rocket Lawyer and Quicken WillMaker Plus) to create a will and here are the key findings from their test:

Although the results were better than having no will at all, they were very simple and typically not a good fit for many complex legal needs and guidance.
Many of the wills produced potential pitfalls and lacked important and timely information ranging from outdated tax laws, little guidance on state laws, ability for the user to modify and add potential conflicting provisions, limited abilities to create special needs trusts and little or no tax guidance.

What Consumers Need To Know

When it comes to good legal service and documentation, you get what you pay for. Many years ago, I tried filing taxes on my own only to learn that a good accountant will save me far more money than they cost due to their expertise, service and thorough understanding of the tax code. A good attorney should provide the same type of value.

If you are initially concerned about the costs involved with the legal documentation you need, ask a number of lawyers for quotes and be candid with them about your budget and what you are willing to spend. In many cases, a good attorney will work within your budget or recommend somebody who will. In addition to providing legal documentation, a good attorney should also provide you with guidance and a better understanding of state laws and tax issues that may be lacking with the low cost online alternatives. Once you have exhausted the potential attorneys at your disposal, then you can consider these online alternatives.

Contact the SEO Consultant Firm if you would like to generate more clients for your law firm

Missouri Becomes First State To Ban Facebook Friending Between Teachers and Students

2011-08-03T20:06:00.003-04:00

Missouri just became the first state to prohibit teachers from creating a "friend" relationship with their current or former students. In what has raised a number of eyebrows in the social media world, the Missouri law now states:

"Teachers cannot establish, maintain or use a work-related website unless it is available to school administrators and the child's legal custodian, physical custodian or legal guardian,"..."Teachers also cannot have a non work-related website that allows exclusive access with a current or former student."

This is most likely the beginning of many legal issues surrounding the use of Facebook and who you become friends with. We are already seeing a growth of conflicts arising from "friend" associations between judges, attorneys and jurors in the legal community.

If you are an attorney, you need to become aware of the growing number of laws and ethical implications of social media use - even if you don't use social media yourself.

If you would like to learn more about Facebook Page Optimization and how we can help you manage your social media policies, please contact the SEO Consultant Firm

Google’s Market Share in NYC

2011-08-01T21:34:00.003-04:00

It is commonly stated that Google has around 66% of the search engine market with Bing and Yahoo picking up most of the remainder. But just how accurate is this number?

A recent article by search engine land sparked my interest to once again review data from a number of law firms here in New York City to determine what percentages I am typically seeing. This is certainly not scientific by any means by here is what I found across all my attorney websites and practice areas:

Google: 83.8%
Yahoo: 6.1%
Bing: 5.2%
All Others: 4.9%

Again, this data is not scientific but is was surprising how little this data varied from one attorney website to another – no matter the practice area or authority of the site. Clearly from an SEO and PPC (Pay-Per-Click) perspective, Google remains the 10,000 pound gorilla for search engines in NYC.

Contact the SEO Consultant Firm if you would like to learn more about how we can help your law firm internet marketing online.

Using YouTube Hot Spots To Help Improve Your Attorney Videos

2011-07-26T17:06:00.006-04:00

With the growing number of attorney videos appearing on websites and social media, attorneys are increasingly beginning to ask how effective they really are. Website and YouTube analytics provide a good tertiary read on the usual views and click through data but they still fail to tell us what we really want to know about our videos such as:

How long should a video typically run before I lose my audience?
Do people want to see me, pictures, or both?
How do my videos compare to other competing videos?
How well do my videos retain the viewing audience?
What can I learn from my previous videos that will help educate me on how to improve my future videos?

In the past, most of these questions left people guessing but with the recent release of YouTube’s “Hot Spots” reporting tool, you can now find many of the answers you need

What Is YouTube Hot Spots?

YouTube Hot Spots are a new reporting tool located on the lower-left of your YouTube Insight report for each of your videos…hosted on YouTube of course. This report now allows you to see such how your videos are received by viewers throughout the course of the video. The metrics provided are compared to thousands of other videos on YouTube of similar length for comparison – you cannot segment by attorney videos only. Instead, you may be competing against the sensational video of the monkey scratching his behind with millions of views…so don’t get too caught up in the overall comparisons.

As noted above, you can now see how people are reacting and behaving when watching your videos. If your video has not yet received 300-600 views, chances are you will need more views to produce the data you need to see this report. In short, as if YouTube’s ranking algorithm involving total views was not enough for you, this is yet another excuse to stream your YouTube videos through all of your web properties.

What Can You Learn From Hot Spots?

After reviewing a number of attorney videos through Hot Spots, I have seen a few patterns that are worth repeating including:

People tend to high higher viewership at those times of a video when nice visuals and images are used in place of a talking head. This may not be welcome news to a narcissist but apparently people react differently to images than people
People tend to have higher levels of viewership at the beginning and ends of a video. This could be the result of user fast forwarding but also could indicate that shorter videos are more favored
It is a good idea to place your call to actions at those times with the highest level of viewer interest

YouTube Hot Spot reporting is still in its infancy but could very well become the new “heat map” for video effectiveness moving forward. Since people are more inclined to watch than read online, this may be yet another valuable tool to help you improve your attorney marketing efforts online.

If you would like to learn more about lawyer search engine optimization and marketing online, please contact the SEO Consultant Firm today to see how we can help you.

Will Google +1 Help Attorneys?

2011-07-25T10:25:00.007-04:00

Questions are beginning to swell amongst attorneys about Google’s latest answer to social media – Google +1. Around three weeks ago, Google released the Google +1 button to accompany their search engine results and try to better combat the growing significance and threat from major social media providers like Facebook.

Since its launch, Google has now surpassed over 20 million users in a matter of weeks- something their last failed attempt at social media (Google Buzz) was never able to accomplish. Since Google +1 is prominently displayed to the right of each search engine results, do people truly see some value here or are they following like sheep so they don’t miss out on another saga of the social media revolution?

What Is Google +1?

Most attorneys I talk to still do not understand what Google +1 really is. The best way to describe this new feature is to think about the Facebook “like” buttons you are increasingly seeing on websites, blogs, etc. The “like” buttons will commonly show the button, the number of people who has indicated a like and a list of pictures of these people. Google +1 works in a similar manner (surprise!) yet here are the major differences:

Google +1 is designed to show their +1 button in their search results screen next to results
Google +1 accompany non-Google (i.e. anybody’s) provided websites
Google +1 will NOT provide/share this data to the website provider
Google +1 will ONLY show you a list of the people in your “social connections”

What Does Google Define As Your “Social Connections?”

According to Google, data for their social connections are derived from four primary sources of data:

People in your Gmail (or Google Talk) chat list
People in you’re my Contacts Group in Google Contacts
People in your Google+ Circles
People you’re following in Google Reader and Google Buzz

When looking at this list, you cannot help to notice what is missing: Facebook (with 750 million users) and Twitter (with 200 million users). Instead, these “social connections” are a Google property…which leads me to my next question: How many people use these Google properties? Here is what I know:

Gmail: as of November of 2010, Gmail had around 193 million monthly users. Chat lists are auto-created from people you commonly email with on Gmail. Many people have multiple Gmail accounts. As for contacts, do most people create and maintain their contacts with Google contacts? Why would they maintain them there and on their smart phones, and Outlook, etc.?

Google Circles: This is Google’s recent answer to Facebook lists – namely allowing people to create circles (or groups) of people in which you can more easily collaborate and share information with. The technology around this seems very interesting but much like Facebook lists – will the masses every really start using it?

Google Reader is simply an RSS aggregator that people will commonly use to centralize, review and access news from multiple sources (i.e. websites, blogs, etc.). I have been providing legal education and discussing the power of Google reader for years now but continue to find that most people simply do not use it – either regularly or at all.

So What Does All This Mean For Google +1?

When Facebook redefined social media, it created a tremor across the entire internet…including the search engines. Ever since then, search engines like Google now see applications like Facebook as a threat to their “follow the yellow brick road” model they have created for themselves. In short, social media creates “alternatives to search” that threatens the very heart of Google’s growth models.

My biggest question around Google +1 is the data they are using for their social connections. In many cases, these sources are Google sources and are not social media related and/or are not heavily used in any quantities that would rival Facebook. So based on this, I would seriously question exactly what benefits are provided to the average +1 user and whether or not they will now take the extra steps to make this yet another social media outreach a success.

Yes, Google has had an impressive start right of the gate with 20 million users but is it sustainable? Will it come anywhere close to rivaling Facebook for the same benefits provided? Google has recently indicated that Google +1 could now potentially impact the search rankings for +1 users based on their connections. But this of course is based on how m any people will actually use +1 and whether or not they will continue to be receptive to Google’s threats to continue change their search results displayed…which might go a long way to explaining the 20 million reasons why so many people initially jumped on their boat here.

What Attorneys Can Possibly Gain From Google +1

From an attorney marketing perspective, the jury is still out on the effectiveness of Google +1 for attorney marketing online and based on my assessment above, I have my doubts. But there may be another benefit for attorneys beyond marketing...

Many attorneys have had a hay day as of late with the growing usage of social media evidence used in e-discovery and legal actions. Due to Google’s arguably lose policies on user privacy, one has to wonder how these new “Google Circles” could potentially provide yet another great source of evidence in a court of law. And how about all the international governmental issues Google has been dealing with over the years? What if another government like China wants Google Circle data on users turned over in exchange for Google operating in China? All these questions make for some very interesting potential legal hurdles ahead…

Of course, the legal use of Google + data will only be as strong as people’s willingness to use it. Based on my observations at this point, I have my doubts. In the end, isn’t Google a search engine and Microsoft a software system provider and Facebook a social media giant? I sometimes wonder what companies sitting on billions of dollars in cash now think they are when they often forget what they are.

If you would like to learn more about lawyer internet marketing, please contact the SEO Consultant Firm today...

Should You Pay For PPC If You Are Already #1 Organically In Google?

2011-07-19T03:34:00.000-04:00

Attorneys with very high organic ranking websites will occasionally ask me if they should also be paying for PPC (Pay Per Click) campaigns for the same search term. In a previous post on why you need to be #1 in Google, I had pointed to recent studies by Jupiter search that showed that 87% of traffic from the search engine results pages go to organic results while 79% of people will ignore PPC advertising all together or only click on them AFTER they have exhausted the organic results first. In short, by asking the question of whether or not you should run PPC with a high organic ranking is basically asking if you want the additional 13% of the search results...or one would think.

Well, an interesting article was just released from Search Engine Land that ran a test on exactly this question and here are some of the key findings from their test:

- When running PPC with high organic results, there was an increase of just shy of 20% in combined clicks
- When removing the cannibalization effect of same page results, the increase in clicks worked out to around 12% (Ironically very close to Jupiter's research numbers f 13%)
- ROI is largely positive for running PPC along with organic results but this is ultimately a function of costs and returns.

How About PPC Landing Page Conversions?

One of the arguments for using PPC is that you can direct the clicks to nearly any webpage you want - unlike organic listings where the search engines (with SEO help from you) determine where the clicks go. These specialized "landing pages" tend to have higher conversions since they are designed specifically just for converting website traffic from PPC ads. Based on this study, the conversion ratios of the landing pages were typically around 10% higher than organic search pages.

So What Should You Do?

In summary, if you are considering running PPC along with your high organic placement, try running the same tests as they did in this study and see if the ROI is there for your desired search term/s. If your ROI is positive, stick with it. If not, stay with your organic search results.

To learn more about lawyer marketing online and how to better market your law firm, please contact the SEO Consultant Firm today to see how we can help you...

Most Large Law Firms Have Twitter Accounts - But Few Tweet Often

2011-07-18T09:14:00.003-04:00

A recent report our by the National Law Journal shows that although most of the nations largest law firms (78%) now have at least 1 twitter account yet most do almost no tweeting at all. Of the firms that had Twitter accounts, eight have protected accounts - meaning you must receive firm permission to access these accounts.

The debate still rages on as to the real effectiveness of Twitter and the business of law. We continue to hear stories of attorneys effectively using social media during high profile cases such as the Angel Alvarez case were he survived 20 gunshot wounds from the police in NYC. Conversely, many of the most highly followed attorneys on Twitter continue to claim that little or not new client generation has resulted from these efforts.

As attorneys continue to learn more about social media and its uses, they continue to question its effectiveness and the best uses of their time and legal marketing dollars.

When working with attorneys, the initial questions I commonly receive are the following:

- What social media accounts do I need (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Videos, etc.)?
- Do I need accounts for my firm, attorneys, by practice area, etc.?
- How do I maintain each of these accounts?
- What do I write about on these accounts?
- Is this an effective use of my time?

To best questions, I continue to promote the creation of a legal active content strategy. This strategy is based on the simple creation and integration of all of the mostly commonly used social media tools into one seamless and easy-to-use information network.

Once created, information is entered in one location (your legal blog) and then transmitted throughout your entire social media network automatically. No more entry into multiple accounts and not more worrying about which social media tool will work the best for you.

If you would like to learn more about setting up an effective active content strategy for your law firm, please contact us today so out top search engine optimization consultants we can help you grow your practice online.

Google Resets Their Page Ranking in The Google Tool Bar

2011-06-28T23:31:00.004-04:00

In case you haven't yet noticed, Google reset their Page Rank on a system-wide basis today. As a result, you may want to take a look at the impacts on the page rank for your website, webpages and blog/s.

On the legal directory front, here are the new page rankings:

PR 8: FindLaw.com
PR 8: SuperLawyers.com
PR 7: Lawyers.com
PR 7: NOLO.com
PR 7: HG.org
PR 6: AVVO.com
PR 6: Washlaw.edu
PR 6: AllLaw.com
PR 5: Accidents.com

Contact Us Today to learn more about how our search engine optimization consultants can help your attorney internet marketing.

6 Steps to Creating Optimized Blog Posts

2011-06-21T18:12:00.009-04:00

1.) Write About Something Useful

Sounds simple right? The problem is that many attorneys create blogs without a clearly defined goal and strategy. Here are some critical elements to consider: Are you posting consistently? Who is creating the blog posts? What are the topics of the posts? And most importantly: Is the information I am posting useful to my target audience? For example, if you are a criminal defense attorney – do people want to know about your weekend or are they more interested in changes in the DWI laws? If you are a divorce lawyer, do your prospective clients want to know about how many people got a divorce last month or how you can protect their assets in a divorce? These are just a couple of examples to illustrate a key point: people will follow your blog only if you give them a reason to. The best reason is to provide them with USEFUL information.

2.) Create a Keyword Rich Subject Lines.

Many people search online based on words and phrases that come intuitively to them and are related to the topic. The subject line of your blog post creates what is called a title tag for that page which is analogous to the title of a book in importance. Because of this, you need to create a subject for your blog post that contains the keywords related to your article and in a manner that is interesting, brief and compelling. If you have a blogger blog, you need to change the rendering order of your title tags first. Since most people will determine whether or not to read your blog post based on what they see in the subject line, make sure you carefully review it and do not publish until you have determined that it contains commonly used keywords, is interesting to a potential reader and is compelling.

3.) Create Textual Links From Your Content To Your Website Pages

Most attorneys have blogs to help support the authority of their websites. Since your website is your main conversion tool, blogs will commonly lead readers to websites for better conversions. One of the most important ways to lead a user to your website and build up the authority of your website at the same time is to create at least 1-2 textual links from each blog article to various pages within your site. For attorneys, these are commonly your practice area pages.

4.) Create A Clear Call To Action

You should always finish a blog entry with a suggested next step (or call to action). If you took the time to optimize your blog entry to grab readers, make sure you providing them with next steps after they read the article so you can improve your conversions. There is a reason why almost every product commercial on TV ends with “Call Now” – it tells the viewer what to do next. Your blog entry should do the same thing.

5.) Use Your Keywords In Your Content

Keywords and phrases that are important enough to include in the subject line of your blog post should also be repeated in the content of your blog post. The search engines not only index based on the prominence of the keywords (in the subject line) but also based on the density of the keywords repeated throughout your entries. It is a good idea to repeat these words and phrases at least 2-3 times in a typically 500 word entry but don’t overdo it – you don’t want to look to SPAMY to the search engines. It is also a good idea to substitute similar words and phrases as well to grab a bigger potential search such as: Attorney or Lawyer, Car or Automobile, Injury for Accident, etc.

6.) Add Links To Social Media

Just because a user may have found your blog now doesn’t mean they will find it again or remember you. With all of the various websites and blog the typical user visits, you cannot expect that all visitors will all proactively continue to come back again and again. Since over half of Americans now have Facebook accounts, it is important to now create your own social media properties and links to these accounts from each blog post so they can simply click a “Like” button once and will be able to follow your blog in their Facebook News Feed Page in the future. With an active content strategy, you can now have your blog posts automatically feed your content to your Facebook Page, Twitter and LinkedIn page where people can see you on a consistent basis.

Contact Us if you would like to learn more about lawyer marketing online and how we can help your law firm generate more clients and cases for your practice.

Cohabitation Agreements On The Rise

2011-06-20T15:38:00.002-04:00

If you are a divorce attorney, you know how difficult it can be in today’s economic environment. Historically, a couple’s largest asset heading into a divorce was their home. With the advent of the great recession, couples are struggling not only with finding and keeping a full-time job but also with the historic declines in their home values. Recent numbers showing roughly 23% (or 1 in 4) mortgaged homes are underwater and combined with our economic climate and low savings rates, it is little wonder why people simply cannot afford to get divorced…not to mention pay the legal fees in doing so.

In a recent survey by the AAML, 39% of attorneys indicated that they are seeing an increase in “Cohabitation Agreements” over the past 5 years. If you are a typical family / divorce lawyer with a website, chances are you already have pages for divorce, child support, child custody, etc. But do you have a web page for cohabitation agreements? Based on a recent search in Google, here are the results I received:

Divorce Lawyer: 8.7 million pages

Child Support Lawyer: 11.1 million pages

Child Custody Lawyer: 6.87 million pages

Separation Agreement Lawyer: 1.24 million pages

Prenuptial Agreement Lawyer: .82 million pages

Cohabitation Agreement Lawyer: .68 million pages

From the numbers listed above, it is clear that some attorney marketing efforts are not keeping up with the market demand. Since a cohabitation agreement is very similar to a prenuptial agreement, it is natural to assume that the numbers should be relatively equal as well.

Please contact us today if you would like to learn more about lawyer marketing online and how we can help your law firm generate new cases and clients.

Legal Market Losing Jobs - Outsourcing On The Rise

2011-06-06T10:38:00.004-04:00

According to recent government labor statistics; the US legal market has lost 700 and 1000 jobs in the months of April and May respectively. At a time when the US economy is starting to stabilize, the legal market continues to struggle in job growth. Year-over-year, the legal industry has fell from 1,113, 100 jobs in 2010 to 1,110,400 jobs in 2011 - a loss of 2700 jobs.

If there is a bright spot in the legal industry it is likely coming from the legal outsourcing industry - as indicated in a recent NYT's article. Here are a couple of key points from the article:

- Legal outsourcing revenues are expected to grow from $400 million in 2010 to $2.4 Billion in 2012. Although a fraction of the world's $200 Billion legal market, the growth is still staggering

- Outsourcing jobs on average commonly pay better (in the $50,000 - $80,000 range) than temp work

- Many legal outsourcing companies are keeping their working within the United States. These companies are typically opening offices and hiring lawyers in lower-cost areas in the US, like in West Virginia, Texas and North Dakota.

Visit our website to learn more about legal marketing online and how our SEO consultants can help you grow your practice

Optimizing Title Tags in Blogger Blogs

2011-06-03T14:13:00.000-04:00

One of the knocks on using Blogger for a blogging platform has to do with the rendering of the title tags within the blog. Based on a standard confirmation blogger blog; the title of each blog post will display AFTER the default title of the blog.

Why is this an issue?

The most important on-site SEO element of any website or blog is the Title Tag for each page on the blog. Since most blog titles tags will render from the blog post subject line, it is important that the primary keywords and phrases for a blog post be displayed from left to right in importance. Since Blogger by default with always display the blog title BEFORE the subject line of each post in the title tag, the signals and Blog SEO value of each post are diminished.

How you can fix the problem

Fortunately there is a work around to this problem that will change the defaults to displaying your blog post subject line BEFORE your blog title and here is how to make the change in your blog:

1.) Log into your Blogger Blog (at either blogger.com or through your Google accounts admin screen) and navigate to: Design > Edit HTML

2.) Back up your template just in case you make a mistake and need to recover your standard template again - click on the "Download Full Template" button.

3.) Find the following code set (near the top - you can also click CRTL + F and paste the following line code to find it: <data:blog.pageTitle/>

<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>

4.) Delete and replace the previous line of code (#3 above) with:

<data:blog.pageName/> |</span><br style="color: rgb(153, 0, 0);"><span style="color: rgb(153, 0, 0);"><data:blog.title/> <data:blog.pageTitle/>

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &ampquot;item&ampquot;'>

<title><data:blog.pageName/> |

<data:blog.title/></title>

<b:else/>

<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>

</b:if>

5.) Click on the "SAVE TEMPLATE" button on the lower-right of the box and then VIEW BLOG so you can see the results. Here is how this this looks on my blog for one of my blog posts:

Contact the SEO Consultant firm to learn more about Blog SEO and how we can provide Lawyer SEO consulting services for your law firm.

Building Search Engine Strategies Around Google Places

2011-05-23T16:12:00.000-04:00

With the advent of Google Places (formerly Google Local) listings within the search engine results pages, law firms continue to realize the importance (and limitations) of a good Google Places Optimization strategy. But Google Places are NOT displayed with every search result which means there are additional ways to take advantage of Google Places...especially when they are NOT displayed.

Google Places are displayed around common searches

Google Places are displayed when a more common search term or phrase is used within a specific geographic region. For example, a personal injury lawyer search in most towns and cities will provide a list of Google Places listings while a search for a mail fraud attorney will not.

Not all practice areas are displayed in a Google Maps

Some of the most common attorney practice areas tend to display Google Places listings by virtue of their commonality and frequency of repeatable search. Naturally, the larger the metro area, the more common you are to see these places results - and visa versa.

Google Places listings can be limiting for law firms

If you are a law firm with multiple practice areas, you may find optimization of your Google Places listing to be limited. For example, there are only 5 business categories (aka practice areas) you can select for any one Places listing yet you may have dozens of Google Places results (or more) for your various practice areas. In these instances, attorneys will often times have to prioritize which areas are the most important to include in their places listings while forgoing the rest.

Build Targeted Pages & Websites around those search areas that do not involve Google Places

As more and more attorneys are marketing online, the competition for the coveted page one results are becoming increasingly fierce and expensive. If you are a personal injury attorney, divorce attorney or criminal defense attorney in a larger city, you know exactly what I mean.

But just because you may not be able to compete for these important positions doesn't always mean that you can't compete for new clients online. For example, say you are a criminal defense attorney in New York City who wants more white collar crime cases. In this case, you will find both the criminal defense and white collar searches include a map. If however you look more specific into a white collar case type, you will commonly find that such areas as: mail fraud, tax fraud, mortgage fraud, etc. DO NOT display Google Places in the search results - almost completely organic results are displayed.

Are these as heavily search terms as criminal defense? No. But does this mean that even in smaller quantities these are not value cases with potentially higher relative conversions? No. To add further, how would a potential #1 position of mail fraud in NYC which gets around 36.4% of the first-page clicks in Google compare to the 5th position for criminal defense attorney that only gets 6.1%? In this example alone, you could get around 6X the number of clicks for mail fraud over criminal defense. Remember, in the end, ROI is all that matters and just because you think you have an acceptable showing for a given term (criminal defense) doesn't always mean that this will translate into a better return than an alternative top position (mail fraud).

Allows you to better market beyond your current geography

So what if you practice beyond the scope of your current office location? In most cases, attorneys are either left with no Google Places result for that area or have to find another office to use to help support another places listing - no small effort. But does this mean you have to market yourself in the same manner as where you office resides? Not necessarily. As we described above, not all practice areas have a supporting Google Places listing. This means that the only real limitation for your competitive positioning is your on-site SEO and link building efforts to your practice area pages on your website.

So in following our example above, you may be a criminal / white collar attorney who handles mail fraud cases in your hometown of San Diego but with good SEO tactics, your mail fraud page, with proper on-site SEO and deep linking can potentially perform just as well in Los Angeles and San Francisco as well.

Summary

As you can see above, Google Places optimization for law firms is clearly important but certainly not the only strategy in your legal marketing efforts. As deep linking becomes increasingly important to improve the important of your targeted practice area pages, it is equally important to know how these various pages will display in the search engines like Google in order to determine your strategy for success online.

The SEO Consultant Firm provides advanced law firm search engine optimization. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help your firm...

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Continues To Provide Poor ROI For Law Firms

2011-04-28T17:52:00.000-04:00

There was a recent study released from User Centric about the overall viewing metrics for people on the search engines. As many continue to rely on our outdated Google Heat Map analysis to determine where a users' eyes go on the search results screen, the data often overlooks where we look for the longest period of time and at what frequency.

Why is this important? There are a number of reasons including:

Running Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Campaigns

If you are running PPC campaigns for your law firm, you are likely paying a very high price to do so without fully understanding the results. Most law firms still can't answer the question as to the effectiveness of a PPC campaign and here is what this analysis shows:

The greatest amount of eyes and visibility fall on the top 3 PPC listings
Due to the recent changes in the Google SERP displays, the right-side bar has been further marginalized in its effectiveness
The top three listings get 5 times the amount of eye time as the right-side bar listings and since the right-side bar typically has more listings to review, your chances of a click drop off immensely

Organic SEO vs PPC Spending - Which Is More Cost Effective?

The debate continues amongst some in the legal community as to where their marketing dollars are better spent. In 2010, 42% of the highest paid PPC terms were for attorneys. Historically, companies would spend 8-9x on paid search over organic yet as we recently learned (once again), Jupiter Research has shown us that 87% of all clicks generated on a results page in Google go to organic and NOT PPC listings. Based on this analysis, I was able to determine that spending on PPC advertising is only 15% as effective as organic SEO spending.

Organic Listings Clearly Get More Eye Time & Visibility

Of all the eye time provided to organic and paid (PPC) listings, 93% (or 14.7 seconds) go to the organic listings. Since a typical Google results screen will have 10 results and even multiple variations of display, here is what you can do to improve your organic listing performance:

Make sure your META Description Tags are both highly effective and include a "compelling message" to attract viewers to your website. META descriptions DO NOT effect the search rankings of your website so 100% of their function should be based on reader conversion. You have only a second or two to grab the searcher's attention so make sure your first sentence is your most powerful one.
If the search results include a blended Google Places display, make sure that your places listing is fully optimized and most importantly, contains an effective, eye-catching, compelling and differentiating thumbnail image. If everybody has a mugshot of an attorney, differentiate yourself by using strong colors, awards, credentials, etc. Again, the name of the game is to competitively grab the users eyes and compel them to click to your website links.

The SEOConsultantFirm.com provides top search engine optimization consulting services to law firms who want to maximize their new case generation capabilities online. Visit our website today to learn more about how Lawyer SEO can help your firm grow.

Why You Need To Be #1 In Google

2011-04-22T08:06:00.001-04:00

Dale Earnhardt was famous for saying that “second place is the first loser” and when it comes to the search engine placement, nothing could be more true. Optify just released some new numbers that make getting to the #1 position in Google all the more important.

Here is a summary of this new study:

- The top 3 positions on page 1 of Google receive 58.4% of the clicks

- The #1 position in Google receives 36.4% of the clicks

- The #2 position in Google receives 12.5% of the clicks

- The #1 position in Google receive as many clicks as positions 2-5 combined

- Head terms in the #1 position had a higher click through rate (32 percent) than long tail terms (25 percent). However, long tail terms had a higher overall Click through rate on Page 1 of Google than head terms (9 percent vs. 4.6 percent).

- #1 position in Google gets 34.35 percent of impressions; #2 position gets 16.96 percent; and third gets 11.42 percent

BUT WHAT ABOUT PPC ADVERTISING?

Since most law firms can’t reach the #1 positions in Google, some will resort to PPC (Pay Per Click) spending instead. So how effective is PPC spending? Well, according to recent studies by Jupiter Research, not very good. Jupiter found that six out of every seven clicks (87%) on the search engine result page are generated by organically listed sites and that 79% of participants either didn’t look at sponsored links at all, or looked at them only after they had gone through the organic results.

So doing the math, PPC advertising only generates around 13% of the clicks on the first page of Google for any given search keyword result. From an ROI perspective, this means that every dollar spent on PPC is only 15% as effective as a dollar spent on organic placement. However, with the recent changes in the Google results pages, I advise that if you are going to do PPC, only bit for the top 3 positions in Google for any given word/phrase or don’t bit at all. Moreover, with the growth of mobile search, I could make a strong argument that being #1 for your PPC terms is a good idea as well.

THE BOTTOM LINE WITH TOP SEARCH ENGINE PLACEMENT

When it comes to attorney marketing online, I always advise clients to play for the first page on any given subject. If your goal is not to reach the first page (either now or later), don’t play the game. Why? Because 90% of people never look past the first page in Google and we have seen above, people click largely on what they see first – with everybody else coming is as the first loser.

Contact Us Today to learn more about how your law firm can reach the #1 position in Google from the search engine optimization experts at the SEO Consultant Firm.

Cell Phones & Your Privacy

2011-04-21T18:13:00.003-04:00

Most people today cannot even fathom living without their smart phones – myself included. Anywhere I go I can now have virtual access and information easier than ever before. Along with the access also comes greater mobility and productivity – all good things...in most cases. But in states like New York, there are consequences as well. For example, using a cell phone while operating a car can cost you a $150 fine and 2 points on your license. But the legal implications can be far worse…

IPHONES NOW TRACKING EVERYWHERE YOU GO?

The most popular smart phones on the market today are the Android and the IPhone. Most people who use these devices (the author included) simply love them. Not only can you talk to others, but you can easily browse the web, take pictures, listen to music, record videos and a myriad of other functions. The power of this mobility in filming videos alone is being attributed as one of the main causes of Cisco ditching their once popular flip video cameras.

All seemed to be chugging along well with these smart phones until a recent news report of the IPhones having the ability to track a user’s historical location and storing this data both on the phone and on their computers once it has been synched. Naturally privacy advocates are up in arms about this since the implications of such data had been previously unknown to IPhone users. But this also leads to another issue…

POLICE CONDUCTING WARRENTLESS SEARCHES ON YOUR CELL PHONES

In January 2011, California’s Supreme Court ruled that police could conduct warrantless inspections of a suspect’s cell phone – including all of its data. Wisconsin and Michigan also follow the same procedures and use tools like the Cellebrite UFED device to literally download all information (including deleted messages and content) from a suspect’s phone within a matter of minutes. In short, if you are pulled over and/or are a suspect in any violation, all of your history on your phone can now be downloaded by the police and may be admissible in a court of law. This naturally leads one to wonder that if the IPhone can track and store your physical location for a year, there would be a lot of people who would love to get their hands on that information – including a suspicious spouse, probation officer, parole officer, tax auditor and the like.

POLICE USING CELL PHONE DATA TO HELP SAVE LIVES

There is a positive side to mobile tracking of users as well. In 2009, cell phone tracking technology allowed the South Brunswick police department to track down a three children who became lost on a nature hike in a 113 acre wooded area. Using their cell phone signal and digital mapping, they were able to guide them to safety in 18 minutes – avoiding the costly and traditional forms of search and rescue. 911 calls have also become more effective with cell phone tracking in situations where households continue to shed their land lines in favor of a cell phone only household.

WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS FOR CELL PHONE PRIVACY & SEARCHES

Ironically, the need to add GPS tracking to a user’s cell phone and ultimately track them down was not the result of some evil company but rather the Federal government. In 2001, federal legislation was passed that requires wireless service providers to identify and place phones on their network to within 328 feet of their actual location. Even though people tend to love this feature when they need to get directions from point A to point B, the federal government was the first to mandate it – and for different reasons. But what the federal government didn’t mandate was storing user locational data and allowing police easy access to your mobile history.

As with other forms of social media, the laws governing user privacy as it applies to technology is in many ways largely outdated on both the federal and state levels and it likely to see many changes in the months and years to come. Until then, smart phones users need to become “smart” as to the downsides of what many see as a great new form of information and freedom. In the end, all of us must understand the ultimate cost of this new freedom for as Nietzsche famously stated; “Freedom is the will to be responsible to ourselves.”

About the Author: Dustin Ruge is the owner of the SEO Consultant Firm based in NYC. Dustin provides advanced search engine optimization consulting services (SEO)

Saying Goodbye To Google Tags

2011-04-15T19:25:00.006-04:00

Every once in a while Google makes a decision that they end up back tracking on. When it comes to Google reversing a revenue generating initiative, you know it is news...after all Google is famous for their "do no evil" mission statement so good trumps money right??

Google just announced that they are sun setting their Google Tags offering for Place listings as of April 29 of this year. As some of you might recall, Google tags was released in New York in June of last year with a moderately big bang. Tags were a great revenue generating opportunity for Google prior to Google's recent blended search results changes that effectively neutered the whole value proposition of making your Places listing better stand out.

What Google tags once was has now been replaced with the much more effective practice of creating highly visible Google Places image thumbnails instead. It continues to me amazed at the large number of companies with strong Google Places listings that display very ineffective images to better capture the users eyes and improve conversions.

When the history book on Google tags is written, one would have to wonder why Google would create and promote such a new offering only to kill it with its own search results page changes shortly thereafter. This may have come as a surprise to Stevie Wonder but I am still shaking my head on this one...

NEW CLE Seminar on Social Media & Its Impact to your Practice (April 26 in Philadelphia)

2011-04-13T10:43:00.000-04:00

Pennsylvania Association for Justice is offering a NEW CLE Seminar on Social Media & Its Impact to your Practice on April 26 in Philadelphia.

CLE Overview:

The use of social media by your clients and how it affects your case, the use of it by you in your practice and the use of it by potential jurors are some of the biggest issues facing you today. The law is developing. Attend this highly relevant program to learn the pertinent issues, including the ethical implications regarding methods used to access information discovery on social networks about defendants and potential witnesses. You will also learn Social Media Tools and Strategies for law firms.

Course planner, Dennis Feeley esq. has recruited Jon Acklen esq. Greg Spizer esq., Dan Siegel esq. and Dustin Ruge (Lawyer Search Engine Consultant) to speak on this program.

Location:
Radisson Plaza-Warwick
17th & Locust Sts.
Philadelphia, PA 19103

9:00 am - 1:30 pm 3 Substantive & 1 Ethics CLE Credit

Click here for more information or to register. Or call the PAJ office at 215 546-6451”

Understanding the Importance of Link-to-Domain Ratios

2011-04-12T15:02:00.004-04:00

In competitive search markets, the difference between high website returns and total failures often times come down to one thing: inbound link building. Many of the questions I receive in re link building include:

- Why do I have more links than my competitor yet they still show up higher than I do?

- Why do I have more links than my competitor yet their PageRank is higher than mine?

- How do I know if my link building efforts are really working?

- How do I know where to get the best links from?

The bottom line is that when it comes to links, most people simply don’t evaluate them correctly. Since many of the qualitative aspects are simply out-of-reach to the typical website owner, there is another way to better compare your website’s links to your competition…

Understanding Link Building

As more websites come online, the search engines like Google have to sort through the 133 Million + web pages to present the best results. For any given search term, the top 3 results typically garner 63% of the clicks while the #1 position gets 42% of the page one clicks…so the returns for being on top pay out in many multiples. Since web page quality is becoming increasing similar for competitive searches, the search engines rely heavily of the quantity and quality of their respective inbound links to determine which results should be displayed at the top. Read More: Inbound Link building

Qualitative Versus Quantitative Link Analysis

There are two aspects to link evaluation: qualitative and quantitative. Each is important in understanding the value of the links you currently have and how to build future links…

Qualitative Link Factors:

- What is the web page authority from which a link is coming from (PageRank, MozRank)?

- How many other links are bleeding off of the same page (decreasing the link value)?

- What is the anchor text for the links leading to your website?

- What is the relevancy of the page links pointing to your website?

Quantitative Link Factors:

- How many total links are pointing to the home page of your website?

- How many total links are pointing to other pages on your website (deep linking)?

- How many of the links come from different domains (Link-to-Domain Ratios)?

How to calculate Link-to-Domain Ratios

Link-to-domain ratios are calculated by taking the total number of links to your website divided by the number of domains providing them. THE GOAL IS THE HAVE THE LOWEST RATIO POSSIBLE - RELATIVE TO YOUR COMPETITION OF COURSE. This is the main reason why website analysis and grading tools like Websitegrader.com only present the count for “Linking Domains” instead of total number of links in their analysis. Total links can be important as they relate to textual anchors, deep linking and the like but when it comes down to authority, the domain count is the key factor. So when it comes down to competitive link analysis – don’t forget the Link-to-Domain ratio…the best performing sites typically have the lowest ratios.

Helpful Resources:

Majestic SEO: Finding the number of links and domain links for your website

Yahoo Site Explorer: Find the number of Yahoo indexed links and deep links into your website

Back Link Check: Find the PageRank and anchor text of the top 30 inbound links

SEOMoz: Download the SEO tool bar to calculate MozRank for each web page in your Firefox browser (updated far more frequently than the Google PageRank)

Source: SEO Consultant Firm - the Top Search Engine Optimization Consultants

New Personal Injury Attorney Directory – Great Link Building Opportunity

2011-04-01T12:06:00.006-04:00

As an increasing number of personal injury attorneys come online, competition is growing fierce for good search results. If you are a personal injury attorney in need of more authority and textual links (everybody raise your hands) to improve your results, Accidents.com can help.

A new accident lawyer directory came online today that is exclusively dedicated to personal injury attorneys. Yes, there are a large number of directories out there today but there are a few if any that provide the following:

- A dedicated personal injury website with over 20,000 pieces of unique PI only content

- Ability to create 10 user-defined textual inbound links websites (see screen shot)

- Direct feeds from your blogs and twitter accounts into your profile page

- Ability to link to multiple websites and web properties (videos, blogs, Facebook pages, etc.)

- Ability to list an unlimited amount of attorneys at one fixed price: $16.95 / Mo.

In reviewing this directory, I have found it to be very affordable and a great directory for building inbound textual deep links to multiple websites and web properties – which is very rare with most directories today. There is no reason why any personal injury attorney with a web presence should not take advantage of this opportunity.

5 Steps To Creating A Winning Social Media Strategy For Your Law Firm

2011-03-13T17:56:00.000-04:00

Over the past 10 years, lawyer marketing online has evolved from the simple days or having a website to now creating an active content strategy through blogs and social media. Having a website is a relatively easy concept to understand – especially when 65% of people now indicate that they start their search for an attorney online. But when it comes to active content and social media, it is far more difficult for most attorneys to fully grasp.

The rapid proliferation of the active content sites such as blogs, Facebook, Twitter and the like are a relatively new phenomenon. Facebook membership has grown from 0 to over 650 million users in just five years alone making it now the fastest growing and most visited site on the internet…even surpassing Google!

Blogs has also caught steam largely due to the search engine optimization and rapid content indexing treatment they receive from the search engines. There are now over 133 Million blogs with a new blog being created each second of each day. In the legal industry, there are now over 4500 legal blogs and growing as well.

Why Are Law Firm Blogs So Important?

Branding – Blogs are a great way to share legal information and knowledge with other attorneys, clients and prospective clients. The more specialized your blog is, the more recognition and branding you can receive for yourself as thought leader within your field of law

Referral Networks- Most attorneys rely on business from other attorneys. Most marketing experts claim that you need 7 to 12 impressions on a person for a marketing message to be remembered – the same applies for attorneys. A blog working in conjunction with your social media vehicles helps to create a consistent flow of visibility you need to support your current referrals and help create new ones.

Search Engine Optimization- Blogs, much like websites, need to be optimized for the best results in the search engines. Since most attorneys who blog also have a website, a blog is a very valuable tool in helping to promote not only the blogs results in the search engines, but by promoting the website as well through strategic inbound linking and conversion.

In-House Counsel- According to the 2010 Corporate Counsel New Media Engagement Survey, when research is conducted for outside counsel work, 27% of in-house counsel now considers their emphasis on blogs as “most important” when doing their research. In short, blogs are a great way to capture business from in-house counsel.

Why Is Social Media So Important For Law Firms?

There is an old saying in marketing that you should “fish where the fish are.” When it comes to social media, your referring attorneys, clients and prospective clients are spending an increasing amount of their time on social media. The major players include:

Facebook: Facebook now has over 650 Million users – have of which access their accounts each and every day. The average user has 130 friends and follows over 80 Facebook Fan Pages / Groups. The average user when accessing their account each day will see their “news feed” which contains updates from all of their friends and fan pages...including law firm fan pages.

Twitter: Twitter is nothing more than a condensed blog (micro-blog) that allows you to publish updates, news & links to anyone within 140 characters per tweet. There are currently 190 million users although only 20% of these people actively tweet each month.

LinkedIn: The most widely used business networking site with over 70 million users – roughly half of which are active in the system. 46% of LinkedIn users describe themselves as decision makers with an average age of 41 years and income in excess of $100K. LinkedIn allows users to effectively build networks of people, create groups of users, share information and keep track of connected user activity and employment.

5 Steps To Creating A Winning Law Firm Social Media Strategy:

1.) Website: All social media strategies start and end with a good attorney website. As more and more attorney websites come online, the competition is increasing for both search results and conversations. People on average now look at 4.8 attorney websites BEFORE they contact an attorney and social media is merely and extension of your website. Since the core of your new client and referral conversations involve your website, it is more important than ever that it becomes the center of your marketing universe in which all activities orbit around.

2.) Blog: Creating and maintaining an active blog is the heart of any social media strategy. Law Firm Blogs are now the single point of content distribution to almost all of your social media marketing. Once a blog entry is created, it can be automatically distributed throughout your entire social media marketing universe automatically. More importantly, blogs send out unique “pings” notifying the search engines of new content so indexing can take place in seconds and minutes within a blog – versus weeks and even months with most law firm websites.

3.) Social Media Properties: Every law firm with a blog should setup and optimize the following social media properties in the following order of importance:

Facebook Page: Facebook pages (or fan pages) should be created for your firm and ideally each attorney within your firm. Either you or somebody with authorization can create these pages and they should optimized for the firm, practice areas and/or names of each attorney. A good Facebook page will index much like a website and be available for anybody to see on the web (Facebook users or not) so much like a website, have an experienced law firm SEO person assist you with these.
LinkedIn: Create a personal LinkedIn account for all attorneys in your firm who proactively network themselves with other attorneys. LinkedIn allows you to search for other attorneys by firm or name, befriend them (make a link request to them) and then share information about you with them. Better yet, your new connection will then allow you to potentially link to other attorneys in their same firm and/or network. LinkedIn also allows you to create and/or join groups of other attorneys as well.
Twitter: Twitter accounts are easy to create and unlike Facebook and LinkedIn personal accounts, anybody can follow them without permission. With an integrated content strategy, your tweets will flow seamlessly from your blog to your twitter feeds so there is no need to provide additional information here – it is simply another place to distribute your active content.

4.) Active Content Integration: One of the most common questions many attorneys ask when it comes to social media is how they can create content for all of these different resources. The answer is very simple: when setup correctly, all you need to do is create content on in your blog and it will flow automatically to all of your social media properties. This can be done in Facebook with Apps such as: Social RSS (blog), YouTube (Videos), Profile-FBML, etc. LinkedIn also allows you to auto-feed your blog postings through Blog Link and Twitter allows you to integrate your blog postings as well. If you have multiple law firm Facebook pages, create a blog link to each page so that ALL of the connections to the firm are updated with your active law firm content. Once all of these pieces are joined together, your content distribution network is only limited to your ability to promote it…

5.) Social Media Promotion: “Build it and they will come” was a famous movie line that may work well for baseball but falls fall for social media marketing. Most people don’t want to give a speech to an empty room yet this is exactly what happens with many attorneys who blog…they are creating billboards in a corn field. Once you have active content integration, you need to be active in your content promotion as well so you can build your audience. It is important to note that this is a discipline based on a journey and not a destination. Here are some tips to help:

Post active and USEFUL content on your blogs on a consistent basis. A general rule of thumb is to create at least 1-2 blog entries per week on your blog. The last thing you want to do is have a blog with no recent entries – it sends the wrong signals to people and can do more harm than good. Useful content is anything you can write that answers the following question: “What can I write that my target audience will find important enough to want to read.” If you don’t have the time to write consistently to your blog, there are other writers out there who can write for you. However you choose to create content, it must be CONSISTENT and USEFUL.
Place links to ALL of your social media properties prominently on ALL of your customer and attorney facing vehicles. This includes: business cards, email signatures, letter head, advertising, networking, speeches, CLE’s, etc…you name it. Anywhere you are, you should be actively promoting your properties.
Build your personal Facebook friend base by actively: accepting friend requests of other attorneys, proactively looking up and making friend requests for each and every attorney you work with as well as other attorneys that you want to be part of your referral network. The best part about building up networks on Facebook is that unlike email and other tools that have high turnover and low-visit rates, Facebook accounts tend to be highly active and do not change. When you meet another attorney, ask them if they are on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter, make note of it and make a friend and/or link request immediately afterwards while you are still fresh in their minds.
Promote your Facebook Pages to ALL of your Facebook friends by sending out a “suggest to friends” request from your Facebook Pages on a steady and consistent basis. Once they indicate that they “like” your page, they will then see a consistent stream of your content from it in their daily news feed.
Build up the authority and visibility of your social media properties through inbound textual link building from your other web properties, press releases, blog posts, etc. Facebook does not limit the number of pages you can create and if your firm has multiple practice areas, this is a perfect chance to optimize a new Facebook page for each of your practice areas. Remember, the search engines will index your Facebook pages in a similar manner as your website and they can even perform at the same levels when fully optimized.

About the author: Dustin Ruge is the founder of the SEO Consultant Firm which specializes in law firm search engine optimization based in New York City. Dustin is a regular speaker on law firm social media strategies and web search engine optimization at CLE’s, state trial lawyer meetings and attorney marketing seminars. How to follow Dustin:

Website: www.SEOConsultantFirm.com

Blog: www.SEOLawyerMarketing.com

Facebook: www.Facebook.com/LawFirmSEO (become a fan today and keep up on important legal marketing news, tips, trends, and strategies)

New Website Release: Goldfarb & Fleece

2011-03-07T13:10:00.004-05:00

Announcing the release of a website for NYC real estate law firm Goldfarb & Fleece: www.gflegal.com

About Goldfarb & Fleece:

Goldfarb & Fleece is one of New York City's oldest and most prestigious commercial real estate law firms. Goldfarb & Fleece assist clients in acquiring, developing, financing, leasing and selling office buildings, shopping centers, malls, hotels, apartment buildings, residential communities and industrial properties and telecommunications facilities — essentially any real estate asset — in any location.

Practice areas include:
- Landlord Office Leasing
- Tenant Office Listing
- Retail Leasing Attorney
- Shopping Mall Leasing Attorney
- Real Estate Development Attorney
- Real Estate Financing Attorney
- Real Estate Acquisitions & Sales
- Real Estate Partnership Attorney
- Net Leasing Lawyer
- Condo Conversion Attorney
- Commercial Property Management Lawyer
- Construction Agreement Lawyer

Visit our website to learn more about lawyer marketing from a Law Firm Search Engine Consultant

Google's New Duplicate Content Changes & Legal Article Marketing

2011-02-27T19:02:00.009-05:00

There is a great deal of confusion as of late about the impacts of duplicate content on the web and how it can impact law firm search results. This has become increasingly important to understand now that Google has announced their new ranking changes as it relates to duplicate content. The rational is pretty simple here: Google wants to give credit to the originators of good content over the websites who would republish the same content on a more authoritative domain and get a higher rank / credit for it.

Naturally you don't want to create multiple websites with the same content - that was also a hard and fast rule of good lawyer SEO. But many law firms do conduct article marketing for the purposes of inbound link building and in these cases, here are a couple of key points you need to know:

- Duplicate content has to do primarily with identical content on the same domain
- If duplicate content is published on multiple domains, Google wants to give credit to the source of that content - irrespective of the authority of each domain publishing it...hence the new changes in the Google search algorithm.
- If you have distributed duplicate content for legal article marketing purposes AND the article also resides on your website AND the distributed content has links back to your website, then as a rule of thumb, you can avoid duplicate content issues if your content on your website and/or blog is at least 20% different than the content you distributed out for marketing purposes. Here are some ways you can do this:

- Change the title of the article
- Change the order of listed items
- Change the introduction
- Change the footer and about the author box
- Rewrite 1 paragraph in 5

Of course you can help avoid all of this by simply not publishing the identical content you have already distributed on your website as well...but many law firms still do.

As I have discussed in previous posts on law firm article marketing, good content distribution can be one of the most effective link building strategies you can use. With all of the recent press about Google penalizing companies for bad link building, it is increasingly important to make sure that you build links from relevant and legitimate sources.

When other law firms publish your content on their websites and blogs, they are also publishing your links back to you as well - a win-win scenario and why article marketing can be so effective. Since there is no Google duplicate content website penalty for publishing permission-based content articles in moderation, you are providing others the ability to publish "useful" information on their sites and blogs for the express purpose of providing enhanced reader value. How these duplicate articles ultimately end up ranking is immaterial since that is not their expressed purpose.

So when you conduct legal article marketing, just understand what the goal of Google's recent changes are and how they can impact the performance of your website and content. The last thing you want to do is write great content, syndicate it for distribution on other sites and then have Google discount your own website's article because the identical content also resides elsewhere.

On a final note, I recently published the top 8 legal article marketing directories which should still be used as described. Just keep in mind that it is always helpful to publish your article on the more authoritative sources FIRST and then to the remaining directories after. For example, if ezinearticles.com is going to give you the maximum exposure in comparison to the other directories, publish it there FIRST and then wait a few days to a week to distribute the same content to the other sources. That way you are sending source signals to Google from your most powerful points of distribution first.

Visit our website at www.seoconsultantfirm.com to learn more about law firm search engine optimization and how to grow your law firm online.

Congratulations Mark Bederow (Great Win - Page 3 NYPost)

2011-02-25T17:51:00.003-05:00

The following story appeared prominently on page 3 of the NY Post today:

A Florida man busted in the city for driving with an unloaded gun that was legal in his home state jubilantly bounced out of a Manhattan courthouse yesterday after a jury, won over by his "Southern charm," cleared him of a felony weapons conviction.

The not-guilty verdict for Jonathan Ryan, 29, came after only 30 minutes of deliberation on a charge of weapons possession that carried a mandatory 3½-year sentence.

"I am so relieved. I feel humbled and blessed," Ryan said afterward.

"When you realize you're on the brink of losing all the little things that are typically taken for granted, you suddenly realize they're not so little."

Steven Hirsch

TRIGGER HAPPY: Jonathan Ryan leaves court with girlfriend Ashley Shewey and lawyer Mark Bederow yesterday after a jury spared him three years' prison.

Ryan admitted that he drove to Manhattan on Feb. 21 of last year with a 9mm pistol -- which he bought legally in Florida in 2007 -- in his truck's glove box. Cops found bullets near the unloaded weapon.

He said he had stowed the gun and ammo in the compartment in 2007 and had simply forgotten about them.

"It was a reasonable explanation that he put the gun in his glove compartment, never fired it and forgot it was there," said juror Ryan St. Clair. "He had no intention of committing a crime."

Ryan had been pulled over on the Upper East Side for turning right at a red light, and when cops approached, the landscaper reached for his registration. That's when they spotted the weapon.

"Circumstance shows maybe he really didn't know [he had the gun]," said juror and retired cop Ronald Schuppert.

Ryan had come from Lake City, Fla., to help move his girlfriend, Ashley Shewey, then a page for "Late Show with David Letterman," back to Florida.

Shewey said her boyfriend made a great impression on the jury.

"He's very old-fashioned Southern charm," she said. "That's what I love about him.

"He comes from a small town. It's all, 'Yes sir,' 'No ma'am.' "

Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. was unapologetic about his office's prosecution.

"Guns brought illegally into New York City -- for any reason -- violate well-established state law and are a threat to our public safety," he said.

"We respect the jury's verdict in this case . . . but we will continue to protect our community from those who illegally possess loaded guns in Manhattan."

Criminal Defense lawyer Mark Bederow said his client should have never been hit with a felony.

"This case was overprosecuted from Day One," he said.

Ryan didn't get off completely scot free. He estimated his lawyer's fees and his trips between New York and Florida left him $50,000 in the red.

"Me and my girlfriend will be paying this for a while," he said.