Legal Search Marketing Blog

Search Engine Marketing Definitions

Many lawyers I talk with are confused by the many different search engine terms and abreviations, most don't know what SEO or PPC mean and below are some of the more important definitions to know in search engine marketing.

search engine marketing (SEM): The process of building and marketing a site with the goal of improving its position in search engine results. SEM includes both search engine optimization (SEO) and search advertising, or paid search (PPC).

search engine optimization (SEO): The process of making a site and its content highly relevant for both search engines and searchers. SEO includes technical tasks to make it easier for search engines to find and index a site for the appropriate keywords, as well as marketing-focused tasks to make a site more appealing to users. Successful search marketing helps a site gain top positioning for relevant words and phrases.

search engine results pages (SERPs): The page searchers see after they've entered their query into the search box. This page lists several Web pages related to the searcher's query, sorted by relevance. Increasingly, search engines are returning blended search results, which include images, videos, and results from specialty databases on their SERPs.

Usually the results on the left side of the page are the organic results and the results on the right side of the page are usually paid or sponsored ads.

spider: A search engine spider is a program that crawls the Web, visiting Web pages to collect information to add to or update a search engine's index. The major search engines on the Web all have such a program, which is also known as a "crawler" or a "bot."

title tag: An HTML meta tag with text describing a specific Web page. The title tag should contain strategic keywords for the page, since many search engines pay special attention to the title text when indexing pages. The title tag should also make sense to humans, since it is usually the text link to the page displayed in search engine results.

The title tag is one of the most important elements to SEO and most law firm sites will not have unique title tags and instead will have no title tag or a one word title that doesnt even match the page.

click through rate (CTR): The rate (expressed in a percentage) at which users click on an ad. This is calculated by dividing the total number of clicks by the total number of ad impressions. CTR is an important metric for Internet marketers to measure the performance of an ad campaign.

cost per click (CPC): Also called Pay per Click (PPC). A performance-based advertising model where the advertiser pays a set fee for every click on an ad. The majority of text ads sold by search engines are billed under the CPC model.

cost per thousand (CPM): An ad model that charges advertisers every time an ad is displayed to a user, whether the user clicks on the ad or not. The fee is based on every 1,000 ad impressions (M is the Roman numeral for 1,000). Most display ads, such as banner ads, are sold by CPM.

geo-targeting: Delivery of ads specific to the geographic location of the searcher. Geo-targeting allows the advertiser to specify where ads will or won't be shown based on the searcher's location, enabling more localized and personalized results.

Google Custom Search Engines Go International

Google has expanded its Custom Search Engine program internationally. Now it's available in 40 languages, and in close to 80 countries worldwide. The Custom Search Business Edition (CSBE), which provides users with complete control over their look and feel, and does not show any ads in the results, is also being made available in those same languages and countries. Unlike the free edition of Custom Search Engines, CSBEs come with a fee. Another benefit of CSBEs is that you can get email support, which is not available in the free edition.

Yesterday I spoke with Nitin Mangtani, lead product manager of enterprise search at Google, and he told me that Google has found the predominant use of Custom Search Business Edition is as a tool to implement site search. Correspondingly, Google plans to setup a web page just for site search applications, though this page is not currently implemented. This should make the setup and management of site search versions of Custom Search Engines easier to manage and deploy.

source

Most Keyword Searches Done Contain Two Words

The largest portion of searches contain two words finds Amsterdam-based research firm OneStat.

Internet users who type two words for on a search engine query account for 31.9 percent of searches worldwide. Three-word phrases are used for 27 percent of searches. A single word accounts for 15.2 percent of queries, and four words are used for 14.8 percent of searches.

"Search engines like Google, MSN, and Yahoo can drive a lot of traffic to a Web site," said Niels Brinkman, co-founder of OneStat. "It is important that a Webmaster or SEO expert knows what kind of search phrases they have to use."

Instances with five (6.5 percent); six (2.7 percent); seven (1.1 percent); eight (0.5 percent); nine (0.2 percent); and 10 (0.1 percent) words are used in fewer searches.

OneStat.com collects data through its Web analytics services. Numbers are averages. Research is based on a daily sample of two million Web visitors from 100 countries.

This is no real surprise, searchers are getting smarter and will use a variety of keywords to locate your site.  Thats why its important to optimize your legal web site for more then just general keywords like New York Lawyer or Chicago Attorney. If someone is looking for a real estate lawyer in New York City, they will probably type New York Real Estate Lawyer. Same thing if they are looking for a DUI lawyer in Riverside country California, they might type Riverside CA Dui lawyers.

Yahoo Announces Fire Eagle

Michael Arrington at Techcrunch reported that Yahoo is announcing fireeagle, which is a new service for obtaining geo-location information, storing it, and making it available to other web applications. This is a technology coming out of Yahoo Brickhouse, a semi-autonomous Yahoo group focused on new product development.

Evidently, the whole system is permission based, which means that users can choose to share their location information, or choose not to. This includes giving users the ability to eliminate any stored information about their locations over time from Yahoo's servers. This should keep the "big brother" concerns to a minimum.

One of the most intriguing aspects of this is that the geo-location information can come from any number of sources, such as other applications, and from GPS devices. You can setup a GPS phone to periodically update your locations information automatically.

The Techcrunch post provides the example of users who make submissions to Flickr who frequently don't provide any geo-location information for the photos submit. With fireeagle enables, this information could be extracted automatically.

Of course, search engines have been using location based information for a long time. They have the ability to look at the IP address of a person who is entering a search query, and then do a reverse lookup to determine the approximate location of that person. Geo-location information from a GPS device, however, would be much more accurate.

IP address based geo lookup is very general in nature, and in some scenarios can be completely wrong. For example, AOL users may have an IP address that changes mid-session. In other cases, someone working in a company office in LA may connect through their corporate network based in Chicago. There are many other example of these types of errors.

From a search perspective, improved location information can improve the location based personalization that search engines have already engaged in for some time. As an example of this, if you are sitting in Seattle, and type in "Italian restaurant", there is a good chance that you really mean "Seattle Italian restaurants".

However, if you just a few miles outside of Seattle, and type in "Italian restaurant", traditional IP based geo lookup might still give you a list of restaurants in Seattle, where what you may really want is a list of restaurants closer to where you are.

source

Latest Legal Web Design

The latest legal web site we have designed is for the Seattle Law Firm of Sean Kuhlmeyer. Sean focuses his Seattle legal practice on family law, table saw law, Personal Injury & Mediation law.

Sean has just started his practice and realized the importance of having a website for his practice.  He has done a fine job in creating a lot of content for the different practice areas within the site.  Most lawyers don't create enough content and the more content you create, the better your overall search engine rankings can be.

If your law firm needs a new website designed or an existing site redesigned, contact Lawyers Court for more information.