Legal Search Marketing

Archive for the ‘Legal Internet Marketing’ Category

A few backs I blogged about the importance of making sure that your Google Adwords campaign is properly optimized. 

Many times lawyers will create an Adwords campaign and not really pay attention to it or use the Pay Per Clicks search engines optimization suggestions, which can result in you paying a lot more money then you should.  We will easily save this client at least $3,000 a month, if not more as a result of reviewing and adjusting his campaigns.

TOP 10 ORGANIC RESULTS ARE VALUABLE
More important though is having top 10 organic results at Google for the same keywords your bidding on via Pay Per Click.  The best thing about the organic listings are they are free!   So if your paying $20 per click on average and you get 100 visitors for the month via the organic listings, that would value your organic listing at $2,000 each month and thats just for one keyphrase.

SAVE MONEY AT PPC & GET TOP 10 ORGANIC RANKINGS
The same Massachusetts Drunk Driving Lawyer that we helped save money on the Pay per click ads, we have now also gotten him top 10 rankings at Google organics for many of the same terms he is bidding on.  Some of the terms are 
- Massachusetts OUI (#6)
- OUI Lawyers Mass (#4)
- Massachusetts DUI (#6)
- Massachusetts DWI (#8)
- Massachusetts Drunk Driving Lawyers (#8)

I already see an increase in traffic from the organic listings. So as a result of our Internet Marketing work, the client has not only saved over $3000 a month but now has many top 10 organic listings and is now getting more traffic and visitors then ever before, which will result in more clients.

If we can be of assistance to your legal practice, with either pay per click marketing or organic optimization, please contact us.

Below are the stats of a Seattle Personal Injury Law Firm website and this is all of the traffic from free or organic search engine listings in 2007. 

Out of the 8500 total visitors, almost 69% or 6000 of them came from Google, which proves Google is the most important of the search engines.  MSN and Yahoo still do produce traffic though, so you have to optimize for each of them but Google is the King of traffic!

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This organic traffic is all very valuable and it can lead to many new clients.  If you would like a free analysis on your legal website, contact us today.

Usually when I take over pay per click accounts, the person is usually overpaying for visitors to their sites.

Ive had many occasions where the person is paying $20 or more to much per click, usually because they set one high amount for their max bid on all keywords.  If you say you will bid a max of $60 per click, there’s a good chance you will and that can really add up.

In the case of this client, who is a Boston criminal Dui lawyer, he was paying a high amount per click so that he could be at the top of the sponsored matches.

$25 A CLICK SAVINGS IN FIRST WEEK, $1000 SAVED

You can see in the chart below that on Feb.12, 2008 he was paying on average $35.83 per click and he was on average in position 1.3. Yet on Feb. 14 the first full day after I took over and made changes, he got the same # of clicks but was only paying $10.69 per click and the only downfall, is he slipped to ad position 2.3, no big deal but what a savings of $25 per click.

Then if you look at the totals for the first week where I took over compared to the first 10 days of February, we got more clicks for over $1,000 less. This is only one campaign of 5, so just a portion of the overall savings.

Looking at the amount spent on 2007 ($45,000+) we would wind up saving the client over $25,000 at least just for this one campaign, and probably wind up getting more clicks.

Part of the reason he is getting more clicks for less is because when you set your bid to high, you might meet your daily budget much quicker, so your ads will be taken down until the next day.

Here are the stats for the first 7 days of when I took over, the 10 days prior and then the totals for Jan. 2008 and the entire 2007.

These are some huge savings and it won’t always be that much but usually I find that there’s always some room for improvement on pay per click campaigns. You really have to pay attention to them and track the progress and it helps to hire someone who does it all the time.

If we can assist your law firm with pay per click marketing, contact us today and we will review your campaigns and help save you money.

We will be helping this client save even more money once we do his organic optimization work. It makes sense to have top 10 rankings for keywords your bidding over $25 per click on! Once that is achieved, then you can reduce the amount spent on pay per click.

"ORGANIC" SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
VS. PAY PER CLICK
Its important to know the difference between organic SEO and Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing.

Organic SEO is the process of getting your site listed in Google’s and other search engine’s main search
index and coming up in the free or organic Search Engine results,
located on the left side of the screen.

Pay Per Click is basically buying the rankings for keywords and bidding to rank higher then other sites, these PPC results come up usually on the right side
of the screen under "sponsored listings".

Anyone can get their site listed in the PPC’s by
simply paying for it, but getting organic listings takes time
and effort. Most studies show that people prefer to click organic
listings because they are more trustworthy, plus the nice thing about them is that you don’t have to pay a per click fee,
which can sometimes be over $10 per click.

BENEFITS OF ORGANIC SEO
SEO can help place your web site among the top search engine results for a particular search, which will lead users looking for your firm’s practice area to your web site. This is a good way to establish
your web presence and gain a solid flow of traffic to your site,  which can lead to new clients.

Each search engine has a different set of rules as to how they rank web sites. Among other things, SEO involves Keyword Research to find all the possible key phrases people
might use to locate your legal web site. Then its a matter of creating the optimized code for each page within the site and optimizing other key elements of the web site to make the site search engine friendly and ready. Once the site is optimized, then its a matter of submitting the site to the top search engines and directories. 

Obtaining links from other quality web sites is the key to building your site’s

Link Popularity score, which is a VERY important factor when search engines such as Google rank your web site. A combination of all these things will get your site listed at the search engines and get people visiting your site.

See some of the

results we have had in the organic
search engine listings for some of our legal clients.

Its important that you have other websites that links to your legal site. Yet it’s not the number of links you get but the quality of the links.  Getting one link from a high ranking well ranked site is much better then getting a 100 links from link farms, sites that have nothing to do with your site or sites that have no existing search engine rankings.

Getting links from established directories can be very valuable and are considered high quality valuablelinks. Links from the Yahoo directory, the Open Directory, .EDU sites and other business and legal directories can be very valuable in your overall search engine marketing plan.  Contact us today for more information.

Getting top 10 search engine rankings is the goal of most search engine optimization projects.  It makes sense that if your in the top 10 for a keyword related to your firms practice, that you will get some traffic from people looking for the type of law you practice. How about if you were able to get ALL TOP 10 rankings for certain keywords!!!

Ive got one client who has a number of different sites including many mini sites that are focused on specific practice areas such as corporate law, tax law, litigation, estate planning and others and most all of them are listed pretty well in the organic search listings.

At MSN for the keyphrase Chicago Tax Law the firm has the first 7 spots and then also the 10th place for a dominating 8 out of 10 top 10 rankings!   Its harder to achieve that at Google BUT they do have 3 out of the top 10. 5 out 10 at Yahoo.

Having multiple sites can be a very good idea and a way to focus on different sets of keywords. Yet its important though to not just repeat the same content on multiple sites, you must have unique content in order to have success. The more unique content, the better, content is and always will be King!

Kevin Delaney of The Wall Street Journal Online reports that Topix.net, the news search site owned by Gannett, McClatchy and Tribune, has bought its .com domain after paying a Canadian company $1 million.

About 50% of the visits to Topix come from search engines, and about 90% of that comes from Google. So, Topix plans to run its site at both Topix.net and Topix.com for awhile, in order to get over any unpredictabilities in Google and other search engine results.

You have to be careful when switching over domain names and it has to be done right. It can take some time to get it all working, but I have moved over a number of lawfirm websites from one domain name to another. 

I saw a couple of posts today including one by Bruce Clay talking about a Google Group post by Vanessa Fox talking about the importance of the meta description tag.

"   Looking at your site in the search results, it appears that your pages would be well served by meta description tags. For most queries, the generated snippet is based on where the query terms are found on the page, and in those cases, your results are fine. But for some more generic queries, where a logical snippet isn’t found in the text, the generated snippet seems to be coming from the first bits of text from the page — in this case, boilerplate navigation that is the same for every page."

Ive always felt that the description meta tag was very valuable because of the fact that Google will use it to describe your site in the search results and it also may possibly add to your overall search score, I think it does.

Its important to see that she says that Google goes for "logical" page content but for some generic queries, they’re using the first bit of text on your page. If you don’t have a Meta data section, that first text is often your site-wide navigation and suddenly all your pages look duplicate.

Bruce Clay pointed out an important fact about duplicate content….

"By the way, the same problem with duplicate pages can happen if you do have a Description tag but you don’t bother to make it unique to the page that it’s on. Having the same Description tag on every page is duplicate content."

SO the bottom line is that its very important to have unique description meta tags on each page within your site. 

We have helped a number of law firms create additional websites that focus on different practice  areas and a different set of keywords.   The minisite will focus on a specific practice area and expand on the information that is on the main site.   This can help you get additional listings at the search engines and drive additional focused traffic to your firm.

The latest firm we have assisted is the Seattle, Washington law firm of Robert Kornfeld.  We had previously created a Washington Personal Injury mini site and now have expanded to create mini sites for Seattle Construction Law, Seattle Medical Malpractice Law, Washington Brain & Spinal Injury & Seattle Truck Accident Law.  Each of these sites has unique content, a unique keyword rich domain name, optimized code focused on a specific set of keywords and interlinked with other websites.

We continue to help many different lawyers from around the country with internet marketing and search engine optimization projects. More lawyers are starting to realize the importance of being found at the search engines for not only the firms and partners names, but also for keywords related to the firms practice.

The latest law firm website that we have have optimized for the search engines is the Chicago lawfirm of Schwartz & Cooper. The firm recently launched a new website design and figured it was a good time focus on the making sure the site was fully optkimized for the search engines like Google.

After a few weeks, the firms website started to come up in the top 10 at Google and other search engines for keywords such as chicago corporate attorneys, chicago litigation, illinois litigation, chicago business lawyers and many others. 

Legal website usually won’t get results this quick, especially if you have a new website. Yet if you have an existing website that has been around for a few years, then odds are you have a solid foundation and can also get high search engine rankings, IF you optimize the site and hire someone like me!