Legal Search Marketing

Archive for the ‘Legal Internet Marketing’ Category

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!

Many law firms never update their legal web sites with new content or news about the firm. Its always a good idea to add new content to your site on a regular basis, because not only does this help the user experience and provide new information about your firm, but its also good for search engine ranking purposes. 

Search engines like Google will favor sites that update content on a regular basis. So the more content and pages you can create of pertinent information related to your legal practice, the better your site should perform at the search engines.

Adding content is not the only thing you need to do in order to rank well at the search engines but it can make a difference if you have prepared and optimized your site for the search engines.

Article from ClickZ about a lawsuit involving how far trademark infringement can go when applied to a subdomain.

A lawsuit that had the potential to define how far trademark infringement can go when applied to subdomains has been settled out of court. The lawsuit was filed by California non-profit religious organization Jews for Jesus against Google in response to a blogger who set up a blog critical of the group at jewsforjesus.blogspot.com.

According to attorney and Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman, the case could have set some precedent about third-level subdomains (like the "blog" part of http://blog.clickz.com). While trademark law has been shown to apply to a regular domain name, it has not yet been applied to third-level ones, and it’s not clear that it would apply, he said. It would also help define Google’s responsibility in what subdomains it allows to be registered.

The case was settled by Jews for Jesus and the blogger, who transferred the site over to them. Since the issues were never decided by a judge, the world will have to wait for the next lawsuit to find the answers to those questions.

KEYWORD RESEARCH – LAW FIRM MARKETING

Every law firm should do some kind of keyword research to determine which keywords to focus on. Keyword research is vital to a succesful search engine optimization campaign, both for organic and pay per click search marketing. Below is some example data from Keyword Research.com for a law firm in Portland, Orgeon.

These are the top 10 results sorted by the # of searches. Below is an explanation of what each column means.

Predicted Searches

Figures in this column provide a rough estimate of the total number of daily searches on the internet as a whole, for each given search term.

Predicted Daily count is just that, "PREDICTED". The searches column contains the total number of ACTUAL searches in OUR DATABASE that is supplied by close to 200 search engines.

Occurences

This column contains an estimate of the number of pages in which each search term appears.

The more pages there are, the more competition there is for the top position in the search results. This means that if there are a lot of pages, it will be more difficult for you to achieve good rankings.

KEI

KEI stands for Keyword Effectiveness Indicator.

It is designed to measure the effectiveness, or the value of a given search term. This is done by correlating a number of factors such as the number times a keyword is searched for, with the number of pages on which it occurs, etc.

KEI is a log scale with values from 0 to 10.

The concept is very similar to the Richter Scale used to measure earthquakes and this is a good way to think about the numbers. Search terms with the largest values tend to be less competitive and thus have the most potential to "shake" things up.

ClickZ takes a look at a new WebSideStory study that concludes the top 4% of site search keywords account for more than half of all site search queries.

Optimizing a site for the top 4 percent of search queries will improve site search results for half of all searchers, according to a study by the Patricia Seybold Group using anonymous data from WebSideStory’s clients.

According to the April 2006 data, just 4 percent of all unique search queries made up more than half of all site searches. For e-commerce sites, the number of unique queries fell to just 2 percent.

Knowing what keywords people are typing is an important part of search engine optimization. I use a number of different keyword tools including Wordtracker but recently started to use a new keyword software program called Keyword Discovery and Im very impressed.

Its probably the best program out there to discover what keywords users are typing in the search engines and it helps you to come up with many additional keywords including mis-spellings of words.  Keyword research should be part of every online law firm web site marketing campaign.

BIG LAW FIRMS IGNORE SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

Ive noticed many bigger or well known law firms that just totally ignore search engine optimization.   I saw an article today at Law.com about the Houston-based Lanier Law Firm, famous for winning a $253 million Vioxx-related jury verdict against pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co. in August 2005.

The article talks about how the firm has launched a new Web site and hopes the site is going to generate new business and that it will be used as a marketing tool. Yet I don’t see any kind of search engine optimization on the site. Some comments from the article….

The firm’s management hopes the much larger site will take advantage of firm founder W. Mark Lanier’s notoriety and bring in business.

"The real purpose of the redesigned site, with the name recognition that Mark has, and the new office in New York, was to have a site that spoke more clearly to visitors — from media to the community to clients," said Kevin Roberts, the firm’s executive director, who coordinated the project. "But it’s still a marketing tool. Hopefully, new business will come in."

But will the site be successful as a marketing tool?

Not as successful as it could be! As of right now the site doesn’t have any meta tags or more importantly keyword rich unique titles on each page of the site. So the bottom line is that its not going to get as much traffic from the search engines as it could be getting if the site was optimized for keywords related to the firms practice. They are not alone, It seems like most bigger firms ignore any kind of search engine optimization.

Good article from Daniel Siegel from The Legal Intelligencer on Law.com about Internet Marketing for Lawyers and how its becoming important to not only have an Internet presence with a web site, but that its key to be found on the search engines for prospective clients that are searching every day.

According to research from the October 2005 Pew Internet & American Life Project report, the following is true of the legal world online:

• 68 percent of American adults (approximately 137 million people) use the Internet
• 65 percent of legal services buyers have gone online to locate a law firm
• 38 percent search online for legal services at least weekly
• 89 percent use search engines to find law firm Web sites
• 86 percent go directly to a law firm’s site
• 71 percent enter law firm Web sites through portals such as Findlaw and Martindale Hubbell

Surprisingly, many lawyers and law firms ignore this reality, and have no Internet presence.

I have noticed this more and more lately and have also noticed that the bigger law firms with big expensive sites are no where to be found in the search engines.

To be effective, your Web marketing should include a budget for the Web site and a separate budget for marketing campaigns. Monitor your marketing closely to determine whether you are attracting visitors and turning them into clients. Your competitors also use the Web, and your next new client is almost certainly using the Internet, searching for you. 

This is very good advise for all law firms and its important to make sure your site is found at the search engines for obvious keywords like your firms name and your partners names, but if you want new clients from the search engines and to be found for keyphrases like Chicago Lawyers, you have to do more then the basics and invest some money for long term success.

HOW IMPORTANT IS A GOOGLE PAGERANK SCORE?

Google PageRank is a score that Google gives every web site and its from 0-10. Many people think that this is a good way to see how well a web site will do at the search engines. The fact is though the Google pagerank score can be very misleading. Just having a high PR score and a lot of links.

The problem here though is if you don’t have other optimization techniques done, like updating each pages title tag or having your keywords within the content of your pages, then your probably not going to be found for keywords related to your practice, no matter how many links you have or how high your pagerank is.

SOLO LAWYERS VS. BIG LAW FIRMS

I see examples of solo attorneys out performing big law firms and saw one today. I reviewed a big law firms site that has multiple locations and over 100 attorneys and they have a very old site that has a domain name from 1994, which is a good thing.  It has a Google pagerank score of 6, which is very good and it has 244 links counted from Google, which is a high #.

These three things combined, an older domain name, a high pagerank score and a lot of links should mean that this site is well ranked but the fact is that its not ranked at all for any keywords related to its practice and in fact many of the partners aren’t even coming up if you Google them by name.

I have many different law firm sites, including solo attorney sites that maybe have a PageRank of 3 or 4, have about 20-30 links, yet are ranked in the top 10 for many different keywords and get a lot of web site traffic as a result. This shows you that its a combination of things that have to happen and that certain things must be done in order to get results at Google.

LAW FIRMS ARE MISSING A GREAT OPPORTUNITY

Most law firms have not paid any attention to search engine optimization and are just starting to realize how important it is. If you have a site that has been around for awhile, has plenty of links from other sites, is in the right search directories BUT isn’t optimized for the keywords pertinent to your firms practice, then your probably missing out on a lot of focused traffic.

Great article from Amanda Flatten of Law Office Computing about law firm web site design and search engine optimization for lawyers.

I contributed to the article and stressed the points that your law firm web site should be easy to navigate, full of useful content and be optimized for the search engines for keywords that are related to your law firms practice and geographic location. 

Its a good article with many useful tips from other legal web designers and marketers including Dale Tincher, Jay Jaffe, Larry Bodine, Peter Boyd & Swati Agrawal.