Legal Search Marketing

Archive for the ‘Legal Marketing’ Category

Post from the Forrester Blog about B2B marketing spending in 2009.

In our Predictions 2009 research,
published December 23, Forrester analysts who cover B2B and technology
marketing predict that marketing budgets will take big hits early in
2009, with typical decreases in the 15% to 25% range. To investigate
whether this prediction is tracking current experience and to look at
the impact of the economy on this year's B2B marketing spending,
Forrester teamed up with MarketingProfs to field a survey that explores
2009 budget plans and looks back at 2008 effectiveness.  Interactive
marketers who work at firms who sell primarily (but not necessarily
exclusively) to businesses will find participating in this research
relevant because we explore a number of online and social tactics along
with the conventional.

The survey is currently in the field.  If you would like to participate, please click on this link.
We have over 400 responses thus far, so please feel free to add your
input and opinions. Reply to this post with thoughts and feedback about
the survey and I'll address anything that comes up. All participants
(who supply their email addresses) will receive a copy of the results.

Here's wishing you a more prosperous new year.

source

Good blog post from Law.com about tools that are available online to locate personal information on people.

Here are examples of how you can use Web sites to find people or to learn about their background:

• Social networking: Trying to track down someone’s address and you’ve had no luck using their name? Consider tracking them through teenage children’s names by visiting social network sites like myspace.com or www.facebook.com.

  These types of sites are now even sprouting up for boomers and elders, as evidenced by www.eons.com. Visit it to learn if the person you are trying to track has a profile.

  Social networking sites are not the only place people are posting personal information about themselves. A family law attorney recently shared an anecdote about the embarrassing information that her client posted to an online dating site discovered by the other side. To dig up dirt, see sites such as match.com or jdate.com.

  Classmates.com is not just for reconnecting with your long lost classmate. It’s the secret weapon of many private investigators. Search by a woman’s maiden name and you might discover her married name. Search by a company’s name and date range to identify people who worked at the company where your client was sexually harassed. You just might find a willing witness.

• Blogs: If you need to learn about someone’s background, cell phone or fax number, read their blog. People typically add personal information to their blogs, not to mention provide a taste of their personality. For example, judging from the entries on a well-known lawyer’s blog, he clearly has a dry sense of humor. This is something you would not learn from his profile at his traditional law firm Web site. Look for blogs at search.blogger.com.

• Podcasts: What better way to learn about someone than listening to their podcast? You might learn about the opposition expert’s real opinion as you listen. Search for general topic podcasts at Ipodder, www.ipodder.org and legal topic podcasts at The Blogs of Law, www.theblogsoflaw.com.

• PowerPoint presentations: Some expert witnesses’ Microsoft PowerPoint presentations from conferences get posted to their Web site or the conference Web site. You may not only be able to learn what that person really thinks by viewing PowerPoints online, but by looking in the editing mode, you can read their notes.

  Find PowerPoints by using the Advanced Menu on Google (or Yahoo), entering a person’s name into the search box and then limiting your results to the file format PPT.

  Better yet, is there some inside information you could retrieve from a corporate presentation posted online? Inside information from Google Inc. was uncovered this way. Locate someone’s PowerPoint presentation by searching at www.google.com/advanced_search.

• Google Groups: Is your client — the one who was involved in an automobile accident — on methadone? Do you believe another client had no notice until November 2002 that his company’s product was defective? Take a walk through the community of Google Groups to see if your client publicly discussed his woes in a discussion group, or if others are discussing your client’s products. The results might change your case strategy.

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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.

Nolo.com is one of the better legal reseach sites on the net. You can do legal research by topic in one of Nolo’s Law Centers, or research through one of Nolo’s features, which include:

• Nolo’s Legal Encyclopedia with articles on legal topics in an easy to understand style,
• Ask Auntie Nolo with questions and answers on a wide variety of legal topics,
• Nolo’s Law Dictionary,
• Calculators for number-crunching, and
• Statutes & Cases

****
The Internet Legal Research Group is another good Web site for free legal research, and is divided into several sections, including:

• Legal Profession,
• Academia,
• Legal Research,
• E-Mail Updates, and
• Attorney Referral Network.

The Legal Research Section is divided into three sections: Law Runner, ILRG Legal Bookstore, and ILRG Web Index. In the Law Runner section under Legal Research, you can go to the Global Index, or the USA Index. The Global Index includes home pages for every nation in the world, including all islands and territories. The USA Index has a listing for each state and then includes some or all of the following links to the following within each state: the state’s home page, judicial branch & case law sources, legislative branch, executive branch, and miscellaneous state government sites.

SOURCE: Allbusiness.com

Good post from the Justia legal blog about Stamps.com relaunching their personalized US postage stamp program.

You can use your own photos to make custom official US postage photo stamps. Law Firms can use photo stamps as an inexpensive way to market their services (the stamp cost is about 1.6x – 2.3x the price of postage, with additional higher volume discounts (see photo stamps pricing)).

This would be a great idea for law firms or really anyone to promote their brand to clients or potential clients. Its also inexpensive and very unique.

I use Wordtracker all the time to do keyword research and its probably the best keyword tool out there, yet Ive always said that its not a perfect science and sometimes I’m skeptical of the results.

The first thing to know is that the way they report all the results is somewhat confusing, they give you two different columns, one a "Count" and then the 2nd is a "Predict" number. (See Below) 

Usually these #’s are pretty close but here are the definitions of what "Count" and "Predict" mean exactly from the Wordtracker site.

Count – This shows the number of times a particular keyword has appeared in our database. E.g. Our database currently holds 373 million words. A count of 147 tells us that this particular word has appeared 147 times out of 373 million (this is over a two month period).   

Predicted - This is the maximum total predicted traffic for all of the major search engines/pay per bids and directories. It is based on the current 24 hour period.

SO, the count # is the number of times the keyword has appeared in the database over the last 2 months. The Predict # is just a prediction of how many times max that keyword would be searched in a 24 hour period at ALL the search engines.

This database of keywords is from meta-crawlers and not from any of the big search engines actual search database. According to Wordtracker, "We get our data from metacrawlers, rather than the search engines themselves. After all, the metacrawlers contain the results from the search engines."

This might be true but I still would probably rather have the #’s direct from Google as to the number of searches done and the keywords used.   

I do know that I tend to question the results from Wordtracker from time to time.  I mean as a quick example I was doing  some keyword research on the term "Chicago Lawyers" and wordtracker brought back some very interesting results (see below), they said that the key phrase "Chicago wrongful death lawyers" has a count of 83 and a predict # of 71, which is much higher then the more general term "Chicago Lawyers" which has a count of 26 and predict # of 22.

WORDTRACKER RESULTS FOR "CHICAGO LAWYERS"

Notice it also lists many other keyphrases with higher numbers such as "chicago accident lawyers" and "chicago injury lawyers". I thought to myself though, no way is that possible because it just seems like that specific search would never get as many searches as a more general term like "Chicago Lawyers".

So I went to Google Adwords and used the keyword tool and the predictions were much different and more realistic I thought (SEE TABLE BELOW).

Traffic Estimates from Google Adwords – 5/11/05

Keywords	Clicks / Day	Average Cost-Per-Click	Cost / Day	Average Position [?]
chicago accident lawyers	1.0	$0.28	$0.26	1.8
chicago attorney	15.0	$1.49	$22.22	1.8
chicago attorneys	9.4	$1.26	$11.78	2.0
chicago brain injury lawyers	< 0.1	$0.05	$0.00	1.0
chicago car accident lawyers	< 0.1	$0.05	$0.00	1.0
chicago dog bite lawyers	< 0.1	$0.05	$0.00	1.0
chicago injury lawyers	0.3	$1.44	$0.46	3.5
chicago lawyer	8.6	$1.50	$12.85	2.6
chicago lawyers	13.0	$1.39	$18.00	2.6
chicago personal injury lawyers	0.2	$1.79	$0.41	3.5
chicago slip and fall lawyers	< 0.1	$0.05	$0.00	1.0
chicago vioxx lawyers	< 0.1	$0.05	$0.00	1.0
chicago wrongful death lawyer	< 0.1	$0.05	$0.00	1.0
chicago wrongful death lawyers	< 0.1	$0.05	$0.00	1.0
Overall	47.5	$1.39	$65.98	2.2

Notice how Chicago lawyers & Chicago attorneys would both get about 12-15 clicks per day, BUT "Chicago wrongful death lawyers" would get LESS then one click a day.   PLUS notice it would only be 5 cents per click for that term, which really says that it gets no action at all and nobody is interested in it.

SO that tells me the numbers from Wordtracker are way off, at least for the keywords Ive listed. I mean they are saying that the term "Chicago Lawyers" only appeared 26 times in 2 months. 

Yet according to Google, if you were listed in the top 3 for that term, you could get 12-15 visitors a day. That might be high but its at least 5-10 per day, because I have clients that are listed for that term and I monitor the traffic.

Wordtracker is still a great tool and it usually is more accurate then this example.  I usually use Wordtracker in combination with the Overture and Google keyword tools for the best possible results.

The Internet research manual "How to Use the Internet For Legal & Investigative Research: A Guide for Legal Professionals" has been completely updated and expanded, it was announced today by the book’s co-authors Carole Levitt, J.D., M.L.S and Mark Rosch.

The guide features extensive reviews of the best legal and investigative research resources available for free on the Internet.  Read Full Story at PR Web.

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SPONSORED AND ORGANIC SEARCH  LISTINGS

Many lawyers are confused by the difference between the pay per click sponsored listings and the free organic listings at Google, Yahoo and other top search engines.

The free or "organic" search listings at Google are listed on the left side of the page and the sponsored PPC listings are located on the right side of the page under "sponsored links" and sometimes at the very top of the page, right above the organic listings.

Organic listings take time and effort to achieve and are usually a result of a legal web site that has a lot of good content, is listed in the Yahoo and Open directories and has a lot of links pointing to it from other sites.

The pay per click or sponsored listings are a result of web sites that bid a certain amount per click on a keyword. The higher the bid, the higher the ranking. Even though at Google its a little bit of a different bidding process then at Overture. At Overture, its simply a matter of whoever bids higher, gets the higher listing, where at Google, its a combination of different criteria including amount bid.

Obviously you want to be listed in the organic listings because its like the gift that keeps on giving and you don’t have to pay every time someone clicks on your site.  Yet it takes time to get the free listings and sometimes you have no choice but to pay extra to visitors to your legal web site. Some lawyers do both, get great organic listings but then also pay for the sponsored links to cover all bases.