Legal Search Marketing Blog

Saving Money at Pay Per Click is Good, Getting top 10 Organic Rankings is Better

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.

Example of Search Engine Traffic to Law Firm Website

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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Search Engine	Referrals	Percent
Google	5,874	68.98%
MSN	808	9.49%
Yahoo! Web Sites	673	7.90%
Google AdSense for Content	241	2.83%
Microsoft Live Search	209	2.45%
Google Canada	188	2.21%
AOL	156	1.83%
Google U.K.	89	1.05%
Ask	76	0.89%
Dogpile	34	0.40%
Google India	20	0.23%
Excite	16	0.19%
MetaCrawler	11	0.13%
Yahoo! Web Sites Canada	8	0.09%
Google Spain	8	0.09%
Google New Zealand	7	0.08%
Google Ireland	6	0.07%
Google South Africa	6	0.07%
AltaVista	6	0.07%
Google Germany	6	0.07%
Google France	5	0.06%
Google China	5	0.06%
Google Netherlands	5	0.06%
Google Italy	5	0.06%
Google Poland	5	0.06%
Google Sweden	4	0.05%
Mamma	4	0.05%
MSN Australia	3	0.04%
Open Directory Categories (dmoz.org)	3	0.04%
HotBot	3	0.04%
Google Israel	3	0.04%
Google Belgium	3	0.04%
Google Bulgaria	3	0.04%
Google Finland	2	0.02%
Ask U.K.	2	0.02%
Netscape	2	0.02%
Yahoo! Web Sites U.K.	2	0.02%
Yahoo! Web Sites Singapore	1	0.01%
Search.com	1	0.01%
MSN U.K.	1	0.01%
All the Web	1	0.01%
AOL U.K.	1	0.01%
Google Austria	1	0.01%
Google Japan	1	0.01%
Google Kenya	1	0.01%
Google Portugal	1	0.01%
Google Russia	1	0.01%
Google Philippines	1	0.01%
Lycos	1	0.01%
Google Switzerland	1	0.01%
Google Turkey	1	0.01%
Google Sri Lanka	1	0.01%
Total 52:	8,516	100.00%

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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.

How To Save a Client $200 on Day 1 and $1000 in Week 1 with Google Adwords

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.

DATE RANGE:	CLICKS	IMPRESSIONS	AVG. CPC	TOTAL COST	AVG. POSITION
FEB. 12, 2008	8	864	$35.83	$286.67	1.3
FEB. 13, 2008	2	504	$ 3.27	$ 6.54	1.8
FEB. 14, 2008	8	1609	$10.69	$ 85.49	2.3
FEB. 15, 2008	7	1135	$10.23	$71.59	2.9
FEB. 16, 2008	12	711	$ 8.46	$ 101.51	3.0
FEB. 17, 2008	18	543	$ 7.08	$ 127.44	2.7
FEB. 18, 2008	14	675	$ 8.14	$ 113.91	2.5
TOTALS (2/12 - 2/18/08)	69	6,141	$11.49	$793.15	2.4
TOTALS (2/1 - 2/10/08) PRIOR TO MY DOING THE UPDATES	65	2,926	$28.84	$1,874.37	1.3
TOTALS (1/1 - 1/31/08)	253	11,600	$29.60	$7,489	1.2
TOTALS 2007	1,885	93,634	$24.77	$45,942	1.3

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.

Good Organic Search Rankings= More Visitors = More Clients

"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.

Getting The Right Kind of Links to your Site

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.

How To Get 8 Out Of 10 TOP 10 Rankings at MSN

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!

Topix.net buys .com domain, worries about Google rankings

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. 

Importance of the Meta Description Tag

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. 

Legal Mini Websites

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.

Latest Legal Marketing Client

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!

Updating your firms web site

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.

Can Subdomains Violate a Trademark?

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 For Law Firms

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.

Query	Searches	Occurrences	KEI	Predicted Daily
oregon lawyer	578,155	1,010,000	5.11	13,200
oregon criminal law	383,994	1,010,000	4.70	8,767
real estate law	301,432	256,000,000	0.18	6,882
property law real estate law	19,211	77,900,000	0.04	439
real estate and portland oregon	16,012	10,400,000	0.30	366
oregon+lawyer	12,902	991,000	1.56	295
real estate portland oregon	10,399	17,100,000	0.12	237
portland attorney	4,863	581,000	1.26	111
portland law firm	3,897	440,000	1.32	89
oregon bankruptcy law	3,843	n/a	n/a	88

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.

Study: Top 4 Percent of Queries Matter Most

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.

Keyword Tools

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.

Bigger Lawfirms Seem To Ignore SEO

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.