SEO | Law Firm » Attorney Website Design

Law Firm Marketing Strategy Should Come Before Your Website Plan

slfadmin — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 17:59:15 +0000

Far too often, law firms focus entirely on their websites with the marketing strategy being an afterthought. For the best performance, you should lay out your online law firm marketing plan before creating a plan for your website.

Any online legal marketing strategy comes down to getting traffic to your website and phone calls to your firm. Not just any visitor will do – you need qualified traffic. While your search engine placement may come to mind, the visitors to your new website will come from various sources, Google being one of many.

Think of Google as three different traffic sources. First, you have traffic from Google’s traditional search results. This is what generally comes to mind when one thinks of search engine optimization. Second, traffic will come from Google Places. These are listed associated with the map and oftentimes are displayed along with your natural ranking. Your Google Places ranking will help your natural search engine ranking and vice versa.

The third source of Google traffic is often overlooked in marketing plans, and that is Google News. Keeping a steady flow of news releases going into Google News will help get same-day traffic to your website and capacious online exposure for your firm.

The steps involved in getting traffic from these three sources should be included in your strategy. Here are a few short tips for each.

1) Google Search – Your search engine optimization strategy is going to rely on large amounts of content available on your website, quality inbound links from third party websites to your website, and a consistent flow of new content posted on your website to make your site appear alive and growing. The most reliable links will come from writing and publishing content in various legal networks that will link back to your law firm.

2) Google Places – While many factors are involved in helping your Google Places ranking improve, one often overlooked element is reviews. The more reviews you have on your Google Places profile, the better you will rank. Reviews show Google that you are a legitimate business and thus worthy of higher placement.

3) Google News – You need to get your press releases published through a Google News contributor. This is the only way to get your content into Google News, as they do not accept direct submissions. Law firms can use Law Firm Newswire (http://www.lawfirmnewswire.com) to get into Google News and hundreds of other news outlets.

Before you plan your new website, get with a legal marketing specialist to draft your strategy for getting traffic.

Let’s Build a Bigger Law Firm Together

To learn more about legal marketing, law firm marketing, lawyer marketing, law firm marketing plans, and attorney websites visit SEOLawFirm.com or call 1.800.728.5306.

Other Resources: Find a Lawyer | The Bigger Lawyer Social Network | Legal News | Attorney Press Release Distribution

Quite Possibly The Most Affordable Lawyer Website Ever

slfadmin — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 18:12:15 +0000

Your law firm’s brand is comprised of several elements – your law firm’s name, your firm’s logo, and possibly your slogan.

When designing your website, your designer should take into consideration the style, color schemes, and feeling that your brand instills. However, the market downturn and slow recovery are tightening the budgets of many law firms and some are making the mistake of putting off their online marketing goals.

Your law firm must be online and the website must be professional. Even if you predominately do traditional marketing, you have to have a website that converts those visitors into new cases. But now, you don’t have to spend a lot of money.

In direct response to the changing economic environment, SEOLawFirm.com has created the Semi-Custom Lawyer Website, a complete website solution for $2,500.00.

Unlike other “template” solutions, the Semi-Custom Lawyer Website offers small law firms 14 unique designs (and growing). These designs are then customized by SEOLawFirm.com’s design team to match your law firm’s brand. Once completed, no two Semi-Custom websites look exactly the same, thus giving your firm a unique and professional online presence.

Content writing and search engine optimization services are available as supplemental services and hosting starts at $12.95/month. However, if you provide your own web content, the total cost of the Semi-Custom Lawyer Website including design customization, easy to use content management system, onsite blog capable of handling unlimited blog entries, sitemaps, initial page building (up to 20), social networking icons, and statistics will not cost a penny more than $2,500.00 (for a limited time – $2,700.00 after promotional period).

To learn more about legal marketing, law firm marketing, and attorney websites visit SEOLawFirm.com or call 1.800.728.5306.

Other Resources: Find a Lawyer | Law Firm Social Network

Invisible Keyphrases – A Negative Online Law Firm Marketing Practice

slfadmin — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 13:03:50 +0000

We hoped that such a practice was buried in the mid-90’s internet graveyard but its still a problem. Blending keyphrases into your attorney website that are invisible to your readers is a technique that makes the Google Bot’s face red and will almost guarantee a delisting. However, some webmasters building attorney websites are still using this as a “search engine optimization” technique.

Unlike some search engine optimization techniques, this one is not up for interpretation. Some lawyers, acting under the advice of misinformed “SEO Specialists,” have long lists of keywords in their website’s footer that are in the same font color as their background, thus making it invisible. Such a practice will negatively effect your legal marketing goals.

The problem is so irritating to Google that they not only mention it but built a whole section on hidden links and hidden text in their webmaster guidelines center.

Google is pretty direct in the language they use to explain the consequence of hiding keyphrases:

“If your site is perceived to contain hidden text and links that are deceptive in intent, your site may be removed from the Google index, and will not appear in search results pages.”

To check your website for hidden text, go to your web browsers top menu and click on “Edit” then “Select All.” This will highlight your entire web page and display any hidden text that your webmaster or “SEO Specialist” may have inserted.

If you find invisible words on the page, you should first demand that your webmaster remove them immediately. A termination of your agreement with them should probably come shortly thereafter as this negligible action will hinder your ability to be ranked highly in Google, and possibly hinder your ability to be ranked at all.

We recently reviewed a lawyer website that had over 100 hidden words in the footer. The attorney informed us that he had paid someone to develop the website in February of this year (2010); thus, acting as a reminder that unethical search engine optimization practices are still lurking.

To learn more about legal marketing, law firm marketing, and attorney websites visit SEOLawFirm.com or call 1.800.728.5306.

Other Resources: Find a Lawyer | Law Firm Social Network

Blogging Your Law Firm to the Top

slfadmin — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 15:06:28 +0000

It seems like just yesterday the web was a static place to be. Websites were static. News feeds updated as frequently as newspapers, and search engine rankings were pretty stable for extended periods of time.

Actually, that time never existed. The web has always been dynamic and quick to change, but in recent years it has been placed on turbo and is changing second by second. What does this mean for your law firm marketing efforts? You should be blogging.

Put a Blog on Your Attorney Website

It has been our experience that secondary websites just for your legal blog are not as effective as placing a blog directly on your law firm’s website. By having a blog on your site in a “/blog/” directory, you can keep your number of pages growing, build links to your blog via social bookmarks, and syndicate your blog feed into Google Blog Search, the ABAJournal’s Blawg Directory, and many others.

This syndicates your blog’s content, brings readers into your website and with the proper design, can convert visitors to new cases. It all starts with an active blog existing directly within your website, filled with relevant practice area content that is valuable and optimized.

To learn more about legal marketing, law firm marketing, and attorney websites visit SEOLawFirm.com or call 1.800.728.5306.

Other Resources: Find a Lawyer | Law Firm Social Network

Downtime Can Lower Your Law Firms Search Engine Ranking

slfadmin — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 13:17:01 +0000

Google puts a strong emphasis on website quality – quality content, quality navigation, quality inbound links, quality outbound links, quality, quality, quality.

Therefore, it should come as no surprise that your website being up and without returning “not found” errors is an important aspect of getting and achieving a high ranking.

As Google visits your attorney website to index your new content, they look for “not found” errors caused by dead links. If your website’s server is timing out, this can cause an error and make an existing page seem non-existent. If Google gets a lot of these errors, their bot may in fact lose patience with your website which will affect your ranking.

Check on your website periodically, and make sure your law firm hosting company is working with a reliable data center that has 24/7 performance monitoring. Some downtime will always occur with hosting for server reboots, upgrade installs, etc., but frequent downtime can only be explained by poor server management.

To learn more about legal marketing, law firm marketing, and attorney websites visit SEOLawFirm.com or call 1.800.728.5306.

Other Resources: Find a Lawyer | Law Firm Social Network

The Size of Your Law Firm’s Website Matters but Quality Must Be Present

slfadmin — Mon, 24 May 2010 11:53:06 +0000

Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) does not hold back any secrets when it comes to what they want in their index. Hundreds of blog entries, FAQs, statements in the news, and tutorials all say one thing – content.

Google wants to see content and they respect websites that bring it to their search engine. That is why most searches for information, celebrities, and political figures bring up Wikipedia articles… because there is content. There are also many popular terms that often bring up newspaper articles, because the news websites have massive amounts of content.

But before you go plugging away and writing hundreds of pages worth of keyword rich content, stop for a moment and ask yourself, “Is this content worth linking to?”

It is true, Google wants to see large amounts of content, but if the content is not providing any valuable information, third parties are not going to link to it. Imagine for a moment that you write on your law firm’s blog a legal position on pending legislation in your state House or Senate. A local reporter then writes a news article and cites a statement from your blog. Most reporters link to their sources in the web publication, thus giving your site a valuable inbound link.

A lot of content is great, and valuable content is better. When focusing on the size and value of your law firm’s website, you can show Google that you are a valuable resource while showing others that you are worth linking to.

So think of your website as more than a business card splash page and make it a legal resource.

To learn more about legal marketing, law firm marketing, and attorney websites visit SEOLawFirm.com or call 1.800.728.5306.

Other Resources: Find a Lawyer | Law Firm Social Network

The Importance of Color in Marketing Your Law Firm

slfadmin — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 18:14:23 +0000

When driving home from the office the other day, I was heading west on a clear evening. The sun was glairing in my eyes and I found myself squinting and blindly reaching for the sun visor to make the overwhelming amount of light stop harassing my pupils. Immediately I thought “that was like looking at a bad website”.

Recently in our law firm marketing podcast, we talked about the best ways to communicate with your target clientele through color and branding.

The podcast episode was based on a two part series that we did some time ago then updated for the podcast. In listening to Sierra Winter describe the different things that attorneys do right and wrong, it reminded me of the importance of color when marketing a website.

One of the easiest ways to turn somebody off on a subconscious level is by using the wrong colors on your law firm’s website. Sometimes, you can take some risks and make a website bold but for the most part, you should keep your brand and color scheme consistent with your market. For example, softer colors for sensitive matters like personal injury and divorce. Stronger colors are acceptable for criminal defense and business law.

If you haven’t heard it already, you should listen to the first podcast here, subscribe on iTunes, or subscribe with Feedburner. The second part of the series is coming out next week.

To learn more about legal marketing, law firm marketing, and attorney websites visit SEOLawFirm.com or call 1.800.728.5306.

Other Resources: Find a Lawyer | Law Firm Social Network

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Content Management Systems Become Standard for Law Firm Optimization

slfadmin — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 13:06:57 +0000

When we started this company over five years ago, content management systems were a thorn with which every search engine optimization specialist was constantly coming in contact. Their clunky feature lists and inability to customize individual titles made them a nightmare to deal with and generally resulted in futile optimization efforts.

How the times have changed. As content management systems like WordPress and Drupal evolved, the open source programming community took over and now content management systems are actually more SEO friendly than static HTML. I’m sure many in the SEO community are still shaking their heads, so next week we will cover how not using a content management system may hinder your attorney search engine optimization.

To learn more about legal marketing, law firm marketing, and attorney websites visit SEOLawFirm.com or call 1.800.728.5306.

Other Resources: Find a Lawyer | Law Firm Social Network

Getting New Clients from Your Law Firm’s Website

slfadmin — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 19:02:59 +0000

As an online law firm marketing company, our specialty is lawyer search engine optimization and getting law firm websites to rank higher in Google and other search engines. Therefore, we frequently talk about it and all things that center around “SEO.” In fact, we love “SEO” so much that we even put it in our name (SEOLawFirm.com).

But we know that what keeps our clients renewing year after year is partially their high ranking but primarily conversion. How many new cases and contacts are coming from their website… that is what truly matters.

A great factor in conversion is the design of the website. The key to conversion is simplicity and fewer steps. The goal of the design is to instill confidence in a user then make it as easy as possible to contact the law firm.

Keeping It Simple

The best way to increase conversion is to add a simple contact form on every page of the website. The form should request only the necessary information like name, email and phone number. It should be clearly visible and accessible on the home page and every sub page within the website.

Secondly, you should encourage the reader of your website and blog to contact your firm and link to the contact page. It is helpful to place contact links within the content of your site.

Implementing a couple simple techniques may improve leads and your return on investment with your online marketing dollars.

To learn more about legal marketing, law firm marketing, and attorney websites visit SEOLawFirm.com or call 1.800.728.5306.

Other Resources: Find a Lawyer | Law Firm Social Network

A Lawyers Biggest Competitor is Not Always Another Law Firm

slfadmin — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:32:32 +0000

Every law firm has competition. Whether it’s the attorney that buys primetime television slots, the firm that takes over the front, side, and back of the phone book, or the lawyer who practices the same area of law in your building; competition is everywhere.

When deciding how to best search engine optimize an attorney website, we look at competition in a different way. Online, competition is not always made up of lawyers in your city. It often comes from more powerful sources.

When building an online legal marketing strategy, we have to first determine the most popular keyphrase for your practice area. Popular keywords are going to give you the greatest return, since they provide the most exposure. While (for example) “Dallas Texas Criminal Defense and DUI Lawyer” may yield a quick page one ranking, it’s unlikely that the 5 individuals that search for that full keyphrase each month will cover your expenses. However, shorten that to “Dallas Criminal Defense Attorney” and you open yourself up to at least 1,600 monthly searches.

Let’s assume you have a keyphrase that is very popular and very competitive like “New York bankruptcy.” With 50,000 monthly searches, this is certainly a keyphrase worth investing in. However, when you search for “New York bankruptcy” in Google, you see that the competition for your search engine ranking is not always other lawyers.

Below the sponsored listings, the first result for this keyphrase is the website for the U.S. Bankruptcy Court Southern District of New York (nysb.uscourts.gov). Being a government website (.gov), it is going to carry a lot of prominence in the search engines. It’s also now your competitor.

The second ranking is a directory of bankruptcy lawyers in New York. This is somewhat like a competitor in that, should someone click on it, they will be exposed to competing bankruptcy lawyers. The third ranking is the Northern District of New York, another government website. When reviewing the whole page of listings, we find 4 government (.gov) websites. That means that 40% of the results page is dominated by search engine heavyweights.

When thinking about the competition for your keyphrases, your online law firm marketing company must take into consideration that everything on the first search results page is a competitor. This can be Wikipedia, a government website, a video on YouTube, or a news story on CBSNews.com. Knowing who you are really competing against will help your law firm achieve prominent rankings for the keyphrases that get search traffic, which ultimately means new cases for your firm.

To learn more about legal marketing, law firm marketing, and attorney websites visit SEOLawFirm.com or call 1.800.728.5306.

Other Resources: Find a Lawyer | Law Firm Social Network