As a rule of thumb, we always recommend solutions first, credentials second. When someone is looking for a bankruptcy attorney, divorce lawyer, personal injury lawyer, etc, they have a problem. If you immediately introduce yourself, starting talking about your history and where you are from, you are going to turn off the visitor.

Think of your visitors as people in an audience asking a question. Then, use your website to provide answers to those questions. You may want to include some frequently asked questions on the home page that link to longer pages with more details. If a visitor is impressed with the solutions you offer, they are more inclined to contact your law firm.

Once they find that you are a suitable match for their legal problem, its time to instill confidence with your history and credentials. If your state regulations allow it, include success stories and testimonials within the content of your sub-page. That introduces them to success stories while talking about the solution to their problem.

Nobody wants to be the first client and nobody wants to be an experiment. Use your blog and web content to present solutions, make it clear that you have dealt with similar problems in the past and that you and your firm can be trusted.

Your website’s content is one of your strongest conversion tools.

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However, law firms that invested heavily in improving their Google Places ranking were hit with a surprise in November when Google merged the search engine rankings with the Google Places ranking in most markets.

Before this took place, local listings were displayed next to a Google Map at the top of the search results page with links to five to seven attorneys to the right. Below the maps area were 10 standard search engine rankings based on the search engine optimization of those websites.

When Google merged the two, everything changed. While some markets still see the traditional top map and lower rankings, most are starting to see and feel the effects of the combined search results.

Now, when you search locally for terms made up of City Practice Area Lawyer (ie: Boston divorce lawyer) you see a combination of regular search engine rankings with Google Places ranking (these have orange balloon icons next to them).

With the merging of Google Places and the search results, Google has begun looking to the website that is linked with the profile to determine the placement of the Google Places profile and search engine ranking.

This means search engine optimization is not obsolete for local attorneys, but rather the driving force behind all local online marketing.

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Having an e-mail newsletter is a great way to attract future clients by building a database of people who are contacting you today then staying in touch with them. While running your law firm, you need to outsource and automate as much of your legal marketing as possible. Combining blogging and e-mail marketing is something that automates a process without the need of outsourcing.

First, you need to sign up for an account with an e-mail list provider. You certainly have a few options, but we highly recommend MailChimp (http://eepurl.com/cmWKf). Their easy-to-use control panel, list manager, and support serves such companies as the BBC, MTV, NOLO, Law Firm Newswire, and half a million others. They offer a free account and one starting at $15/month, making them an affordable addition to your legal marketing strategy.

After creating an account, you want to click on the “Create Campaign” button and the “RSS Driven Campaign” link.

It will then ask for your “RSS FEED URL”. It will look something like this:

http://www.example.com/blog/feed/

You then select how often you want it sent out. Daily, weekly, monthly? Then set a time.

The next steps allow you to modify your e-mail template and schedule your e-mail list.

If you set this for monthly, your subscribers will receive an e-mail with a few headlines and links back to that month’s blog entries on your law firm’s website. If you are using another email service, ask them if they offer an RSS solution, most services do.

If you are already blogging, this a great way to automate a monthly e-mail newsletter. It would allow you to do stay in contact with prospects without adding one more monthly to-do to your already cluttered schedule.

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.

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As we explain this to prospective firms day after day, many lawyers question how Twitter and Facebook will work for their firm. Will someone following them on Twitter then get in a car accident and call them? Probably not.

Will someone become a fan on Facebook and when his or her marriage goes south, give the firm a call? We have seen it happen, but that is not necessarily the goal.

It is all networking. Much like you introduce yourself to other lawyers in hopes of getting referrals, you interact on Twitter and Facebook to get your content published, syndicated, distributed, and sent across the web. Lets walk through the process.

1) You write a blog entry on organizing your assets prior to getting a divorce.

2) This blog entry is tweeted to your profile linking back to your blog. The tweet looks something like this “Organizing Your Assets Prior to Getting a Divorce – lawurl.com/abc123”.

3) The blog also goes across Facebook.

4) A follower of a follower or a friend of fan sees your article and is in the process of a filing for divorce.

5) Through your network, you have a new case lead.

Social networks also help your firm to get referrals from other attorneys. As other lawyers follow your content, they get a feel for your expertise in your area(s) of practice. As they also network online, they may run across cases in your expertise in your city. Remember, the Internet is a big place, but the interconnectivity of social networks makes the globe a little smaller.

The later case of lawyer referrals is the most common success of social networks. However, with your content circulating the networks, it gets republished on other sites (blogs, forums, etc). When that happens, links point back to your law firm’s website.

So routine tweets and Facebook postings can get you leads, referrals from other law firms, links back to your website, and ultimately lead to a higher search engine ranking.

And that is just one part of the online law firm marketing process.

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.

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Frequent Blogging

Blogging is helps your law firm attract new cases in a number of ways.‭ ‬First,‭ ‬the blog keeps the website active.‭ ‬An active website tells Google that you have a lot of new relevant content.‭ ‬When compared against a website that has old content,‭ ‬a website with fresh new content gets the extra point.

According to Google’s blog,‭ ‬their search engine has an estimated one trillion websites indexed.‭ ‬That is individual websites,‭ ‬not web pages.‭ ‬When determining the position of a website for a‭ ‬specific keyphrase,‭ ‬they are grading on a curve against the sites in their index.‭ ‬They have certain criteria that they are looking for,‭ ‬including the following:

1‎) ‏Website content‭ ‬– how much content is on the page,‭ ‬how much unique content is available,‭ ‬and what is the quality of that content.

2‎) ‏Inbound links‭ ‬– The number of inbound links to a website helps Google determine the question from‭ ‬No.‭ ‬1‭ ‬regarding the quality of the content.‭ ‬Their theory is‭ ‬that‭ ‬more people will link to good content,‭ ‬thus links equal quality votes.

3‎) ‏Age of domain name‭ ‬– Just as your law firm gains credibility with age,‭ ‬so does your domain name.‭ ‬Older domain names tend to rank better than newer ones because they have a longer history in Google’s index.

4‎) ‏New content‭ ‬– An old website with new fresh content and inbound links seal the deal.‭ ‬With all of these elements working together,‭ ‬your website earns a stronger search engine position.

Blogging frequently is not as time consuming as you may think.‭ ‬A blog entry does not have to be a full page,‭ ‬it can be‭ ‬one to two‭ ‬paragraphs of commentary on changes,‭ ‬news events,‭ ‬or opinions related to your area(s‭) ‬of practice.‭ ‬A weekly blog posting can be done by allocating just‭ ‬20‭ ‬minutes a week.‭ ‬And together with the other elements listed above,‭ ‬blogging‭ ‬can make a huge difference in your search engine ranking.

Blogs also help drive inbound links to your website.‭ ‬We’ll talk about that in a future blog entry.

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That is generally sound advice but as a lawyer, you are in a unique predicament. Through all the bickering, fear mongering, and partisan wiles, politics comes down to the formation and interpretation of your product… the law.

Over the years, we have monitored the performance of the blogs that our law firm marketing clients contribute – and what we found was a little surprising. There is value in political commentary. This was true from both sides of the aisle.

In traditionally left-leaning areas of the law (personal injury and immigration), we found that blog entries that took on a political undertone related to their respective area of the law had higher levels of syndication, more direct inbound links to the blog entries, and higher levels of sharing across social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and Digg.

On the other side of the aisle, we looked at traditionally conservative areas of law (corporate, securities, and tax). Blog entries that spoke out for or against state and federal legislation (bills and laws) not only had greater amounts of sharing across social networks, more syndication, and more readership, law firms in conservative genres had more direct requests for republishing the politically charged article in newsletters, magazines, and journals.

Its safe to say, based on this review, that politics in your law firm’s blog is a great way to charge some interest in your firm’s website. However, you have to keep the focus on the legal aspects.

If you start getting venomous in your political writing and talk more against the individual politicians and not so much the legislation they back or oppose, you may isolate yourself from potential clients that do not fit in the stereotypical political box.

Just as attorneys in those practice areas may not fit the profile, conservative individuals often need personal injury representation and some liberal voters also own large corporations and get involved in periodic tax disputes, so you cannot assume your target clientele share in the comprehensive party beliefs. So keep the focus on what the politicians are doing, how it will affect the interests you represent, and throw in some of your own commentary. This will yield great interest in your firm through your law firm’s message.

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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.

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