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

Just last week, we reviewed a website for a law firm and this particular page on the website was related to bankruptcy law.

The client’s URL was: websiteurl.com/lawyer-attorney-1267187.html.

What Google outlined in their search engine optimization guide 2 years ago, was that they want to see relevant keyphrases in the URL. So if this was our client, this page would look like the following:

Websiteurl.com/practice-areas/bankruptcy-lawyer/

This tells Google that this subpage of the site is related to one of the keyphrases we are optimizing for “bankruptcy lawyer.” The other URL mentions “lawyer” and “attorney” but does nothing to describe which of approximately 50 practice areas this particular page is discussing.

Utilizing clean descriptive URLs is something that helps your search engine ranking as well as your click conversions from search result pages.

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

Google in particular loves content. In their webmaster guidelines, they write advice like, “Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.” In their “do not” list they say, “Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.”

In fact, they even broke off a section of their guidelines just dedicated to the dangers of “Little to No Original Content.”

So it’s pretty well established, Google wants your attorney website to have content, quality content, and lots of it.

As a law firm, you are able to fulfill their wishes by simply expounding upon your practice areas. If you are a family law attorney, don’t list your areas of practice as:

Divorce
Custody
Paternity
Alimony
Adoption
Prenuptial Agreements

Make a separate sub-page of your website for all of those practice areas that are related to divorce and family law. The same applies to all areas of practice. The more you can talk about your practice areas, the more pages your legal website will have, and subsequently the more secondary keyphrases for which your attorney website will rank highly.

By having a separate page for “child custody,” for example, you are more likely to rank on the first page for those terms “child custody.”

Do not make the mistake of having just one practice area page and itemizing your different areas. Write a separate page for each and make your law firm’s website a 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

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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.

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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A common mistake made by many law firms is pushing their website and online legal marketing strategies to the back of their priorities. By doing this, the law firm loses a lot of exposure and potential clients.

Everyday, people and businesses go online – not to the phone book – to look for a lawyer. In every major city and in every practice area, thousands of searches flock to Google and other searches engines to seek legal counsel.

To show you how important it is to begin quickly, we ran a search count in several major metro areas in different corners of the United States. The number represents the number of searches Google received for that keyphrase each month. It’s an approximation provided by Google.

Miami divorce attorney – 1,600

Seattle personal injury – 6,600

Boston bankruptcy lawyer – 1,700

Houston criminal defense – 12,000

Los Angeles immigration lawyer – 3,600

As you can see, the traffic is out there and if your website can’t be found or if it doesn’t look its best, your firm is missing out on new cases.

Keep in mind, search engine optimization does not happen overnight so beginning a strong online law firm marketing campaign soon is imperative to the success of your firm in 2010.

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

When you go to a store, most major retail outlets have sensors at the doorway. You probably overlook them, but they are certainly watching you. Every time someone walks in and out, a system tracks the activity to see how popular the branch is. Consultants are often brought in to monitor shopping habits from the cameras in the ceiling to figure out new ways to attract shoppers to high profit items.

Fortunately, getting statistics about your website is a little easier but certainly no less valuable. What keywords or referring sites are getting people to come to your website? When they get there, are they staying? Where do they go? Your blog? Your ‘about’ page? How long do they stay? What percentage is filling out your contact form and of that percentage, which traffic source is driving your highest conversion?

Of course you probably don’t know this off the top of your head, but do you at least know how to get your website’s statistics?

Knowing what is happening on your law firm’s website is extremely important. Without statistics, you are flying blindly up (or down) the search engine optimization ladder.

A good place to start is with Google Analytics. If you already have a Gmail account, Adwords account, or other Google Account, you can point your browser to http://www.google.com/analytics and sign up. Your webmaster will have to place code in the footer of your site on every page you want to track.

While other statistics applications and services are available that compete with Google Analytics, we have found that Google Analytics is widely supported and fairly accurate when compared to server logs.

Statistics play such an important role in the success of our law firm marketing projects that last year, SEOLawFirm.com’s parent company bought all of their SEO staff members the Apple iPod Touch and tied in the Analytics data for every client that member manages. We also believe that clients should have access to their data and know how to access and read it.

If you currently do not use a statistics package, integrate Google Analytics into your website and see what you have been missing.

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

Over the years, here are some of the reasons we have discovered.

Age

Most commonly, the cause of the high ranking over a law firm that is new to marketing online is due to the competing firm having a more established presence on the Internet. Law firms that have had an active website for 3-5 years have an advantage over newer sites.

Media

A little attention from the media helps your search engine optimization. Sometimes, law firms that maintain strong relationships with their local news organizations get a boost in their ranking. When a news outlet writes an article in their paper or reports a story on television, they also include the article on their website. News organizations generally have high ranking websites so by maintaining strong relationships with your local news outlets, you can get some strong links pointing to your firm’s website.

More than Age

It certainly takes a lot more effort than just existing to make it to the first page. For example, a law firm in your practice area that sets up a website and does nothing with it (in terms of link building or onsite SEO), is going to rank just as low five years from now as they do the day they go live.

From the time your website goes up, content should be written and distributed with links back to your site, social networks should be pointing to your website, and your onsite blog should be syndicated; a variety of inbound links should start pointing to your law firm’s website from the time it is visible to the public.

So with a little time (which can be greatly reduced with a strong inbound linking strategy), some distributed content and inbound links consistently pointing to your website, your law firm can compete with Internet elders.

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

A common deliberation in firms of all sizes is whether to continue old marketing practices that are offering limited returns or to pursue newer marketing avenues like search engine optimization and online law firm marketing.

If it’s decided to utilize web design and search engine optimization, should a firm drop their Yellow Page ads or downsize with plans of fazing out?

In comparing online media with traditional media we will start with the website. The website holds a unique power in that it can be a stand-alone marketing strategy as well as a complimentary piece to your offline marketing. For example, a billboard with your website address on it could prove to convert a passersby to a new client, who would have otherwise ignored your phone number.

Another example of a website working as a complimentary piece of your offline marketing is with television, radio or print. Your firm could publish free information pieces then advertise those pieces on your radio, television or print advertisements to encourage viewers and listeners to visit your website.

An attorney website can do what a advertisement cannot and that is build confidence with the prospective client. It is on a website that your law firm can prove to the interested prospect that your firm is competent, experienced, and capable of handling their situation.

Where drive by and print media force you to consolidate your message into a few words, your website gives you the ability to expound upon your knowledge and give client testimonials, case examples, frequently updated blog entries, user instigated videos (always avoid auto-play), and other details to encourage a user to contact your firm.

Next week we will talk about what to expect with the second part of your marketing strategy, the search engine optimization.

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