Aside from the logistical challenge of the natural rankings only allowing 10 listings (17 in areas that still show the traditional Google Places Map at the top), some law firms take their marketing efforts to the next level while others use the weight of their long existence to pump their rankings.

Let’s begin with the one element that nobody can force, the element of time. Just as your law firm gains credibility in your community as it gets older and more established, your website gains credibility with Google the longer it exists. For very popular keywords (such as personal injury in major metro areas), a lot of the top page one listings are law firms that have their domain name for five to 10 years, thus giving them substantial weight with their optimization efforts.

Just having an aged domain is not enough. A domain name that is 15 years old but not properly formatted, optimized, or linked to will not enjoy a page one ranking. The age is just a heavy push upward if your other SEO elements in place. Before you run out and buy an old domain name, many in the SEO community believe that once a domain name is purchased by a new owner, the page rank and age resets. Thus, you end up overpaying for what Google sees as a brand new domain name.

The other overlooked element that many law firms do not incorporate into their online law firm marketing efforts is video. Of course, many lawyers have videos on their website, they do not necessarily help with optimization. What does help is maintaining robust YouTube channels and posting videos on other video networks. We have seen firsthand that lawyers who have a library of videos on YouTube (more than five) see a ranking boost shortly after the videos go live.

Do not use YouTube as an outlet for commercials, but rather information. Just as textual content is king on the web, video content is equally important. Make five to 10 videos that are less than one minute explaining a certain process in your area of law. Divorce lawyers should make a video about the first steps in filing for divorce. And another for for custody. Then another for non-contested divorce. Bankruptcy lawyers can briefly explain chapters 7, 11, 12, and 13 bankruptcies, thus giving them four videos to put in their YouTube channel and publish on other video networks.

In a later issue we will talk more about videos and how they can even help your local Google Places optimization.

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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1) Obvious Contact Form – Once you have a visitor on your law firm’s home page, you have less than one minute to convince him or her to stay and read more, contact you, or leave. If visitors do not have an easy way to contact you on every page, they will more than likely leave. The easiest way to accomplish this is to place a short contact form on every page. This is generally in a sidebar towards the top of the page. Brief contact forms should include Name, E-mail, Phone Number, and a box that allows visitors to briefly describe their legal needs. A more detailed form can be on your contact page, but for the short contact form, keep it simple.

2) Obvious Phone Number – Having a contact form on every page provides an obvious way to get a potential client to contact your firm. However, not everybody wants to e-mail. Some prefer to call. You should not hide your main phone number on a contact page or a footer, but instead make it clearly visible on the top of every page. It should contrast with the background color and be slightly larger than the other text. It should not take someone more than two seconds to look around your website and locate the main telephone number.

3) Compelling Comments First – As stated above, you have less than one minute to encourage someone to contact you once they land on your website. Therefore, the first paragraph of your home page and sub-pages should be the most compelling. In three sentences, talk about your experience within your particular practice area and end on a sentence that instills confidence in visitors that your firm can deliver the success they need. Always start the content by identifying the reader’s problem, never start with you or your firm. Work into that after you show that you understand the visitor’s needs.

These three simple techniques can make the difference in converting website traffic into new cases, but it is only the beginning. A professionally developed marketing strategy can bring your firm web traffic and efficiently convert it.

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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Your website traffic can be split into two basic columns: those who are interested in reading and those who are interested in talking. The readers are more likely to visit your website multiple times before ever making contact, while the talkers are more likely to visit your site once and become a viable lead.

The goal of your website design should be to quickly convert the talkers and make them fast leads while also providing resources for the readers. This content is also valuable for your online law firm marketing and search engine optimization efforts.

Focus on the Talkers
Your website needs to designed around the talkers, the group of people who will see a couple of lines and instantly fill out a contact form or call your law firm. These are fast leads. If you do not make it easy for them to get in touch with your firm, you are going to lose them.

This starts at the design process. Law firms often make the mistake of overcomplicating the home page design. You do not want to put too much information on the top of the page because it will discourage fast conversion. The readers, the group of people who want to learn more and study your content, are going to scroll down and locate your information. You already have their interest.

When working with your designer, focus on the top half of the website. This is the part of the website visible to the visitor before scrolling down. Your firm’s contact method and positioning state need to be clearly present at the top.

Below that in the regular page area, you want to keep the layout clean. Generally, we recommend a two-column design, which makes the website feel more open. You do not want to clutter the feel of the website or make it look like a newspaper. Even newspapers like USA Today and the Washington Post (on their story pages) use simple two-column layouts on their online publications.

If you simplify your design, open your website’s layout, and provide a lot of valuable content, you will appeal to the ready-to-contact audience as well as the studious readers, thus having a vehicle built to convert both visitor types.

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 | Law Firm Social Network | Legal News | Attorney Press Release Distribution

Last year, Google merged Google Places with its search engine rankings, making the search engine optimization of a website work together with the Google Places profile to determine the website’s ranking. While that helped many law firms, it hurt suburban attorneys.

When a user types in a term like “Tampa divorce lawyer”, all of the Google Places rankings that appear are law firms in Tampa, Florida. This seems logical. However, just 10 miles east of downtown Tampa is the suburb of Brandon. Many law firms in Brandon optimized for keyphrases related to “Tampa” but their Brandon, Florida address now puts them at a disadvantage.

This is true everywhere. From Cambridge, Massachusetts to Bellevue, Washington, law firms in cities surrounding major metropolitan areas are at a disadvantage in Google Places.

Does these mean your law firm needs to pack up its office and move to a high rent suite downtown? Not really, as your firm has a couple of options to remedy this problem and help your law firm marketing.

1) Satellite or virtual office – The easiest way to tap into the metro market is to get a virtual office or virtual address within the major metropolitan area. You would list this address in Google Places as “by appointment only”. Most virtual address/virtual office plans come with conference rooms and meeting spaces. Aside from helping your Google Places ranking, maintaining a virtual office may help service clients closer to the city core.

2) Capitalize on the outskirts of town – Another option your firm has is to dominate your local town rather than compete in the city. Suburban keyphrases generally have less competition, but substantial search volume. With the lower levels of competition, dominating high page one rankings can take place sooner and convert better than city terms.

More information on suburban marketing is available at http://www.seolawfirm.com/law-firm-marketing/suburban-legal-marketing-and-seo/.

Generally, a law firm can expect to pay $75 to $150 per month for a virtual address in a major city. It may sometimes be more, depending on the available features. However, the investment may be worth it if it means competing in the metropolitan market.

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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You do not really know. Networks provide statistics, but they are very general. The newspaper can give you circulation, but they cannot track how long someone stared at your ad or how many of their subscribers opened up to the page that had your advertisement.

The web is very different, if you have the right tools in place. Unlike television, radio, phonebooks, print, and outdoor advertisement, you can get exact numbers and behavioral data to help optimize your legal marketing spending.

Last year, SEOLawFirm.com’s parent company, Adviatech, launched Advialytics, which is based on the opensource Piwik project. Unlike Google Analytics, Advialytics offers real-time tracking. If you are not an Adviatech client, you cannot create an Advialytics account. Therefore, we would recommend you get started with Google Analytics.

Once the analytics code is placed on every page within your website, the following is the information you need to pay attention to:

Page views: A page view is a total number of views on all your pages. For example, one visitor that clicks on five pages will total five page views.

Unique Visitors: These are individual real people. This is determined by IP address. One person sitting in his or her office visiting your website 30 times in a month will register as one unique visitor.

Bounce rate: You want this number to be less than 50 percent. If someone clicks on your page and clicks back in less than one to two minutes, it is considered a bounce. You want the average time on site to be more than two minutes because that means your visitors are actually reading your content.

Entry pages: This tells you where people are landing. Usually, the most popular page is the home page. However, you may notice that your blog is number two. Or perhaps a particular practice area page is very popular. If a sub-page is getting a high percentage of visitors, you may want to add some extra elements to that page to help convert the traffic that the sub-page is getting.

Referring sites: If your law firm has a press release go out through Law Firm Newswire and it attracts 500 readers with 100 of those readers clicking on your website link, you will see 100 visitors register from the referring website: http://www.lawfirmnewswire.com. The referring site stats tell you where visitors are coming from. You can also combine this information with other data.

A detailed analytics package can show you where your best marketing efforts are being rewarded. You can also set up additional options such as conversion tracking, which allows you to see how many people fill out a contact form. By reviewing your statistics package in detail, you can gather a lot of information to help guide your law firm marketing efforts in the right direction and see how your current strategy is performing.

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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Many attorneys come to us because their existing website is not found in search engines and/or not generating any traffic. This, of course, is a common problem that we are more than capable of dealing with.

The other issue is not as uncommon as one might think… legal websites that are ranked high in search engines but are not converting traffic to cases. For that, you have to think design.

Two elements make up a successful online marketing campaign: traffic and conversion. Web traffic takes the longest to achieve since the search engine optimization process is progressive and can take a little time. But once someone is on your site, you have to convert them or else they are just one more number on your daily website statistics.

Conversion generally depends upon content and design. The content is where you prove to your visitor that your law firm has the solution to their problems and the experience to handle them professionally. But if all of this great content is not intuitive to locate and you do not have a clear path to contact your firm from any page within your site, this is content is not going to help.

A professional design instills confidence in your use while making it easy to navigate to the content that will convert the visitor to a new client. If a website’s look and feel does not match the professionalism of your firm, you are going to unnecessarily turn away prospective clients, which ultimately works against your goal of building a bigger law firm through your online presence.

Let’s Build a Bigger Law Firm Together

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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.

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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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.

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 | Law Firm Social Network | Legal News | Attorney Press Release Distribution

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.

Other Resources: Find a Lawyer | Law Firm Social Network | Legal News | Attorney Press Release Distribution