Legal Internet Marketing Blog

The importance and relevance of legal Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for attracting qualified clients and helping a law firm become more successful is very well known, but it’s not enough to simply know that it is effective. In order for legal professionals to really understand how legal SEO helps them, they need to know why it works and why it provides a significantly better return on investment than traditional legal marketing methods. So we’ve compiled a list of some of the things that every lawyer should know about legal SEO:

• Legal SEO lets you compete with the big firms – Legal Search Engine Optimization levels the playing field for your firm and allows it to compete successfully with larger law firms with huge marketing budgets. Smaller, savvier, more nimble firms can use legal SEO strategies to thrive in a hyper-competitive field.


• It is the most cost-effective form of marketing – Traditional forms of marketing are expensive and may or may not achieve the desired results. Once the proper foundation has been established for your site’s success, your legal SEO keeps working for your firm 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.


• It helps your site attract local clients – Web users are becoming more sophisticated at finding local goods and services on the Internet. Modifying legal SEO keywords and phrases with the names of local cities makes it easier for potential clients to find your site!

Continue reading " What Every Lawyer Should Know About Legal SEO " »

Posted by Susan Sipe | Permalink | Email This Post

Posted In: Legal Marketing Tips , Straight Talk about SEO

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By now, most Web-savvy people in the legal world, or any industry for that matter, are familiar with the importance of social marketing. They understand that social marketing not only enhances the effectiveness of other legal Internet marketing strategies but far more importantly, it allows them to receive feedback from and interact with their site’s visitors and target audience. Social marketing provides a practical way to share information. However, the owners of sites and their Internet marketing consultant need to be very careful about how this information is dispensed. Web users are becoming increasingly sophisticated at discerning useful social marketing content provided for their benefit or entertainment from attempts to manipulate their purchasing decisions via social marketing methods. In order achieve its goals, social marketing strategies must have merit and something useful to contribute to the social networking communities that is serves.

To that end, here are some social networking ideas to keep in mind that will help you through the current economy and set you up for success when it recovers:

• Keep it real! – As previously mentioned, Web users are quite astute at discerning genuine efforts to contribute to the community from fake attempts to manipulate them and can employ the power of social networking to ‘call out’ fakes. This is illustrated by a recent incident where some popular Twitterers were outed for taking cash in exchange for product recommendations in their tweets. This created an outrage among Twitter users, and the backlash sullied the reputations of the Twitterers and the products they were shilling for.


• Create your own community and engage your readers – Blog posts rank well in search results, give readers a reason to check your site often, provide interesting and useful information and create a sense of community among your readers. Consider adding a blog to your site with posts written by you, your legal Internet marketing consultant or a mix or both.

Continue reading " Using Social Marketing in a Down Economy " »

Posted by Susan Sipe | Permalink | Email This Post

Posted In: Client Development , Content Development , Legal Marketing Tips , Legal Web Site , Social Networking

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The old saying that “bad news travels fast,” has never seemed more relevant than it does in the Information Age. These days, a legal professional’s reputation not only can precede him or her, it can also directly influence a potential client’s decision to contact or not contact him or her. The rising popularity of Web sites that allow people to share their positive or negative experiences with products or professionals of any stripe makes it easy for people to share their opinions. Those opinions, whether based on fact or not, show up in search results and can have a profound impact on the success of a law firm or legal professional.

To that end, we’ve compiled a list of proactive reputation management tips that are inexpensive, enhance the effectiveness of other legal Internet marketing techniques, and allow legal professionals to take charge of their reputation management. These tips for lawyers include:

• Harness the power of social marketing – Social marketing sites are becoming increasingly relevant for any lawyer’s or law firm’s Internet marketing. Consider creating profiles for yourself and/or your law firm on social networking sites that cater to legal professionals as well as the heavyweights like MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, and others.


• Host informational videos on your site – Consider hosting informational videos on your legal Web site that address some of the questions your clients often ask you about. These add value to your site, engage your site’s visitors and also rank well in search results!


• Add a legal blog to your site – Whether you write the legal blog’s posts yourself or have your legal Internet marketing company compose them for you, they benefit your site, rank well in search results, and allow you to address topical issues in the legal industry and provide valuable information to your site’s visitors and potential clients.

Continue reading " Online Reputation Management Tips for Legal Professionals " »

Posted by Susan Sipe | Permalink | Email This Post

Posted In: Client Development , Legal Marketing Tips , Legal Web Site , Social Networking , Straight Talk about SEO

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The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) is expecting that businesses will expand their mobile marketing budgets by up to 26 percent in the coming year, despite evidence that suggests that businesses will be spending slightly less on marketing this year overall. While mobile marketing is still quite small compared to the reach, relevance and revenue generated by Internet marketing, as more and more users use their personal communication devices to browse the Web, the effectiveness and market share of mobile marketing is expected to rise in the foreseeable future.

While mobile marketing currently represents only 1.8 percent of total marketing budgets, the MMA expects that the total spending on mobile marketing will climb from $1.7 billion to $2.16 billion in 2010. Approximately half of the brands and agencies the MMA polled recently said that they were experimenting with at least one type of mobile marketing, with SMS text campaigns the most popular choice, followed by mobile Web sites and mobile email marketing, respectively.

Most often, marketers are integrating their mobile marketing efforts with the Internet as statistics suggest that mobile Internet access increased 36 percent in the United States over the last year. Further, the research indicated that over 18 million Americans currently have mobile Internet access, and 54 million people worldwide enjoy mobile Internet access. Although mobile marketing has steadily gained market share over the last several years, the research also found that slow connections, spotty network connectivity and extra fees are still the principal barriers to entice mobile users online.

Industry experts believe that mobile Internet marketing has been and continues to be effective because it reaches consumers when they are shopping, running errands and making purchasing decisions away from their home. A research study conducted by Universal McCann on smartphone usage patterns found that more than one-third of smartphone users described as “high-use” respond to mobile advertisements. The study found that:

• 53 percent of smartphone users click on mobile advertising


• 35 percent request more information or a coupon


• 24 percent make purchases through their handsets


• 82 percent said that they use mobile devices while at work


• 81 percent said that they used their mobile devices while shopping

Continue reading " Mobile Marketing Budgets Expected to Climb 26% This Year " »

Posted by Susan Sipe | Permalink | Email This Post

Posted In: Legal Marketing Tips , Marketing News & Information

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Many clients in a hurry to have their legal Web site up and running overlook the importance of the site’s infrastructure in terms of site performance, ease of use, navigation, ranking opportunities and other important considerations. They care a great deal about page layout, color scheme, cool Flash animations, how the site reflects the professionalism of their law firm and other cosmetic features of their site, but are less concerned about the actual ‘nuts and bolts’ aspect of their site.

In many ways, a Web site’s infrastructure in analogous to a house in that it can look great from the outside but, unless it has been built to withstand a wide range of different environmental pressures, it will not last or provide its intended benefits. From a legal Internet marketing standpoint, unless a site is designed and built to rank well and perform well from the very beginning of the project, it will never achieve its goals or provide the proper foundation for the success of any legal Internet marketing strategies. Here are a few reasons why your legal Web site’s infrastructure is so important:

• It ensures that your site loads quickly in all browsers and traffic conditions – Good site infrastructure will ensure that you legal site loads quickly and properly when viewed through any browser and in high traffic conditions. A site that looks great in one browser but displays broken features in another will turn off site visitors and reflect poorly on your practice.


• Makes it easier for Google and other search engines to index your site – Sites built with clean, uncluttered code are easier for Google and the other search engines to index, which is a bigger deal than you may think. The indexing algorithms are designed to ‘remember’ which sites are difficult to ‘crawl’ and therefore index their contents less often, which affects placement in search results.

Continue reading " Why Your Site’s Infrastructure Is So Important " »

Posted by Susan Sipe | Permalink | Email This Post

Posted In: Content Development , Legal Marketing Tips , Legal Web Site

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