Legal Internet Marketing Blog

The growth and upkeep of any legal internet marketing plan requires continuous effort. Simply having a website is not enough, but it is definitely a start! Even after your website has been created, the work is not over. One way to make sure that your search engine rankings continue to grow is to add new content to your website. However, adding fresh material to your website is a balancing act in and of itself, requiring more than just putting the content up on the site.

Think of your website as a garden. If you leave it unattended for too long, what happens? Plants start to wilt and weeds begin to take over. Don’t allow all of your hard work in developing a website go to waste. Instead, make the effort to add new content – but not just any content. Search engines respond to relevant keyword-rich, but not over-stocked, content that is fluid and has accurate optimization.

By creating a website with pertinent content, you’ve developed a foundation, planted the seeds. Now it’s time to tend to the site in a way that supplies it with intentional, well thought-out content updates. When you add new content to your website, you should think about what material will be the most informative for your target audience. Why are visitors coming to your legal website? They need help and you must provide them with the valuable resources and guidance that they need to get them started.

It is important to point out that your “old” content is still valuable. When adding new content to your website, you are not getting rid of the foundation you’ve worked so hard to establish. These older pages have been indexed by the search engines and have contributed to your Internet presence. This is why these pages should not be removed. Re-writing some of these pages or adding new content and optimization to them will provide more up-to-date information (new legislation, statistics, government reports, firm announcements, etc.) that the search engines will pick-up on. You can also create new pages and link them to/from older pages as resource centers to provide more details about the areas of law in which you and/or your firm practices. Remember, though, that adding new content to your existing website is something that must be done with precision. Rushing through this process has the same effect as overwatering plants or putting too many flowers in one bed.

Adding new content with effective legal SEO to your website will help these pages get indexed by the search engines, thus enhancing your website’s rankings by driving more traffic and getting your firm recognized for certain terms. If you think that your website contains all of the material that it possibly can, then it’s time to get creative. While no website should be jam-packed with pages in a careless, hurried fashion, a new web page can give your legal Internet marketing some momentum.

Legal websites have to strike a balance when it comes to the type of content that is featured on their site. Search engine visibility is at the heart of any good Internet marketing campaign, but the kind of content that search engines like Google, Yahoo & Bing rank favorably is not necessarily the type of content that compels potential clients to pick up the phone and contact your firm. This is best illustrated by using a theoretical case study:

A criminal defense law firm in Colorado wishes to launch a firm site that competes for keywords relating to their main areas of practice. They design a site that has relevant content relating to crimes like theft, DUI, assault, etc., creating unique pages for each of the crimes. After being indexed by Google, that content is thrown into the mix with all the others hundreds of thousands of pages by attorneys on Colorado criminal defense (778,000 according to Google).

In an effort to set themselves apart, they begin to beef up the ‘relevant’ content as Google’s webmaster guidelines instruct them to do. By adding more content to their pages, including things like Colorado legal statutes and discussions of the law, they are able to increase the ranking of their pages. With the addition of incoming links from outside sources that have recognized the website as an authority on issues of Colorado Criminal Law, Google begins to recognize the site as a valuable location with a plethora of information for the keywords the firm is trying to target.

So after a time, the firm is able to get to the coveted first page of Google results for their keywords… but now what? What the firm is left with are pages with thousands of words worth of information on Colorado theft charges that is dry, worded in legal-speak, and quotes legal statutes that most individuals have no interest in.

It is important to remember that any potential client that visits your site is not interested in becoming an expert in the crime that they are accused of committing. They are not interested in practicing law, representing themselves, or reading the legal statute or penal code that they have been charged with. This is exactly the type of legal website content, however, that will result in those pages having a high visibility in search engines. It is the content that Google most readily rewards with favorable search engine rankings.

A potential client wants to know that you can get them out of the mess they are in and defend their rights in court. They want to know that they can trust you, they want to see other cases you have handled like theirs, and they want to hear from people you have worked with in the past. This type of content does not inherently “match” with the content that Google would offer favorable rankings to.

So a balance of both is the best course of action for any website. Write informational content to get better rankings and write compelling information to get potential clients to pick up the phone and call.

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" »

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" »

Linking with reputable sites can win you points with the search engines, which highly prize viable networking achievements. However, if you’re careless about which sites you link to, you could run into trouble.

The Internet is awash with so-called “link farms” – shady services that offer to artificially inflate a site’s network in the hopes of fooling the search engines into thinking that the site is popular. While using link farms can actually yield some short-term gain, this process puts you at risk for getting de-listed by the search engines and thus ruining your online legal marketing efforts.

A better approach is to develop with great on site resources, including original content, answers to questions about your niche of the law, and biographical info and data/awards about your firm. With this foundation in place, other valid, high-ranking sites will likely want to link to YOU. Your cachet as a “high-value” site makes you appealing as a link to other high-value sites, which also want to climb the ranks. So by refocusing your efforts to improve site quality, you can coincidentally improve your likelihood of making important new online friends.

You can build content and links simultaneously – and in fact most successful owners do “walk and chew gum at the same time” – but remember that these two processes are linked. It all starts with unique, well-branded, well-developed source material.

1) A dysfunctional practice
If your firm’s financially disorganized, troubled by ethical problems, or incapable of taking on new cases, a web site isn't going to fix it – no matter how well constructed or content rich. If your firm is having difficulties, fix them first then build your web presence.

2) The actions of competitors
The Web is a Wild West and will likely continue to be so for some time. Just because you rank well and dominate a keyword today doesn’t mean that you can sit back and relax. You must continue to build on your foundation so that you can stay ahead of your competitors. You are only as good as your current SEO campaign. The Internet is a living, breathing, ever changing animal - a shape shifter. You cannot control the behavior others, but you can control your own thematic approach by focusing on your web site and your long-term strategy.

3) The shifting algorithms
Google, Yahoo, MSN and the other big search engines are constantly looking for ways to improve search (and make more money of course). The algorithms that are used by spiders to rank web sites will evolve to fight back against so-called “black hat" SEO techniques. Your goal should not be to “trick" the search engines with rank well quick schemes, but rather to deliver good, timeless, highly relevant content. Remember the tortoise and the hare????

4) The reactions of all visitors
Your resources are limited. Focus on pleasing as many visitors as you can. You are never going to please "all of the people all of the time".

In today's Internet environment a blog is the single most cost effective Internet marketing tool available. You can get a free blog from many places and/or you can purchase professional blogs if you have the budget for under $5000 a year and it is worth every penny.

Here are just some tips on what to do once you have a blog...

1) Update frequently
The best written and most compelling legal blog won’t yield a good ROI if you only update it biannually. Schedule time to blog on at least a weekly basis.

2) Keep your blog focused
All too often, newly minted bloggers go off on tangents and wind up diluting what otherwise could be a potentially powerful marketing tool. Think about who your potential audience is when you write your blog posts and tailor the information to what they might be interested in.

3) Cut out the fluff and avoid repetition
Hopefully... You already own and maintain a solid legal web site, so keep your blog in the same manner. Don't use it to stuff in keywords designed simply to “trick the search engines.” Not only will you lose readers, but you could ultimately damage the brand of your web site that you've spent so much time and money building.

4) Use clear, concise language
As a lawyer, you're trained to think in complex sentences and to use multiple clauses to convey ideas. But your readers are not lawyers! They need short and interesting, not long and elaborate.

5) Integrate your blog into the rest of your legal web site
Your blog and site should function as parts of each other, reinforcing the presence you’ve built online.

For more information or questions about blogging or search engine optimization for your website, contact me at susan@slsconsulting.com

Be as specific as you can about your practice and area of the law.
Tailor your content to the kinds of clients you most want to represent. Answer questions that your clients are most likely to ask.

Build content for consumers.
It can be difficult for you as a legal professional to empathize with the dilemmas and frustrations of writing about the law at a consumer level. You must remember the level of knowledge that most potential clients have of legal matters is much lower than what comes naturally to you. You must walk your clients through the process step-by-step. Outline hypothetical scenarios. Give concrete examples. The clearer a potential client can visualize the process of working with you, the less overwhelmed he or she will be and the more likely he or she will trust you with the case.

Make your content readable, to the point, and don't ramble.
Individuals looking for lawyers online are under stress. If you besiege them with massive pages of information adorned with crazy fonts, graphics and other web “extras,” you will scare away potential business. Even if the materials you present are legitimate, thematically relevant, and original, you must SIMPLIFY. Break up your content pages into small, digestible bites and make the navigation easy for the user.

Build your web site with a mind to expansion.
Ideally, you will keep adding new content and resources for the life of your site. Update with new case information, new biographical information, and new answers to FAQs.