Legal Internet Marketing Blog

What makes you unique as a lawyer? How does your law practice differ from all the others in your field, your city, and your state?

These may seem like basic questions, but they are important to ask. Once you have the answers, use them. The best place to start is on your website; after all, it’s one of the first places potential clients will “see” you and it’s your chance to make a lasting first impression so they pick up the phone and call you.

What You Can Do
Not to discount the tremendous skill, knowledge, time, and effort that go into handling cases through deposition, mediation, settlement, or trial, but it is commonly understood that for an attorney’s career to really take off, he or she must find the time to be involved in the legal community outside of the courtroom, so to speak.

Whether it’s giving lectures, teaching a course, attending seminars, or becoming a member of a prestigious legal organization, an attorney’s hard work doesn’t stop with cases. Taking the time and finding a way to most effectively share these involvements, contributions, and successes is an important part of a legal Internet marketing campaign that goes unnoticed far too often.

How to Show Yourself Off
Let’s take a closer look at highlighting your unique characteristics online as a lawyer with an example. There are handfuls of Long Beach personal injury lawyers. However, Joseph H. Low stands out from the rest in a simple, but precise way. On Mr. Low’s website, http://www.jhllaw.com/, the home page features lectures and seminars that he leads with a link taking visitors to a page with more details about each event: http://www.jhllaw.com/lectures.html. Mr. Low has made the time and put in the effort to teach Continuing Legal Education (CLE) credit courses for attorneys. How else would you know this unless you attended one of his course’s yourself, saw a website newsletter flyer about it, or read about it on Mr. Low’s website?

Why You Should Do It
Choosing a lawyer is a big decision. If a person visiting your site sees that you go above and beyond by being an instructor or leading speaking engagements to share your knowledge and that others rely on you for this information, then that’s another way for you to use your website to highlight your uniqueness and reputation.

If you’re going to take away one thing from this example, and this blog post, let it be that it’s vital to be involved in events and activities outside of the courtroom; however, don’t just do it and then walk away. Make sure you have tangible representation of your involvement in speaking events so others can learn more and see how you’re different than other lawyers.

Your legal website is the perfect place for you to shine. There are tasteful and advantageous ways to highlight your accomplishments and unique characteristics so that visitors will no longer be in doubt as to who they want handling their case.

Have you ever used your phone to search the web? With the ever-expanding mobile market growing with each passing day, it’s important for businesses to realize that having a mobile website to help promote their brand is becoming more and more of a necessity. Aside from the obvious task of making sure that your mobile site properly loads on multiple mobile platforms (typically Apple’s iOS and Android operating systems) and even tablets (such as Apple’s iPad), there are a couple other things to keep in mind when building a mobile site.

For starters, remember to keep your branding consistent across all sites. If you have a logo, be sure to include it somewhere on your mobile site. If all of your websites use the same color pattern, be sure to emulate that pattern on your mobile site.

Basically, you want to make sure that visitors to your mobile site clearly recognize its connection with your other branding sites. In addition, be sure to connect your mobile site with your social media sites.

Applications for the most popular social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, often come preinstalled on smart phones. Be sure that these profiles are up-to-date, and that all information, particularly contact information, is consistent here as well.

As far as the content of your mobile website is concerned, be sure to set in place a content management system that will allow you to keep track of updates and easily make edits across all sites. Such a system will come in handy especially if your company moves offices or changes its phone number. By keeping track of all content under one management system, you can affectively ensure that content across all branding sites doesn’t unnecessarily repeat itself and remains consistent with your company’s message.

Having a mobile site may not seem like a necessary expenditure when it comes to mapping out your online marketing campaign, but it’s certainly something worth looking into. While your current website can certainly be accessed on a mobile phone via any online browser, it more than likely isn’t going to load properly, is going to be cumbersome and difficult to navigate, and is probably going to turn off potential clients. Commission your Internet marketing company to build out a mobile website that represents your brand, and you’ll have a leg up on your competition in the years to come.

What would you say if I told you that spending in a certain industry was going to increase more than six fold in the next four years? Aside from wanting to invest your money in this rapidly expanding industry, you’d more than likely want to know what kind of business is going to experience such tremendous growth. Well, in case you’re wondering, the expenditures for mobile advertising are expected to total $20.6 billion in 2015. This year, those totals are projected to top out at a mere $3.3 billion.

For those of you who may have missed part one of our two part series on the importance of mobile websites in marketing, allow me reiterate. Mobile legal Internet marketing may not seem important today, but it is becoming more and more essential with each new model of iPhone and Droid phone that hits the market. People are utilizing their mobile phones in a much greater variety of ways than they were just a few years ago, and smart phones are becoming a common tool in the world of Internet search.

When you take into account the rapidly expanding world of social media, and couple that expansion with an increase in commonality of mobile phone Internet searches, it’s hard not to take notice of how mobile phone users are spending their free time when not texting or making phone calls. If you’ve ever found yourself killing time during your lunch break, or trying to pass the time before a dentist appointment, then you are more than aware of how ingrained mobile phone use has become during the last decade. According to January 2011 statistics, more than 200 million active Facebook users access Facebook from their mobile phones, with other social networking sites such as Twitter bringing in similarly strong numbers.

So what does this ultimately mean for attorneys and law firms? You should strongly consider designing a mobile site that compliments your primary website. Take into account that a mobile screen is smaller than a laptop or computer monitor, so it is important to keep your mobile site simple and streamlined. The world of mobile search is constantly expanding, and has now become an essential part of any successful legal Internet marketing campaign.

Mobile phones, particularly smart phones, have become an integral part of the average person’s daily routine, so it makes sense for attorneys to establish a presence in that routine. Nowadays, people use their mobile phones for everything from making phone calls to transferring money via online banking to even purchasing discount deals on sites like Groupon.com. Mobile phone users “check-in” to local businesses, stay in-touch with their friends, and sometimes even rely on GPS to get from point A to point B. For attorneys concerned about their legal Internet marketing strategies, having a mobile site will help make sure their firm can be found and easily searched from the convenience of a mobile phone, no GPS required.

Simply having a legal website just doesn’t cut it anymore. With more and more law firms catching on about the benefits of having a well-constructed website and a strong legal Internet marketing plan, the competition just got tougher. But who doesn’t like a good challenge?

When developing ways to increase your website conversation rates, one of the first things to think about is how to make your website more appealing to search engines. Doing this will ultimately make your website and your services more appealing to potential clients: they’ll be able to easily find you because you’ll be on the first page. In addition, with a well constructed website, the search engines will include the links to your site that you want visitors to navigate to.

To get the links that you want and to rank for the terms that you want in the search engines, making sure that you have a well crafted sitemap, straightforward navigation and good backlinks on your website is a productive start. However, you can’t neglect the importance of website design and organization in terms of your site being easy to navigate for visitors – and for the search engines.

A legal website also must have informative and updated content with proper keyword use and placement. It’s understandable to think that stuffing as many keywords as possible on your website will make the big difference that you need to get desirable rankings and sitelinks. But this is not how it’s done. There is more to it than that. Keyword stuffing, or the overuse of one or more keyword or keyword phrases, within web page content or meta tags can be considered SPAM in some cases and even result in your website being penalized. And you definitely don’t want that.

Another thing to remember is that you can’t cheat your way to high rankings or sitelinks. Search engines can only be fooled by unethical practices such as “cloaking” and other “black hat” SEO tactics for so long, so keep that in mind when thinking of new ways to improve your legal website rankings.

SLS Consulting, an established and respected boutique legal internet marketing consulting group located in South Pasadena, California, is honored to be celebrating 10 years in business. To mark this very special occasion, SLS Consulting is proud to announce the launch of its brand new website, which can be viewed at: http://www.legalinternetmarketing.com.

The team of marketing professionals at SLS Consulting that President and founder of the company, Susan L. Sipe, has trained and assembled, are pioneers in the internet marketing field. With Susan’s lead, their efforts have helped countless firms build personalized strategic marketing plans aimed at increasing client development. SLS’s unique approach to internet marketing includes offering exclusivity to our valued clients based on their geographic location and area of expertise.

With the launch of its brand new website at: http://www.legalinternetmarketing.com, SLS Consulting offers legal professionals a new hub for exploring all of the custom services that their firm has to offer. Whether they are looking for a tutorial on the A-B-C’s of search engine marketing, an example of SLS’s certified results in search engine placement, or testimonials from attorneys who have benefited from partnering with SLS; the new website is an exciting addition to SLS’s impressive stable of assets.

Continue reading "SLS Consulting Legal Internet Marketing Firm Celebrates 10 Years In Business With Launch Of New Website" »

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" »

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" »

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" »

With the explosion in popularity that social media and social networking sites like facebook, twitter, youtube, videojug, and linkedin have recently enjoyed, many attorneys are faced with the question of whether or not to invest the time and money involved in creating and maintaining profiles on these sites. Can tweeting 30 times a day and having hundreds of followers to your profile increase the number of great cases you get? Will it cause your phone to ring more often?

The answer, in most instances, is a resounding ‘no’, but that does not mean that these sites don’t serve a purpose. The real value of these types of sites becomes obvious when you view your name (and your law firm’s name) as a trademarked brand name. A brand name that like any other in the business world, needs to be protected.

While it is true that you don’t have to devote large resources to social media sites, you do have to protect your brand name and trademarks by registering or ‘claiming’ your profiles. Almost all of the profiles that you create on the most popular of social networking sites are free. It just takes time and a valid email address. By taking the time to create profiles for yourself and your firm, you successfully claim your virtual identity online preventing brand and trademark abuse while contributing to your legal Internet marketing efforts.

Another variable here is the potential that some of these social networking sites have for exploding in popularity. Let’s not forget the story of facebook.com, a social networking site that started very small. Originally the site was intended to be a networking tool for Harvard students. As it’s popularity increased, other colleges and high school were allowed to join its ranks as well. It wasn’t until late 2006 that the site actually opened its membership to non-students. Today the site has more than 200 million active profiles. Who knows which social networking site will enjoy similar success? By claiming as many of these profiles as possible you insure that you are well positioned to take advantage of future success.

Additionally, and this is actually the most important factor from an SEO standpoint, social media sites can rank very highly in the search engines, especially for people’s names. If you’ve ever done a search for an individual you know that very often the first page of results can be dominated by myspace, facebook, youtube, and linkedIN profiles. The pages where the profiles are listed can also have very high page ranks, offering valuable links back to your firm’s website.

The most attractive part of this plan of action is that it costs virtually nothing. Any intern or office administrator can log into these sites and create profiles for your firm. The potential benefits far outweigh the time invested, and protecting your brand name on a prime domain can reap substantial benefits to you and your firm’s online identity.

Everyone knows that a good sitemap on your webpage is imperative to getting your pages noticed by Google. What many people don’t know is that Google has a Sitemap Protocol that allows you to inform all search engines about URLs on your websites that are available for crawling in a more dynamic fashion. This Sitemap Protocol is rendered as an XML file that lists all of the URLs on your site like a normal sitemap would, however its scalability and custom commands allows you other options that a typical HTML sitemap would not.

XML Sitemaps enable webmasters to include information about URL’s like when the page was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other pages in the site. The document provided by Google describes the formats for Sitemap files and also explains where you should post your Sitemap files so that search engines can retrieve them.

Some of the XML tags that are described in the document are:

• <lastmod>: This tag indicates the date of the last modification of this file.


• <changefreq>: Indicates how frequently the page is likely to change. Values like ‘always’, ‘hourly’, ‘daily’, ‘weekly’, ‘monthly’, ‘yearly’, and ‘never’ are all acceptable.


• <priority>: Indicates the priority of this URL relative to other URLs on your site. Valid values range from 0.0 to 1.0.

XML Sitemaps can be a valuable tool for your legal website that allow search engine crawlers to more effectively and efficiently crawl your site. It is important to note, however, that the Sitemap Protocol supplements, but does not replace, the crawl-based mechanisms that search engines already use to discover URLs. As Google’s XML sitemap page indicates:
“Using this protocol does not guarantee that your webpages will be included in search indexes… using this protocol will not influence the way your pages are ranked by Google”

With today’s economic woes affecting seemingly all aspects of business, many law firms large and small are struggling with exactly how to spend their marketing budgets. A solid indicator of where to spend your money can come from looking at other industries, gauging the climate of search engine marketing budgets across the board to get a feel for how much of your budget should be spent online.

A report published on emarketer.com regarding a study conducted by Econsultancy and SEO firm Guava, indicated that online marketers around the globe are increasingly turning to search marketing tactics.

Fifty-five percent of respondents said they planned to raise spending on SEO, and 45% said the same of paid search. In addition, 31% of SEO and 32% of paid search users said they intended to maintain their budgets.

It seems that business marketing executives are learning what many of our clients have known for quite some time, that search engine marketing is the most reliable, efficient tool in attracting new customers. SEO offers inherent advantages over paid search options, although the benefits may take time to make themselves apparent.

“SEO improves organic listings, which Internet users prefer over paid search, and it is cost-effective,” said eMarketer senior analyst David Hallerman. “Furthermore, optimization works across all search engines, and an optimized site does not drop off the first results page even when marketer spending slows or stops—as it can with paid search.”

Although this article refers primarily to online sites that have a traditional, commerce driven product, the goal of a solid legal Internet marketing strategy is always the same, increase traffic to the site and visibility in organic searches for relevant keyword terms. All attorneys, regardless of their specific mode of practice, can benefit from a sound online marketing campaign whose focal point is a strong SEO plan.

Our firm has specialized in building these types of marketing plans for more than 10 years. Our track record of success is well documented and we remain at the forefront of search engine marketing tactics. Contact us today, we can help your firm dominate online searches and help potential clients find and contact your website first.

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.

You’ve maintained a web site for your law firm for years. But it’s not generating the kind of traffic you need to justify its existence. Should you “throw the baby out with the bathwater” or salvage what you can and rebuild?

One reason why it may not be a smart idea to abandon your current site completely is that Google, Yahoo, and the other big search engines value site longevity. In other words, if your site has survived on the Web for years, it should have a leg up on newcomer legal sites in the rankings.

On the other hand, if your site has received demerits from the search engines, or your online brand has otherwise been tarnished, a different approach may be called for. You may need to start again from scratch or otherwise do some serious reputation management.

When rebuilding, you need to take into account your current client/visitor base as well as the costs and resources you’ll need to get your “Version 2.0” site up and functioning at full capacity. For instance, a client may have your current site bookmarked. If you suddenly switch to a new web site, and three months from now that client wants to refer someone to you, he may not get the information to you in time for you to take action.

Brainstorm the consequences of recalibrating your site building and SEO approach to avoid these and other major headaches down the line.

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.