Legal Internet Marketing Blog

If you have a solid legal website, there is a good chance that several Internet marketing and SEO companies wish you were their client. And they will try to rope you in. In an effort to sweep you off your feet, you may have received messages similar to the one below:

Hi,

Let me know. Thanks.

Another interesting tactic to gain more clients that seems as though it would rarely, if ever, be successful, is to submit a Contact Form on a website or sending an email stating the following:

When I Googled "lawyer -- --" your website is on page 39.

If you are wondering why your online sales and enquiries are below expectations, this is almost certainly the reason.

How often do you go past page 1 of Google? You’re probably like 93% of the population who don’t bother looking past the first page. Being on page 1 is like having a store on 5th Avenue or Rodeo Drive; the easier your site is to find, the more traffic and sales you’ll get from the 600 million people who use Google, Yahoo and Bing every day.

Why choose us to rank you above your competitors?

• Guaranteed page 1 rankings, or we work for FREE


• Proven track record of ranking sites to page 1


• The lowest rates on the market – and NO setup fees

Simply reply “Rank Me!” to this email for a FREE consultation.

One point to highlight regarding the above message is that the term that the company entered into Google and found for the attorney’s website on the 39th page, is not even close to a term that the attorney’s site is meant to rank highly for. The message does not even contain helpful information relevant to their practice.

These messages are so impersonal and inaccurate because the individuals who are sending them submit so many that they don’t even review them to make sure the information is correct! Another interesting factor of these SPAM offers is that some companies and individuals will even “follow-up” with you:

Continue reading "Shoo Fly, Don't Bother Me: Sifting through SPAM Marketing Offers" »

Sipe & Associates, Inc., dba SLS Consulting, is proud to announce being selected for the second consecutive year for the 2010 Best of South Pasadena Award in the Internet Marketing & SEO Service category by the U.S. Commerce Association (USCA). As a well-known and established boutique legal marketing consulting group, Sipe & Associates, Inc. continues to provide personable and rapid client development.

The USCA "Best of Local Business" Award Program recognizes outstanding local businesses throughout the country. U.S. Commerce Association (USCA) is a New York City based organization that recognizes the best of local businesses in their community. Each year, the USCA identifies companies that they believe have achieved exceptional marketing success in their local community and business category. These are local companies that enhance the positive image of small business through service to their customers and community.

Nationwide, only 1 in 70 (1.4%) 2010 Award recipients qualified as two-time Award Winners. Various sources of information were gathered and analyzed to choose the winners in each category. The 2010 USCA Award Program focuses on quality, not quantity. Winners are determined based on the information gathered both internally by the USCA and data provided by third parties.

To learn more about how Sipe & Associates, Inc. is different and how we can help your business grow, please visit our website at http://www.legalinternetmarketing.com/ or call 1-323-254-1510.

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" »

People with an insider’s knowledge of Microsoft say that the company will make an announcement soon that Facebook posts will appear in Bing’s search results in the near future. Microsoft has said that posts from Twitter users have already been integrated into its new search engine’s search results. It’s also possible that posts from other social media sites will also be included in the future.

The president of Microsoft’s online services division, Qi Lu, was expected to make the announcement about the integrated search results at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. The senior vice president for Microsoft’s online audience business group, Yusuf Mehdi, is expected to conduct a demonstration of the new capabilities of the Bing search engine.

Microsoft’s deal with Twitter, which is expected to be nonexclusive, has reportedly been included in the company plans for many weeks. Microsoft engineers had already included Twitter posts into Bing in anticipation of the announcement. The terms of Microsoft’s deal are not expected to be disclosed, but a person inside the deal who wished to remain anonymous said that negotiations included a payment from Microsoft to Twitter.

Continue reading "Microsoft's Bing Browser Integrates Twitter and Facebook Posts in Search Results" »

Many Internet users don’t know that some Internet service providers allow certain sites to load faster than others do. However, the debate over “network neutrality” is gathering momentum again in Washington and e-commerce sites may finally get to compete on a level playing field if legislation is passed to make access to all websites equal. ISPs and Arizona Senator John McCain lead the opposition to this legislation. Whether the debate will favor e-retailers is still very much in doubt.

The Federal Communications Commission recently proposed new rules that would prevent giant Internet service providers, such as AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and others, from allowing the transmittal of web traffic of some websites at faster speeds than others allow. These ISPs claim that they should be able to charge more to send some traffic at higher speeds since streaming content for television shows and videos are chewing up large chunks of bandwidth and straining network capacity.

Many Internet companies and retailers favor network neutrality, arguing that allowing Internet users equal access to all online content promotes innovation and growth of the web, especially smaller companies that can’t afford to pay more for faster transmission.

Continue reading "Online Retailers Wish for Online "Network Neutrality" and May Get It" »

After suffering setbacks due to the recession, Internet advertising appears to be recovering well ahead of predictions. While advertising in traditional media like newspapers and magazines continues to founder, resulting in layoffs and pay cuts, advertising online seems to be gathering steam again. Kent State professor and former media analyst Lauren Rich Fine recently said that advertising in traditional media, classified sections in newspapers in particular, will never recover to pre-recession levels.

This forecast is in sharp contrast to the growing number of advertisers steadily increasing their online advertising budgets where more of their target audience spends their free time. Further worsening conditions for older media outlets, advertising online is less expensive, and an online advertiser’s return on investment is much easier to measure and track. Even companies that have longstanding advertising relationships with television networks and publishers are realizing that they need a strong marketing presence on the Internet, too.

"You can draw a straight line from the time when people hear an ad on the radio or television to when they search for that company on the Internet," said David Karnstedt, chief executive of Efficient Frontier, which helps manage ad campaigns on search engines.

Continue reading "Internet Advertising Regaining Momentum" »

An article published recently in the Los Angeles Times reports that Yahoo, parent company of venerable website hosting giant GeoCities, is closing down the site that allowed people to create their own pages a decade ago. Then GeoCities sites created by users ranked well in search results and were a social networking hub of sorts for hundreds of thousands of users. Though rudimentary and generally unsophisticated, these pages allowed users to create fan sites, talk about their hobbies, share their political views and a myriad of other topics. They could create pages at no cost, take advantage of a modest amount of storage for images and documents and stake out their own little corner of the Internet when there weren’t many options to do so.

Yahoo was scheduled to pull the plug on the domain and millions of pages on October 25, 2009, and one of the most common domains in the young history of the Internet was expected to cease to exist except in fond memory. In early 2009, although GeoCities stopped accepting applications, current users were allowed to update their pages and save their sites to their hard drives. Compared to peak traffic and users in the late 90s, comparatively few users remained. Yahoo is urging those remaining to transfer their accounts and pages to Yahoo’s web hosting service for $5 a month.

Continue reading "Yahoo Closes GeoCities Site" »

Managers and employees at Internet payment giant PayPal envision a future in which cash is an obsolete form of currency. We will order drinks through a touch screen at a bar and buy movie tickets by touching a movie poster on the side of a building. In PayPal’s forward-thinking future, software developers working for other companies will be able to create these alternative ways of purchasing the products we want by using PayPal’s technology. These visions of our possible future got a lot closer when PayPal announced that they would open their platform on November 3 to developers who want to build payment applications.

While innovations in many other industries have changed the way we live, work and play, there has been significantly less innovation in new and alternative means of making online payments. PayPal President Scott Thompson said as much recently at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. He said that the industry has been resistant to change, but legitimate concerns about fraud and security have been the largest impediments to innovation in the field. He also said that payments are a highly regulated business and require a great deal of cooperation and coordination between senders and receivers.

Still, “there’s a clear sign in the market that people want something better than they have today,” Mr. Thompson said. “Cash and checks are dying a slow death.”

PayPal, an integral part of Internet auction giant eBay, has primarily been driving the growth of the popular auction site. Now, the company is keenly interested in becoming the way that people pay for everything online, on their cell phones and in the course of their daily lives. Mr. Thompson said that the company has been working with software developers at big hardware and software companies, start-ups, mobile telecommunication device manufacturers and other companies. “Payment innovation needs to move from the hands of a few big entities to the hands of many,” he said.

Continue reading "PayPal Open Platform to Ignite Innovation" »

What started only two years ago as a messaging service with few bells and whistles has evolved into a company with worldwide recognition, millions of Tweeters and the fans who read their tweets. Twitter founders, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, had the business savvy to outsource ideas on how to grow and improve their service to the people who use it on a daily and hourly basis. The company monitors how users use the service and which ideas become popular. Then company engineers transform these ideas into features.

The company has announced that two new features will be rolled out sometime in the next several weeks called Lists and Retweets from users’ ideas.

“Twitter’s smart enough—or lucky enough—to say, ‘Gee, let’s not try to compete with our users in designing this stuff, let’s outsource design to them,’ ” said Eric von Hippel, head of the innovation and entrepreneurship group at the Sloan School of Management at MIT and author of the book “Democratizing Innovation.”

Professor von Hippel said that economists have thought that the people making products and running the companies are natural sources for new ideas and innovations. However, technology companies have turned that model upside-down successfully by allowing others to innovate for them. This works primarily because the Internet lets people around the world share ideas in real time and software allows users to design new products inexpensively. A good example of this is photo-sharing giant Flickr that started out as a small part of a game. When Flickr founders discovered that the photo-sharing aspect was more popular than the game, they shed the game and focused on building Flickr.

This shift favors young start-up companies as older companies tend to rely on proven ideas and techniques, and the structures of their companies may discourage outside-the-box thinking intentionally or unintentionally. Nevertheless, that may be changing somewhat as older companies now try to emulate the methods of new companies after watching how new companies grow to success. One good example is Ford Motor Company—it noticed that users were modifying the voice-activated entertainment and GPS system, Sync, and so invited college students to create new features for the system.

Continue reading "Twitter Evolves and Grows Successful by Listening to Customers" »

Branding consultancy giant Interbrand released its 2009 list of the best 100 global brands recently. Sysomos, a social media monitoring and analytics firm, looked at Interbrand’s data from the perspective of the top 20 brands’ social media presence on blogs, forums and news sites. This led to some intriguing differences in positioning. For example, Google, which placed seventh on the Top 100 Brands list, ranked first in social media mentions. Coca-Cola, the top brand on the Interbrand list, slipped to eleventh on the Sysomos list.

The Interbrand list put Coca-Cola, IBM and Microsoft as the top three in their list, while Sysomos’ top three included Google, Apple and Microsoft. Sysomos found that the fastest-growing brand this fall was Gillette from a social media standpoint. Sysomos determined that most of the mentions that drove the results for Gillette arose from the marketing campaign for its new Fusion razors. Curiously, 13 of Sysomos’ top 20 brands saw their social media mentions drop over the last two months with BMW down 31%, Honda -25%, and Toyota -24% as the steepest declines. Google registered a 13.45 drop for the same period.

Continue reading "Google, Apple and Microsoft Top Three Brands in Social Media" »

Not so long ago, small business owners had to be very selective about their advertising with their limited marketing budgets. Google AdWords and Internet marketing have leveled the playing field for small businesses substantially. However, unless owners or their Internet marketing expert plan their AdWords campaign carefully, they can quickly find themselves spending thousands of dollars with little return on investment.

First, determine if a Google AdWords campaign is the right choice for your business. For example, if your company produces a new product with very little name recognition, an AdWords campaign centered on a keyphrase like “organic turkey pastrami” might result in very inexpensive clicks, but little traffic to your site.

Next, establish an affordable budget and stick to it. Regardless how competitive your target keywords and keyphrases might be, unless you set a daily and monthly budget and stick to it, you’re setting yourself up to pay an expensive tab for pay-per-click. Instead of focusing on the quantity of clicks on your ad, concern yourself with the quality of those clicks.

Third, consider modifying your selected keywords and phrases with the names of nearby cities or your county. Also, bear in mind that AdWords will let you select a defined geo-specific area where your ads will reach local customers. If your snow plowing business is in Manchester, New Hampshire and you’re trying to attract qualified traffic with a PPC campaign for “snow removal,” it doesn’t do you much good if a user eighty miles away sees your ad. Select Manchester snow removal, Bedford, NH snow plowing services or another nearby community.

Continue reading "Small Business Guide to Using Google AdWords" »

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" »