Nolo's Lawyer Blog

Lawyers: Learn how to increase your online visibility, generate more traffic and get more clients from your website with these top ten tips.

This is the first in a series of posts on the most important things attorneys can do to optimize their websites and increase bottom-line results. Learn how to rank higher in major search engines and drive more qualified traffic to your site by following these simple top ten tips. Here are the four major goals for improving your website:

• Search: Get listed higher on major search engines like Bing, Yahoo and Google
• Traffic: Increase qualified traffic to your website
• Visitors: Get more people to your site and keep them browsing longer
• Convert: Convert site visitors to clients

People search online for good, relevant information, so the most important element of your website would be good, relevant content. Using search-friendly text and key words that help inform potential clients about you and your practice are critical . But what is the best way to create that content and what do I do after I've got all of my information ready?

For now, we'll start with important tips to improve your website, with more detail on each in our upcoming blog posts.

1. Strategy Overview: Do a basic review of your website and online marketing strategy and set realistic goals for improvement.
   
2. Website Analytics: Implement some basic tracking capabilities on your site to measure visitors and traffic, like Google Analytics.
   
3. Website Content: Create good, relevant content and topic-specific articles for your site.
4. Blogs: Create a blog to keep your site fresh and current.
5. SEO: Optimize your site's page titles with relevant keywords so that search engines can better find you.
   
6. SEM & PPC: Consider search engine marketing and Pay Per Click (Google Adwords) advertising.
7. Link Building: Let other sites know you exist and have them link back to your site.
8. Email Marketing: Invite your visitors to join an email list for periodic newsletters about your practice.
   
9. Social Networking: Learn to utilize Linked In, Face Book and Twitter to help drive traffic qualified traffic to your site.
10. Client Intake Form: Convert site visitors to paying clients by adding a simple intake form.

Online marketing, like any form of marketing, is a step-by-step process. Check back with us next week to learn more about how you can improve your online strategy.

Clicks, hits, visits, uniques, impressions, page views, conversion rates, click-throughs, CPM (cost per thousand impressions), RPM (revenue per thousand impressions) CPC or PPC (cost per click), CPL (cost per lead), CPA (cost per acquisition), ROI (return on investment) -- what does it all mean?

Are you drowning in a stormy sea of unfamiliar terms and conflicting information, trying to quantify and measure the success of your online marketing? Are legal marketing companies making promises based on SEO metrics and page one placement with major search engines like Google and Bing?

Value vs. Volume

The bottom line for attorneys, especially solo practitioners and smaller firms: it's a competitive landscape out there, and at the end of the day, you're just trying to attract more clients who want to hire you. You can have all the "traffic" in the world, lots of clicks and unique visitors, but how do we qualify this traffic, and how many of those qualified visitors end up becoming clients?

Let's take a closer look at overall online marketing and advertising strategies and try to get to the bottom of the great traffic debate.

Online advertising continues to drive the majority of revenues with the big four search engines; Google, Yahoo!, Bing and AOL, leading the pack. According to Price Waterhouse Coopers, "search revenue accounted for 47 percent of 2009 second quarter revenues, up from the 44 percent reported in the second quarter of 2008. Display advertising, the second largest format, accounted for 35 percent, followed by Classifieds (10 percent), and Lead Generation (7 percent) of 2009 second quarter revenues", totaling $5.5 billion.

Different advertisers and marketers are paying for different types of online exposure. But exposure alone doesn't necessarily mean more customers. Paying for clicks, hits or visits on one site might not provide the same ROI as another site, depending on visitor demographics and how qualified the traffic is.

Here at Nolo, for example, we pride ourselves on being a full-service legal resource center where millions of visitors come for help with their legal needs. When a consumer browses our thousands of pages of free legal content, we provide geo-targeted attorney listings related to the information our visitors are seeking. A site visitor who clicks on one of those attorney listings should be a more likely client than one who clicked on a paid Google link through a general key-word search.

Despite the promise of absolutely trackable results and metrics for every dime invested in online marketing, the age-old adage of "there are no guarantees in advertising" still rings true -- buyer beware.

SEM vs SEO - What's the difference and what does that mean for lawyer websites?

"If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it really make a sound?"  If you build a website, and no one visits, how can you generate more business online?  Okay, not quite the same comparison but still applicable for today's internet businesses. How do you promote your website once you've transitioned your law firm online?  It might be time to consider investing in some form of "Search Engine Marketing", or SEM.

Not to be confused with SEO "Search Engine Optimization", covered in a previous post on the Nolo Lawyers blog, SEM is the general practice of increasing a website's visibility in search engine results.  Most commonly, SEM refers to greater search engine visibility through pay-per-click advertising and paid placement.

SEM can be part of a comprehensive overall online strategy to boost your website's visibility in search engine results, but other important factors include unique content, link building, social media marketing, and optimizing a website via SEO. The primary function of SEM is to affect your appearance in search engine results and know that consumers can find you.

There are agencies that can help you implement an SEM program, or you can go it alone with legal directories, Google AdWords, and other forms of paid advertising. When choosing an SEO consultant, make sure to follow some if not all of these best practices.

At the end of the day, it's all about results and the ability to measure them. Make sure that you have a historical baseline of metrics before implementing an online strategy and allow time for your efforts to take hold.  For example, do you know how many unique site visitors you get each month, and what sites they most originate from?  Using a month or two's worth of data might reflect exceptions in the marketplace, or peaks and valleys with times of year, rather than a true reflection of your return on investment.  Metrics also allow you to understand what might be resonating most, or least, among potential clients, and how they're most likely to find you.

Are you one of the shrinking-but-still-confused group of internet users that are still uncertain about the widely used terms natural or organic when it comes to search engines and search results? Let's take a look; it's actually a lot simpler than you might think.

The internet is currently dominated by three major search engines; Yahoo!, Bing and of course Google. According to Nielsen data from August 2009, Google still has the lion's share of domestic queries at 65%. Yahoo! comes in a distant second with 17% of all search traffic and Microsoft's Bing, growing at 22% month over month now accounts for 10.7% of all Internet searches.

One way to look at it is basically the difference between paid vs. non-paid advertising online. Let's face it, most everyone wants to be on the top of the first page of results when users are searching for specific key words or phrases. The easiest way to do this is to pay for terms that people are searching for, usually on a bidding system, so that your website will show up higher than your competitors for a given search result. The second way to look at it is that websites with the most relevant content matching the terms that users are searching for show up higher than those with less relevant content. Part of the recognition for relevancy is also represented by how many inbound links there are to your site from other sites. The more that people point to you, the more of an authority you must be is the basic logic but we'll save inbound and outbound linking for another post.

Let's look at Google as an example. When you type in a term like 'Bankruptcy' into Google, the first thing you'll see in the results at the top left of the page is Sponsored Links, typically three listings in a lightly shaded yellow box. If you look to the right of the page,you'll see in the vertically shaded column additional Sponsored Links as well. (Click on the chart to see a larger version.)

The Sponsored Links both across the top and down the right hand side are all paid advertising. The organic or natural results are then listed below on the left hand side. In this case, the news results for this search are pointing to a Wall Street Journal which mentions bankruptcy and then the US Bankruptcy Court page is next.

Check out an earlier post about Search Engine Optimization basics here. You can also read more about Google's recommended SEO practices here.

Know Your Visitors & Where They Are Coming From

You've got your website up, maybe even a blog. You've committed part of your overall marketing budget towards online marketing and you're using several social media tools like Linked In, Twitter and Facebook to get noticed in the increasingly vast sea of online attorneys. Perhaps you've even enlisted the help of an attorney directory, maybe even an SEO consultant.

For lawyers doing any online marketing, advertising or Search Engine Optimization, knowing who is visiting your website and where those visitors are coming from are two of the most critical components in measuring the ROI for your online marketing.  There are several tools to help analyze your online traffic including demographics and category or topic specific interests.

Here at Nolo, we use WebTrends, a paid service that combines analytics tools with professional services. There's also Mint, which helps web owners better understand their traffic trends at $30 per site. Yahoo also has a free analytics tool but the best bang for your buck is Google's FREE tool - Google Analytics. Google's free traffic measuring tool helps attorneys track their website traffic: where their visitors are coming from, what pages are being visited, how long they stay on a particular page and the bounce rate - how many visitors simply click their back button and leave the site altogether.

Here's a simple breakdown of how to get started with Google Analytics:

• First, sign up for a free Google Account.
  
• Then, use your Google Account information to sign up for Google Analytics.
• Register your site(s) with Google Analytics.
• Cut and Paste the generated code onto your website - NOTE: If you are NOT the person administering your website, you'll need the help of your webmaster or the company that built your website for you. You may even want to check with them before you star.
• Set up reports for your site within Analytics to help better understand your traffic patterns.
  

Take the Google Analytics tour for a brief video overview of their tool.

"By making this powerful service free, we aim to give all websites - large and small - the tools they need to better serve their customers, make more money, and improve the web experience for everyone," says Paul Muret, Google engineering director.  Google Analytics also ties nicely into other products in the Google ecosystem--including AdWords, AdSense, Website Optimizer, Webmaster Tools and more, giving attorneys powerful resources to aid in making valuable decisions regarding their online marketing.

Finally, Google Analytics can be very confusing or even daunting at first, especially for less-than-savvy web users. Don't let this dissuade you from jumping in feet first.

Web 2.0 & Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Many of you have heard the term SEO by now but may still find yourselves wondering what the deal is with search engine optimization. Well, if you're not following the latest legal tech-trends on the online front, you're not alone.

Here's a very simple breakdown.  Perhaps you know marketing pretty well and your basic strategy has been fine for years. You've got your ad in the local newspaper and yellow pages, referrals are good and you do the usual networking with family, friends and clients. And, you've finally gotten around to creating your own website. Now what?

Your website, just like your other marketing efforts is just another avenue for potential clients to learn more about you and to ultimately pick up that phone to contact you. But how do online customers find your website in the first place? Welcome to the world of SEO - how to optimize your website so that clients can actually find you online.

Most consumers are now using major search engines like Google & the newly introduced Bing as their primary method of finding information (content) online. The key is to provide helpful search-engine friendly information about you and your services for those potential clients searching online.

To learn more about SEO and online marketing, Nolo's legal partner company Justia has a great SEO resource center devoted to Law Firm search engine optimization for attorneys and legal marketers that want to know more.

Remember, like all traditional marketing, patience and a well-planned strategy are the most crucial factors to getting noticed online.