Other Local Search

Of course Google is the place to start. Google gets the most traffic and is the default in the majority of mobile devices today. However, don’t forget about Bing and Yahoo.  Be sure to claim those listings as well. You need your local listing everywhere you can get it.

Expand Your Content

Once you have your listing claimed and it has your law firm name, address and phone number, don’t stop there. Complete all the information you can about the business. Be sure to include a description, photos, videos, links and more. The more your listing is complete, the better. Look at your competition and be sure you are giving more than they are.

Coupons

Google Places offers coupons to advertise any deals you may offer. It may be a book download, a how-to ebook download, free consultation or anything that you push to give you an advantage. Anything you can come up with to have a coupon or more will help your listing stand about above the competition.

Reviews

Reviews make your listing stand out. The more positive reviews you have, the better. It’s believed that Google considers the amount of reviews you have when ranking your local listing. Come up with creative ways to get clients to give you a review. The more the better.

Citations

Citations are local listings on other directories. Google picks up on these through the links they have to your website. Be sure your law firm name, address and all other info is consistant with that listed on Google. It’s believed that this also helps Google rank your listing, therefore increases your visibility. Get as many citations as you can.

These are just a few tips that should help your Local Search Placement. If you are unsure of how to do these things or you just aren’t having much luck because your area is so competitive, contact us today for help.

Virtuoso Legal Marketing now offering complete website strategy services for small law firms. From website design and hosting to maintenance and Internet marketing, they have it all under one roof. It is now no longer necessary for a law firm to work with separate companies to satisfy the requirements to have a well-designed, highly visible website that generates leads.

Founded in 2010, Virtuoso Legal Marketing is a sister company to Work Media LLC, which has been providing search engine optimization (SEO) services to companies of all sizes all over the United States since 2005. Unlike most other companies providing web design services to law firms, Virtuoso Legal Marketing started as an SEO company first, and the idea of generating website leads drives everything the company does.

In addition to website design and on-page SEO services, Virtuoso Legal Marketing can facilitate email marketing, pay per click (PPC) management, local search and Google Places optimization, complete link building services and custom programming.

It is not only its SEO orientation that sets Virtuoso Legal Marketing apart from other web design companies, but the core principles under which it operates: market exclusive service whereby the company will not promote firms that compete against its clients in the same markets and practice areas; no contract requirement; and all work is actually performed in-house by Internet marketing professionals who have years of experience working with law firms.

It is critical that your website be easy to navigate from mobile devices. Think about your mobile audience and what information on your website they need to access quickly if viewing from their smart phone. Now, look at your competition and see what they are presenting up front on their mobile site. Have a mobile version of your website created that includes only the information that is important on the go , making your site as useful as possible to your audience. It should be quick, easily navigated, and not require too much reading.

As a law firm website, consider the most common situations your mobile audience may be in while viewing your website. Could they have just been injured in a car accident? What about a construction accident? There are many possibilities so be sure the most common are obvious on the mobile website.

Also consider offering a promotion or some incentive to get them to contact you right then. This especially applies to personal injury attorneys. Be sure the mobile website design displays your phone number and makes it quick and easy to contact your office or intake service. A good way to do this is to have your phone number and address link to your Google Places / Maps listing. This will allow your viewer to quickly dial or get directions to your office.

Be sure you research other mobile websites. Grab a smart phone and browse around your competitors’ sites and even common websites you view every day. See how it’s being done and put yourself in your audience’s perspective, and then communicate that to your lawyer website design company. Think through the details of what the site needs to accomplish for the mobile device user before beginning any design process.

Aside from article marketing, there seems to be another effect from the Panda update. It appears that there has been a refocus on on-page Lawyer SEO as well. Optimizing your website has always been one of the first steps in SEO, aside from the preliminary steps like keyword research and competitive analysis. So many internet marketers forget about this and skip right over it. It’s understandable when so much focus has been on all the different linking strategies. However, it’s never been something to ignore and now seems to be more important than ever.

Never start an SEO campaign without first optimizing the website itself. The Panda update is all about content, and the quality of it. The same applies to your website. Start with its content and the quality, then quantity, of it. Compare your site to your competition and make an effort to make your site better. Never stop adding quality content. As your site grows, it should become a bigger player in the game.

Always optimize your website pages and content. Never loose focus of your keywords. Use them whenever you can, but be mindful of readability and always provide useful information to your visitors. Don’t forget to be constantly reviewing your keyword data with your analytics. Make appropriate changes to accommodate what works and test new keywords as you go.

There is more to on-page SEO than the obvious of course. Such things like website structure, Meta data, its ability to be crawled and more. Including any social media and blogs is important as well. Without some level of website admin access and knowledge, these things usually require an SEO specialist or internet marketing professional to accomplish. However you go about internet marketing, be sure on-page SEO is a part of the strategy and revisit it often.

• What are your top five target keywords in terms of traffic potential to your website?
• How do you rank for those five keywords in Google or Bing?
• How much organic search engine traffic does your website receive?
• For your top five keywords, how do your top competitors rank?
• How many Facebook fans do you have?
• How many Twitter followers do you have?

If you are unable to answer these questions then you do not have a farm grasp on how well your law firm is represented online. The answer to several of these questions is found in your website analytics, while several others are simply observational, such as your search engine rankings.

If you have not logged into your website statistics lately, or you have never logged in, then you should do so today. You may find yourself pleasantly surprised. Although chances are the surprise will be more on the negative side. If you haven’t even installed analytics on your website, then you’re basically blind when it comes to your website performance. Install your analytics!

Just like business in general, you need to know where you are today and where you are going. And you’ve got to measure your rate of progress. Internet marketing is the same thing. Where are you today? Where do you want to be? In a Lawyer SEO campaign, you have to choose specific keywords for which you would like your website to rank. Specificity is the key.

But again, isn’t that just business in general? In business you need to know how much money you’re making today and how much you want to make in the future. Set specific goals and track your progress. It’s all just business.

We advise our clients to do both. Paid search is an excellent short term strategy because it can be used to immediately begin driving traffic to a website. SEO is a better long term strategy because over time it yields a higher return on investment – you do not have to pay for every click to your website. Using both you can drive traffic quickly as well as build momentum toward driving free organic traffic.

Either way, the key to success is knowing how much you can pay for a lead.  Taking it further, you need to know in general what percentage of people who arrive at your website fill out a contact form, or contact you in some other way. And then you need to know of those who do contact you, on average how many become clients and how much can you expect to earn on them. Using this information, you can work your way back to determine how much you can afford to pay for a visit to your website.

For simplicity, let’s say the amount is $100. You have determined that if you only pay $100 for every form submission or phone call, then you earn a reasonable profit. So $100 is your target cost per conversion. If your analytics or paid search data shows that you have to spend $10 for every click to your law firm website, then you need 10% of those visitors to contact you ($10/$100). That 10% is known as your conversion rate. If you see that your conversion rate is less than 10%, then your campaign is not profitable. In that case, you know you need to make some adjustments to try to improve conversions.

With SEO, the same concept applies, but the math is not as clean. Initially, you will probably lose money with SEO. What you need to do is track the number of leads that come into your site via organic search traffic. If in a given month you spend $2,000 on SEO and see that you have received 20 leads, then you’ve hit your target cost per lead of $100.

Search engine marketing can actually be much less mysterious (due its trackability) than other forms of marketing. You’ve just got to have an understanding of the numbers. You’ve got to know how much you can afford to pay for a lead. Then build out your internet marketing campaign to hit that target cost.

The main question here is whether to jump on Google +1 or play the waiting game. Since it’s unknown how Google +1 will affect search results, it’s hard to predict the value even if it does take off. For this reason, who wants to spend time and efforts on +1 this early in the game? With that said, Google has shown us over and over that it places some emphasis on things that are grandfathered in. I would recommend that if you are aggressively practicing law firm social media marketing, you may want to consider giving +1 a try. Of course don’t drop everything, but put the button on your site, sign up for +1 and create your profile, and start using +1 by recommending sites. If you do this you will have a head-start when and if +1 is successful.

In other words…

Your SEO company might be a redneck if…

1.    Its own website home page has a title of “Home.” … Really?

2.    It thinks that it is somehow possible to squeeze twenty-three of its own competing clients’ websites into ten spots on the front page of Google. (Now that’s some redneck math right there!)

3.    Its idea of a linking campaign is linking its own clients together.

4.    It builds websites using tables rather than layers. What is this – 1998?

5.    It thinks that a sitemap is something you use to look for treasure.

6.    Its contract requires you to mortgage your house and give away your first-born son before you actually own your website.

7.    It thinks PPC is some kind of illegal drug.

Lest any of our readers take offense at my use of the word “redneck,” let me inform you of this: Virtuoso operates from a small town called Dickson, which is about a 40 minute drive West of Nashville. I live on a farm, raise vegetables, and have chickens. So I jest with my use of the word “redneck”…but everything else in this article is dead serious. You need to ask yourself: do these guys really know how to promote a website? And do they have my best interests in mind? ESPECIALLY if they are requiring any kind of ornery contract for their services.

Having a great looking website is awesome. But you’ve got to look at it as a lead generator, and if no one ever finds your site, it is not going to generate any leads! It could be argued that an ugly website might convert better, depending on your market (but that’s a discussion for another day). You want to work with a company that really understands Internet marketing and the ways to drive traffic to your law firm website.

Budget
SEO deals with organic rankings. These are non-paid positions in the search engines but that doesn’t mean they are free. It can take a great deal of time and work to get good visibility organically. This translates into paying an SEO specialist to optimize your web site and manage an ongoing off-page strategy. The competitiveness of your market place will dictate how much time and money will be required for success. Consider, for example, how many companies there are who would like to rank number one in Google for the term “auto-accident.” Now consider how much more effective (and probably less expensive) it would be if you could narrow your playing field to “Los Angeles auto-accident” or even “Orange County auto-accident.”

In contrast, Google AdWords advertising can be a little more systematized. It’s PPC ads are paid positions, and, although you may only have a setup fee invested initially with a PPC management specialist, you will pay monthly for the visitors you receive through these ads. You can set a budget and spend as much as you want but when the budget is met, your ads are turned off. Essentially, you get what you pay for with pay-per-click.

Time
SEO takes time. It usually takes months to get results. There are many steps to on-page (website optimization and development) and off-page(link building, blogging, social networking, etc.) SEO. It takes time to research, optimize, build content and links, and to develop a social network. The tasks are potentially endless and must be  maintained on a regular basis. SEO works best long-term.

PPC can essentially be setup quickly—ads can be up-and-running in a few hours. Unlike with SEO, with PPC you can compare results and make adjustments in days rather than months. PPC is the way to go if you are on a strict time frame and there are very specific goals.

Lifespan
SEO is a time investment. Positive results can fade away quickly if the effort    used to achieve them is stopped. It’s important to keep an eye on your reports and not fall asleep at the wheel. Over time rankings will fall and you will be starting over again. For this reason it’s important to keep up Law Firm SEO management even after your goals are met. There is always more that can be done and more keywords to be targeted. SEO is an ongoing process.

PPC on the other hand is instant. It can begin within hours of entering your payment information and activating your ads. It also ends the instant you turn off your ads and stop spending. Once your PPC ads are turned off and you stop paying for visitors, your visibility is gone. The lifespan of Law Firm PPC is directly related to that of your budget.

Goals
it’s important to have set goals when going into internet marketing. If you are selling a seasonal service or product then PPC may be the best option. If you are marketing an item for a short period of time, then PPC is the way to go. However, if you are looking for long-term visibility on the web and do not wish to pay for every visitor along the way, consider SEO. Typically, service oriented businesses benefit greatly by SEO, but any company who wants to be successful today should have a plan for their SEO.

Whether you offer a service or product, if you are looking to drive the most traffic and get the most visibility possible on the web, then consider doing both. It may seem overwhelming to organize at times, but SEO and PPC working together will compliment each other and strengthen any branding strategy.

Your web site may or may not have been affected by this update. Depending on your search engine marketing strategy you may have dropped in rankings or risen based on some competing sites being penalized, or maybe you remained unaffected completely. However you were affected, now is the time to be sure you are on the right track with your SEM strategy. It’s more important than ever that you use a reliable and knowledgeable law firm SEO specialist that practices only white-hat tactics.

White-hat is considered to be Search Engine approved SEO tactics. These are legitimate  strategies that provide long lasting results. In comparison, black-hat techniques are much more like spamming in execution and in   perception by Google. They may produce fast results but eventually end up in a penalty from Google or even a complete ban..  The Panda update to Google’s algorithm serves as a good example and reminder that Google is fighting black hat techniques on an ongoing basis.

So what exactly changed in this latest update? Basically, Google identified content farm websites and eliminated information coming from them (links and content) as a factor in how it ranks websites. Content farms are directories that house numerous articles and links. These articles were low in quality and usually copied from other reliable sources. The purpose of using such directories is to quickly distribute content with backlinks to your web site. Black-hat techniques would mass distribute short low quality articles to as many of these content farms as possible in the shortest amount of time. In the past this temporarily worked. Not anymore.

Quality content marketing is still one of the best SEM techniques. If it’s done correctly, the results pay off in a reasonable amount of time. The proper way to distribute articles is not through content farms. It’s important to use a Lawyer SEO specialists that provides good content and only distributes to established directories. Be sure you are not dealing with a spammer. At Virtuoso Legal Marketing we create content with purpose and value. Our articles offer readable, relevant and useful information to your readers. We do not use auto distribution software but instead manually distribute to the top article directories such as Ezinearticles.com and Associatedcontent.com, just to name a few.