Choosing the right domain name for your law firm

So you’re thinking about getting a new website. You’ve either never had  a law firm website before or you’ve had a website that just didn’t work to generate new business. Maybe it was poor design, bad content or  it was practically invisible to people searching on the web because it didn’t rank high in the search engines. If you’re experience is like most attorneys, most likely it was all of the above. So now you’re wordering what name should you choose for the domain of your new site? Your attorneyfirstandlastname.com or something with keywords in the domain? Here are a few things to consider when choosing a domain name:

1. Domains with keywords in them have the best potential to rank better

Now, let me preface this by saying you can still rank well without keywords in the domain. In no way is it crucial to have keywords in your domain if you want to rank well. The reason why it helps is because when people link to you, they typically will use your domain name when linking to you. Keywords in the links pointing to your site helps with rankings. Another reason why it may help is because search engines seem to think that sites with keywords in the URL are typically descriptive in nature of the content on the site and thus more relevant.  That being said, some of the most successful law firm websites I know of just use their firm name for their domain. Any good law firm marketing company company can work with any domain name as long as it hasn’t been penalized or blacklisted by the search engines.  I wrote a post on things can can get you penalized by the search engines previously.

2. Long domain names can be bad

Most of the best law related domain names are taken these days so people are turning to long domain names just to get a domain with keywords in it. Most of the time, it’s not worth it! Long domain names can be hard to read, impossible to remember and may be a flag to a search engine that you have a spam site.  Don’t choose something like ’san-francisco-california-personal-injury-lawyer-wrongful-death-attorney.com‘ It’s not worth it. Your better off chosing something that can be marketable on your business cards on other marketing efforts.

3. Consider buying an existing domain name

Any brand new domain is going to take time before you can start to see traffic from any competitive keyword phrases. At this time, it typically takes about 10-12 months to start seeing ranking on Google, 4-5 months to get traffic from Yahoo and 1-2 months to see traffic on MSN. If you’re talking to an SEO company or any law firm marketing firm and they don’t divulge this information to you, they’re either not being honest with you or they don’t have a clue what they’re doing. For this reason, you should consider buying an existing domain that has already been live on the Internet for a while. Either through auction or make an offer to the site owner. I prefer the latter option.

4. If your existing domain is “old”, use that one

As mentioned above in # 3, new domains take time before they even have the opportunity to rank for competitive phrases. If you have an old domain, consider keeping it as long as it’s relevant to your practice.  If your domain has nothing to do with your practice or your domain has been blacklisted or penalized, this isn’t a good option for you. Search engines tend to trust older domains more than newer domains and before you can rank high in the search results,  a search engine needs to trust that your site is a legitimate site.  This is why Google requires most new sites to  wait roughly a year before they rank for competitive terms. Some people refer to this as the “Sandbox” or the aging delay. 

5. Just give up. The Internet doesn’t work anyways.

Just kidding. As long as you have the right Internet marketing company working for you, the sky is the limit. There are many great opportunities so stop wasting time! Go register a domain name!

Technorati Tags: Marketing

5 SEO tactics NOT to use on your law firm’s website or How to get penalized by the search engines

Many webmasters, website owners and SEO’s try to spam the search engines. No, not that spam.  When most people hear the word “spam” they think of email spam in their inbox or this. “Spamming the search engines” is when tactics are used to try to trick the search engines into getting them to rank your site higher. I strongly advise against these tactics since your site can be permanently blacklisted (kicked out of the index) or penalized so that it will not rank well. Some companies that offer Internet marketing for lawyers may use these tactics, so beware! Here’s some of the things NOT to do on your law firm’s website.

1. Invisible text: Some attorneys use invisible text on their website. If you follow that link, you’ll notice that this website uses invisible text (in this instance, white text on a white background). To observe the invisible text, scroll to the bottom of the page. You’ll notice a large amount of blank area on the page. Now go to the top of your browser and select “edit” and then “select all”. This will highlight all the text on the page. Now, in the same area where there was seemingly nothing, you’ll notice the text that fills up the page. This may work for now, but invisible text like this will eventually get your site penalized and possibly even blacklisted from the search engines.

2. Multiple sites with the same content: If you own multiple domains, don’t put the same content on all the sites. This is against the guidelines of the search engines. Duplicate content on multiple sites may trigger a duplicate content penalty. Instead use a legitimate URL redirect like a 301 redirect, URL forwarding, etc. For example, if you try to go to http://www.aj.com , you will actually be redirected to ASK.com. This is perfectly “legal” to the search engines. Put your content on one site and use a re-direct so people are directed to your main website (website A) if they type in website B, or website C, etc.

3. Sneaky redirects:  Legitimate redirections like the above mentioned are fine. However, many SEO companies use sneaky redirects which essentially show a website visitor one page and show a search engine spider a completely different page. This is an attempt to deceive the search engines. Don’t risk your law firm’s website by using sneaky redirects. Make sure your law firms Internet marketing company is also not employing these techniques.

4. Keyword stuffing: Back in the day webmasters use to stuff the meta tags with loads of keywords and keyphrases. It used to work to get their site ranked high but it doesn’t work like that anymore. Meta tags are not nearly as important to Google, Yahoo and MSN as they used to be because of the keyword stuffing abuse. By the way, I hear a lot of attorneys that have been told their meta tags is how to get ranked high in the search engines. Absolutely not. If some SEO company tells you that, it’s not true. Also, don’t stuff your website with the phrases your trying to rank for or you will never get a visitor to stay on your site. If all the content of this site read something like “Lawyer marketing is important. Do you need lawyer marketing? A very important element of success of your law firm is lawyer marketing.” That’s just annoying. Don’t do it. Besides, search engines may penalize your site if they think your “keyword density” is too high.

5. Participating in Link Farms: Link farms are typically a network of websites created for the sole purpose of generating links for a website. There are ways to literally get thousands of inbound links to your website instantly. STAY AWAY FROM THESE LINKS!! There are some services that offer to “Submit your site to thousands of directories” or “We can get you hundreds of links instantly”. This can be a red flag to a search engine like Google telling it that your site is not a quality site. If Google doesn’t think your site is a legitimate site, it won’t rank high! You need to earn Google’s trust before you rank. On the subject of links, don’t exchange links with sites that are not related in content to your site. If a link can be beneficial to your  web site visitors, then it’s ok to place that link on your site. But if a law firm has links to a poker site or a Viagra site, those are links that have nothing to do with the law. Avoid trading links with non-related sites. Your law firm’s Internet marketing company should abide by the same practice. If they have placed links on your site to other sites that have nothing to do with the law…beware. This kind of activity is usually performed by SEO companies that don’t know what they’re doing.

How to Measure the Performance of Your Law Firm’s Website

Law firms around the country use many different ways to market their practice. From television advertising, radio adverting, Internet marketing, Yellow Pages, direct mail, outdoor advertising, attorneys market their practice by any way the law will allow. Attorneys in Kentucky recently took an advertisement out in the newspaper to market themselves to family members of victims who died in  an airline crash (which by way angered the attorney general). That may be taking it a bit too far (my own opinion). It’s difficult in any marketing effort to be able to completely track the effectiveness of the marketing campaign but if your website is set up properly, you can track your websites performance and get quite a bit of information about your site visitors as well. While every lawyer wants to know “How many visitors is my site getting each month?”, did you know you can find out much more information about those visitors? Through web analytics, you can truck information such as:

• Number of visitors per hour, day, week, month (with most programs, you can track by time period such as June 1st-September 19)
• Referrer source so you can tell where those visitors came from (this is a great way to tell which websites or directories are actually providing traffic to your website especially if you’re in multiple attorney directories)
• Click path, which tells you how people travel on your website (for example they enter on your homepage, then visit your attorney profile, then your contact page)
• Page views per visit - This can say a lot about what visitors think about your site. If most of your site visitors are averaging 1 page per visit, guess what that means about your site? Most likely, the design is bad. (in another post, I talked about the importance of an appealing website design). When a site design is bad, consumers don’t stay to read the content of your website. If they don’t read the content, most times they’re not going to call you.
• How many times emails came through your site (if you have a form on your site)
• If you use pay per click, you can tell which visitors came through pay per click and which ones came through googles organic listings
• Which search engines are delivering the most traffic for you. This of course also allows you to see which search engines are not delivering traffic.
• Location of your site visitors

A good idea if you want to track the results of your law firm web site’s performance is also to use a dedicated phone number so you can track all the calls made as a result of people visiting your site. I’ve seen many attorneys who complain about not being able to track their marketing and they use the same phone number in the yellow pages and their website. Get a customized number, it’s a few extra dollars. If you’re targeting clients out of your area, get an 800 number that forwards to your local number. You don’t want to miss out on that big case because a potential client doesn’t want to call an attorney outside of their area code.

Search  ”web analytics” on Google, Yahoo or MSN and you can see some of the companies that offer web analytics. Google offers free web analytics so for you attorneys that don’t want to spend any money, that’s one good option.

How to choose the right SEO (Search Engine Optimization) company

Raise your hand if you’ve been burned by a salesperson before. Yes, anyone reading this has fallen prey to shady sales people and companies in the past. Whether it was the Don Lapre infomercials from years ago (Don Lapre spoof), or that salesman the told you your first website was going to bring in tons of business from the Internet, most lawyers just don’t trust salespeople. I don’t blame them. Even salespeople don’t trust other salespeople. It’s just natural to think like that because 90% of the time people trying to sell a product or service think about themselves and not about the best interest of who they’re trying to sell to. When you’ve been assured that “this advertising will work, I’m sure of it” and it falls short of your expectations, it just gets that much harder to trust the next salesperson you meet with. Although they are hard to come by, there are excellent SEO firms out there and you need to find the SEO (search engine optimization) company who can help you meet your needs of generating new business on the web. So how do you choose the right SEO company to handle your law firms Internet marketing? Here are some things to think about when trying to find the right SEO firm.

 1. Have them show you their ORGANIC results in Google.

If they can show you their clients on the 1st page of the Google search engine results pages for competitive phrases, that’s a good sign. A good example would be “San Antonio personal injury attorney“. A bad example would be “San Antonio motor vehicle collision law firms“. Why? Because nobody searches for “San Antonio motor vehicle collison law firms”.  Use a keyword suggestion tool to find competitive phrases. I’ve heard of many SEO companies trying to showcase their results by showing off the results of phrases that are not commonly searched.  Yahoo and MSN also matter, so ask for results on those search engines as well. The rest just don’t matter. The up and coming search engine is ASK, but it only has a 5% of Internet traffic. Google however owns 50% of the market and it’s the engine that will generate the most traffic to your site if you are ranked highly.

2. Do they understand the nature of your practice?

If you meet with someone who has no idea about the practice of law they may still be able to help you improve your Internet marketing, but usually companies that specialize in Internet marketing for attorneys are your best option. SEO firms that understand the legal field typically have a better understanding of how to sucessfully market your law practice online since they know what has worked for other law firms. Companies that specialize in search engine optimization for lawyers also tend to know the legal directories to list your firm in. Aside from having your site appear in the search results, directories are the other way for consumers to find your firm so it can be a crucial part of your overall Internet marketing plan. Look, you could go to a buffet and find Italian food, but if you want a great Italian mean you have a much better chance of getting a quality dinner at an Italian restaurant. Same thing with SEO’s. Choose someone who understands your practice.

3. How long will it take them to get you ranked high?

For those of you with new sites, this is a great question to ask in order to find out if you can trust them. If you have a brand new domain, Google typically takes a minimum of 9 months to rank well. Yahoo roughly 4 months. MSN, as short as a month. Keep that in mind when you talk to them. If they tell you “a couple months”, they don’t know what they’re talking about. If you have a domain that has been on the web for a long time, you’ll be able to see results faster. The time it takes to get your site ranked well will depend on the age of your site, the amount of links on the web that are pointing to your site, where those links are coming from, your site structure, and the level of competition on the web for your desired search terms. There is no easy answer for this question but the answers they give you will probably give you  more insight into their company.

4. How many clients do they currently have that are going after the same search terms you want?

If they have a bunch of clients going for the same search terms, you’re probably better off looking elsewhere. Someone is going to get the short end and it may be you. Many of the larger firms that do lawyer website design and attorney search engine optimization  take as many clients as they can in as many cities as they can. If they have 15 personal injury clients in Los Angeles, someone’s going to be upset with their results.

5. Ask for referrals

Referrals are always a good thing. You can speak to a client instead of the SEO firm and get more honest feedback. Don’t bother asking for referrals from a competitor, even if you know them. You wouldn’t want to give your marketing secrets to your competition would you? They don’t either.

6. Pricing

What type of pricing do they offer? SEO firms all charge different prices so find out about their fee schedule. If they are much cheaper then other SEO firms, you begging for trouble. Do NOT shop on price alone or you will pay for it in the long run. Some SEO companies will get your site banned by the search engines and that’s the last thing you want.

7. Methods

Ask them about their methods for optimizing websites and make sure they are clear about what they do. You do not want someone optimizing your site that will use tactics that can get your site blacklisted or penalized by the search engines. Some of these tactics include invisible text  (text on page is the same color as the background so you can’t see it but search engines can), cloaking (showing a visitor one page and a search engine spider a different one), and link farms. In regards to linking, take a look at some of their clients websites. Find the links page(s) or resources page. If they link to sites that have nothing to do with the legal industry, stay away from them. Your only begging for trouble. 

Do people really look on the Internet for an attorney?

Attorneys in small firms who have been practicing law for many years know that growth of the Internet is changing the legal marketplace. While most small firms depend on referrals from other attorneys and previous clients, there are few that can survive without additional new clientele. With the popularity of the Internet, the Yellow pages are not nearly effective as they used to be. Use of the Yellow pages has declined greatly while Internet usage continues to climb. According to research conducted by Internet World Stats, nearly 70% of the poplation in America uses the Internet. Research I conducted using Trellian’s Keyworddiscovery, a keyword research tool with a database of over 32 billion keywords compiled from over 180 search engines in the last 12 months, showed these phrases as the most commonly searched “lawyer searches” on the Internet:

• Personal Injury lawyer(s) (over 2,000,000 searches for PI attorney(s)/lawyer(s))
• Tax attorney(s) (this was a suprise to me)
• Criminal attorney(s) 
• DUI/DWI lawyer(s)
• Bankruptcy attorney(s)
• Divorce lawyer(s)
• Accident lawyer(s)
• Malpractice attorney(s)
• Real estate attorney(s)
• Construction lawyer(s)
• Lemon lawyer(s)
• Probate lawyer(s)
• Trademark attorney(s)
• Patent lawyer(s)
• Employment lawyer(s)
• Business attorney(s)
• Securities lawyer(s)
• Trial attorneys

I could keep going but the point is that several thousand of these searches each month are performed. Some of these practice areas have over 100,000 searches conducted each month. The most popular search phrases start at the top of the list.

 So do consumers use the Internet to find an attorney ? Yes, absolutely. Even people who know an attorney use the Internet to conduct research before hiring an attorney. I worked with someone in the litigation support industry for a number of years. He had worked exclusively with law firms, from sole practitioners to large firms, for over 10 years. He knew hundreds of attorneys. When he needed to hire a defense attorney (that’s another blog post if he pisses me off), he still researched the law firm he hired on the Internet before hiring that sexual harassment defense lawyer (oops, sorry D.H.). The point I’m making here is that yes, people will use the Internet to research you even if they’re referred to you. Interesting to me is that there are so many attorneys who don’t even have a website. Trust me, if you don’t have a website you are losing business. Having a website doesn’t mean you will have success on the Internet though. To pick up clients through the Internet you need to have great online visibility, compelling content and a professional design. In another post I discuss the importance of your websites’ design. The business is out there. Will those potential clients find you or your competitors?

Importance of Your Site Design & Huge Sideburns

The great majority of lawyer websites that I see have bad  hideous website designs. I’m pretty sure most of them were designed even before there was an Internet. They look that bad. The funny thing for me, as an Internet Marketing Consultant for Lawyers, is when I tell an attorney how bad his/her website is, most will say, “It’s not that bad…I kind of like it”. Yes….and I kind of like how the famous track star Carl Lewis sings the national anthem.

 Getting high rankings on Google, Yahoo and MSN is crucial to having your website generate new business for you, but often overlooked is being able to convert visitors to your site into buyers. That is accomplished by having compelling content on your site that convinces a potential client to call you. However, most people who are looking for an attorney will not even read the content if the site design is not good. Your website’s design must be attractive and professional looking in order to keep a client on your site reading through the content. If a site design is ugly, or even has an outdated look, you will lose your visitors. I know this from analyzing website traffic reports. The telltale statistics for me are 1)Page views and 2) Time on your site. If the great majority of your visitors are only visiting one page, then leaving after an average of 5 seconds, you’ve got problems. Not Michael Jackson problems,  but that’s not good for business if people are leaving your site almost as quickly as they came. With the Internet, it’s kind of like dog years. If you’re site design hasn’t been changed in 5 years, that’s like 35 years on the Internet. From a consumers perspective, the design of a site is tied in to how good an attorney may be. Is that true? Of course not, but that’s how consumers think. Which of these two attorneys below would a consumer be more likely to chose?

a. http://www.personal-injury-attorney-in-san-diego.com

b. pslaw.com

Wow. Definitely not lambchops.

Another extremely important element is the navigation of your site. Is it easy for visitors to find the information they are looking for? Is it easy for the search engine spiders to find the information on your site? Site navigation is another crucial element to retaining visitors on your site.

Many attorneys don’t want to spend money on a new site design, but what they are missing is that usually (depending on what type of case it is) one new client will pay for that site design. Even if your site doesn’t come up for generic search phrases, people will still search for your site by typing in your name. Trust me, if your site looks something like Mr. Sideburns site above, you need a new design. You’re losing potential referrals as well.

One more thing, if you look scary or crazy, don’t put your picture up on your site.

Getting Links From Directories

One of the ways for law firms to be found on the Internet is to get listed in popular lawyer directories. Although the majority of your business may be through referrals from past clients, most consumers do not know the name of an attorney when they are looking to hire one. Even when consumers do know the name of attorney, they still conduct research online to make sure they are hiring the best one. Consumers turn to the search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN to try and find local attorneys. The only way you can be found on the Internet is if your website appears on the first two pages of the search results or if it appears in a lawyer directory that does appear in those searches. The way that most Internet users search when looking for an attorney is:

    (location)+(practice area)+(lawyer(s) or attorney(s))

For example: Riverside, California criminal defense attorneys

If you are a criminal defense attorney serving Riverside, the directories that appear on the first page are great directories to list in. The is one way to make your site more visible on the Internet and it’s smart marketing to get listed in the popular directories if the price is right.  

Certain directories provide added benefits such as links to your website which in turn help to raise your websites rank in the search engine. We’ve discussed factors that search engines use when ranking a website and the most important one is inbound links, which are links on other websites that link to your site. Not all links are created equal however. Many lawyer directories use what’s called a “redirect”, and most redirects give no “boost” to the ranking of your website. To find out if a link is a “direct link” (which is what you want), right click on one of the links on the directory that links to the lawyers websites. For example, here a link to Findlaw’s directory. On the page, the names of the firms are linked to the firm’s website. Right click on the name of “Estey & Bomberger ” and select “properties”. You’ll see http://stats.findlaw.com/prod=dts/cid=3405749/msa=292/pa=139/sub=770452/*http://www.personal-injury-attorney-in-san-diego.com

This is a redirect. It takes a site to http://www.personal-injury-attorney-in-san-diego.com, Estey & Bomberger website, but this type of link does not provide any link benefit to the site. By link benefit, I mean the search engines don’t recognize it as an actual link to the site. Even without the link benefit, a listing in Findlaw is still valuable as it will provide traffic to your site.

Now let’s take a look at a directory link that provides an actual direct link. Here is a page from the Internet Lawyer Directory, a California attorney directory. This page is from the San Diego personal injury attorney section of the directory:

http://www.ilawyerdirectory.com/attorneys/personal_injury/0/1/san_diego

Notice the listing for the Pacific Law Center, whose web address is http://www.pacificlawcenter.com Right click on “visit website“, select properties, and you’ll see their website address. This is an actual direct link and this link helps to give their website rankings a boost in the search engines.

So, get listed in lawyer directories that appear on search results in Google, Yahoo and MSN and especially in those directories that provide actual “direct links” to your website.

How Search Engines Rank Websites

The most common question attorneys will ask me is “How do I get my site up higher in the search engines?.” Before I explain the answer to that question, let’s make sure you understand what a search engine is and how they work. A search engine is simply a database made up of electronic documents, web pages. Just because you have a website doesn’t mean it’s in the database of the search engines. How do the search engines find web pages to put them into their database? Through “robots” that crawl the web, collecting information through the links on the web pages that already exist in their index.  These robots, or “bots” as they’re  referred to, are created to collect information by travelling through links and then bringing the information they’ve collected back to the search engines index. So, lets assume you’ve just had a website created for your law firm.  How can your site be found by the search engines? You can either submit your site  directly to them through their submission service (all major search engines have one) or get your link added to sites that the search engines frequently crawl. Submitting your site to the search engines can take months, so that’s not usually the best option. The fastest way to get your site indexed by the major search engines is to get a link to your website up on a website that the search engines crawl on a regular basis. For the most part, if  a website is ranked high for a query it usually means the search engines crawl those sites frequently. Some great places for you to get links are in local lawyer directories. Let’s say your firm is in Southern California. Type in “Southern California lawyer directory” on Google, and try to get listed in some of the directories that show up in the search. Once your site is listed, the search engines will eventually find the link(s) to your website. If your website was created by a company that knows how to create a search engine friendly web design, the search engines will be able to find the other pages of your site and eventually index those other pages as well. Most web designers actually don’t create websites with the search engines in mind, which can make it difficult or even impossible for the search engines to find all the pages in a website. If you don’t have a search engine friendly web design then get help from a good search engine optimization company who can work with your site to make sure it can be crawled and indexed by the search engines. 

So if you didn’t know before, now you know how to get your website into the search engine indexes. Many SEO companies offer to ” get your site listed in thousands of search engines”. Don’t waste your money. The only search engines that matter are Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK. AOL uses uses Google search to power their search results. These search engines make up more than 90% of searches conducted on the Internet. So how do the search engines determine the rankings for search queries? Each search engine has their own different formula, or algorithm, for determining rankings. Believe it or not, Google uses over 200 factors in determining rankings. Yahoo, MSN and ASK also use many factors to determine how they sort results. Although the importance of each of these varies across the different engines, some of the more important factors are inbound links (links across other websites that point to your site) and the content in your site. Search engines constantly change and tweak their algorithms in order to improve their search results. This is why you see the rankings change all the time. The goal of every engine is to provide the most relevant results to the query performed. Let’s say you use MSN to conduct a search for “Las Vegas restaurants” and the results return a bunch of gambling web sites. If you’re like any other consumer, you will not use MSN anymore because you are not getting the results you want. You’ll probably try Google and perform the same search again. Search is big business and the search engines don’t want to lose users so that is why they want to return the most relevant results possible. If you want your site to be found for those search queries, you need to make your site relevant. If you’re an estate planning attorney, and your site has one page that says “We provide estate planning sevices to anyone in Arizona. We handle living trusts, wills, probate and estate taxes”. You may have a few more sentences discussing how long you’ve been in business, offering a free consultation, etc. What do you think is going to be more relevant to a search for “estate planning attorney in Arizona”? (1) A one page website with a few lines of text, mentioning estate planning  (2) A website, filled with many pages of content explaining estate planning, wills, trusts, answers to frequently asked questions, and all other related topics. Usually those sites with great content naturally pick up links because of the great content and those added links help them to rank higher in the search engines. If you want your site to rank higher in the search engines, you need plenty of great, original content on your site and inbound links from other websites to yours. Hopefully this helps you understand how the search engines rank the results of the searches conducted on their engines.

How is my firm’s website ever going to be found?

The Internet is enormous. Millions of websites are on the World Wide Web today with thousands of new sites being created on a daily basis. The reality is that the vast majority of lawyer websites created are virtually invisible to Internet users. With nearly 80% of Americans using the Internet today, making your website highly visible on search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN is an important component to the future succuss or growth of your law firm. Many law firms with a website that is found through the most common searches people use when searching for an attorney online have been able to pick up clients through the Internet on a consistent basis. So how can your firm’s website be found by the typical consumer searching online for an attorney? To understand what it takes to have your website appear on the top of search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN, you must first understand how they rank the results to queries performed on their engines. We’ll get into that next.