Do you monitor the web analytics for your law firm? What dashboards have you created? Here are some thoughts on creating actionable SEO dashboards in Google Analytics that will better help you understand the meaningful traffic to your site(s) and blog(s).
Do you have a background in design? Do you have years of experience designing and developing websites for lawyers? For business? For anyone? Stop pretending you do. Stop telling yourself that your sites are “good enough.” Stop using crappy stock legal imagery. Stop blending in with all of the other do-it-yourself legal websites. Stop telling us about how hard you’ll fight and how passionate you are. Stop trying to turn your website into another law firm television ad.
Do you have something to write that’s actually worth writing about? Do people actually subscribe to your blog? Do you even know? Would even know how to figure that out? Do people talk about your blog? Do they share what you’ve written with others? Has anyone ever emailed one of your posts to somebody else? Stop churning out regurgitated news stories. Stop creating posts for every iteration of “your city” + “your practice area(s)” + ‘lawyer or attorney or law firm.”
Do you know the fundamentals of user experience, information architecture and conversion optimization? Do you know the best practices to help search engines find, crawl and index your web pages? Are you familiar with the webmaster guidelines of major search engines? Is your best SEO strategy figuring out the right keyword density of your pages? Are you familiar with the most recent major Google algorithm updates? Do you know who this is:
Stop pretending you’re an SEO. Stop wasting time and money on article and directory submission software. Stop buying hundreds of legal domains and linking them altogether. Stop being surprised when your sites get a major penalty from search engines. Stop using content scraped from other sites. Stop creating pages for the purpose of ranking for a particular keyword. In fact, stop focusing on your rankings altogether.
Are you Adwords Certified? If I said “enhanced campaigns” to you, would you stare back blankly? Stop blaming Adwords. It’s not Google’s fault that you’re broad matching every legal term you can think of. It’s not their fault that your ad copy is weak. It’s not their fault that your landing pages suck, are slow to load and don’t respond well to mobile devices. It’s also not their fault that you’re not tracking, measuring and optimizing your campaigns to increase conversion and lower your average CPA (that’s cost-per-action to you).
You’re a grown-a** lawyer. Stop blaming your marketing consultant for your crappy web marketing. Stop blaming them for hurting your reputation and causing ethics violations. Start taking ownership of your decisions to hire web marketing consultants. Spend some time vetting the people you work with. Understand what they’re planning to do on your behalf. Hold them accountable for acting without your permission.
Stop pretending you’re listening. Stop commenting, sharing, liking and re-tweeting these posts and then going out and leaving blog comment spam, publishing spun and scraped content and sending unsolicited emails for links.
Stop incessantly nodding like some creepy bobble-head, only to go out and create another crappy website and pouring time and money into “tricking Google.”
Stop doing the same thing and expecting a different result.
Stop it!
Let’s say you’re researching something related to a legal matter. As a lawyer, you probably do this all the time. You research case law and statutes. Depending on the task, you might turn to another lawyer you hold in high-esteem. You might refer to a treatise on the subject. You might hire a subject-matter expert to provide an opinion.
And in performing this research, you’ll make judgments about their relevance to your investigation, as well as, how much weight, authority or credibility should be afforded to each of them.
You might even sort these sources of information based upon how you perceive their relevance and authority.
Now let’s say you are trying to build a machine that does this.
The very purpose of this machine would be to sort the relevant and reliable, from the irrelevant and unreliable. And in order to accomplish this task, the machine would need to know who the reliable authorities are on a particular subject and what they’ve said and written on the subject.
No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.
Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a “special relationship” with Google, or advertise a “priority submit” to Google. There is no priority submit for Google. In fact, the only way to submit a site to Google directly is through our Add URL page or by submitting a Sitemap and you can do this yourself at no cost whatsoever.
- Google Webmaster Tools help on Search Engine Optimization
I don’t know how long we’re going to have to talk about this. Probably forever. At least as long as you keep buying it…
Making great stuff for the web is becoming more and more central to business development. Effective content assets speak to an audience at varying stages of the business development process. In other words, they supply an audience’s demand for information whether it be researching a topic or preparing to hire.
I recently came across this tweet in my feed:
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If attracting visitors from local search results is part of your legal marketing strategy, you probably know the importance of acquiring positive reviews on your Google+ Local Pages.
Which may lead you to conclude that you should solicit Google+ endorsements from clients and colleagues. Of course, most lawyers are limited as to how they can permissibly obtain reviews by their state’s rules of professional responsibility.
One way that business owners have tried to increase the number of reviews they receive from customers is by holding a contest to provide incentive for folks to leave reviews. Which probably violates your state’s ethics rules. But if violating your state’s ethics rules doesn’t dissuade you from holding a contest for reviews, here’s another reason: these contests violate Google’s guidelines.
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I read this terrific article yesterday on How To (and not to) Work With A Designer. The article is chock-full of good advice that really hit home for me based on my experience working on web design projects.
I would like to share a few of the suggestions that should be top of mind for lawyers.
The internet is an amazing tool for communicating. And we’re still just learning many of the ways that we can use it to do stuff. One area in which the internet has, and continues to, excel is in business development. But in order to take advantage of the internet for your law firm, you have to actually do. Here are 15 internet marketing verbs to put you in action:
Silly. Child-like. These are just a couple of ways The Florida Bar Guidelines for Networking Sites Approved by The Standing Committee on Advertising have recently been described.
And as I wrote in Solely Social or Used to Promote?, they demonstrate a fundamental lack of understanding about how we communicate.
You see, the Florida Bar would prefer to look at communications by lawyers on social networking sites as fitting into neat little boxes.
In one box, they would put communications by lawyer “solely for social purposes, to maintain social contact with family and close friends.” These they suggest are not subject to the lawyer advertising rules.
In a second box, they would put “pages appearing on networking sites that are used to promote the lawyer or law firm’s practice.” These they suggest are subject to the lawyer advertising rules.
And while some communications by lawyers may fit neatly into one of the two boxes, of course we know that the overwhelming majority of communications will include social purposes, as well as, promotional purposes.
But even if we recognize that communications are intended to convey a variety of meanings, there’s really another question here. Should the intent of the communication be the distinguishing factor?
Gorillas are the largest extant species of primates. Adult males, also called silverbacks, range in height 1.65–1.75 metres (5 ft 5 in–5 ft 9 in), and in weight 140–200 kg (310–440 lb). Occasionally, a silverback of over 1.8 metres (5 ft 11 in) and 230 kg (510 lb) has been recorded in the wild. Obese gorillas in captivity have reached a weight of 270 kg (600 lb).