Any great team has game plan, a strategy for success, a concrete vision for the future.  SmithSEO can help you to optimize your online marketing strategies and convert more online visitors to clients.  It’s time to get in the game!

Setting Up Your Offensive Line

Whether you are new to online marketing or a seasoned professional, these plays will help to set your 2013 online marketing strategies in motion. Before jumping into more complex strategies it is important to set the foundation that will bring you to the goal line and beyond.  Understanding the basics of internet marketing and the unique business climate of your firm will help you to take advantage of opportunities provided by marketing your firm online.

• Review the Latest Google Best Practices Guide by Jerry West – As a first step, or as a refresher course, this guide will benefit anyone trying to gain an online presence.  Jerry West is recognized as one of the top online marketing experts and his guide provides insight and strategies for getting maximum “Google Love”. I highly recommend a look at this book.

• Refine and Communicate Your Competitive Advantage – Warren Buffett, the well-known, highly successful investor always provides the same answer when asked what he looks for when buying a business. He looks for, “a long-term competitive advantage”. He is only interested in those companies that are able to separate themselves from the competition with best in class products and services, and most importantly, companies who know how to communicate these differences to their prospective clients. 

• Little Things Matter – In his 2010 highly successful book entitled, Little Things Matter, author and successful entrepreneur Todd Smith points out that success is based on the little things we do each day. Smith maintains that everything you do either leads you to greater success or leads you away from success.  Your small choices either lead you closer to the sale or further away. I believe that everything makes an impression. From the copy on your website, to the images you post, to your responsiveness with a prospective client and their concerns, now is a great time to think about what will make your service better and different from the competition in 2013.

Push to the Fifty Yard Line

Once you understand the basics and are clear about your firm and its unique advantages you can begin to move the ball up the field.  Quick yardage can be gained by simply updating existing sites with improved marketing tactics and by clarifying for potential clients why it is that your firm is the best.

Improved Copy – Legal copy in general tends to be very boring and technical. Simply updating your pages to be more conversational and personable can go a long way towards showing prospective clients that you are easy to talk to and that you will understand their situation.

Link Building – This is the fuel that boosts your website to the top of Google. Without quality links, your website will never rank. Because this is our forte, I’m not going to spill our secrets. But I will say that you need to focus your efforts in two areas:

• Link diversity: You need to acquire as many different types of quality links as possible. If you just focus on one or two types of links, you have a higher likelihood of not ranking or even being penalized.
• High PR links: PageRank (PR) is still king. You need to focus your efforts on acquiring great links from high PR pages.
• A split of followed and nofollow links.

Use a Wide Range of Branded Anchors – For maximum gain, focus more on branded terms (e.g. Law Firm of John Doe) as opposed to just keywords (e.g. Chicago personal injury lawyer).  Stay away from naked links, links without anchor text, and completely unrelated links, such as the “more here” link. However, diversity is still the key. Use a wide range of branded anchors. For example:

• Law Offices of John Doe
• John Doe Attorney at Law
• City Attorney John W. Doe
• City Injury Lawyer John Doe
• John Doe’s Web Page on Auto Accidents

Toot Your Own Horn – You should have previously defined your unique selling proposition/competitive advantages and now is the time to proudly communicate them on your website.  On the very first page, and again throughout the site, clearly communicate to your prospects what makes you different than all the other competing lawyers. Why should they use you? Consumers shop around for lawyers now more than ever before. When a visitor comes to your site, you want to be the obvious choice and leave them thinking they would be crazy to go anywhere else.

Putting Your Firm in Field Goal Range

Increasing your online presence and knowing where your traffic is coming from will aid you in marching down the field and breaking through the competition’s defenses.  Get ahead by taking advantage of the newer technologies and connecting with clients using 2013 technology.

• Trackable Phone Numbers – Tracking calls from your website will allow you to gauge whether or not your online marketing activities are effective. You can setup unique numbers for SEO, PPC, Mobile or any other activity you want to track!

• Mobile Content – I’m not a fan of legal apps as they stand today. Download rates are poor. Also, I haven’t seen the effectiveness or ROI of “mobile sites” for law firms. However, as the percentage of mobile searches increases I do think it’s important to have mobile responsive designs for your website. A mobile responsive design simply makes your website friendly for a mobile user without the expense of a separate site.

• Google Plus Local – Google+ Local provides the marriage of the Google+ social media service and the local search platform.  This can provide your law firm with greater opportunities for search engine visibility. It’s important to setup your listing properly and develop regular citations. A citation is a listing that includes your law firm’s name, phone number and address in a local directory and can be structured, as in a directory listing or unstructured as in a client review.

• Niche Sites – Niche sites are awesome for two reasons. First, they allow you to obtain multiple rankings for your primary keywords, one on each site.  Second, because they act as insurance just in case something were to happen to your main site. Recently, I had a client who had some spammy links created from a competitor. Their rankings tanked. Thankfully this was a niche site and not their main site, but it’s never been more important to create insurance sites.

Now You’re in The Red Zone

You could settle for three points but why not push your firm downfield by providing fresh content and making your presence known where the people are; on social media sites.

• Provide Frequent Blog Posts – Google does look at how often your site is updated. I recommend you create 2-3 blog posts per week. These can be “news” related or provide general information like “5 Ways to Stay Safe this Holiday Season”. The reason I like those two topics is because they don’t require an attorney to write the article. You can have someone in your office setup a Google alert to find news stories (e.g. “car accident Phoenix”). Then anyone can come up with general information articles that may be useful to your visitors.

• Create a Team of Writers – Use a professional writers service such as TextBroker to create quality content at a reasonable price.  Email me and I’ll tell you who to use at TextBroker.

• Link to Your Blog Posts to Social Media Accounts – I don’t recommend that lawyers get too involved with social media. This can lead to trouble with the state bar associations. Also, I just don’t see lawyers bringing in a positive ROI based upon their efforts in social media. With that being said, I do recommend that all lawyers create accounts for themselves at Facebook (Facebook Fan Page), Twitter (a personal account is fine) and Google+. As your blog posts go live on your website, you should have links to those posts go on your social media accounts. This is a simple task that can be automated with certain plugins, or you can have your assistant handle this.

Into the End Zone

These plays are a must if you want to score in the world of online marketing.

• Live Chat – Live chat is a must have nowadays for law firm websites. It’s more likely that a prospective client will start a live chat than call you. Potential clients feel that there is less of a commitment and with live chat you get the fish on the line right away. Website contact forms are useful however you may lose them if you are not able to respond fast enough. I can see live chat replacing contact forms in the near future.

• Videos – I highly recommend videos on your website for conversions. They are relatively easy to rank in Google if uploaded to YouTube. Providing appropriate descriptions and geo-tagging on videos is great for local ranking too!

• Google Authorship – I’m now recommending that might clients start using Google authorship on their websites. Basically, you link your email address and Google gives you extra listings for articles you have written.  A quick and easy way to increase your presence in the search results.

Making the Conversion

In the big game, every point matters. Once you’ve scored and made your presence known, don’t stop there.  Ongoing review of your conversion strategies and conversion rates is essential to maximize your ROI.

• Focus on Conversions – Conversion optimization, the art and science of improving your conversion rate, is one of the most difficult skills for any marketer to develop. There are many things that completely ruin your conversions. You could have great rankings, but only convert 10% of the prospects that visit your site into actual clients. You can do better. Implementing the plays listed above and measuring their effectiveness will allow to fine tune your strategy for maximum return on investment.

Post-Game Wrap-Up

Just as in football, there are any number of plays you can make to outrun and outscore the competition.  In order to be effective you must focus on your own strengths, opportunities and measure your results.

To get started, ask yourself these questions:

• How can you position your service so that you are the “obvious” choice?

• What will you do to make your competition irrelevant in 2013?

One thing is certain for 2013, challenges and opportunities await law firms who promote their services online.  Game On!

Resources:

• Jerry West’s Google Best Practices Guide:

http://www.googlebestpractices.com/google-best-practices.html

• Todd Smith’s Little Things Matter:

http://littlethingsmatterbook.com/store/

• Examples of engaging website copy:

http://www.BestAttorneys.com

• Primer on citations:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/discovering-local-citation-opportunities-whiteboard-friday

• Live Chat Resources:

http://www.websitealive.com/ will let you manage your live chat in house

http://www.ngagelive.com/  if you want to outsource your live chat

Image Source: biography.com

I recently saw an interview with billionaire investor Warren Buffett.  Buffett was asked about which qualities of a company he looks for when assessing an investment opportunity.  Without hesitation he answered, “an enduring competitive advantage”

This led me to thinking about what this means for my own business and for the businesses of my clients.  We are all paying attention to standard performance measures in order to assess the health of our firm at any given time, but a competitive advantage can be the key to a law firm’s long-term success.

What is a competitive advantage?

It may seem self-explanatory, but in order to use your competitive advantage to its fullest potential, it’s important to clearly define what that advantage is.

Basically, there are two types of competitive advantage:

Comparative Advantage – In which your firm is able to provide a service at a lower cost than your competitors.  This may not mean that you sell those services at a lower price, but it does allow you to either have a larger margin than your competitors or, should you charge less, may attract more clients to your firm.

Differential Advantage – A differential advantage is when you are providing a product or service which is different than the others, and therefore seen as better.

Keeping an eye on your operational effectiveness, or watching the bottom line, keeps you in business but honing in on your competitive advantage is a strategy for the long-term.

Unfortunately, unlike the “numbers” which give you a picture of the health of your company, competitive advantage cannot be boiled down to a ratio or financial formula.  Determining your advantage requires a hard look at your company, your competitors, the market situation and a little fortune-telling as to what the future may hold for your industry.

What does competitive advantage look like?

In her book, Creating Competitive Advantage, author Jaynie Smith writes: “In my research with middle-market companies, I found only two CEOs out of 1,000 who could clearly name their companies’ competitive advantages. The other 99.8 percent could offer only vague, imprecise generalities.”

However, we can find many examples of how companies who clearly defined their competitive advantage were able to break away from the pack.  Does your competitive advantage look like any of these?

Coca-Cola: The Coca-Cola Company owns four of the world’s five most popular non-alcoholic, carbonated beverage brands.  Think about it.  All of the Coke, Diet Coke, Sprite and Fanta consumed by the whole world, is owned by one company.  Pepsi may be a rival however, until it topples a few of Cokes top-sellers, not just one, Coca Cola will continue to sit at the top and sustain its dominance.  Advantage: Brand Popularity

Costco: The warehouse superstore changed the way many Americans shop by creating a competitive advantage that has been untouchable by many. By working with high volumes of merchandise, which allow for cost efficiencies, and mastering the rapid distribution and turnover of that merchandise, Costco has sustained its advantage over smaller competitors such as Sam’s Club.  Advantage: High Volume (handled efficiently)

Apple: No talk about competitive advantage can ignore the advantage in innovation and design enjoyed by Apple.  Apple’s non-wavering focus on design and innovation of the consumer experience has allowed it to weather the volatile word of high-tech.  Advantage: Innovation

Wal-Mart: Everyone knows this story. Low price equals competitive advantage. Say what you will about their approach but this is the most capitalized company in the world.  Offering the lowest price has allowed Wal-Mart to serve its target market better than any other competitor. Advantage: Low Price

General Electric: You might say that General Electric is living off of its past, and in a sense that is true. This company is one of the most powerful in the world because of the patents that it holds. It owns something everyone else wants or needs.  Advantage: Strategic Assets

There are other ways to gain an advantage over competitors. First-mover advantage, meaning you hit the market before your competitors are able to.  Having superior customer support worked for many years for the Gateway computer company. FedEx used speed or time to gain an advantage in the package shipping industry. They simply could get your package there before anyone else.

How do I create competitive advantage?

Companies with competitive advantages do one of two things.  These companies are either doing something different than the competition or they are doing the same things, but in different ways. If your company is providing the same product or service, in the same way as all the others, it’s not likely you will be able to bring your firm to the next level.  There are strategies to create an advantage however.

Do you have brand popularity?  Do customers or clients know who you are in your area? Having an online presence is crucial in these times in order to be seen by the whole community.  For some younger people, online may be the only place they search for legal services.

Even if you are the leader in your area, if you are receiving the majority of the potential clients over other firms, are you able to sustain by handling the volume with efficiency? Ensuring your processes are effective in both time and money can create an advantage over inefficient firms.

You can also create a competitive advantage by being ready for new, hot topics in your target areas of practice. If you are ready to hit the ground running on new types of cases you can take advantage of a first-mover strategy.

A Law Firm Example – Sokolove Law

Sokolove Law is a great example of a law firm which transformed itself from a regional marketer of legal services to the largest in the country.  By finding and using their competitive advantages of innovation and efficiently handling high-volume, Sokolove Law has grown into a firm which has generated over $700 million in attorney fees over the past five years.

Sokolove Law set up a model which allowed them to maximize the case generation and referral process and provides a service needed and desired by almost 400 co-counsel firms.

In order to become so successful, the firm has spent as much as $12 million annually on Internet marketing.  There is a team of 20 just to handle all of the digital and online marketing for the firm!  With their focus on marketing and efficiency in their target areas, their team is almost guaranteed to win the client.

Conclusion

If you have not yet clearly identified your competitive advantage, it may be time to do so.  A competitive advantage can create shield around your business which prevents competitors from breaking in and allows your firm to experience extraordinary growth and increased profits.

There are many ways to create a competitive advantage, through branding, efficiency and pricing. A careful analysis of your firm, your market and future trends can help you to hone in on your advantage and focus your business on the most important, and productive, areas.

Are you ready to lead the pack in providing 21^st century of legal services your clients?

Getting your business found on Google is more than having a well optimized and relevant website representing your law firm. Google Places, which takes up a large portion of the 1st page search results (consider the image below as an example), and for practically any service based business requires specific action on your part.

The above serves as an example of a search on Google, with the Places results on the 1st page

Is my law firm in Google Places?

Most likely it is, due to the fact that many businesses were automatically listed within Google places from various sources of freely available information regarding your law firm.

How do I go about claiming my listing?

If you head over to Google Places, and select Get Started on the right hand side of the page (as per the image below), you will be required to sign in with your Google Account details (assuming you have a Google account, otherwise we recommend getting one to manage all aspects of your Google activities online).

For first time users you will probably have to do a search based on the listed telephone number of your law firm, and once the result or even results are returned you should select edit and complete the required information, including category of business. Don’t be alarmed if there are duplicates, but you should claim all of the listings that are yours.

Verifying your law firm’s Google Places Listing

Once you have claimed your law firm’s Google Places Listing – its now time to verify it. This can be done either by phone or by postcard – although the latter is more common nowadays. If you are given the option of phone verification, do it there and then and you will have full control of your Google Places Listing, and you can begin with optimizing the listing, adding images, video and more.

The process of verifying your listing is detailed in the steps and images below, and provide the basic steps for verifying your Google Places listing:

1. Login to Google Places

2. Select “Verify Ownership” to the right of the listing:

3. Select By Phone (if possible), otherwise request a postcard be delivered for verification:

In the event of having to opt for the postcard option, within a couple of weeks the card should arrive – login to the Places dashboard and add the PIN that would have been sent and the listing will be yours!

To quote the search giant

97% of consumers search for local businesses online. Be there when they’re looking for you with Google Places for business – a free local platform from Google.

Download the brief guide here

Amazon found that it increased revenue by 1% for every 100 milliseconds of improvement. [Source: Amazon]

Mozilla shaved 2.2 seconds off their landing pages, thereby increasing download conversions by 15.4%, which they estimate will result in 60 million more Firefox downloads per year. [Source:Mozilla]

Not sure how well your website is performing? Try this tool from Pingdom.

More crazy cool stats here: http://www.webperformancetoday.com/category/mobile/page/2/

The tactics below are often overlooked by most law firms and we believe through our experiences that their importance in 2012 will only grow!

Conversion Rate Optimization

You’re site ranks top three for most of the keywords you’re targeting, but you’re still hungry to boost lead count and revenue. Where do you turn? Try Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). CRO is the art and science of improving your website’s conversion rate. Here are some tips to help improve your conversions in 2012:

• Has it been a few years since your last website design? Consider redesigning your website with two key things in mind; usability for your visitors/clients and a clean design that keeps your company site looking modern, professional, and approachable. Make sure that you are also having the site designed for viewing on different platforms including mobile platforms.
• Is your content engaging, educational and persuasive? Focus on your reader’s experience and make sure that your copy is engaging, educational, persuasive, and clearly articulates who you are and what they can do on your site. Make sure you have a clear call to action on every page (what do you want the reader to do after they have read your content?).

Measurement

Do you know where your leads are coming from? Do you know what you’re most profitable keywords are? Do you know how much you’re paying per lead on PPC, SEO and Yellow Pages? How about those FindLaw and Lawyers.com listings? If not, it’s time to take online measurement and analytics seriously. In the past we have used Google Analytics for tracking fluctuations in traffic. Moving into 2012 we’re stepping up our game with goal tracking and unique phone numbers (that integrate with Google Analytics) to provide actionable data that will help us better calculate ROI for our client’s campaigns.

Remember that every campaign must be profitable. Whether you’re using PPC, SEO, lead generations or Yellow Pages. If the marketing channel isn’t producing a positive ROI, kill it.

Interested in learning more about analyics? We recommend the Google Analytics training session by ROI Revolution and the book Web Analytics 2.0 by Avinish Kaushik. If you’re looking to track leads with a unique trackable phone number that integrates with Google Analytics, we recommend IfByPhone.com.

Reputation Management

In October of 2010 Google began showing links to Place pages near the organic listings. On your Place page, Google is compiling reviews of your business from other websites and directories.

Here’s a screen shot of a typical organic listing with the link to the Place page located to the far right:

With Google adding a link to your Place page from the organic results, your reputation (good or bad) is open for the world to see. There is no better time than right now to begin building up your online reputation by obtaining quality reviews from current and past clients.

Take a look at some of these comments that Google is showing on Place pages:

Would you contact any of those attorneys after reading their reviews?

Here’s a question for you: How many of those reviews were written by competitors? Here’s a story about an attorney writing negative reviews about his competitors. Could it happen to you? Absolutely. Are you prepared for negative reviews?

If you haven’t put a program in place to help protect or improve your brand image, now is definitely the time!

Here are some basic steps to get you started:

• Purchase the following extensions for “YourBrandName”: .com, .net, .org, .us, .biz…etc
• Launch a one page WordPress website on each of the domain names with information about your firm.
• Purchase the following extensions for “YourBrandNameSucks”: .com, .net, .org
• Put together a document that has a list of places where someone could give you a positive review. When you have a client that is satisfied with your services, ask that they write a testimonial on a website that accepts reviews.

Google Maps/Places Optimization

If there’s one big thing we’ve learned in 2010, it’s that Google is taking local search results VERY seriously. If you haven’t already verified your Google listing, you are behind the curve, but even if you’ve verified your listing, you need to take steps to make your Places page the best it can possibly be:

• Submit your website to the Universal Business Listing (UBL) service. When optimizing a website for the organic results, it’s all about acquiring high quality backlinks. But when you want to rank well in Google Places/Maps, you need to obtain citations from as many directories and websites as possible. The UBL gives your Places page a jump start by submitting your business information to some of the most popular and widely respective directories on the Internet. The $49 option seems to work well for most clients.
• Upload relevant videos and pictures to your Place page.
• Write an engaging description about your firm, and use your primary keywords when possible. However, don’t feel like you need to use any of your keywords more than once.
• As we said above in the reputation management section, encourage your happy customers to write a review for your law firm.
• Make sure your firm is setup under the right categories. If you’re an injury attorney, “Personal Injury Attorney” is definitely better than just “Attorney”.

Are you serious about your Google maps results? Read this full list of Google Maps ranking factors and get to work!

Mobile

Quote from Google CEO, Eric Schmidt: “Most people in the future will access Internet mostly from mobile devices.”

Checkout this article that states “Mobile will outpace desktops by 2013” (yes, that’s only two years away!!)

When was the last time you viewed your website on an iPhone, Droid or iPad? In the past, browser compatibility was relatively simple, but with the growth of mobile phones, your website must be accessible from all devices. When choosing a firm to re-design your website, make sure you ask them how usable their websites are on mobile platforms.

Landing Page Design

Lately I’ve been seeing more and more lawyers and legal lead generation companies using great looking landing page designs for their PPC campaigns. If you’re spending more than $5,000/month on PPC, you should definitely be trying various landing pages and testing them with Google Website Optimizer. The cost to test a few different landing pages can be recouped quickly from the increase in conversions you’ll obtain by simply testing.

Link Building

SEO is still an extremely effective form of marketing for law firms, but few attorneys know how SEO works and how to boost their rankings. I’ve long preached to clients that about 80% of Google’s algorithm is based on link popularity (i.e. the quantity and quality of websites linking to you). The law firms that win in the organic section in 2012 will be the ones that take their link building very seriously.

Looking to give your SEO campaign a boost? Here are some great directory links to boost your link popularity:

• http://botw.org/ and http://local.botw.org/
• http://www.business.com/directory/law/
• http://dir.yahoo.com/
• http://www.romow.com/Business/Law/

In Conclusion

Online marketing is a critical part to the success of your law firm. With SEO, social media, videos, blogs, reputation management, Maps/Places, link building…etc it’s easy to get lost in all the “ideas” of promoting your firm, and not get anything done (or do many things poorly).

Choose of a few of the ideas from this post and execute them with excellence. And, consider hiring an expert to help bring fresh ideas to your law firm. For example, have you tried hiring a landing page design expert? Consider the following designers who do nothing but landing page designs:

• http://snoobdesigns.com/
• http://www.iamalandingpagedesigner.com/
• http://www.landingpagewebdesign.com/
• http://www.landingpagestar.com/

Best of luck to you and your law firm’s Internet marketing promotions in 2012!

Official release here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/place-search-faster-easier-way-to-find.html

Google Maps/Places/Local (whatever they want to call it…) just got a lot more important!

For example, I recently read an article by search engine strategist Carrie Hill that does a terrific job of explaining the primary factors that cause site visitors to leave (or ‘bounce’) off a web page immediately after landing on it. In marketing metrics, this is referred to as bounce rate. When your site’s bounce rate is low (desirable), visitors are taking the time to learn about you and your services; when it’s high, they’re leaving before your marketing message has a chance to captivate them and move them to contact you.

Hill offers helpful tips for lowering high bounce rates. Of utmost importance is making sure that your pages match the search query term that brought them to your site in the first place. This is one of the reasons why the right keywords are vital to search engine optimization.

Next, what do visitors see when they land on your website pages? Two tools—Attention Wizard from Site Turners and ClickTale—help you see what your visitors see when they land on your web pages.

Finally, is it abundantly clear to potential clients what they should do when they land on one of your web pages? This part of your internet marketing strategy, often referred to as conversion path, is what turns a site visitor into a new client. Hill’s advice: “Make your conversion path so easy to follow that a monkey could figure it out.”

What's your strategy for standing out from the competition?

Let’s face it, hiring a lawyer is a very important decision. The problem is, most law firm websites look similar and provide similar information to their visitors. So how can you stand out?

Why not show off your expertise as opposed to screaming “call me for a free consultation”!

Just a few ideas:

1. Start a blog and update it regularly.

2. Create a free report that shares valuable information with your target audience (e.g. 21 Mistakes that Can Ruin Your Case).

3. Create a few videos and answer common questions that you receive from clients.

Here’s a recent post by marketing guru Seth Godin:

Do you really expect that the first time we transact, it will involve me giving you money in exchange for a product or service?

Perhaps this is a good strategy for a pretzel vendor on the street, but is that the best you can hope for?

Digital transactions are essentially free for you to provide. I can give you permission to teach me something. I can watch a video. I can engage in a conversation. We can connect, transfer knowledge, engage in a way that builds trust… all of these things make it more likely that I’ll trust you enough to send you some money one day. I can contribute to a project you’re building, ask you a difficult question, discover what others have already learned.

But send you money on the first date? No way.

The question then, is how much time and effort does your non-profit/consulting firm/widget factory spend on pre-purchase transactions and how much do you spend on trying to simply close the sale?