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?