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?

The way you see yourself should match other people’s natural perceptions of you. If you try to brand yourself as humorous and your jokes don’t even manage to crack a smile, your brand will not stick. Compile a list of your personal strengths and check them against a list of adjectives others use to describe you. If you are genuine and honest with yourself about your strengths and start building your brand from there, you will be much more successful than if you are trying to be something you are not.

Some of the groups of people that may have differing opinions of who you are and what you stand for can be:

• Family and close friends
• Acquaintances
• Colleagues
• Long Term Clients
• Potential Clients

How do they see you? What is different in each group’s description of you? What qualities overlap all the groups?

Some Things to Consider Before You Create Your Brand

Before you start to build your brand, have a plan.

• What are you hoping your brand will help you to achieve?
• What are some of the challenges your brand could face?
• If someone leaves a negative comment on your website or Facebook profile, how will you respond?
• Additionally, how will you respond to positive comment?

In this age of Google, the information you, and others as well, put out there on the Internet is very easy to find. Before you post anything on the Internet, expect for it to be there forever. For this reason, you should definitely have a plan before you begin.

Step 1: Your Brand Statement and Logo

Using your list of unique values and strengths you should create a personal brand statement. It should be one sentence that represents you and what you stand for. Since your brand statement is a one-liner that describes you, incorporate it into all of your other branding tools. Put it on your website, in your email and blog signature, and use it as a tag-line on your Facebook and LinkedIn profiles.

Step 2: Your Website and Blog

Your personal website or blog is another opportunity for you to promote your brand. You should register your own name as the domain name, and if that’s not available you should choose something that coincides with your brand.

Having a blog will lead to higher search result rankings than a static website. Blogging about controversial issues is a great way to show how consistent your brand is. If you respond to similar issues in the same way, it will lend itself to your authenticity. Authenticity should be an aspect of everyone’s brand, regardless of the other qualities you have chosen to brand yourself with.

Step 3: Your LinkedIn Profile

LinkedIn is a social networking site that is focused on professional contacts. Your profile will consist of your work history, where you got your education, any Awards or Honors you have received and any professional organizations you belong to. You can improve your visibility on LinkedIn by answering questions posed by other users and by providing and receiving recommendations from your connections.

Facebook is arguably the largest social networking site on the Internet. Facebook has more than 250 million active users. Because Facebook is more for personal connections than LinkedIn is, it provides an opportunity to connect with people on a more personal level. That said, you don’t want to post potentially embarrassing or overly personal information here. However it is your opportunity to post some personal anecdotes that will help people, including industry peers and potential clients, feel as though they know something about you as a person, which is a part of your personal brand.

Step 5: Your Twitter Account

The best description of Twitter is that it is a micro-blog. The main function of your Twitter account is to provide your followers with an answer to the simple question, “What are you doing?”.

Twitter can be used to update, or Tweet, people that are “following” you when something happens like:

• You updated your blog
• You uploaded a new video to your website
• An article you wrote was published

You can also “follow” the leaders in your industry to be one of the first to know when something blog-worthy happens. That way you will be at the forefront of responding to pertinent issues.

Step 6: Your Email Address

As discussed above with your website, you should have your own name or something describing your brand as your email address. This will be much easier if you own your own domain name. If you are using a free online email service like Hotmail or Gmail try to stay away from email addresses like esquire1752@hotmail.com because it’s not easy to remember and does nothing to describe your brand. Your email address will serve to help link all of the other aspects of your social networking because it is used on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Make sure you use an email signature that includes your personal brand statement, your logo and a link to your website.

One very important thing to keep in mind when presenting your brand on all of these social networking sites is to be consistent. The image you portray on Facebook should be the same as that of your LinkedIn profile and your personal website. Also try to keep the same look and feel across all of your branding items. Your logo and brand statement should appear on your business card, all of your online profiles and even in the signature of your emails. Use the same colors on your website as you use on your business cards. Your brand is your identity, both online and offline.

For more information on personal branding, please visit the Personal Branding Blog by Dan Schawbel.