SEO for Lawyers, Attorneys and Law Firms

We are currently working on an organic SEO campaign and an AdWords campaign for a boutique law firm which includes U.S. securities lawyers in Vancouver, BC. SEO campaigns tend to work extremely well for boutique firms with niche markets because you can generally get very good search engine results in these focussed specific areas. For example, good SEO results for consumer oriented categories such as PI or real estate is difficult and/or expensive because of the competition in these areas. However, smaller niche areas are often overlooked and your firm may well be the sole AdWords advertiser or one of a few firms competing for organic results. In this case, the AdWords campaign worked very well, producing great results instantly. The organic campaign will likely also produce good results. Contact us if you want more information on niche practice SEO and internet marketing.

Check out this latest post from SEO guru, Aaron Wall on why Google loves “old” web sites:

http://www.seobook.com/why-google-trusts-old-websites-so-much

As I have said to clients many times, this poses tremendous opportunities for law firms that posted a “brochure” type web site a few years ago and have not done much with it since then. Whether you know it or not, your “old” web site has likely attracted some trust and value in the eyes of Google. However, you are likely not taking full or even much advantage of that trust and value if your site has stayed static for any considerable period of time. A relaunch of such a site can bring tremendous SEO gains if the site is redesigned with proper SEO concepts in mind. You can get an even bigger boost if you redesign your site using a content management system and then actually use the CMS to update your site regularly. This is an easy and relatively inexpensive way to get much better internet visibility for your firm.

There has been a considerable amount of commentary recently on Google’s purported penalizing of sites that sell paid links. See for example these comments:

• Aaron Wall: http://www.seobook.com/google-pants-on-fire
• WebProNews: http://www.webpronews.com/insiderreports/2007/10/29/yes-google-admits-torching-your-pagerank
• Danny Sullivan: http://searchengineland.com/071007-173841.php

Has this controversy carried over into the legal web space? I haven’t seen much evidence that it has. Generally, for any particular search on lawyers, the top ranked sites remain directory or portal services, most of which have some form of paid link inclusion. As a result, inclusion in these types of sites is still a valuable strategy for a law firm to improve its search results and visibility. Of course, there are other equally valuable tools such as the use of blogs. As I have written previously, the legal space does pose unique problems for ranking related to the difficulty of ranking lawyers and professionals generally. Personally, I think that directories and portal sites still provide a valuable service in that they provide an easy way for lay people to find a lawyer: I don’t think that it is in anyone’s interest to penalize such sites if they are well run. Full disclosure: I have an ownership interest in LawOne, a BC lawyers network. While not a directory service, LawOne does provide a “portal type” site for BC and Vancouver lawyers which is well ranked by Google.

Most large law firms are now using content management systems to maintain their web sites. The advantages are numerous:

• Ease of administration - liberation from web designers/developers
• No reliance on external parties - site can be maintained by internal marketing staff or by office admin staff
• Site will be more up to date if it is easier to add new content
• Most systems will permit automated display of most recent news items, events etc …
• The use of a CMS will also usually provide an SEO boost both due to increased frequency of changes in content and from the use of the system itself

The implementation of content management systems has sometimes proved to be daunting historically as the cost of the systems can be very high and implementation costs can incrementally increase these costs even further. However, there are now excellent open-source content management systems which can provide almost exactly the same benefits at a fraction of the cost. At my legal marketing agency, Skunkworks Creative Group, we commonly use a system based on the open-source CMS, Joomla, which provides the general CMS benefits as well as excellent ease of use. The implementation of such a system is economical even for small and medium sized law firms and provides a long term solution to web marketing which will provide impressive return on investment.

We have customized Joomla for law firm use and are in the process of adding increased functionality which has been specifically designed for lawyers and law firms. Shoot me an email if you would like more information.

Maybe it is bad luck to post on Friday the 13th. But here goes anyway on my thought of the day: the decline and fall of the Yellow Pages. Most law firms, particularly ones in consumer oriented practice areas such as personal injury and family, spend an inordinate amount of their marketing dollars on the Yellow Pages. Historically, this has been a smart move. The Yellow Pages has proven to be a vital part of the marketing budget for law firms trying to reach these types of markets. However, it is my firm belief that the times are changing. In my experience, hardly any one under the age of 30 uses the Yellow Pages. Pretty much the only use for that big fat yellow book in this demographic is as a stand for their computer monitor. This age group has grown up online. They live to be connected and they get nearly all their information online. As a result, they use search engines almost exclusively when they are looking for something including a lawyer. As a result, law firms should carefully gauge the demographics of their clients. If your firm does a lot of work for young people … start thinking about increasing your SEO budget. You will reach more clients (and at a lower cost) than you will through the Yellow Pages. Even with older clients, you should start to think seriously about your search budget. The usage of the Yellow Pages has been consistently falling over the past few years while the use of search is incrementally increasing. In addition, the cost of Yellow Pages advertising is exorbitantly expensive given its falling market share. In addition, and in some markets including British Columbia, there are competing versions of the “yellow pages” so you have to spend even more to get full coverage. These trends will continue. Eventually, as the “wired population” gets older and bigger, the demographics of the market place are going to kill off the Yellow Pages. An eventual victory for trees if not for the phone companies.

One caveat on all of this: if you are a criminal lawyer, the Yellow Pages still has some important value … as far as I am aware, the authorities will still let an arrested person make one phone call … I don’t think they permit a Google search … yet.

For some reason, whenever I talk to law firms about SEO, they generally want to do either organic optimization or pay-per-click. My impression and anecdotal evidence suggests that the reason for the single pronged approach is that generally law firms are somewhat sceptical about the value of internet marketing generally. Often, I get comments along the lines of “do we really want to get clients off the internet” or “I don’t think I have ever got a client from the internet” (as an aside, the latter comment is almost always the result of poor referral tracking).

As a result, there seems to be a reluctance to spend money on internet marketing. Of course, these same firms are often spending plenty of money on marketing … usually through yellow pages ads or maybe tv ads on the cable listings channel. They can usually be persuaded to try SEO but only with a limited budget and only on one aspect of SEO. If you tried that approach with the yellow pages or with tv, that would be like saying “I only want a really small yellow pages ad at the back of the section” or “I only want my tv ad to run late at night when it’s not as expensive”.

The point of my comments is that in order to get real success on any marketing campaign, you have to allocate sufficient resources to the campaign and you have to do it properly. A well executed campaign, whether it is in the yellow pages, on tv, or on google, can produce stunning results but a half-baked campaign will only produce half-baked results.

If you want to be the “Go-To Guy” (in other words, THE lawyer to call in your practice area) on Google, then you need to do a multi-faceted campaign such that your name pops up wherever the searcher looks. You want the searcher to think that you are THE guy … you appear everywhere they look … that means credibility in the eyes of a searcher and it means lots of people calling you. How do you do it? You get your SEO consultant to run an effective PPC campaign so that you are at or near the top of the PPC results. You also want to be high in the organic listings so that when the searcher sees your name in both places, you are THE guy to call. And you want to appear in all of the lawyer directory services as well: if they look in any of those, your name comes again. Once again you are the one to call.

In short, do it all. Do it right. Be the Go-To Guy in your practice area. Believe me, it works.

I have just posted my new white paper “Search Engines for Lawyers” which is available for free download immediately. The paper is intended as a general introduction to search engine marketing and optimization for lawyers and attorneys. It reviews the differences between organic SEO and PPC and highlights the major issues that you should consider with each. The current version is in Adobe PDF format. I consider this to be the “beta” version of the paper and I would appreciate any and all comments which I will use for the next revision. Download Search Engines for Lawyers (1 MB PDF File).