Attorney Matthew Poole discusses how important it is to find solutions that offer a high level of customization in order to narrow your reach to the potential client that offer you the highest probability of retention regardless of the cost of your legal services. Mr. Poole shares with you the various types of advertising he has tested to generate new law firm business for his solo practice.  He explains how he was about to leave his stressful and less profitable associate job at one of the largest, downtown law firms in his area.  He also offers tips and ideas concerning how to start a law practice of your own with less risk and less expense. He also shares the “hidden costs” that some less targeted advertising  presents and that the idea of focusing on obtaining call volume to generate quality clients does not work and is unprofitable.

Mr. Poole shares real world experience on why traditional advertising such as full page yellow page ads, radio, newspaper and print items are not targeted enough to attract and retain the right type of client and how that is a costly mistake. Attorney Poole shares a valuable technique that he uses to attract the right amount of call volume from clients who were targeted toward the types of clients that his legal services would be a benefit to for a fraction of the cost of all other advertising.

Call (769) 218-6099 for FREE ADVICE from marketing experts – no sales pitches, just real advice.

Search engine penalties can be bad news for your legal website sending it plummeting down the list into no-man’s land—or worse, being removed entirely. It’s imperative that you check your law firm’s website frequently in order to ensure you are not violating any search engine rules. All the major search engines have their own list of “do’s and don’ts” which tend to change fairly rapidly in an effort to stop black hat SEO and other unethical practices.  If your legal website has inadvertently violated one of these rules, don’t despair, as it is possible to dig yourself out from under these penalties–so long as you take immediate action.

What Causes Search Engine Penalties?

The majority of the causes of penalties by search engines are not ones you will ever have to deal with, as they are deliberate efforts to hustle and con the search engine. Code swapping, also known as cloaking occurs when one thing is submitted to a search engine, then when the user clicks they see something entirely different. This can occasionally be done legitimately in order to prevent others from imitating a successful page of to hide a text-only page for a more visually appealing one. Either way, it will get you a slap on the wrist from your search engine, so it’s important to delete this practice from your legal SEO arsenal.

Keyword and Meta Tag Stuffing

More commonly, websites will be penalized for repeating a word or phrase over and over in an attempt to increase relevancy and move up the search engine ladder. Remember to use  keywords judiciously in your legal website and legal blog, and if you manage your own meta tags, never place your high traffic legal keywords in meta tags when they have no relation to the actual web page. Check your content and your meta tags thoroughly to make sure your keywords are used in a natural and acceptable manner in order to avoid penalties.  Remember that a normal occurrence of keywords in high quality copy writing will be between 2% and 5%. If you repeat your legal keywords to the extent that they make up more than 10% of the words on your page, expect a negative consequence.

Call (769) 218-6099 for a free discussion about your law firm website.

Penalties for Other Practices

Tiny text, page stuffing or duplicate pages and page spoofing are usually done deliberately, rarely accidentally. Those who are attempting to “game” the system will hide keywords by putting them in at a 1pt font—beware, search engines are getting more and more sophisticated and able to spot such techniques. Page spoofing occurs when a page seems to be legitimately developed for a particular keyword, then when the user clicks on it, they are taken to a page with little relation to the original click.

Page stuffing occurs when the same web page is either directly duplicated, or modified only slightly, then submitted to the search engine. If your law firm has multiple legal websites as well as one or more legal blogs, make sure you take extra care not to duplicate content from one to another. This is also known as “mirroring” a site, meaning you have several domains and put the exact same content on each. Whatever the reason, it is considered spamming and can get you penalized.

If your Legal Pages Have Been Penalized

If your legal websites or blogs have been removed for what the search engine considers an infraction, you have two choices. You can get a new domain name and, essentially, begin from scratch, making sure you don’t employ the same tactics which garnered your original penalty. If you had a well-established legal site, however, this is somewhat akin to business suicide. You have likely built your brand name and spent extensive time and money marketing your legal website.

A better idea is to first find out what earned you the search engine’s wrath by contacting the individual help and support branch for each search engine. Once you know what went wrong, then the offending practices or page must be immediately removed. If you have linked to bad sites, get rid of the links. If you have hidden text, remove it, if you have engaged in keyword stuffing, have your content rewritten. You may be required to contact the search engine, admit your mistake, tell them how you have corrected it and beg forgiveness—in other words, fall on your sword. After that, the only thing you can do is wait—it can take as little as a month, or as much as a year for full absolution to occur and the search engine to allow you back into the fold.

Car accidents, even minor ones, can be very unsettling to both drivers. Know in advance what to do in the event of an accident. Your primary concerns should be the safety and well-being of all parties, and taking steps to protect your interests in the aftermath. Here are a few steps that will help you respond appropriately.

Safety First

If anyone involved in the accident sustained injuries, call 911 immediately. Don’t try to move someone with injuries or allow yourself to be moved. Paramedics can determine the extent of injuries and move victims without causing more harm to the victim. Leave the vehicles where they are if there were injuries or the physical damage to the vehicles was extensive. Otherwise, move the cars off the road to a safe place. Be careful when exiting the vehicle, doing so on the side away from traffic.

For the Record

Call the police to report the incident. In some areas, the police respond only to serious accidents, so give them the basic facts and ask for instructions. Whether the policy of local police is to respond or not, you will need to exchange information with the driver of the other vehicle. Get their name, address and phone numbers, insurance information and license plate number. Provide your information as well.

Take pictures of both cars and any other evidence you can, such as skid marks or rubble from the damage. Use the camera from your cell phone if you have one. Alternatively, some drivers buy a disposable camera and keep in the glove compartment specifically for this purpose. This may make it easier when you hire an Atlanta auto accident lawyer.

What To Avoid

When speaking to the police and to the other driver and/or passengers, cite only the facts. Do not admit or imply guilt, by apologizing, for example. The shock and anxiety people often experience following a collision, even a minor one, color your perspective, and it’s not uncommon for drivers to feel it was their fault in the immediate aftermath of an accident, even when it wasn’t. This is important, because in many states, liability is decided under a system called comparative negligence. This system recognizes that in a lot of cases, both parties had at least some responsibility for the accident. Admitting guilt at the scene could affect how much liability you are later assigned. Speak with an Atlanta auto accident attorney about your case today.

After the Fact

Call your insurance company as soon as possible after the accident to report the facts. They will need to know when and where the incident occurred and the other driver’s information. They will also ask if a police report was filed and whether any injuries occurred. Don’t offer any additional information. Then, if you feel there is a need, you can contact an Atlanta car accident attorney, who can advise you whether any additional steps are needed to protect your interests further.

As Rudyard Kipling noted, “Words are of course the most powerful drug used by mankind.” Lest you’ve forgotten the cardinal rule of website success, I will say it again: While the look and feel of your legal website is crucial—and perhaps second on the overall list—content is the heart and soul of any website. The ultimate goal of your legal web pages are to build a relationship with potential clients, and while the glitz and glamour of your design may initially “hook” your reader, if your copy is not extremely compelling, they will click on by with lightning speed.

Not to mention the fact that search engine bots just happen to be the blindest users who will ever visit your site—web crawlers virtually ignore the flashy design and go right to the meat of the content to determine how your legal site is indexed and found. Search engines ferret out quality content, and content happens to be the only factor they value, so you can see just how important unforgettable the legal copy on your pages can be.

How to make it Personal

The Internet gets more personal by the day, therefore writing in third person using long legal terms your readers may have trouble understanding will only ensure they pass you by and find a website they can understand. Your potential clients come to your website because they have a problem they need solved in the most expedient manner possible. Your legal copy needs to make a personal connection with you and your firm, and legal blogs especially should convey your personality. Reach your clients by speaking directly to them—in plain English without the technical/legal jargon.

Hold Your Visitor’s Attention

Compelling copy grabs your reader, holding their attention to the very last sentence. When you are writing legal copy for your website or blog, put yourself in the shoes of your potential client. What is their problem? How can you solve the problem? How is your solution different/better than that of your competitors? How can you, right this very minute, make your reader’s life easier and better by solving their legal problem? Don’t forget to slip in a reference about how you can also save your client time. Because we are all so crazy-busy, anything that saves us time and/or trouble becomes very appealing.

Break up Your Page

You are probably aware that readers of web pages scan your legal website pages more than they actually read. Huge chunks of copy can be overwhelming, causing the visitor to leave your website quickly. Frequent paragraph breaks, headings which tell the reader exactly what the paragraph is about, and bulleted lists can all help your reader get to the end of your page. We love short bursts of text, short, easy-to-read sentences, balanced white space and bold black headings, so incorporate those things in your legal blog and web pages.

Edit before Publishing—then Edit Again

Don’t edit as you go along, rather wait until you are finished and can see the whole picture. When you stop to edit as you go along, you compromise your creativity. Once your legal article or blog posting is complete, then go back and remove any undesired elements. Once your content satisfies you, proofread, proofread—and proofread yet again. If you were meeting a prospective new client for the first time, it’s a sure bet you would go out of your way to make a great first impression. Your legal website or blog is your first impression for a score of potential clients, and, let’s face it, the old adage about never getting a second chance to make a first impression is quite true. If your first impression is full of spelling, grammar or punctuation errors, your professional image can be critically damaged. Many copywriters read their words out loud to ensure they have the rhythm they were aiming for, hopefully the rhythm of natural speech.

Janet Ellen Raasch
Janet Ellen Raasch is a writer, ghostwriter and blogger (www.constantcontentblog.com) who works closely with professional services providers – especially lawyers, law firms, legal consultants and legal organizations – to help them achieve name recognition and new business through publication of keyword-rich content for the web and social media sites as well as articles and books for print. She can be reached at (303) 399-5041 or jeraasch@msn.com.

A truly engaged employee is one who believes so strongly in an organization that he or she invests discretionary effort in its success. In other words, a truly engaged employee is someone who regularly goes above and beyond his or her job description.

What does this mean in a law firm? While equity partners (and those on the track to become equity partners) are best thought of as owners rather than employees, everyone else should be considered an employee.

The engaged non-equity track associate involved in document review will notice and point out an interesting new detail. The non-engaged counterpart could ignore this detail, because it might make the job more difficult.

The engaged paralegal or legal assistant will cheerfully work evenings and weekends as a courtroom date draws near. The non-engaged employee will complain and sulk.

The engaged mail room person will deliver a registered letter to a lawyer as soon as it arrives, allowing for timely consideration and response. The non-engaged employee will wait until the next scheduled delivery cycle.

And finally, the engaged marketing director/manager/support person will devote extra time and effort to creating a truly customized client proposal, rather than simply answering RFP questions with the usual non-specific content.

In addition, employee engagement is not limited to the workplace. An engaged employee will rave about his or her law firm outside the office as well — whether to neighbors on the sidewalk, fellow parents at a soccer game, or someone they meet at book club or a cocktail party.

When you consider these examples, it is easy to see how truly engaged employees can propel law firms from run-of-the-mill to highly successful. “Defining and communicating the unique story or message at the heart of your law firm is essential to employee engagement,” said Laura Wegscheid.

Wegscheid discussed why law firms should enhance employee engagement in order to improve morale, operations and the bottom line. This presentation to the Rocky Mountain Chapter of the Legal Marketing Association (www.legalmarketing.org/rockymountain) took place Sept. 13 at Fogo de Chao Restaurant in Lower Downtown Denver.

Wegscheid is a senior consultant with Cast Communication Design (www.castcommunicationdesign.com), an internal communications consulting firm focused on helping businesses engage and align their employees.

The value of engaged employees

Modern research organizations use rigorous science to assess levels of employee engagement and link engagement to performance.

In 2009, Hewitt discovered that businesses with highly engaged employees have total shareholder return 19 percent higher than firms with average engagement.

According to a study of a large professional services firm by the Hay Group, the firm’s five most-engaged regional offices generated 43 percent more revenue per consultant (think lawyer) than the firm’s five least-engaged offices.

“According to Colorado Bar Association statistics,” said Wegscheid, “the average attorney has $446,500 in billable per year. A 43 percent increase adds an additional $191,995 to this amount, for a total of $638,495 per lawyer. That translates into $1.9 million extra for a firm of 10 attorneys, $3.8 million for 20 attorneys and $5.8 million for 30 attorneys. This is a lot of money.”

Research clearly demonstrates that the more engaged your employees, the better your revenue, productivity, earnings, shareholder returns, employee retention and customer loyalty.

According to Gallup, about 16 percent of employees at any business are actively disengaged. “Some call these people ‘CAVE dwellers,’ for ‘consistently against virtually everything,’” said Wegscheid. “They will actively try to destroy your organization.

“An additional 29 percent truly believe in your business and are actively engaged in making it succeed,” said Wegscheid. “That leaves the majority of your employees — approximately 55 percent — who are neither disengaged nor engaged. Smart businesses focus on transforming these ‘neutrals’ into highly engaged employees.”

How to encourage employee engagement

Good internal communication is one of the best ways to move employees out of the middle and into the “high engagement” zone.

“Internal communication is evolving,” said Wegscheid, “with the balance shifting from a model weighted by formality and control towards a model that facilitates employee engagement. Few organizations fall squarely into one of these four models.”

The inner circle model has the highest level of formality/control and the lowest level of employee engagement. Executives confer behind closed doors with no employee input. Information travels through formal channels from the top down to managers, who tell employees what to do – but not why. “Most, but not all, organizations have moved beyond this model,” said Wegscheid.

The cascade model is still quite controlled, but has a little more employment engagement. Decisions are made at the top and information flows from the top down, but managers are expected to share some information with their teams.

In the dialogue model, decisions and information still flow from the top – but are often accompanied by an invitation to ask questions. Feedback is limited to topics raised by leadership. The process is formal, but two-way, with the goal of making sure employees understand the information that was communicated.

“Most organizations, including law firms, currently operate at the cascade level and perhaps at the dialogue level,” said Wegscheid.

The community model combines the highest levels of employee engagement with informality and freedom of expression. “This model shares a mindset with social media,” said Wegscheid. “Knowledge is not controlled at the top, but contributed by and commented on by all participants in a network. Everyone has something to contribute.”

In the community model, leadership is still needed but messages can be initiated by anyone, encouraging the free flow of information throughout an organization. In this model, individuals feel comfortable sharing expertise and learning from each other, which results in spontaneous collaboration by employees at all levels to solve a problem, rather than formal teams composed only of executives. Employees as well as owners feel invested in the results.

“Because of sensitive information, proprietary relationships and a billable hour model that does not reward efficiency, the community model can be challenging for law firms,” said Wegscheid. “However, there are elements of this model that can be incorporated.

Engaged employees are those who understand and believe in a law firm’s message. This message can be created at the top and then delivered formally to employees (a low-engagement model). Conversely, it can be created collaboratively (with facilitation by firm leaders) and made part of an ongoing conversation among employees (a high-engagement model). Or it can be somewhere in between.

“The important thing,” said Wegscheid, “is to understand the value of employee engagement and actively consider which steps your firm can take to improve it – and consequently improve the firm’s bottom line.”

By now most of us are at least somewhat familiar with the SEO strategies used to boost our legal website up into the much-coveted first page place of honor. Because Google gets smarter almost by the hour, it continuously comes up with more advanced algorithms which strive to halt the use of so-called “black hat” SEO tactics, while encouraging the use of organic SEO. While the term “organic search” sounds a bit like something you might find at the Whole Foods market, it is simply the latest buzzword for a search which returns a ranking result based on keyword relevancy and overall content. This is in direct contrast to the listings which are based solely on who dug the deepest into their pockets to appear at the top. The idea of organic search rankings is to quickly return to the user the most relevant results based on the page’s content, the relevant links which point to the page and a smattering of other so-called “objective” criteria.

Advantages of Organic Law Firm SEO

The primary advantage of organic SEO is that we tend to trust the results more, and they are often much more relevant than sponsored results.  Organic searches typically will produce higher click-through rates for your legal website (all other things being equal) thereby maximizing traffic to your web pages. If there is a downside to organic SEO, it is simply one of time. Organic results rarely come quickly, rather build slowly but surely.

Of huge importance in legal web pages and legal web blogs is promoting your brand, and putting your resources into organic search results can give you a decided marketing edge in this area.  Most of us are skeptics when we see a television commercial, an ad on the Web or a sponsored ad on a search engine because we are fully aware that the ads are commercially motivated and may not yield us the results we are after.  Another high-ranking advantage of organic SEO is that it’s free! Google has remained adamant about not charging for inclusion in their index of billions of pages, therefore organic SEO is one of the few things which you really don’t have to pay for.

How to Boost Organic Search Engine Rankings

In order to fine-tune your legal web pages to the preferences of the major search engines, you must first know what each search engine is looking for, and why the law firm at the top of the page is able to hold that position week after week.  Some search engines tend to index more of your pages than others, meaning no two search engines will be analyzing exactly the same pages.

Location is Key, Keywords are Critical

Most search engines first consider the same aspect of those who sell real estate—location, location, location. In this instance location refers to where your keywords appear as well as how often your keywords appear in relation to other words on your legal web page. The assumption is that any page which is relevant to your overall topic will, of course, mention your keywords near the top of the page, in the headline and in the first few paragraphs of text. While your keywords are critical, if a search engine discovers you have repeated keywords hundreds of time in an effort to climb up the search engine ladder, it will judge your entire site to be spam. Such a slap on the wrist can be extremely hard to recover from, so use your keywords judiciously.

Other Important Considerations

Make sure your legal website is clean and easy to navigate—not only will your potential clients thank you, but the search engines will have a much easier time locating your legal web pages as well as all the sub-pages.  Take great pains to link each of your legal website or legal blog pages to other pages within your website if you don’t want your rankings to go down. High quality links which are directly relevant to your legal sites can strategically boost ratings; if you include relevant links from government or education sites, you will see a much quicker upswing. Finally, if you have a clear theme which runs through each page of your site, you stand a better chance of a good ranking.

Headlines and Copy

And, of course, nobody reaches the ranks of the privileged few at the top without clear, keyword rich headlines in strategic locations, and high-quality content which boasts keywords scattered naturally throughout the pages rather than appearing as though they have been artificially added. Your copy must be enticing, unique, and optimized all at once. The longer your site has been around, the more authoritative it is judged to be, at least by the search engines, so make sure you are abiding by the basic rules of organic SEO, and be patient. Soon, you will be rewarded by your law firm’s site popping up on the very first page of the search, and you will be out of the choppy waters and into smooth sailing.

Call us today for a free discuss about your law firm website at (769) 218-6099.

If you are fortunate enough to have reached and maintained your legal web page ranking goal, the next step is to commit to a certain level of maintenance to keep them at their present coveted position.   It can be said with reasonable assurance that throughout your attorney SEO campaign you will notice three stages, or three critical areas of importance as they relate to keywords. Occasionally you may see an initial surge or spike soon after your legal pages are published, crawled, indexed and scored. If your pages demonstrate an authority in your particular niche (and they certainly should) they may well remain buoyant, however if your legal site’s keywords have millions of competing sites with the same keywords, that initial spike can spiral downward quickly.

Managing the Rollover Effect

Following the initial spike of your legal pages ranking, you could also see something known as the roll-over effect. This is relatively common especially in legal blog sites in which there are a set number of posts on a page, then the results roll off the page into an archive, or into pages further down the line. The problem lies in those important links on your legal site; when the page rolls into an archive or a page 2, 3 or 4, the links roll over as well, causing your pages to take a significant dip in search engine ratings.

And Finally—the Comeback

Once your legal website has firmly established trust, stability, quality and relevancy, that roll-over dip which likely filled you with dismay will be relegated to only a dim memory. When you are considered an authority on your subject, and those who are searching for answers to critical questions find them in spades on your legal sites, you have likely passed the search engine algorithm litmus test.

Your Ultimate Goal

The goal you should be shooting for is to naturally attract more of the quality potential clients you want, and less traffic you don’t want, and one of the best ways to accomplish this is to consistently focus on keyword selection on an ongoing basis. Keyword management is fast becoming critical to your overall bottom line, therefore each and every keyword in your arsenal must deliver maximum bang for the buck. Be ruthless when you find under-performing keywords which are not delivering conversions. Add new keywords, but only after you have done some in-depth keyword research. Raw query logs and reports are helpful in showing you which terms your potential clients are actually searching for, so take advantage of them. Refine any broad-match keywords or phrases with exact matches; you will see your traffic refined, your conversion rates increased, and your search engine ranking climbing quickly.

Don’t Forget Negative Keywords

Many people are unfamiliar with negative keywords, which are essentially keywords that you don’t want to be found under. Again, check the raw query logs and reports, but look for queries which are really irrelevant to your legal website or legal blog, and add the terms to your negative keyword list. It’s extremely important that you monitor your keywords on a regular basis in order to gauge their continued effectiveness.

Check Out Your Competition

Just as you need to monitor your keywords, you also need to continuously monitor your closest competitors. Although you may be king of the mountain today, other law firms can gain dominance through SEO as well, toppling you from your throne without warning. Because 42% of all searchers click on the top search engine result, it is certainly a position worth fighting for and constant tending to. In the end, just as anything worthwhile requires ongoing attention, so will your legal website and legal blog. Monitor your keywords, add quality content often, strive to include quality links, and soon you will have achieved organic search engine nirvana.

Hostgator – 2nd day in a row! What ever happened to REDUNDANCY! I am sure the standard Hostgator reply will come now… U R Killing us!

Redesigning your law firm’s website can be time-intensive, expensive and likely frustrating and difficult. It can even leave those within your firm with hard feelings due to different beliefs regarding the future of your firm.  Should your firm decide to take the re-design plunge, the SEO firm should be involved right from the get-go. If your firm has a sound SEO strategy in place, it can definitely make a difference in internal firm debates, allowing you to choose the best platform, programming language and layout. Having your SEO firm involved early in the firm’s redesign can also alleviate the possibility of additional development work following the launch of the new site. If your legal firm doesn’t already have an SEO firm, now is the time to choose one—preferably one that can communicate effectively with your website design company.

Optimization vs. Compliance

While most web development firms will extoll their abilities to produce search engine sites, don’t confuse this with SEO. While it is true that web development firms can certainly create an SEO-compliant site, they are likely not going to be conducting true site optimization for your law firm. Although there are exceptions, there are few development firms which have the capabilities to conduct more sophisticated market and keyword research or to find weaknesses through conducting analytics reviews. What your web development firm can do is create a basic SEO compliant site and perform basics which include ensuring search engine compliance by creating web friendly code. On the flip side, your SEO firm should certainly be able to supply a standards manual which will enable SEO compliance.

How to Utilize Your SEO Firm During Redesign

Of course your law firm’s specific SEO budget will dictate their level of involvement in your web redesign, but unless you are using Joomla, Drupal or WordPress, you need to make sure your SEO reviews your content management system to make sure nothing is blocked.  A review of your CMS platform by your SEO company is a pretty simple and inexpensive task which can ultimately save your company literally thousands of hours. The SEO firm will also review your finished templates for compliance to the standards manual guidelines. As far as content optimization goes, the SEO firm will want to thoroughly review every one of your law firm’s traffic-driven pages to ensure they have integrated keyword research and are optimally positioned. Most SEO firms will simulate spider crawls and check for broken links before the site goes live, and this final review is really important to the overall success of your website. Oftentimes companies don’t even know there are serious problems with their website until it is late in the game.

Questions to Ask Before Taking the Plunge

Search engine optimization is both an art and a science, and is absolutely essential in positioning your law firm’s website in the search engines with the highest-ranking keywords. There are questions you should discuss prior to re-designing your firm’s website, the most important being to ask what the problems with your current site are. Even if you, or even everyone in your firm is tired of the look of your legal website, that’s not necessarily a reason for a re-design. The more important question is how your clients and potential clients feel about the website. Consider a survey or poll on your website to garner some feedback—even though your clients probably aren’t professional web designers, even the “Average Joe” can usually spot a bad website. Don’t update your site just because you think you should do it once a year, like you do your spring cleaning at home. Consider your goal. Is it to increase traffic, improve conversion rates, or reduce bounce rates? The answers to these questions make a huge difference in not only whether you should redesign your website, but how you should structure the redesign. Make sure you have goals that are measurable, or you will be right back in the same position this time next year.

What Effect Will a Redesign Have on My SEO?

If you have specific problems with your legal website, resist the temptation to overreact. It’s quite possible that the perceived problems can be fixed with optimization rather than a full-blown design. If so, all the better.  Certain changes you may decide to make in the design of your legal website can significantly impact your search traffic, so it’s a good idea to have your SEO firm take a good look at the overall picture before you begin. Site redesigns are notoriously long and laborious, so make sure you have some safeguards in place; will you maintain and optimize the old website while building a new one, or will it languish in neglect? Finally, if you are planning drastic changes to the design of your law firm’s website, you need to know that things may get worse before they get better—change is difficult, and clients may be confused by your new layout. As long as your firm considers all aspects of changing your website design before beginning, you should have smooth sailing.

The goal of Google’s panda update was to ferret out black hat SEO, however in the process it penalized some websites which were not perhaps intentionally duplicitous, but happened to be filled with plain bad SEO. Even if your legal website or blog was not one of the many who were slapped by the new update, it could be time to do another “once-over” to ensure your legal site does not employ any of the tactics which could garner you a penalty.

What is Black Hat SEO?

Sooner or later Google will catch most all black hat tricks, so it’s important that you know exactly what to look for. If you are not clear on what black hat SEO really consists of, it basically refers to search engine optimization “tricks” which are downright underhanded and unethical. Black hat SEO seeks to deceive the search engines, giving your legal site a ranking it may not deserve. The most common ploys used during black hat SEO consist of keyword stuffing, hidden or invisible text, cloaking, content farming or link farms. While these tactics will get your website noticed quickly by the search engines, they fail to provide your potential clients with anything of real value.

Keyword Stuffing, Content Farming and Link Farms

Keyword stuffing consists of filling your legal website with information which is almost unintelligible due to the overuse of keywords. Unethical SEO companies also write keywords in white text onto a white background—you or I are unable to see the keywords with our human eyes, yet search engine spiders can easily see them, bringing about an immediate bump up the search engine ladder, at least until the search engine discovers the ruse. Spinning software takes one article which might have started out as high quality copy, then spins it into hundreds of articles used by many companies as a means to link to their site. Again, most search engines will eventually figure it out if you are using content farming or article spinning techniques. A link farm consists of a website which is set up with no other purpose than increasing the link popularity of other sites by increasing incoming links to those sites. These links are generally totally unrelated, and will be picked up by the search engines.

What is White Hat SEO?

White hat SEO will enhance the quality of your legal website by giving value to your reader, and, although it will take longer than using black hat SEO, you will eventually earn a high website ranking. White hat SEO chooses a solid keyword phrase which accurately represents your legal page, then uses it in the Meta tags. White hat SEO contains content which accurately reflects your business and your website, and gives your reader value and worth. When your legal website garners other high-quality websites linking to a legal blog post or page within your legal website, you have a quality inbound link, further boosting your search engine rankings. This is in sharp contrast to black hat SEO which incorporates a less than stellar link list which is traded simply to boost search results. In short, any SEO tactic which conforms to the stated guidelines of search engines, making no attempt to deceive them, is considered white hat SEO.

What if Your Legal SEO is Just Plain Bad?

Even if you have avoided being penalized for obvious black hat SEO techniques on your site, you still need to be hyper-vigilant about checking your legal sites often to ensure the content is superior, the links are legitimate and of excellent quality, and, while your keywords are used judiciously they are also used in a way that makes sense and doesn’t alienate your reader. Using white hat, organic SEO will get your legal website noticed—in a good way!

Power surge after storm…apocalypse averted?

Once you’ve grabbed your intended reader’s full attention with the title of your legal blog, you are left staring at the second most important part of the page—your opening paragraph.  Think how disappointing it would be if you’d spent considerable time and effort crafting a killer headline for your blog posting then your potential client slipped quietly away with a click of their mouse due to an opening paragraph which simply faltered and died. If you want to ensure your legal blog posting really delivers on your headline’s promise, then consider the following:

Jump Right In With a Question

Open up your blog with a question, even if it happens to be a rhetorical one. The idea is to get your potential client thinking because thinking equals engagement with your writing, and engagement means they will continue to read. Remember, though, not to ask a question which could be answered with a “no” or “who cares?” answer.  After you’ve asked your burning question, thrown in a quick anecdote which will either bring a smile to your reader’s face, or establish the main point of your posting.

Especially in the legal world which can be known for its, um…dryness, a little personality can go a long way. Don’t be afraid to figuratively let down your hair from time to time, but keep it relatively tasteful. You could also use an amazing quote that fits into the theme of your legal blog post—anything that will continue to hold the reader’s attention and prevent them from a shrug and a click onto greener—and more interesting—pastures.

Give Them a Powerful Mental Image

Although the legal profession can seem narrow and technical to the layperson, your legal blog doesn’t have to have the same tone. You can relax the legalese in your blog, and use your most descriptive words to activate your reader’s imagination. In the same vein, using metaphors, similes and analogies (correctly, of course) can be a powerful tool for capturing your visitor’s attention and telling a story in a single sentence. Citing a statistic or fact that is particularly unique or startling is also a good tool to use in your first paragraph.

Share Something Personal with Your Readers

We all love to feel as though we have established a deeper connection than a standard business one with our business connections. While you should never make up something “personal” (it will come back to bite you) simply for the sake of grabbing your reader, it can be used very effectively in expressing your own unique personality. When you share something personal about yourself, you can literally guarantee that there will be readers shaking their heads in agreement, saying “me too!”

Withhold One Piece of Critical Information and Break it Up

Though it seems a bit sneaky, holding back a key piece to the puzzle of your legal blog’s overall theme until later in the posting is a great way to ensure your visitors keep reading to the very end. Yes, past the fold and all the way to the bottom. Remember that we read the web very differently than we read the printed page. It’s okay if you have lots to say, but make sure you break it up and have plenty of informative headlines which enable readers to quickly scan before they make the commitment to actually read. Use an assortment of lists, images, bold text, subtitles, and paragraphs in easily readable chunks. Get your reader totally intrigued with your headline and first paragraph, and before you know it you will have a dedicated reader, not to mention a potential client.

Nearly everybody realizes that the need to build links on your legal website is a constant, even though other factors may change, and trends may come and go. Having a large number of high-quality links has consistently stood the test of time, serving as a solid indicator of your legal site’s relevance and standing in the search engines. Quality links are responsible for infusing new life into your attorney website, creating a successful site which brings a steady stream of fresh new visitors on a daily basis. The question, then, is how much is too much? Is it possible to incorporate too much of a good thing into your law firm website? Well, Google seems to think so, but before you panic, realize that Google is not judging your inbound referrals, but rather on-page links from one section of your legal website to the other, or to external pages.

What’s Google’s “Magic” Number?

Google’s “official” recommendation used to be that the links on each page be kept to a reasonable number—they set this “reasonable” number as somewhere below 100. However the creepy-crawly spiders of today are able to perform much more effectively, and will now read a considerably longer portion of the page before indexing it. In this case, having more than 100 links will likely set off the spam filter’s “alarm,” and result in a lower-perceived quality for your page. While it is unlikely that any legal website will have more than 100 links on a single page, if you do, be ruthless and cut. If you are unable to cut, split your page into two or more new pages. Dropping the number of links in this way can get you out of the spam radar, allowing your legal website pages to rank higher.

Why 100?

If you are wondering about Google’s seemingly arbitrary number of links they “allow,” then you need to think about each link on your legal website’s pages as a choice your potential clients have to make. When they run across a link, they either decide to follow the link in order to get to the information they are searching for, or they ignore the link and continue on with the page they are currently reading. If you have 100 links on a single page, you are asking your reader to essentially make 100 choices—a simply overwhelming prospect in this fast-paced day and age.

How Many Links Should I Use in My Legal Blog?

Using keywords in your links is a great way to boost your legal SEO, bringing more traffic to your legal blog through search engine keyword searches. This is due to the fact that Google’s algorithm gives linked text heavier weight than non-linked text. But—too many links can be viewed as span, and Google will remove your law firm’s blog from search engine results entirely, which is exactly what you don’t want to happen. Experts in the field give the “accepted” link-to-text ratio as one link for every 125 words. Therefore, if your blog is 500 words, you are safe including four links in your post, and if those links are keyword-specific, all the better. Keep in mind that once a blog is flagged as spam and removed from search engine rankings, it can be sheer torture getting it readmitted. Where you legal blogs are concerned–stay within the acceptable limit.

As if you didn’t have enough things to worry about when considering your law firm’s SEO and website rankings, now you have to worry about having too many links. Well, it’s really not as bad as it sounds, and once you realize that a fewer number of higher quality links can garner you much more success than a larger number of so-so links, you are on your way to legal SEO success.

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If you happen to be a bit fuzzy on exactly what a landing page is, then think of it as a page on your legal website which allows you to “capture” a potential client’s information through a lead form. In other words, your legal landing page will be targeted to a specific client, and will have some sort of intriguing offer (a high-quality newsletter, article on a specific subject, etc.) which will hopefully allow you to convert more of your browsers into full-blown clients.

While many businesses tend to send their advertising, e-mail or social media traffic to their homepage, this can be a missed opportunity. Your goal for your legal landing page is to first figure out exactly what you want your visitors to do—then make it as simple as possible for them to do exactly that. So, whether you are improving your current landing page, or starting from scratch, take a look at the following tips for a legal landing page that will significantly boost your conversion rates.

Hook Them with Your Headline

Your legal landing page can literally live or die based on your headline’s overall quality and “catchiness.” You have a ridiculously short amount of time—2-3 seconds—to grab your reader, entice them to read further, and stop their hand from clicking on its way. If your headline is truly great, it can even smooth the rough edges from other potential mistakes on down the page.

Don’t Use Your “Regular” Design Theme for Your Landing Page

While your legal website and legal blog may have a design theme which works just fine for your visual presentation of information, when you get to the landing page, you are attempting to bring your client’s mind into sharp focus on one specific action. In this instance you don’t want sidebars and multiple columns, or any extraneous stuff that can confuse or distract—thereby reducing conversions. No clutter is the rule on your legal landing page–create a clean, concise page that says what it says with style and punch, adding nothing else.

Don’t Muddy the Waters by Asking for Multiple Things

While we all tend to believe that the more choices we have, the happier we are, in reality this has been proven false time and time again. Many of us, when given too many choices, end up overwhelmed and frustrated, and our decision is to make no decision at all. Your legal landing page should ask for one specific action and only one. Whatever your question is, ask it straight up, in an unambiguous manner.

Remember to Concentrate Your Offer above the Fold

Most web surfers spend at least 80% of their scanning time above the fold. This is not to say that people absolutely won’t scroll down the page, but don’t assume they will continue without clicking away. Grab your potential client’s attention and hold on for dear life, but make sure you can deliver on what you are offering. You don’t ever want to lose your credibility by making an offer you can’t back up 100%.  Once you have hooked your reader, don’t distract them by offering multiple exits from your landing page. You want your visitor to be wholly focused on filling out your form for whatever you are offering.

Give Your Clients the Perfect Solution–Quickly

Most people who go to legal websites are looking for answers and your landing page should be the place they can find that answer in the most succinct manner possible. Identify the problem, and tell your potential client why you have the perfect solution. Keep your landing page short, sweet, and to the point, then deliver on your promises, and you will find your conversion rate moving steadily upward. And never forget—once you’ve succeeded in getting your visitor to fill out the form, make sure they are directed to a thank you message which can also briefly offer other solutions you may have.

Speak with a law firm marketing expert, not a sales person.  Call (769) 218-6099 if you want to improve your lawyer website and make more money.