LawyerCasting

2 Free Tools to Check Your Law Firm Website for Broken Links and Duplicate Content

Loren Baker at Daily SEO Tip recommends checking your website for broken links as an important step towards improved SEO. He says that "if your site delivers error pages or links to non-existent pages or files on your server, then search engines like Google are going to consider your site as being “under construction“, and therefore not being useful or relevant to the human user.

Conversely, Barker observes that:

"Working on client SEO accounts, I have run into numerous issues where fixing some internal broken links, outbound links, and making sure all of the files on the server are working have boosted a site ranking from pages 3 or 4, to page one."

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YouTube Traffic Exceeds 100 Million Unique Visitors For First Time in January 2009

Law firms and individual attorneys considering whether to start using online video as a marketing tool need look no further than research by comScore finding that more than 100 million unique US Internet users visited YouTube during January 2009. Those viewers watched an average of 62.5 videos each. While those numbers are impressive--remember they are just for YouTube--comScore's research further showed that a total of 147.3 million unique US visitors--almost half of the United States' population--viewed an average of 100.7 videos each.

eMarketer notes that much of YouTube's growth results from videos that its users post on the site, or user-generated video (UGV). eMarketer projects that in 2009, about 18.1 million US Internet users will create UGV, and the number of those UGV creators will reach 27.2 million by 2013.

Figures like these make clear that online video has become a viable marketing channel for those lawyers and law firms willing to invest in quality video production.

Research Highlights the Importance of Segmentation and Campaign Frequency in Law Firm Email Marketing

New research from MarketingSherpa highlights the importance of making sure your law firm email alerts are properly targeted to client interests, and that you adhere to a reasonable frequency.

Email newsletter subscribers were asked: "If you have unsubscribed or simply stopped reading emails from one or more businesses this year, what were the primary reasons?"

• 58% responded that "the emails weren't relevant to me."

• 44% said they "received too many emails from the sender(s)."

• 31% was "simply receive too many emails from all sources to pay attention."

See the full chart here.

As MarketingSherpa notes, the top two answers highlight the importance of the individual relationship between senders and recipients to a successful email marketing program.

With recipients identifying relevance and campaign-level frequency as the top two reasons for opting-out or simply ignoring a sender’s email, the lessons for law firms are as follows.

Is Pay-Per-Click Advertising Worthwhile for Your Law Firm?

Whether your law firm should use pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a question whose answer depends on an understanding of the pros and cons of PPC ads, and where that type of advertising fits in with your firm's overall marketing strategy. This question was addressed via some case studies of personal injury law firms using PPC in a recent Law.com article.

Here's a summary of the pros and cons of PPC:

Pros:

• PPC can result in higher quality leads for the firm's services;
• PPC can produce relatively quick results, with calls increasing fairly soon after a pay-per-click campaign begins;
• PPC can boost targeted traffic to the firm's Web sites; and
• Although PPC advertising can be expensive, a well-planned and managed campaign can pay for itself by attracting new, high-quality business to the firm.

The Conversion Value of Well Crafted Description Tags in SERPs

Law firms spend alot of time and money optimizing their websites and blogs to appear at the top of Google's results displayed in response to relevant queries. But appearing at the top of the results is not the end of the story. Rather, once links to your law firm website or blog are appearing at the top of the "SERPs" (Search Engine Result Pages), you need to entice people to click on those links (much like good ad copy is what gets people to click on Google ads in the right sidebar).

Getting searchers to click on your link in a SERP involves crafting compelling title and description tags. We've previously blogged about writing enticing title tags using copy that appeals to self-interest, has a news angle, or promotes curiosity (as per SEO guru Aaron Wall).

As usability guru Todd Follansbee explains, meta description tags are equally important since they help users determine relevancy, and set expectations as to what they'll see when they click through. Description tags can be especially conspicuous because Google may boldface the searcher's keyword in the snippet. As a result, warns Follansbee, if you don't manage your description tags, you are losing relevant traffic and the conversions that would result. A good law firm website content management system will allow you to modify description tags on a page-by-page basis.

Follansbee notes that you can't always control what copy Google will display in a SERP with your link, but if there's a well-written description tag, Google is likely to use it.

After the jump, Follansbee's guidelines for writing good description tags

Smart Marketing in a Recession: Use Social Media to Build Relationships

The recession is probably making it tough for your law firm to sign up new clients (unless, of course, you have a bankruptcy and restructuring practice, or specialize in litigating financial fraud cases). So do you cut back on marketing? No. Instead, you adjust your marketing for the recession.

One of the smartest pieces of advice on this subject that I recently heard was from Debbie Weil, a corporate social media consultant. She said in a recent blog post: "Smart marketing in a recession is about building relationships." Exactly. Maybe you're finding it hard to get new clients to pony up retainers, but it certainly doesn't cost these prospects anything to build relationships with your attorneys. So focus on that objective. In the long run, those relationships will pay dividends when the economy turns around and there are funds to spend, deals to close, etc.

Weil further notes that social media is the perfect tool for this purpose. Social media helps us build relationships with little financial outlay - we only need to invest our time (of course, for a lawyer, time is money, but if you can't spend your time performing billable work, then at least spend it building relationships that represent "assets" for which the payoff will come in the future).

In closing, we'd be remiss not to also add that you shouldn't forget about nurturing your relationships with existing clients. Email marketing plays a vital role there because these folks have already given you permission to communicate with them. If you periodically send them material of value that helps them understand the legal issues facing their busineses and industries, it will remind them why the relationship with your firm is worth maintaining.