Integrity Marketing

Why Monitor Law Firm SEO?

Google Giveth ... and Google Taketh Away ... without warning!

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) -- like estate planning -- is not a once-and-done proposition. If your law firm website has been optimized for search engine ranking, don't be lulled into a false sense of security. You may be at the top of Google's Page One today, but tomorrow may be a whole new story!

Don't ask me how I know ...

Okay -- ask me. Let me tell you a little story about search engine optimization and the whimsical guys at Google.

We were strolling happily down Website-Leads-Rolling-in-Lane with our IMS website comfortably ranked #1 on Google's Page One for the search string, "Estate Planning Newsletters." We have held this position, quite happily I might add, for a good long time. 

One might have thought we had a virtual lock on it.

One might have thought wrong. Nobody has a virtual lock on anything when it comes to Google. Those guys are always working! They change their algorithms frequently, just to keep things interesting, I suppose.

Fortunately, we practice what we preach around here. We monitor the SEO of our own website, just like we do those of our clients. Every Monday night, our monitoring software kicks itself on and runs dozens of detailed reports. Some of those reports arrive in my inbox on Tuesday mornings as handy dandy PDFs.

Well ... last week, one arrived in my inbox bearing bad tidings. We were no longer #1 on Google's Page One. In fact, we weren't #2 either. Or #7, or even #78.

Google had DROPPED us from their rankings! I mean completely jettisoned us into the Black Hole of the world wide web. Oh, we still ranked for other important search strings ... but anyone searching for an Estate Planning Newsletter on Google would not find us! (To make things even more confounding, Yahoo and Bing! both kept us on Page One ... go figure!)

What had happened?

We may never know. Google does not take phone calls.

But I can tell you what I did! First, I checked and re-checked my numbers just to make sure I wasn't seeing things. Honestly, it was hard to believe. But once I was absolutely sure it was not some April Fool's joke, I got myself (and my staff) to work.

We downloaded, revised and uploaded a new .htaccess file with a few revised re-directs that we thought MIGHT have been causing the problem.

I downloaded, revised and uploaded new SEO code to several of our key pages.

Then we created a new sitemap and re-submitted it to Google, just to get their attention.

Then I did one more thing. Not willing to simply waste a week of marketing to wait-and-see what Google might do next, I launched a new Google AdWords pay-per-click campaign. I set up a modest budget, composed a straightforward ad, and set a bid that would almost guarantee space on Google's Page One for "Estate Planning Newsletters." So, while I was waiting for Google to re-index us, I would cover my bases with a paid listing.

So we were still on Google's Page One last week -- sort of -- even if only by the grace of Pay-Per-Click (Note: if anyone "guarantees" you a Page One listing on Google, they are probably talking about pay-per-click and not organic search. I'm just saying...)

Thankfully, I see today that Google has now rediscovered us and we are near the top of Page Two. This happened so quickly that I know we are on the right course. I expect we will get back to the top of Page One.

Here's the moral of the story -- if I hadn't monitored my site, I probably would not have known that we were dropped from the index...at least I would not have known as quickly. I would not have done the damage-control with the pay-per-click. And I would not have acted so quickly to get us back in the index.

I will continue to monitor the site, and watch it climb. And if it stalls, I will do some more work to get it back on track.

We do the exact same thing for our Essentials clients. Sometimes clients ask why we include SEO monitoring and maintenance in their monthly fee. This is why.

No one has a magic wand. No one can control Google. And no one has an answer hotline to Google to find why they do the things they do.

Google Giveth ... and Google Taketh Away.

Monitoring helps us get it back!

Lawyer Advertising Ethics Warning

I frequently receive examples of lawyer advertising, and have recently been receiving an interesting e-mail newsletter. Something about that e-newsletter always struck me as wrong, but people often do a lot of strange things with their marketing, so I never really paid too much attention.

But over the past few weeks, I’ve seen a disturbing trend. Because I believe this marketing approach violates the ABA’s Model Code regarding lawyer communications, I want to warn you – should you be solicited to use this type of advertising in your own practice.

It’s storytelling.

Jane was one of five children.  Her mother, Ellen, was 87 and had been ailing for some time. Jane’s oldest brother, Bob, had been given a power of attorney by his mother to act for her. Under the power of attorney, Bob had broad powers. He also had access to all of Ellen’s accounts. The rest of the family had no idea that Bob was using his access to steal his mother’s money.

What is wrong with storytelling? There are at least three things wrong with this marketing approach.

1.       First and foremost, to be blunt, it’s a lie, which is just wrong.

2.       Second, it’s an ethics violation. The Model Code prohibits advertising that is “false or misleading.”

Here is the actual Rule 7.1 of the Model Code: A lawyer shall not make a false or misleading communication about the lawyer or the lawyer's services. A communication is false or misleading if it contains a material misrepresentation of fact or law, or omits a fact necessary to make the statement considered as a whole not materially misleading. (Emphasis added.)

To tell a story about fictitious people who get into fictitious trouble because of their fictitiously poor planning is both false and misleading. Especially if the story is presented without disclaimer, as if it were true. This approach can mislead readers to believe you are recounting a true story about your own clients, Jane, Bob and Ellen.

Remember – when your law journal publishes the names of attorneys who have been disciplined, they typically do not list the infraction. AVVO  (the online ratings directory) also will list any disciplinary action on your profile. No one will know you were just “story telling.” They may assume you were embezzling funds from your clients’ estates!

3.       It undermines your marketing message. In the fields of estate planning and elder law, your goal is to establish trust, to build a reputation as a trusted adviser, to encourage prospective clients to trust you enough to give you a phone call.

You are poorly advised to begin that relationship with a lie. Even if you call it a story.

As a journalist, I come from a long line of gifted story tellers myself. My kids used to be very good at telling stories, too.  As they grew and matured, however, they learned the difference between a good story and a lie. The example above is a lie. Here is how it might become just a good story:

“Sometimes people place their trust in the wrong folks, particularly when it involves family. Be careful with granting powers of attorney, as things can go wrong. Consider a hypothetical family, with a daughter we’ll call Jane and her elderly mother, whom we will call Ellen …”

You see the difference? The first example is a lie, it is misleading to the reader. The second example is a story. You give the disclaimer, and everyone knows it’s a story. In many states, this approach is considered ethical – but not all. Some states make it very clear that storytelling of any type is considered “false and misleading.” So be careful. You are responsible for compliance with your own ethics rules.

But everyone should know better than to lie.

Law Firm Marketing and Low-Traffic Search

What kind of revenue is your website generating for your law firm? If your answer is “not enough,” then you may want to learn more about how website marketing actually works for small-niche firms like yours in estate planning or elder law.

Two of the top challenges of website marketing, particularly for niche firms, are traffic and visibility. Your website won’t drive new business to your law firm if the right people – your target audience – do not see it. And they will not see it if they cannot find it. Search engine optimization is the process of making sure your website can be found – quickly and easily – by people who are looking for your service and are likely to choose you (they are within driving distance of your office). So, you will want to optimize your website for local search, to be certain that people within your market area find you first when they go online to search for an estate planning or elder law attorney.

How much traffic will local search optimization drive to your website?

You should not depend on SEO alone to drive sufficient volume to your website to truly impact your law firm’s bottom line. Why not? Because the traffic on your small-niche search terms is relatively low. Sometimes so low that the major traffic estimation tools will not even track them. This does not mean these terms are not used, it just means that in the global economy of the internet, the “big boys” like Google won’t expend resources to track them. Why not?

Follow the money. Google tracks keyword traffic for only one reason – to sell those keywords in pay-per-click campaigns.  In fact, their Traffic Estimator is really a tool for designing pay-per-click campaigns.  The Traffic Estimator tells you how much you should bid on a search string, and gives you an approximation of what your campaign would cost each month. Low-volume keywords and search strings are dropped out of the auction – and you won’t even get a traffic estimate if Google doesn’t see your campaign as profitable – to THEM. Remember, a click-through on your low-volume keyword(s) is practically worthless to Google.  Google does not really care that this highly-qualified prospect might be worth $2,500, $4,500 or $10,000 to you!

We recently optimized a client website for local search, focusing on terms like “estate planning attorney,” and “elder law attorney” combined with our client’s city and state. For example, “estate planning attorney overland park ks.” We tracked his website statistics over the past four months, and this is what we found:

1.       Site traffic jumped from an average of 70 visits per month in October to an average of 700 visits per month in November, December and January!

Google’s Traffic Estimator would not have predicted this traffic increase. When I check the Estimator, it still says that traffic is too low to estimate for his keywords. Yet, we optimized his website for local search, and his traffic jumped 900%!

2.       Top search terms bringing visitors to the site included his CITY + “probate attorney,” “elder law attorney,” “estate planning attorney,” and “estate planning lawyer.”  Note: When I run Google’s Traffic Estimator for these terms in his city, Google tells me there is not enough traffic to measure.

3.       So, how do we get these results? We do not rely solely on SEO to drive traffic to your website. We use a well-orchestrated marketing system. Your optimized website is the hub of the system, but is integrated with and supported by smoothly operating systems that include both inbound and outbound marketing.

Think about this – if your website attracts 700 qualified visitors each and every month … if your website is properly designed to extend those visits into ongoing with relationships … if your website converts a mere one percent of those visitors into initial consultations … how would that impact your revenue?

Let’s do the math. (We have a handy conversion calculator on our website you can use to check your own numbers.)  We will use conservative numbers. 700 visitors, an average fee of $2,500, and a one percent conversion rate … would mean $17,500 in new revenue to your law firm monthly.

Now, as a true marketing professional, I would tweak those numbers down a bit. Consider a one percent conversion rate, and seven calls to your office monthly. Let’s say half of those are not truly qualified, as may sometimes happen. So, you get three to four initial consults per month from your website. That’s one per week, on average. Most of you say you close 90 to 100 percent of the people you see in your office, but let’s say you close only 50 percent of these people. That’s two new clients per month, with an average fee (on the low side) of $2,500 per client. That’s $5,000 per month of new revenue – revenue you would not otherwise have had – generated by your website.

Five thousand dollars per month is a pretty good head start every month, right? Wouldn’t that take a pretty good bite out of your overhead?

We will show you how to get results like these at our Spring Practice Development Workshop. Sign up now for just $595 (through March 1^st). Visit our website for complete details. You can register online, or just call James at 1-877-352-2021, ext. 0 and he can take care of you over the phone.