Integrity Marketing

Beyond Google Rank: Is Your Website Working?

Google Rank is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to evaluating website performance.

One of the most challenging aspects of my job is helping clients make good decisions about their websites. The typical challenging conversation starts something like this:

I had a friend who knows a lot about SEO take a look at my site and they said you guys have got it all messed up! I want you to give them access to the back end so they can fix it for me!

If our conversation starts like this, just know that I have put my phone on temporary mute, banged my head against the desk, rolled my eyes and heaved an exasperated sigh. I want to hang up, but I won’t. I’ll un-mute my phone and ask, in the most pleasant voice I can muster:

What makes you think your SEO is “messed up?”

The story usually starts at a cocktail party where some self-proclaimed expert who once built a website on WordPress was trying to show off. Unfortunately, the details of the criticism have been lost in translation. And no, I am not going to give this total stranger, who lacks any sort of credentials or qualifications, access to destroy all of the hard work we have put in to get your website ranking well on Google search.

Let’s Not Jump the Shark Here

If you’re having questions about how well your website is performing, or whether it needs a facelift, a refresh, or an SEO upgrade, please just give us a call. After all, we are the experts you are actually paying every month to do this work for you.

Before you call, or even during your call, take a look at the FACTS about your website. In this digital age, we no longer have to rely on gut feelings, intuition or even the personal opinion of our friends at cocktail parties. We have these wonderful things called ANALYTICS that tell us a very truthful, accurate and informative story about how well your website is performing.

You Don’t Have to Be Certified in Google Analytics

Your personal account manager here at Integrity Marketing is already certified, so you don’t have to be. But honestly, it does not take a certified analyst to understand the most important metrics about your website. In fact, you can learn a lot from a single, monthly email.

Your E2 CRM and The One Minute Manager

Every month your E2 CRM automatically delivers a performance report directly to your inbox. You don’t even have to log in (or remember passwords, etc.) to read it. And you sure don’t have to get certified in Google Analytics!The email gives you an at-a-glance summary of your website, blog, email marketing and automation activity for the current day, the past week and the past month.

Here are the sections you’ll want to quickly review:

Number of Contacts in Your Marketing Database

Does this number look “right” to you? It should include all of your clients as well as your leads, prospects, and referral sources to whom you market, including everyone who subscribes to your e-newsletter and blog digest.

This number should steadily increase month-over-month. Keep track of it. If it’s not growing, this means you are not adding any new clients or subscribers to your database. It should grow.

Warning Flags. Call Your Account Manager Immediately if:  

• This is a very small number, say only 10 or 15. There may be something seriously wrong with your database.
• This is an extraordinarily large number, something you don’t recognize as legitimate. You may be the victim of a hacker or a SPAM attack.

Website Page Views

While this number is not the same as website visits, it’s an important number to know. Not only would you like to know how many website pages were viewed, but this report will tell you which pages get the most views. This shows you which sections of your website and blog are most popular and the typical customer path through your site.

You’ll also know if your website is averaging 50, 100 or more page views per day. This is a good gauge of how well your website is performing in terms of traffic and engagement.

Conversions and Website Signup Forms Submitted

Here is where the rubber meets the road. How many people submitted website forms (requesting a consultation, a personal contact, a download offer, etc.) or completed one of the other conversion goals established for your website? If you’re getting a steady number of website conversions, then you should be seeing the results in your appointment book. (Remember that this particular summary does not include phone calls generated directly from your website, these conversions are tracked separately.)

If You Have Workflow Automation Set Up

This email also summarizes your automation activity – showing how many times each of your workflows were activated. This gives you an idea of how well your marketing activities are integrated into your practice, how well you follow up on web leads, and the true impact of your online marketing.

Email Marketing Performance

These are your at-a-glance performance statistics for all your email marketing efforts. You’ll see how many emails were sent, how many were read, the click-through rate, exactly what links were clicked on, and how many times.

Who’s Working for You?

The email is also a very nice management tool. It shows which of your staff members logged into your CRM, when, and how often. You can see if all scheduled workflows were successfully completed … or not. Sometimes the primary reason a CRM is not working is … well … no one is using it! You’ll want to know if your staff are making an honest effort to make this work, or just hoping you will forget about it.

But What About Google Rank?

I knew you were going to go there. Google Rank – or how Google ranks your website on the results pages for various searches – is a moving target. Search results are increasingly personalized and influenced by your own online activity. In other words, if you search for yourself on Google, your results will be very different than mine, or your cocktail-party friend’s.

And here’s another hint: Results depend on the search.

That’s right. If your friend searches for estate attorney in upper New York State, and you search for estate attorney in Buffalo NY … you are likely to get somewhat different search results.

And finally: Results depend on location.

If you search for estate attorney from your office in Buffalo, and I search for estate attorney from my office in Colorado Springs we will get very different results, even though we’re both using the same search terms.

So … we send you a monthly average web ranking report, generated by a third-party (not us) that specializes in aggregating your search results on Google and giving you a general idea of how the search engines display your website. We pay for this service on your behalf to ensure you get the most accurate, objective reporting available.

There’s More to That Iceberg than You Can See on Google

Above all, remember this: Your goal is to grow your practice.

Our goal is build a digital marketing engine to do that.

Getting SEO right is one of our specialties – we have a staff full of folks who are certified specialists working hard every day to get your website front-and-center for the searches that matter most to your practice.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. We also work hard to make sure people click-through on your listings and actually visit your website … and to keep them engaged when they arrive. We build the path to conversion with nurturing points all along the way – from your social media to your blog and content marketing to email marketing and even automation to ensure your firm has the best possible chance of converting website visitors into delighted new clients.

So the next time one of your friends gives advice about your website, please – thank them nicely, refresh their drink, and give us a call the next day. We actually would love to hear what they had to say. Sometimes friends give great advice and you never know who will have the next great idea! (And if they are really good, let them know we're always open to hiring great minds!)

Law Firm Digital Marketing Do-It-Yourself: Not Always a Great Notion

So you’ve mastered LinkedIn and you’re on Facebook every morning, checking in before you start your work day. You’re thinking, hey I can do my own digital marketing. Yes, you can, but should you? There are pros and cons to DIY digital marketing for the estate planning and Elder Law attorney, and before you travel down this path, let’s consider how wise it is for you and your practice.

No one understands my practice like me. That’s true—to some extent. No one sits at your side of the desk and sees the work flow, cash flow and employee performance, for better or worse, than you do. But your practice is not unlike many other estate planning law firms. IMS account executives work with estate planning law firms across the country, and have done so for many years. We know the challenges that this practice area faces, whether your office is three people or thirty or sixty. We may even have insights about problems that you haven’t even faced yet, based on the stage of your practice.

No one understands my clients and prospects like me. We beg to differ there. This is what IMS does, every day, all day long: help estate planning attorneys like you reach clients and prospects to bring them past the obstacles of time, money and fear and into your office to tackle their estate planning. We have spent decades on this, and we bring a mastery of digital marketing to your practice. So, that’s not a reason to do digital yourself.

I kind of understand the whole SEO thing. Here’s where non-digital marketing professionals get themselves into trouble, sometimes serious trouble. We’ve seen programmers who understand what to put in source code and decide they are ready to become SEO experts—before getting black-hatted out of the game completely, along with their short term clients. We say short term because once you’ve been banned by Google for black hat SEO, you don’t go back for more! SEO has become an extremely technical and complex area of digital marketing. It’s not for do-it-yourselfers. Not if you want to stay on the right path and achieve real results.

Practicing law and profitability. This one is so obvious but we’ve seen enough instances of it being ignored so we have to mention it. Your time is better spent practicing law and taking outstanding care of your clients than dabbling in digital marketing. IMS clients are a smart group of entrepreneurial attorneys. They understand the value and importance of marketing, which is why they work with us. However, they are also really good attorneys who understand that practicing law is their bread and butter.

We’re always up for a conversation. If you’ve got questions or suggestions about digital marketing, we’d love to hear from you. Call James at 877-352-2021 ext. 80 or submit a support ticket. We’re all ears!

Mixed Messages Confuse Everyone–Including Your Team

If a law firm’s NAPS (Name, Address, Phone Number) are inconsistent, Google’s purely numbers-based algorithms evaluate it as a negative and adjust your quality scores accordingly. Human visitors have the same kind of reaction anytime there is inconsistency in your marketing methods and strategies. If you are sending out mixed messages, can you expect your marketing to succeed?

Make a plan and stick with it. Comparing apples to grapefruits is a fruitless endeavor that will yield a bumper crop of confusion. One month your law firm is at every event in town, speaking, networking, supporting. The next month, no one leaves the office. That’s confusing to your community—are they active, or not?—and your team—are we out and about as part of new client development, or not?

Give marketing tools a chance. One blog will not break the internet. A series of blogs over time that is well-written and targeted to the interest and needs of your client base will, in time and with the correct marketing support, generate followers and new clients. Blog support from IMS arrives in your inbox every week—use them consistently for best results.

Don’t pivot in the middle of a campaign. Changing horses in mid-stream can only lead to a watered down marketing effort. Here’s one example: a firm purchases the use of a direct mail address for a year. One letter is sent out, with no call to action and no explanation of benefits. The project is pushed aside when something else attracts the partners’ attention—a four color brochure. Managing partner’s quote: “Direct mail doesn’t work.”

Actions speak louder than words. Once time and resources have been invested in creating a strategic plan, the next step is action—sometimes the hardest part. Make the decision, approve the content, give the go-ahead to let the website go live. Discussion can only take you so far.

Be consistent in excellence too. Nothing creates more cognitive dissonance than a slogan that exalts the firm’s commitment to results, excellence and leadership if mistakes are made, the firm does not hold any leadership positions in the law or in the community and cases are not resolved in an optimal fashion. Hold yourself and your team to the highest standards in everything you do. That will send the clearest message of all.

Add Fireworks to Law Firm Marketing Budgets for a Bigger Bang

Marketing budgets vary by sector, and nowhere is that difference more evident than in law firm vs. consumer packaged goods marketing budgets. One survey showed that consumer packaged goods devote 24% of their total company budget on marketing. That number includes national companies who spend millions on television, print ads and promotions. By comparison, law firms spend about 2-4% of gross revenues on marketing.

Law firms don’t necessarily need to spend nearly a quarter of their revenue on marketing, but the difference in spending is a dramatic one, and is worth a closer look. Product companies think of their marketing as an integral part of doing business. In the face of massive competition, the on-going battle for shelf space in retail brick and mortar stores and top-of-mind consumer awareness, they have no choice.

Competition among law firms and online legal services and the rise of legal marketing has transformed the legal services sector. It is no longer sufficient to be a highly skilled and caring practitioner, just as being the tastiest sirloin alone does not sell a steak. You know what’s coming next: the sizzle.

Does your budget have room for sizzle? Digital marketing means that legal marketers can do more with limited resources, but there comes a point where budget size has a negative impact on results. Try running a law firm without billing software. It can be done, but the cost in time and staff resources becomes a losing proposition.

Where are law firms spending their marketing budgets?

• Website development and maintenance
• Marketing software—E2-CRM, CLIP^SM
• Social media—your time, staff time or outside agency
• Creative—branding, graphic design
• Digital advertising—AdWords, Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns
• SEO—Search Engine Optimization
• Print advertising
• Public relations
• Special events
• Promotional imprinted items
• Collateral materials (brochures, client materials binders/folders)
• Stationary, labels, business cards

When conducting a mid-year review of the law firm’s financial performance, look at the budget for marketing in relation to the firm’s six month revenues. It won’t be 24%, but if it’s too low, perhaps it’s time to consider what opportunities are being missed. Go back three or four years and be sure to compare apples to apples. Is there a connection between your marketing spend and the firm’s performance? What events occurred that spurred more income for the firm?

How Does Spam Hurt Your Law Firm Website? Let us Count the Ways

Spam can wreak havoc with your law firm, in more ways than you might think. The junk cluttering your email inbox, the time wasted when your IT department has to fix a damage done by spam, the investment in technology necessary to continue to combat spam; that’s just for starters. Think about this: spam poses a real threat to your website’s Google analytics.

And what if spam is not seen as spam by Google, but as black hat SEO?

Fake traffic skews analytics. It can happen pretty quickly, and you may not realize it at first. Your website traffic is growing steady and then, traffic takes off like a rocket. You think, wow, that article I published in the bar journal must have really gotten a lot of interest. But the calls to your office don’t align with the jump in analytics. A closer look reveals that all of the traffic is coming from one website, and it’s not a website you know. It’s spam.

Referral spam is profitable for hackers. Spammers target large numbers of websites to find vulnerable sites. They spam your site to show that their URL is sending many referrals, with the goal of building their own website’s traffic. Often they are paid based on the number of links or referrals they generate.

Spam can overload your computer system and compromise security. It’s hard to imagine that hackers would want to launch a DoS (Denial of Service) attack on a lone law firm, but that’s why so many security systems are in place. A DoS attack makes your website unusable and crushes your firewalls. The goal is to exhaust technical resources. The result is legitimate users can’t get to your site.

Smart hackers lead to smarter systems professionals. At IMS, we are always on the lookout for improved solutions, and that includes website protection. Today there is a new class of captchas—those small boxes at the bottom of forms that require you to type in randomly generated codes are no longer state of the art. We’re not sharing what it is we are using, but with systems that automatically detect spam bots on forms, we prevent spammers from getting near our client’s forms.

At IMS, we build websites to shield our clients from the impact of spam. With the help of trained end users—you and your team—your data and your systems are in good hands! If you have any concerns about spam and your estate planning and Elder Law website, submit a support ticket.

How Do Well-Built, Best Practices-Based Law Firm Websites Get Spammy?

Law firms that count on strong SEO performance also rely on the technical back-end of their websites to protect against the efforts of malware, viruses, spyware and other threats. With multiple layers of digital protection in place, well-designed websites can withstand attacks that, in most cases, users are completely unaware of. How do you know your website is shielded? It performs well, Google has not penalized you for being spammy, and people are able to search and find your website.

Isn’t that something you expect? From IMS, yes, but not everyone understands why website protection is part of what we build into IMS sites. Here’s what can happen without the care and technical proficiency built into every IMS website:

Not all SEO practitioners have your best long-term interest in mind. Be wary of the SEO practitioner who promises the moon, delivers, then disappears, just around the same time that Google rankings sink or worse, your site is blocked and can’t be accessed. They have likely employed black hat techniques to give rankings a quick jump, and your site has been deemed spammy by Google.

Keyword stuffing, broken links, poor quality links and a bad user experience. Time is everyone’s most precious commodity. It’s annoying to open a website that you thought had useful information and find it’s nothing but a waste of digital space. Repetitive use of keywords, links that take you to useless pages, and tons of ads creates a bad UX (User Experience). Google agrees, and will rank the website accordingly.

Who is behind that website? Millennials aren’t the only ones who expect complete transparency—Google does also. We hate opening an “About Us” page and finding nothing but corporate speak. A good website includes info about people, even if it only tells us about top leadership. A spammy website has no people, and you won’t find anyone associated with the company on social media.

Sometimes your solution creates a problem. If you do a search and a URL listing contains a message saying “The contents of this website cannot be displayed,” it might not be a safe website. We all know what happens next. You try another browser and it opens fine. Sometimes that’s a good thing, but sometimes you have simply found a work-around to a system that was put into place to protect you.

At IMS, our focus is on estate planning and Elder Law firm sites, not ghost practices that exist to gather clicks. If you have any questions about the health and well-being of your website, call James at 877-352-2021 ext. 80 and we’ll be happy to give your website a check-up!

Lawyer Videos and Why Your Firm Should Have at Least One on Your Website

A law firm website without at least one professionally produced lawyer video is like a website without an About the Attorneys page. Today’s visitors to estate planning and Elder Law firm websites are looking for a connection and reassurances on an emotional and intellectual level. Lawyer videos make that connection happen faster than pure text.

But I have outstanding credentials, so why do I need a lawyer video? If you have outstanding credentials, great reviews on Avvo and Martindale, Super Lawyer and Chambers, congratulations—these lawyer accolades are not given out to every attorney and they do have an impact. But… remember the quality and caliber of your peers. If you are a Preeminent 5.0 out of 5.0 attorney, you are competing for clients with other Preeminent 5.0 out of 5.0 attorneys. If the difference is that they are reaching clients at the heart, while your website is an unemotional sleigh ride of facts, you may be losing clients without even knowing it.

We’re all a little slow around this time of year. Not true. IMS clients who have embraced lawyer videos, automated their intake processes and incorporated powerful E2-CRM are busy year round. If you are concerned about a seasonal slowdown, may we recommend using your free time productively to schedule a strategic planning retreat? And yes, that would be the perfect time to start preparing your lawyer videos.

My website doesn’t get as much traffic as I want, so why would I add a video to it? It is possible that a lack of a video may be WHY your website is not getting as much traffic as you want. Remember Google buying YouTube? Google spent $1.65 billion to purchase the video sharing website. Sounds expensive, but the revenues from YouTube have more than paid for itself already. People love videos. They expect to see videos on all websites, from a shoe retailer showing someone walking in shoes to live streams of conferences. Adding a video makes a difference, especially where sensitive legal topics that combine money and emotions—that would be estate planning—are concerned.

I’m as busy as ever, so maybe I don’t need a lawyer video. Well, you might be busy now, but remember that the playing field is changing rapidly. Your competition is not just the colleague a few miles away. Millennials who are more comfortable filling out a form and having an interaction with a seamless app are migrating to the online legal services providers. We’re not going to mention them by name; they have a strong enough SEO platform and don’t need any help from us. But you know who they are, and they are not going away any time soon.

I’m still not convinced. Remember that we work with and speak with attorneys at estate planning law firms across the country. We rely on hard data, not anecdotal evidence, so that we can make the best recommendations for our clients. And we fully believe in the power of lawyer videos!

If you’ve got questions about lawyer videos or any IMS services and how they can boost your profitability, call James at 877-352-2021 ext. 80.

Law Firm Digital Marketing 101: Law Firm Directories

The first thing you need to know about law firm directories is to be careful. There are many law firm directories, some legitimate, others not so much. You don’t want to find your firm bounced off of Google because of a law firm directory. Next, you probably want to know what a law firm directory is, and why do you need to be listed?

A law firm directory is an aggregator of law firm listings that in some cases occurs almost naturally, like Avvo, Super Lawyers or Martindale, by the simple virtue of being a list of attorneys and law firms. Others are curated lists of lawyers, where attorneys are selected, and still others are automatically populated from other directories.

High quality law firm directories are far more than simply lists of attorneys. They are information-driven websites, rich with content, loaded with articles and high quality links to bar associations and legal publications.

In some markets, an online search for an attorney will result in a large number of paid ads from directories, followed by a number of organic results, also from directories, with individual law firms and attorneys coming in behind the directories.

Law firm directories have become a big business.

What should your estate planning and Elder Law firm do about law firm directories?

You and your firm are likely already present on some of them. Just make sure that all of your NAPS—name, address, phone number—are consistent on each site. How to find out where you are? Google yourself.

Paid listings are not a bad thing. Yes, free is always easier, but certain directories are paid only. That does not guarantee that you’ll get an amazing flurry of traffic, but should keep you away from the link farms and low quality directories that can harm your quality scores and could put your site at risk for black hat SEO. Remember, cheaper is not always better.

Not sure about a directory? Submit a support ticket and we’ll be happy to help. Remember that IMS does far more for our clients than build lawyer websites. We serve as strategic advisors to our clients, helping them navigate digital marketing, firm development and profitability.

What Does a Healthy Law Firm Social Media Campaign Look Like?

A strong social media campaign for an estate planning and Elder Law practice looks very different than one for an online bookseller. But some elements should be the same. Social media, including blogs, Facebook pages, LinkedIn conversations, Tweets (on Twitter) and videos need to be current. They also need to be geared to your visitors, who should represent your ideal client. Still not dipping your toes into the social media pool? Maybe these tips will help:

Use what you’ve already got. If your firm has published articles in consumer media or been quoted by media, use that for social media content. A quote in a newspaper becomes a springboard to a blog post.

Have you published a few articles? Congratulations, you’ve got a library! One firm went through their archives, digital and otherwise, and came up with more than twenty bylined articles on various topics. All of those articles equals one great big content bonus. Social posts on each of the articles can be used to link to the articles. Your email newsletter can introduce the topics and link to the articles also.

Original thinkers add original content. Google will penalize a website for duplicate content, but users will penalize social media sites for showing the same-old story. Most of the estate planning attorneys that we know are also skilled writers and, probably because of the type of law they practice, keen observers of the human condition. They are able to take a news story or a deadline or a seasonal holiday and tweak it so that the story becomes personal for their targeted client and/or their target market.

Be responsive—that’s what social means! If someone posts about a problem they are having, do respond on the page, but not with a direct answer to their problem. You’re not practicing law online. Instead, acknowledge their issue, and ask them to send you a private message (if you are on Facebook) or invite them to call the office to speak with you. If you get a compliment, don’t forget to say thank you.

Have a strategic plan. You would never “wing it” in court. Don’t wing it and expect to win big in social media. Create a plan, six months or a year in advance. It’s easier to write a blog post when the topics are set in a calendar, and if news events demand a pivot, you can always push the calendar back.

Danger Ahead: Black Hat SEO a BIG No-Go for Law Firm Marketing

Clients often ask about competitors who rank higher than them on Google, and then suddenly disappear from search results completely. Why does that happen? Often it is the direct result of law firms that work with companies using black hat SEO. These strategies don’t follow the best practices guidelines of search engines and don’t focus at all on the user experience. They exist solely to ratchet the law firm’s presence up in the rankings. The risk is being knocked off of search indexes completely. That’s why many firms using black hat SEO appear and then—woosh!—they disappear.

Using black hat techniques can get your firm banned from search engines, which undoes all of the good work that you have done in building credibility, authority and a strong user experience for your estate planning and Elder Law firm. It’s a big risk, and not one worth taking. At IMS, we focus our website development, search and social marketing on best practices. We are in it for the long-haul, helping your law firm build and maintain strong rankings because by doing all the right things.

Black hat methods are also used in paid search (AdWords) campaigns, known as black hat ppc.

Remember that Google changes its algorithms almost daily, and the algorithms measure the human experience of your website. How relevant and useful is your content, how are videos used on the website to educate and inform visitors? These are just two of the elements that make a strong website.

But if you add a single page that is stuffed with keywords that have nothing to do with your law practice and everything to do with getting people to find your site, that’s black hat SEO.

If you engage with a company that conducts a link farm operation, where multiple websites connect with each other for the sole purpose of building the number inbound links, that’s also black hat SEO.

A legitimate relationship, like having an article that you wrote appear on a consumer finance website that links back to your law firm site, is not a link farm. Google will know the difference.

Black hat doesn’t just include tactics you or a vendor might use for your website. It also refers to techniques used by others against your website. Those include someone hacking your website, building a negative SEO campaign with spammy links, or creating pages or even entire domains using your content.

If you are concerned about the health and well being of your website, submit a support ticket and let’s talk. If you receive an email or a phone call promising top rankings, fast, be careful not to put your website or your firm at risk.