When working on a law firm SEO campaign, one of the trouble spots can sometimes be finding content. A lawyer’s time is valuable and, as a service provider, my team can’t spend all day with an attorney asking him/her for details of the practice. So the challenge becomes creating quality, easy content about a law firm without disturbing the firm more than necessary and without having to cite case law itself.

There are a number of content creation methods but let’s look at one example of low-hanging fruit: video. Yes, yes – everyone knows that online video is great and YouTube results get good rankings in Google. But what I’m talking about is using a lawyer video as the source of text content for the firm’s website. A prime example of easy content can be found on the website from Phoenix criminal lawyers Billar & Donald. The firm presents good information within the video… let’s use that on the website too! Take the time to transcribe the audio to text and include a few links in the text when doing so. Hey, maybe even experiment with publishing it as a PDF transcription. What’s great is that all of this can be done without having to produce new copy or pass the content in front of the powers that be for pre-publish approval.

In all, “easy content” can be produced as fast as you can listen and type if you use a video as the source. Sure, the search engines will eventually get good enough at understanding video to make this practice unnecessary, but as a content development technique – let’s say for accessibility – it’s a nice one to keep in your back pocket.

A quick search turns up a few service providers, for those not interested in doing the transcription themselves:

• www.videotranscription.net
• www.gmrtranscription.com
• www.transcriptionsservice.com
• www.transcriptionstar.com

P.S. It looks like Google has issued a standard for video transcripts.

Many articles have been written on the value of geo-targeted keywords – search phrases that combine a location with a service. These geo-targeted, long tail keywords like “Montana malpractice attorney” are traditionally what search engine marketers like me and my team pursue for our legal clients. They deliver highly targeted traffic that converts well. But two things sometimes occur that put the broadest keywords possible on my plate to target like “injury lawyer” or “adoption law“. I’d like to present two instances where the broadest keywords were brought to the table and offer them as a way to show how to help your firm succeed when considering these high volume targets.

1. Long keywords based on a law firm’s small hometown don’t deliver much traffic. This is true for many small towns. Pascagoula Mississippi family lawyer may not turn up much traffic no matter what your rankings are. The tendency for these law firms may be to target generic keywords like “injury lawyer” in pursuit of pure traffic volume. For those law firms, I instead advise pursuing “General Practice”, geo-targeted keywords on their homepage like “Pascagoula lawyers” or “Pascagoula attorneys“. Sure, you should develop pages about your particular areas of practice and even include them on the homepage, but focus on your city name + lawyer or attorney as the first phrase in your TITLE tag and in your content headers (h1 and h2 tags). It’s also a good idea in this situation to develop content on the areas around your small hometown that may draw traffic.

 

2. Some law firms truly have a multi-state or national practice. Disability attorney Eric Shore helps clients with their social security disability cases. His practice has three physical offices in NJ and PA, but they handle SSD and SSI cases in almost every city in the U.S. For that reason, his firm’s keyword focus is on keywords without a geo-qualifier… straight “disability lawyer”, “social security disability lawyer” and the like. These are a tremendous challenge. When supplied with a relatively new website, no matter how well constructed, a conventional SEO campaign will struggle to succeed at this level of keyword competition. For these firms, I first advise the same strategy as I would for any website: do your keyword research, present your areas of practice in detail and work to include good conversion mechanisms like contact forms on your site. Then, to build national rankings, a large amount of off-page content distribution like press releases, how to articles, blog posts and more should be on a national law firm’s “to do” SEO list. The primary difference between a nationally-focused website with rankings and one without is this level of off-page optimization.

For those who do succeed in getting rankings for high volume, broad keywords, there’s an advanced level of consideration: the tremendous difference in visitors who want to see “disability” purely for base information and those who want to see “disability” in relation to a legal claim. If you are going to target the broadest keywords and actually succeed in capturing one or more of those targets, make sure your site helps those visitors self-select their navigation through your site. In that way, you can also tailor your message to that audience within that special navigation path.

I hope this has helped clarify thinking around the value of a website’s broad vs. geo-targeted keyword targeting strategy. Before targeting this elite group of broad keywords, be prepared to come with lots of content on your site and off… and know what to do with that traffic when it arrives!

One thing that I always recommend to my clients is that they put a unique call tracking number on their website. In today’s post, I’d like to outline what a call tracking number is and why it’s an essential part of marketing.

What is a Call Tracking Number?

A Call Tracking Number is a dedicated phone number that can be placed on a website and/or online or offline advertisements. When a potential customer calls the tracking phone number, it will automatically forward to whatever phone number you choose.

Why Would a Call Tracking Number Benefit Me?

Using a call tracking number is one of the best ways to track your advertising expenses. Typically, on a monthly basis, you will receive a report as to how many people dialed in via your tracking number. You can now compare your advertising costs, to the leads generated. Ultimately, this can help you when determining your ROI.

Where Else Can I Place a Call Tracking Number?

Call tracking numbers can be placed on:

• Websites
• Print Ads
• Online Ads
• Blog Posts
• Local Listing
• Profile Pages
• Landing Pages

Are Lawyers Using Call Tracking Numbers?

Being that I am in the field of Legal Marketing, we have made this concept available to many attorneys who have purchased websites with us.

Many of our clients have taken advantage of this tracking service, regardless of the area of practice. Participating clients have been from practice areas such as LA car accident attorneys to Ohio bankruptcy lawyers. Attorneys are spending valuable dollars on a monthly basis to expand their business. Legal marketers are placing call tracking ads anywhere they can to track their efforts. More recently, lawyers have been placing call tracking numbers on there articles on the lawyers.com Law Blog.

Return on investment is what online marketing is all about – without effective tracking of the phone calls generated by a law firm website, the attorneys will never know if their website investment is paying off.

Popular Call Tracking Providers

• ATG (eStara)
• CallSource.com
• Telecapture

Before Google(GOOG) cracked down on Adsense abuse, mesothelioma-related pay-per-click (PPC) keywords were undoubtedly the most expensive and lucrative. Rumor has it that at its peak, these words cost as much as $200 per click. Wow! So, now that things have normalized (whatever normal is), is mesothelioma still king? While doing research for BRBS & HBN (mesothelioma lawyers in Philadelphia), I discovered that mesothelioma is still one of the most expensive PPC keywords. For example, “mesothelioma attorneys san diego” goes for $51.03 per click. [...]

The devil’s in the details but…

1. Your SEO? Content + Authority = Rankings
2. The Payoff? Rankings + Analytics (including conversion tracking) = $

See also: ROI

p.s. How ya’ like that zingy title?

As most SEO professionals will tell you, a common question asked by clients is “Why does Site X have better rankings than mine?” Restated, the question is really “What is SEO and how can it work?” Explored using lawyer websites as examples, let’s hit the high spots:

First, is the firm looking for keywords or keyphrases that actually appear or pertain to their site? Meaning, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve talked to firms who wonder why they don’t rank for, say, Los Angeles palimony when, in fact, they have no content about either Los Angeles or palimony. This is a very simple example to emphasize one point: develop content about your target keyword topics. Many times, the law firm website with better rankings simply has better content about the subject.

What else can give one site better rankings than another? Well, in general, there are two elements involved in getting good rankings: on page factors and off page factors.

        On page factors include good content and targeted TITLE and META tags to start.

        Off page factors include who is linking to the firm’s website, how long the site has been online and other things.

Alternately phrased:

        Content + Authority = Rankings

This highlights the fact that content development isn’t the only thing involved in getting rankings… particularly in highly-competitive markets like New York injury law or Florida workers comp. With content development assessed, we turn our attention to the idea of the law firm website’s authority.

The primary determination of authority is the quality of incoming links to a given website. Does Law Firm A have incoming links from topical sites where Law Firm B does not? To check, go to Google and type this in to the search box:

link:www.yoursite.com

and compare the results to

link:www.theirsite.com

Many times, the site with the better rankings will show more, quality links within this result set. It is the quality of the linking site that is important, not simply quantity.

In short, that’s how you answer the question, “Why does one site rank better than another?” Yes, it is far too simplistic a presentation, but it will get the non-technical user oriented quickly as to what things they can do to improve their visibility within high-density searches.

Woohoo! A short note today – I’ve seen this in the past but have never commented on it. CaseDetails.com is #1 in Google for “lawyer SEO” and #7 for “attorney SEO”. Are they high-volume targets? Nope. Are they high-yield targets? You betcha.

Seeing how I haven’t really tried too hard to linkbuild for these keywords, this is a good example of how accurate META tagging and good content can sometimes be enough to achieve good search engine rankings.

[update 102907 - well, the only constant is change. I'm back down to #4 on lawyer SEO. Maybe this post offended them. *L*]

[tags]SEO, search engine rankings[/tags]

I ran across an article on microsoft.com (of all places) on How to Write Web Content for a Busy Audience the other day and it prompted me to organize my thoughts on how to write/modify legal content for online distribution. Of course, the primary goal will be to get rankings for those keyphrases that people are actually searching for rather that what you may think people are searching for. A perfect example: I sometimes encounter lawyers who focus on Matrimonial Law, to the exclusion of all other keywords. Family law, divorce, settlements, etc. are far better choices. Similarly, attorneys occasionally obsess over being ranked for Somewhere County injury attorney. Other than a very select few US counties, this personal preference to think about a firm’s practice within a county-based keyword set ignores the fact that better targets like CityName StateName injury attorney, CityName StateName attorney and CityName injury are more appropriate. So how does an copywriter or web developer decide these things in the online legal market place? Download the PDF on Targeting Legal Content for the Web to find out more…

[tags]web content, copywriting[/tags]