Get the basics of successful local business and law firm online marketing

Local search is growing and changing at a rapid pace. This seven-day series will discuss the basics of local search with Google, Yahoo and Bing, its growing importance and how your law firm or locally-based business can benefit from it.

What is local search?

A local search occurs when someone searches for businesses or products in their area. This search can take place through a local search engine like Google Places, Yahoo Local and Bing Local or through the general engines.

Why should you optimize specifically for local searches?

Google estimates that over 20% of searches now include a reference to locality and that number is growing. People don’t want to wade through pages of results that aren’t in their area. They want relevant, local results. If you optimize your site effectively, you can get more benefit from these local searches.

In November 2010, Danny Dover posted a Whiteboard on the basics of local search on SEOmoz. He outlined five steps that can help you improve your local search. They are:

• Setting the stage with relevant content and a well-optimized site
• Doing extensive local keyword research and targeting
• Creating a local page with Google Places, Yahoo Local and Bing Local
• Link building
• Submitting to local directories

This series will focus on those five steps as well as what not to do with your Google Places page.

Next, we’ll take a look at setting the stage with a well-optimized site. We’ll discuss link building, as well as accessibility and content.

Keep checking in at CaseDetails.com for more information on the basics of local search and more.

Pump up PPC campaign performance by using the negative keywords option

As campaigns get larger, actively managing negative keywords becomes an even more important aspect of PPC campaign management. It’s difficult to test and refine creative copy when the campaign consists of hundreds of thousands of keywords.

In his article, “Case Study: How Negative Keywords Can Pump Up Paid Search Performance,” Matt Lawson states, “In a high-volume world, actively managing negatives is possibly the single most impactful opportunity you have for increasing conversions and decreasing costs.”

He goes on to explain that not maintaining a negative keyword list usually results in “bad impressions” on paid search ads. A bad impression is when your ad shows up in the results for a search term that won’t lead to a conversion for your business. By listing these irrelevant and non-converting terms as negative keywords, you reduce the number of bad impressions.

Let’s look at an example: Assume you practice real estate law. A consumer searches for “real estate law school” and gets your ad set for the keyword “real estate law.” Since he isn’t looking for a lawyer, chances are slim that he’ll convert, even if he clicks on the ad. Using the negative keyword “school” would have eliminated that bad impression, cut unnecessary cost and improved ROI. The benefits for PPC campaign management don’t stop there.

Regularly updating your keyword list should significantly improve campaign performance by generating the same number of conversions for fewer clicks.

Eliminating irrelevant searches will also boost the click-through rate, which should increase quality scores. Improved quality scores will reduce cost further as well as improve ad position, which in turn drives more traffic and conversions.

You can then reinvest the money you save from bad impressions into higher bids and new keywords.

Which leads us to the biggest reason to utilize a negative keywords list: It’s free. While most other ppc campaign management techniques require more investment, negatives are a way to decrease costs while increasing profits.

The best way to identify possible negatives is the raw search query data. Review this report regularly for searches that don’t apply to your business. Then add these terms to your negatives list to eliminate bad impressions.

Now you’re ready to start identifying negatives and making them work for you. For more information on PPC campaign management, keep returning to CaseDetails.com.

Does your product or service have a low or non-existent keyword search volume? Chances are if your law firm is in a smaller city or town, your primary keyword target may not get much action. If so, don’t give up on using SEO as a marketing tool. Just because people aren’t searching for your exact city and area of practice yet doesn’t mean you can’t put SEO to work for you.

In his article, “How to Do SEO for Sites and Products with No Search Demand,” blogger Rand Fishkin gives four ways to use SEO for products with low keyword search volume.

The Substitute
Many products that don’t have direct keyword search volume can be marketed based on their similarities to an existing product. For example, if you’re an estate planning lawyer in Small Town, Georgia, using SEO could be a challenge since there’s very little search volume for that specific keyword.

However, you could target searches on a similar service such as estate planning software or online estate planning. These ads would then rank alongside the product you’re trying to replace.

The Comparison
Not all services or brands will be qualified to substitute for an existing product. But many will be comparable to something familiar.

Let’s say, for example, you practice insurance law. The search volume for that keyword isn’t great. You could improve the volume by comparing it to similar areas of law.

Attract the Audience. Not the Query
Another option is to market to an audience defined by their age, gender, income and other personal traits, instead of marketing to an audience that’s searching for what you sell. Doing this will require careful planning and preparation.

You need to learn as much about your target audience as possible. What types of sites do they visit? What kinds of searches do they perform regularly?

In the estate planning example, let’s use young parents as a target group. If you know they regularly search for children’s products, parenting tips, articles, etc. you could create a blog focused on those topics. You could then advertise your firm alongside the primary content.

Build the Brand
The final way to use SEO for products with low keyword search volume is to build your brand. The same contests, celebrities and videos that Pepsi or Coke use when they launch a new beverage, can help customers searching for related content find your firm.

Using SEO for products with low keyword search volume will definitely be a challenge, but now you have a good idea of where to start. For more advice on putting SEO to work for your law firm or small business, keep referring to CaseDetails.com.

When redesigning your website don't forget SEO

Are you looking to update your firm’s website? Don’t forget to consider SEO in your website redesign. Making your site user-friendly and appealing depends a lot on SEO. Mark Jackson, in an article on Clickz called Redesigning Your Website? Don’t Neglect SEO suggests the following.

Avoid common SEO mistakes by keeping these tips in mind:

Do Your Keyword Research. This sounds elementary, but it’s crucial to having your site perform well in SEO. Use keyword tools such as Google AdWords, Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery. Consider looking at existing paid search campaigns for click-through rates (CTRs), time spent on site and conversion rates.

Determine How to Be Competitive. Choosing good keywords is only half the battle as only a few of them will be competitive. Figure out which ones are competitive by doing a Google search for your target keywords. Take the top-10 ranking sites and analyze them to look for content patterns, best practices, etc.

Build Your Information Architecture. This is an important SEO factor for website redesign. Make customers want to visit! Your site should be appealing, search engine friendly and have content that adds to the user experience.

Review Your History. Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke, right? SEO for website redesign requires that you determine where you were getting your traffic. Keep elements that were working for your firm in the new site.

Include Redirects. Use a 301 redirect from every page of the old site to the new site. If you can keep the same URL during the relaunch, great. If you can’t, however, your URL structure is going to change. The 301 redirect will automatically connect the user to the new site.

SEO for website redesign is key to the success of your site update. Figure out how to make SEO work for your firm’s new site. Keep checking in at CaseDetails.com for information on link building, adding video to your website and more!

A little planning and research goes a long way with link building

We’ve been covering the basics of a successful link building campaign, based on an excellent guide from SEOmoz. Now, it’s time to start applying what you’ve learned to your firm’s site. There is a little more prep work to do, however, as link building research is still needed.

Consider employing these useful link building tools:

1. Yahoo! Site Explorer Reported Inlinks – Set up your site with Yahoo! Site Explorer. With this link building research tool, you can determine the popularity of a site and find pages that link to that site. A site with powerful links will pass pages of greater value through their links.
2. Number of Links Per Page – The PageRank formula states that the value of a link is decreased when there are other links on the same page. Thus, it is better to be linked to by a page with fewer links on it. Something to keep in mind as you search for link possibilities.
3. Possible Referral Traffic – In your link building research, try to pay attention to potential referrals, not just the search engines. Remember this is a giant referral system! You can gain a lot of traffic through links from strong, important sites. Google Trends can give you a general idea of a site’s traffic.

This is just the beginning of link building research, but if you master these tools, you will be off to a good start. Keep checking in at CaseDetails.com for more information on website structure, using authoritative outbound links and more!

Make sure your inbound and outbound links measure up

Link building is a crucial aspect of achieving and maintaining a strong online presence and high rankings on the search engines. Here, we will focus on the link building basic of measuring link value.

Ideally, you want your firm’s website to have a varied and natural link pattern, meaning you want the websites that are linking to you to be from a variety of sources. The same goes for the types of sites you link to from your law firm’s site. Building that pattern, unfortunately, is a difficult task to master.

Search engines use actual precise metrics to measure the value of each link, and even the best SEO specialists cannot determine the precise algorithm. However, there are several link building basics that can help you estimate link value:

1. Page Ranking – This is basically a system of algorithms that assigns a numerical value to web pages. The higher the ranking, the better. To figure out the value a search engine gives a certain page, try doing a search of some keywords and phrases that certain pages target.
2. Google PageRank – This is the system of ranking created by Larry Page of Google and is definitely a link building basic “must.” The numerical value determines the page’s importance and relevance. Your firm’s site will want to link to pages with a high PageRank.
3. Google Blog Search – Here is another important tool created by Google that measures accurate backlink information (consider it going behind the scenes). You can learn a lot from seeing which sites and pages have earned respect in the blogosphere.
4. SEOmoz mozRank – Basically, this tool ranks how popular a web page is in relation to others. The more links to a page, the more popular it will become.

Spend a few more minutes here on CaseDetails for an explanation of link building in general and how it fits into your overall online marketing campaign. When it comes to link building, just a few minutes of research followed by 15-30 minutes of application can help bring your law firm’s website higher on the search engines, and bring more clients your way.

Come back often to CaseDetails.com and learn more about link building, local directories and creating a site map.

Understanding how to build quality links to your website can help you get to the top

You have your firm’s site up and running, but now you need to know how to maximize its exposure on the web. Link building can help.

What is link building and how is it related to the success of your firm’s site? You’ve come to the right place.

A link building campaign is crucial to building popularity and gaining trust on the Internet.

Links are basically the connections between the different pages that search engines crawl (consider it a giant referral system). Getting a referral from an important and trusted source goes a long way, right? Likewise, links help determine popularity and respect based on how they are linked. A trustworthy site is usually linked to other trustworthy sites, while a spammy one is not.

Before truly comprehending what linking building is, you need to understand the link signals that search engines use. The following elements are used to measure link value and a site’s link profile:

• Global Popularity – This one is simple: the more popular and valuable your site, the more search engines value links from that site.
• Local & Topic-Specific Popularity – Links from sites related to your topic are more important to the engines than general or off-topic sites.
• Anchor Text – This one is important. Search engines place a heavy emphasis on anchor text quality. If many links point to a page and these links contain target keywords, the page is likely to rank well for the particular phrase(s) in that anchor text.
• TrustRank – Search engines have developed systems for calculating trust. In order for your firm to get a boost in the scoring system, you will want to earn links from highly respected sites.
• Link Neighborhood – It is also important to monitor the sites your firm links to. Choose these as carefully as you choose the ones you earn links from. Creating connections between several respected sites – both inbound and outbound – will increase your chances of scoring well.

Link building is a difficult art to master. Now that you have figured out what link building is, continue to check back for more information on taking it a step further. Learn more about how to fix broken links, link building opportunities on social media sites and how to measure link value. Check out the SEO in 30 Days series to find out other ways of optimizing your website.

PPC Advertising Tips

We gave a brief overview of social media in Day 29 and suggested a few sites to start on. We’re concluding the SEO in 30 Days series today with another brief overview, this time of pay-per-click advertising.

PPC advertising, or pay per click advertising, can be hard for a small law firm. Competing against large corporations with massive marketing budgets can leave your firm at the bottom of the list. Learn the basics of paid search marketing and make it work for your firm.

The way PPC advertising works is that you pay for your firm’s ad to appear in a search engine’s sponsored listings. Every time a customer clicks on your ad, your firm pays for that click. The price of a click is often determined by a bid-based system where advertisers specify how much they are willing to spend for a given keyword. Read more about PPC advertising in the PPC section of CaseDetails.

PPC advertising is a great way to drive traffic to your site without having to optimize for natural listings. Incorporate the following tips into your PPC campaign and your firm will remain competitive.

1. Choose the time and day. Google actually lets you choose when your ads will run. Determine when potential customers are most likely to search, and advertise during those times.

2. Do your research. Keyword development is vital to the success of your PPC advertising campaign. Expand past broad keywords (like “firm”) into local and specific keywords (like “Boston divorce firms”). This way, you will zero in on potential clients who are further along in the search process.

3. Use geo targeting. Most potential clients expect their searches to be within 15 miles of their location. Target your business accordingly.

4. Use exact matches. Broad matches don’t do your budget any favors. Google has several matching tools. Using the exact match tool will control costs and the searches that are displaying your ads.

5. Keep it relevant. Make sure that your link is 100% relevant. Don’t link to just the home page of your firm. Link to the practice area or lawyers who can help. Otherwise, customers may click away from your site and never come back.

Following the SEO in 30 Days series will give your law firm an advantage over your competition in the search engines and in your marketing efforts. For more detailed information on search engine optimization for law firms, search the CaseDetails site. Remember, SEO is a work in progress; come back often to read about the latest SEO techniques that could bring more business for your firm.