Google Plus made a big splash when it landed a few months ago, and its user base exploded into the tens of millions, even while it was still in beta. Now users everywhere can +1 things they like and see what other people in their social circles have +1′d. So can Google Plus help your law firm’s online marketing efforts?

As Dustin Ruge argues in “Will Google +1 Help Attorneys?,” the answer is maybe. But don’t count on it. Google Plus, the social media site, is growing quickly but still lags far behind Facebook’s 750 million, Twitter’s 200 million and even LinkedIn’s 100 million users.

The +1 button, Google’s answer to the “like” button, appears both on websites and next to search results. However, it’s not clear that people actually see any value to Google+ right now. It’s likely they’re simply grabbing onto the latest “next greatest thing.”

Even worse, Google is severely restricting how it defines your “social connections” by including only users of other Google properties. In other words, people:
• In your Google Contact list
• In your Google chat list
• In your Google+ Circles
• You follow in Google Buzz (which Google just announced that it is discontinuing)
• You follow in Google Reader

Sure, Google properties are popular, but how many people really keep all their contacts in Google? Who cares what people from their RSS feed (Google Reader) like? And as for Google Plus circles, the user base needs to be much larger before it can provide useful data.

Until that happens, or Google includes other social connections in its data, Google Plus isn’t likely to be very useful for law firms’ online marketing. On the other hand, Ruge thinks it could provide attorneys with some interesting legal challenges in terms of privacy and how Google uses the +1 data. What do you think?

Information in this post gathered in association with a Los Angeles employment lawyer.

photo courtesy BJN

When a person searches for “Kentucky fried chicken“, Google’s primary goal is to try to understand whether you’re in Kentucky looking for fried chicken or in New Jersey (like I am) looking for the local KFC. In a nutshell, that’s an example of how a searcher’s environment… their associations and place in the world give context to the search that’s taking place.

With that goal firmly in their sights, Google has helped move us from the world where rankings are driven by keyword density to one where context is king. They are looking for cues of what the searcher (you and I) is really looking for when they search for Kentucky fried chicken. Take that same kind of richness of context and apply it to the text itself on your website. It has become increasingly important to ensure your website’s copy not only addresses your visitors’ core search, but their motivations and environment as well. What do I mean? In a simple example, when a person is interested in immigration, they also are likely to have questions or ideas about becoming a citizen, the naturalization process, getting a green card… legally, work in the US, visas, worker status, help and more. For both your user and your search engine rankings, this sort of in-depth understanding of the words and concepts related to your topic is key as we move into 2010 and 2011.

Great, Clay. You’ve proven you’re a nerd and like tangents (like Google does???). How can you put this sort of Latent Semantic Analysis (“LSA”) to work for me? I’ve found LSA is great for rankings but, more practically, it’s great for giving you ideas on where to go with your web content development. If you can tap in to the relationships and concepts associated with your topic, it makes it much easier to produce interesting copy that’s useful to your visitors.

Here’s how you can put LSA to work for you using “motorcycle accidents” as an example. Search for the phrase and note the first web URL they return that has good content on the landing page. Take that URL, copy it, and visit the Google Keyword Tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. Under “How would you like to generate keyword ideas?” select the Website content radio button. Paste the URL into the input box and check the “Include other pages on my site linked from this URL” checkbox. Click to search and Google will go out and gather LSA ideas for you! The results returned include grouped keywords centered around concepts.

The first URL returned is http://accident-law.freeadvice.com/auto/motorcycle_accident_statistics.htm. Analysis shows related concepts like personal injury, motorcycle helmets, safety, learning to ride, head on crash, motor bike crashes, etc. Note those LSA keywords.

Move on to another top URL returned by Google: http://www.vtwinmama.com/accident_survivors.htm. Using the Google Keyword Tool on this URL, we get more keyword concepts like Harley Davidson, motorcycle safety, leather motorcycle jacket, motorcycle class and more. Each URL you research will return variants that are often useful. Of course, there is a lot of repetition of concepts like motorcycle accident attorneys and motorcycle safety but there are always gems in the results.

Thoughts?

The Nielsen Corporation recently released its search engine market share numbers for December 2009. Were there any surprises? Let’s look:

Combine Google with AOL (same results) and you can see that their algorithm serves up nearly 70% of all search results online. This really isn’t shocking, but the decline of Yahoo! is clear; they formerly served upwards of 25% of all search results. Now? They’re lucky to get near fifteen percent. Bing.com (aka Live.com, aka MSN.com) is still hanging in there with just under 10% of searches. One would have thought all of their marketing spend would have moved that needle more…

Validating the summary above is the December 2008 Nielsen chart:

As you can see, both Google and Bing have grown their market share by a fraction of a percent but Yahoo! has seen a more serious decline. There are no surprises here but attorneys and/or lawyer marketing professionals can take away a few ideas:

1. Google is still dominant and will usually be the source of your search engine traffic. You’re right to use Google to judge the overall optimization of your site.
2. Yahoo is on its last leg… While you can still find some good PPC values within Yahoo search and top SEO keywords will yield traffic, consumers are abandoning that search engine in a continuing stream.
3. Pay attention to Bing in 2010 but their rankings will likely fluctuate frequently. (I find bad search results quite often.) If you feel like getting to know Bing better, try their PPC program.

Thanks to the folks over at SearchEngineWatch for calling out this newly-issued data.

A metric that’s increasingly discussed is “bounce rate” – this is largely due to the fact that it’s featured as a statistic on the first report page of Google Analytics accounts. What is bounce rate, how is it useful and are there similar metrics that are useful for understanding your website?

In February 2009, the Official Google Blog released a two part post named The Power of Measurement (1)(2). In it, the idea of bounce rate is introduced by Avinash Kaushik and described simply as

It [bounce rate] measures the number of people who landed on your site and refused to give you even one single click!

In a later post Avinash went on to outline

It [bounce rate] is usually measured in two ways:

* The percentage of website visitors who see just one page on your site.
* The percentage of website visitors who stay on the site for a small amount of time (usually five seconds or less).

So what’s that telling you? A high bounce rate means visitors are coming to your site, not seeing what they needed or expected and they leave. There are three main ways bounce rate is useful:

• Assessing Referrers – If you’re running any advertising or link placements, bounce rate is helpful for understanding which referring sites are sending low quality or mis-targeted traffic. (Go to Traffic Sources, Referring Sites to view the top offenders.)
• Weak Pages – You can also look at your individual pages’ bounce rates and determine if their tagging is mis-targeted or the content could be improved. (Go to Content, Top Landing pages to view the pages with the highest analytics bounce rate.)
• Poor Design – A high overall bounce rate can also be an indication that your website navigation is unclear or your calls to action are weak. Does your site really make it easy for visitors to find information and/or talk to you? The answer to this question is usually found in A/B testing of one design’s bounce rate vs another.

We’ve addressed the basics of the Google Analytics bounce rate statistic, but are there other website metrics that can serve similar or complementary purposes? (For argument’s sake, let’s say you are not using an analytics package that doesn’t feature this statistic.)

• Avg Time on Site / Avg Time on Page - most reporting systems will tell you how long the average visitor spends perusing your site. A low number usually indicates less engaged (potentially confused) visitors. Of course, you can drill down to the individual page statistics and look at each page’s avg time on page for a deeper view.
• Avg Page Views per Visitor – a very high level metric. Think of it this way: if you have a page views per visitor of 1, your bounce rate is 100%. Very generally speaking, the higher your average page views per visitor number, the more engaged or interested your website visitors are.
• Time on Site or Page Views by Referrer - like the two metrics directly above, this information can help identify referrers sending low quality traffic.

Overall, bounce rate is both a measurement of visitor quality and of your website’s targeting. Traffic sources or landing page content should be inspected accordingly. If you aren’t drinking the Google kool aid and don’t use Google Analytics, there are similar metrics available in nearly all traffic measurement packages. Use information like bounce rate, time on site and page views per visitor to initiate improvement measures, test those improvements and re-test to maximize the return you receive from the traffic your website receives.

Quick post – Google AdSense publishers can now elect to feature YouTube videos in conjunction with Google advertising. It’s an interesting idea. I’m giving it a test run on my travel video page but I’m not sure of the value for professional organizations. I suppose with the right targeting… maybe a test is in the works.

[tags]adsense, youtube[/tags]