Photo courtesy of sqback

On February 7, 2010 an explosion ripped through the Kleen Energy power plant in Middletown, Connecticut, killing five workers and injuring a dozen more. The blast, determined to have occurred while workers were purging a natural gas pipeline, caused property damage to the surrounding communities, and was heard as far as 20 miles away from Middletown, a southern suburb of Hartford.

Local police, fire fighters, search and rescue teams, and emergency crews were the first to respond, followed by forensic scientists, OSHA and other groups. This is fairly standard. But another, now-standard response also began – the response by some Hartford-area personal injury and workers compensation lawyers.

While more traditional methods of speaking with the families of victims and the injured were employed by the local attorneys, two Connecticut firms utilized online marketing to reach out to potential clients. How?

A search on Google for “Middletown explosion” brings up a local firm’s ad via Google’s “pay per click” keyword-driven advertising system. The ad headline: “Gas Explosion Cases – CT.” Clicking on this ad brings you to the personal injury law firm’s website.

Another firm created a series of eight videos about the explosion and posted them on YouTube. The videos are set up like news interviews, with the law firm partner answering questions on filing workers compensation claims and other related topics. Links to the law firm’s website are next to each video.

Without being able to see the number of click-throughs the ad is getting or knowing how many clients (if any) each firm has acquired as a result of these activities, we can’t know the specific outcomes of these firms’ online marketing efforts. The number of views of the videos on YouTube is not all that high, but, according to a Small Firm Business article, the firm does claim to have gotten one client via the videos.

Regardless, these attorneys have the right idea: a powerful way to reach the maximum number of people around a specific topic is under your fingers. Millions of searches are performed daily. For the cost of a few videos, or a modest budget for a pay-per-click ad, you can get your firm’s message out to hundreds, thousands, maybe even millions of people. Even if it doesn’t result in a client right away, it does give you and your firm exposure, and a stronger online presence.

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.

I haven’t seen it on TV yet, but the SearchEngineWatch Blog has put up notice that there’s a new Yahoo! television ad spot that’s supposed to start running soon. Here’s the video:

Did it excite you? *Yawn* was my reaction. Will this move the needle for Yahoo! search like Bing’s recent ad campaign?