It seems like there's a new internet marketing trend just about every year, but 2012 has been a doozy: there are so many internet marketing trends that it's hard to keep track of them all.  As 2012 winds down, here are seven trends in internet marketing for attorneys and law firms that will help you develop a comprehensive marketing plan for 2013.

Top Internet Marketing Trend #1: The Dawn of the Local Web

One of the biggest changes for 2013 according to internet marketing trend watchers is that local's going to be more important than ever.  When people started using the internet, they were fascinated by their ability to connect with people all over the globe.  The idea that you could be sitting at a computer in Chicago, typing to a person who lived in Munich or Vladivostok or Canberra that you'd never met before, was one of the biggest changes that the internet brought into our lives.

However, as people have grown used to the internet, they've grown increasingly attached to local based searches and are forming geographically based groups.  There are a number of reasons for this, but the simplest is this: when you This means that more and more, you're better off following internet marketing trends that emphasize the local.  Consider getting a guest blog spot on a blog that talks about local issues, or be the interviewed guest on a local podcast if some aspect of your legal practice might be interesting to listeners.

Top Internet Marketing Trend #2: Everyone's a Social Butterfly

Some lawyers are still clinging to an idea that seemed reasonable enough a few years ago: that internet marketing trends toward social media sites are just fads.  Today, social media is finally big enough that holding onto that attitude may be what's holding you back.

There's no reason not to become part of social media sites today.  Social trends are the biggest internet marketing trends today for a reason.  Surveys show that the number of people who have obtained consumer information about attorneys from social websites has been doubling for each of the last two years.  By giving yourself a social presence, you're not just jumping on an internet marketing trend bandwagon.  You're giving yourself the best chance to build long term professional relationships with a much wider range of people in your community than you ever had access to before.

Learn how to really use technologies like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.  Don't start by assuming you already know what internet marketing trends matter most on these sites—look for information that is recent, because what works at one time may not work six months later.

Top Internet Marketing Trend #3: Grassroots, Not Astroturf

Because internet marketing trends in 2011 and 2012 have tended to result in attorneys paying a lot of attention to review websites, some lawyers have gotten the same idea as other businesses: to either write the reviews themselves or have some other non-client write good reviews to keep out the bad.  However, most review websites have protocols that prevent this, and will stop you from using bogus reviews if any are detected.

Even if you're not caught automatically by the site, putting new fake reviews onto a review site ignores the real problem.  If someone's actually giving you an honest critique that you're failing to address, you're not going to cover up the problem for long with fake grassroots postings.  Instead, try responding to a person's negative review reasonably and without assigning blame to the other person.  You may also want to ask real clients you know have had a positive experience to write about your law firm on the same sites where you're currently having problems with negative reviews.

Top Internet Marketing Trend #4: Funny Business

Not every attorney is funny, and not every attorney has to be.  But if you honestly do have a good sense of humor, you can get on board with a lot more internet marketing trends.  The internet is often a funny kind of place, and if you understand its inside jokes and its memes, you'll be a lot more likely to succeed at placing funny content on the internet.

Just because a website is funny doesn't mean it's not informative.  A number of websites are devoted to lists of interesting events or people in history or pop culture (like cracked.com) and these sites are likely to have an educational as well as humorous tone.  You can give people valid legal information even if it's got some humor tied into the message too.  Stay away from jokes that could cause offense to oppressed groups or that could give you public relations problems later on.

Top Internet Marketing Trend #5: Ratings Matter More

Ratings really do make a difference for your law firm's success now.  Because it's one of the biggest internet marketing trends, you should put some effort into your strategy for building a good presence on these sites.  Most review websites, like yelp.com, allow businesses to include some information about themselves.  Keep this information updated consistently, and double check to make sure there are no typos.  No matter how many clients want to call your office after seeing your Google Places profile, if your phone number is a digit off, they'll be thwarted every time.

Top Internet Marketing Trend #6: Rise of the Mobile Machines

The shift toward mobile content distribution is one of the ongoing internet marketing trends that shows no sign of slowing.  All internet marketing trend predictions estimate that in less than 36 months, people will use mobile internet as much as traditional desktop or laptop internet.  Get to know mobile marketing and mobile internet marketing trends now, including things like QR codes (whether or not you decide to use them).  If you're not informed about the possibilities of mobile marketing, you may be leaving huge numbers of clients out of your strategy.

Top Internet Marketing Trend #7: Diversified Content

It's not enough any more to just have a blog, unless you're part of a very small firm, according to current internet marketing trends.  Consumers want videos and infographics.  The more that you diversify your content, the more you'll be ready to evolve toward whatever the next internet marketing trends will be.

The biggest social news stories of 2012 shocked internet marketers and changed how the web works for consumers.  But perhaps the biggest shock is how little these major changes are actually noticed by consumers or anyone who isn't in the know about social media.  If your law firm is getting up to speed about social media strategy, you need to know about these big social news stories from the last year.  We'll tell you the basics of each one and why they matter for marketing in 2013 and beyond.

#1: Social Media's Ever-Expanding Demographics and Geography

One of the biggest trends in social news stories for 2012 was the idea that social is no longer just a fad.  While social networking was once considered the exclusive province of high school and college students, today, it's just as likely to be grandmothers and grandfathers signing up for the biggest social media services.

What's more, the vast expansion of broadband internet connections and smartphone technology, along with 3G coverage expanding to rural areas, means that rural people are also able to use social media more than ever before.  Law firms should start to consider having a social media strategy today even if they're not in a major metropolis—even the smallest towns in the sleepiest areas of the United States now have vibrant groups on Facebook.

This also means that you should never assume that your demographics on Facebook and Twitter are exclusively young people.  If younger and older people using your firm's services tend to have different concerns, you may want to change the visibility settings so that you're only showing each group of people posts that they're likely to get something out of.

#2: The Skyrocketing Success of Facebook

Facebook has become the biggest social network in the consumer arena by far, and at this point just about every law firm should already have a Facebook firm page.  However, one thing that has been consistent about the legal industry with every social network is that lawyers have lagged behind in social media adoption.

The social news stories coming out about Facebook should be enough to convince you to sign up.  In many ways, Facebook is the best generator of the kind of word of mouth buzz that used to bring people into attorneys' offices.

#3: Twitter's Continued Rise, 140 Characters at a Time

While it still lags significantly behind Facebook in terms of overall users, Twitter was reported by social news services to gain millions of users in 2012.  Twitter's users tend to be more influential and connected overall than the average person, and that means that people who tweet can become fantastic brand ambassadors when given the chance.

Law firms can use this social news story to their advantage by signing up for a Twitter account as soon as possible.  Very few attorneys are on Twitter compared to other social networks, according to social news stories about attorneys' use of these sites.

#4: Foursquare Defeats Gowalla, Becomes Geo-Champion

Until early 2012, there were two major competing services that were in social news headlines for geolocational targeting abilities and “check ins” based on a person's location.  The two services were Foursquare and Gowalla.  However, Gowalla couldn't make it through 2012, and Foursquare became the undisputed champion in this area.  If you're looking for a solution that lets you target potential clients in particular geographic areas, your law firm needs to start considering Foursquare.  While this smaller social networking service isn't useful yet outside of cities, you may want to keep an eye on its growth.  It recently made its search results available to non-members, which may mean that it will become a hub for more and more traffic.

#5: Google Search Updates Make Social More Important for SEO

One of the biggest stories to affect internet marketers in 2012 was Google's newest update, Penguin.  This update changed the way that Google ranked some pages, and made it much harder to use things like article spinners to make your web presence look bigger than it was.  Because of this, social news became more and more important, as social sites skyrocketed to the number one place for companies to build their inbound links.

Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are the three most important networks you can focus on if you want to improve your search engine performance in Google as well as on Bing/Yahoo.  If you're interested in creating more inbound links, you may want to look at social bookmarking websites like reddit in order to get your links looked at by more people. Social bookmarking sites also allow the possibility for your content to go viral.

#6: Sponsored Social News Stories Become Major Form of Advertising

Social networks used to just have content from friends, and no ads at all.  Ads started out on the sidebar, but in 2012, they started invading the Facebook feed.  Sponsored social news stories can now be purchased by companies, which can show them to people in a certain area, people in certain demographic categories, or people who are connected to people you're already connected to.  

You can also promote your posts to ensure that everyone who is following your Facebook timeline sees your story in their feed.  If you don't promote a post, only approximately 15 percent of your Facebook friends will usually see what you have posted, according to social news published in 2012.

#7: Ratings Websites and Continued Yelp Controversies

One of the biggest social news controversies in 2012 centered around Yelp.  Yelp was already sued once for blackmailing business owners, but the judge granted summary judgment in their favor.  However, in 2012, many businesses still noted that they were seeing the same pattern: consistent positive reviews, a phone call from Yelp asking them to sign up for an expensive premium service, and then their positive reviews disappearing if the service was refused.  This is definitely an issue to watch out for if you rely on Yelp for any part of your law firm business.

Over 90 percent of attorneys are now engaging in some form of online marketing.  However, with online marketing comes new copyright concerns, and many attorneys may not be aware of the ways in which they may be committing copyright infringement or making the theft of their copyrighted materials easy.  In this guide, we'll go over some of the basic concerns about copyright that attorneys should keep in mind when they are designing websites, making content for search engine optimization purposes, or distributing content, including through social networks.

Search Engine Optimization and Infringement

One of the biggest recent changes to how search engines rank pages is that Google will no longer rank inbound links that come from web pages that they believe are copyright infringement.  This means that if you use an “article spinner” service (which makes many copies of an article, possibly changing it slightly, and copies it to various locations on the internet for the purposes of building a large number of inbound links in a short period of time), only one of those links is likely to count for each new piece of content you feed to the spinner.

This means that you'll now need to focus not only on getting content that is high quality, but on differentiating your content on different websites.  It won't be enough just to change a few words around—Google is now clever enough to detect when this kind of obfuscation is used in many cases, and will still consider it potential infringement.

Try to make sure that you're not copying a great deal of your content from one page to the next—not for different social media profiles, not for blog entries.  If you're copying content in a way that looks deliberate, it's likely that it will be regarded as an attempt at over optimization, which will be used as a reason to lower your site's rankings.

Intellectual Property Problems With Online Images and Text

When you're building your website for the first time, you may not have paid much attention to where you got the images and layout of your website.  However, in most cases, those images and any content that you “borrowed” were actually copyrighted by their creator and may not have allowed free use by just anyone.

You should always check the source of any content that you post online in order to avoid potential infringement claims later on.  There are a large number of stock photo services that will provide you with the full licensing rights to use an image as long as you pay their licensing fee.  By paying these fees, you ensure that you can defend yourself from any infringement claims.

Monitoring Your Online Reputation

You should also make sure that you're monitoring your reputation online.  Infringement isn't the only way that your content can be used inappropriately.  If you find any potentially defamatory content online, there are reputation management services that can quickly get it removed from most websites.  

As a law firm, you'll have a lot more credibility when you send a cease and desist than most other website owners, so you probably don't need to worry about defamatory content remaining up for long as long as you maintain an attitude of vigilance.  Self-Googling isn't just a vanity pastime when you're working in this kind of market—it's an absolute necessity for understanding what people are seeing first about you and your law firm.

If you see that you're having some reputation problems, you should take some positive action as well as taking action to remove the offending statements.  One of the best ways to make sure that your search results stay “clean” even with a negative result is by simply adding more content that is high quality and will rise above the offensive page in search rankings.  Because most web searchers never go past the first or second page of search results, you don't need to push it down much to make it disappear for the vast majority of users.

Monitoring the Use of Your Content

If you've used original content—for instance, original writing or photographs of your law office—as part of your website or your social media presence, you should search for that content online periodically.  Infringement can happen while you're not looking, and you may find that your content has been used for purposes you would not have approved of.

If you do find that infringement has happened, you can start by emailing the webmaster of a website.  If the webmaster doesn't respond to a cease and desist notice, you can try talking to the hosting provider.  Many hosting providers are very sensitive to infringement claims and will take a website down immediately upon being provided with evidence of infringement.

Keeping an Eye on Infringement Laws

The state of copyright on the internet is in some flux.  There are currently several plans in place from content providers to start punishing copyright infringement, but most of these schemes involve video and audio files rather than the types of content most likely to be part of an attorney's website.

You should make sure that you're keeping informed about any changes to internet copyright law and how internet service providers deal with claims of infringement.  You should also make yourself aware of your own hosting provider's policies about infringements of copyright, in case you would ever be accused of infringing on someone else's copyright.

How to Avoid Infringement

In addition to making sure that all of your images are purchased legally from image websites or are created in-house specifically for your site, you should also make sure to run your written content through a plagiarism checker before you post it.  If it detects plagiarism, you should alter the content significantly so that you aren't considered to be infringing on another person's intellectual property when you post your article and have it indexed by Google.
 

Attorneys who work primarily for businesses as clients can have a harder time creating a brand and marketing that brand than attorneys who market to consumers.  B2B content marketing can seem tough because the clients are tougher—they expect a better product and they're not afraid to shop around.  You can make those attitudes work to your advantage by using these strategies as your firm heads into 2013.

Strategy #1: Make Good Blogs Into Great Blogs

Surveys show that most business oriented firms are already doing some B2B content marketing through blogs.  Lots of lawyers have good blogs.  However, few have truly great blogs.  Why is that?  What separates the excellent from the merely pretty good?  B2B content marketing depends on knowing how to appeal in a way that goes beyond just you talking and informing.

The main thing that a great blog has and a good blog doesn't is a sense of community.  A great blog owner makes room for conversation and community, and knows how to moderate comment sections to minimize animosity and spam while maximizing opportunities for genuine interaction.  Great blogs develop cult followings not just because the B2B content marketing on your page is great, but because you've let your readers and blog become a community that is more than the sum of its parts.

Strategy #2: Don't Be Afraid of Social Media

Many attorneys don't see the benefits that social media can bring to their firm's marketing and brand presence. However, one of the best things you can do for B2B content marketing is to make and share social media content.  You should make sure that if you're doing business marketing, you're focusing most of your internet marketing dollars on LinkedIn.  Surveys consistently show that to be the most commonly used social network by the people who would be most likely to be on your client list.

Good social media conversations are a huge part of B2B content marketing.  Remember that every conversation you have in public on social media websites will become something that other people look at and use to judge whether you're a good firm to do business with.  Put your best foot forward, and don't let anger or frustration cause you to lose sight of your brand image.

Strategy #3: Start Writing Engaging Press Releases

A press release is only as great as the eyes that it attracts.  If your B2B content marketing press releases are only getting published on websites that will publish anything, odds are they're no longer helping your website's SEO ranking much any more.  That's because of some algorithm changes collectively referred to as Google Penguin that effectively shut down the usefulness of those sites.

Instead of writing press releases designed for search engines, start writing ones designed for humans.  If you create compelling storytelling as part of your press release B2B content marketing, you'll have a much easier time getting noticed.  Sending your press releases to the right people can also be a big help to your overall success rate.  Try sending press releases with your B2B content marketing to local business magazines as well as bloggers who discuss local business news.

Strategy #4: Consider Creating Microsites

One strategy that less than a third of law firms are currently using to attract B2B clients is creating microsites.  It's now so cheap to buy domain names that there's nothing wrong with buying a domain for a single very specific purpose—even if that purpose is just to showcase a single piece of B2B content marketing.

A successful microsite will address a direct consumer need in a way that is informative or entertaining.  If you're not paying attention to your clients' needs, your presentation is likely to fall flat on a microsite.  Make sure that any microsites you create are professionally designed—it's all too easy to tell when a law firm has skimped on its website budget.

Strategy #5: Webinars and Webcasts

A large number of law firms are already making at least some use of web broadcasts, including webinars.  If you're not already creating webinars, consider the types of legal subjects that you most enjoy talking about and helping people understand.  By creating a webinar, you let people see you in action, explaining things just like you'd explain them to a client.  It's a great introduction to how you practice law and what a client can expect from your firm if they choose to hire you.  This is one of the best B2B content marketing practices for firms to increase their conversion rates.

Strategy #6: Creating Useful, Targeted E-Mails

You may think that direct email is dead as a B2B content marketing technique.  The old days of just spamming everyone and seeing what stuck are over—spam filters are too good, and even if you get past them, people are too cynical.  Instead, try microtargeting niche guides.  When someone becomes part of your email list, keep track of the things they're actually interested in and only send them emails about those things.  This keeps the number of people who unsubscribe from your email list lower, while giving a higher chance that people will contact you because of your email marketing.

Strategy #7: Mobile Optimized Content

The mobile web is growing in importance at a truly staggering rate.  As more areas become connected with 3G and 4G coverage, mobile traffic online has been doubling every year for the last three years.  It is expected to nearly double once more in 2013, eclipsing desktop and laptop traffic as the most common way for people to access the internet.

This means that the best time to start optimizing your B2B content marketing for mobile was about 6 months ago.  The second best time is today—and you need to hurry!  Other firms are starting to figure out B2B content marketing through the mobile web, but as of now, only 15 percent of firms are actively using it.  By getting in on the ground floor, you ensure that some of the most affluent and connected clients are able to connect easily to your law firm through their mobile devices, including smartphones and tablet computers.

If you've been looking for local SEO tips, you may be seeing a lot of contradictory information.  That's because local search SEO is a relatively new form of search engine optimization.  Already, local accounts for over 20 percent of searches, and over 40 percent of searches made from a mobile device like a tablet PC or smartphone.  Keep reading to find out how you can use local search SEO to get clients whether you're a huge law firm or a solo practitioner who's just starting out.

How Local Search SEO Helps Small Firms

When you're a small law firm, you don't really usually draw in clients from everywhere.  Most small firms bring in clients just from their city and the surrounding communities.  Local SEO tips can help you to get more of those clients without advertising to people from outside your community (who, after all, are very unlikely to ever become paying clients of your firm).

The great thing about local search SEO is that it can help to level the playing field with the larger law firms in your area.  If you use local SEO tips effectively, your website will appear on the same search pages as your larger counterparts.  That's the kind of advertising you can't afford to do in most media—to actually stand shoulder to shoulder with the biggest firms in your area.

Combining Local Search SEO With Mobile Optimization

In today's cell-phone oriented world, mobile optimization has become more important than ever.  Your firm needs some local SEO tips that are designed for mobile devices.  One of the reasons that mobile phones are great for web traffic is that they make it very easy for a potential client to actually call your law firm and schedule an initial consultation.  Local SEO tips that don't include any information on mobile traffic are likely to be outdated—by 2014, most web traffic will be mobile based in the United States.

When you're doing local search SEO with mobile optimization, you'll need to work on a lot of different profiles for ratings websites and Google+ Local.  In addition to hiring consultants who can give you some local SEO tips for mobile, you may want to consider reputation management services.  These services work to monitor what's being said about you online and can provide you with quick and easy takedown of negative reviews in many cases.

Local SEO tips are actually becoming more important than ever because of mobile phones.  Why?  Because most mobile customers just don't want to have to click, scroll, and zoom through many different pages.  They're more likely to just click on one of the top five results of their search than desktop users.  This means that you need to get your local search SEO to the top of Google and Bing if you want to draw in mobile traffic.

Combining Local Search SEO With Direct Ads

One of the biggest disadvantages of local SEO is that even if you use all the best local SEO tips, you're not going to see results today or tomorrow.  It can take weeks, or even months, for your local search SEO to pay off.  Meanwhile, your firm needs to attract business today.

The best way to fix this problem is to look for some direct advertising tips as well as local SEO tips.  Direct advertising gets you new business as soon as you start using it, and can be much faster than local search SEO.  

While you're doing direct ads, though, you should be enhancing your website with local SEO tips so that you can gradually get away from paid search results.  Studies show that only about 20 percent of users actually click search ads, so you'll be better off with effective local search SEO than you will be with even the best advertisements.

Can I Do Local Search SEO For Free?

One of the best parts of local SEO tips is that if you use them wisely, you won't need to keep paying to make your website stick at the top of the search results page.  In fact, if you're willing to do a lot of local search SEO research, you will probably be able to do most of your search engine optimization without paying anything.

That's because local SEO tips blogs are common online, and most of the best tools for local search SEO are actually available completely free of charge.  Google and other search providers like to provide web developers with these tools so that legitimate websites know how to reach the top of search engine results.  You can start your local SEO efforts by just looking around on Google's website and using its built-in tools for local search engine optimization.

Hiring Local Search SEO Services

The fact that it's possible to read enough local SEO tips to do it on your own doesn't mean that you necessarily want to.  If you're having trouble developing a local search SEO strategy, you may want to think about hiring a service to help you do better.

These local search services can do the tedious work of putting all of your firm's information into various profiles and local directory listings.  Instead of spending hours trying to apply local SEO tips to your web presence, the work is done for you and the results will start to build slowly over time.

The Future of Local Search SEO

Local searches are likely to get even more local in the future.  Because people tend to want services right away when they're using mobile devices, you may even be able to focus your marketing strategy on SEO for people right in your neighborhood or other hyperlocal area.

Attorneys in cities have started using local search SEO to optimize for suburban customers by incorporating keywords pertaining to nearby suburbs in their copy.  This is a great way to expand your reach if you're trying to compete in a cutthroat area, and it's a strategy attorneys are likely to use for years into the future.