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Web Marketing Analytics

Web Marketing Analytics

 

Everything About Web Marketing Analytics

With two thirds of legal clients using the internet to find a lawyer, and web traffic diversifying into social media and mobile websites, it can be hard to know what marketing strategies are working for your firm.  Fortunately, there's no need to guess.  Web analytics marketing can give you solid, reliable information about your web traffic so that you can understand where your clients are coming from and how to get more business for your firm.  If you're new to web marketing analytics tools, read on to find out how to make the most of your data—usually without spending any money on software.

Why Should My Firm Use Web Analytics Marketing?

Whenever someone visits your law firm's website, they leave a digital trail.  Think of a web marketing analytics tool as an experienced tracker, following those trails to find out where your site visitors go and what they do.

A decade ago, technology for web analytics marketing was still in its infancy, and many sites only kept track of how many visitors their website had. Today, web marketing analytics tools have become a huge industry, with thousands of available reports that look at various aspects of your web traffic.  What has become clear for most firms is this: the “old” metrics of site visits and pages visited are not useful for understanding how your website can better help you meet your goals.

Instead of focusing on irrelevant statistics, web analytics marketing helps you figure out what parts of your website are generating clients and which parts are underperforming.  The best part about using web marketing analytics is the immense potential for customization: no matter what your needs are, you can generate reports that tell you what you want to know.

Web Analytics Marketing: An Ongoing Process

When firms start looking into web marketing analytics, they may have a clear one-time goal in mind, like a website redesign.  For example, let's say your website hasn't been updated regularly or redesigned since 2008.  Some parts of your site may still be working and drawing in traffic, and you need to know which parts those are and why they're working in order to make the best possible redesign.

Having this kind of short term goal for your web analytics marketing is fine, but it's important to understand that this type of marketing is always more effective when you use it continuously over a long period of time.  Web marketing analytics tools provide you with a valuable way to see trends as they happen, and there's no reason to ignore your analytics just because you achieve one or more of your marketing goals.

When you start to budget for web analytics marketing, then, consider it a permanent part of your business.  The internet certainly isn't going away any time soon, and if you're not monitoring your web traffic and analyzing it appropriately, you could miss the next big trend while your competitors capitalize.

Reports and Dashboards and Tools, Oh My!

One of your biggest choices in web marketing analytics is whether to hire a marketing service to handle your analytics or whether to have your own personnel working on analyzing your web traffic.  While there are advantages and disadvantages to both routes, the smallest firms may not be able to afford either a full-time web analytics marketing specialist or an outsourcing solution.  Solo practitioners may find themselves having to do their own web marketing analytics with very little guidance.

If you do choose to do your web analytics marketing in house (a good choice if you want to keep control over your data and custom reports), but don't have a full time analytics staffer, you can take web seminars on analytics tools and reporting.  Seminars can be a great way to familiarize yourself with new reports and creating custom reports.

Making Sense of Your Data

Once you've got the data from your reporting tools, web marketing analytics depend on thinking like a client.  The numbers you find are only a small part of your web analytics marketing solution: what you really need to understand is why those numbers are happening and what's making your clients leave your site or come back for more.

For small law firms, figuring out how clients work with your site can be difficult.  If you're having problems seeing why one web page is working while another isn't, try asking a non-lawyer acquaintance to enter your site at a landing page that isn't working and tell you what they see.  Alternately, just try something new, or even several new landing pages, and see which works best.  Continuous experimentation can lead to great web analytics marketing data.

Deciding Your Marketing Strategy

Your web analytics marketing tools can also help you decide what marketing techniques you can still tap into.  For example, if you're getting very few visitors from social media websites, you may want to integrate more social media content into your site.  If video search engine optimization seems to be working well for your website, you may want to include more videos or even start making a video blog series.

One of the biggest decisions for law firms is whether you want to emphasize pay per click (PPC) or SEO (search engine optimization) traffic.  While up to 80 percent of web traffic for law firms depends on organic search results, paid search may be more effective for your firm in particular—and your web marketing analytics can tell you exactly what the situation is..  You should use web marketing analytics to learn more about where your search traffic is coming from, then decide whether to concentrate on playing to your strengths or improving on your weaknesses.

Remember that you can always change your strategy if your web analytics marketing doesn't seem to be effective.  No matter what, though, you should give any new strategy some time to work: search engine optimization strategies, in particular, can be slow to pick up steam.  Being too impatient could lead to abandoning what might have been a successful strategy if you'd simply stuck with your first web marketing analytics solution.

 

Web SEO Analytics

Web SEO Analytics

 

Everything About Web SEO Analytics

Most website visitors—up to 80 percent—find law firms using organic searches, not paid results.  If your firm is considering switching from pay per click advertising to search engine optimization marketing, you need SEO web analytics to make sure that your strategies are working to deliver the clients you need.  This guide will help you get started with web SEO analytics and enhance the quality of your website's search engine optimization strategy.

Taking Your Time

When you start using SEO web analytics tools, you'll need to give the tools some time to gather data about your website.  Results from just a few days for a new website won't give you good data, and could lead to making big web SEO analytics mistakes.  Even though you may be excited to see whether your new strategy pans out, the first step is always hurry up—and wait.

Once you've gotten a large enough amount of data to do SEO web analytics (you'll want data for several hundred visitors, at a minimum), you'll have a better view of what visitors to your website are actually doing and how they interact with your content.  If you know from past experience that your visitor count varies strongly depending on the season, you may want to let your data accumulate for several months or even a year before doing web SEO analytics.

Which Tool Should I Use for SEO Web Analytics?

Before you can even begin to gather data for your web SEO analytics, you'll need to decide on what tools you want to use.  The most commonly used tools for SEO web analytics are made by Google, and are called—quite appropriately—Google Analytics.  If you're new to analyzing web traffic, using Google's services can be a great place to start.  Not only are these tools relatively robust, they're also free, and many tutorials online can help you get started if you're stuck.

Other search engines, like Yahoo (recently merged with Microsoft's Bing), also offer web SEO analytics tools.  You can also find SEO web analytics tools designed by other third party companies.  Often, these latter tools are specialized for some particular aspect of web SEO analytics: for example, some tools focus very strongly on conversions and landing page optimization, while others focus on keyword performance.

Because of the abundance of SEO web analytics software, it's critical to keep your goals in mind when shopping for your software solution.  Don't feel like you're confined to just using one web SEO analytics tool, if the one you've been using hasn't worked as well as you wanted.  While every additional tool you use will require additional training and time to use correctly, you may find that several tools in tandem can provide a much better solution than just using one piece of software.

Outsourcing Your SEO Web Analytics

If you feel unprepared to handle your own web SEO analytics, you may want to start talking about outsourcing.  For many law firms, outsourcing SEO web analytics is a much more attractive solution than doing analytics in-house.  Nearly anyone can use basic reports with analytics software, but really achieving your goals may require advanced web SEO analytics and custom reporting.  This can require the touch of a programmer, not a marketer, to get right.

If you do decide to outsource your SEO web analytics, try to find a service that lets you keep any data that you accumulate.  This may not seem important if you're not sure what to do with your data, but keep this in mind: the company you hire to do your web SEO analytics now may not be our outsourcing solution forever.  When you switch outsourcing companies, you want data continuity and a streamlined transition—and you definitely don't want to have to start gathering your data all over again.

Targeting Keywords

One of the biggest uses of SEO web analytics is figuring out which keywords are working for you.  If you're using search engine optimization, you're probably already paying a lot of attention to which keywords are driving traffic.  What web SEO analytics can do is help you figure out which keywords are actually getting you new clients.

You can engineer custom reports with SEO web analytics tools that show you not only which keywords are working best, but also what keywords are similar enough to generate more traffic.  Finding a keyword family can make your website copy more readable and less repetitive than simply sticking to a few simple keywords.

Making Your Website Engaging

No matter how good your website is at drawing search engine traffic, you need to drive conversions.  To do that, you need to keep your clients on your website—but what way is best for your particular firm?  What works for one firm might not work for others, so you will want to do real, data-driven web SEO analytics to make sure that your strategies work.  Here are a few strategies you may want to try to increase visitor engagement:

• Calls to action can often turn visitors into clients—you can experiment with SEO web analytics to figure out which calls to action are working and which are falling flat.

• Videos can make your clients up to 60 percent more likely to contact your firm.  Whether you're new to video marketing or already have a lot of videos on your site, you can use web SEO analytics to make sure that your videos are drawing in clients instead of sending them away.  You can also identify topics that would be good for future videos.

• Mobile traffic will account for up to 25 percent of web traffic by 2016.  This means that if your site isn't mobile-friendly, you could be losing clients every day.  SEO web analytics tools can see whether your mobile traffic stays or goes.

• Social media is the name of the game for marketers today, and you need web SEO analytics to make sure that your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts are doing what you want them to do.  SEO web analytics can also help you manage your reputation and ward off potential public relations crises within social media circles.

 

Search Engine Marketing Blog

Search Engine Marketing Blog

 

Everything About Search Engine Marketing Blog

One of the most powerful tools for driving new traffic to your law firm's website is a search engine marketing blog.  Search engine marketing blogs are now maintained by over 60 percent of America's largest law firms.  Whether your law firm is large or small, this guide can help you get started with blogging and avoid some of the pitfalls faced by owners of search engine marketing blogs.

Search Engine Marketing Blog Tip #1: Be Prepared

Some of the biggest problems with search engine marketing blogs are caused by a simple lack of preparation.  When you decide to install your blog, you should discuss the impact of a search engine marketing blog on your web traffic with your web hosting provider.  

Because search engine marketing blogs can drive a great deal of traffic to your domains, it's critical to have a web hosting solution that will fit your needs.  If the new traffic is too much for your hosting, you could suffer from downtime, and depending on how your search engine marketing blog is designed, this could take down your main website as well.

Search Engine Marketing Blog Tip #2: Participate in Other Blogs

Too many people who start search engine marketing blogs just write in their blog without thinking about commenting on other people's blog entries.  One of the best ways that you can improve your visitor count is to comment on someone else's search engine marketing blog periodically.

When you comment on other search engine marketing blogs, don't just post an advertisement for your blog.  This will lead to you being perceived as a spammer, and your search engine marketing blog may be dismissed as spam.  Instead, try to find search engine marketing blogs that are talking about topics that interest you, and make comments that engage you in the blog's conversation.

Commenting on someone else's search engine marketing blog may not deliver results right away, but often, this person will look at your blog and may link it in a later post.  This is one of the best ways to network with other people who maintain search engine marketing blogs like yours, and linking to other people's blog entries is also a great way to get reciprocal links.

Search Engine Marketing Blog Tip #3: Get Your Message Out

When a search engine decides what page rank various search engine marketing blogs should have for different queries, it's relying on several things to make that decision.  One of the biggest factors in search engine rankings is the number of inbound links you have, and whether those inbound links are from websites that are, themselves, popular and well-respected.

When you write a great entry for your search engine marketing blog, you should try to make that entry appear in more places than one.  Owners of some search engine marketing blogs have found that their search rankings improve when they post blog posts, with links back to their blog, to press release or article submission websites.  These websites help you build large numbers of inbound links quickly.

The other way to build inbound links for search engine marketing blogs is to use social media.  If people in your social media contacts like your search engine marketing blog entry, they'll link to it.  Using this method means that you'll have to be very careful to keep your keywords looking like natural language—but for optimum search engine results, you'll want to do that anyway.

Search Engine Marketing Blog Tip #4: Facilitate Conversations

The best entries on search engine marketing blogs are often the ones that leave room for discussion and questions.  You can facilitate conversations on your search engine marketing blog by asking open ended questions at the end of your blog entries.  

For example, let's say you're using your search engine marketing blog to market to other attorneys.  You write a great article about handling difficult clients, and you think that your methods definitely work.  You can either end the article with your observations, or by opening the floor: “This has worked for me, but what works for you?  Tell me your best strategies for helping clients who aren't easy to work with.”

If you want your search engine marketing blog to be conversation-friendly, you'll need to keep an eye on comments to delete anything that involves name-calling or spam.  Don't delete comments that just involve a vocal disagreement—search engine marketing blogs that do this are stifling conversation, not encouraging it.

Search Engine Marketing Blog Tip #5: Make Your Blog Mobile Friendly

In just a few years, traffic from mobile devices like smartphones and iPads will be more common than traffic from traditional laptop and desktop computers.  What does this mean for search engine marketing blogs?  

Well, for one thing, it means that you need to make sure that your blog install displays correctly on mobile devices.  If your blog is jumbled or squished with impossibly tiny margins whenever it's displayed on an iPhone, you'll lose out on that traffic.

You should also try to keep at least most of your blog entries relatively short.  Because it can be a pain to scroll a lot while using a mobile device, search engine marketing blogs with short, concise posts that still show insight will be most successful in the mobile market.

Search Engine Marketing Blog Tip #6: Experiment!

If something isn't working, many owners of search engine marketing blogs make the mistake of just stopping their blogging experiment.  Before you shut it all down, consider changing up what you're doing with your search engine marketing blog.  Sometimes, search engine marketing blogs just need to change who they're marketing to, or what their posts are about.

Whenever you experiment with your search engine marketing blog, you should give your experiment some time to work.  Changing the focus of a blog repeatedly can give your existing readers whiplash, and you want to maintain a core of readers who are promoting and linking your entries.

 

More Traffic. Web Traffic Analytics for Law Firm

More Traffic. Web Traffic Analytics for Law Firm

 

Everything About Web Traffic Analytics

 

Up to 95 percent of visitors to your law firm website may not comment, inquire, or do anything else as a result of their visit—they just click on your website, then disappear.  How can you find out more about this silent majority of customers?  Using web page analytics can help you figure out where your traffic is coming from and how to convert more page views into paying clients.  Web traffic analytics doesn't have to be tedious: with the right attitude and the right web analytics dashboard, you may be surprised at how easy it is to understand the traffic for your firm's website.

 

Start With Your Goals for Web Page Analytics

 

While it can certainly be interesting to tinker with a web analytics dashboard in order to get a better idea of what's going on with your website, the best web traffic analytics depend on having strong goals before you start.  Obviously your end goal is to get new clients with your web page analytics, but what do you actually want to analyze?

 

Your goals should depend on what kind of advertising you already use to drive traffic to your website.  For example, let's say that the majority of clients who contact you from your website arrive because of a pay per click ad campaign.  You'll want to use web traffic analytics to determine which of your ad groups and keywords are generating the best client leads.

 

Web page analytics for websites that primarily have a search engine optimization strategy will usually have different goals.  Your web analytics dashboard may reveal that one of your pages sees significantly more traffic than another, due to a high page rank for a term that is in demand with your target market.  Web traffic analytics will make it easier for you to identify the best SEO terms for your firm's marketing to focus on.

 

Your Web Analytics Dashboard

 

When you first get started with any new web page analytics tool, it's a good idea to familiarize yourself with the dashboard.  A web analytics dashboard is how you'll interact with a web traffic analysis tool, and while every dashboard is different, they share some key information.  

 

This dashboard is showing web page analytics for a full year.  Let's start by looking at some of the key terms involved in these web traffic analytics and what they mean.  Visits just means how many unique people (or computers) have visited your website in a certain amount of time.

 

You'll notice that this web analytics dashboard shows over 62,000 pageviews and only 16,000 visits.  Dividing these two numbers gets you your average pages per visit—about 3.9.  What we can see from the top several numbers in the web analytics dashboard is that the average potential client who sees this website visits for about 3 and a half minutes, and looks at four web pages in that time.

 

Every web page analytics service offers a different dashboard with different information.  The best way to familiarize yourself with the specifics of your service's web analytics dashboard is to just play around with its various reporting features.  Try to find out where your web traffic is coming from, and what search engines seem to be generating the most clients for your firm.

 

Web Page Analytics Services

 

Deciding which web traffic analytics service to use depends on your needs and—to put it simply—your comfort level.  Think very carefully about whether you consider yourself to be a beginner to web page analytics or a more advanced user.  If you're just starting out, you may want to use one of the more basic web traffic analytics tools, with a great deal of information online about these tools in case you get stuck or aren't sure what to do with the data you find on your web analytics dashboard.

 

If you're an advanced user, choosing a web page analytics service will depend on your goals.  Some web traffic analytics tools focus very strongly on maximizing page views through your advertising, while others emphasize conversions.  You may want to use a basic web analytics dashboard to figure out where your greatest strengths and weaknesses are, then pick another web page analytics tool that will help you arrive at your goals.

 

On-Site and Off-Site Web Page Analytics

 

There are two different types of web traffic analytics you may have heard a lot about—on-site and off-site.  But what's really the difference, and which is more useful?  Off-site web page analytics try to help you get information about potential clients and how people online are interacting with similar websites.  On-site web traffic analytics look at how visitors behave once they're on your website.

 

While you may want to know more about what potential clients are doing before they arrive at your website, the truth is that on-site web page analytics are usually much more robust and can drive traffic better than off-site analytics.  It's important to look at your own website before analyzing your close competitors and looking at the demographic information that off-site web traffic analytics usually includes.

 

How To Learn More About Web Traffic Analytics

 

It's not always easy to understand the tools you can use to analyze your website.  If you're new to web page analytics, you may want to look for online seminars that can teach you how to use the tools you have.  If you are using a leading web analytics dashboard like Google or Yahoo, there are many online tutorials that can guide you through the numbers you see and explain what they mean.

 

You may also want to sign up for classes.  Classes with an experienced instructor are one of the best ways to ensure that you understand how to get the most out of your web analytics dashboard.  If you've been having problems understanding web tutorials, classes are a great way to interact with an instructor and ask the questions you've needed to ask.

Using Google Profile Directories for Law Firm Marketing

Using Google Profile Directories for Law Firm Marketing

Google, with its nearly 67 percent market share, is the proverbial 800 pound gorilla in the search engine marketing world.  It's no surprise, then, that Google profile directories are some of the biggest and most relevant directories for law firms to become a part of.  If you're not already using the Google profile directory as part of your marketing strategy, there are several reasons that you may want to change that.  Keep reading to learn more about how Google profile directories are already helping attorneys across the United States, and how you can get onboard.

What the Google Profile Directory is For

Google's goals involve becoming a market leader in a huge variety of tasks involving information gathering.  Google profile directories were made in a way that makes them scalable all the way up to becoming a sort of giant global telephone book.  By creating a Google profile directory entry, you make your business more easily searchable by people looking for you.

Google profile directories also are a valuable source of link juice for many businesses.  Because Google's own pages are often relatively high Page Rank pages, and because the search engine ranks its own pages higher in its search results, you can give yourself a search boost by becoming part of the Google profile directory.

Local Search and the Google Profile Directory

One of the most innovative aspects of the Google profile directories is that they allow businesses not only to include their location, but also to have those location results displayed on a map.  This means that Google profile directory users can find the businesses that are closest to them and that would be most convenient for them to drive to.

Currently, Google profile directories including Google Places have been renamed to Google+ Local.  However, Google+ has not been as successful as the tech giant had perhaps hoped.  This means that there's a strong possibility the Google profile directory could go through another name change in 2013 in order to better reflect the ways users are actually using the site.

Local searches now represent about 30 percent of overall searches, and a higher percentage of searches for attorneys.  You're much more likely to get conversions from clicks you get through Google profile directories and local search than from clicks you get from traditional search engine rankings.  This means the Google profile directory is a great time investment for any law firm that primarily draws its client base from a small local area.  Firms that have a very specific legal field but nationwide geographic practice focus may have a harder time drawing in users from Google profile directories.

Creating Your Profile

When you create a profile on the Google profile directory, you'll be asked for a substantial amount of information.  There's always a temptation to put in only barely as much as is required and say “we'll come back to it later and fill it out more completely.”  However, that's not really putting your best foot forward, and this kind of short-sighted thinking is no way to get started on your search engine marketing campaigns.  Fill out all the information in a way that makes your website inviting for potential clients to click on.  You want to portray yourself as informed and professional, but not too stuffy for people to contact freely.

Also, this should go without saying: double check all of your data before you submit the profile to Google profile directories.  You don't want to have your Google profile directory entry accidentally direct people to an incorrect phone number or address.  If people make a mistake based on the entries you've placed in Google profile directories, they're unlikely to become a client of your firm—who would want an attorney who wasn't detail oriented?

Maintaining Your Profile

If any aspect of your law firm changes, from the name to the phone number to the focus of your niche marketing efforts, you should update your Google profile directory entry.  Google profile directories aren't somehow updated automatically, and you will need to manually input any changes to your firm in order to make sure that your directory entry stays current for prospective clients.

Monitoring Reviews in the Google Profile Directory

One of the more interesting aspects of Google profile directories is that business profiles allow people to actually write reviews about businesses they've patronized in the past.  You should check your reviews in the Google profile directory at least once a week after you have created your directory entry.  Keep in mind that even one or two negative reviews, if they're particularly harsh, can make it much more difficult to get clients.  People today have a tendency to look for reviews before purchasing any products or services, especially when those services are expensive.

There's always a chance that some or even all of your negative reviews are not written by disgruntled clients, but rather by your disgruntled competitors.  If you suspect that a review is not actually from a customer, you can report the review.

Keep in mind that not all negative reviews are just from the jealous competition.  Be smart enough to respond in a positive and optimistic way to genuine negative reviews.  There's nothing that looks worse for a company than loading off all of the blame onto a client who had a bad experience.

Incorporating Google Profile Directory With Your Marketing Campaign

One of the smartest things you can do with Google profile directories is encourage your best past clients to post reviews.  If you've received negative reviews from real clients, this is your best way to make those reviews irrelevant.  Enough positive feedback will start to overwhelm the negative reviews until prospective clients simply don't listen as much to the negativity.  Ask your social networking contacts to give you a positive review if they've had a good experience at your firm—this can be a great way to help you generate inbound links and great reviews.  You can re-post the call for reviews every few months, so that new followers see it.
 

How To Advertise Your Blog

How To Advertise Your Blog

 

Everything About How To Advertise Your Blog

Over 100,000 blogs are being created every day, and lawyers are six times more likely to be bloggers than the average person.  In this sea of newly created blogs, you'll need to figure out how to advertise your blog if you want to stand out.  Keep reading this guide to find out handy tips that can help you advertise your blog.

How to Advertise Your Blog: Word of Mouth

The most old fashioned way to advertise a blog is just to tell someone you know.  Of course, in the modern world, word of mouth has transformed.  You can use targeted small email lists to send out links to your blog entries when you think that an entry might be of interest to a particular subset of your friends, colleagues, or acquaintances.

Don't discount face to face interactions when thinking of how to advertise your blog.  You can advertise a log simply by including a blog URL on your business cards.

If you want to advertise your blog with word of mouth, you should get a URL that is short and to the point, and easy for people to remember.  It will be much harder to advertise a blog if its URL involves several slashes, numerical sequences, or long phrases.

How to Advertise Your Blog: Social Media

You can advertise your blog more easily if you use social media contacts.  By posting links to your blog in Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter, you'll advertise a blog to some of the people who are most likely to strike up a conversation or post a link: the people you know.  Think of social media as a way to extend traditional word of mouth strategies.

Even though you want to advertise your blog with social media websites, don't make your links sound overtly like direct advertising.  You want to make posts with value to the people you're connected to—that's how to advertise your blog most effectively on any social media website.  

Clicks aren't worth anything if they don't take your visitors to quality content.  Think of making your content available to your closest professional colleagues and people you know more distantly—in addition to making it easier to advertise your blog, this can keep your content high-quality.  You'll be less likely to skimp on quality in favor of search engine optimization if you advertise a blog consistently in your Facebook or LinkedIn feed.

Other blogs are another form of social media you should use to advertise your blog.  It's easy to advertise a blog by making comments in other people's blogs.  If you're linking to a post you've made, don't make it look like an ad: instead, you need to learn how to advertise your blog subtly, with posts that contain real, relevant information and not just buzz words.

How to Advertise Your Blog: Joining a Blog Network

Reciprocity is key to understanding how to advertise a blog on the internet today.  One of the best things you can do to advertise your blog is to join a network made up of blogs with similar themes.  If you advertise a blog from your network, they will generally respond by offering you similar advertising for your blog.

Let's say that you offer a guest blogging spot to a blogger who writes about a related legal area to the one you cover in your blog.  If they're in a blog network with you, they can offer to reciprocate by letting you do a guest entry for their blog.  This reciprocity extends your reach as a firm and can help you build the inbound links that are the foundation of good search engine optimization for your law firm website.

How to Advertise Your Blog: Blog Directories

One of the first steps you should take to advertise a blog when you've just started posting is to get your name into as many blog directories as possible.  This requires practically no computer knowledge, and most blog directories make this way to advertise your blog quick and intuitive.

After you learn how to advertise your blog more effectively through other channels, it's likely that blog directories will bring in less traffic to your blog than advertising your blog with other methods.  This doesn't mean that it's a step you should skip if you have a long-term strategy—just that it's only a first step.

Some blog directories may not allow just any blog.  To advertise a blog on these directories, you'll need to have a history of quality posting, preferably with other qualified attorneys linking to your entries and discussing them.  In general, you'll get more quality hits when you advertise your blog with these more selective directories.

How to Advertise Your Blog: Paid Advertising

Readers of other law blogs may be interested in posts like yours, so other attorneys you know may have blogs that are a natural place to advertise your blog.  You may want to ask some blogs you like whether they have advertising rates available for new advertisers.

If a blog has an audience with demographics you want to capture, you can start advertising your blog there.  Learning how to advertise your blog with paid advertising can have a bit of a learning curve: it can be much more expensive to advertise a blog on some websites than others, and it can be confusing to figure out where you're getting your best traffic from.

How to Advertise Your Blog: Mobile Advertising

If you want to advertise a blog that has mobile friendly content, you may want to send direct SMS advertising that links to your blog posts as part of your blog advertising strategy.  Advertising your blog this way will yield the best results when you use targeted lists of mobile numbers.

It won't do any good to advertise your blog with mobile direct ads if your blog's formatting appears off when it is visited with Android or iPhone devices.  Keep your blog entries short and to the point, easy to read during someone's commute or a quick break when you send an ad by SMS.

 

Web Analytics Strategy

Web Analytics Strategy

 

Everything About Web Analytics Strategy

 

Up to 90 percent of law firms today have web analytics available for their use.  Getting the most out of web analytics reporting, though, requires creativity and experimentation.  Designing your firm's web analytics strategy can help you to get more clients and a better overall return on investment for your marketing budget.  In this guide, you'll find out how to use web analytics reporting to change your firm's website, and how strategies for web analytics have changed over time.

 

Web Analytics Strategy: An Art Becomes Science

 

The first websites ever designed were implemented in the early 1990s.  These primitive websites contained mostly (sometimes exclusively) text, and had very few ways of tracking visitors.  By the mid-1990s, traffic counters had begun to track how many hits a website had received, but the science of web analytics reporting was still in its infancy: usually, all that a website owner knew about his or her site was how many visitors had arrived in the last month or even year.

 

Because so few statistics about visitors were tracked, trying to figure out what made one website successful while others failed was considered more of an art than a science.  Websites were viewed as creative projects, and heavy data analysis and number crunching were nearly absent.  However, as search engines became more robust, a number of web analytics reporting tools became useful.

 

Perhaps the biggest change to web analytics strategy came when Google announced that it had bought a web analytics reporting company and would now host free analytics software for websites.  Google Analytics brought hard numbers to websites that had previously been designed based on guesswork, and within a few years, hundreds of other web analytics companies had sprung up all over the world.  What had once been a purely artistic endeavor now required statistical analysis to understand.

 

The Scientific Method and Web Analytics Strategy

 

Because web analytics reporting has, indeed, become a science, it's critical to look at your website in the way a scientist would: hypothesizing, then testing hypotheses.  When you develop your web analytics strategy, it's not enough to just look at your most successful pages, then designing the rest of your website to look more like them.

 

When you're doing scientific experiments, it's absolutely critical to change only one variable at a time.  When you change more variables, you might change the result, but you won't know why.  Learning why one part of your website works while another doesn't is the most important part of web analytics strategy. 

 

Your web analytics reporting tools can only go so far—if you change too much, too fast, you won't be able to identify what made the biggest difference.  While it may be hard to wait for results, the best web analytics strategy involves making slow, gradual changes and carefully analyzing what works.  Keep in mind that even if one of the hypotheses you develop doesn't work, you still know more than when you started.  Not every experiment pans out—that's part of the science of web analytics reporting, and it's perfectly okay.

 

Strategizing for Continuous Improvement

 

Every experiment you do can help you to optimize your web analytics strategy.  If the results of a test show that a new type of landing page is dramatically lowering your bounce rate and you've done your experiment right, you'll be able to duplicate the results with several different landing pages.  Once you've got the bounce rate down, though, what about conversions?

 

Whenever you've hit one goal, it's time to revise your web analytics strategy to seek new goals.  What's critical about these new goals, though, is that they directly relate to the results of your previous experiments with web analytics reporting.

 

Web Analytics Strategy For Visitor Segmentation

 

Your web analytics reporting may reveal some interesting things about your website visitors.  For many law firm websites, different types of visitors are looking for very different things.  If your attorneys have several different practice areas, for instance, the content that would be relevant to a visitor looking for an attorney to represent them in divorce proceedings would be quite different from what a prospective adoptive parent would be looking for.

 

When two groups of clients want two different customer experiences, you can use web analytics reporting to figure out traffic flow and keep them looking at different pages.  This web analytics strategy is called visitor segmentation, and may even involve creating multiple websites for different aspects of your law firm.  Visitor segmentation isn't just useful for large firms—you may be able to increase key performance metrics for your web analytics reporting even if you're a solo practitioner, just by making sure different types of clients see different sides of your practice.

 

Web Analytics Strategy For Mobile Content Development

 

One way to get ahead of competitors in today's web searches is by developing a mobile-friendly website.  Many law firm websites are not easily viewable by visitors using smartphones, and if your site requires a potential client to scroll or zoom for good information, it's likely that they'll fly directly into the arms of your competition.

 

When you check out your mobile site, it's important to make sure that it's compatible with all types of phones.  Remember that you can redirect mobile users to a separate, mobile-friendly site, so there's no need to abandon your main website if it's meeting your current goals.  You may want to engage in different web analytics strategy for your mobile site, especially because it can be much easier for mobile users to make a phone call than to fill out an online form, making it harder to keep track of conversions.

 

Listening To Your Clients

 

Don't get so wrapped up in the website analytics reporting numbers that you lose sight of your clients and their stated needs.  Some of the best website analytics strategy can come from really listening to client feedback about your website.  For example, if you keep hearing that clients want more information about a particular topic before they call, you may have a new experiment to try.

The Do’s and Don’ts of Yelp for Lawyers

The Do's and Don'ts of Yelp for Lawyers

Yelp is one of the biggest websites for posting reviews of services all over the world, with over 50 million visitors a month visiting the site to check reviews while researching their purchases.  Yelp for lawyers can help with your law firm marketing and make it much easier to get new clients converting just based on your web presence.  This simple guide will help you understand some basic things to do and things to avoid when you're becoming part of the Yelp lawyer listings for the first time.

DO Take Charge of Your Own Yelp Destiny

Keep in mind that even if you're not among the legions of attorneys who have already become Yelp lawyers, clients can still post reviews of your firm on Yelp.  If you are a Yelp lawyer, on the other hand, with a full profile, you'll be able to check your reviews more easily and make sure that any reviews you get are the genuine article.

Don't let other people get to your profile before you do.  Yelp for lawyers works best when attorneys are taking charge of their pages and making sure that they contain correct information.  Yelp lawyer listings should be updated on a regular basis if your firm has any changes that could affect the accuracy of the information already contained in your profile.

DON'T Ever Post False Reviews on Other Profiles

When first using Yelp, lawyers often notice that some reviews are posted that don't appear to actually be from real clients.  This is one of the most deleterious parts of Yelp lawyer listings for attorney marketing, and you may think that posting reviews like that for your competitors would help you get ahead.

However, if you're found to be posting fake Yelp lawyer reviews, you could face severe disciplinary action from your state bar association.  This kind of conduct is considered extremely unethical, and on Yelp lawyers are expected to work only on their own profile rather than on profiles belonging to other firms or attorneys.

DO Solicit Reviews for Your Services on Social Networks

If you're already using LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, you probably have some friends and followers who will click on just about any link you post.  If this is the case, try asking your social networking friends whether they'd be willing to contribute a Yelp lawyer review for you.

Often, the people you're connected with on a social network will be more willing than other clients to help you by giving positive reviews to help you better compete with other Yelp lawyers.

DON'T Solicit Reviews from Non-Clients

Even though your great aunt Sally and your roommate from college want very much to see your legal career succeed, it's never a good idea to solicit reviews for your Yelp lawyer profile from people who've never actually been on your client list.  Make sure that it's clear when you make your social network call for reviews that you're only looking for reviews from real clients who can speak to your legal decisionmaking abilities.  Yelp lawyers who knowingly allow positive reviews from non-clients to continue being posted on the website may face disciplinary action, the same as if they had created the reviews themselves.

DO Ask for Misleading Reviews to Be Deleted

If you have received a negative review that sounds like it's not from any client you've ever had, you can immediately notify Yelp to let them know that someone has posted a false review.  Yelp lawyers find that this happens relatively frequently, and it's often difficult to track down which Yelp lawyer posted the negative review to defame you.

Generally speaking, the best way for Yelp lawyers to deal with receiving a false negative review is to report it, have it removed, and move on.  Trying to get a competitor disciplined is a waste of time unless you have very good proof of who created the false Yelp lawyer reviews for your firm.

DON'T Respond Unfairly to Real Criticism

When you see something negative said in your Yelp lawyer reviews, some attorneys have a tendency to get defensive.  But when reading reviews on Yelp, lawyers should look at negativity as giving an opportunity for improvement.  If you comment on a negative Yelp lawyer review, your comment should be constructive and contrite, rather than defensive or aggressive toward the reviewer.

If potential clients see that someone is giving extremely vitriolic feedback to negative reviewers, they won't be very likely to contact your firm.  The best web presence for Yelp lawyers is to look collected and professional, even if someone's saying things about your law firm that are deeply negative and hurtful.

DO Monitor Your Reviews Frequently

By finding that your Yelp lawyer profile has received a negative review early, you can do a lot to mitigate the damage.  You can, as many of the best Yelp lawyers do, respond in a thoughtful and kind way to the negative review, which will improve audience perception of your practice.  You could also make sure that you now solicit positive reviews from some of your best clients, in order to drown out the voices of the disgruntled clients who had posted a review.

DON'T Panic Over One Negative Review

It's easy for Yelp lawyers to become panicked at the idea of a negative review if they've never received one before.  Some attorneys with Yelp lawyer profiles have even gone so far as to sue for defamation.  However, as long as the reviews were posted by actual clients, it's very hard to collect on this type of suit.  Most businesses, including law firms, that have tried to sue due to Yelp reviews have had the case thrown out and been forced to pay the attorney fees for the defendant.

Use positive techniques to regain trust from your internet audience if you've lost some of it due to a negative review.  Suing typically just makes it so that the lawsuit is forever a part of the Google results when someone searches for your law firm.  That's not what any firm wants on the front page.

Blog Ads

Blog Ads

 

Everything About Blog Ads

Ads for blogs are nothing new.  Today, blog ads can help you earn about $50 to $750 every month if your blog gets about 100,000 visits.  Keep reading this guide to learn several techniques for how to get ads on your blog.  You'll learn how ads for blogs work whether you decide to handle your own billing for advertising or not.

How to Get Ads on Your Blog: Doing it Yourself

If you're experienced with ads for blogs, you may want to handle your blog ads all by yourself.  Certainly, this route has some advantages.  If you don't know how to get ads on your blog and use a blog network instead, you'll have to pay a cut off the top to the network that is handling the billing.  When you do the work yourself, you get all the money—but you also have to deal with all of the problems.

Usually, before placing blog ads, companies will want to see some hard numbers from your website about the amount of traffic you usually get.  Ads for blogs usually cost more when the demographics reading your blog are more impressive.  If your blog has already established an audience of prominent lawyers and judges, you won't have to worry as much about how to get ads on your blog as a new blog for a solo personal injury lawyer.

How to Get Ads on Your Blog: Using Ad Networks

The work of finding blog ads isn't always worth it.  You should ask yourself before looking for ads for blogs: how much can you really expect to make?  While most blogs from small firm lawyers are attracting new business, can you really say that your articles see enough page views to make it worth learning how to get ads on your blog yourself?

If the prospect of saving a little money doesn't sound like it would be worth it, and you'd just like your blog ads to bring in some spare cash, you can sign up with a blog network.  Odds are, unless your blog really hits it big, ad networks aren't going to be a gigantic revenue stream.  However, you can make a modest amount of money consistently while doing very little yourself.

Ad networks can teach you how to get ads on your blog quickly, and will take care of all billing and analytics so that you don't have to worry about anything.  You can get ads for blogs running in a matter of days when using a blog network, and don't need to worry about blog ads taking over valuable time that you need to use growing your business in other ways.

How to Get Ads on Your Blog: Sponsored Blog Posts

Increasingly, sponsoring a blog post directly is considered a great way for companies to advertise products and services.  Some sponsored posts are ads for blogs—perhaps with a guest writer.  Other times, a company may offer you a free product or service in exchange for your discussion in your blog ads.

When writers don't make it obvious that sponsored blog posts are blog ads, readers can feel betrayed.  This is why it's important to note when a post is sponsored, so that people know that they're reading ads for blogs.  If the content is interesting enough, people won't skip over a sponsored post.  Just make it interesting and make sure that it looks more like your typical content than it does like typical blog ads, and you'll be well on your way to advertising success.

How to Get Ads on Your Blog Without Scaring People Away

When you start selling ads for blogs, you may try leveraging your personal and social media contacts only to find out that you're losing friends without getting more blog ads sold.  This is definitely one of the reasons that many law firms choose to outsource their blog advertising needs, but you can still learn how to get ads on your blog without an ad network and without alienating people that are close to you.

Don't use a hard sell approach for selling your blog ads.  Instead, make the rates for your ads available publicly on your blog and send a link to people who indicate an interest.  Ideally, you'll learn how to get ads on your blog by just getting people to click on your entries.  It's much better to get people interested in your ads for blogs by making quality content than by trying to engage in direct sales, especially if you've never done this type of marketing before.

How Much Will Blog Ads Make Me?

Unfortunately, the truth is that ads for blogs no longer make as much money as they used to.  If you learned how to get ads on your blog several years ago when law blogs were relatively new, you may have gotten a better rate on return.

Today, you should only expect ads for blogs to generate a large amount of money for your law firm if you're able to attract a huge audience.  There's no reason not to shoot for the stars, but you should realize before you get into the blog ads business that most legal blogs aren't going to be great advertising moneymakers.  

Your best chance for monetary success is to try to develop a great community for discussion.  You may want to consider a group blogging effort with several lawyers from your firm, because these kinds of group blogs lend themselves very easily to informed dialogue and discussion.  When you get more readers participating, commenting, and staying longer on each page, you'll be able to charge more for every blog ad impression.

Analyzing Results of Blog Ads

In order to get high-paying ads for blogs, you'll want to show that you can generate not just clicks, but high quality, high-conversion traffic.  Having good web analytics can help you to show advertisers that advertising with your blog is worthwhile.

You should take as much time, in general, analyzing a new campaign with web analytics as you did planning the campaign.  It's possible to learn a great deal from your existing web traffic—don't ignore it!  Too many firms waste data that could be shedding light on the best new ways to market your firm on the web and beyond.

 

Secrets of Successful Link Building Campaigns For Lawyers

Secrets of Successful Link Building Campaigns For Lawyers

Link building isn't easy to learn—which probably explains why only about 60 percent of American companies are currently making any specific link building efforts.  When you're working a law firm, developing a link building campaign can seem stressful, but in reality there's much less to it than you'd think.  Keep reading this article, and other link building articles on lawfirms.laws.com, to find out how to establish link building campaigns that really work without sacrificing your reputation.

Creating a Link Building Tool Kit

Many of the tools you already use on the internet can be considered allies in your link building campaign.  For instance, let's say that you already have a significant presence in the blog world.  That's great—we'll consider that blog a link building tool that you can come back to and use at any time.

Your contact list is also a link building tool.  Building your contact list and making sure that many people on it are well-connected online can make your link building campaign far more successful.  

In addition to these kinds of tools, you'll need some software.  Use caution before purchasing any kind of link building tool online—make sure that you're getting the best deal for the functionality offered.  Some link building tools simply aren't worth it.  In some cases, there may be a way to obtain a free version of the same link building tool that you just paid for it, without sacrificing quality.  Try using search terms relating to the aspect of your link building campaign that you're working on, then find a tool that works for your purposes.

What to Avoid in Your Link Building Campaign

Not every link building tool works in a way that will actually lead to improved search engine performance.  In fact, if you mismanage your link building campaign by using unethical techniques or having your links show up on thousands of unrelated websites, you could actually see your search rank decrease.

Why?  Because when a link building tool works by putting your link on so many unrelated websites, Google takes notice.  Because of some recent algorithm updates, called Penguin and Panda, if your links appear to be the result of paid linking or article marketing programs, you may find these inbound links now impact your quality score negatively.  Because of this change, Google has seen requests for removal of over ten million links that were now hurting SERPs.

Now, some companies that want to sell a link building tool that uses these methods may claim that Panda and Penguin aren't completely effective.  This is true—websites that use bad linking methods do still appear in some searches.  But what will you do when the Google engineers get better?  Undoubtedly, Panda and Penguin aren't the only updates we'll see to change these types of results.  It's very likely that if Google engineers don't want people using those services, they'll rapidly move to make it harder and harder to use them effectively.

The truth is, paid linking and article spinning were always cheating—and everyone who did it knew.  As a legal professional, you don't want to look like a cheater, so avoiding any link building tool that works in these ways is a good idea.  Do you really want to risk your existing SERPs for the sake of a potentially unethical link building campaign?

What Does a Great Link Building Campaign Look Like?

If bad link building usually involves irrelevant and low-quality websites, you might guess that excellent link building relies on high-quality websites and highly relevant content.  You'd be right.  Instead of using a link building tool that promises instant results, you can use reliable methods to create a great (and more time-consuming) link building campaign.

For small law firms, some of the best ways to kickstart your campaign is to talk to people you know who already run websites.  If you can pitch a guest story for a blog, or an interview for a podcast or blog, you'll grab new inbound links.  Typically, these kinds of guest stories and interviews involve at least one mention of your website, and they can prove very productive for attorneys who know how to use them.

Using LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter

If you're looking for a resource beyond your Rolodex to help you build your link building campaign, try the folks you're connected to on social media.  Your social media contact list can be the most important link building tool in your entire arsenal.  You can make yourself clearly available and highly visible as someone to interview or to invite as a guest blogger, and you can promote your own blog entries in this way as well.

What makes these strategies work even better is the ease with which people can share a link they found originally on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.  This part of your link building campaign is actually killing several birds with one stone—in addition to making yourself more visible on social media and building link presence, the shares can expand your reach.  This means that on an hour for hour basis, spending time on your social media presence is probably one of the single best SEO strategies you can enact.

Long Term Link Building Campaign Strategies

To find out what the next big link building tool will be, you'll want to stay aware of blogs that are relevant to legal marketers and search engine optimization specialists.  Many blogs will actually discuss the results of a link building campaign, including what went wrong, so that you can learn from professionals.

You'll also want to look at optimizing your site for mobile viewers.  As more traffic goes mobile (it's already a quarter of web traffic today) you'll increase your conversion rate by making sure your website looks great to people accessing it from smartphones and tablet PCs.  These surfers are more likely than anyone else on the web to convert right away, as long as you're optimizing their viewing experience.
 

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