Online Web 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.


Today, the biggest catchphrase in link building is “one way link building.” One way links are considered to be the highest quality links available, and these “backlinks” can help you to market your law firm and get to the top of searches. Of companies that have recently begun using a formal SEO process, only 37 percent are currently doing any external link building at all. Keep reading this guide to find out whether you need a one way link building service.
Reciprocal Links and One Way Links
Before we can really talk about the nitty gritty of one way link building services and whether you should even use a one way link building service, we should get some terminology out of the way. There are two ways that websites can be linked by another website: reciprocal linking, and one way linking.
If someone links to your website and you don't link back, this is called a one way link (or, sometimes, a backlink). If, on the other hand, you're linking to someone's website and in exchange they're linking to yours, this is called reciprocal linking.
The History of Reciprocal and One Way Links
In the earlier days of the internet, there were a lot of different reciprocal linking schemes to improve the search results of websites. As these became more and more common, reciprocal links stopped being a very good indicator of whether a website actually had quality content or not. To acknowledge this change, changes were made in search engine indexer algorithms that basically punished websites that overused reciprocal linking.
Enter the one way link building service. As soon as one way link building was the next big thing, it seemed like every marketing company on the web was offering one way link building services. However, for every one way link building service that was doing innovative, ethical, organic link building, ten more sprung up that were promising only links—in great quantity—and nothing more.
As those kinds of one way link building services became common, it created the same kinds of issues that reciprocal linking had previously caused. Every time a one way link building service posted a link to a totally unrelated website, they lowered the quality of the web as a whole.
Google's response was to release changes to its search functionality, mostly involving the weighting of inbound links by source quality. This means that the business models of many of the one way link building services have recently become untenable—their results are now neutral at best, negative at worst. Not every one way link building service uses these methods, but it's something you should keep in mind when you look for someone to provide one way link building services for you.
Developing One Way Link Building In-House
Finding a reliable one way link building service may sound tough enough that you'd rather do it yourself. If you're going to be handling your own one way link building services, you'd be wise to take a hint from the Beatles and get a little help from your friends. If you can ask friends, colleagues, family members, and neighbors to post links to your content on their blog or website, you'll be able to avoid hiring one way link building services while still getting all their benefits.
If you let people in your life know various topics that you'd answer questions about online, you never know who might have a blogging or podcast interview opportunity that could lead to one way link building. These kinds of venues are becoming increasingly common, and what's more, they'll appear as a very high quality link—probably better than you'd get from one way link building services. Social media can also help you find backlink leads, often better than a one way link building service.
Using One Way Link Building Services
If the idea of working on your own for every new backlink makes you want to stay home from work tomorrow, you may want to just hire a one way link building service to help you with your one way link building needs. As long as you're careful about vetting your one way link building services (by asking them to provide references and case studies), you can usually improve your one way link building efforts.
Because there are so many different ways to engage in one way link building, every one way link building service emphasizes different aspects of creating backlinks. Some may be blog-focused, while others look at social media or social bookmarking sites for backlinks. You should, generally speaking, use a one way link building service that already has strong experience doing one way link building for the legal industry. Without this industry experience, they may make missteps or even land you in hot water with the state bar association by violating advertising ethics guidelines.
Resources for One Way Link Building
Whether you're interested in doing your own one way link building services or hiring a one way link building service to do the work for you, it's good to know about best practices. One of the most crucial documents for marketers on the web right now is found at https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356. This document is part of Google's content guidelines. It outlines what Google currently considers a “link scheme” that could be found to be in violation of the terms of service or Webmaster Guidelines.
Every search engine that your website will appear on has some kind of content and quality guidelines, but Google's guidelines are typically the gold standard for ethical one way link building.
You should also use local community resources for one way link building. Think your community doesn't have any? Think again: check your local chamber of commerce and see if they do one way link building by listing your firm's name and contact information, as well as its URL, on their online directory of local businesses. These local directories are used by Google when choosing which results to offer people who have made searches with geolocational terms.

For a long time, Google and Twitter have had some problems with each other. Twitter, in 2011, accused Google of deliberately quashing some social media search results in favor of Google's own Google+ social networking platform. In turn, Google said that Twitter had made itself extremely unfriendly for search engine optimization in many ways. As of October 2012, that has changed. With the new Twitter profile directories on the website, you can now actually search for any profile you want. This guide will help to familiarize you with the new Twitter profile directory system so that you can start using Twitter profile directories as part of your law firm's search engine optimization strategy.
What Does the Twitter Profile Directory Show?
Currently, Twitter is working on getting all of its profiles listed in the Twitter profile directories on the website. It can be relatively difficult to crawl all of the profiles to create the Twitter profile directory, so the directory system itself should be considered a work in progress, at least in the beginning while it continues to populate with profiles.
Twitter profile directories are listed in alphabetical order both by account name and the “real name” listed on the account. Currently, the Twitter profile directory includes millions of entries, and will include millions more by the time it is finished indexing.
While Twitter said that it would only include public accounts in Twitter profile directories, so far that has not seemed to be the case. Many writers online have noticed that there are many entries for protected profiles in the Twitter profile directory, but if you attempt to click on any of these accounts you still won't be able to see the content that is being posted to them.
Why Did Twitter Want a Profile Directory?
It was very important for the website to create Twitter profile directories because Twitter had started having some problems with Google and other search engines. The reason for the problem? Without some kind of indexing structure or a Twitter profile directory, it was very difficult for search engines to help people find the Twitter accounts most relevant to their search results. Because Twitter has a very high Page Rank and popularity level, just adding Twitter profile directories has helped Twitter results climb even higher in Google search engine rankings.
It's likely that it will still take some time for Google to fully catch up with the new Twitter profile directory structure. Bing is taking even longer—a full week after Twitter announced the new Twitter profile directories, Bing had only indexed one page from the results.
Even though the Twitter profile directory is a bit late on the scene, it's better late than never for the social media giant.
How Can I Use the Twitter Profile Directory for Search?
Let's say that you want to find some other profiles for users on Twitter you know. You might think that Twitter profile directories would make this task a great deal easier. However, the Twitter profile directory actually only gives browsable results, rather than allowing for individual users to search. Why? Because adding its own search capacity would be a huge burden to Twitter's servers and would make the website much more likely to go down because of too much traffic.
However, Google can do much of the heavy lifting of search instead of Twitter. Because people's Twitter names appear next to their profiles in the new directory, you can now actually use a search query on Google to look for Twitter profiles: “site:twitter.com/i/directory/profiles” followed by your search term. This will restrict your search results to profiles found on public Twitter profile directories.
How Do I Get New Followers with the Twitter Profile Directory?
Twitter profile directories mean that it's more important than ever to have your firm's name listed as the official name on your Twitter account. Too often, businesses try to get clever with their naming, but your firm name and a very brief description will make it easier for people to do a search of the Twitter profile directory and find your firm.
Part of the way that Twitter profile directories work to help you get new followers is simply by making Twitter more popular with Google. Having user directories and a more easily indexed site means that Google will now rank Twitter results even higher than it currently does.
Which Search Engines Have Indexed the Twitter Profile Directory?
The truth is that Twitter profile directories are actually so new that no search engine has yet successfully indexed every page of results. However, the search engine that has done by far the most indexing of Twitter profile directory pages is Google. Both Bing and Yahoo, as well as the search engines with less market share than the “big three,” are running quite a bit behind in the race to index the entire profile directory system for Twitter.
At last count, Google had indexed over 500,000 results through the Twitter profile directory. If you want to find any Twitter profiles through a search engine, it appears that Google will be your safest bet for the foreseeable future.
What Does the Future Hold for the Twitter Profile Directory?
As Twitter profile directories become more accepted by search engines, you can expect your Twitter links to be worth even more. What this means is that you should try to emphasize inbound links coming in from Twitter in order to make your search engine optimization efforts more successful.
It's possible that at some point in the future, the Twitter profile directory will become user searchable, rather than just making itself available for indexing by search engines. If this is the case, expect for there to be some growing pains while Twitter gets used to the search traffic and makes it easier to search for profiles that belong to people you'd be interested in following or having follow you.