So what exactly goes into “SEO Friendly” web design?  Here’s a big hint: it should be a lot more than just filling out your title tags for you!

While I could easily stretch this article to 4000 words and still not cover all the minutiae of SEO friendly design, I’m going to stick to a few basics that should give new site owners a quick checklist to run through to see whether or not their site is up to snuff.

Well doesn’t this SEO friendly site look…professional…

Preliminary Keyword Research

This, I think, is one of the bigger warning signs indicating that you might have been duped. How is your web designer supposed to know what your business should be chasing if you’ve never even discussed the direction you want to take?

While it’s easy enough to pick a few obvious keywords for your site to focus on, it takes a lot of work (and a lot of interaction) to figure out the best direction for a client’s keyword list.

At a minimum, we try and determine a few key traits about a customer’s client base in order to figure out what their most lucrative keyword segment is, as well as determine what kind of business the client wants.  This is information that can’t be gleaned from an old website or content the client might provide.  For example, we had client, a home improvement company, that when they came on was ranking fairly well for (and getting business from) doing wallpaper and painting work.  Seems like a no brainer to chase those keywords right?

Wrong!  Our client was sick of wallpapering and painting work and the amount of tire kickers that he had to send bids to was eating up a lot of his time.  He had no idea that all this business he didn’t want was coming from the fact that he was so well-optimized for those phrases.  After a short discussion we determined the direction he wanted to go in and created our design and SEO campaign to follow suit. He’s now taking on more of the higher-paying work that he wants.

This is the type of research that should be driving on-page SEO decisions when it comes to your web design.  We typically use some of the following questions to feel out what kind of business our clients are looking for and incorporate the answers into our preliminary research:

• What would be “the perfect” lead for your business?
• Currently, what kind of new business are you bringing in.  Is this what you want to focus on?
• What geographic locations do you currently work in?  Do you provide on-site services or serve customers from a business location?
• Could you provide a range of towns/areas you would want to provide services for?
• Who would you consider some of your main competitors?
• Is there any type of work in your field you would want to avoid?

Decent Load Times

Site speed is an increasing factor in search rankings, and taking the time to code out a website that loads quickly should be a top priority.  Now a reasonable load time depends entirely on what kind of site you’re running – but generally, anywhere under 1.5 seconds would be considered good in my book – though don’t fret if you see that number change each time you run a speed check.

Pingdom’s site speed check. Check it out here.

During your development process I’d recommend keeping tabs on how long it’s taking your site to load.  You can run this tool on a development server that your web designer might have supplied to give you an idea of how it’s looking so far – but the real test is once that set is live and hosted on your servers.

There’s a few quick things you can do speed up your site without too much of an investment – I’ve actually covered the topic before on a guest post I wrote for Link Assistant about a month ago so I’ll refrain from repeating myself.

Complete Title/Meta Tags

Yeah, I riffed on these earlier in the article, but this remains an important step.  You’ll want to be on the lookout for a few things here:

• Unique title tags, meta tags, and meta descriptions for each page
• Making sure the tags used are relevant to the content on the page
• Make sure they remain under the recommended length for each tag
  • Title Tags: 60 characters
  • Meta Tags: 160 characters

A quick tool you can use to check these quickly is Screaming Frog or Xenu.  These programs will allow you to “spider” your website and can quickly give you a look at all of the title and meta tags in use without having to page through each site and check these manually.  There are free versions of each of these programs so you won’t need to dish out any cash.

Outbound Do Follow Links per Page

Having too many outbound links per page is also a warning sign this site isn’t as SEO friendly as you might have thought.

While it’s time consuming and monotonous to manually check these – I’d again fall back on Screaming Frog and Xenu to check through your site.  Screaming Frog in particular will give you a “outbound links per page” metric you can use to see whether you should be concerned.

Generally it takes a good amount of outbound links per page to consider them a problem – I’d recommend getting concerned if you see anymore than 70 outbound links per page - especially if it is the same amount of outbound links appear on all pages.  Steps to get this resolved include no-following internal links, reducing the amount of navigation present on the site, and reducing footerwide links you have on each site.

WC3 Code Validation

The WC3 Markup Validator remains the defacto source for checking to make sure your website was coded up to current web standards.  Having a properly coded site is vital these days, and if you’re seeing too many errors showing up through this tool it may be good to bring it to the attention of your web designer and have him or her fix these errors.

There will be a lot of erroneous warnings that come up depending on how the site is coded and what CMS it’s running, but this is a quick way to see just how friendly your site is.

Webmaster Tools: 404 Errors, Sitemaps & HTML Improvements

In addition to using WC3 Validation, Google Webmaster Tools remains an important source for determining just how SEO friendly your site is.

There’s going to be a few item’s you’ll want to check out here – this tool contains a lot of information to determine whether or not your site is ready for an SEO campaign.  If you don’t have both Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools set up – that’s a pretty big warning sign.  If you do – proceed to the next steps.

Health>Crawler Errors

This section will contains any 404ed links that Google is running into as it crawls your website.  Any good web designer (capable of coding out SEO friendly sites) should be taking the time to 301 redirect any old URL structure over to your new architecture.  This is one of the repeat offenders I see in any SEO friendly website our company inherits.

You’re not only losing backlinks to those old pages when these aren’t set up – you’re also losing customers; as they’ll continue to trickle in through your broken URLs and quickly exit your site.  Ideally, you want to see this error rate as low as possible (preferably zero) but maintaining this crawler health is an ongoing process.

Health>Blocked URLs

This screen helps us determine whether your robots.txt is set up correctly.  While your designer may be blocking a few URLs (which is normal) Google will give you a red flag on this screen if their crawler or an excessive amount of URLs are blocked.

Optimization>Sitemaps

Sitemaps are another crucial part of a SEO friendly website – they allow Google to much more easily crawl through all your pages without getting stuck in your navigation.  You should see a sitemap linked to your Webmaster tools profile (along with it’s current crawl data) and preferably a link to your sitemap in the footer of your site as well.

Optimization>HTML Improvements

This section shouldn’t be reporting any problems, but if you have duplicate meta tags, title tags, or URLs you get a nice breakdown of any issues Google finds here.  This section is another good one to watch – as your site expands you’ll inevitably need to check up on this section and make some updates, but for a brand new site you should be in the clear.

If you see this message above – you’re in good shape…

Did Your Site Pass the Tests?

If you notice some red flags when going through these steps, you probably shouldn’t immediately pick up the phone to rip your web designer a new one.  There are a huge number of factors that come into play here and some reasons why you’d see some of these tests come up negatively despite having a well designed and SEO friendly website.

If you have some questions about your sites you’d like us to look into feel free to sound off in the comments and we’ll post some updates!

I’m here to tell you how to find the baseline of exactly how often your law firm should publish articles in order to positively affect your Google search rank.  It should be states (and I will repeat this) that site size does not automatically equal page rank.  However, if you are publishing quality content, what it does do is help your site along in naturally doing all of the things that Google’ algorithm likes, thus positively affecting your page rank.  Of course, there are plenty of other reasons to publish content on your website, but this guide will give you a general publication frequency to help your firm catch up to your competitors or stay on top of competitors trying to catch you.  Keep in mind that there are a ton of other factors that play into how websites make it to the front page.  This article is based on the premise that all other non-content-frequency factors are considered equal.  I know, I know, suspend your disbelief for the next 10 minutes.

Outlining some of the factors that affect Google rank will be useful in adjusting the final amount of content that you need to publish.  If you are lacking in any of the next areas, you should publish more than the number your competitive analysis provides.  If you are doing well in these areas and your competition is not, you can probably lower the amount you will arrive at later in the article.

Each of those dots represents a law firm in Center City Philadelphia

On-site Factors that can Affect how Often Your Law Firm Should Publish

There are a couple of on-site factors at play that can affect the frequency with which you need to publish and the weight with which Google will give your site credit for the content you publish.  Notice that I keep italicizing ‘can’ – that is because none, one, all, or some of these factors can all play together to act as an accelerator or hindrance to how well your blog posts perform in Google’s search algorithm.  Think of these as either shortcuts or roadblocks for the number of articles you should be publishing.  Managing these factors is not an exact science and is more of a combination of best practices.

1. Keyword Density

Think of this as the total frequency with which words appear in your content and pages compared to the total volume of all the words on your site.  You will want to have higher keywords densities for the words that you are chasing without it seeming unnatural.  Keywords that you will want to have high densities for include your practice areas, your geography, and client-side issues.  In many ways, this metric is directly tethered to the next category, total site size.

2. Total Site Size

Think of this in terms of the total number of pages on your website.  If you are just starting out, you are going to fall into that category of needing to publish as much as you possibly can.  Some legal websites on the front page for very competitive keywords can have as many as 5,000 pages (consisting of articles, practice descriptions, and  news stories).

3. Current Search Rank

Are you already on the front page of Google for your niche?  Are you number 8 trying to get to the top spot or are you number 46 trying to crack the front page?  If you are already on the front page, figuring out how much you need to publish is easy – you just need to be publishing more often than all of the sites ahead of or behind you.  If you are on the seventh page trying to get on the first page, then the answer is probably ‘as much as you possibly can’.  If you’re in the middle somewhere, figuring it out can be a little more tricky.

4. Age of Site and Overall Authority

You could write 10 articles about this topic alone, so I will try and keep it short.  The age of your domain is becoming an increasingly important factor in the weight and authority that Google gives to your site and the content on it.  It’s one of the factors you can’t manufacture and in many ways, other important factors like keyword density and total site size are linked to it.  It is simply impossible (in most cases) to be publishing 50 posts or articles a day.  So if your competitor’s site has 5,000 pages on it, it has probably been around for a while and naturally enjoys some of the other favorable factors as well.  In this sense, domain age is becoming equally as important to, if not moreso, than some of the other factors that go into determining a site’s overall authority.

However, the age of your site is only one of the import factors that go into how Google considers the overall authority of your site.  The authority metric dictates how the content that you publish is valued within Google’s algorithm (both on-site and in the search results).  Page authority is a somewhat vague factor and no one has definitively figured out how it affects the upward aspirations of websites at any authority level.  This is because, 1. many websites don’t maximize the effect of their authority (as applied to search rank); 2. many high authority websites don’t care as much about Google rank because visitors come there on their own; and 3. websites with high authority are probably doing all of the right things anyway (publishing high-value, unique content many times a day that gets linked to on it’s own.)

In theory, if you are a law firm such as Morgan Lewis and have a high authority (6), you should be able to rank for almost any term (related to practice areas) because your site enjoys a relatively high authority rank within Google’s algorithm.

So how does this affect the frequency with which you need to publish?   If you are Morgan Lewis, you don’t need to publish nearly as often as a law firm with a lower site authority.  This is because the Google rank for almost everything you publish (if formatted and presented properly) will benefit from your authority and have an increased (as compared to the same content on another site) impact on all of the other factors that make a website rank well.  The bad news is that page authority is exponential – meaning that if your site has an authority index of 2 and you are chasing a Morgan Lewis (with a page rank of 6-7), you may need to be publishing 2-3 times as often as they are over a long period of time.

Think of page authority as an overall combination of on-site factors that affect how well the content on your site performs in Google search.

5. Overall Quality of Your Site and the Content on it

Another factor is the overall quality and formatting of your site.  If your site has non-Google-friendly formatting of titles, subheadings, and descriptions, you have an uphill battle.  If the previous content on your site lacks in quality or length, you have an uphill battle.  If your content is too similar to other content already published elsewhere on the web, you have an uphill battle.  If you website has broken code, is slow to load, or there are problems with the hierarchy or pagination, you have an uphill battle.  The format of the content can also make a difference.  Does your law firm publish content as a PDF?  PDFs are harder to rank than html and can easily be ripped off and duplicated on PDF archive websites.  Make sure that your on-site factors are not sandbagging your efforts.

Now that we have covered some of the on-site factors that can help or hurt your publishing efforts in search, how do we determine how often to publish?

Next, Take a Look at the External Factors

1. Look at Other Firms on the First Page of Google

Google your niche and your geography.  Take note of the first 10 firms that show up.  You can ignore any sites that are not law firms.  Legal websites often have to compete with lead generation and directory sites such as lawyers.com, findlaw.com, avvo.com, and the others.  Those sites have huge total site sizes.  For the sake of this exercise, ignore those sites.

2. Find out how Much Content Each Firm Publishes per Month

‘Content’ can be considered any page that is added to Google’s index – a blog post, article, newsletter, or press release that results in a new web page being published.  For more accurate data, you can use the average for several months worth of data.  To find out how many pages a website has had added to Google’s index for a given period of time, you just have to search for that site and change the time settings on the search to either the previous month or an arbitrary amount of time.

First enter this phrase into the Google search bar: “site:WHATEVERWEBSITE.com”.  I’ll continue with the Morgan Lewis example.  Your search should look like this:

You’ll notice that the search returns about 252,000 results, but that is not the number we will use for the total site size.  There are many duplicate and junk results in that 252,000.  In our search for a smaller amount of time, the number of junk results are negligible and won’t skew the results too significantly

Next, we will want to change the time parameter for the search to one month.  In my example below, I use the average of three months worth of data.  Click on ‘search tools’ to expose a drop down menu.  From this drop down menu, select ‘Any time’ and select ‘Custom range…’.  Then set your custom range of time.  All of the pages that are in the search result now are web pages that have been indexed in Google during that time.  For our math, we will use the number of pages indexed in Google.  Note that this is not always the same as the number of pages published during that time, rather how many were crawled and indexed by Google.

3. Find out how Many Pages Each Firm has in Google’s Index (Site Size)

To find out how the total number of pages a website has in Google’s index, visit Webrankstats.com and enter the domain.  Scroll down the results to see how many pages are in Google’s index.  A couple of notes: It should be repeated that site size does not equal page rank.  Having more pages does, however, allow you to natrually accomplish some of the other things that positively affect your page rank and inbound traffic (such as rank for more terms.)  Also, Google likes sites that publish quality content often, so if you are doing all the right things for each new page you are publishing, you help your rank.   It goes back to site authority.  If you are publishing quality content often, Google will crawl your site more often and give you a higher authority.  In short, site size only matters when you are doing everything else properly.

4. Do a Little Math

Let’s use the Philadelphia market at an example of how to do a competitor analysis.  I have broken down some of the area’s firms into an area of competition and tracked how often they are publishing content.  I took a per month average based on the months December 2012 to February 2013.

I did this exercise with the 10 largest law firms in Philadelphia because I was interested in how often they published content.  What I actually found was much more interesting.  To read more about what some of the BigLaw firms are doing wrong when it comes to their internet marketing, read “What Are the Big Law Firms Doing Wrong When it Comes to SEO?”.

To demonstrate how to determine the number of posts your firm should be publishing, I will use some realistic, yet very competitive examples.  Let’s take a look at ten Philadelphia law firms that show up as the first ten results when you search for ‘Philadelphia personal injury attorney’ (again I ignored directory and lead-gen sites).  I chose personal injury because you can probably infer by the fact that these firms are showing up in such a hyper-competitive niche that they are doing most of the right things SEO-wise and have been for some time.  This will be a more true example of determining the number of posts to publish.

10 Top Ranking Philadelphia Plaintiff Injury Firms :

Blogging isn’t usually this relaxing.

Determining how Often to You Need to Publish

If you take the average amount of content that the sites on the front page are publishing, it will give you a baseline of content that you should be publishing.  That amount would be great if you were already on the front page, but most sites are trying to catch up.  This is where total site size comes in.  You’ll notice that most of the sites in our personal injury example have a healthy number of pages on their site but are publishing fairly few posts a month.  That is because they are almost all in the mature phase of their content strategy – they are playing from the front.  Many of these sites are doing things such as publishing on a network of off-site blogs that they are building.  That is good news for us trying to catch them.

If You are Playing from Behind:

Let’s say that you are a Philadelphia personal injury firm with a total site size of 40 pages chasing sites on the front page with an average site size  of 499.3.

This is where your current rank comes into play.  When determining the amount of time that you are giving yourself to play catch up, find out how far down you are in the search results and adjust the catch up time accordingly.  Some things to keep in mind when setting a catch up goal for your site:

1. Unless you are paying people to write your content or have many associates who are writing for you, you will probably want to come up with a realistic content schedule.

2. If you are far down the search results, give yourself more time to catch up to the sites on the front page.  This will make your final rank more stable and more natural in Google’s eyes.  If a site goes from ranking 130th for ‘Philadelphia bankruptcy attorney’ and one month later is in the top five, Google may think something is up and slow your ascent or wildly fluctuate your rank.  Here’s a good theory that we have tested as true:  If you are within the top 20 results, feel free to give yourself a time table of one month.  If you are between 20-40, give yourself between one and two months to catch up.  If you are between 40-100, give yourself three months or longer.  Anything beyond 40 is probably not being actively SEO’d and is ranking based on other factors.  This is essentially no-man’s land.  If you are completely off the search results (over 100), consider cleaning up the on-site issues that are probably holding you back before you begin to devote efforts to publishing content.

3. Remember to log out of Gmail and open an incognito window when determining where you rank for a search term (failing to do so will make you show up much higher than you do).

Let’s go on to say that your site is somewhere down the list and we want to come up with a realistic content schedule of four months to catch up to the sites on the front page.  That means that you can determine exactly how often you will need to publish to catch up and surpass the average site size within four months.

Here’s the math from the example:

499.3      (average site size)

-    40      (your site size)

__________________

459.3    (the difference is current site size)

+ 4(3.3)   (months multiplied by the average number of posts)

___________________

472.5    (how many more pages they will have than you after your desired catch up target)

/      4    (how many months you have to catch up to their total site size)

___________________

118 pieces of content a month

So, there you have it – you only have to publish four pieces of content a day for the next four months straight.

Now obviously, 118 posts per month may not be realistic and seem a little surprising.  This number essentially falls into the realm of  ’as often as you can’.  If you are in this boat – a new site going against established sites in one of the most competitive niches in major market – you may need to adjust your timeline or devote considerable resources to doing all of the other things correctly.

Think about it – a site with 40 total pages probably hasn’t been around for very long.  Most of the pages on the front page for this niche have been around for some time.  You are essentially condensing several years worth of effort into four months.

The reality is that the difference between firms on the front page and other firms in a less competitive market is usually not very much.  In many cases, giving yourself two or three months would be very reasonable, and you may only need to publish 20 pieces of content per month during that time.

Note: If you are already on the front page, adjust the figures to include everyone ahead of you.  If you are third, take the averages of the two sites in front of you.  If you are already on the front page, dial your target time to 1 month if you wish to do so.

If You are Trying to Stay on Top:

You need to determine how often the next four sites behind you are publishing and multiply it by 1.5.  That will ensure that you are publishing more often and make it very difficult for them to catch you by only using a content volume strategy.  You should also be doing all of the other things that benefit search rank and website user experience.  Create content that potential clients will find fresh, interesting, and useful.  You can also always be improving your on-site conversion factors.  You can also try building out the sophistication of your efforts.  Once firms reach the front page for their main site is when many of them start to create and build off-site blogs that after time can also rank for the same keywords or benefit the main site to keep it’s existing rank.   Many other firms start to add issue-specific resource pages, video, audio, and all of the other things that can also benefit your search rank.  That is the state that most of the firms in our example are in.  That is why we produced such a ridiculous number.

So Why Does This all Matter?

There can be arguments made that site size doesn’t matter and that there are plenty of sites out there outranking sites with with 5,000 pages when they only have 150.  This is true, but when deciding on a content schedule, if you are doing everything right, having just as many pages on your site that all rank well will definitely put you on par with the sites that currently rank on the front page.  You can also safely assume that as as you publish more and more quality content and your authority rises, that your organic search traffic will increase regardless if you make it to the front page or not.  More pages equal more keywords and they allow you to rank for a large number of long-tail keywords that can attract visitors who otherwise would have gone elsewhere.

So there you have it, how to generally determine the frequency with which your firm should be publishing in order to catch up to your search competition.  Like I mentioned earlier, there are tons of other factors at play here; but in perfect, simple example where we are comparing apples to apples, this should tell you how often you should be publishing.

Adjust that number based on how your site is performing in any of the areas mentioned in the beginning of this article, how much ground you have to make up, and how quickly you would like to get there.

It’s important to realize that this is not the end-all-be-all.  This article is based on the premise that we are comparing websites that have all of the same ranking factors outside of content.  Obviously, that is not the real-world case.  There are many more issues that come into play in how a law firm makes it to the top of Google search results for its practice area.  Further, the quality and topic of your content play into how well your the content (and your site overall) performs moreso than the number of pages.  If you are publishing poor quality content, you can publish 1000 blog posts a month and it wouldn’t help long-term.

Happy hunting.

If you would like to get started catching your competition

Bernie Clark can be reached by phone at 1-800-856-5761 or by email at clark@majux.com.

Originally, I was going to use these firms as an example of what the firms with the power of hundreds of attorneys and a full marketing department behind them are doing as part of their content marketing strategy.  What this list became was an excellent example that despite the efforts behind publishing such large volumes of content, even the big firms sometimes do it incorrectly.

First let’s take a look at the ten largest law firms in Philadelphia, the average of how many pages they publish a month, and the total site size.   This is a good example of how often the firms that publish the most are putting out new content.

For the explanation how I got these numbers and why this matters, read the other post.

10 Largest Philadelphia-Area Firms:

As you can see these are massive sites.  If a website has a total page count in the six digits and an authority rank of 6, it theoretically should be able to rank for almost anything that it wants to.

What I found when digging through all of these web sites is how many of these firms are doing it completely wrong and how it’s hurting their search engine rankings.

Now, I understand and remember well from my in-house days what the politics are like in law firms and sometimes it can take months to push through new business development strategies.  It could be completely possible that many of these firms are intentionally ignoring Google search as a stream of incoming web traffic.  Maybe they think that purchasers of complex commercial litigation aren’t searching Google for who is going to defend their next shareholder proxy contest.  But in this day-and-age, it’s almost negligent to not be (at the very least) formatting web content correctly to at least give it a chance to rank within Google.

Here are some examples: Pepper Hamilton (450 attorneys, 1,200 staff) uses bold headings instead of H1s or H2s and publishes pages with poor or duplicate page descriptions (two of the absolute worst formatting mistakes you can make).  You’re telling me that no one in their 1,200 staff knows how to properly format a web page?  To me, it’s indicative of a larger problem.

Blank Rome publishes all three of their blogs on separate domains.  While that strategy is fine and I understand that sometimes there are organizational or technological limitations, nowadays having five different websites can create 10x the work (especially for a smaller firm).  Those blogs range in authority, but average a rank of 3-5.  They are essentially working that much harder to make each of those sites rank on their own instead of them all working together to help the main site.  Further, most of the posts on those blogs do not interlink with anchor text to the main site.  For instance, Blank Rome only links to their main site for anchor text of the name of the attorney who wrote the article.  That’s great if that attorney wants to rank for their own name, but they might have been doing that anyway.  Think of all the wasted link and authority benefit if they had kept all that content on their main site.

If you want to see how doing the incorrect things can affect (or better described as having no affect) a blog or website, try finding one of Blank Rome’s in Google search.  Blank Rome’s off-site blog, The Bankruptcy Law Watch, is described as an informative commercial bankruptcy blog written by a commercial bankruptcy firm right here in Philadelphia.  It is a page rank 4.  It would be reasonable to think that it could show up if you were to Google “commercial bankruptcy Philadelphia”, “commercial bankruptcy attorney Philadelphia”, or “commercial bankruptcy law firm Philadelphia”, and yet it does not show up in the first 10 pages of Google results for any of those search terms.  100 other web pages that show up for it’s targeted keyword before it does.

What Law Firm does it Right?

One firm that does it very well is Duane Morris.  You’ll notice if you visit their blog that all of their blogs are a subdomain of their main site, i.e. a url something like blogs.duanemorris.com/BLOGNAME/, and the posts on the blogs are interlinked with anchor text to their attorney bios and practice pages.  That, folks, is how you should be doing it.

</rant>

Our plan acted as a great band-aid to cover the absence of a webmaster/SEO manager during restaffing and even ended up shifting the permanent roles of some non-marketing staff.

We needed to find some clever and “easy” ways to cover a few key processes:

• Consistent updates to our website
• Tracking our incoming web leads
• Generating content for our website
• Linkbuilding
• Reporting

1. Train Your WordPress Coordinator and Install a Few Plugins

Filling the roles of a not-yet-hired webmaster was simplified into two main tasks – updating and maintaining the website.  This ended up being the most difficult work to spread around the office.  While WordPress is not difficult for a trained individual, we found the administrative staff had trouble picking up an unknown content management system.

We began to think of ways to automate and simplify the process.  Your website (like the website in the example) may be running WordPress.  If so, this means that we can rely on a some useful plugins to handle the maintenance aspect and there will be minimal training needed to allow someone to update the blog and other link assets.

Updating and Adding Content

One of the boons of WordPress is how easy it is to update.  You don’t need a working knowledge of HTML or CSS (although it helps…) and there’s plenty of free resources to train a staff member to fill this role.

WordPress developed it’s own series of lessons within The WordPress Codex which is the “go to resource” for aspiring WordPress designers.

Step one for your designated WordPress coordinator will be to have them review these how-to guides to get familiar with WordPress.  The next step should be for them to make sure that there is a backup of the current site in case you need to revert back.  This can be done in one of two easy ways.  The first and least tech-savy method is to simply call your website hosting provider and check that there is a somewhat current backup of your website’s data on their server.  The second and more technical method is to log into your website host’s FTP access for your site through a downloadable FTP client like Filezilla (you should have those logins buried in an old email somewhere) and simply download all of the files from your website to your local hard drive.

The next step is to let your new webmaster take a peek at the back-end of your site (usually by adding “wp-admin” to the end of your URL you can access the admin login) and determine where your blog posts, pages, and articles need to go to maintain the formatting of your site.

WordPress is fairly foolproof – but make sure to stress the huge ramifications that some errors might have on your firm’s website.

Below is a great infographic covering 15 of the worst issues your WordPress site could be stricken with.  Make sure to resolve these issues as they arise.

CopyBLogger developed this great WordPress infographic that covers 15 errors that a new developer might run into.

Automated 404 Detection and 301 Redirect Writing Plugin

Once we found a staff member ready to take over the temporary webmaster/developer duties it was time to automate some of the web maintenance any good SEO should be doing.

The WordPress plugin 404 redirected is a great solution for some light website SEO maintenance without needing to hire or train anyone.  It will automatically scan the incoming links to your site for any which cause your website to show a 404 error.  These are all collected in your WordPress Dashboard and your web developer can periodically go in an make sure those broken links all redirect to their proper pages.

CopyLink Plugin

If people are copying the great content your publishing (and you are publishing great content right?) you can use CopyLink to help push text copiers in the right direction and maybe snag a few organic links from your content.

Each time text is copied from your site a link to the page it was copied from is also included.  Now this is far from a complete solution for your linkbuilding (as other webmasters can just delete these) but it’s our hope there’s a few kind souls who might take pity on our law firm and keep the link active.

2. Tracking Your Internet Leads from Start to Finish

Now that you have your website in order, we can start making sure all this extra work is having an impact.  You should already have some sort of intake team that handles incoming phone calls and web leads, our main focus here is to make sure we can track two things:

• The sources of all incoming leads (forms, emails, calls, walk-ins) and the % of these leads that were internet based
• Incoming traffic to our website with a focus on organic visits

Front End Tracking

If you don’t have Google Analytics set up, do that first.  Then have your newly-minted website admin drop the tracking code in your header.php file right before the /head tag and give Google five minutes or so to catch up and confirm that data is being received.  Log into Analytics and make sure you starting to see some traffic data.

This is the front-line when it comes to tracking your progress in Google.  For the time being, you just want to make sure this service is running and collecting data.  After you have 2+ months of data, you can start comparing progress and figure out exactly what ‘s working for you as far as your website.  You should also set up goal tracking for your form fills that should be rolling in.

Back End Tracking

Now that we can see what people are doing on your website, it’s important to make sure your staff can determine the source of each incoming lead.  There’s really no automated process for this – just make sure your intake staff makes an attempt to ask the following questions from your incoming leads:

“Where did you find us?”

And if they answer “Google, Search Engine, etc”

“What did you type in to find our site?”

Now as we build up this data for your lead sources you can start to see some great trends emerging as far as the types of searches your clients are using to find you, as well as how well your website is performing compared to other sources.

The best way to track this is just to set up a spreadsheet with the following columns to fill out for each lead.  This also works well as a spreadsheet your intake team can use to track their outreach and status of potential clients.

Try to keep track of the following at a minimum but these will change depending on your practice area:

• Lead Source
• Keyword Used (If Found by Search Engines)
• Date of Contact
• Date of Incident
• Client Name
• Case Status (Signed, Referred, Declined, Pending)
• Notes about Client
• Client Contact Info

Review these once a month and start tracking some trends to see whether your work is having any immediate effect on your bottom line.  If you are starting from scratch it will take a few months to get everything rolling.

3. Make Everyone A Writer

This can include Paralegals, Associates, Interns, Accountants, Receptionists, and even Partners.  If handled correctly, your staff can quickly become your front-lines when it comes to brainstorming content for your blog AND writing it.

This might be an area where you hit a little backlash – your staffers are most likely inundated with calls, emails, and paperwork all day, and the thought of sitting down and writing a blog post is the furthest things from their mind - but this is where you are going to save the most money, and get the most results if it’s done right.

Keep the writing work lighthearted and make sure your employees can make time for it – you don’t want to see a content writer angry…

Now the biggest hurdle is to figure out what you want to say.

Ping your paralegals and intake staff for some of the biggest problems, questions, or issues you’re hearing from new clients and start creating articles to solve those issues.  A good strategy would be for each staff member to:

• Identify a problem or question a customer/client is having (can be legal or non-legal)
• Write up a 350+ article answering the question or outlining the issues
• Have those articles filtered and proofed by an associate
• Send it over to your new website admin and have them post it as a page or blog post

The effect of this is two-fold:

• Organic visitors will be looking for this information which could mean a conversion for you
• Less non-converting exploratory phone calls since common questions are already answered on your website

In addition to providing value to your clients, make sure you are writing up posts and articles about REAL COMPANY STUFF (SEER’s acronym, not ours – see these slides courtesy of Will Reynolds of SEER Interactive for an explanation) as this is the kind of content that can take a more personalized tone and your firm more personable and stand out. It should be noted that this personalized voice approach is tried and tested among Plaintiff firms, however you should be writing to the appropriate style and voice of your intended audience, obviously a target group like business owners would be different.

Again – you might receive backlash for this – one hour of writing per week per employee (even if they don’t deliver each week) will be enough to keep your blog updated and your site expanding.  Even if you offer your staff incentives, it can often be less expensive than hiring dedicated writers.

4. Get Your Entire Staff Looking for Link Opportunities

This will soon ring true…

If you’re successful in getting some non-marketing staff writing articles, you can make sure they know to share their work with friends, family, personal contacts, and even clients and vendors.  This will make a positive impact on your social media efforts, but ultimately you want your staff to understand what a backlink is, and keep an eye out for any opportunities for one.

Using Personal Injury as an example, here’s a few quick tasks you can have your staff implement to work on building backlinks to your website:

• Asking Doctors, Chiropractors, and other businesses you refer clients to to link to your law firm
• Reaching out to vendors and asking if you can provide a testimonial about their company in exchange for a link back to your site from the testimonial
• Having an intern build out local citations for each of your office locations as part of their daily tasks
• Having lawyers and associates email their alma maters and trade associations for link opportunities.

Much like the writing engagement, you’ll have some staffers that balk at this.  You may need to provide some incentive to get your staff on board, but this is just as important as writing content for your site – in certain cases even more important.  The amount of backlinks to your site influences your search rankings.

5. Reviewing Your Results Month-to-Month

Let’s hope you see some similar growth in your Analytics reporting.

Now that we’ve successfully shaken up most of your staffer’s job descriptions, it’s time to make sure we’re seeing some progress – by all means if 3-4 months go by and none of your metrics are improving, it might be time to revisit the SEO work you are spreading out.

While I could list 50 metrics we can look at to understand the minutiae of each site visitor, we’re going to focus on just a couple key metrics you want to track the month to month movements in:

• Keyword Rankings
  • SEOMoz.com is a cost-effective way to automate this task – track as many relevant keywords as you can
  • Focus on tracking the average movement each month and determining how you can create content to appeal to straggling keywords
• Organic Visitors
  • Since you set up Google Analytics at the beginning of this process you should regularly be checking in to see how many visits you’re getting from search engines.
  • It may take 2-3 months to get rolling, but even just publishing a blog post should bring an improvement to this metric.
• Total Internet Leads
  • This data should be available through the back-end lead tracking you set up and without an improvement here we’re not making progress.  As with the other metrics it may take 3-4 months to really start seeing some statistically sound increases.
• Total Signed Internet Leads
  • The ultimate measure of SEO success – signed clients who found us through Google.

While you’re not going to have the agility of a normal in-house our outsourced SEO team, these are some great ways to at least get something running within your firm without too much effort or increase in payroll.

If you have been ignoring that fact that you even own a website for the past couple years, this kind of process yields even greater results as adding new content and backlinking is a quick way to revitalize a coveted “aged” domain.

Looking for more help?

Although this article is based on one example from one of our medium-sized clients, it obviously may not be realistic for a law firm of any size to allocate non-marketing staff resources to an internet marketing initiative.   If you would like to set up your own internet marketing campaign, I invite you to call us.  We have worked with attorneys and firms of all sizes, practices areas, and levels of market competition.  We can revolutionize your internet and content marketing strategies.  If you are looking for a marketing team that spins in the background of your practice and produces in-bound leads, feel free to give Majux Co-Founder Bernie Clark a call today at (215) 983-2642.

As a self-described cynic of corporate jargon, I found myself  motivated to write a year-in-review article about trends from within our industry.  Now, before I go any further, yes, I am aware that this type of article is essentially the inception of linkbait (I even created a couple memes below), but this is something I was actually very interested in.

As far as buzzwords go in the internet marketing industry, we’re probably akin to the Madagascar of the animal world.  Our work allows for a dirty, flexible, DNA of vocabulary that is prone to mutation.  Sometimes it seems like new buzzword hybrids are being born every other day.  In a business where the highest form of compliment is to have your name or strategy be turned into a verb, let’s take a look at some of the buzzwords oft-described as being worthy of the title of internet marketing buzzword of the year.  For the sake of looking at the popularity of trends, I chose five:

1. Content Marketing
2. Social Marketing
3. Reputation Management
4. Thought Leadership
5. Relationship Marketing

Of these, I would probably pick ‘social marketing’ as the most cringe-worthy phrase, perhaps followed by ‘thought leadership’.  I would probably pick ‘content marketing’ as the most legitimate in terms of the description of a strategy.  Heck, I am even guilty of using the phrase ‘content marketing’ (note to self to come up with a different description for 2013).  Some honorable mentions that didn’t have enough search volume to register on this graph’s scale include ‘conversion rate optimization’ and ‘multichannel marketing’ (I have a prediction this one will be hot in 2013).

But these phrases do mean very real things to real people, and there is some actual insight within this Google search trend.  Do you write a blog geared toward the internet marketing industry?  You’d probably want to focus on what is being searched for the most, as that might be an indicator as to what people are the most confused about.  Here is what was hot in 2012 according to Google search trend:

What was amazing to me, is the skyrocketing popularity of the phrase “reputation management”.  For a scale, the phrase ‘social marketing’ had an average monthly global search volume of 550,000 searches in 2012 (according to the Google Adwords Keyword tool).  That number represents that green line that crosses the middle of our graph and stays somewhat consistent around the 40/100 scale line….

That means that roughly 1,375,000 people (550,000 x 2.5) searched for the phrase ‘reputation management’ in December of 2012.  Think about that, 1.375 million people.  If you were well-positioned for that search term, your traffic probably blew up in the closing months of this year. It’s understandable too – Google local switched over to Google Plus and all of the sudden, thousands of previously non-existent third-party reviews were popping up alongside your name on the front page of the SERPs.  To make matters worse, Google kept changing which third-parties it was pulling these reviews from.  Stories were all over the news about companies being sued for libel and being found either guilty or not-guilty after writing fake reviews about competitors.   As confusion abounds regarding Google’s transition to Google Plus and the lack of case law surrounding libel on review sites, people turn to the internet to figure out what’s going on.  And thus, out of necessity, an internet marketing buzzword was born.

So, congratulations “reputation management”, our buzzword of the year.  If you had reputation management in your SEO buzzword pool, you win.  My money is on “mobile optimization” for 2013.  And not to get too deep, but in many ways, aren’t we all in a sort-of buzzword pool, jockeying for visitors and trying to get out in front and well-positioned for emerging high-volume search terms?  Think about it.

Happy New Year everybody; may your 2013 be filled with monetized paradigms.

So our big problem here was:

• More organic traffic but less leads

Some SEO’s might drool at the increase in organic traffic and hop around the real issue (less business for our client) but we like to take the time to really delve into the issue and came up with an analysis that can really pinpoint the specific practice area’s our client had been seeing losses (or gains) in.

Google Analytics provides a nice comparison of incoming keywords month to month, but when your unique incoming keywords coming in per month numbers around 1300-1500 it can get hard to get any real takeaways from that data when you have 3000+ datapoints to consider (which is two months of data to compare).

Picking your Practice Area Segments

For our legal clients it’s been beneficial for us to start segmenting this keyword data by practice area (amongst other things) so we can take a look at groups of keywords all sharing the same theme and determine which of these segments is posting a loss or a gain for the month.

We’ll go through this example with a hypothetical law firm aptly named Clark & Clark Law Offices

Clark & Clark Law Offices primarily practices in three areas of law: personal injury, divorce, and bankruptcy.

Segmenting out keyword traffic for each of these practice areas will be important but not all of our incoming keywords are going to be fitting snugly into those three categories.  Using these three practice areas as a base you’ll most likely see the other following segments come into play:

• Branded Keywords: ‘Clark Law’, ‘Clark Lawyers’,’ Clark & Clark’, etc.
• Image Searches: People searching for images our site is hosting
• Less Legal-Centric Injury, Bankruptcy, or Divorce Queries: ‘Why does my neck hurt so much after this car accident?’
• General Law Queries : Keywords that don’t mention a specific practice area
• Misc : Some incoming keywords just really won’t have a theme – dump them here but don’t do this too much or a large chunk of your traffic will be segmented here
• Not Provided: Google has been holding back on data for around 25-30% of our clients traffic as you’ll most likely see a similar number in your reports.

Now these segments change drastically between firms – the important thing is to make sure you’re consistent when you’re naming them and not getting too specific with these segments – we want to reduce the amount of datapoints we’re looking at and having categories with only 3-4 keywords in it is only going to make our final analysis more confusing.  When we finish our analysis we typically have around 15-20 specific categories which gives us much more actionable data than 3000 unique keywords.

Exporting your Data from Google Analytics

Now all of this data is going to be available through your Google Analytics account.  You’ll want to navigate to the following pages through your left sidebar:

Traffic Sources>>Sources>>Search>>Organic

This is the organic search traffic report you should be looking for.  Traffic Sources>>Sources>>Search>>Organic

You now should be looking at a screen of your incoming organic keywords to your site over whatever time period you had originally selected.  As we want to compare two months we will select  the month we want to start with, and the check off the “Compare Two” check button located right below the date selection box.  At this point you’ll notice your keyword data at the bottom of the screen now shows 2 numbers for each keyword.

We’ll now be exporting this data to excel so we can work on the segmentation.

Make sure that “500 rows” is selected at the bottom of the screen.

Google Analytics only allows you to export 500 rows of data at a time, so if your Google Analytics is showing more than 500 rows of keywords you’ll have to navigate to the next page and repeat the process until all your data is available in CSV form.

At the top of the page select the “Export” menu and save the resulting data as a “CSV” file.

Here’s the menu you’ll need to navigate to in order to export your keyword data as a .CSV (comma-separated values) file.

If you have more than 500 rows you’ll need to combine all the various files into one large file so we can eventually tag all the keywords with our segments and throw all that raw data into a nice pivot table through MS Excel.  Your data should resemble the table below:

Tagging your Keywords with your Practice Area Segments

Now on the far right of your set of data add another column for your keyword segments and start filling in your data.  You’ll notice that each keyword appears twice (one row for each month) so you’ll be tagging these in groups of two.

This step of the process is a little time intensive – I can get things rolling a little quicker by using text filters within excel – but if anyone has any other ideas we’re more than welcome to include them!

After segmenting your data should resemble the picture below – we used dummy data to fill in our statistics so you’ll most likely have MUCH more keyword data – I circled the added segments:

 

At this point your tagging is done – next is to drop the data into a PivotTable in order to extract some actionable information out of it.  Our dummy data we used for our analysis isn’t the greatest – you can see Clark & Clark Law is having a rough month with regards to their SEO.

Here’s the data in it’s pivoted glory:

 

 

Already we can see some examples of why we’re seeing increased traffic and less leads – in this case our dummy data shows Clark & Clark getting a fairly large spike of image traffic throughout October which pulled down the overall conversion rate we’ve come to expect and thus the amount of incoming leads.

Getting Creative With Your New Data

You can also use a couple of Excel charts and different table formats to give a clearer idea of what your traffic is doing.  Below is a pie chart generated from our data set that displays the breakdown of our incoming anchor text for one month.

Looking at two of these (for each month) side by side can give you a nice visual cue of what segments are shrinking and growing.

 

In addition we can also break out our data from the pivot table into an easy-to-scan table.  Here I added a few extra metrics including a % breakdown of each segment (in relation to their respective month totals) as well as highlighting in red any segments which experienced a drop over the two months we compared.

 

While I’m the first to admit this analysis takes a bit of hard work (segmenting the keywords takes time) but we find it useful in analyzing what type of traffic gains or losses we’re experiencing when it comes to incoming organic results.

Looking at a broader keyword overview month to month has helped us identify where our efforts are being wasted, and where we need to spend more time building links and creating great content.  In this situation, Clark & Clark took hits with regards to their Branded, and Miscellaneous traffic.  It’s worth it to note that in this situation I’ve lumped our “not provided” keywords into our Misc. traffic.

Luckily we still saw growth in Clark & Clark’s “money making” keywords – personal injury, bankruptcy, and divorce.

Hopefully your firm or company can use this analysis to focus your SEO efforts where they are needed – if you have any questions or some clarity is needed feel free to drop us a line or respond in the comments.

About Us

Majux Marketing is a Philadelphia based internet marketing company that serves attorneys, professional service providers, and other companies of all types.  To see how we can help you develop a highly-tuned internet marketing strategy that doesn’t just return traffic, but moreso emphasizes targeting leads that convert into new clients, give us a call today – (215) 983-2642.

Monitor your rank and your categories

This goes back to our original point.  Because it is so easy (relative to organic) to rank for a local result and that ranking well locally is a one-way ticket to the top of more-and-more SERPs, you want to monitor your local rank and categories fairly frequently.  If someone knocks you off the front page, you obviously want to show your local profile a little love.  Also, as more categories are being included in the search results that show local results, there is much less competition for those search terms.  Many business have a Places (G+) profile – not many check back often and update their local search categories.  Updating your’s might just move you to the top of a new and noncompetitive search term.

Never use a custom category

First off (this is worth mentioning), you should never use a custom category for you Google Places profile.  It simply won’t show up in search results.  You’re essentially wasting an available slot for other terms that you could show up for.

Place a realistically wide mile radius

Depending on your business or practice, as your SEO strategy matures and coasts, you theoretically should be adding more and more geographic keywords to your SEO mix; i.e. Philadelphia, PA [your keyword].  As you devote more resources to ranking for these geographic keywords organically, your local results should/could see a benefit.  So as long as your mile radius is set to include these geographies, you may find your local result ranking for geographies that it previously didn’t – especially non-competitive geographies.

Get out ahead of this

We’ve found  that people are so generally confused by Google Local (then places, then G+) profiles, search results, and citations, that there is an inherent opportunity here if you can either figure it out or hire someone to do it for you.  Very few business owners we speak with know exactly what goes into ranking for local results and how to optimize a G+ or Places profile.  This means that typically, their ranking highly for local search results is often a product of 1. luck, 2. age of their internet presence, or 3. their being in the phone book 5 years ago, 4. all or some of the above.

What is Bernie talking about?

If you would like help optimizing your Google Local presence, feel free to contact us.  While it is easy to build or optimize your local profile, the best use of your Google Places (G+) profile and your G+ contributor profile can be confusing and is beneficial to be optimized in conjunction with an overall internet marketing strategy.  Call us today to see how you can leverage local search for your business or practice.

Pagerank used to to be a much hyped and talked about factor in the internet marketing world; although nowadays pageranks update so quickly that if you are doing the right things, you should up your rank during the course of a normal SEO campaign.

The higher your pagerank, the more often your site is indexed and the easier (‘easier’ meaning exactly that, easier, it doesn’t mean automatically)  it is to get your content ranked higher in Google search results (although the two are independent of each other).

There are several factors that affect a site’s page rank and there are thousands of websites where you can find what those factors are, so I won’t cover that in depth here.  One a macro-level, the major factors include the number of visitors to your site, where and how often on the internet your site is mentioned, and the age of your website.  10 is the highest, 0 is the lowest.  For instance, Twitter is a 9 or 10, Facebook is a 9, a blog you just started last week would be a 0, and the New York Times is a 9.

How often is pagerank adjusted?

So you are a blog or company that launches a new website – you do all the right things, post good content often, get organic mentions from other websites, but other websites can effortlessly publish content sporadically and rank higher immediately after publishing.  How long will it take you to get a pagerank boost for your efforts?  Well, stay the course, because lately it appears that pagerank has been being adjust every three-to-four months.

When Is The Next Google Pagerank Update? 

It was last updated in August.  I can confirm this because our pagerank rose in August.  So, that means that we are probably not all that far away from the next update, or at least halfway there.  I found this schedule of all the past pagerank updates going back to 2007 (Courtesy of Hobo SEO; click on the picture for site).  I can confirm this as accurate at least from November 2011, on (more or less).

So what does this mean for attorneys, accountants and professional services?

PRs aren’t the end-all-be-all when it comes to exposure and internet marketing.  But for the most part, it means that international law and accounting firms like Morgan Lewis (a PR 6) and Deloitte (a PR 8) could probably outrank you in the SERPs tonight if they wanted to and were doing it right.  The good news for you is that they aren’t (for the most part).

Why that is probably deserves its own post, but the simple fact is that they either don’t want the size of client that comes in from the web or internet marketing is so new for professional service, that the big firms with traditional structures, big budgets, and red tape simply can’t move fast enough to stay ahead of the curve.

It also means that a small firm with a quickly adaptable and focused strategy can outrank those sites with elephant-in-the-room PRs.  In short, it means that if you get out there and maximize your efforts and resources correctly, you can play on the same stage as the big boys regardless of pagerank (for now).

Contact us

If you would like to find out how Majux can help you develop an internet and content marketing strategy that spins in the background of your practice, contact Bernie Clark today by phone at (215) 983-2642

One of the major factors is how easy to track all of the information has become.  Nearly every facet of a website interaction can be tracked in some form.  A business has near immediate access to data that shows: how and where a visitor arrived, where they went, the amount of time that visitor spent on the site, and much, much more.

The cost of data vs. market research

This data allows businesses to gauge the relative success of various approaches, and arrive at a solution that works for them and their business organically.  If an initial strategy is not yielding a huge increase in page views or conversions, data can be used to try and assess why that is.  Was the page difficult to navigate?  Perhaps there was a particular bottleneck that can be weeded out with a thorough analysis.  If each user left the site at the same time, this information can illuminate the source of the problem.

Additionally, if particular content generated a huge increase in page views or conversions, this can very quickly indicate that similar content may yield similar (or even improved) results.

With classic “physical” marketing strategies, this information is much more difficult to obtain, and in some cases simply impossible to gather, so the strategies themselves become much more difficult to make intelligent decisions about.  You would either have to pay a marketing research firm to conduct the analysis for you or go into an initiative blind and lose out on the potential sales that you could have enjoyed if the initiative doesn’t work and you had had the opportunity to make changes.  This costs your business money over the long term, without the improvement that is inherent in an online medium.

The low cost of internet marketing

Another positive aspect of marketing on the internet is the relative low cost.  When you consider the cost of mailing full color flyers over a broad area, buying an ad in a publication, or purchasing space on a billboard, the cost to benefit ratio of sophisticated internet marketing is extremely apparent.  This is because internet marketing is not “passive”.

Search engine optimization, when done properly, allows people searching for a service to find and inquire about your service.  There’s no way of knowing that the average newspaper reader will see your ad, if the ad will be relevant to them, and if it isn’t, why that is the case.  With internet marketing, you know your site’s exposure is due to relevant web searches, you know how many people saw your content, and you can assess why or why not they decided to contact you for you services.

Ultimately, internet marketing is constantly refining itself, and thus, ever increasing the potential for returns on investment in the months and years ahead.

Contact us

If you are not actively ensuring that your company is found where potential customers are looking, you are losing out on new business.  Whether you are an accountant, attorney, retail space, pizza shop, or a virtual business – if you are thinking about adding online marketing to your business development mix, we invite you to contact us.  We can show you what your competitors are doing and how you can do it better, and help you build an online presence that is steady, well-positioned, and can yield a return on investment for years to come.

Search engine optimization is the process of tailoring a website to comply with Google and other mainstream search engines, resulting in your site being ranked higher, and thus, listed higher in search results.

The majority of people searching for a service in 2012 use Google, (with 66.4% of explicit core searches in March of this year). With the prevalence of smart phone technology and wifi connections publicly available in many major cities, it has never been easier to find local and national businesses through a simple search.

Google recently rolled out a new algorithm that tweaked their Google Local service on search results pages.  What this means for the accounting marketing world, in a nutshell, is that 7 of the top results in a Google search are allotted to businesses specific to the zip code from which the search was placed. This means that, when someone searches for “accountant New Jersey” or “CPA Philadelphia”, with proper search engine local optimization, your site will appear within those seven results.

Many professional accounting firms can receive a large influx of new clients thanks to personal or business tax season, and if this crowd is a part of your target market, ranking highly in search results could be very helpful.  Potential clients will immediately find your site, telephone number, email address, and physical location; all instantly clickable for immediate interaction.  Additionally, the more clients you get through online marketing, the more likely satisfied clients will leave positive reviews articulating their experience with your firm.  This can only serve to further the reach of your company, as more potential clients can reassure themselves on your company’s positive reputation by reading such reviews.

Obviously, we often talk quite a bit about internet marketing here.  But no one can igore ‘real world’ business development.  Marketing mistakes can lead to dissatisfied clients, ineffective strategies, and wasted budget.  Here are a few of the major mistakes many marketing companies sometimes fall into.

1. Lack of an understanding of the customer – A lot of marketing professionals tend to err on the side of a product-specific mind set.  Focusing mostly on the product itself, they can often neglect useful knowledge regarding the mindset of who wants or needs the product.  Even worse, many times marketers or company owners can be so convinced the product or methods employed are so “cutting edge” that they can’t possibly fail.  A strong example of this can be found by examining “New Coke” in 1985.  The marketing message may have been effective, but without a true understanding of the ideal customer (and their tendency to stick with a good thing) the product failed.

2. Failing to Listen – In the example above with “New Coke”, market research was undoubtedly done.  They probably ran focus groups, demographics, and broad analysis of the opportunity in the market.  What they perhaps failed to do, was listen directly to their existing customers, and ask the right questions of them.  By focusing on the buying behavior of who already buys your product rather than only identifying the buying behavior of those who don’t, you may save yourself a large amount of time, effort, and budget in a failed campaign.

3. Ignoring the customers of their customer – Another classic blunder for a marketing team to make is to pay full attention to the articulated needs of their client, without acknowledging the needs of the client’s own target market.  Often times a marketing company will appease a client in order to keep them happy, but will comply with ideas that may not be rooted in that client’s own customer base.  Peering into the root of your customer’s customer’s problem and solving it is crucial for a successful marketing strategy.

4. Guerilla marketing gone wrong – Modern physical marketing is a mixed bag, with attempts at sensational activities resulting in social media spread and “viral” status.  Sometimes this works, other times it fails miserably.  Vespa recently hired attractive models to ride up to cafes, bars and restaurants, flirt with someone and hand them their “number.”  The number ended up connecting them to their local Vespa dealership.  Essentially, the scheme was a bait and switch, and it triggered the negativity one would expect after essentially suffering a rejection from an attractive model, and then being asked to buy something.

5. Putting the company first – This falls slightly into the “customers of customers” advice above, but can be articulated quite well when looking at Sony’s approach to Betamax in the late 70s.  Sony released the format, but kept it proprietary, and didn’t listen what customers wanted out of a magnetic tape video system.  At the same time, JVC realized that what customers wanted was longer tape time, and they met that need.  By opening up their technology to several other companies, a wider adoption of the medium was achieved quickly, and with competitive pricing, VHS soon overtook Beta as the preferred medium.  The success can be tracked directly back to listening to customer needs and meeting them.  A successful marketing company can work with a client to discover, on a personal level, what the target market actually wants, and a way to give that to them.  As it turns out in the marketing world, the customer of a customer is always right.

Obviously, marketing is a critical element to any business strategy.  In the past, companies turned to consultants, large marketing budgetary allotments, and the hiring of market research companies.  Fortunately, internet marketing is shifting that paradigm, and adding or shifting budget away from traditional marketing initiatives in favor of internet marketing can have added benefits for you company.

Here’s how:

Exposure – The internet is a pervasive medium.  Nearly everyone is connected, many times in subconscious ways.  From smart phones in your pocket silently updating your Twitter feed, to sending and receiving email, updating Facebook or Pinterest, searching for recipes or reading a review on your iPad.  There are millions of micro interactions that take place online every day. In the past, companies used print ads in magazines and newspapers or a billboard to maximize exposure.  But that often limited an ad’s effectiveness either geographically or demographically.  In March of this year, Pinterest recorded 2.3 billion page impressions to over 4 million unique visitors per day – and that’s on an international stage.  Think about that, if you were able to capture just a fraction, say .005% of those eyes with a viral post showcasing y our website or product, that’s 20,000 people (who are probably interested due to the fact that they clicked on your content).  And that’s one website.  There are thousands of popular social websites and hundreds of millions of English-speaking blogs.  Traditional media simply can’t compete for exposure on that type of level anymore.

Cost – Physical marketing is expensive.  Printing involves the cost of papers and inks, delivery costs postage, placement in magazines or newspapers costs money, and it all takes time.  With online marketing, the costs are relatively cheap in comparison (often just time and outsourcing costs), and the results can be astounding.

Speed – Internet marketing happens quickly.  With a proper marketing strategy in place for your business, content can be posted instantaneously to the web, and results are nearly as fast.  You don’t have to wait for magazines to go to print and be delivered.  You publish and content appears.  Then, if visitors like what they see, they fill out a form, and a business relationship has bloomed – all in a matter of seconds.

Feedback – Most aspects of page views and interactions are able to be tracked, rendering often expensive market research obsolete in many ways. Your marketing is your market research, and if something works, you can almost instantly decide on how to follow that lead toward an even better marketing campaign.  The process is dynamic.

Growth – Internet marketing is a fluid concept, and approaches to marketing are fluid in turn.  Because of this, your business can quickly adapt to a new trend in the market, an initiative that works, or a new channel of potential exposure.

Ultimately, an internet marketing campaign will extend your company’s reach, reinforce an online identity, and bring potential clients to your virtual and real doorstep.

Thinking about integrating internet marketing into your marketing mix?

Contact us today.  Whether you are thinking about internet marketing in Philadelphia or Tokyo, we can tell you how a well-oiled internet marketing campaign can add more exposure to your business and convert more leads into sales.  Regardless if you business is ‘brick and mortar’ or virtual, internet marketing can help you get more customers.

Google search is the new Yellow Pages.  This is a reality in 2012, and for a company of any kind to succeed, an online presence is extremely important.  This is especially true for retail or other ‘brick and mortar’ businesses navigating a difficult economy.  Search engine optimization can put your business on Google’s map (literally).

The reality is that the majority of potential clients in any given city find most ‘brick and mortar’ stores through a simple word search on Google or comparable search engines.  For instance, a woman looking to find a salon may search for “salons in Philadelphia” or “what is the best salon Philly.”  A woman trying to find a good Thai restaurant nearby may use, “good Thai restaurant in Center City.”  We call this sort of search a “natural language” search (another example, and one of the most popular searches on Google: “what is the meaning of life?”) and it’s more and more commonly used as people become accustomed to using search engines as an information source.

Geotargeting

Conveniently, even if the woman in our hypothetical scenario doesn’t include her city’s name, the search will still feature results in her area code thanks to Google Local.  This algorithm, recently implemented by Google, lists 7 local businesses on the first results page of every query.  These seven results also provide easily accessed contact info, location information, and user reviews.  If searched on a smart phone, this means the telephone number, or a map to your location is accessible in a single click, with red markers representing the physical location of each business.

With search engine optimization, your retail, restaurant, salon, or pilates studio could appear higher on the list of local businesses on the results page.  So, when a large mass of tourists come in for a busy weekend or new college students arriving for the fall, their smart phone searches will highlight your business.  Not only will this lead new clients visiting your website, it will provide them easy access to contact your retail location, or stop by to take a look.  These interactions are incredibly valuable for local businesses, and go far beyond the Yellow Pages of our previous generations.

We live in a rapidly digitizing world, and the more prevalent a business becomes online, the more frequently people will “discover” your business. Search engine optimization coupled with positive Google Local or Yelp reviews are a source for business growth that should not be underestimated.

If you are thinking about adding internet marketing to your marketing campaign

We invite you to give us a call.  Let us show you how having a targeted and increased web presence can help you attract more foot traffic and more potential customers.  We handle Google Local optimization, reputation management, search engine optimization, and geotargeted search for mobile devices.  Want to make sure that your store, restaurant, or office is found when people are searching for your competitors?  It’s no accident that they show up on the first page of Google and you do not.  Contact us today, we can show you how we can help you get there.

References – This one is obvious.  So obvious in fact, that many people fail to consider it.  What is the first thing you do when you need to repair your vehicle?  You ask friends if they know a good mechanic.  You check Yelp for reviews and ratings.  The same should be true with an internet marketing company.  If you find a promising company, ask them for references.  Unless the company is fairly new, most successful companies should have a strong portfolio of satisfied clients eager to make a recommendation.  This can put you at ease.

Beware of “guarantees” – Internet marketing, be it SEO, PPC or social media based, is not an exact science.  Most companies that claim to offer a “guarantee” or use other language that feels “scammy” are usually exactly that.  Instead of considering a company that makes large promises they can’t necessarily keep (usually just to get your first check in their pockets), you should search for a company that is transparent and intelligent, with a focused approach.  The other thing to know is that Google is constantly changing its algorithm.  Any internet marketing company that is experienced should know and understand that.  They should know full well that, especially in the beginning of a campaign, your rankings can be up one day, and down the next.  And if your marketing company is promoting best practices, a first page ranking that is more stable to fluctuations within Google’s algorithm changes takes time to build – sometimes a long time depending on how competitive your niche is.  Any company that guarantee you front page placement in month one or two may even be able to get you there, but you probably won’t be there long, and once you are penalized by Google for participating in what it considers ‘web spam’, the recovery process can take a lot longer than a month or two, if at all.  Nothing is guaranteed when it comes to Google’s search results – trust your gut, if a company interacts with you like a used car salesman would, steer clear.

Communication – Again, transparency is paramount. You want a company that will listen to your company’s needs, and offer form fit solutions to your particular set of priorities.  If a company uses a “one size fits all” approach, this will typically result in something that may not match your desired campaign, or fit your budget.  For example: there are many 3^rd party options for analytics.  If your budget is lower or your campaign is limited in scope, there should be several options on the table to accommodate that fact.  For instance, Google Analytics gives insight into what visitors do on your site once they’ve decided to visit; and the service is free.  While it is likely not the optimum solution for a company looking for sophisticated analytics, it may be a good sign if the option at least comes up in a conversation.

All in all, prioritize transparency, focus, and professionalism when searching out a company to meet your internet marketing needs.  Look out for vague pricing or one track strategies, and you’re well on your way to a successful marketing campaign.

If you are considering hiring a company to manage your internet marketing strategies

If you are thinking about devoting resources to promoting your business on the internet, contact us today.  We can give you varying strategies based on what your budget is and we will never try and upsell you.  We understand the constraints that businesses are facing in this economy – especially small businesses.  We will be down in the trenches with you, working to make your phone ring with potential new customers.  We offer competitive pricing packages and can offer many references of our satisfied clients.

1. High Cost – FindLaw’s contracts seem to be notoriously lengthy and somewhat obtuse, locking you into a deal that could end up being long-term and expensive.  This makes the high costs difficult to justify, without transparency regarding what you are specifically paying for, and what the time frame of the service will be.  These costs can include a charge for website creation, another charge for “renting” flash, a fee to market the site, and several other services not included in the package.  All this, and the prices only include 1 to 2 site “refreshes” per year, and were created in a proprietary system that may not translate upon removal from the service (That is, if you can remove it, see below).  Another fact to consider is that Thompson, the company that owns Findlaw, employs sales representatives in every major city across the United States.  That is an awful lot of overhead that they have to cover through their fees.  Don’t believe us?  Google “Legal Marketing [insert your city]” and see who comes up, it very well might be a Findlaw sales representative.

2. Reused Content – Often times, what you are paying for is reused across several client sites in the network. FindLaw uses templates to build your site, and reuses content in very similar fashion between multiple sites in their client portfolio.  Thus, artwork and other content appears on multiple sites, quite possibly in the same metropolitan area.  The end result is a link pyramid in which many sites are competing against each other for the same web traffic, all while looking somewhat similar.

3. Issues With Content Ownership – There are also several horror stories about people trying to get out of their Findlaw contracts and wanting to take their websites with them.  When it comes down to it, FindLaw owns your firm’s website while under contract.  The content is impermanent.  This means that once you stop paying for service, your content and links in high domain authority properties are removed.  This has resulted in many lawyers having a significant amount of trouble transferring site content once a contract is up.  In fact, there are businesses whose sole focus is rectifying such problems (http://www.rashmun.com/findlaw.html).  Thus, many consider the FindLaw network a “Hotel California”, meaning “…you can never leave.”  Inversely, owning your own website is essentially permanent and relatively inexpensive these days, with no need to tie yourself into a payment plan for the foreseeable future of your business, and any gains in ranking and web visits won’t vanish as soon as you stop paying high priced service fees.

Contact us

If your law firm or your practice is thinking about switching from Findlaw for your legal internet marketing needs, contact us before you do so.  We can back up your website and recreate it on another website development platform to ensure that there is no loss of data.  We can also take a snapshot of your online profile (footprint) and make sure that no inbound links and search engine ranking is lost.