Lawyer Marketing Tips from Custom Legal Marketing

How to find the right content mix for your law firm

Bill Gates wrote his essay, “Content is King” in 1996. Twenty years later, the phrase still continues to dominate the online marketing world. Companies in all industries are in a rush to produce as much content as possible, hoping that something sticks — that some piece of content will hit upon the magic mix of luck, quality and value and become a viral sensation. This rush has created glut of…

Google Penguin 4.0 is live and running in real-time

Google revealed today that it has rolled out Penguin 4.0, the first confirmed Penguin update in nearly two years. Google’s announcement of the long-awaited release confirms what many in the SEO industry have long suspected (and hoped for). Penguin is now running in real-time. Additionally, Penguin is running at a more “granular” level, meaning it is looking at individual pages, rather than…

How lawyers can take advantage of new trends in video advertising

The demand for online video content from publishers and consumers has been growing steadily for years. In the United states, 78 percent of internet users say they watch online video. In July of 2006, a little over a year after YouTube launched, 65,000 videos were being uploaded every day. Now that number is in the hundreds of thousands. Over 400 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every…

Google’s Labor Day Weekend Update is a Big Win for Keyword Stuffers

While the number of algorithm changes so far in 2016 has been lower than average, several no-name updates have stormed through Google’s search results, disrupting top-page standard bearers. In May, Google started issuing outbound link penalties and devaluing media sites. This caused a big shakeup as the ripple affect dethroned many highly-ranked page one listings and introduced some new websites…

Worth 1000: Is your photography supporting your firm’s voice?

If your law firm’s name was not mentioned somewhere in your articles, on your website or on your advertisements, could people identify the material as coming from you? If a potential client came across one of your Facebook posts and one of your SlideShare presentations, would he or she recognize that each was produced by the same entity? If you met in person, would that encounter reflect the…

5 ways to beat boring website copy

Law firm marketing content does not have to be dry or dull. Certainly, producing stock legal marketing copy is easy — just look at almost any website or brochure, take a couple notes and copy like a robot. Explain that the law is complex, say a few things about how only an experienced lawyer can help, drop in a couple of keywords and there you have it. It almost writes itself. But this type of…

Four common misunderstandings about attorney website design (and how to fix them)

It happens to the best attorneys, designers and marketers. You embark upon creating a website together. You brainstorm, you prototype, you test, and you build what you believe to be a great new product. Then, at some point, you realize that something has gone awry. Online conversions are down, bounce rates are up. Time on site is suffering. A mistake has been made, and it is more than a mere typo…

Local citations tend to proliferate regardless of whether you are paying attention. Even if you have done very little active citation building, your firm’s local information is likely listed tens if not hundreds of places across the web. If you are working actively on local SEO, you will likely find thousands of sites on which a you can build a listing for your firm. Ensuring the accuracy of your…

4 Long Form Page Examples for Attorneys

Long-form pages are becoming increasingly popular among web users. But it’s not just humans who like them; Google also rewards this media-rich content. We will explain why in a moment. What is long-form content? A long-form page consists of in-depth copy paired with other forms of media. While a standard article may include a picture with some text, long-form content integrates graphics and other…

HTTPS is taking over Google search results: Are law firms keeping up?

It’s been two years since Google announced that a secured (HTTPS) connection was a minor ranking signal. While most websites that conduct transactions or have user registrations and other features that involve processing data already utilize an HTTPS connection, law firms rarely do. HTTP vs HTTPS Simplified By default your website is accessible via an HTTP connection. With an SSL certificate, you…

When a client with a robust link portfolio and growing rankings informed me that their links had disappeared, I almost dismissed it as another Google Search Console error. The law firm’s link portfolio has more than 30,000 links from about 400 domain names. Google Search Console generally reports about 350 of those linking domains. They can also expect about 1,000 clicks each month to be reported…

Google updates its mobile algorithm: how your firm can stay on top

In February of 2015, Google made waves in the SEO community by announcing a major algorithm update before rolling it out. The change, which went into effect two months later in April, expanded Google’s use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. The ensuing rankings shake-up, hyperbolically dubbed “Mobilegeddon,” did push website owners to make significant changes. According to Smashing…

Law firm advertising in a mobile-first world

Google announced several changes to AdWords last week, targeted for mobile campaigns. The updates further demonstrate Google’s position that we live in a mobile-first world, and website owners must adapt. Here is a brief overview, along with some steps your firm can take to plan a mobile advertising strategy that fits your goals and reaches your prospective clients successfully. Expanded text ads…

5 strategies for writing better blog titles

While the quality of the content and writing itself is essential in the creation of a great blog, your efforts may go unnoticed if it lacks an effective title. Because the internet is wrought with the noise of so many other articles and posts vying for attention, readers have been taught to filter through search results and ignore those that simply fade into the background because they fail to…

How to write a professional attorney bio people will actually want to read

Nobody said writing an attorney bio was glamorous. But it is necessary. Unfortunately, it is a task that is often given too little attention, resulting in a boring bio page that is just a thinly-veiled rehashing of an old resume. Your attorney bio page is important. In fact, it is probably one of the most important pages on your law firm’s website. According to HubSpot, about pages are the second…

What lawyers can learn from Google’s Webspam Report

Google released its 2015 Webspam Report this week, which details actions the company took over the last year to try to clean up the internet, reduce spam and increase page quality. When Google chooses to release actual data, webmasters and website owners (and yes, lawyers) should take note. The reports often provide insight into the types of practices Google punishes and rewards, which you can…

7 ways to hold visitors’ attention and keep them on your site

Two metrics that are often used to determine a website’s performance are time on site and bounce rate. Bounce rate is the percentage of times a user clicks on a page and leaves without visiting any other page; in other words, the percentage of single-page visits. A high bounce rate can indicate that your landing pages are not providing visitors with the information they need. However, a high…