I’ve been providing and teaching SEO since 2005, and frankly when I hear someone say ‘The SEO industry changes so much’ I get that chill down my spine…like, they just don’t get it.

You’ll see that we rank at the top for the keyword [Local SEO Case Study for Attorneys] 

 The case study is nice, but today I’m going to cover the implementation, not the strategy.  So if you’re interested in a high level overview of the strategy, head over to learn about to marketing your law firm on the Internet using SEO.  

You see, the SEO industry is really just…well bullshit.  Everyone’s got an opinion and not is really regulating what’s being said.  I’ve written a lot about my thoughts on this, but for now to get value from this piece, I’ll say this in proper SEO fashion, just believe me!!

Today is about the activities that provide the greatest SEO bang, along with the greatest value for your Law Practice.

7 Most Effective SEO Activities for Lawyers

1. Consistent High-Value Blog Content
2. Quality Effective Website
3. Video
4. Press Releases
5. Guest Posts
6. Profile Citations
7. Reviews

It’s really that simple, just not easy.  You’ll hear so much in SEO about ‘content is king’, write blog posts that are 1000 words and 5% dense with your target keyword, have a website that scores 90 in Google, get data aggregators, citations, optimize your profiles….and on and on and on and on.

There are so many strategies and opinions it’s quite frustrating, gives me a headache more than that when I’m in a hockey locker room full of 13 year old boys going through puberty.

Listen to Google

It’s about Trust and Authority.  Heck, look, I’m referencing the greatest authority source on the matter, Google.  They are literally telling you exactly what you have to do to rank on their search engine. You have to be a trusted authority source on the matter.  It’s that simple.

The hard part is actually proving to a search engine that your content is worthy to rank.  

I tell my students a little secret in trying to understand is a particular ‘SEO strategy’ is worth it. Imagine yourself in a completely dark room, eyes closed, and ask yourself….if this strategy good for my clients?  Is this strategy good for my business?  Is this strategy good for my own values?  If you answer YES to all three, then it’s probably a worthy strategy.

Imagine the question of link building…having link on a quantity of sites.  Is this good for the client, being listed on a directory in Canada? Probably not.

What about a video that answers a DUI question for a Criminal Defense Attorney’s potential client? This would make great sense for the business, the attorney and the client.

The following list I’ll be talking about in a authoritative and trustworthy sense, I’ll be forgoing the nuances of the SEO world.  I don’t want a headache today.

Blog Content

This one is definitely not the most insightful or unique tip you’ve ever heard.  It’s also quite a boring discussion, so I’ll try and give you the nuts and bolts in a couple of breaths.

Your blog is your communication to your audience.  So answer their questions!

If you’re a Personal Injury attorney interested in getting more car accident cases, think about the typical questions a prospective client asks you.  Make a list of the dozen most asked questions.

Now create a blog post answering each question.  Don’t outsource it.  Don’t write a piece to achieve 1000 keywords.  Write an essay like you were taught in school.  Submit a piece that you’d be proud to give to your favorite professor.

Make you have your works cited (outbound links).  Make sure you use visuals when you can (images).  Make it readable (headlines / short paragraphs).  

Your list of a dozen or so topics and this is your content creation schedule for the next year.

Website

OK, so every small business should have a website.  You can spend build a free one, you can spend $25,000.  You can make it flashy, have great features and impress your best collegues, but the bottom line is, if it doesn’t perform, it’s useless.

As far as SEO is concerned, there are perhaps a dozen or so important things to consider.  Some will give you a list of 25, others say five or so factors are truly important.

We call these On The Page factors.  Technically, your website should be error free, load relatively quick and be fairly up to date in the coding.  So plan on getting a rebuild every three to five years.

Page loading speed is pretty important.  We measure with two tools

1. Google Page Speed Test
2. Pingdom Speed Test

As long as your website is loading in less than 4 seconds and less than roughly 4mb, your going to be OK. However, you ideally want a website to load in 2 seconds.

As far as user experience, your website should be achieving a Call to Action, or CTA.  Typically this is either a phone call to the business or a form filled out on the website.

Obviously there are many elements required to help optimize the CTA such as user navigation, user experience and technical elements such as CTR (click through rate) tracking.

A good website requires the skills of several areas.

Of course content is important, but you’ll see this entire piece is merely focused on quality content, which is housed and organized properly on your website, the users and the search engines.

Video

Let’s face it, video is the one digital medium that touches all three factors that influence human behavior…our words, our tone, and our physiology.  While each has its own weight in its ability to influence, it is said our physiology represents 55% of our influence.  This was first written about by Albert Mehrabian and his 7-38-55 rule.

We can only convey physiology with video

Video is usually very confusing and scary for some.  It could cost a lot of money, it could require an investment in technology and skill. It brings the deer in headlight look when considering what to do with video.

Video is really not that hard, if you stick with the basics.  You don’t need a highly edited, heavy b-roll scripted studio shot video to be effective.

A simple rule with video is good lighting and good audio.  So let me give you a simple video strategy for your firm, this is exactly our strategy for our clients.  It consists to two types of video.

1. Attorney Talking Head
2. Blog Talking Head

Sure, you can spend $15,000 on a solid commercial and have that as your headline video, but here I’m talking about creating videos on a regular basis.  Remember, the search engines love consistent quality content.

You can choose both of these strategies or either one.

Attorney Talking Head

Hire someone or bring someone in to record you at your desk.  Wear your typical daily clothing and psych yourself up to speaking with a prospect, not a camera.

Have your dozen questions written out that you put together for the blog exercise. 

Make sure you have some good lighting on your face and eyes, with no shadows.  Don’t use the camera mic, plug in a lavalier or use a good boom mic.

Have someone ask you the question and start talking.  If you feel more comfortable, speak to a person in the room rather than at the camera. Just stay consistent.

Editing the video is easy, you’re shooting for 90 seconds to four minutes, ideally in the two minute range.

Post the videos regularly (not all at once) to YouTube.  Embed the video on your blog.  Propagate to your social channels.

Blog Talking Head

We have a little studio that we create talking head videos for our clients.  It’s simple, we take a popular blog post of theirs, create a script, read it and add b-roll.  Check out this client video.

Videos like this will run your around $500 a piece.  But look at it like this…a year’s worth of video is valued at $6k, and for that price you’ll have a complete library of content that is answering your client’s objections.  These videos can be used for years to come, over and over…on your blog, on YouTube channel, social media and client presentations.

Press Releases

It would be nice to be able to put this image on your website and social channels, wouldn’t it?!

A press release when done properly will do this.  We’ll do a press release at least quarterly for our clients and get distribution into at least 150 press publications.  This PR piece below was submitted to 267 Full Page Placements on 267 different news sources. This included Google News, Fox, Associated Press, ABC, CBS and NBC!

There are many PR distribution services available, and many are simply useless.  It’s tough the play the free game here.  We spend significant time creating a quality piece that’ll be picked up and spend upwards of $1000 for effective distribution.  The media game is a pay to play game.

Guest Posts

You’ve heard links are important in SEO.  You’ve also probably heard a quality link is more important than quantity.  But the question becomes, where do you get links from?

Vision this…a scientist publishes a paper and it’s picked up in a science journal.  Another scientist doing research and uses the first piece as a reference.  When the 2^ndscientist moves up in the ranks, the trust given to the first scientist will increase.  Guest Posts do the same and provide that value in the form of improved SEO…or links.

This is an article that we hired to have written for us by Sharon Rondeau.  Her blog is a very busy blog with high authority on Google…in this case, her blog and this page receive a PR6 rating.  So a link from her blog to any site passes high page rank value.

As you can see in this article, it’s a piece that written about a car accident situation and provides a link with the anchor text [personal injury attorney].  This link is directed to our client, and in this case, we’re trying to improve the keyword of their main core competency, a PI attorney.

You can become a guest writer on your association websites, your school, clients’ websites or publications you’ve been published in.

A firm such as ours spend a lot of time building relationships with high authoritative blog writers that can offer value to their audience with content relevant to our clients.  

Profile Citations

These are simply directories.  There are major one, niche directories, local directories and industry, major aggregators, the telco’s, the list goes on.  

Our industry is split on opinions on who to hire, how to execute and whether to hire data pushers. I’ll tell you what we do.

You’ll need a consistent profile about your business.  We take the time to create a properly optimized profile with description, image set and all relevant and pertinent information.

First we purchase the elite plan at YEXT for our clients.  This costs us about $1000 a year.  This is nice, in a nut shell, because it instantly covers a lot of the biggest directories such a Bing, Yelp and Yahoo.  It’ll help with about 50 sites and ensure you have all four of the major data aggregators.

Over the first six months, we then proceed to manually claim and own the profiles that YEXT has created. YEXT is also nice for duplicate suppression.

Next, we begin the monthly ongoing process of acquiring about 30 new citations a month.  We have a huge database of local and industry citation sources.

There are literally hundreds available.  Some can take 30 minutes or more to properly acquire and claim.  This is an ongoing process, indefinitely.

Reviews

Reviews are said to be the digital form of word-of-mouth, or WOM.  WOM is definitely the best marketing strategy in history for attorneys, and this still holds true.

You need a firm-wide Review Strategy.  Period. I believe it is imperative that you, as the attorney and business owner, to build a company philosophy towards the importance of receiving positive reviews on a consistent basis, for the life of your practice.

We call this finding your hero clients.  You want to do what you can to ethically encourage your most satisfied clients to talk about you online.  Whether it’s Google, or Facebook, you need a system to encourage, measure and monitor this activity.

Your goal should be to receive at least two new 5-star reviews per month, but one a week would be better. Obviously the volume of your firm will further dictate this activity, but regardless, you need consistent reviews.

We implement our RAP system, or our Review Acquisition Programfor Attorneys.

This is a system that helps build that company culture, provides the tools to encourage client reviews and helps measure and monitor progress.    

Bottom line, if your website is not mobile compliant, you are already losing profit. Period.

WON Marketing Conversion Process

In order to be mobile compliant, you need a dynamic website that changes the placement of content on different size devices, like a phone or laptop.

The easiest way to accomplish this is through code functionality in a Content Management System, or CMS. Our preferred CMS is WordPress. We have done over 250 different WordPress (WP) websites and we have dedicated resources programming WP websites.  Not outsourced to someone overseas.  ‘Made in the USA’ means quality theses days….

You might already have a CMS, but this does not mean your website is mobile compliant. This is dependent on your theme, and most themes are NOT Mobile!

Benefits of a CMS

1. Easy for Non-Technical Users

The main point of a CMS is to allow users to add, remove and change content without programming knowledge. If you want use Microsoft Word, you can add and remove pages on a website running a CMS.

2. Always Up to Date

WP uses themes and plugins. New plugins are available when technology changes. For example, Facebook changes a feature, allowing you to stream content on your website from your Facebook page. The developers of the Facebook website plugin get to work. Your website plugin gets updated automatically and you have the new features….without hiring a developer to make changes.

3. Immediate Communication to Clients / Prospects

Because you can add content very easily, you can add content immediately without a developer. Perhaps you have a promotion you want on your blog, or you have a new employee….perhaps the weather is bad and your deliveries for the day will be delayed…you or your employees can put this on your website in minutes

4. A Blog!

It’s amazing how many business websites do not have a blog. I don’t know why. It’s a major factor in ranking, but more importantly, it’s the most effective way to communicate with your audience.

Not Facebook. Not Email Marketing. Not Instagram or whatever. It’s your blog.

WordPress will give you the ability to immediately have a blog.

5. Some additional Awesome Features & Benefits!

   • Web Analytics – know who is coming to your website from where
   • SEO Optimization built in
   • Design Functionality – without rewriting content
   • Multiple Users
   • Security – always being Updated – automatically
   • You’ll Save Money!

Here’s the Offer….

We’ve done over 250 CMS websites and we’re pretty efficient now. Most local business website’s we’ve done are between 9 and 15 total pages.

Not considering the posts on your blog if you have one, we’ll convert your existing website to a WordPress CMS platform and ensure your website and content is mobile compliant.

We’ll do this for a flat fee of $1000.

This promotion is being promoted to all of our clients and prospects. But we can not take more than 7 new project in August and 10 conversion in September. Otherwise I feel we’ll comprise our great service. We’re servicing the conversions on a first come, first served basis, and you need to expect two weeks for the conversion to be completed.

Complete the form below or call 847.807.4382 and we’ll get in touch soon to discuss the conversion and provide any additional details you require.

1. You’re losing new customers
2. You’re losing existing business
3. Your Word of Mouth Marketing has a bleak future….

Let’s face it, you’ve heard this before…you need a mobile website. Well, I’m saying the same thing…except let give you a different perspective.

Bottom line, you’re going to lose new customers, lose existing business and your word of mouth marketing, your best marketing, has a bleak future.

Before I get into this further, let me explain a few things about what a mobile website really means.

The difference between a laptop, a desktop, a tablet, mobile phone or even browsing the internet on your TV is rather simple. They are all a computer with simply a different size display. Really, when it comes down to it, ‘mobile marketing’ is simply giving consumers the right information on the device they are using.

It’s that simple.

But most websites built before 2012 or 2013 do not have this ‘mobile’ capability. And it’s now costing you profit for not having a website that is mobile compliant.

Yet it’s much easier to have this mobile functionality. Is your website mobile?

If you browse your website, and you need to scroll left or right to view content (not up and down), then your website is not mobile. Sure there is more to it than simply the scroll test, but I’ll get into that further.

A mobile website is a dynamic website, one that changes the placement of the content (text, images and video) to be allowed to be displayed in an attractive manner on the varying devices, whether it’s a 27” desktop, 15” laptop, 10” tablet or 5” iPhone.

A mobile website answers all the marketing challenges….deliverying the appropriate content potential customers are asking for in order to take action on your business.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a Chiropractor or Courier company. Your customers go to your website to answer their questions…whether it’s your address, phone numbers, philosophy, techniques….you know, those consumer buying questions….which leads to conversion.

The Number One reason to have a mobile website is ….

1. You’re losing new customers

Bottom line, you’re not going to rank in Google searches if your website is NOT mobile compliant. Google has a nice tool here to check how mobile compliant your website is.

Let’s face it, Google’s job is to send their users to a place that answers their questions. With over 60% of users looking for local businesses now using their mobile phones, it’s obvious Google will want to give it’s users the best user experience, hence sending them to websites they can easily view on their phones.

Since search drives more traffic to a local business website than ALL other mediums combined, the value of your website drops if it’s not mobile compliant.

It’s that simple.

Traffic + Conversion = Sales

That’s the Internet Marketing Equation. Since it’s apparent a non-mobile compliant website will results in poor rankings, a non-mobile website also affects the other part of the Internet marketing equation…conversion.

This is taking a prospect to take an action…book that first appointment, or place that first delivery order.

If a consumer needs to scroll left and right, up and down, the proof is clear, they’ll move to the next website.

2. You’re losing existing business

They say you have 3 ways to increase and grow your business

• Get New Customers
• Increase Existing Customer Transaction Amount
• Increase Existing Customer Transaction Frequency

Truth is, the first one is the ‘go to’ for business owners, but the following two are much easier and often forgotten.

Your website is an extremely valuable tool for help you with the ‘other’ two ways to increase your bottom line.

By driving existing customers, and education them on all your services and offerings, statically you can encourage your existing customers to spend more and spend more frequently.

It should be obvious now where I’m going with this….You are missing over 60% of your existing customers of you’re not doing this properly.

You are leaving profit on the table, today, right now.

3. Your Word of Mouth Marketing has a bleak future….

The BEST form of marketing in history for a local business is, and always will be, word of mouth marketing.

I could write an entire book on why I believe this to be truth, even in the days of the Internet.

Apple has the most expensive computers around, but is the richest company on the planet.

Because they have a great product and great service.

If you’re a local business, and you are passionate about always giving your customer a great experience with your company, people will talk.

People will leave reviews. Customers will flock to give you a video testimonial.

Truth is, I’ll trust the palate of some of my friends to recommend a great local restaurant rather than reading a bunch of reviews on Yelp.

But there are also friend’s palates that I won’t trust. But that same person, I’ll trust their opinion on the best hardware store. Point is, I’ve some how, internally, figured out who I trust for what types of products and services…this is Word of Mouth (WOM) Marketing.

So a friend recommends a restaurant to me. I browse their website, but become frustrated their menu is old school PDF format that doesn’t fit on my phone. That document has an 63% chance I’ll leave within 3.7 seconds!

Word of Mouth FAIL. All that investment to deliver a good product and service is out the door, because I didn’t invest a few bucks making my website mobile.

What Now?

Time for a Mobile Website! It’s that simple. Google itself says the average business should reconsider their website every 3 years. Heck, ‘freshness’ is a major ranking factor.

WON Marketing has a promotion for the end of the summer.  Learn more here!

We’ll convert your entire website for a fraction of the cost of your website.

But that’s not the only benefit, there’s more you’ll be getting.

You can fill out the form below and we’ll be in contact with you shortly to discuss the implications and costs…but in most cases most of you will get a new website, mobile compliant conversion for $1000.

Click here to learn more about our Mobile Conversion Promotion.

Complete form to apply for a conversion or call 847.807.4382