This post reflects the opinions of the leadership team at Juris Digital: CEO Casey Meraz, CSO Matt Green, and COO Leann Pickard.
Imagine that you are pregnant. You know the sex of the baby and you’ve got a name picked out. You’ve started preparing your home for the arrival of your new family member. You have dreams and aspirations for your child.
You go in for a routine appointment with your doctor, and you’re given the worst news imaginable: Your baby has a disease that prevents lung tissue from developing. Your doctor informs you that your baby will, at most, live for minutes after being born. And she tells you that giving birth to your baby will put your life in danger.
Now imagine that you live in a state where abortion is illegal, and so your doctor tells you that she cannot help you safely terminate the pregnancy. Moments after receiving the most devastating possible news about your baby, you must now face the reality that you need to travel out of your state to receive an abortion to avoid risking death or decades-long imprisonment.
This is not some far-fetched hypothetical. 8 percent of all pregnancies involve complications that threaten the life of the baby and the mother.
Want to help women get access to safe abortions? Check out this resource from Alison Turkos.
We are appalled by the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade. We believe that this decision to strip women of sovereignty over their own bodies is not only a symptom of a dying democracy but will literally cause women to die.
We believe that women have a self-evident right to control their own bodies and that any law to the contrary is a violation of their human rights.
We recognize that women who live in states where abortion has been criminalized – and who do not have the financial resources to travel – will be most impacted. This will disproportionately affect women of color.
We recognize that 1 out of every 6 American women will be the victim of rape in her lifetime and that this barbaric ruling will prevent those women from safely terminating pregnancies that result from rape.
At this time Juris Digital’s leadership is dialoguing with legal counsel and women’s rights advocates to understand how we can direct our resources to help the women on our team and in our communities get access to abortions and reproductive health care that is safe, private, and free from government tyranny.
In the meantime, we wanted to make our position clear.
If you want to help, we encourage you to visit this resource which provides a list of the most productive ways to support access to safe abortions.
Did you know that Google penalizes websites that operate outside of their terms of service? A couple of years ago Google was actively penalizing a lot of law firm websites who were going after links in unnatural ways. But penalties are not just limited to law firm websites.
Having been actively involved in the SEO industry for almost 20 years now, iv’e seen, worked with, and been apart of some very nasty penalties. Iv’e seen first hand what they can do to a law firm’s case intake and also seen the joy they receive when getting out of a mess like this.
This whole journey is part of our story and why we’re ethical white hat marketers. Unfortunately uneducated marketers may not even know how to diagnose a penalty or realize that they’ve been in one.
If you’ve ever hired an internet marketing company, built links, or participated in shortcuts it’s probably a good idea to run an analysis to see if your website is under a Google Penalty.
There are a few signs that may indicate that your website has been penalized by Google:
If you think your website has been penalized, you can try to identify the issue by reviewing the guidelines provided by Google and making any necessary changes to your website. You can also try submitting a reconsideration request through Google Search Console to ask Google to review your website again.
To learn what types of penalties you can get let’s first talk about Type of Penalty and then we can get into the causes of penalties. Not all type’s of penalties are created equally. Here is a brief run down of the types and how they can affect you.
1. Manual Penalties
Manual actions are actions that members from Google’s Webspam team took against some or part of your website. In these cases someone from their quality team physically reviewed your site to come up with the decision to send you into a penalty.
With manual penalties you will be notified in Google Webmaster Tools via the message center and can also check it by visiting: Search Traffic > Manual Actions. (You can see an example of this to the right side of the screen)
On this page any manual penalties will be listed along with more information about the penalty. We will get into this a little bit later.
With manual actions there are two sub types you can get hit with:
A. Site Wide Action
Site wide actions indicate that the problem is affecting every page of your website and none are immune to the penalty.
B. Partial Matches
Partial matches are penalties that impact individual URL’s. It will be limited to the individual pages or sections on the site which the action applies to.
Watch this video from Google’s former head of Webspam Matt Cutts to learn more
2. Algorithmic Penalties
In addition to getting a penalty that was manually assessed by a Google Employee, you can also get what we call algorithmic penalties. Have you heard of the dreaded Google Updates named after animals such as Panda or Penguin?
These updates the algorithm are meant to take out people trying to manipulate Google’s search results unnaturally at the algorithmic level. Since there are so many violators this is a way they can assess quality in much greater volume based on trends of spam based websites.
Since people are constantly trying to manipulate search engines you can can safely assume that there are a lot of ways a website can be penalized. I’ll go into all of them briefly below but the most common ones I see are link penalties, Content Penalties, and Hacked sites. More on this in a bit.
Unnatural links
How To Remove It: Manually remove bad links and create a disavow file. Submit reconsideration if it’s a manual penalty.
This is a big one that is about as common as SEO companies sending you emails trying to sell you SEO services. One of the problems with unnatural links is understanding trends and being able to make corrective actions. If you have ever paid for a link or participated in a scheme for the purpose of getting a link then you have violated the Google Webmaster Guidelines.
Remember how I mentioned Thumbtack.com earlier? They were penalized by giving away “points” in exchange for a link to their website. Google is a corporation and can make their own rules so it’s important to stay in the loop with them.
In the law space here are the most common things I have seen Webmaster’s participate in that has gotten them penalized.
Even if you didn’t participate in any of the above tactics you need to be checking into this. In some cases your SEO company may not have told you what they participated in. In others you could be a victim of negative SEO where potential competitors or other shady goons are building unnatural links to your website.
Thin content with little or no added value
How To Remove It: Create good substantial content and get the pages re-indexed.
If you’ve familiarized yourself with Google’s best practices or commonly read internet marketing blogs then you must have heard how bad duplicate content is. Duplicate content won’t help you rank in the search engines.
In addition to this, thin content won’t help you either and also puts you in a very tricky situation with a looming penalty. Thin content could be pages with just a few words or it could also be doorway pages.
In 2008 I saw a lot of law firms create multiple city landing pages with little or no unique content. In these cases I also noticed them copy and paste these to different pages optimized for different cities while replacing just the city name.
If you did this get rid of it ASAP. That’s just asking for it if you’re still getting away with it.
Hidden text and/or keyword stuffing
How To Remove It: Remove keyword stuffing and clean up your content
Back in early 2000’s someone figured out that search engines were remarkably less sophisticated back then and relied heavily on the number of keywords used on the page. You may have heard the Keyword Density Myth. If you’re hiding black text keywords on a black background you will need a time machine to succeed.
Although I joke about this, it’s sad because I still see it from time to time. However more commonly I see keyword stuffing as a problem. How do you know if you’re keyword stuffing? Just ask yourself if it reads naturally. If not, you may have a problem.
Things like this make me puke: “Do you need a Los Angeles personal injury lawyer to help you with your Los Angeles personal injury case?” ~ and you can get MUCH worse than this.
Hacked Websites
How To Remove It: Remove spam or hacked issues. Submit reconsideration request.
This one is actually pretty common and unless you’ve seen the notice you might not know. Hacked websites are pretty common because hackers are constantly finding vulnerabilities in platforms and plugins.
Pro Tip: Be careful about the WordPress plugins you install. Some can cause vulnerabilities.
Spam
How To Remove It: Remove spam. Submit reconsideration request.
Thankfully spam reasons are not as common as anything else I see. Typically if you get a spam warning you know you did something wrong and that you need to fix it. As a rule of thumb don’t do anything unnatural such as using spammy structured markup or participate in cloaking and you’ll be ok.
Want to know more about penalty types? Here is some further reading from Google on Manual Penalties. (Source: Google Search Console Help)
Now to the meat of this this post. Are you wondering if your website has a penalty? At this point I’m assuming you’ve already checked to see if there is a manual penalty associated with your website. If you haven’t, here is what you need to do.
Checking For A Manual Penalty
**Note: You must have Google Webmaster Tools Installed
If you do have a manual penalty it’s best to consult a penalty recovery expert for further advice. I am working on a penalty recovery guide for attorneys which will be published soon.
Keep in mind that link based penalties will take dedication to remove and can be more complicated than most others.
Checking For Algorithmic Penalties
Checking for algorithmic penalties is a serious business. The problem with algorithmic penalties is that unlike manual penalties there are no notifications. In addition to this, algorithmic penalties may only affect a page or a small section of your website.
Learning how to read between the lines here and figure out whether or not your penalized is best left up to experts. However there are some things you can do to get a good idea if you were penalized or not. One such method is by using a free tool called Panguin by Barracuda Digital. This tool requires you have Google Analytics but will connect to it and align known updates with your analytics data.
A quick tutorial on how to use this is below:
This tool is a very powerful tool that allows you to comb through organic traffic data and get a clear picture pretty easily. The problem is that identifying you have a penalty due to a traffic drop off on a certain data requires different work to remove it.
If you do see major traffic drop offs with these changes you need to develop a plan to see which specific pages were affected and how you can go about removing the penalty.
First relax and take a deep breath. Your situation may not be as bad as you think. Honestly it just depends on how far in the hole you are with Google. Penalties mean Google has lost trust in your website to some extent. Determining the extent to which the trust was lost is important as is figuring out a plan to help you get back where you were.
When your website was penalized it was receiving some sort of artificial boost from your activities. Not only do you want to remove the penalty, you want to gain back the trust naturally and in a white hat method.
Penalties suck and since I’ve personally seen some of the worst I would be happy to talk with you about your current situation. Simply give me a call or feel free to email me direct at cmeraz (at) lawyerseomarketing.org. I can also advise you on do it yourself options.
If you’ve made the decision to invest in content for your law firm’s website, congrats! You’ve made a really good choice.
At Juris Digital we can genuinely claim to have built our business on the back of targeted, compelling, and useful website content.
In turn, we have helped hundreds of law firms grow their practices and get more of their best cases by deploying strategic lawyer website content.
Did You Know: Juris Digital is a marketing and SEO agency that also staffs a 30-attorney content writing team with experience in dozens of practice areas and jurisdictions? It’s a potent combination. Ready to put us to work for your law firm?
Let’s Talk ContentMy name is Matt Green and I am one of the founding partners here at Juris Digital. I love to help lawyers and legal marketers make smart investments in effective website content that creates measurable growth for their business.
In this post, I’ll discuss 9 of the most important questions that you ought to ask yourself before you invest in website content for your law firm.
It’s important that you understand why you’re creating content for your law firm’s website. What do you hope to achieve by publishing content? In most cases law firms use website content for marketing –– to directly attract new clients to the firm.
However, there are plenty of other productive reasons to invest in content for your website:
Before investing in legal web content it’s important that you clarify the purpose of the content you’re creating. A strategic content service provider will help you with this during the initial phase of your engagement.
RELATED: How Much Should I Pay for Legal Content?
For most law firms the primary audience for their website content is prospective new clients. In other words, the individuals that they hope will hire the firm to help with their legal issues.
For some though, the primary audience is the firm’s existing clients, attorneys who refer cases to the firm, other attorneys at the firm, or even journalists and news media who cover the firm’s casework.
Before investing in website content it’s crucial that you define who your primary audience is for each piece of content that you create.
Once we have defined who the audience is for our website content we need to ask ourselves what type of content is required to satisfy those folks and ultimately have them take the action we want them to take.
There are a several website content archetypes that we deploy for our clients at Juris Digital:
These are pages on your website that convey your primary services. These tend to be linked-to from the main website navigation and are more or less “static” in nature. These pages are normally aimed directly at potential new clients.
Service pages are generally optimized for search keywords that have a strong transactional and local intent (eg. “DUI attorney houston”). Service pages are a more-or-less essential ingredient of any law firm website.
Here are a few examples of service pages that perform well for our clients:
About the firm pages are just what you’d expect: Pages that convey things about the law firm such as the firm’s history and mission, biographies of the firm’s attorneys, examples of the firm’s results for clients, testimonials from the firm’s clients, and honors, awards, and media coverage that the firm has received.
I sometimes refer to these as braggy pages. They represent the firm’s opportunity to talk themselves up. Here are a few examples of About the Firm pages that perform well for our clients:
Client success stories are among this author’s favorite types of website content for law firms. These are pages that tell the story of the firm’s clients. In my opinion, there is no better way to convince your audience – whether they be your potential clients, your existing clients, or people who can refer you clients – that your firm is the right choice than by telling the stories of others that you’ve helped.
At Juris Digital we offer client success story creation as a service. You can learn all about what that looks like – and see examples of our work – on our client success story service page.
RELATED: How to Create Client Success Stories That Turn Website Visitors Into Your Best Clients
Informational articles are aimed at folks who have questions or are doing research about your area(s) of practice. Law firms who are serious about deploying content as a means of widening their reach and gaining more new clients online invest in informational content. Whereas service pages are written for folks who are presumably ready to hire a lawyer, informational articles attract a much wider audience because people who search for legal information are not necessarily ready to – or even considering – hiring a lawyer (though they often are!).
An example of a search that someone looking for an informational legal article might conduct is “average payout fo 18-wheeler accident“. Someone who searches a query like this is looking for information that is relevant to the services of a personal injury law firm, even if they are not yet convinced that they need to hire a lawyer. Law firms who publish this sort of website content give themselves an opportunity to get in front of these folks.
Here are a few examples of informational legal articles that perform well for our clients.
RELATED: Evergreen Content Marketing for Law Firms
This sort of content is typically delivered in the form of blog posts. This includes reactions to and analysis of legal rulings in the firm’s practice areas, and research related to the firm’s areas of practice. Generally, this is not content that can be effectively ghost-written by an agency like ours. This sort of content needs to be produced by experts in the field (ie. the attorneys at your firm).
The audience for this type of content is generally folks who can help amplify the law firm such as journalists, bloggers, thought-leaders, etc. While this type of content can absolutely generate positive outcomes for the firm, those outcomes tend to be much more difficult to track and attribute because the benefits they produce are indirect.
At Juris Digital we believe that the best way for law firms to get their content in front of their audience is via organic search (SEO). When a content strategy is backed by keyword search data the results can be transformative.
But there are other digital channels for getting your website content in front of your audience as well including:
A strategic website content partner like Juris Digital will work with you to understand the best channels for promoting your law firm’s website content.
For law firms that have been engaged in content marketing or other forms of web marketing for some time, there is often an opportunity to significantly improve results by evaluating what content exists and then repurposing and revamping that content strategically.
One of the things that separate Juris Digital from other legal web content vendors is that we take the time to assess our client’s current website content before making recommendations for new content. Of course, sometimes the clients who come to us are starting from scratch and so they need new content written from the ground-up. But often we are able to save time and money and achieve positive outcomes by repurposing and revamping existing content.
CLIENT SUCCESS STORY
See how we deployed legal content marketing to help Massingill Law massively increase traffic and leads from the web.
Before investing in website content for your law firm you need a plan for measuring the performance of the content you published.
At Juris Digital, because we are a marketing agency and not just a purveyor of written words, we help our clients understand the potential outcomes of any given piece of content, and we help them measure the performance of the content after it’s published. We do this by ensuring that web traffic tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console are properly configured on your website. This enables us to help our clients understand what specific pieces of content are most effective at generating positive outcomes so that those pieces can be prioritized for continual updates and improvements.
You might be noticing a theme here, which is: Simply “ordering” pieces of website content is not good enough. There needs to be strategic consideration behind each new piece of website content your law firm produces. One of the key considerations before investing in legal web content is to understand where that content should live within the existing structure of your website.
For example, if you want to do a piece on the penalties for a third DUI charge in your state, should that content be presented as a service page? Or as an informational article? Or, should it not even be its own page, but instead, be incorporated as a new section in your existing DUI service page?
In making this determination, we may uncover opportunities to make improvements to the way that your website’s existing content is structured. At Juris Digital we help our clients uncover these opportunities by taking a holistic approach to website content creation.
RELATED: How to Use Topic Clusters and Keyword Clusters for More Effective Legal Content Marketing
In the world of legal marketing, the word content is often synonymous with written content — words. But written words are far from the only format for conveying information on the web. Based on the nature of your law firm’s practice and the specific topics you want to cover, you may benefit from producing other forms of content including:
At Juris Digital we advise our clients on what supplemental content types might be needed to achieve their goals, and because we are a full-service digital marketing shop, we have the talent and resources to create those additional assets.
It’s important to understand that website content is simultaneously an asset and a liability. It is an asset in the sense that it can fundamentally transform the quantity and quality of new business opportunities that your firm generates from the web.
But it’s also a liability in the sense that it’s something that must be hosted, managed, and updated over time. Accordingly, it’s important that before you invest in content for your attorney website you consider whose job it will be to manage that content, and what that process ought to look like.
At Juris Digital we can help you define what must be done to maintain high-performing content over the long term, and put a plan in place for ensuring that is achieved.
To sum up: It’s possible that you understand perfectly what sort of content you need for your law firm’s website, and you simply need someone to write the words. In that case, we might not be the best fit for you. But if you’re like most of our clients, you’d benefit from a website content provider who will go beyond typeing words, and will also take the time up-front to understand your goals and your audience – using a rubric like the one I’ve presented here – in order to maximize the efficacy of your investment.
Let’s Talk Content
If your attorney SEO program or paid search marketing is not generating enough signed cases, the first step needs to be looking internally.
One of the biggest problems I see with attorneys who struggle with internet marketing is that they’re getting leads, but not taking them as seriously as they should. Let me explain:
Recently I finished conducting a survey where I interviewed over 30 successful attorneys across the country about their online marketing efforts.
During these conversations I gained significant insight into what digital marketing channels are working the best at getting new clients for law firms.
While most of these calls were very insightful to me, I also found myself answering a few questions for them.
As I dove deeper with my questioning I found that many of these attorneys didn’t have a problem with their online marketing, but rather a problem of not converting as many leads as they should have.
While you can’t expect to close 100% of cases, you should be able to close a very high percentage of qualified cases. Lead qualification will vary greatly from firm to firm but once you set your criteria for the minimum requirements to take a case you can work on a higher closing rate.
Firms that are not signing 90% of their qualified cases have room for improvement. Here are some of the top reasons I have seen for close rates being low.
You probably think this one is a no-brainer, but it was shocking to me how many attorneys told me that they return calls promptly. The fact is that your firm should be set up to answer all calls at all times. If a potential client is looking for you online they’re shopping.
When they pick up the phone they want to talk to someone. If it takes too long or they have to leave a message, you better believe they’re calling someone else next. Lost calls are lost money.
If you don’t have an after hours answering service or overflow procedure in place you need to set one up. We recommend our clients work with Alert Communications.
I once worked with an attorney who told me he returned emails within 24 hours because they didn’t seem as urgent to him. That is the wrong mindset to have. If you have a method for collecting customer information you need to be able to respond to that request immediately.
Whether it’s an automated email that links to a calendar booking appointment or just a SMS notification to one of your staff members so they see it right away, you need to get on that. Responding promptly is going to boost your close rate. Even if they respond with a contact form, call them right away.
Take a critical look at your staff. Have you ever gotten a bad online review because of an interaction the client had with your company? It doesn’t mean that you have the wrong staff members on board, but sometimes it means they need more training. Remember that every interaction someone has with your company is a brand experience.
If your intake staff is not well trained enough to the point where they’re not being helpful or creating a bad customer experience, or they don’t know the answers to common questions, then you’re losing business. Invest in your staff and make sure they get the proper training.
Let’s say you have a potential client on the phone and the case looks like something you want to take on. Do you have an online intake that you can go through there and then with the client? If not, you’re missing out.
How much time do you waste using investigators, screening cases further, or doing manual paperwork to get a case signed? Did you know you can provide a BETTER customer experience? Making it easier for the potential client will save your firm time, improve your organization, and make a difficult process easy on them. If you’re not converting 90% of your qualified cases, this tip can help you improve your business fast.
Even if the initial call goes well but the client wants to speak to an attorney you should always avoid transferring the call to voicemail. Voicemail is the lead killer. Ensure you create the proper procedures so that clients are always taken care of on that first touch point. Invest in the backup systems and ensure that you can do everything in your power to avoid this scenario.
Nobody has time to wait around for a phone call to be returned.
Strategies for Bringing in Consistent Clients for Your Family Law Practice
So you’re looking to get more clients for your family law practice? Getting started with marketing your family law practice online can be daunting, but don’t fret! You’ve come to the right place.
Here, I’ve laid out a specific action plan for building and executing a marketing strategy for your family law firm that will generate relevant leads via inbound digital marketing channels.
Note: For the most part I have not included any “traditional” marketing methods (ie. networking, billboards, TV ads, etc.) in this post. Rather, I’ve focused on online, inbound marketing, as this is our area of expertise and what we believe to be the best method for building a sustainable lead generation engine for your family law practice over the long term.
CLIENT SUCCESS STORY
See how we deployed a combination of holistic strategy consulting and advanced digital marketing execution to help Vantage Group Legal grow from zero online presence to attracting potential new clients every day.
Before you can go about generating new clients for your law firm on the web, it’s critical that you understand who you are targeting, and why they should choose to hire you instead of someone else.
To define your target audience, spend some time answering the following questions about your ideal client:
Once you’ve answered these questions and have a strong understanding of who your target clients are, turn your attention to defining why you are the best choice to represent them.
The fact is, you can generate thousands of unique visitors to your website, but if you can’t clearly convey why your firm is their best choice, all of that traffic will be for naught.
To come up with your unique value propositions, spend some time answering the following questions:
For an example of a family law attorney who does a great job conveying his unique value propositions on his website, click here.
You can invest tens of thousands of dollars on your firm’s digital marketing assets – custom website design, beautiful photography, videos, graphics, etc – but if you fail to publish useful information which is optimized for keywords that your potential clients search when they need your services, your results will be lackluster.
Below is arguably the most valuable information in this entire article: choose keywords that your know result in highly relevant traffic and optimize for those keywords.
For the purpose of giving you realistic examples, we have used Illinois and Texas as the state for these target keywords. You can simply replace these states with the name of your state for your keywords.
Now that you understand who your target audience is and you’ve defined why they should hire you for their family law needs, it’s time to put that information on the web.
There are of course endless online channels and tactics that you could utilize to get in front of your potential customers. Below I’ve prioritized what we at Juris Digital believe to be the most effective digital properties for marketing your family law practice.
The most important (and likely most expensive) piece of your family law firm’s marketing tool kit is your website. Unlike social media profiles or ads on legal directories like Avvo.com or Lawyers.com, your Firm’s website is an asset for your business. It is a digital property that you own and control 100%. Accordingly, it’s a critical investment.
You ought to treat your website as the cornerstone of your Firm’s marketing efforts. If digital marketing follows a hub and spoke model, your website is the hub. It is where your best content lives, and where you should direct all potential customers regardless of where they discover you.
At Juris Digital we have written extensively on what law firms need to know about creating an effective website. Below I have curated and linked to the most important of those articles that will help you understand the right process for creating your family law firm’s website:
The second most important web property for your family law practice is your Google My Business listing. Google My Business is the name of Google’s free tool that business owners use to manage the information about their business that is presented to the world on Google.
Because your family law firm is a local business that services local clients, it is essential that you claim and optimize your listing on Google so that people find you when they search general, local queries related to your business, for example:
To optimize your Firm’s Google My Business listing, you need to make sure to do the following:
In 2020 Google rolled out a pay-per-lead ad offering for family law firms called Local Service Ads. You’ve probably seen these ads before without necessarily realizing it. They look like this:
These ads have quickly gained popularity because unlike traditional Google PPC ads – where you pay for each click your ad gets – local service ads are pay-per-lead, where you only get billed when your ad generates a contact.
You made it to the bottom; thanks for reading! If you have any questions about the information presented here please drop a comment below and I’ll respond in short order.
Ever wonder why you prefer one law firm website design over another?
The answer: Simplicity. Or, in other words, “less visually complex”.
Simplicity in a law firm website doesn’t mean your homepage has to be nothing but white with black text, or extremely minimalistic in the aesthetic.
Rather, simplicity refers to a design which facilitates seamless communication between the eyes and the brain, allowing us to process information quickly and effectively. This 2013 Harvard study taught us that humans generally make a decision on a website design within 1/50th to 1/20th of a second based on the “visual complexity” of the design.
Below is a perfect example of how use of white space and typography can completely alter the emotion that a word evokes:
Despite being the same word, our minds react differently to the version on the left than the one on the right.
Again, this doesn’t mean that your website’s homepage must be nothing but a white background with black text. Rather, I’m suggesting that you simplify the “clutter” (which evokes feelings of anxiety and stress), using enough space to help the user gather what is being communicated within the content and aesthetic of the page.
The whole idea of “web experience” is not to make the viewer feel “trapped” or “run away” but to feel comfortable enough to read your content and find out what your law firm is about. The attorney-client relationships require a certain level of trust and comfort, and you want to evoke those feeling with your website’s design. White space can help achieve just that.
If you invest in content marketing (articles, blog posts, videos, infographics, etc.) it is likely that the majority of your site’s visitors are interested in learning something. That’s why at Juris Digital we prefer simple design places our best content at the forefront of our client’s websites.
When a design is stuffed with decorative, flashy, blinking, moving, bright colored icons or elements, it’s can be easy for the user to become distracted from the task of navigating the site to find what they are looking for.
Who doesn’t want more conversions, right?! At Juris Digital we have simplified the structure of a law firm homepage into four parts:
Web design and conversion optimization go hand in hand. A user is expecting to do something on your website, to take some sort of action. It’s our job to create a simple flow to help the user accomplish that goal.
We generally suggest that a law firm website’s primary navigation include no more than six parent links. This should include Home and Contact links. You don’t need excessive links to complicate or clutter a navigation system. How is this done?
Simple Navigation:
Overly Complex Navigation:
We loooove fast load times. Simplistic design normally correlates with page speed, and page speed normally correlates with websites that people love. Elements such as image borders, drop shadows, extra illustrative images, big images, image calls, video embeds, social share buttons, parallax scrolling, giant background images, all increase page load times. Most web design companies add this “flare”, which commonly accomplishes nothing but slowing down the site’s page load times.
Just remember your homepage is often your law firm’s first impression. Strive for simple, elegant design which evokes the emotions you want your clients to feel.
Whether you’re using WordPress, HubSpot or Webflow it may be time to seriously consider how your site is designed to attract ideal clients.
Today I was doing some research on legal content writing providers and I came across a company called Lexicon Legal Content.
The first thing I noticed is that in their homepage title tag the company makes this claim:
As both attorneys and legal marketing professionals know, claiming that you are the “best” in your marketing materials is, at best, misleading, and at worst could result in disciplinary action by state bar associations.
But, I thought, perhaps there is some independent, trusted source that has actually reviewed legal content providers and concluded that Lexicon Legal is in fact the “#1 best rated” legal content provider. So I poked around.
The first thing I did was put lexiconlegalcontent.com into Ahrefs to see what websites link to them, my thought process being that this would be a quick way to find any sources that mention Lexicon Legal Content as the “best” legal content writing service. The first thing I found was this post from AttorneyatLawMagazine.com:
I noticed that that posting was part of a collection of posts categorized underAttorneyatLawMagazine.com’s “Legal Vendor Authorities”:
Ok, soAttorneyatLawMagazine.com rates legal vendors that they consider to be the “best” and writes posts about them on their website. Perhaps this is what Lexicon Legal is referring to when they call themselves the “best” legal content writers? Maybe.
This begs the question, how doesAttorneyatLawMagazine.com come up with their list of “best” legal vendors? Well, on their best legal vendors page they state the following:
If you are a legal vendor and you don’t see your industry above, please reach out and we can look into adding the industry. Then we can vet your company to see if you are a good representation for your specific industry. If you do see your industry above and it is not filled, please reach out and we can vet your company!
Ok, so the assumption here is that, at some point, someone from Lexicon Legal Content reached out to AttorneyatLawMagazine.com and asked to be vetted for inclusion on their best legal content vendors page.
So, I clicked the “reach out” link to see what that process might have looked like. When I did, I was taken to this page:
As you can see, this page allows you to contact the legal marketing team atAttorneyatLawMagazine.com. What this indicates to me is that the best legal vendors listed byAttorneyatLawMagazine.com are not really based on any sort of unbiased assessment of legal vendors, but rather, are purely a pay-to-play marketing service.
Based on this, I’d conclude thatAttorneyatLawMagazine.com’s rating of Lexicon Legal Content as a “best” vendor is not adequate for Lexicon to be able to refer to themselves as such.
Next, I turned my attention to online reviews of Lexicon Legal Content. Perhaps their claim of being the best legal content writers is based on an overwhelming number of positive, third-party online reviews, I thought.
I first checked the most authoritative and common online review sources: Google, Facebook, and Yelp. As of the time of publishing this post, neither their Facebook page nor their Google Business Profile contained any reviews, positive or otherwise. I did not find a Yelp listing.
I dug deeper in the search results, looking for any third-party sites where I might find reviews of Lexicon Legal Content. I found none.
So ifAttorneyatLawMagazine.com’s designation of Lexicon Legal Content is little more than a pay-to-play nod, and the company has precisely zero customer reviews from trusted online review sites, what is their “best” claim based on? Did they simply make it up to try and stand out in search results? And if so, is that the sort of company you want to trust with your legal content writing?
If not, I hope you’ll consider reaching out to Juris Digital’s legal content writing team instead. We don’t claim to be the best, but we do take a great deal of pride in the awesome responsibility that lawyers and law firms place in the hands of our capable, ethical team. We also have far less than zero real client reviews.
It’s no secret that Google has been continuing to reward bigger law firms and bigger brands with more search visibility. The competition in all search mediums for attorney’s is very stiff and a great example of this is just looking at the costs per click if you do Google Ads.
In 2021, for personal injury attorney’s these clicks can range from costing $20 – $1000+ just to get one click. This also trickles into the organic and local side of the search algorithm that causes some attorney’s and unrepeatable SEO companies to participate in shady tactics. The good news is that Google is getting better every day at catching these goons and is rewarding the legitimately powerful websites.
Simply put, Barnacle SEO is leveraging other websites rankings for your benefit. Basically you want to be anywhere your potential clients are looking for your services, whether it’s your website or someone else’s.
Almost every-time one of your potential clients searches for a keyword, they will be given several options such as:
These are the pay per lead program results that show up. See the example below:
These are the pay per click product Google offers. You will notice these are marked by the word ad.
This is where we find most clicks with local intent go. Getting listed here is free, meaning you won’t pay per click or lead (although competitive).
Below the ads and the local results you typically see local law firms and other websites such as legal directories, award sites, and more.
Barnacle SEO and Share of Search is being listed on each of these websites that you’re able to. So wherever your potential clients are looking, you show up.
No obviously it would be nearly impossible to rank on your competitors website, but there are typically many other options to show up and get listed.
Time and time again I see law firms who participated in shady link building tactics or other manipulative behavior get penalized for trying to game the search engines.
If your company website is your main source of case leads, what would happen if it were to disappear off the search engines tomorrow? Barnacle SEO acts as an insurance policy.
Tracking leads by source is essential to help measure any marketing campaign. If your firm is setup to collect details on exactly where the lead came from you can help justify any investment in these areas.
By having strong visibility on these other properties you will get more calls and click throughs to your firms website.
Sometimes potential clients “shop” around for the right attorney. While doing this they typically visit multiple websites to do their research.
If they see you on Avvo.com when they click on that result and then notice your firm’s website next on the list they are going to be more likely to click on your website since your name seems familiar.
Websites likes Lawyers.com and Avvo.com give a place for clients to leave review for you. If you have a high rating on these sites you will be more likely to get a call.
This is especially helpful when potential clients are researching your name. They will look for customer reviews and ratings across the web. You can learn more about how to get a 10 AVVO rating here.
This question is a bit complicated since it can involve so many aspects of search. That being said there are some things you can do right away to help increase your presence. There are two ways you can go about this. They are:
You can optimize your attorney or law firm profile on the third party websites like Avvo.com and Lawyers.com. The higher you rank the more visibility you will get when potential clients click through to that page.
You can play off of their domain authority and build up your profile page to rank for your desired keywords.
Each of these methods require two very different approaches which I will cover below.
Most searches performed in the attorney landscape will come up with one to three websites that are heavily prevalent in almost all searches. These websites are Avvo.com, Lawyers.com, and Yelp.com. This means that if you were to conduct almost any commercial keyword search for an attorney you would find one to five of these websites listed in the search results.
Now since each of these properties are each independently owned and operated they each have their own algorithm which will dictate who shows up where. To make this simple I have broken down these sites with the most common things you should do on each of them to reach your desired position. If you want more details please feel free to message me directly.
Avvo.com has been a growing player in the legal marketplace for quite some time. AVVO.com typically shows attorneys by geographic area and then rating. Avvo provides a 1-10 rating score you can gain and increase.
If you’re not a 10.0 you likely won’t show up on the first page of results. Even if you reach the coveted 10.0 Superb rating you will also have to continue to be active to stay on top of your competitors. In a nutshell this is what you should do to reach that 10.0 rating on Avvo.com.
Doing these things along with being active in the Avvo community can increase your score. Once you reach the 10.0 position you will be getting more click throughs and traffic from searches that rank above the fold like the example above. If you want a more in depth guide on what to do you can also read my full guide and learn how to get a 10 AVVO rating here.
Lawyers.com and Martindale.com commonly appear in the search results pages. Martindale has a strong search engine that I speculate uses a variety of factors to rank your position. These are the things you can do to stand out on Lawyers.com
It’s no secret that Yelp.com has been growing in popularity. Just because most of their users use it for restaurant reviews does not mean it should be overlooked one bit. Consumers already have confidence in Yelp and with their strong review filtering, their reviews can go a long way in the consumers eyes.
Yelp is also a bit tricky. Their review algorithm is very strong and filters a lot of reviews including legitimate ones. In addition to this you’re not allowed to ask for Yelp Reviews per their terms of service. That being said there are some work arounds you can do to get reviews including logging into your Yelp Business Dashboard and getting the provided Yelp code. If this is visible on your website it’s fine.
You just can’t solicit clients directly and ask them to review you. You also can’t provide any incentive for a review. With Yelp.com there are only three things I look at.
Typically I am hesitant to share this with SEO’s because I have seen some SEO’s using it for evil. The good news is that with Google’s advanced algorithms I feel more and more comfortable everyday that people who try to manipulate this will get caught.
That being said, let’s roll right in. Advanced Barnacle SEO in my eyes weighs much more heavily on traditional organic SEO ranking factors including strong quality link earning. Let’s look at a quick example.
If we know that Google already rewards high quality domains and your law firm already has a profile on that domain, then it should be easier to increase it’s visibility given the domains trust. What you need to do is first identify the websites that are appearing for the search terms you’re most interested in (1 or 2) and optimize your profile page using standard organic SEO best practices around it.
Although you won’t have full control you usually have some control over the elements that appear on your page. Once this is complete you can then build and earn links to your specific profile page. Usually I ask my clients to link to their attorney profile pages from their website and all other attorney pages that allow them to have outgoing links. This will increase your page’s authority and in time will allow your profile on a site like Avvo.com to rank for your desired keyword.
While some people are afraid of this because your visitors will likely also see your competitors you have to realize this can be a good thing. If all your reviews and trust signals across the web are positive towards your firm, then your potential can do their research and they will still pick you. Some of the attorney clients I advise also purchase ad’s on these 3rd party sites to get more visibility. While we have not had luck with lead generation through typical 3rd party Pay Per Click ad services, the impressions will count towards a client selecting your firm.
Is barnacle SEO hard?
Right now surprisingly there is still not a ton of competition in this field. If you take the basic steps I mentioned above you will be ahead of 90% of your competitors. If you want to get more serious about it, talk to an experienced SEO or have your in house team research it in more detail.
How Long Will This Take?
Barnacle SEO is like organic SEO. It’s not a sprint but rather a marathon. If you’re not trying to manipulate the search engines it will take time, but the investment is well worth it.
It’s my opinion that barnacle SEO needs to be a part of every successful law firm internet marketing campaign. Overlooking this now will shoot you in the foot later. Also, given the chances of penalties and other shady tactics out there it’s wise to diversify your investment. Also consider that in this article I only touched on the very basics.
An advanced Barnacle SEO plan can involve creating additional websites with great content that serve a purpose and help users in need. If you can think of a resource that will be of value to people and actually help them the possibilities and ideas to dominate in this space are endless. Remember to focus on training and preparing for the marathon and not just a sprint or you’ll end up back where you started.
Working with law firm clients on their digital media strategies, the question always eventually comes up:
A great question, especially considering that law isn’t exactly a “sexy” social media topic. So normally the question turns from how should we post on social channels to what should we be posting to get the most out of our social channels? Let me give you some guidelines as to what type of things you should be posting and how often you should have self promotion posts.
Before we dig into what you should be posting I want to be clear on the mentality to achieve success on social media channels. Social media has many uses but one that isn’t effective for anything but big brands is the soapbox method.
Too often we see companies only doing self promotion on social channels. We refer to this as the “soapbox” method. This isn’t being social, but rather just making regular announcements, which for some companies is all they want to use their channels for and that’s fine, but you most likely will not increase followers or engagement on your posts taking this approach.
The mindset you will want to adopt to help create a working social presence on any channel is to be social with your topics. So not just using your own promotion, but instead contributing to other discussions/posts outside of your own.
What I mean by “being social” is picking topics that you are interested in and can contribute either a unique thought or fuel a discussion with your followers. This is the most effective way for a company to find their place in the social landscape, and the success of this will help direct your social strategy with what your followers want to see.
Now that you have a social mindset, let’s introduce balancing your social posts with targeted promotion for your firm.
Normally my recommendation for most companies are to have 70% of your posts be informative, entertaining social posts to stir discussion and 30% (or less) promotion.
I normally encourage a certain amount of tact when doing self promotion for lawyers especially, because in many cases their services are used strictly out of need and talking about things like bankruptcy, car accidents, or civil litigation aren’t always the best social posts.
Most people don’t like to advertise their personal issues on social channels so the self promotions have much less engagement than other topics like case discussions or legal issues. After posting regularly for a while you will just find a more natural balance to talk directly about the firm and still maintain social topics to gain followers and regular engagement on your social channels.
Speaking of social channels, sadly they are not all created equal. What you post on Facebook may not engage as many users on Google+ or Twitter, so conquer one channel effectively with your followers and tailor your discussions to your followers on each channel. I know this sounds like a lot of work and IT IS, but to be most effective with your marketing especially socially, you need to take the time to consider your audience’s demands first.
Now for the good part, actually posting. Common questions I get are how often should I be posting or since I’m supposed to be posting more than just law firm news what types of posts should I have?
All great questions and if you have a social media director, they should be able to answer these quickly. I went ahead and broke down both of these topics for you giving you both suggestions for posts and the best time/frequency to make these postings.
Want more? Read out full list of social media tips for lawyers here.
This is a very tough question to ask because it really depends on a bigger question: How many quality social posts can you create? Don’t concern yourself with how often you are posting. The important part is that you are being effective with the posts you are making and taking time to create them.
Some companies can be content machines and put out many good posts weekly and even daily. However, I also do not want to discourage you from posting so if you have something to say to your followers or an interesting topic others might enjoy post it; these are often the best posts. After all, if you find the topic/post engaging and interesting most likely so will your followers/peers.
Statistically there are two ideal times to post content for followers: In the afternoon and in the morning depending on your target audience. As a rule of thumb, if you are targeting your peers or professionals networks post in the morning (7am-11am).
If you are targeting customers or using more entertainment oriented networks do these in the afternoon(1pm-4pm). This will help to maximize your exposure to your follower engagement.
To be most effective with your post times run some tests on different channels, days of the week and times to see what your particular followers are most receptive to.
Obviously I can’t tell you exactly what you need to be posting, but after talking about how your posts shouldn’t be entirely about promoting the firm you might be wondering what you should be posting 70% of on your social channels. Here are some suggestions to help guide social postings for your law firm:
These are just a few places to help guide your posts and shares, but the bottom line is to be SOCIAL, if you are genuinely interested in what you’re posting, most likely so are your followers.
In 2021 there are a lot of different social networks you could be posting on. But just because there are a lot of options does not mean that you should.
Our clients who are the most successful in terms of engagement and brand awareness focus on the channels they’re best at. It could be Youtube, Twitter, Facebook or Tik Tok. But you have to put in the effort.
As I said earlier this can be a lot of work to be genuinely social, but it is important to build a community and followers who are engaging with your posts otherwise you might be just wasting your time on your social channels.
I also wanted to give a quick mention to Bryan Townsend for giving me a reason to create this post and being proactive about socially posting as a lawyer.
