I think most designers and business owners out there would agree that a logo is the most important part of any brand. Logos shouldn’t be difficult, hard to understand, pointless or create puzzles for the audience to decode. They should tell a story in a blink of an eye.
We can all probably name a handful of logos that we recognize, but what we don’t know is the time behind creating a logo. From idea, execution, to redesign, there are a lot of components that create a brand’s story.
Many believe that redesigning their logo is a quick and easy way to upgrade or freshen up their brand. In reality, it can be a risky proposition. Lets take the clothing store Gap for example.
In 2010 Gap released “a more contemporary, modern expression” of their logo said the store’s VP Bill Chandler. The logo release sent many loyal Gap customers into a Twitter and Facebook comment frenzy. The result was an immediate take down the new logo.
The famous redesign mistake:
Logo redesigns should not be taken lightly. If major corporations like the Gap can mess it up, so can you.
These questions will help organize your thoughts going into a meeting with a designer OR they will help you understand when and why you need to redesign your logo.
It’s critical that you take the time to understand what, if anything, are the good traits of your current logo. There might be something within that logo that works. This will make the process easier and create a smoother transition to the new logo.
You never want your logo to be complex. Remember, it has to make an impression in a blink of an eye. Overall, simplification in the logo makes it clearer and quicker to grasp your brand’s message.
For Example:
The colors are not what define your logo’s story or identity, but rather, the overall look and feel. Colors play a huge roll in the psychology of how the viewer feels towards your logo, and too many colors can add confusion, or bring the audience’s attention away from point you want to make.
For Example:
Sometimes you have elements or icons that have been so ingrained within your brand that you don’t want to part from them. So, no fear! The redesigned logo should respect those traditions. However, there is nothing wrong with modifying the colors, brush stroke, or icon to make it more modern or cleaner.
Take a look at these examples below:
The variety of available typefaces is almost endless. Sometimes with certain typefaces cause your message to get lost because they are difficult to read, which will cause viewers to disengage. Look for a way to minimize the complexity of your font to make it fully legible. In doing so, you find the balance between keeping the brand and showing your personality.
For Example:
This is the fun one in my opinion. Below are two examples of corporate logos, Fedex and Amazon. Fedex (if you haven’t noticed before) uses their negative space between the E and X to create a arrow. The arrow represents speed or movement.
The other example, Amazon, uses a “smile” to point to the A and Z representing that they deliver anything from a – z and their products will bring a smile to your face.
Incorporating messages like this reinforces a brand’s story and value propositions.
For Example:
What is a vector? According to Wikipedia: “Vector graphics files store the lines, shapes and colors that make up an image as mathematical formulae.” (a.k.a. EPS files)
What’s the purpose? Your logo has to be compatible online, offline, and everywhere in between. A vector image can be resized for all mediums including stationery, t-shirts, banners, and all other promotional materials.
There is no denying that Avvo is a huge website with massive visibility in Google and on TV. In fact, according to a recent SEM rush report I conducted, I found that they’re getting an estimated 1.3 million visits a month in Organic traffic. You can see how their monthly organic traffic has been growing pretty steadily over the past year in the graph below.
With that much search visibility, you may find yourself asking the question: “Are Avvo’s paid advertising services worth the investment?” Today we’re going to look at some real world data to see how effective it’s been for some of our legal clients.
To answer this question accurately it’s important we look at all sides of this story to get a full understanding of the benefits and detriments of Avvo’s paid services.
I usually tell my clients the first step in their journey should be to conduct a visibility study and determine if Avvo is ranking for keywords that are important to your business.
For us, we track important keywords through GetStat and simply run our whole keyword list through a ranking analysis in a metropolitan area. If we find that Avvo has enough visibility for our clients in that specific geographic area, then we can continue to the next step.
Right now it looks like Avvo is gaining prominence in a lot of searches and it seems they’re targeting “best” and “near me” queries with some of their optimization efforts.
You can see this in the SERP example below (the way they optimize their title tags)
In most cases, you will find that Avvo does have enough visibility to ensure you shouldn’t totally ignore it. You also can’t forget the ways you can show up on their website.
You can’t hide from AVVO in a lot of search results and there are a couple of different ways to show up on AVVO.
First and foremost you should know that AVVO attorney profiles are free listings. By being an attorney you can get a free profile and be a part of their internal database. This allows you to show up in their internal searches. This profile will also rank highly for attorney name searches in Google once you optimize your profile.
Here is an example of a free attorney name profile below:
But that is just one of the ways a profile will appear on the website. The page where a new client who did not previously know about you or your firm will likely find you on a search results page. Potential clients can find these ranking directly in Google or by doing a search on the Avvo.com website from any page.
The problem with the standard search pages is that there are no free listings above the fold. This means that a user would have to scroll to find you if you’re not paying for a pro listing.
To give you an idea of which listings are paid listings, I highlighted them in red in the example below.
You can see that there is heavy promotion for the paid listings and the free listings are dwarfed. The problem with this is that even if you have the highest attorney rating and someone sorts by rating you will show below the sponsored listings and premium profiles.
Your organic placement on Avvo depends on your overall rating numerical score from 1-10. Now let’s look at the different services they offer for paid placement.
Avvo offers a variety of services some of which are free and others which are paid.
The free options they offer include:
I always recommend maximizing your free exposure and thus I suggest you take advantage of a free profile and fully optimizing it. You should also focus on getting clients to leave reviews on your profile as a standard business practice. If you need help optimizing your profile, read my Avvo optimization guide here.
In addition to the free options, Avvo currently offers two paid services that are good for potentially generating more case leads.
The paid listing offers include:
Avvo pro is a paid subscription service by Avvo that can enhance your Avvo profile. According to Avvo it promotes the profile and gives consumers additional features to contact that specific attorney.
Some of the things the Pro designation allows you to do are:
In addition to this you are given a pro designation on your profile listing which may affect click through rate. We also saw earlier how having an Avvo Pro profile increases your overall visibility above the “free” members.
Below is an example of an Avvo Pro Listing with the Avvo Pro Badge (in blue)
Avvo advertising is a service they created specifically to help your profile gain more visibility within the Avvo.com website. Through this service, they offer paid advertising for those searching in your geographic areas and practice areas. Its similar to a Google Pay Per click in that sense but typically less expensive for attorney based searches.
Using the same example from the screenshot above you can see how these appear circled in red.
One thing to consider before you decide to advertise on Avvo is what your rating is and whether or not you have enough client reviews. Even if you pay to play you are still being compared to other attorneys.
The first case study we’re going to look at is a criminal defense attorney located in central California. This attorney advertised with Avvo for over 3 years starting with a basic pro listing and then upgrading to the sponsored listings in targeted geographic areas.
Over time it sounds like he has been tracking his Avvo performance pretty carefully and better than most attorneys I speak with. Currently, he has maxed out all of the advertising impressions in his area by blocks. Avvo sells the equivalent of listing impressions in blocks of 100.
Thankfully, he was kind enough to share some of his Avvo analytics data with me which you can see below:
I think it’s also worth noting that he does have a 10 Avvo rating as well. Looking at the data above you can see he had over 6,000 impressions during that recorded period. Those numbers seem big! But did it result in cases?
“On average, with current amount I pay, I get about 25 calls and another 25 website clicks per month. But sometimes these are the same person calling or visiting on multiple occasions (because AVVO tracking requires their own special phone number). Those provide ample opportunity to generate new business.I probably close about 5 per month straight from AVVO and the average fee per client is between $2500-$10,000. Some months a very slow and some fast.” – Nicco
Traffic looks cool, but if it doesn’t convert then it’s useless. Looking at the screenshots and data, I was able to confirm that he was getting about 25 phone calls and 25 website visits a month. You can see this in the screenshot below:
Although website visits can be great they differ from phone calls because they still have to contact you once they reach your website. This is why having goal tracking and analytics setup properly can play such a huge role in tracking your campaign success.
Overall, the math worked out like this. He spends about $2,000 per month to get around 6,000 profile views. Of that, it results in 50 contacts.
The Math Breakdown
The Avvo paid listing impressions have an overall conversion rate of about .0083%. This is based on the total “potential clients” metric Avvo provides which seems to count impressions from unique visitors.
This brings the total cost per case from Avvo to $400.
” I have been happy with AVVO but only as a piece to the puzzle. Ideally I would cut my blocks down in half and devote that other $1000 to some other form to further diversify but I can’t complain” – Nicco
Overall Nicco seems pretty happy with his Avvo paid services and it’s meeting his business goals. It would be interesting to re-evaluate the conversion rates by the impression channel. For example, if 25 conversions came from his profile views then that conversion rate would be very high.
If you get a higher conversion rate on another channel it may make sense to increase the investment there.
In this example, a Denver-based personal injury attorney was solicited by an Avvo outbound call team to sign up for their premium listings. This law firm has been advertising with Avvo for over a year using this service.
Here are the stats for a year of Avvo advertising with a Pro Listing:
Website Visits from Avvo: 100 ~ these are visitors who clicked from the AVVO profile to the client’s website.
Email Contacts from Avvo: 5 ~ these are emails sent via Avvo.com to the client
Calls Generated: 7 ~ these are calls tracked from the Avvo Call Tracking number.
Cases Signed: 1
The data below is over the past 30 days and was pulled from Avvo’s back end analytics. It is just tracking the actual contacts and not the visits.
Analysis Of Efforts:
In this example, you have to remember you get what you pay for. At $100 a month, it would have been worth it for this client if they signed at least one case, which they did do.
While the ROI worked out for them in this case you can see that it’s probably not effective for someone who wants a quality volume approach. There is also no way to separate which of these visits were “free” visits vs. which ones were paid visits which can make a big impact.
There is also no saying that consumers didn’t find the attorneys profile via a free search and then click through to the clients website. One of the frustrating things is that they do in fact show profile visibility history for the past 30 day date range but it does not show which channels resulted in the contacts. I suspect this is on purpose and you can see this in the example below:
Since Avvo hides some of this data it’s difficult to say how effective ads are being vs the free profile listing. This is something to consider when deciding whether or not to purchase paid ads from them.
I interviewed seven other attorneys who have used Avvo’s paid services over the years and it seems that there results were pretty typical of what I have seen.
Practice Area: Criminal Defense
Location: Fresno, CA
Nico, an attorney from Fresno, California seemed to have the biggest wins I heard about during my interviews. According to Nico,
“I have used (paid) AVVO for a couple years now. I started with just the simple pro plan but as my business grew I expanded with block/sponsored paid listings. The cost was prohibitive at first but now it is an integral part of my attempt at diverse marketing. Fact is, whether us lawyers like it or not, people gravitate towards directories like AVVO because of the review system. AVVO reviews are a whole other conversation but consumers really do look at them. I have gotten far more business from “I found you online and liked your reviews” than “I spoke with so and so and they said I should call.” It is the modern approach that my firm strives for because modern clients care about that stuff.” – Nico
Practice Area: Family Law
Location: Chicago
Joshua, who is a family law attorney from the Law Offices of Joshua E Stern told me that he advertised with Avvo for 5 months but it was hard to track the ROI. In his words,
“Avvo was cheap. I paid $120 per month for “3 blocks of 100 searches.” I currently pay very little for advertising. I’m starting an SEM campaign, but I am a firm believer in content marketing. Avvo, like Yelp, Findlaw, etc., have poor metrics for calculating ROI and most internet users rely more on Google than third party sites to do research on their legal issue/representation.” – Joshua
Practice Area: Probate & Estate Planning
Location: Florida
I spoke briefly with an attorney named Jon who does probate and estate planning in Florida. He wished to remain anonymous. He signed up for three months using their promotional rate at about $100 per month but did not receive any leads from this.
Practice Area: Employment Law
Location: Orange County
Branigan, another attorney I interviewed who was an Orange County employment lawyer told me he advertised with Avvo for over 12 months. After spending almost $2,000 he received between 6 and 12 phone calls but none of them turned into a case. To put his experience in his own words,
“When you compare those numbers with what my website produces, it was a complete waste of money. But hey… you live and you learn.” – Branigan
Practice Area: Corporate Transactions
Location: NYC
The firm Peter works at, Scarinci Hollenbeck, is a bigger firm with a lot of attorneys and multiple locations. Over the years they have tried Avvo with several different attorneys at various lengths. During their trials, they also did not sign any cases they were able to attribute to the Avvo.com listing.
Practice Area: Criminal Defense
Location: Dallas
Paul from the Saputo Law Firm has been advertising with them for over a year at around the $100 price point. During this time he has not been able to attribute any cases to Avvo although it did seem it may not be tracked fully.
Practice Area: Federal Trademark
Location: Tri-State Area
Patrick from Pesochinsky Law Firm LLC. shared his experience with me as well. According to Patrick
“I used Avvo.com for 2 months. It was roughly $250 a month, but it was unsuccessful and did not bring in any new business. I ended up requesting a refund.”. – Patrick
Practice Area: Criminal
Location: New York City
Todd from the Spodek Law Firm seems to be happy with his overall results when considering the aggregate approach.
“I have been advertising with AVVO for a number of years and currently have about $3,000 monthly spend with them. I find that the I receive 5-10 leads via AVVO over a month. However, I find that it’s the aggregate advertising technique that seems to work best for me. For example, a client may find me on AVVO and then search online, and check Yelp, etc. However, my SEO guy says it’s not worth it and I should just be doing local SEO and Yelp.” – Todd
Paying for ads from a service like Avvo can be a tempting proposition to sign more cases. Over the years I have worked with a lot of attorneys who have tried Avvo and sadly their results were typically less than subpar.
However, those attorneys who invest in reviews and getting a 10.0 score do seem to perform a bit better. At the end of the day, you have to determine if Avvo is a good opportunity for you to try. To make the best decision I recommend looking at your ROI. If $1,200 a year ($100 a month) will get you one case in that year that would mean you have a $1,200 cost per case! That’s a large investment!
On the other hand, what can you use that money for that will do better? Typically we recommend content marketing and link building initiatives but every firm is different. The fact remains though that if you can’t track what sources your cases are coming from, you have more groundwork to do.
Although I’m not a fan of Avvo for many reasons, I will also say that you should never consider ignoring it.
No matter who you are you should use Avvo to sign more cases for your firm and know that you can do that using their free services by putting your attention towards the right things. If you’re still considering Avvo paid ads you should enter into a limited time campaign with proper goal tracking setup and evaluate the campaign after a certain period. Since the ads start showing immediately you can run it for 30 days and see if it’s a good fit for your business.
Here are some things you should do with Avvo no matter what.
I hope you found this article useful and informative. What has your experience been using Avvo’s paid services? Please leave your feedback in the comments below. We’re interested to hear what you’ve been through!
YouTube and Attorneys are a match made in heaven. Years ago, you had to be lucky enough to catch a crazy attorney ads on TV. YouTube changed that. Now attorneys post and promote their ads via the platform on a regular basis.
Regrettably, the vast majority of the ads on YouTube are just plain bad. You know the type of legal ad I’m talking about, too. They usually aired during daytime TV, had a stiff attorney in a suit talking about ‘justice’ or droning on about some type of legal case. Boring.
And really, who wants to rank or share these ads? Not me. Instead, I’d rather explore the ads that make me laugh – even if they aren’t technically ‘good.’ That’s why we’re sharing the “Best of the Worst.” From a technical aspect, these ads are no feat in filmmaking. Dated effects (but they have effects!) permeate the videos. The acting is….well….not good. But they are a whole lot of fun.
Without further delay, it’s time to jump into the list. One quick note though – I am definitely aware that most of these attorneys are from Texas. There seems to be something about the Lone Star State that inspires attorneys to compete for viral videos.
On top of the hilarious videos compiled in 2017 – we’ve got a couple new nominees for “Best of the Worst” Attorney ads!
Honestly, I can’t believe we missed this one last time. With a slogan like “Turn your pain into rain” there was no way we were leaving it off this year.
If you’re going through tough times and need to file for bankruptcy, Denvil Crowe has you covered. Add some off-key vocals and a cheesy tune in the background and you’ve got Attorney Ad Gold.
These guys are serious (I think). Jim Adler and son Bill Adler have both adopted the moniker “The Texas Hammer.” Don’t deal with the insurance company on your own, let them get hammered.
Surprise! We’re back in Texas. Pete Reid is an Austin business lawyer, but he is also apparently a pro soccer player, a chess master, some type of martial artist, a crimefighter, and much more. I’m not sure what any of this has to do with business litigation, but it makes for a good YouTube video!
You know you’ve made it when Danny Trejo is down to do your commercial. You also know that almost anything with Danny Trejo is gold. Enjoy this one.
OK – this one is pretty old, but the YouTube upload is from last year. And it’s too great to leave off the list. This ad has everything. Pristine delivery? Check. Vicious bluntness? Check. At least five great insults? Check. Seriously, don’t miss this one.
This Alabama attorney spared no expense for his latest commercial. If things get too contentious, it appears he’ll knock out the insurance company and send cash flying everywhere. Also, I wonder how many “state name + hammer” nicknames are out there?
I saved the best for last. The Texas Law Hawk is the Michael Bay of attorney advertising. Special effects? He’s got ’em. Flame throwers? Those too. Frankly, I’d hire the guy strictly based on his willingness to make hilariously over the top commercials. His latest is a Christmas Special, featuring Santa Claus of course.
Legal marketing is not easy. We’re poking fun, but we appreciate the effort and creativity that went into making these commercials. If you’ve seen any “best of the worst” type commercials, we’d love for you to share in the comments below!
Wondering whether your website is properly optimized for mobile devices?
We have several clients whose mobile traffic constitutes over 65% of their total website traffic. Needless to say, if your website is poorly optimized for mobile device browsers, you’re missing out on potential new business.
Below are 5 common examples of poor mobile optimization. If you’re site suffers from any of the following issues, you’re likely leaving money on the table.
Almost all of our clients tell us that phone calls are their preferred form of contact with new clients because people who call tend to convert into clients at a higher rate.
As such, we make it a priority to ensure that our client’s mobile websites make calling the firm as simple as possible:
As you can see, we utilize a “sticky” bar at the top of the viewport to allow visitors to click and call the firm from anywhere on any page of the site. At the very least you should make sure that wherever you list your firm’s phone number on your site the number is coded properly to enable click-to-call functionality.
We’ve talked before about the importance of site speed, especially on mobile devices. If a page loads slow on desktop browsers it will load even slower on mobile browsers.
Two of the biggest contributors to slow loading pages are poorly optimized images and iframe embeds (eg. Google Maps) which require an external request to load.
Make sure that your top trafficked mobile pages contain properly sized and compressed images, and do your best to avoid using iframe embeds. Screenshots are often a much better option than embeds.
It’s 2017. You should not be using different URLs to serve up well optimized mobile pages for your visitors. Rather, your website should be coded to be responsive which allows you to maintain just one version of each page on your site, and deliver the same user experience regardless of browser or device.
One of the most common challenges for mobile websites is delivering intuitive navigation so that people can quickly find the information they are looking for. Offering a prominent site search bar on every page of your mobile website is a great way to do so.
On mobile devices the viewport is obviously much smaller than on desktop, laptops, and tablets. If you have a gigantic sticky header menu, and a livechat option, you may be creating a frustrating user experience by blocking the majority of the actual content viewport.
Thanks for reading! What mobile optimization mistakes did we miss? Please let us know in the comments below!
Backlinks continue to be the primary driver of high search engine rankings.
Why? Because backlinks are normally very difficult to get, and a site that does get them is seen by Google as an “authority” website.
One of the simplest ways to get backlinks is to buy them. But are paid links effective in terms of boosting your website’s rankings?
Let’s explore.
It’s no secret that paid links go against Google’s quality guidelines. Google has held this position for years:
But like many of Google’s statements regarding SEO tactics, one look at real world search results indicates that not only are paid links not punished by Google, they’re rewarded.
To illustrate how Google appears to be all talk when it comes to enforcing paid link abuses, let’s look at a website that ranks in the top three organic results for highly competitive keywords:
URL: https://baumgartnerlawyers.com/
Keyword Example: [houston personal injury lawyer]
Suggested CPC: $135.11
Google Ranking: #2 Organic
Of this website’s top 30 backlinks, 10 are obvious paid links:
Another nine of the site’s top 30 links were gained as a result of a scholarship contest that the firm offers. While this does not involve an explicit exchange of cash for links, one could make a strong case that it still goes against Google’s guidelines, since the links would never have been placed without the firm offering up cash:
So, at the very least, ten of this firm’s top 30 backlinks are explicitly paid links. Another 9 of them were gained as a result of the firm’s promise to pay out cash to a scholarship winner. That means that two thirds of this top-ranked website’s best links are of the paid link variety.
This example is NOT an outlier. We see legal websites whose best links are paid links performing well in incredibly competitive markets all the time.
Reality is this: Even though Google doesn’t want to reward sites that buy links, in many legal niches, you’re unlikely to rank highly for your primary keywords in the absence of paid links.
If you do decide to pay for backlinks to get your site moving, it’s critical to consider the following factors.
In general, you want to avoid paying for links on websites that have nothing to do with your firm’s services or mission. If your law firm does business litigation and you find yourself considering purchasing a link on a technology forum, think again.
Alternatively, if you’re a business litigation law firm and you’re considering sponsoring a local non-profit that helps encourage young entrepreneurs, this makes much more sense because this group’s website is relevant to your firm’s services and mission.
If you’re spending good money on a link it’s crucial that you know the “authority” of the page that will contain the link to your site. Notice that I’m not saying that you need to know the authority of the website overall, but rather, that you need to know the authority of the specific linking page.
For example, have a look at this page:
http://lawyers.findlaw.com/lawyer/firm/personal-injury-plaintiff/houston/texas
Using the Moz Open Site Explorer, I can see that this page has an authority of 35/100:
This is a pretty good page authority. But, what happens if your link doesn’t get placed on this page, and instead is buried in a deep archive page:
http://lawyers.findlaw.com/lawyer/firm/personal-injury-plaintiff/houston/texas?random=656&stq=80
All of a sudden, you’re getting a lot less value for your money.
If you’re going to spend good money on a link, it’s essential that the link be of the followed variety. Many sites that sell links do not make it clear that the link you recieve will be a “nofollow” link.
While there is evidence that nofollow links could still have positive ranking benefits in certain cases, they’re certainly not optimal, especially when your paying for them.
The BBB is a great example of this. You can pay $600+ per year for a listing on BBB.org, but you’ll get the same nofollow link as their free, non-accredited profiles.
Is it your ultimate goal to rank high in Google for search queries containing [your practice area + your city/state]? Of course it is! And I sincerely hope you’ve already reached that milestone.
What you’re probably missing, however, is how to make the content on your practice area pages relevant and useful for users, and perhaps even more important for SEO, how to make it unique from the competition’s.
There are only so many unique things you can say about auto accident cases or DUI defense for a given city. And guess what? You are saying the same stuff as all of your competitors, which means that your content isn’t standing out, neither to your site’s visitors nor to Google’s crawlers.
Ok, at this point, you’re probably thinking, “Who cares? I’m ranking #1. I’m on top of the world! I just need to keep cramming more keywords and backlinks in to stay on top, right?” Wrong! Actually…
Google’s business model thrives on advertising, which only works if they have a steady stream of users. People like to use products that work well (obviously), so Google only maintains its dominance by feeding users the best possible content to answer their queries.
And so on that principle, the search engine came into existence. But their plans were foiled by some meddling kids SEOs who realized that they could game the system by cramming the most keywords onto their page. Of course, that resulted in such masterpieces of content as:
Our Denver law firm has the best lawyers in Denver! Hire our personal injury attorney to handle your car accident case today. Our lawyer practices law from a law firm in Denver, and serves all of the Denver suburbs in personal injury cases, including Lakewood, Littleton, Englewood, Centennial, Aurora, Arvada, and any other place where car accidents happen and a person could use personal injury services.
Thrilling…
Because of the above-stated business model, Google didn’t really love this, so for many years, they have been developing more and more complex algorithms to find sites that really give the user the best experience. While some have claimed that this means that Google is trying to eliminate SEO, the reality is that they are just changing the factors of SEO (for the better). These days, having good SEO means providing a good user experience.
So how do you make your content more awesome? Here are some simple ways to make your practice area pages better, in the eyes of both humans and Googlebot:
You want your content to represent the needs of as many users as possible, and videos are a great way to target people who are either visual or aural learners. They can accompany your main content to give users a quick and easy breakdown of your main points. Here are a few tips on making a great video:
Video has a reputation for being expensive and complex. However, it need not be, especially for small or solo firms. Here is the investment required to make perfectly adequate videos:
What’s that? You don’t have the skill to do video?
You don’t want to pay anyone?
Just ask yourself one simple question:
What information does the person who will be watching this video need the most?
If someone either landed on, or clicked to, your auto accident practice area page they are likely interested in information that will help them determine whether they should contact an attorney about a potential law suit. In your video, give them information that will help them make this decision.
Transcribing your videos will add a few hundreds words of completely unique content to your page. Here is an example of a lawyer doing this.
Here is an example of a law firm that is doing a great job using quick videos to make their practice area content better.
As you can see, this attorney didn’t spend thousands or come up with some elaborate, highly creative concept. Hell, he didn’t even write a script.
He simply talked to his online audience the same way he would talk to a client in his office.
It’s really hard to get clients to leave you a review online. What isn’t hard is taking 5-10 minutes each time you help a client to write a quick synopsis of their case and how you were able to help them.
This type of content is amazing for SEO purposes for several reasons:
Here is an example of a small firm that is using case stories effectively.
As I mentioned above, it can be very difficult to get your client to leave you a review online. However, what we see quite often is that clients are willing to write-up kind words about your legal services in an email or even speak them over the phone, but they just won’t get online to leave the review.
In these cases, use the client’s review on your practice area pages!
For example, if you help a client with filing for bankruptcy, and they send you an email thanking you for your help and quality services, ask them if you can use this as a review on your website.
Also be sure to ask if you can use their name. At a minimum you’ll want to include their first name, and the initial of their last name.
Beyond injecting unique content into your practice area pages, and potentially improving the conversion rates of those pages, adding reviews to your pages using schema.org will also make your important pages eligible for review star rich snippets:
Here is a free tool I created for easily generating the schema.org review code: [Schema.org Review Generator for Attorneys]
Here is an example of a law firm effectively using client reviews on their practice area pages.
If your practice area is personal injury, you don’t have to tackle car accidents, slip and fall, and brain injury on one page. Instead, talk generally about personal injury and your firm’s experience in it. Make subpages for each of the more specific practice areas that fall under the category of personal injury, and include a list of them (with links) on the main personal injury page. You may include a short blurb about each, but don’t chase a rabbit down a hole.
While conciseness is important, don’t let that get in the way of fully explaining the topic. Practice area pages are well suited to long-form content, and Google will reward your completeness. If there is a subject that you feel warrants mention, but is too specific for that page, and you don’t have any information on your site, consider linking to an external source. There are SEO benefits to outbound linking, which are rarely mentioned.
You could also consider including related blog posts at the bottom of each practice area page.
This firm does a great job of staying on-topic and guiding users to more specific details.
Humans have short attention spans. If your practice area page is just a wall of text, users will find it daunting and probably won’t make it through the second paragraph. To keep users’ attention, you’ll need to spoon-feed them information, by breaking it into digestible chunks. Here are some steps to help:
Here is a screenshot of a blog post with little formatting. After updating the post, it looks like this.
By incorporating short videos, client case stories, client reviews, and engaging formatting, as well as keeping your topics relevant, you can not only improve the SEO of your most important practice area pages, but also provide your potential clients with the information that they need to make the best decision possible.
Are you in the process of researching legal marketing agencies? If so, you know that it can be difficult to prioritize the qualities to look for in the agencies with whom you speak.
In this post I’ve tried to make that task easier by explaining what I consider to be the most essential values and capabilities that are shared by the best legal marketing agencies.
Hire a legal marketing agency that has these values and capabilities, and your odds of a successful partnership will be strong.
When you hire a legal marketing agency for your law firm it is essential that the agency embrace transparency. The agency should go out of its way to share the goals of their strategies, the specific details of their tactics, and then of course the data that speaks to the efficacy of those tactics.
A high level of transparency indicates that the agency has a specific plan for achieving your goals, and that they are using data to measure whether that plan is producing the desired outcomes. It also indicates that the agency values your investment and wants to show your that by continually earning your trust.
A great legal marketing agency must value empathy, which is the ability to share in the feelings, thoughts, and emotions of another.
Simply put, great marketing is impossible to achieve without the ability to be empathetic. Your legal marketing agency must be able to empathize with your potential clients in order to produce marketing materials that will address their most fundamental issues.
A high level of empathy indicates not only that your marketing agency will be able to effectively market your services, but also that they will be able to understand your priorities and points of view.
Exclusivity refers to the agency’s willingness to work with your competition. Some of the biggest and most well known legal marketing agencies in the world (coughFINDLAWcough) do not value exclusivity, and frequently work with numerous law firms who all compete for the same business, in the same market.
If a legal marketing agency is willing to work with your top competitors, they cannot possibly act with the best interest of your firm in mind throughout the duration of your relationship.
If the legal marketing agency you hire does not create and present a compressive strategy for achieving your goals, that’s a bad sign. Great marketers will insist on what we call a measure twice, cut once approach. They will use all available data to create a marketing strategy with defined, measurable key performance indicators.
If strategy development is not a line-item on the marketing proposal you receive, consider this a red flag.
The legal marketing agency you chose must have strong technical capabilities. This refers to all things digital technology; web development, basic software development, technical SEO knowledge, etc.
The agency you hire ought to have in-house technical expertise in order to ensure that your firm’s digital marketing initiatives are not inhibited by any technical limitations.
One way to think about marketing is as a pursuit to not only get in front of your prospective clients, but to look your best when you do. Many of the less effective marketing agencies you’re likely to come across in your search will neglect design. After all, it’s a specialized and not particularly cheap skill set to hire.
The legal marketing agency you choose ought to have in-house design talent. This will ensure that their deliverables always achieve the goal of making your firm look good whenever it’s found, online or off.
When people are in a situation where they’re considering hiring a lawyer the stakes are normally high. For that reason it’s critical that your legal marketing agency have the ability to produce accurate legal content that not only addresses your potential client’s questions, but does so in a way that does not mislead them or violate your state bar’s law firm marketing rules.
Every piece of content that is published on behalf of your law firm reflects on you. The legal marketing agency you choose must use qualified legal writers who will ensure that your content is not only highly accurate, but more importantly, that it does not open your firm up to liability.
If you’re in the process of researching legal marketing agencies for your firm and have questions about the process, please feel free to leave them in the comments below!
Effective legal marketing starts with strategy. A strong foundation provides a platform from which you can build and manage campaigns. Creating client personas is an important part of the planning process. Personas will help you target and refine your marketing efforts to maximize ROI. By identifying the common traits of the people that need your services, you’ll avoid wasting marketing spend.
Not sure what a client persona is? Don’t worry – it’s simple:
A client persona, commonly referred to as a customer or buyer persona, is a semi-fictional profile used to represent your ideal client. The persona aims to define targeted demographics, attitudes towards services, behaviors, objections, and other essential information.
To put it bluntly – yes. Legal marketing is intensely competitive. The bigger your market, the tougher it is to create and execute effective marketing strategies. In recent years digital marketing has made competition tougher. It’s also made personas more important. The ability to identify the typical buyer’s journey and adjust strategy accordingly is crucial. A client persona will aid immensely in those efforts.
You’re on board. It’s time to create client personas and tweak your digital marketing strategy. But where do you start?
Right here on the Juris blog, of course. We’ve got all the info you need to create client personas today. Check it out:
Start by reviewing existing client profiles. Look for trends. Common age range? Similar occupations? Where do they live? Work? How did they find out about your firm? What motivated them to seek your services? Record all information that might be relevant for your client personas.
Your website is the most powerful marketing tool you possess if used correctly. Contact forms are an excellent opportunity to capture information relevant to client personas. For example, you might ask for a potential client’s location in addition to other standard information.
Analytics information can also be relevant to client personas. Do most of your clients find your firm through organic search, or are they using other methods? What type of device do potential clients usually browse your site with? This information, along with other KPIs, can be especially helpful in building personas.
Using existing client profiles and your website can help with a hefty portion of your client personas, but key information will still be missing. Talking to past and current clients is a great way to fill the gaps. You can ask pertinent questions that will provide enlightening answers.
For example, you can inquire about your client’s biggest objections when considering various legal providers. You can also ask about hobbies, interests, fears, and their end goals in hiring you.
Here are a few tips for recruiting interviewees:
Now that you’ve gathered the data it’s time to build the profiles. Start by outlining the information that each persona will include. Check out the list below to see some of my recommended persona details. After you’ve got your outlines, can you give each profile a name and start to complete the information. Keep in mind that you may have some commonalities between personas, and that’s totally fine.
Sifting through this much data can be tough, so I recommend using a tool like Microsoft Excel to organize the information.
Client personas differ based on the type of law you practice, your location, and other factors. However, we’ve put together a list with some essential details that shouldn’t be left out:
TL;DR – Client personas are essential to effective marketing. They are profiles of ideal clients, and they can be created by using existing data and talking to past, current, and future clients.
If you like to discuss personas further or talk about SEO and digital marketing as a whole, we’d love to chat. Reach out today!
Have you ever wondered which of your digital marketing efforts are actually producing leads, and which aren’t?
To make sure that your law firm spends it’s digital marketing dollars on the most effective channels possible, it’s essential to track the conversions that your website produces. Without conversion tracking set up it is impossible to tell which aspects of your online marketing are working, and which are not.
Below I’ve defined “website conversion”, and provided the process we use here at Juris Digital for tracking our client’s most important website conversions.
A “conversion” on a website means that an action was taken by a visitor to contact your law firm. These are referred to as ‘leads’ and ‘goals’ as well. Ultimately, conversions are an empirical mark to help gauge a website’s performance.
A few examples of conversion types are:
Each of these conversions can be tracked accurately in Google Analytics. This will produce insights that you can use to better understand where your leads are being generated from and how this changes over time.
For a long time call tracking has been a taboo subject among local search marketers because of concerns surrounding NAP consistency. We’ve seen this become less of an issue with local SEO over the years, which could be attributed to the call tracking platforms giving more consideration toward local SEO concerns. However, it most likely reflects the advances in Google’s local search algorithm.
While implementing is critical, it’s important to understand how call tracking works. We’ve found the greatest success with a service called CallRail. Despite trying several different services over the years, this has been the best and most accurate.
Call tracking is a simple idea that can become complex very quickly. The principal is that you have different phone numbers displayed under different circumstances to track different marketing channels.
For example, if you are looking to track calls that were a result of visits from a specific channel (eg. Paid Search), then your call tracking program should display a specific phone number on your website under that circumstance. In this way, if a visitor calls the number, it is attributed to that channel.
There are two ways to track calls from your website:
We prefer using a pool of numbers because it allows us to further segment where the conversion originated from.
One draw back to using a pool of numbers and showing them dynamically depending on the referrer is that your clients or peers might copy the dynamic number and use it instead of your primary number.
This raises a concern because ideally you want the primary phone number being used to avoid data inaccuracies or missed calls if you ever discontinue use of the call tracking service.
Pro tip: set up Google Alerts for your tracking numbers that way you are noticed if they are used across the web and can take action if needed.
If you’re using a service like CallRail, you can easily integrate your call tracking in Google Analytics. This is a feature to look for if you’re shopping around. Some services might have their own tracking but it is hard to draw performance conclusions without relating the conversion data to site traffic. This is the most accurate way we’ve found to track phone calls.
Contact form conversion tracking is very simple to setup within Google Analytics. To do this you will will need just two things: A editable contact form on your website, and Google Analytics.
Here’s a more in depth procedure on Setting Up Your Google Analytics Goal Tracking.
Form conversion tracking has a few options outside of counting the notifications that are sent to your inbox. The two methods we use depending on the situation and form type are:
Once you are tracking this data, you’ll see where your contact form conversions are coming from in the Conversions section in Google Analytics. You can even take a look at the different paths taken to reach that conversion with the attribution metrics.
Many of you may recognize the live chat as the disruptive box that asks you if you need help, but how can we tell if the disruption works? The efficacy of a given Live Chat service depends on how it is setup to work both for the user and for your law firm.
Most Live chat services are staffed externally. For this reason, especially for law firms, it is best to give explicit instructions to your Live chat provider for how the chat should be conducted. Obviously how a chat is conducted will vary between different fields of law so here are a few guidelines for setting this up for a conversion:
There are many companies who offer live chat services. Make sure you choose one that will operate and track your conversions in the desired manner. After purchasing and implementing chat, give it a test to make sure the operators are conducting the chat and make adjustments as you see fit. Often, this is overlooked when implementing chat and can actually greatly impact the conversions themselves.
In most cases Live Chat conversions are all tracked within a proprietary dashboard, but in some cases they will integrate with Google Analytics. For Live Chat, since there is an operator, you want to track two important metrics:
Initiated chats will help you understand if the chat box is prominent enough on the site for visitors to use it and seeing the drop off between the qualified leads will help you understand if there is a possible issue with the chat dialogue.
When trying to set up your live chat to work with Google Analytics it will be best to inquire with your specific live chat representative. Every chat service is a little different in the set up and what they define each conversion as.
On the Google Analytic side, live chats are tracked as either Events or as Goals. Despite the array of Live Chat offerings some services will openly admit they cannot accurately track to Google Analytics, so if you’re shopping around be critical on your choice depending on how they are able to track your conversions.
Data. Data. Data. Conversion tracking provides empirical data to help you understand which marketing sources are working best. The data can also help you make decisions which improve the conversion rate of your website.
Either way you decide to look at the data, there are actions to be taken from it to help guide further your success in lead generation. When compiling your information, I recommend trying to keep the majority of the data in Google Analytics so you can compare your conversions to your site traffic easily. May the conversion tracking be with you!
Navigating legal marketing is like digging for gold in a minefield. There are a multitude of options and it seems like everyone has the silver bullet. The problem is that most of the marketing endeavors you discover are a waste of money; a land mine.
According to a survey by the tech firm Software Advice, 56% of web users have used live chat to engage a company or brand. The feature is especially popular among millennials who are 20% more likely to use chat than a baby boomer. Live chat is gaining in popularity across all industries, but does it work for lawyers?
As with most questions of this nature, the answer lies in the details.
Before we get too far along, let’s quickly address what “Live Chat” is and what purpose it serves. Today’s world operates on demand. We don’t want to wait for our Amazon order, we don’t want to wait on hold on the phone, and we want to talk to someone who can help ASAP. Enter live chat.
No longer do you have to fish around on a website for a contact form or even click the phone number to dial. When a site features live chat, a box will pop up in the browser asking some version of “how can I help?”
To some, this is a helpful tool that puts them in contact with the information they need right away. Others, however, could see this as yet another intrusion in their already compromised web-browsing experience.
It begs the question; what are the advantages and disadvantages of live chat for lawyers?
Let’s start with the disadvantages to live chat.
Questionable Value for the User
Most live chat solutions for law firms are staffed by people who are not associated, at all, with the law firm. This means that whenever a potential client initiates a live chat, they are not going to get any actual answers about their situation.
Live chat implemented this way simply replaces the experience of a contact form with an experience of actually “chatting” with a person. However, that person is not going to be able to give any useful information. The best they can do is pass along what the user says to you, the law firm.
Intrusive User Experience
Many legal live chat providers, nGage especially, preach the efficacy of the pop-over live chat. You’ve experienced this before: You hit a page and within a few second you get a big annoying pop-over asking, “HOW CAN WE HELP YOU”.
While this may be effective in terms of pure conversion rate, it can also be off putting to some visitors, and who knows, maybe those visitors would have been great clients, but instead they got annoyed and bounced.
Remember also that older generations are not as likely to appreciate live chat options, and even some younger people would rather use alternative methods. There should always be an option to easily dismiss the chat window.
Now that the unpleasantries are out of the way, we can move on to the benefits of live chat for law firms.
Let’s take a look:
One must consider the potential for conversion theft. For this reason, accurate tracking and reporting are crucial. Adding the expense of live chat can be a benefit if it’s bringing new conversions or better leads, but if people are simply chatting but not signing on as clients, you may be better served to eliminate the option.
Most websites, especially those that don’t have a high number of conversions, will benefit from live chat.
For more on tracking conversions, check out this post: How to Track Conversions on a Law Firm Website.
Live chat is definitely worth consideration from attorneys and marketers trying to maximize the value of a website. As with any endeavor, individual results vary based on your target audience, goals, and the efficiency of your campaign.
To get you started in the right direction, let’s check out a few tips for effectively integrating chat on your website:
TL;DR Live chat can enhance law firm websites by boosting interactions and conversions. The value you get from live chat relies on your execution. Reach out to talk to the Juris team to discuss the potential of live chat for your firm.