There are 2 ways to get authorship data connected to your personal Google+ page so as to get the author’s thumbnail photo next to content that Google displays in its search results:

(1) First method:

Verify the author’s email with Google (when matching the domain of the website) at https://plus.google.com/authorship and include a byline in each post or article (for practical reasons, the byline would only work for blog posts and articles on main website), NOT for content posted elsewhere on the web or for static content on the main site.

This is a follow-up to my post about Twitter’s new keyword-targeted Promoted Tweets of May 1, 2013.

In April 2013, Twitter unveiled an enhanced version of it’s “Promoted Tweets” advertising to allow advertisers to target tweeters by keywords that the tweeters are putting into their Tweets.

LegalPPC believes that, since the advertising can be geographically targeted as well, this could be an excellent and affordable way to get your law firm’s message in front of a lot of local Twitter users (recognizing that it’s too new to know for sure but at least it won’t cost much).

This guide is to get you started, step-by-step, in case you want to give it a shot.

Download our free eBook, LegalPPC’s Guide to Twitter’s Promoted Tweets. We won’t even ask for your email address and phone.

There’s an exciting new advertising opportunity in Twitter that could be productive and cheap for lawyers. Keyword-targeted “Promoted Tweets”!

For maybe the last 6 months, Twitter has been allowing people with Twitter accounts to run “Promoted Tweets,” which allowed you to display one of your tweets to Twitter users based on their geographic location (and a few other demographics). Not very focused for a service provider as specific as a lawyer and probably more annoying than useful for a lot of Twitterers.

A few weeks ago (April 2013), Twitter announced an enhanced version of their advertising platform which allows for keyword targeting. This is pretty exciting and what it means is that you can display one of your specially composed Tweets when someone tweets a certain phrase, for example, “looking for a lawyer” even if that person is not a “Follower” of your account. And it’s geographically focused so only people in your community will see your Tweet when they type in one of your target phrases.

I’d encourage everyone who has a Twitter account to give it a try.

Google “Now” – Buy it before you know you need it?

“Google Now” is an App for your mobile device that allows Google to anticipate what you’re looking for before you start searching. It’s been around for about a year for Android but is now available for iPhones too.

Sounds pretty useful and streamlines the buying process for consumers who can have products and services pushed directly to you through your hand-held.

It aggregates information it has gathered about you to figure out what you need before you start looking for it. According to experts, here’s where the information comes from:

• Your location
• Your historical searches,
• Your gmail, calendar and Google+
• and Google Finance

Handy or creepy? Decide before you install the App, but keeping in mind that Google has this information about you whether you care to use “Now” or not, you may as well take it for a spin.

When Google first released details about their integration of Google+ into Google places, there was an initial hope that this would cut back on some of the inconsistencies, irregularities, and downright flaws of the largely automated Google maps/places platform. Though Google places was a unique concept upon conception, and still a centerpiece of anyone’s web presence, it has the potential to confuse as many users as it helps to make contact with you. The largest flaws or irregularities come in the form of duplicate listings and unconventional or fraudulent reviews.

At first, the issue of duplicate listings seems  like only a minor inconvenience. However, even before the transition to Google+ Local, the fact that Google takes data from all over the Internet to auto-generate listings opened up an irritating scenario where there are multiple duplicate (but unrefined, unedited, and sometimes incorrect) listings appearing alongside the correct one. This floods the user with (almost) identical options during a local search, potentially confusing them, and making them see your firm in a way that suggests a lack of organization and clarity. Some users may decide to use a competitor, because your business is (seemingly) spamming Google with listings, or otherwise, they see a crude duplicate as inferior to a standardized, sculpted listing of a competitor. This problem is only magnified with the Google+ integration, where duplicate listings become duplicate business pages, with incorrect pictures, wrong information, or missing reviews.

Many people had hoped, in vain, that the transition to Google+ Local would make each address (or at least each address+building/office number) have it’s own Google+ page, essentially eliminating the potential for duplicate listings. This is not the case, and instead of solving the problem, this has only made the issue more confusing and potentially damaging to a brand in the eyes of a prospective client.

While duplicate pages are still rampant, it remains unclear if the reporting system for duplicates has any more weight that it did previously. Though there is no visual evidence to support this hope (as the reporting system looks largely the same), it would help immensely with the issue, as over time businesses would weed out duplicates from existence.

Beyond the issue of duplicate listings, Google+ Local brings a new unwanted variable to the table. Google places has has done away with its “star” ranking system. It has replaced it with a Zagat style ranking, where 30 is the max ranking. While to casual users, a red “30” seems like a bad 30 out of 100, I can only assume users will rapidly realize the truth, that 30 is the highest result possible.

Does this mean you should not bother with Google+ Local? Absolutely Not! Google places, despite its flaws, is still one of the key pieces of managing an online presence. Considering that the platform is free to use, and very customizable and robust when things go well, it would be foolhardy to ignore its potential. Diligence is the key, and even though time is valuable, a good Google listing is more so. Continue to send error reports to report duplicates, build a good set of reviews and ratings, and your hard work will pay off.

That is, until Google decides to ‘innovate’ again…at that point, all bets are off.

Does the following scenario sound familiar? The end of the week is approaching, and the office hasn’t had a phone call in hours. Your administrative and support staff have wrapped up projects and are running out of tasks that are time-intensive, if not entirely finished with all work.  While this scenario may seem blissful when busy or behind schedule, sooner or later you may find yourself ahead of the work week.

On one hand, you may consider sending hourly workers home, to save from paying them to grasp at straws for things to do (and that’s if they’re entirely diligent and not tempted by the millions of distractions possible at a workstation). On the other hand, prior experience may nag at you that the moment they step out of the door, a crisis requiring all hands on deck will inevitably arise. Therefore, the best solution would be to find productive assignments for them that will be worth them staying.

Well, have you claimed your Google place listing yet? Are you listed (correctly) in the yellow pages and other directories? Does your firm have a Facebook business page? When was the last time your website had some new content or an article posted, even if from a third party? This is hardly the end of the list of questions you can ask yourself and your staff, but these alone could easily fill up a slow afternoon.  You may wonder if these tasks are truly worth the time and labor hours, especially if your support staff are highly trained and educated in their fields.

The truth is, these assignments, and others involving your firm’s online presence, are extremely valuable to have completed. While some of them are important enough to address even when it’s not a slow business day, they are especially viable tasks when all of your more pressing matters of the week have been attended to. Many of them would only take an hour or less, making them even more ideal for the waning hours of a slow day.

Below are some examples of possible assignments, and why they’re so useful to have done between more obvious tasks:

1.  Google Places Listing: This is perhaps one of the most important assignments, and is also one of the easiest. When prospective clients want to investigate their choice of firms online, more than 95% of them use Google. If your business is not claimed on Google places, you will be at an immense disadvantage at being found amongst competitors who have been proactively managing their online presence. Because many searchers include geographic keywords with their query (“injury attorneys in Chicago”), having your business claimed with the correct address ensures that you appear on the map of business listings. Appearing on Google’s map (which is located near the very top of the search results) is a great way to get your company’s name in front of searcher’s eyes, especially if it would otherwise have been at the bottom of the page…or worse, on page 2.

Another reason it is so important to claim your Google place is so that your information can be updated. Having incorrect information on Google places (this can occur when Google automatically gleans the listing from other sources, such as YellowPages.com) is almost worse than having no listing at all. Whether the name was auto-filled wrong, or your contact information is outdated, that will be the last time a potential client considers you. In the mind of an unbiased searcher, you’ve wasted their time by having them call a disconnected number, and you’ll have become worse than unknown.

Consider this: If it means that even one client finds you that wouldn’t have before, won’t it have been worth the twenty minutes needed to set it up? Get started at http://www.google.com/places/

2.  Bing, Yahoo, MapQuest Listings: While these search engines certainly aren’t the priority that Google is, they are the next logical step as far as search engine listings go. Google isn’t the only search engine that gleans information from other sites, and YellowPages.com is not Google’s only target, either. That is why it is important to ensure your listing is also updated and visible on search engines like Bing, Yahoo, and map directories like MapQuest.com. This way, no matter which search engine is copying the other’s index, your information will be up to date, and all the more likely to appear to a searcher.

3.  Online Directories: While search engines are definitely the most important place to ensure that your contact information is correctly listed, the sheer quantity of online directories makes them worthy of mention.  Directories like Yellowpages, Local, and Supermedia are just three of the hundred or so directory sites, or at least the ones that matter. They all have (nominal) weight in making your firm turn up in a search before the other guy. Make sure the information is consistent, though (I’d recommend copying the information from your Google Place, exactly as it appears); so that the indexing search engines immediately recognize all of your listings as one (proactive) entity.

4.  Website Content: Now that you have a better understanding of just how important it is to have Google and the other search engines on your side, here’s a tip on how to make them like your site more: Don’t be static. A website that adds new content (even quasi-regularly) will be much more appreciated by search engines. By adding new content, you are assuring that the search engines think that your site is relevant, up-to-date, dynamic, and more interesting to searchers than a site that was last updated in the nineties. If you don’t have a whole lot of updates to add about your own firm, add an ‘articles’ section to your website, and have it filled with relevant news stories, editorials, industry journals, or even comics! Even if you don’t want your support staff writing the content, set them to work finding these valuable content pieces, so your website can appear more active.

5.  Press Release: Press releases are valuable because they make (copious) mention of your firm and/or site on third party platforms. When you have any kind of relevant or interesting story to publish about your firm, compose an article about yourself and send it out to anyone who will take it. Even if The Wall Street Journal turns you down, there are free journal and article sites that you can send it to, or even allow you to post it yourself! Make sure to include many links to different parts of your website (though it’s best to avoid arbitrary over-use, some search engines can recognize this!) and of course mentions of your firm and/or its applicable employees. When the search engine sees your firm on resources other than your own site, it will assume you are much more relevant and worth showing up on a search.

6.  Facebook: Ever heard of it? It’s kind of popular. Facebook is the Google of social media, and as such, you need to have some sort of presence on it.  Even if your firm won’t ga
in as much from it as other industries do, there is a value to having your firm listed on this Internet powerhouse. You’ll want to make a business account and then make a business page. Assign a support staff member to regularly update the “wall” with company news, relevant industry articles, and anything else that will show viewers that you are active and socially-conscious. Encourage clients and partners to “friend” or “like” your page or profile, and do the same for their Facebook pages. It’s a quick and painless way to network, and can sometimes lead to a large return on (time) investment. To read more about the importance of social media in the context of your law firm, see our earlier article: Social Media Marketing for Lawyers

7.  Linked-In Business Profile: Creating a Linked-In business profile is also an important social media task, though for slightly different reasons as Facebook.  A Linked-In profile is an easy way to create a networking hub for your firm, where you can find and be found by likely cohorts and interested searchers. It also provides a social media outlet to send to those business partners who shy away from Facebook like it’s a plague designed by the current generation to make them feel technologically inadequate. Having a Linked-in profile is becoming more expected for business professionals, as well as companies. If you think of Facebook as a power-tie (standardized flair), then Linked-In is the suit jacket (practically mandatory in its professionalism).

8.  Start a Mailing List: Keep your employees, partners and affiliates informed! Create a mailing list (email would be the economic choice, but sending out a paper newsletter is almost less likely to be “trashed” before reading these days) to keep anyone who might take interest in the current events of the firm.

9.  E-mail Marketing: Have a new office? New employee? Different practice areas? Tell your clients! As long as it doesn’t go against your privacy policy (which it shouldn’t, since you are directly contacting them and not disclosing their email to anyone else), send everyone who’s ever been in business with you an update on your firm’s march to the top of the legal ladder. While it may be ignored by 99% of readers, if even one person is reminded of your services and calls or responds, won’t it be worth it? Be careful with this one, though: the last thing you want is to appear that you’ll be spamming their inboxes every other day. Make the emails respectful, professional, and only send with a legitimate update or offer.

10. Create a YouTube Video: If you perform a Google search for something general, you’ll notice that links to websites are not the only returned result. Near the top of the page, you will be given links to YouTube videos, where you can view videos instantly without needing to download neither files nor software. As it turns out, Google puts a huge emphasis on these videos (especially now that they own YouTube!), and they can be an enormous advantage in your favor over your competitors. Even if you were to only make a concise, moderately professional video, and upload it to YouTube with all the appropriate keywords and links to your website, you could easily overtake a competitor who was above you on Google’s search results (if they don’t have a video).

Searchers are much more likely to view a quick and effortless video about a firm, whether it’s a third-party review or company-made, before investigating the actual website further. If you make a snazzy company introduction or a virtual tour, you could also embed it into your company website, or send it to potential clients

A good video is pure marketing gold. A below-average video or worse will just make a viewer laugh and consider your firm unprofessional. Make sure you show the final product to an unbiased acquaintance that won’t be afraid to tell you it’s not ready to represent your firm. You could consider a professional video company for a truly effective video, though that may defeat the purpose of keeping your staff busy. With a few interviews, shots of the office or building, and a few edits from free software (to add names and titles below speakers, along with a few inter-scene effects), you should have at least a satisfactory video, with minimal investment.

11. Craigslist Classifieds: Anybody looking for anything will very likely give Craigslist a try…eventually. While you may not think legal services are as synonymous with Craigslist as say, selling a lawn mower, there is actually a section dedicated to it. By posting specific classifieds such as “Affordable New York Divorce / Family Law Attorney”, you can try and capture searchers who have a specific concern or legal matter. You can then create multiple different listings for different law areas, and maximize your reach. Thousands of other legal firms are posting classifieds on Craigslist to try and capture this niche of searchers, why aren’t you?

The waning days of the work week don’t seem nearly as quiet now, do they? There are online presences to be managed, content to be written, and clients to gain!

Admittedly, any or all of these steps might not be the specialty of your support staff. Otherwise, you may desperately want to take these steps, but are blessedly busy with other matters. For these and many other solutions for your law firm, contact LegalPPC to manage your Internet marketing, so you can get back to your practice!

Having the right website in place is a critical preliminary consideration before embarking on and type of online advertising.

It cannot be emphasized enough that your law firm website must be good before you spend any money in advertising. With the wrong website, you can buy a lot of really good traffic from Google and make Google rich, but have nothing to show for it if everyone backs out of your site to see what else is out there.

Elements of a Successful Law Firm Website

• Good Content

Often a website will have information about statutes of limitations or filing requirements and fees. Other times you’ll see a website that is so stuffed with keywords and links that it is easy to see that the website was written for search engines, not for people who visit it.

In both cases, these websites may be driving away more visitors than they’re bringing into your law practice. Good, engaging content that reaches out to the website visitor will help move more of your website visitors to want to make contact with you.

Shift your message away from descriptions about the law towards something more akin to “We know what you’re going through and we can help.” Get the point across to your website visitor that you care about them and they will be more likely to call or email your office.

• Practice Area Pages

If your practice areas are described in a single page with a list of bullet points, it is suggested that you take the time to build out your practice area content and develop separate pages for each type of case you handle. This includes sub-areas of law. For example, if you’re a general civil law firm, you can have a family law page and a real estate page, and if you’re a family lawyer, you should consider having a divorce page, custody page, support page, and so on.

Having more specific content on your site will help convince the visitor to that page that you’re the expert they’ve been looking for.

• Emotive Photography

Royalty-free stock photography can be an inexpensive way to reach visitors to a web page on an emotional level. Find pictures that pertain to the specific practice area that will resonate for your prospective client. For example, if you’re a family lawyer, a photo of a small child on your custody page can make a big difference in the feel projected to the website visitor.

• Updated Look and Feel

A lot of websites that were designed 10 years ago appear very narrow on wider modern monitors. Just widening a website from 600 pixels to 900 pixels can sometimes freshen up and modernize the look of a site.

Typography and font size is another issue that a lot of designers overlook. Most modern computers come bundled with a wide variety of fonts giving you a lot more choices than just Arial or Times Roman. In particular, the 9-point Arial font found on hundreds of websites produced by a few of the major directories make law firm websites look like cheap templates are a difficult to read by many because the font size is too small.

• Conspicuous Calls to Action

Don’t leave visitors stranded on a page not knowing what to do next. Adding a conspicuous call to action like “Contact us for a free, no-obligation consultation” linking to your contact page can help people decide to make contact with you.

• Easy to Find Contact Forms

Make it easy for people to contact you. Have your phone number in your header graphic and the link to your “contact us” page clearly visible above the scroll bar. Better yet, a contact form on every page in exactly the same place will make it quick and easy for anyone, regardless of what page they navigate to, to write to you.

• Testimonials

Testimonials from former satisfied clients do a lot to warm up a website and if you have any, consider putting up a testimonials page, linking it from your main navigation so people can find it.

• Simplify

Too much movement on a site, over-doing the graphics, burying important website elements under distracting buttons or icons can overwhelm some visitors and drive them out of a site.

• Get Others’ Opinions

Have an informal focus group – ask people who’ve never seen your site before to view it and tell you there impressions. Ask them pointed questions. Could they find what they were looking for? What was their overall impression of the firm? Would they hire you? Are there specific things about the website they liked or disliked?

• Ask an Expert

If you’re unsure whether your website is ready for Primetime, the author of this article invites you to make contact with him for a free, candid website evaluation. Contact information below.

Author: Ken Matejka, Attorney at Law
Email: Ken@LegalPPC.com
Search Engine Marketing for Lawyers

You’ve all heard that on the Internet, content is king. For most people, text is the first thing that comes to mind when they think of content. But it also includes images — specifically, the kind of images that are more than just decorative elements.

Thoughtfully chosen images can communicate at a glance the content of a particular page and work in tandem with the text. High quality images can enhance the overall level of professionalism apparent on your site. They provide visual interest that draws visitors in, as well as resting places for the eye. They can even invoke emotions that prompt the visitor to action (such as making contact with your law firm).

On the other hand, poorly chosen images are space wasters that clutter the screen without adding any value to your visitors. They can confuse or irritate by being unrelated to the content of the page. They can bore them by being too obvious, lazy or generic. They can be hard to see because they’re too small, the contrast is too low, or the image is too complicated. And of course, they can just plain be ugly or unappealing.

So, what works? What should you (or your designer) look for and what should you avoid when selecting stock photos for your law firm website?

Well, if there’s one piece of advice that we can give you, it’s to avoid law firm cliches as much as possible — images of gavels, scales of justice, law books, the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, courtrooms, the Statue of Liberty, eagles, etc. Unfortunately, these are exactly the kinds of images that show up when you search for “lawyer” or “attorney” on all of the stock photo sites (often the starting point for naive web designers looking for pictures for a law firm website).

By avoiding cliched images, you will be on the right path to selecting compelling images that actually support the text on your website. Look for high quality photos that are sharp, are reasonably high contrast, and where the subject matter is distinct and easy to understand.

If your law practice is commercial litigation or management side employment law or some other type of law where your ideal client is another business, then you already know that your best referral source is other attorneys.

This is because most people would rather get a personal referral to an attorney from a friend, relative or colleague, rather than search blindly for representation online. When the person who needs an attorney is a business owner, chances are that he or she is already connected in some way to the legal community and has someone to ask for a personal referral.

Consequently, networking with opinion leaders and other lawyers in your community will always be critically important for the B2B law practitioner.

However, there are affordable online marketing opportunities that can be effective in getting your message in front of prospective clients.

LinkedIn

The business networking site, LinkedIn recently started allowing people to advertise to other LinkedIn members on a pay-per-click model. Like Google advertising, you write ads that you would like to be displayed on LinkedIn pages and you pay LinkedIn a small amount of money when someone clicks on one of your ads.

Your ads are linked to specific pages on your website that can be, and should be, custom tailored to the type of person you are targeting on LinkedIn.

Unlike Google advertising, your ads are not associated to search phrases, triggered when someone types something into a search box. Instead, you place your ads according to certain criteria about the person you want to reach, for example, geographic, industry type and job title. Click here to read more about LinkedIn advertising.

Managed Placements in Google

Google’s “Content Network” refers to the thousands of websites Worldwide that Google partners with to deliver ads that pertain to the content of the websites’ pages. For example, if you scroll to the bottom of the homepage of the New York Times, you will see a gray box with the words “Ads by Google.” Google places the ads there with the permission of the website owner and shares the click revenue with the website owner.

Normally, Google decides where an advertiser’s ads will display based on the content of the pages across the Content Network, but a variation of the Content Network, known as “Managed Placements” allows you to pick the sites where your ads are displayed.

This can be very useful for the B2B law practitioner who wants to reach a specific demographic. Placing ads on websites like the NY Times or financial or business news websites frequented by business owners is a chance to raise awareness in the local business community about your firm’s services.

Microsoft AdCenter Content Advertising

Microsoft AdCenter offers a product similar to Google’s Content Network known as “Content Advertising” which can get your ads inexpensively on business news websites like the Wall Street Journal and financial news websites like Barron’s.