Maury White Attorney at Law: What are the best interests of my children?

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Maury White Attorney at Law: What are the best interests of my children?: Ever wonder how your children are feeling about your litigated divorce or the fighting in your home? If you think you are doing them a fav...

Success in Real Estate and at Cocktail Parties

Success in SEO is analogous to success in real estate

The key to success in real estate is owning a variety of properties in good locations. The key to success in drawing traffic to your site is ranking well for a variety of frequently searched keyword phrases. When prospective clients perform searches they rarely look beyond page one of the search results pages. So you can think about that first page of search results as a residential sub division with just 10-15 ten lots in it. As in real estate, you want to own the best location in within the sub division. Which from an SEO perspective is the first result.

Now it would be nice if you could own all 15 lots in the sub division, but Google works very hard for that not to happen. So to acheive success in SEO your goal is to rank high (best location) for a variety of frequently searched phrases. (best sub divisions) In writing content for your site always be thinking about phrases you can rank well for and make sure they are included in your copy.

Social networking (Facebook, LinkedIn) - Be an interesting guest at the cocktail party

To be effective at social networking imagine that you are at at cocktail party where people are talking about divorce. Your goal is to be recognized by a lot people at the party as a leader in the conversation about collaborative divorce and mediation.

So, what do you do? You could try the interrupt approach. Like with traditional marketing you could move around the party and tell as many people as you can about your message and how smart you are. The problem with the interrupt approach is that it is all about you and not them. If the word gets out it is possible that the people at the party will start avoiding you.

Another approach would be to find the various thought leaders on Divorce who are at the party. These are people who know a lot of people at the party and are known for interesting thoughts on divorce. When you connect with these people your goal is to first listen and comment on their message and perhaps share their message with others. Your goal is to become a supporter and contributor to their dialogue. As a result of being part of their dialogue they start to find you interesting and soon their friends think you might be interesting too. As a result they start checking you out and asking about your thoughts and sharing your thoughts with other people at the party.

So the goal with social networking is to be an interesting participant in the overall conversation at the party. And to be interesting you have to take interest in others first. This is vastly different than the traditional interrupt driven approach to marketing.

Google Boost "Pay for Click" for Mere Mortals

Google has introduced a new Pay for click product called Google Boost. It is similar, but less complex than Adwords. (also less customizable) And is basically a very easy to use "Adwords like" solution that uses the data in your Google Places listing to create the ad,

This product does not offer all the options that Adwords users have. However it is incredibly easy to use.

If you sign up with Google this month they give you $100 of free clicks.

Changes with Google Local Search

Ranking high on page one of Google''s search results page is key to drawing new visitors to your website. During the last month, Google has implemented some major changes to the way it displays search results for local searches.

What is a local search?

A local search is one that contains a geographical keyword. (i.e. Seattle Divorce Attorneys) Local searches are very important to Family Law attorneys, since virtually all Family Law is local. Listed below is a description of the recent changes to the Google search engine results page:

• Local Map is now moved to the right sidebar.
• Before the top 7 to 10 listings were from Google Places/ Local (the results formerly next to the map) and the organic results appeared afterwards. Google used and different algorithms for both Google Places/local results and for the organic results
• Now, both the map results and organic results are a blend of data. This is a big change. Before it was possible to have poor organic results and still rank well because your Google Places listing did well.

What does this all mean?

It is not yet clear how these changes will affect Family Law Internet marketing. However, based on what I have seen thus far, I will offer my opinion. The attorneys negatively affected by this change are likely to be those that previously had a high ranking for their Google Places listing, but ranked poorly (or just average) in the organic results. Conversely, attorneys that previously had poor Google Places rankings with good organic rankings may be positively affected. Everyone else is likely to be impacted in some way because it will change user behavior.

What should you do?

Below is a partial list of suggestions for enhancing the visibility of your Collaborative Family Law website.

• Claim your Google places listing: Once you have completed the listing fill in all the information you can including: pictures, videos, reviews and all available fields.
• Update your page titles -These are the words that appear at the top of your web browser when you are on a page of your website. They are also the words the title of the Google search result for your website that show up as a blue link.
• Make each page title unique
• Add a few internal links on your site - Add links within your website. Use keywords in the link description.
• Add your address and phone to every page of the website
• Claim your profile on legal directories, Chamber of Commerce, Merchant Circle, Yahoo Local, etc. - There are a huge number of yellow pages-like directories that allow you to update your business information for free. These sites get a lot of traffic and tend to rank well. At the least you should go to each one, claim your profile and make sure they are linking to your site. In addition, consider directories that are relevant to legal and are local. ALWAYS COMPLETE THE PROFILE FORM 100%.
• Increase the number of inbound links to your site - The change during the last month have made this more important than ever.

Conclusion

It is clear that traditional organic factors (especially title tags and inbound links) are going to become more important. If your firm has not done much in the way of organic optimization in the past, this may be a good time to consider organic optimization. Or better yet give us a call. Visibility Partners has been helping Collaborative Family Law attorneys with organic search engine optimization for the last five years.

Landing Pages are Good

Writing content for your site is always helpful. Here are some thoughts.

Creating 400 plus word articles on any topic related to Collaborative Divorce or Divorce is helpful to your SEO efforts.

In addition to articles, adding landing pages is helpul. I am sending two suggestions for Landing pages. They are listed below. .



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Child Custody Attorneys serving key community

We are a group of divorce attorneys trained in the process of Collaborative Divorce. The collaborative approach to divorce is often a good choice when children are involved.................


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Child Support Attorneys serving your county

We are a group of Divorce Attorneys dedicated to helping families through the divorce process. Divorce can be hard on the kids......................

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When writing landing pages think about your geographic keywords and your practice area keywords

Reviews in Google maps

Your Google maps listing can help you draw traffic to your website or generate phone calls directly to your office. To make your listing more visible (rank higher) it is important that you complete the entire profile. This includes adding pictures/videos and having reviews from happy clients. I recommend that you have 4 reviews for your listing.

The best way to get a review is to ask someone to write a review for you. Ideally the review should come from a happy client. (or colleague outside your firm/group)

A review is usually a couple sentences long up to a paragraph in size and is easy to write. The tricky part comes in actually finding the spot where to write the review. For most people you will need to give them some guidance on where to go.

Guiding the reviewer

The reviewer should do the following:

- Go to http://maps.google.com/ and click on the sign in link in the upper right corner

- Enter a username and password.

- If they don't have a account with Google they will need to create one.

- Then they should do a search in Google maps with the exact listing name:

- Then they should click on the more info link (it is in a tiny font next to the listing name)

- Then click on the write a review link (located in the middle of the page on the right

- Write the review

If you have a client that is knowledgeable in Google this will be a peace of cake. However, for many people, they will need your help.

Where is the traffic going?

Google continues to be a dominant player on the Web. But there is dominant shift underway. Social media sites like Facebook are growing to the point where they are likely to surpass Google in terms of overall traffic. According to the analysts at Hitwise, Google currently receives 9% of all the Internet traffic. While Facebook receives 7%. Google still has the lead but the gap is rapidly closing. In the United Kingdom, Facebook traffic now exceeds the traffic to Google.

How does this affect Family Law attorneys? The traffic numbers give us an indication of where the action is. There is still a lot of action in the search area, but it is clear that social media is growing at rapid rate. To have marketing success, as a Family Law attorney, it is critical that you become comfortable with Social Media and in particular Social Networking. (Facebook, LinkedIn)

I spend most of my time with LinkedIn because of it's concentration of business users. However, Facebook is the market leader and should be considered in your Social Media strategy. The key is to get comfortable and competent with social networking. Social Networking is not expensive but it requires that you participate in the game. With old school marketing and advertising you just had to Pay to Play. With Social Networking, you have to Play to Play.