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.

Not in our blood?

Avinash Kaushik is the Analytics Evangelist at Google. Listed below is quote of his from a recent speech.

"The Web has been around forever and yet it is not in the blood of the executives who staff the top echelons of companies. Make no mistake, they are smart, they are successful and they want to do better. But the web is such a paradigm shift that if it is not in your blood it is very difficult to imagine its power and how to use it for good. How do you demand innovation & creativity & radical rethink if you can't imagine.

This is not just a problem for executives. It affects most of us who are over 40 years in age. We were born into an analog world and the web is forcing us to change in a way that does not feel natural. However, if we are willing to take the plunge into the digital world, it will creep into our blood as well.

Plan Ahead When Going Solo

Sometimes the partners of multiple attorney law firms decide to split up and go back working as solo attorneys. Making this transition involves important decisions regarding the current website of the firm and the future website platforms needed to support the attorneys who go back on their own. Here are some things to consider:

• The firm's current website may be a valuable asset. Often times the firm's current site gets substantial traffic because of it's size, age and number of inbound links. Unfortunately, it is difficult to split the value of an established website into multiple smaller sites. The original domain name can only be used by one of the new firms. Deciding who gets to keep the original domain name is an important decision.
• Generating traffic for a new website requires, writing substantial content and doing substantial SEO work. It may take a long time to generate the same level of traffic of the firm's current site. More visitors means more phone inquiries.
• Duplicating the content of the current firm's current site on to multiple new sites is not an option. Splitting up the content may be possible, but only to a degree. And splitting the content could result in a net negative traffic flow.
• Websites will need to be created for the attorneys going solo. There may be economies of scale in creating multiple new sites at the same time using the same general structure, but with different color schemes and different content.
• When you make the decision to split up the firm and transition back to solo attorneys, start building the new websites ASAP. Because of Google's Sandbox, it is very difficult to get good search results until six months has gone by. It is important to get the clock started.
• If you have a strong need to generate leads faster for the new websites, you may want to consider setting up a Pay for Click account and buy your visits. With Pay for Click you can turn up the traffic quickly. Of course to do that, you have to donate substantial money to Google. (Clicks can be expensive and Click fraud is real)

The key is planning ahead and getting help from a firm who is experienced in helping Family Law attorneys with SEO and website planning.

Website Report Card

Your website can be an important marketing tool for your practice. But how do you know if your website is set up to create value for your firm ? Perhaps it's time for a website report card. Listed below are five main criteria for evaluating your website.

Visibility

Is your site generating leads for your practice?

Is your site on page 1 of the search results when prospective client search divorce related "keyword phrases?

Is the structure of the site adequate for taking on a search engine optimization effort?

Is there limited or no flash?

Content

How much content is there?

How frequently is the content updated?

Are important keywords prominently throughout the site.

Is the content readable?

Is there sufficient white space?

Is the width of the content is less than 75 characters ? ( less than 60 is ideal)

Is the phone number prominent?
Is there original content on the site? (duplicate content kills your SEO)

Message on the site

When prospective clients visit your office are they inspired to take action and call your office?

Is your content written to address the concerns of your prospective clients?

Navigation

Is the navigation understandable or are people confused the first time they visit your site?

Aesthetics

Is there a professional clean look to the site?

Are there attorney pictures on the site?

Are there appealing client focused pictures, quotes and images on the site?

Are the client benefits to working with you immediately visible to your eye on the home page ?

Conclusion

If you would like to learn more on how you improve your website grade please visit www.visibilitypartners.com or call us at 414-828-5897.

When will the phone start ringing?

So you hired an SEO firm to help increase the traffic to your website. But despite sending a check, the phone at your Family Law firm has yet to start ringing and the traffic to the site is low.

• Why is that?
• When will the phone/website traffic increase?
• What should your expectations be for the first six to nine months?

Why?

In the beginning of a project your search rankings will improve, but the rankings will not be high enough for people to find you. This is because people tend not to click on a search result if it is listed beyond page one or two in the search results. However, as your rankings continue to improve, the traffic to the site will start to increase and the phone will start to ring. So in the first few months, an important indicator of success is the rate of improvement in your search rankings. If a month or two has gone by and your search rankings have improved dramatically that is a very good sign that the SEO process is working and that your traffic will increase soon.

The only way to know that the rankings are improving is to measure the rankings each month. We recommend that you rank a list of keyword phrases at the beginning of the SEO process and track your progress each month. The SEO process requires a little patience and seeing progress in your rankings each month will help you stay the course.

When?

Most of my Family Law attorney clients will ask me; when will the phone start ringing consistently? Phone traffic tends to increase in-line with increases in absolute unique visitors. (Unique means if a person visits the site 10 times they are still counted as one visitor) In my experience working with Collaborative Family law websites the magic number seems to be 150 absolute unique visitors. When a site receives 150 unique visitors a month the phone may ring once or twice a week. My expectation at the start of any project is for the traffic to increase to 150 to 250 unique visitors per month in about six to nine months from when the site goes live.

Expectations

I don't guarantee the numbers above. They are at best educated guesses, because there are many variables outside of our span of control that affect the final outcome. Having said that, I think the numbers I listed above represent reasonable goals for the first 6-9 months.

Paid for Advertising as a short term measure

For our clients who are looking for immediate results we recommend a six month Pay for Click campaign. With a PPC campaign you get immediate results, but have to pay each time someone clicks on your listing. This is not ideal, but for some it is an effective measure for achieving faster results.

You are the next American Idol and the importance of link building

Talent is not enough when it comes to becoming the next American Idol. To win, you need America to vote for you.

This is also true when it comes to pushing your site to the top of the Family Law search rankings in your area. In the SEO game, incoming links are like votes on American Idol. You need to have a lot of incomming links from other sites to make it to the top. When someone links to your site, they are in essence saying, "I like this site more than other sites".

That is why Google favors sites with more inbound links.

Divorce and the Business Cycle

The first quarter of 2009 will go down in history as one of the bleakest economic periods during the last quarter century. Almost all of the clients I work with experienced a slow down in their Family Law practice. There was also a dramatic slow down in divorce related searches in Google during Q1 of 2009. Since that time traffic has increased substantially. In fact for most of our clients "divorce related search traffic" has more than doubled for February 2010, year over year.

Checking your search rankings in Google

In working with Family Law clients they often want to check and see how our search engine optimization services are helping their search rankings.

It seems easy do to. Go to Google and perform a search (i.e. Collaborative Divorce Minnetonka) and then count down through each search result until you arrive at the result for your site. Easy, right? Well not exactly, there is a catch. Google will rank your site higher if you have visited your site recently. This means that your search results may look better than they actually are.

How to get an accurate ranking

To get an accurate ranking, you need to delete your browsing history. How you delete your browsing history is dependent on your browser.

For Firefox go to Tools, and then click on delete recent browsing history.

For Internet Explorer, go to tools, delete browsing history, click on the radio boxes labeled Temporary Internet files and browsing history.

Warning

Sometimes you may not want to delete your browsing history. For example, when you type in a partial address of a website that you have been to recently, the browser will help you fill in the full address. The browser does this by looking at your browsing history. If the browsing history is deleted you will not get that benefit.

Prioritizing keywords for your Family Law site

Prioritizing your keywords is an important part of developing a sound Internet Marketing strategy. There are two types keywords to think about: practice specific keywords and geographic keywords.

Practice Specific keywords

These are phrases that relate to your practice areas: divorce, child custody, paternity. maintenance, estate planning etc. When choosing the keywords it is important to choose words that get searched frequently because ranking well for words that are infrequently searched provides little value. There are many tools out there to help in the process of researching keywords. Without doing any research you can pretty much assume that the most important search phrase is going to be Divorce Attorneys. Because of this it is important that you identify yourself/s as Divorce Attorneys and not Family lawyers on your website.

Geographic keywords

These are the cities, suburbs, counties, regions and states important to your practice. Typically the most searched phrases are the largest city, county or region. Although, the frequency of searches does not always scale with population. For example, a large suburb that has 1% of the states population may still get half as many searches. The reason for this is that people are more likely to search for a divorce attorney within a 25 mile radius. It is important to choose communities that are frequently searched. But you should also consider, communities where there might be high concentrations of quality clients. Even if those communities are not searched as frequently.

Keywords and bullets

When writing content for your Home Page think about keywords and bullets.

Keywords
Include your keywords in the title of at the top of the page and in the
first paragraph, last paragraph and in the body some place.

Bullets
Each time someone visits your site, they make a split second decision on
whether to stay or go. By including benefit bullets in your first
paragraph you increase your chances of keeping the visitors interest.

Listed below is sample text for a Milwaukee based Family Lawyer. In writing
your content include your key communities and key benefits of your practice.

Milwaukee County Divorce Attorneys serving clients in Glendale, Whitefish
Bay, Fox Point, key community, key community

Our team of Divorce Attorneys provides experienced counsel and assistance to
Wisconsin couples in all areas of Family Law and divorce Our goal is to
help our divorce clients to:

• Complete their divorce in a timely manner
• Create a bright financial future
• Have control over divorce negotiations
• Maintain strong ties with their children during and after the divorce
• Move on with their new lives

Warning; Do not copy this content and paste it to your site. Google penalizes websites with duplicate content.

Careful when changing your domain name for your Family Law site

Sometimes when attorneys create a new website they want to change the domain name. This is okay to do. But to ensure that your search results are not affected make sure your web developer does a permanent redirect from the newest domain to the oldest domain name

Landing Pages help improve search rankings

One way to add content to your website is through something called landing pages. There are three types of landing pages that I will mention in this post that pertain to Family Law websites.

• Home Page - Technically the home page is not a landing page but it is the most important page on your site and it is very important that the content on the home page is both search friendly and client friendly. By Search Friendly, I mean that your most important keywords are concentrated and prominent. As an example, let's say your most important keywords are Minneapolis, St Paul, Twin Cities, Minnesota, Divorce Attorneys. Those words should be at the top of the Home Page first paragraph and last paragraph. By Client friendly, I mean the the content focuses on the benefits your firm provides to the client.
• Geographical Landing pages are written like your home page but may target secondary communities in your are. The goal is to create a page so improves your search results for a secondary community and has a message that is tailored to a person that does a search related to that community. (i.e. Wayzata Mn Divorce Attorney) You may do as many landing pages as you like, but creating the landing pages will take time for you to create. It takes time because the content must be unique (at least 40% different than any other page on the site)
• Subject Matter Landing pages- The content for Subject Matter landing pages targets more a more specific areas of the your practice. For a Subject Matter landing page you will still be including geographical information, But you will want to use broader geographical names like Minnesota International Custody, or Minneapolis, Twin Cities etc. If you use smaller communities you are not likely to get any searches. Listed below is sample text for a person writing a Landing Page for Ramsey County Divorce
  

Just a few thoughts on landing pages for Family Law attorneys

Include city names when you write articles

Writing new content for your site is very helpful for your search results. One way to add content is by writing an article on something related to Family Law or Divorce. Whenever you write an article you always want to think about adding keywords that are important to your Family Law practice.

An easy way to add keywords to an article is to include your name, your title (Divorce Attorney) and the key cities you serve. (i.e Author: Jim Smith, Divorce Attorney, <key city> <key state>)

Five ideas for boosting your search rankings

I. Develop a content plan and start writing more content for your site. This will be very helpful for increasing your traffic. To make better use your content plan out where the content should go within a structure that makes it easy to navigate.

2. Increase incoming links to your site. By submitting some of your articles to ezines we can increase the number of links into your site..

3. Making changes to the navigational menus of your site so that web visitors can more easily navigate the substantial quantity of content on your site.

4. Create additional landing pages to key communities and other keywords (i.e. child custody)

5. Create a blog and regularly make entries

6. Set up a Pay for click account. This costs money, but it does boost the traffic to your site and can indirectly improve your search rankings

Drawing Traffic To Your Family Law Website

Are you drawing significant traffic to your website every month? Do you frequently get calls from prospective clients who have viewed your web site and want to learn more about your legal services? When you do Internet searches on words that are relevant to your practice, does your website show on Page One of the search results? If you have answered “No” to these questions, you may want to consider enhancing your site for better results.

The process of enhancing your website to achieve better search results is known as Search Engine Optimization and can be a very cost effective way to market your practice. Your practice can become highly visible on the Internet without that much effort or expense.

You may be saying:

“This makes sense, but I am just a small minnow in the enormous sea of the Internet. There is no way my little firm can get to page one of the search results.”

That statement is 100% false and the primary reason why Legal Professionals do not think their website is a useful tool for growing their practice.

The reality is, Search Engines love sites that have a focus. As a Legal Professional in XYZ, Illinois, you are much more focused than larger firms that span multiple geographies and law disciplines. The key for success is to leverage your focus and follow some basic principles in creating your website that enable the search engines to recognize your practice and/or geographic focus.

So, what do you need to do?

There is a standard set of steps that need to be taken to achieve the desired results. We have worked with numerous attorneys on helping them optimize their sites. In all cases they have been able to move to page one of the search results for their important keyword phrases.

When we work with attorney clients we do the following four things:

* Change the structure of the site to make it more receptive to the search engines.
* Increase the number of inbound links to your site. (That is arranging to have other sites link into yours.)
* Update your site to include important keywords which are placed in locations that displays them more prominently.
* Set up a process within your firm to regularly update your site with new content. The search engines love to see fresh content. (Google in particular.)

This approach is effective because it off loads the bulk of the work from our attorney clients. The attorney need only focus on creating new content every month or two.

Remember a little bit of new content goes along way. Writing 400 new words of content every month or two goes a long way towards improving your search results The key is to write from the view point of the prospective client and include your important key words in the content.

The practices we have worked with have seen a dramatic increase in qualified phone calls to their office. If you would like us to evaluate your site, please contact us today: 414.921.4856

In closing, what would it mean to your practice if you were getting an additional 3-6 calls per month from prospective clients? How many new cases would this generate for your firm? Legal Professionals that have taken the time to optimize their site have consistently achieved these results. More importantly, they achieved these results at a fraction of the cost of services offered by Martindale Hubble or other expensive legal directory services.