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.