“We need to generate more traffic to our law firm website because it currently doesn’t generate enough leads. We need some search engine optimization to help us generate more leads.”

This is a common statement, but there are two potential problems with it…

First of all, this statement reveals a common misconception a lot of website owners have — that search engine optimization can be used to generate website leads. SEO is a traffic generator, but not a lead generator. SEO can increase the amount of traffic to a law firm website by improving the site’s ranking in major search engines (for relevant search phrases). But SEO is not a lead generation technique. In other words, it can increase the number of visitors to a law firm website but it cannot make those visitors do anything upon arriving.

Secondly, many legal websites get plenty of traffic on a regular basis, but do a poor job converting that traffic into leads and inquiries. In other words, these problem websites lack the fundamentals of lead generation.

I once spoke to a lawyer in my area who swore she wasn’t getting enough website traffic, based on the fact that she wasn’t getting any emails through the site. Fifteen minutes of research revealed something surprising (to her) but unsurprising to me. Her website was getting about 15 - 20 unique visitors per day. That’s plenty of traffic for a single lawyer. If she converted just one of those visitors into a client each week, she would have more business than she could handle.

But therein lies the problem, and it’s a common problem on many law firm websites. Her website had some web usability problems that made it hard to navigate. So we fixed those problems. It was also hard to find the contact information, a website marketing sin. So we fixed that too. We also created a free phone consultation service (for first-time inquiries) and promoted that service in highly visible places on the website.

Long story short, she is getting a steady stream of emails through her site these days.

This story illustrates the difference between website traffic and viable leads. It really doesn’t matter how much traffic your law firm website has if you’re not converting those casual visitors into viable leads and inquiries. In other words, you have to work hard to get those visitors to do something once they reach your website. Otherwise, your visitors are like cars passing by on a highway.

This story also illustrates the need to have some kind of analytics program in place on your law firm website — a stats tool that tells you how many visitors you get each day, what search phrases they use to find you, and other critical pieces of website “intelligence.” Without that, you don’t even know where you stand, or what needs to be improved.

Now what? When do visitors start coming to your website? When do those precious leads and inquiries come in? Well, if you don’t have a lawyer website promotion plan in place, it’s going to be a long wait.

You have to think about the situation from a numerical standpoint. When you put a new website online, it’s nearly the equivalent of putting another grain of sand on a beach. Sure it’s there, but does it really matter? Will anyone notice its arrival? Clearly not.

This is why you have to be active with your lawyer website promotion efforts. You need your website to be more than a grain of sand on the beach … you need it to be noticed. You need the site to bring in traffic and — ultimately — convert that traffic into viable leads that you can follow up on.

Here are some things you can do to promote your website so it doesn’t become just another grain of sand on the beach:

Web Promotion Ideas for Lawyers

• When your site is up and running, send out a press release through the online PR sites such as PRweb.com.
• Start an article-publishing campaign to educate the public on your particular area of legal practice. Distribute your material through article sites like EzineArticles.com and link back to your lawyer website from each article.
• Submit your lawyer website to web directories for promotional purposes as well as long-term search engine visibility.
• Be proactive about search engine optimization (or pay somebody to do it on your behalf). This way you will maximize the website traffic you get from Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.
• Start a lawyer blog to help keep your website fresh. Publish new information to the blog on a regular basis, and submit it to blog directories.
• Most importantly, fill your website with plenty of quality content. After all, it doesn’t matter if people find you online if they don’t like what they find.
• In general, just be active online when trying to promote your lawyer website. The more active you are, the more visible you’ll be to your key audience.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this short guide to lawyer website promotion and that it helps get your wheels turning. Remember, being active online is the first step to being visible online. So combine some of the techniques I’ve listed above with your own ideas. Create a well-rounded web presence, and the traffic will come.

The same is true for law firm websites and the websites of individual lawyers as well.

In other words, people have higher expectations for law firm websites these days. So when they encounter a static site with outdated content, or a site that doesn’t allow them to do anything, they will quickly move on.

On the other hand, people will be more inclined to stay on your law firm website if you let them interact in some way. This can help increase your website conversion rates (which, for lawyers and law firms, usually refers to the number of people who contact you about your legal services.

After all, the longer a person is on your law firm website, the more likely they will be to take some form of action (asking a question, subscribing to a newsletter, etc.).

You can increase interactivity in a number of ways. And these days, there are all kinds of software products to make it extremely easy for you! Here are a few examples of interactivity you could build into your website:

How to Increase Your Website’s Interactivity

1. Publish a legal blog and allow readers to comment on it. Don’t just allow it … encourage it.
2. Educate your blog reader’s about the blog’s RSS feed, how they can use it, what the value is, etc.
3. Use an “RSS-to-email” program like Zookoda so your blog readers can subscribe to the RSS feed by way of an email address.
4. If you have the audience and the web traffic for it, launch a Q&A discussion forum on your website. You install a program like VBulletin or phpBB to do most of the work.
5. If you have customer service folks, put a chat feature on your website so visitors can “click to chat” with customer service. This can be a great way to at least capture a name, email address or phone number before people leave.
6. Similarly, you can create an FAQ / Knowledge Base section of your website where visitors can submit their questions (and read previous Q&A with your staff).

Remember, when people are able to interact with your law firm website in some way, they are more likely to stay on the site longer. And the longer they stick around, the more likely they will be to take the action you want them to take.

Brandon Cornett publishes a lawyer marketing website that offers advice on all aspects of Internet marketing.

2 Sides to Lawyer Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Optimization – SEO is the act of improving your website’s natural rankings in the search engines. “Natural ranking” is what makes this approach to lawyer search engine marketing different from the second approach discussed below. With SEO, you improve your rankings by creating a content-rich website focused on certain key phrases, and then linking to the site from elsewhere (through directory submissions, networking, etc.)

* Learn more about search engine optimization for lawyers.

Pay Per Click – PPC marketing, also known as sponsored search, is where you pay for search engine rankings. Google’s PPC program, for example, is called Google AdWords. If you take this approach to lawyer search engine marketing you will have to pay a certain amount of money every time somebody clicks on your search engine listing.

* Learn more about pay per click for lawyers.

Now that you know the difference between the two lawyer search engine marketing strategies, the question becomes: “Do I need both of them?” That depends on several things — namely, the competition.

If you practice a specific area of law in a smaller city, there might not be that much competition online. In this case, you can probably get plenty of traffic with search engine optimization / SEO. However, if you practice general law in a big city, you may find it necessary to pursue both types of lawyer search engine marketing just to stay visible online.

Benefits of SEO as Search Engine Marketing Tool

Both SEO and PPC have their pros and cons as lawyer search engine marketing channels. But in my opinion, SEO should be a part of every lawyer’s marketing budget. The results you derive from SEO are long-lasting, whereas the results you derive from PPC will disappear as soon as you “turn off” the campaign or exceed your PPC budget.

These are the questions we have addressed in the most recent marketing article posted to the main website. In this new article, I’ve tried to explain the concept of attention as a type of currency or commodity. When you can understand this fundamental concept, you can take your law firm Internet marketing program to new heights.

Consumer attention is the first step to consumer interest. And interest is the first step to action. These are fundamental relationships and concepts of Internet marketing for any business, and that includes your law firm.

Read the full article here:
Internet Marketing for Law Firm - The Attention Factor

But when it comes to website design — specifically, law firm website design — the concept of design becomes less personal and more business-related. After all, when you’re talking about a business website, the design should serve the primary goal of business growth.

Whenever you make a design change to your law firm website, you need to ask yourself a few key questions:

1. Will this design change help my visitors accomplish their goals?
2. Will this change support the overall goal of my law firm website (e.g. lead generation)?
3. Will my changes increase or decrease the usability of my website?

Website Design Relates to Business Success

Website design and usability go hand in hand, and nowhere is this more important than on business website. A well-designed website will increase the chance that people will follow the path you want them to follow, and take the actions you want them to take. This is the first step to website lead generation.

On the other hand, when a law firm website is poorly designed, it can frustrate visitors and reflect poorly on the law firm itself (and the people within it).

When we design a lawyer website or law firm website, we obviously want it to look nice and function properly. That much is a given. But we also want it to support the business goals of our client. Because a pretty website does you no good when people don’t respond to it.

In keeping with this notion, we integrate the following techniques into all of our law firm websites and lawyer websites …

Components of Law Firm Web Design

• Good organization to help people find their way around the site
• Proper web coding to ensure consistent display in all web browsers
• Quality content to reflect well upon the website’s owners
• Easy-to-find contact information for lead generation
• A strong focus on usability to make it easy for people to respond

Questions About Our Design Services?

If this approach to law firm website design matches your expectations and desires, then contact us to learn more about our web design and development services.

• increase the overall value of your website
• expand your overall web presence
• increase your search engine visibility
• attract new clients via search engines and networking
• reinforce your law firm’s legal expertise
• give people more of a reason to trust / contact you

These are just a few of the benefits to using a law firm blog as part of your marketing mix. And I think we can agree that these are all good things.

But refer back to that introductory statement: “By publishing quality content on a regular basis…” In order to capitalize on everything a law firm blog has to offer, you will need to publish new content often.

For many law firms, therein lies the rub. What do you blog about? Where do you get ideas? How can you possibly create new blog material on a regular basis?

I’ve posted a new article that will answer all of these questions for you, and I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how simple the solution is.

Read the article here:
Feed Your Law Firm Blog with Google Alerts

What is Attrition?
The dictionary defines attrition as being “a reduction in numbers usually as a result of resignation, retirement, or death.” Now let’s translate that definition for online lawyer marketing purposes.

Online Marketing Attrition
With regard to Internet marketing, attrition refers to the people who do not take the desired action(s) you want them to take. When attrition is high, overall marketing success is low.

At each step in the lawyer marketing process, there’s a chance you will lose some people. The good news is, each point of marketing attrition can be improved — that is, you can minimize the number of people who “drop off” at each step of the way.

Learn more about marketing attrition, and what you can do to minimize it:
Lawyer Marketing Online - The Attrition Factor

All throughout this blog, this website, and this web marketing book, we have offered tips on lawyer SEO — the act of improving your website for better search engine ranking (and traffic levels).

Here’s another tip for you, that’s both simple and effective. Put keywords into your website’s hyperlinks.

Putting keywords into hyperlinks is one of the easiest on-site adjustments you can make to improve the search engine visibility of your law firm website or blog.

Here’s why…

Search engine “robots” use hyperlinks to navigate your website (much like a person would), and they can read the text found within the hyperlink (much like a person would). They use this “link text” to help determine what the destination page is about (much like a person would).

I don’t mean to sound like a broken record here. I’m repeating the “like a person would” for good reason. By using descriptive keywords within your hyperlinks, you are helping people and search engines at the same time.

Note the difference:

• Click here for more information. (This is vague for people and meaningless to search engines).
• Get more lawyer marketing advice. (This tells you where the link goes, and it also tells search engines what the destination page is about.)

In other words, this simple strategy is good for both website visibility and website usability.

Because without leads and inquiries, you have no business.

To explain this concept further, and to offer some tips on generating leads the right way, we have posted a new article to the Knowledge Center.

Article excerpt:

One of the best ways to generate leads via the Internet is to make people actually want to contact you. Instead of contacting strangers to offer your services, what if they contacted you and asked about your services? This is a significant shift, and it can do wonders for any lawyer’s business development.

Read the full article here:
Lawyer Business Development - How to Generate Leads