Free Book on Lawyer Website Marketing
September 10, 2007 – 4:53 pmAs you’ve probably already noticed from the “free book” graphic over in the sidebar area, we now offer a free e-book on website marketing for lawyers and law firms. It offers more than 100 pages of advice on all aspects of lawyer website marketing — blogs, SEO, online PR, website lead generation and more.
You can download the book here (PDF file, 1.3 MB)
Here’s the book’s introduction:
Web Smart Lawyer
How to attract new clients and grow your business with a highly visible web presence.
From an Internet marketing standpoint, there are two types of lawyers.
First, there are those who see the Internet as being potentially helpful as a marketing tool. They’ve heard of other attorneys or firms who have benefited from an Internet marketing program, but they’re just not sure it’s for them.
Secondly, there are those lawyers who know the Internet can help them grow their business. They have no doubt or ambivalence about the matter, and they are ready to capture their “fair share” of web traffic in order to take their business to the next level. They only need a little guidance.
I’ve written this book for the second group, those who are ready to pursue an Internet marketing program with vigor, but would like some helpful tips before they get started. This second group represents my ideal audience, so if you are part of that group, you will get a lot out of this book. I guarantee it.
Purpose and Objectives
With this book, I hope to open your eyes to the infinite ways you can use the Internet as a marketing tool to help you attract clients and grow your business. But don’t let the word “infinite” scare you. While there are certainly endless ways you can go about an Internet marketing program, I have written this book around some very specific techniques. This will give you a useful education that you can put to work immediately, without overloading you with too much of everything.
As we advance through this book and talk about different forms of online marketing, I want you to remember one thing above all else. All of the individual elements work together to support the ultimate objective, which is to attract clients and grow your business. Blogs, websites, articles, press releases, search engine marketing—these Internet marketing tools can be useful and effective on an individual basis, but they can accomplish much more when used together.
This comprehensive approach to Internet marketing is what I’m going to teach you in this book. I refer to it as the “web presence,” and it’s a term you’ll hear me use a lot in this book.
The Web Presence vs. The Website
These days, a simple website is not enough to ensure your online success. You need to be more active online (or pay someone to be active on your behalf) in order to attract the kind of website traffic that turns into qualified leads—and, ultimately, new clients.
In the past, lawyers and law firms could put up a simple 5-page website, and people would eventually find it (and perhaps even respond to it). That is no longer the case. To be “findable” online today, you need more than a basic website—you need a web presence. This guide will show you how to create one.
So, then, our mission statement and goals would look like this:
- To broaden your Internet presence so your target audience has multiple ways to find you online.
- To increase the chance people will find you through search engines like Google™ when researching legal topics relevant to your business.
- To increase your overall marketing success by creating a “passive” channel for inquiries and leads.
- To make you one of the most widely published Internet authorities on legal matters in your city or state.
How will we do all of this? We will do this by first establishing your web presence, and then ensuring that your web presence exceeds that of your competitors (or most of them, anyway).
In other words, we will make it nearly impossible for people not to find you online when researching legal topics related to your business.
What’s a Web Presence?
The Internet has grown by leaps and bounds over the years. Today, the size of the Web is measured in billions of individual documents, with millions of new documents coming online every year. These documents run the gamut from web pages to PDF documents, from audio files to images and beyond.
What’s the end result of all this content? For one thing, it’s harder to be found online than it used to be. So you have to work smarter and publish content through multiple channels to ensure your future “findability.”
The Need for a Web Presence, Illustrated
Let’s look at a hypothetical scenario. Let’s say we operate a law firm in San Diego. There was a time, just a few short years ago, when only a dozen or so law firms in San Diego had websites. Websites used to more expensive than they are today, and they took a lot much longer to build and put online. On top of that, few law firms felt the need to go online ten years ago. There wasn’t the “Internet rush” that we see in today’s legal industry.
So let’s say we put a new website online, catering to San Diegans with certain legal needs. If we were one of only thirteen San Diego law firm websites, that would make it really easy for people to find us online. If a search engine showed ten results on Page 1, we would have a strong chance of being on that page. Less competition, right?
Now flash forward to the present. Things have certainly changed!
It’s 2007, and thousands of San Diego law firms have websites and blogs online. In fact, when I search the phrase “San Diego law firm” in Google (with quotes around the phrase), I get 20,900 results. That means there are more than twenty thousand individual documents online (and in the Google database) that mention the phrase “San Diego law firm.”
Even if you were to (A) eliminate repeat pages from the same websites, and (B) remove all web pages that were not owned by law firms, you’d probably be left with at least 3,000 individual websites owned by law firms in the San Diego area. Keeping in mind that search engines only show ten search results per page, this means each of those 3,000 companies has a very slim chance of appearing on Page 1 of the search results.
If you were to search that same exact phrase (with quotes around it) right now while reading this book, you would probably get more than 20,000 search results. That’s because the Internet is constantly growing as more lawyers and law firms go online, and as more websites and blogs spring up. Want to experiment and see how many search returns you get? Go ahead … I’ll wait. Enter the phrase “San Diego law firm” into Google (with quotes included) and see if you get more than 20,000 search results.
The point is, that’s some stiff competition!
From a research and communication standpoint, the legal industry is rapdily moving online. If you look at the pattern of Internet business, you will know the same thing has happened with other industries, such as real estate. These days, if you’re a real estate agent without a web presence, you’re an agent without a lot of business. The same thing is now happening with the legal industry, albeit at a slower pace.
Here’s what it all boils down to. In the very near future, all legal research will be conducted online, and lawyers without a web presence will operate under a handicap.
So as a legal professional, you can pretend the Internet isn’t that big a deal, and then later on wonder why your business isn’t growing as quickly as you’d like. Or you can embrace the Internet and grow your business to exciting new levels.
If you choose the latter, you’ll need a strong Web presence. You need to give people more ways to find you online, and you need them to be thankful when they do find you. By increasing your “findability,” you will turn your one-part website into a multi-part web presence.
That’s what we’re going to talk about in this guide. I won’t waste your time with useless theories or unnecessary background information. I’ve stripped away all of that fluff to avoid wasting your time (and to keep the price of this guide reasonable). I will get right to the heart of things, by showing you the fundamental pieces of your future web presence.
So without further ado, let’s jump into the first part of your web presence. Let’s talk about those all-important search engines.
