In this article, I’ll explain what link building is, how to attract the right kinds of links, and what it all has to do with law firm SEO success. You’ll also learn what to avoid, which is equally important.

Definition of Inbound Links / Backlinks

An inbound links (a.k.a. backlink) is simply a hyperlink from some other website to your website. If I add a hyperlink to this article that links to your site, I’ve given you another inbound link.

In terms of law firm SEO marketing, hyperlinks from one site to another are similar to popularity votes. Search engines use “link popularity” as one of several ranking factors to determine which websites show up at the top of a search results, and which ones are buried on page 5, page 10, or page 5,215. There are several other important components to law firm search engine optimization, but links are high on the list. They are also the hardest SEO component to acquire, as you will soon see.

Linking Your Way to SEO Success

There are other lessons on this blog that discuss lawyer SEO in general. Obviously, this article focuses on the link building side of things. There’s a reason for this. The difference between law firm websites that rank #1 in a competitive market, and those that rank #99 or below, often comes down to the quantity of quality of links in place. In other words, an effective link building program can help you achieve top rankings in Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines — regardless of how competitive your geographical niche might be.

How to Get Links to Your Law Firm Website

Now we come to the million-dollar question. How do I get other websites to link to mine, for law firm SEO success? There are many ways to do this, actually. I’ll offer you a list of link-building techniques for further research, but I’ll focus on one technique in particular — a strategy that can give you great results in your SEO marketing program.

Here are some of the things you can do to attract links from other sites:

• List your law firm website in web directories, such as DMOZ.org, BOTW.org, and the Yahoo directory.
• Publish educational articles online through sites like EzineArticles.com and GoArticles.com.
• Add your law firm site to legal directories, organization websites and the like.
• Create useful, informative content that others will want to link to as a resource.
• Publish press releases online, through websites like PRWeb.com and PRLeap.com.
• Launch a law firm blog and start publishing authoritative, engaging content (that others will cite).
• Hire an SEO marketing firm to get links for you. But see the word of caution below.

I promised to expand on one of these link-building techniques for you, so let’s talk about the second item on the list. Publishing informative articles on legal topics is a great way to achieve law firm SEO success.

In addition to publishing your work through “article directory” sites like the ones listed above, you can publish them onto an endless variety of legal websites. And if you link back to your own site from the “Author’s note” at the end of the piece, you’ll pick up an inbound link for every article you publish.

Better still, links from legitimate websites that are relevant to your own own (legal oriented) are the best kinds of links for SEO marketing. You’ll get the best results in terms of Google ranking from “scoring” these kinds of inbound links. And publishing quality articles is a great way to do it.

Here’s what I would recommend doing:

1. Do a Google search for “law +submit an article” or “legal +submit an article.”
2. From the above search, make a list of websites that accept legal articles from experts.
3. Start submitting your work to these website, with an author’s note at the end of each article.
4. Use an author’s note like the samples I’ve provided below.

Sample Author’s Note: John Smith is a family lawyer in Austin, Texas. He has been practicing law for more than twelve years, and he recently started a blog on this subject. Learn more or contact the author by visiting http://www.JohnSmithLawBlog.com.

Obviously, that would be a real link if there actually was a John Smith law firm blog, but you get the idea. So each time John places a new article onto another site, he picks up yet another link back to his own website. In terms of law firm SEO marketing, there is no end to what you can accomplish using this technique. Publish a couple of new articles per week, on a wide variety of legal sites, and you’ll achieve top Google rankings in a matter of weeks or months.

An SEO Word of Warning

I recommend handling this process for yourself, as opposed to outsourcing it to a law firm SEO company. Some people (such as inexperienced SEO companies) don’t realize that you can take this technique too far. But you can. There is a such things as “over optimization,” and the more advanced search engines such as Google will actually penalize you for it by demoting your website — the exact opposite of what you’re trying to achieve. Do a Google search for “search engine penalties” and you’ll see what I mean.

Here’s what Google has to say about it: “Some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results.” Source

In closing, I would point out that you should strive for quality over quantity when it comes to this strategy. A website with 100 hyperlinks from high-quality legal sites will typically outrank a website with 1,000 or more links from crappy sites. In other words, search engines will consider the source of the hyperlink — not just the link.

Do You Need Advice or Guidance?

If you have questions about this aspect of law firm SEO marketing, feel free to email them to me. I usually answer questions on the blog for the benefit of all readers. If you would like some one-on-one phone time, I can do that too. Check out my consulting website for more on that.

But first, let’s cover some basic terminology. Here’s the primary difference between the two lawyer search engine marketing tactics I’ll cover in this article:

• Search engine optimization (SEO) — This is the act of improving your website for better rankings in Google, Yahoo and other search engines. Here, we are talking about natural or “organic” rankings based on website popularity and relevance. This strategy involves such things as keyword research, content development, link building and more.
• Pay-per-click (PPC) — With this search engine marketing technique, you would create an advertisement for the sponsored section of the search engine’s results page. Your rankings would be determined by (A) how much you bid per click and (B) the average click-through rate of your ad.

The image below shows the difference between natural search listings and PPC ads. The green shaded area is where the sponsored links appear (pay-per-click). The pink shaded area shows the natural / organic listings. So if you employ both aspects of lawyer search engine marketing, it’s possible to have y0ur website appear twice on the first page of results — once in the sponsored section, and once within the organic results.

Some lawyers use both of these techniques within their search engine marketing programs, while others rely on one more than the other. Some lawyers don’t use either technique, and this is a real shame because they are losing business. I always recommend using SEO strategies to drive web traffic. I only recommend PPC in certain cases, and it must be preceded by a good deal of research and planning.

Here are some of the things I’ve learned over the years about each of these strategies. Apply these lessons learned to your own lawyer search engine marketing campaign, and you’ll get better results in the long run — more traffic, more exposure, and more business growth!

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Marketing Advice

Google AdWords is by far the most popular form of pay-per-click marketing, for the simple reason that it’s the most p0pular search engine. The tips in this section apply to PPC search marketing in general, but can also be applied to Google Adwords in particular.

Here are some tips for success with pay-per-click marketing:

• Learn everything you can about PPC before using it as a search engine marketing strategy.
• You need to create a strong and relevant ad that gets people’s attention.
• Focus on specific keywords that will bring qualified traffic (your city + your legal specialty).
• The headline of your PPC ad should match the targeted keyword in some way.
• The landing page is a critical component of your PPC strategy. This is the particular page of your website where people land after clicking through your sponsored listing / ad.
• Your landing page should be built around your key objectives. For example, if you want people to contact you, your landing page should include complete contact info. Remove other distractions from the page.
• The page title / headline of the landing page itself should also include the keywords the person has searched. This will reinforce the fact that they are in the right place, thus reducing the number of people who “bounce” away from your site.
• You should only bid as much as needed to achieve the page position you want. Any more than that, and you’re throwing money away.
• You can also improve the page position / ranking of your PPC ad by increasing the click-through rate. In other words, you will be rewarded for creating an effective ad that entices people to click.
• You must constantly experiment with keywords and ads. Programs such as Google AdWords give you all kinds of tools to help with tracking and monitoring — so use them! Don’t get complacent. Keep testing one campaign against another to see what gives you the best results.

I’ll close this section with a word of caution. If you’ve ever seen the “guts” of the Google AdWords program (meaning the area where an advertiser would go to manage his or her campaign), then you’ll know it’s a complicated entity! That’s why I urge you to be cautious when approaching pay-per-click for the first time, whether it be AdWords or some other program. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can end up spending a lot of money with nothing to show for it. Here are some tips for using PPC in your lawyer search marketing efforts.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Advice

Every lawyer can benefit from better organic rankings in the major search engines, and that’s what SEO can deliver. Best of all, the results of an SEO program are long-lasting. They don’t disappear when you turn off the “switch” the way PPC results will. If you get your lawyer website to the top of the search engines with SEO, it will remain there for a long time (with only minimal “maintenance” on your part).

Here are some tips for success with natural search engine optimization:

• It all starts with content. Keyword-rich content is the fundamental building block of SEO success. So you’ll have to do plenty of writing to support this strategy — or pay someone to do it for you.
• Create a broad range of content that’s relevant to your practice. This can include articles, FAQ pages, glossaries, online learning centers and more. The more keyword-driven content you create, the more traffic you can pull in through the search engines.
• Your website must acquire links from other sites over time. This is the key to top rankings in the major search engines. An SEO campaign starts with keyword research and content development, but real success comes from link building.
• You can attract links in many ways. If you want to learn a variety of effective techniques for doing this, download a copy of the Web Smart Lawyer e-book.
• You should analyze the top-ranking lawyer websites within your field and geographic area to find out what they’re doing to earn those rankings. Particularly, you should see where their links are coming from.
• If you can get links from the same sites that are linking to your top-ranked competitors, you can achieve similar search engine success. Use Yahoo Site Explorer to see where your competitors’ backlinks are coming from.
• Read this article on attorney marketing with SEO techniques. It offers a lot more advice on this subject.

SEO is a long-term strategy that requires patience and persistence. But it’s an essential part of any lawyer search engine marketing program. In fact, if you can succeed with SEO and achieve top rankings in Google, you may not need to do any other form of marketing!

I recently stumbled across a Texas bankruptcy lawyer’s blog that had stolen a good deal of content from one of my own blogs. They had taken entire articles from my site, published them onto the lawyer blog, and passed it off as their own content. They had even converted one of my own personal anecdotes into a “client case study.” What kind of lawyer violates copyright laws out of sheer laziness? Well, in this case, it was the result of a lawyer blog company called Lex Blog. It is my understanding that they put the content there.

So who’s to blame in a situation like this? Who is the real copyright violator? Well, regardless of who actually stole the content from my site, I’d say the blame falls onto the shoulders of the blog’s owner (in this case, the Texas bankruptcy law firm). That’s who I would hold responsible. And if I had actually filed a DMCA complaint with that lawyer’s web hosting company, they probably would have shut his website down. I’ve had to do this on two other occasions, in cases of blatant copyright violation, and both times the hosting company acted swiftly to shut down the offending websites.

Of course, this is an easy problem to avoid. Just write your own content. You should be doing this anyway, to position yourself as an authority. But you should also do it to avoid copyright infringement (unbeknown to you). If you let an Internet marketing firm write the content for your lawyer blog, there’s a 50/50 chance you’ll end up with plagiarized content on the site. Why? Because many people in the Internet marketing field are scumbags. I worked in that industry for several years, so I know this firsthand. And it’s the primary reason I left that field and started an Internet publishing company. These days, I often butt heads with these very scumbags, because they steal content from my various websites on a regular basis. Lazy — that’s all it is.

Aside from the risk of copyright infringement, you should write your own blog content for other reasons too. The whole point of publishing a lawyer blog is to establish your expertise in your field. How can you do that if you publish work by other authors?

Search engine optimization is not nearly as complicated as most people make it out to be. Attorney SEO firms, for example, will make it seem like a highly complex and technical process — beyond the reach of the average attorney. But this is simply for job security. In truth, SEO marketing revolves around two core concepts. Website content and links. Here’s how those concepts related to search engine optimization success:

• Website content — This refers to the information you have on your website. Within the content of attorney SEO marketing, I’m talking about the text that appears on your site. In order to show up in a search engine for a particular phrase, you need to content related to that phrase on your website. This is the fundamental building blog of SEO success. You must always start with keyword-rich content, and plenty of it.
• Links to your website — This refers to inbound links from other websites to yours. These are also referred to as “backlinks” by those in the SEO marketing field. For instance, if I link to your attorney website from this blog article, you would acquire another inbound link / backlink from this website to yours. In turn, this would help with your attorney SEO program, because search engines rank their results partly based on “link popularity.”

So there you have it, the two key concepts found within any SEO marketing campaign — content and links. That’s not to complicated is it? Of course not! I told you it was straightforward. Oh, you can be sure that the attorney search engine optimization firms will make it seem more complicated. They’ll talk about the hundreds of steps they go through to get good results. They’ll show you diagrams and “blueprints” for success. But it’s just not that complex. Attorney SEO marketing can be time-consuming, sure. But it ain’t rocket science, folks.

Content = Building Block of Attorney SEO Success

Let’s start with the content side of things. As I mentioned above, you cannot begin to appear in the search engines for a particular phrase until you develop keyword-rich website content around that phrase. I’m talking about the words, sentences, paragraphs and pages that make up your website. A search engine “spider” will read through this information in order to understand what your site is all about.

Here’s how the process works, and how it relates to attorney SEO marketing success:

Let’s say I practice family law in Austin, Texas. Naturally, I want a website that will attract people who need this kind of attorney (i.e., qualified traffic). So the first thing I need to do, from an SEO standpoint, is write some keyword-rich content for my site. Here’s how I would do it:

1. Use a keyword research tool like WordTracker.com or KeywordDiscovery.com to create a list of popular search phrases (related to my practice).
2. Write a page of website content for each of the phrases on my list.
3. Ensure that each page is well optimized for search engine visibility. I would do this by repeating the keywords and phrases naturally throughout the content, and by including them in the page title as well.

That’s the gist of it. Pretty simple, right? By the very nature of their profession, most attorneys are excellent writers. So this part of the SEO process will probably be the easiest for you.

Links = Secret Weapon of SEO Marketing

Do a Google search for a broad, high-traffic search phrase like “San Diego law firm” and you’ll find thousands of results. So how does Google (or any other search engine) know which ones to put on page one, and which ones to “bury” on page 100? Well, each search engine does this in different ways, because each one has its own ranking “algorithm.” But a lot of it comes down to the two things we are covering in this SEO article — content and links.

But keyword-rich website content can only take you so far. After all, if hundreds of websites have similar amounts of content built around a particular phrase or topic, they would appear equal. Right? Wrong. This is where links come into the picture. In most cases, the websites with the most inbound links from other sites will appear near the top of the search results. This is referred to as “link popularity” — the quantity and quality of inbound links.

Writing content is easy. I wrote this article in about 30 minutes. But attracting links is another matter entirely. I can’t just go out and snatch up links from other sites. I have to earn them. And that’s the number-one concept you should take away from this part of the article. You have to work hard to attract links from other bloggers, webmasters and Internet publishers. And the best way to do this is by creating quality content that others will want to cite.

Let me repeat that last point, because it’s a critical concept you need to absorb. The key to link building (and thus the key to attorney SEO marketing in general) is to create useful content that others will want to link to and recommend to their readers. If I do a good job creating tutorials like this one, I’ll eventually attract links from other web publishers. Ideally, they will find my content so informative and useful that they hyperlink to it from their own websites, as a way of sharing it with their readers. I strive to make my website a useful and authoritative resource for this very reason, and you should do the same … if you want to achieve SEO success on your attorney website.

You should strive to create the kind of site that attracts links naturally, sort of like a snowball effect. I’ve just explained how to work toward that goal. But in the beginning of your SEO marketing campaign, you’ll need to be a bit more proactive with your link-building efforts.

Here are two places where you can learn those proactive techniques:

• From the Web Smart Lawyer e-book
• From this tutorial on improving your Google rankings

I hope you have enjoyed this guide to attorney SEO campaigns. If you would like to learn more about this subject, check out the search engine optimization section of our main website. There, you’ll find a list of articles on this topic.

In this article, I’m going to give you a list of steps you can take to increase the Google ranking of your lawyer website, slowly but surely over time. Notice I said “slowly” and “surely.” These are key words to remember. There is no shortcut to good search engine rankings — it takes a steady effort over time. But the end result is worth it. And speaking of results, let’s talk about what you stand to gain from such an accomplishment.

The Benefits of Good Website Ranking

Let’s say I’m a lawyer in Charlotte, North Carolina. Let’s further assume that I have a business website that explains the services I provide, my contact information, etc. If I increase the number of visitors to this website, I will in turn receive more phone calls and emails from prospective clients. Better still, if I can increase the number of qualified visitors (i.e., people who are actively seeking a lawyer in the Charlotte area), I’ll grow my business even more. In fact, I’ll have a steady stream of prospective clients contacting me on a regular basis.

This is the benefit of having good search engine ranking for certain key phrases. In my hypothetical scenario, let’s assume that my lawyer website eventually climbs onto the first page of Google and other major search engines. Using a keyword-research tool such as WordTracker or Keyword Discovery, I find out that there are dozens of people searching for the phrase “Charlotte lawyer” … each and every day! Add in all of the variations / extensions of this phrase, and we are looking at hundreds of searches per day.

Now, Imagine that my lawyer website appears on page 1 of Google for this key phrase. More specifically, it appears at the top of the page, within the first five results given. What does this mean? It means that I’ll have a steady stream of qualified visitors to my website every day — people who are actively searching for a Charlotte lawyer. And if my website is professional and helpful, and gives people several ways to contact me, a certain percentage of those visitors will call or email me. In other words, my website marketing program is running itself. All I have to do is maintain my Google rankings with some occasional website work, and I’ve got all the clients I need.

Getting Your Lawyer Website to the Top of Google

Ranking #1 in Google for a certain phrase can be pretty challenging, especially if it’s a highly competitive search phrase. But reaching the first page of results is not all that difficult. With a steady effort over time, you can probably put your lawyer website within the first five results on page one, and that can bring all of the benefits we discussed above.

The question is, how do you accomplish these things. I’ve included several chapters about search engine optimization in my lawyer marketing book. So if you’re serious about this topic I recommend downloading a copy of the e-book. For this article, I’ll give you a basic overview of what SEO involves, and I’ll get you pointed in the right direction with an SEO program for your lawyer website.

Search engine optimization / SEO is the act of improving your website for better rankings in Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines. Some of this process takes place on your lawyer website, and some of it takes place off the site. These two components are referred to as onsite and off-site optimization. Let’s talk about each one in turn:

• Onsite — The first part of SEO involves changes made to your actual website. For starters, you need to have a well-designed site that is organized and interlinked in a logical way. This helps search engines crawl through the site. Next, you need to have plenty of keyword-rich content related to your legal services and your geographical area. Lastly, you need to have certain components such as HTML titles on each of your web pages, to help search engines learn what your site is all about.
• Off-site — Once you have a well-optimized lawyer website with plenty of keyword-rich content, you need to venture off site to further advance your SEO campaign. In short, this means you must acquire links from other websites to yours. This will help you improve your Google ranking steadily over time. Search engines look at links as votes — more or less. If a lot of quality sites link to your lawyer website, it will improve your “link popularity” and, ultimately, your search engine rankings.

This onsite optimization stage is pretty straightforward. It takes some effort to write content for your site, but there’s no mystery about it. (Check out this list of online writing tips for more on this subject.) It’s the second stage of the process, off-site optimization, where many lawyers struggle. How does you increase the quantity and quality of inbound links to your lawyer website? Here are some ideas to get you started.

1. List your site with some of the big web directories, such as the Yahoo directory and DMOZ. There are hundreds more directories online — just know that some are better than others, in terms of legitimacy.
2. Write an educational article on some aspect of your legal field, and publish it through article submission sites like EzineArticles.com, GoArticles.com, ArticleDashboard.com and more. You can find dozens of these article websites online, and nearly all of them allow you include a link to your lawyer website from the author’s bio.
3. Okay, here’s the money tip. Write this one down for future reference! It’s a great way to acquire plenty of links to your lawyer website from legal-related sites. Take the article-publishing strategy mentioned above, and use it across the Internet as a whole. Do a Google search for law +submit an article and you’ll find thousands of places to submit a legal article — and pick up a citation link in the process. This is a strategy SEO firms don’t want you to know about, because it renders them obsolete!
4. Write a press release about some aspect of your legal services and submit it through online PR sites like PRWeb.com. Once again, you can pick up a link through this process, which will help you improve your Google rankings over time. If you’re press release is truly newsworthy, you’ll get some direct traffic out of this technique as well.

Now just rinse and repeat. Seriously. Search engine optimization is a long-term strategy. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. And I’ve just shared some of the best tips for taking your lawyer website to the top of Google and other search engines. All you have to do now is repeat the process over time.

My advice is to create a schedule of tasks you want to accomplish each month. For example, on a weekly basis you might complete the items listed below.

Sample SEO schedule of weekly tasks:

• Submit my website to two additional web directories. (See tip #1)
• Publish a new article onto other legal-related websites. (See tip #3)
• Create one extra page of web content, focusing on a certain key phrase.

Want better results, more site traffic, and more inquiries? Just increase the frequency of the tasks listed above. There is no mystery to search engine optimization. It just comes down to a consistent effort maintained over time — and 90% of it revolves around content and links. Add plenty of keyword-rich content to your lawyer website over time, and acquire links from other sites. This is how to improve your rankings in Google and other search engines.

I’m not digging at anyone here. I just want you to leave this article with a good understanding of how the industry works. I have worked with more than a dozen web designers over the years, and they all had one thing in common — marketing success was the furthest thing from their minds when they created websites. After all, they are website design experts. Their training and experience related to how things looked and functioned, not what they produced.

Why am I telling you all this? Because it’s possible for a well-intentioned designer to actually harm your website marketing program, simply because he or she doesn’t consider the big picture. For example, I’ve seen designers who created law firm websites that were entirely image-based. Even the content was presented as a big JPEG image. Why? Because it gave them the most design flexibility. But they didn’t realize that this will also ruin a website’s chances for good search engine rankings. So focusing on the “pretty” side of the law firm website, they were actually harming the productive side of things.

What to Tell Your Website Designer

Tell your law firm website designer that marketing performance is equally important as site design. In particular, tell him or her you want a website that ranks well in search engines like Google. If they don’t know how to deliver this, you should consider hiring a search engine optimization (SEO) consultant to advise the website designer from day one.

Tell your designer you want to make it really easy for people to contact you. This will increase the number of people who do contact you. Your phone number and email address should be easy to find. You might even include your phone number in the upper-right corner of every page (i.e., part of the website header).

Tell your website designer you want to add content to your site over time. A blog is a great way to do this, and most web developers know how to install them. You can use a blog to add new content to your law firm website over time, and it’s as easy as typing a Word document. It’s important to set these objectives early on, before the site design gets underway. It’s easier for a designer to build a blog into the plans from the start, but it can still be added on after the fact if necessary.

Are You Making These Advertising Mistakes?

In truth, there are literally hundreds of ways to botch an advertisement. But I’m not writing a book here — just an article. So I’m going to focus on five of the most common mistakes with lawyer advertising campaigns.

1. Forgetting to Do Your Research

Many people spend too much money for advertising simply because they haven’t done enough research. Before I started my own consulting business, I was the advertising manager for a major printing company. I had an assistant whose job it was to research advertising options, pricing, markets exposure, etc. It was a full-time job for her. That’s how important it is to research an ad market before you plunge into it. I don’t expect you to hire somebody for this process — and you probably don’t need to, unless you’ve got a huge marketing budget. You can handle the process yourself.

Here are some of the things you should research before spending money on your lawyer advertising program. First, you should look into all of the options available to you. If you’re considering a newspaper ad, for example, you should find out about all of the pricing and display options. You should also research the market / readership / viewership for the channel you’re considering. If you use TV advertising, you’ll want to know as much about the network’s viewer demographics as possible.

I also recommend that you seek affordable options to advertise your business locally. This can be a great way to promote your services without spending a lot of money. For example, here’s a website in Austin that offers online advertising for only $9 per month. You can’t beat the price, and it might be a great opportunity for lawyers in that town. You have to do your research to find promotional channels like this.

Sure, it’s a learning process. You might not be familiar with the advertising process and terminology, so you’ll have to do some preliminary homework before you can even research your options. But you need to research every aspect of your lawyer advertising before you spend money on it. Otherwise, you could be wasting your time and money.

2. Failing to Distinguishing Your Ads

Here’s how some lawyers create their ads. They find out what their competitors are doing, and then they repeat that strategy. In other words, they simply plug their own name, photo and phone number into someone else’s advertising strategy. This is the absolute worse thing you can do, because it virtually eliminates your chances of setting yourself apart.

Marketing expert Seth Godin uses the analogy of brown cows and purple cows. If you drive through a cow pasture, you hardly notice the brown cows after a while. They all look exactly alike, so they become invisible after a while. But what if there was a purple cow in the same field? You would certainly notice that, wouldn’t you?

3. Not Hiring a Advertising Professional

I have seen some hideous lawyer ads over the years. You can spot them a mile away, because they are sloppy, poorly written, badly designed, etc. This is what happens when somebody with no advertising experience tries to create an ad for a professional publication. If you’re not familiar with the world of print publications (or TV advertising, or Internet ads), then find somebody who else. These people can help you with some of the other items on this list too, such as the research phase.

4. Repeating Failures Over and Over

The person running your ads (whether it’s a magazine, a TV network, or a direct mail printer) makes money from the number of advertisements you run. But they do not make money based on the success of those ads. This is a key point to remember, especially if your ads are not delivering the desired result. They will sell you on the idea of repetition, and how important it is to repeat your ads over a long period of time. It’s in their best interest if you keep running your ads, but it may not be in your best interest — not if the advertisements are failing.

Repetition is a good thing, but you should never repeat a marketing strategy that fails on the first go round. You should adjust the strategy until it produces results, and you should continue to “tweak” it to get even better results. Repeating a failed advertising campaign will only cost you money — it won’t help you grow your business.

5. Failing to Measure the Results

How do you know if your lawyer advertising program is working? By tracking the results, that’s how. The problem is that many people forget to track their marketing. And when this happens, you have no way to measure your marketing ROI (return on investment).

Here’s an example of what I mean. If you are paying a lot of money on newspaper or magazine ads, you need to know how well they are working. You can do this in several ways. Some people will set up a special URL / website address, and use it within the advertisement. That way, you know that the visitors to that special web page were sent from the magazine ad.

There are many ways to track your lawyer advertising results, and entire books have been written on the subject. How you track your success will depend on the types of advertising you use. The important thing is that you’re something to measure success and ROI.

Let’s talk about some of the things you can do to get more clients through your attorney website or blog. Here are some marketing “secrets” that many in the legal profession don’t know.

1. Search Engines are Replacing Phone Books

Given the rising cost of printing, and the rising demand for environment-friendly business models, how long do you think the phone books will be around? Another five years? That’s about what I figure. The economic recession of 2008 - 2009 has already put many of them under. With each passing year, more and more people are choosing Google over the phone book to find attorneys in their area.

Some of you are yawning and saying, “Yes, I know this, and I’m well prepared.” But I know there are some attorneys out there who are still in denial, because I’ve spoken to some personally (you know who you are). Make no mistake about it. If you want your business to thrive well into the future, you need an attorney website marketing program that embraces search engines — and capitalizes on what they deliver.

2. SEO is the Best Website Marketing Investment

We just talked about the importance of search engines. Each and every day, people use the Internet to find attorneys and law firms in their area. It’s a constant stream of traffic, and it’s growing all the time. Thus, if your attorney website appears on the first page of search results for certain key phrases, you can tap into this pre-existing Internet activity and get a lot of clients out of it.

This brings up the topic of search engine optimization (SEO). This is the act of improving your website’s search engine rankings by using keyword-rich content and attracting links from other website owners. In my mind, this is the best website marketing investment for attorneys to make in the web-driven economy. For one thing, it doesn’t cost much to improve search engine rankings through SEO. It mostly takes time and effort. And by putting forth this effort, you can get excellent exposure to your key audience at the best time at all — when they are actively seeking an attorney in their area.

3. You Can Use a Blog to Attract Even More Clients

Most attorneys are familiar with blogs, in a general sense, even if they don’t know how they work. Whether you realize it or not, you are reading a blog right now. The main part of this website is powered by the WordPress blogging program. If you go to the home page of this site, you’ll see a series of entries listed in reverse-chronological order. This is how a blog works.

Best of all, attorney blogs are incredibly easy to use. That’s the whole point of blogging — it allows you to publish information online quickly and easily, without the need for web programming skills. If you can create a Word document or send an email, you can publish an attorney blog. That’s how simple it is.

If you offer a wide range of legal services for clients, then a blog can serve you even more. You can publish web pages with incredible speed and simplicity. You can update your blog with new information on a daily or weekly basis. Just type your entry, click the publish button, and you’re done. What’s the result of all this fresh content? For one thing, it helps you connect with a bigger audience through the search engines. You can’t show up in Google for a certain phrase until you have content on your website that’s related to that phrase. A blog is a great way to create that content, especially when you deal with multiple topics / legal specialties.

The bottom line is that your attorney website marketing program should include blogging, and you should use it often to grow your web presence and attract new clients.

4. Most People Will Choose the First Attorney They Contact

Consumer surveys have shown, time and time again, the most people end up choosing the first attorney they contact (by phone or by email). What does this mean to you, in terms of website marketing? It means that if somebody finds your website and contacts you as a result, there’s an excellent chance they will become your next client. Sure, you have to position yourself well on your website, and you have to handle that initial inquiry well. But the hard part will already have happened — the person found your website and took the first step by contacting you.

You can drive people to your site in many ways. We already talked about search engine optimization as one of the most effective techniques. But you can also drive web traffic with advertising, public relations and more. Once people reach your site, they want to answer certain questions. Who is this person? What does this attorney specialize in? Can he or she help me? What experience do they have? How can I contact them? Your website should answer these questions, and it should be neatly organized so people can find what they’re looking for.

Website Marketing Conclusion

Web marketing is a big topic with hundreds of individual parts. This article does not cover everything, but it explains some of the most effective ways to grow your business online. If I had to make a list of the most important parts of an attorney website marketing program, it would look something like this.

• A professional, well-designed website with plenty of quality content.
• A search engine optimization program to increase traffic and visibility.
• A regularly updated blog to grow the web presence over time.
• Some kind of public relations plan to increase awareness and drive website traffic.

Does your online marketing program include these things? If not, stay tuned to this blog. We will be adding new tutorials on a weekly basis, to help you accomplish these objectives and more.

The first we changed was the look and feel of the site. The new website is much cleaner and easier to use. We’ve stripped away all of the distractions to help you find what you want — Internet marketing tips and advice.

We also have some new marketing experts who will be contributing to the site, and we will soon open up a publishing avenue for other authors as well. This means that anyone with online marketing ideas to share can publish their work right here on this website. There will be more to follow on this later.

You’ll find new marketing articles on a weekly basis (at least), so be sure to check back often. You can also subscribe to our RSS feed with a free feed reader such as Google Reader.