Law Firm Websites, SEO and Social Media Blog

The 2012 Legal Market Survey Report was published yesterday, providing comprehensive analysis of legal marketing trends from the United States. The main conclusion? That online marketing has become the main generator of new business.

Further to our blog post outlining our top tips for Internet marketing for professional services firms in 2012, we have produced a short presentation on YouTube. This explains our approach to Internet marketing for law firms and others:- 

We are pleased to announce that we have now set up on Pinterest.  We currently have three boards active, showcasing some examples of our work in Social Media, SEO and Law Firm Website Design and we look to add more to these boards both in terms of our sharing our knowledge but also in terms of sharing other valuable information and will be looking to connect with other professionals on what is surely one of the hottest social networks of 2012.

Moore Legal Technology has now launched a definitive twitter account for each of our main areas of expertise together with our main Twitter account. All of these areas of our expertise help our customers to generate more business online:

The following is our article first published on the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers (Making the Most of the Legal Web) in November 2011 regarding the looming personal injury referral fee ban and generating more direct business online.

We work with many law firms in the UK to optimise their websites and blogs for search engines through advanced SEO techniques and we manage and advise on social media campaigns. The end goal is always to generate more laser-targeted leads and enquiries for our clients.

It therefore comes as no surprise to hear that 4 in 10 law firms in the US are reporting winning new clients through blogging and social media. The news comes through ALM’s Legal Intelligence report on law firms’ use of blogs and other social media ($499 to download) via Daryn Teague (@darynteague), as picked up by one of the leading authorities on legal blogging, Kevin O’Keefe, in his article 40% of Law Firms and Attorneys Get Clients From Blogs and Social Media.

With the news that the economic worth of activity on the Internet is set to spiral upward during the course of the next few years (indeed the web economy is set to double by 2016) we thought it might be an idea to give you a few of our tips for 2012.

We are pleased to announce that our clients, LawCloud, for which we provide social media consultancy services, have had their LawCloudComputing blog listed by Computer Weekly as one of the top 10 best new blogs of 2011.

"A shrinking legal market and fierce price competition has placed law firms under immense pressure to be as productive as possible. For their IT departments, this means a focus on freeing up fee earners so they can spend as much time as possible doing what they are best at – making money."

We are pleased to welcome guest author Rob Greenslade, Sales & Marketing Director of Centralis, as he looks at the competitive pressures driving law firms towards virtualisation and the technology options available:-

A new version of Twitter is being rolled out in the next couple of weeks. Explained in more detail through the subdomain Fly.Twitter.com the new version of Twitter has been released already for Android, iPhone and Tweetdeck users, with the full version to appear in the next few weeks.

Last week I spoke at the 2011 LawWare User Conference on the subject of the "High Street Law Firm in a Digital Age".

If you are trying to drive more traffic to your website, it is a good idea to share links to articles or other pages on your website through social media channels. And when you do so, you will want to increase your click-through rate ("CTR"), i.e. the rate at which others click-through your links to arrive at your website. You may think that sharing a link with hundreds or thousands of followers, on Twitter for instance, will naturally result in many clicks through to your website. It is, however, not quite as easy as that and there are some additional tips to consider when sharing links.

Further to our recent post about our thoughts on the relatively new social network Google+, Google+ has now activated business pages.

Looking to drive more traffic to your website using social media? StumbleUpon is your answer. Over the past year in the US, for instance, StumbleUpon sent more traffic to websites than any other social media network including Facebook or Twitter.

Guest post by Peter Collins, managing director, Retain International

For law firms and other businesses in the UK and around the world, search engine rankings are becoming more competitive. Some areas of practice are more competitive than others, but even in the most competitive areas, it is still possible to get to the highest places on Google or other search engines for targeted keywords in targeted geographical locations. Considering the more competitive areas of online search such as car hire can provide some welcome examples for law firms and other professional service firms considering enhancing their online strategies to convert relevant enquiries.

Over the course of Social Media Week Glasgow (week c.19 September), the Business Banter team have organised an exciting programme of early morning events. Various speakers will be presenting on how social media has benefited either their business or that of their clients. Some of these presentations will be of particular interest to the legal profession and businesses across Scotland.

When working with law firms to measure the ROI on their social media use, one of the useful tools we use is the url shortener bitly. It was therefore interesting to read Bitly's latest blog about how long a social media link is “alive” before people stop caring or, more accurately, how long before people stop clicking through the link.

It may have been only recently that your law firm or business has been encouraging you to become familiar with social network platforms such as Twitter or Linkedin. Indeed it may have been only recently that you feel that you have mastered the basics, grown a sizeable following or even made connections that have led to business for your practice.

Law firm newsletters are usually produced following hours of fee-earner time and are usually distributed by mail and email. Such newsletters have been, and indeed still are, useful both for marketing purposes and for keeping clients and potential clients updated with legal developments in practice areas of interest to them. While law firms also choose to post such newsletters to their websites, many are still missing out on the opportunities offered by blogging.