Law Firm Websites, SEO and Social Media Blog

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 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.

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.

Facebook is the social media application that lawyers are often most cynical about. This is closely followed by twitter, unless the firm is already on twiiter and seeing the benefits of engaging.

Moore Legal Technology will be speaking on outsourced web marketing and social media at an exclusive legal event focusing on law firm management, outsourcing and technology on 21 June 2011. The event is a must if you want to find out more about new technologies, outsourced services, better financial management and internet marketing.

With an average of 600 tweets, 34,000 Google searches and 700 Facebook posts being made every second (source: Exact Target), today’s online conversation is a loud one. If harnessed correctly, the rewards for law firms, businesses or other professional organisations can be great. However, if care is not taken, employees and fee earners may be distracted to the point where the firm could lose a lot of money through reduced productivity.

Often we speak to law firms and other professional service companies who are interested in setting up 'microsites' to focus on particular service offering, or niche. We generally advise against this for the same reasons that we would generally advise setting up a number of blogs, instead of focusing on one that is already doing well. Our reasons are detailed below, but we would happily go into more detail on any point covered.

I know our posts have been a haphazard in terms of timing, but we’re sticking with it and if you follow our advice you will attract new clients. We’ve given a brief overview of domains and templates and are now ready to move onto on page seo for law firms.

First things first; if you are commissioning a third party to design your website make sure that the following are editable:

1) Page Titles: The most important aspect of online seo – if your page titles aren’t keyword rich you’re onto plums.

2) Descriptions: Although the descriptions are hidden within the code of your site and have little actual relevance in terms of affecting your rankings, they should be drafted carefully as they present one of your first opportunities to get potential visitors to click on your natural results. Essentially they should include reference to page keywords together with clear calls to action (i.e. Phone 0845 620 5664 for free initial advice!)

3)Heading Tags: In the same way as headings in a written document help to identify degrees of importance and natural breaks, heading on a website serve the same function and help to distinguish less important body text frompage headers.

If you don’t have control of any of the above, then our advice would be to go elsewhere.

Unless you can no longer afford the petrol….

Recently we have been reviewing a lot of professional services firm websites and in spite of the fact that we shouldn’t be, we remain surprised at how many of them are being let down by proprietary content management systems.

Larger organisations often have vast amounts of content and good domain histories, and as such they should routinely rank well for the short tail and longer tail keyphrases related to their services. It would appear that often poor on page optimisation arising from inadequate CMS functionality is holding them back.

Traditionally larger professional service companies would have taken the view that ‘we do not wish to be instructed by members of the public and as such search engine rankings are not important to us’  but as internet usage continues to grow, particularly mobile internet searches, they run the risk of only being found by those who already know them thereby losing out on countless opportunities to grow their brand, extend their influence and reinforce their authority.

Recent research by Forrester (as brought to our attention by Ben at Barker Brooks) titled The Rise of the Digital C-Suite, where ‘C-Suite’ is a term used to describe the chief executives, heads of finance and heads of information at the 10000 most successful companies in the world highlighted that not only is the internet the C-Suite’s top information resource but also that members of the C-Suite search for information themselves.

So, back to the title of this post; if you have a strong professional online presence which is not being presented properly to search engines as a result of a content management system which is not fit for purpose then, effectively, you’re keeping the Ferrari in the garage.