Law Firm Websites, SEO and Social Media Blog

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.

According to a recent website design, SEO and social media infographic by R.O.I. Media, a significant 42% of search users click the top ranking link when they perform a search in a search engine. 8% of users will click the second link and, thereafter, the click-through rate (CTR) drops. The research also indicates that 62% of search users click links on the first page of search results for any given term.

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

In a departure from our typical workload of legal website design, optimisation and marketing we've branched out into tyres!

For those lawyers interested in boosting their law firm's presence on the web, particularly those using blogs to do so, it is important to know about SEO ("search engine optimisation") or, at least, know that you can trust your online business generation consultant to understand it proficiently.

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.

If you’re putting time and effort into creating regular content for your website then you want to be getting the most out of it. There are a range of options for getting your content out there but the first thing you should do is check that your Content Management System (CMS) is doing all it can from an on page optimisation point of view.

The first thing I always do when reviewing a customer site, or potential customer’s site, is have a look at their page titles. If their page titles, as opposed to their article titles, are poorly structured then they are falling at on page ooptimisation hurdle number one (I never thought I would say that).

What is a page title?

When an internet marketeer or search engine optimisation refers to your page title he, or she, is referring to the text which is displayed at the top of the browser bar.

Where this become increasingly important is in the creation of articles, bulletins and news items relating to a service or a company but not specifically designed to attract traffic from a single search engine query. Such items will pick up the longer tail traffic, i.e. traffic arriving from phrases you are unlikely to guess at. Over time such traffic will dwarve that arriving from your very specific keyword targets, particularly where your site contains a depth of content.

In such circumstances, if your page title does not reflect the nature of your content, perhaps by dynamically picking up article titles, then your CMS is letting you down and you are not maximising your efforts.

What should you do?

Check out your articles to see if the page titles vary from article to article and display a title relevant to the content. If they don’t get on to your developers and give them the hairdryer treatment.

McSporrans are a small yet innovative firm of Edinburgh solicitors specialising in all aspects of criminal law, road traffic law and criminal defence.

The Glasgow Law Practice is Carr & Company's online presence.