Law Firm Web Design, SEO & Social Media Blog

Hello, g’day, nín hǎo. It’s been an exciting week for the team at Moore Legal Technology, one which sees us reach another milestone in our growth as we pick up our first international accounts with a project in Australia and one in Hong Kong.

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Earlier this week I presented to the Glasgow Sole Practitioners’ Group at The Royal Faculty of Procurators on the subject of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for Sole Practitioners: Getting You Found Online.

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At the start of 2012 we blogged our top 7 online marketing tips for professional services companies for the year. Looking ahead to 2013, here are our top digital marketing tips for law firms, lawyers and other businesses to get the most from their online marketing efforts and investment.

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In a guest blog in the Law Society Gazette, Stephen Moore discusses contemporary issues in marketing for law firms, changes in the way potential clients are searching for legal services and how law firms can capitalise on the changes taking place in the legal sector.

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Google's algorithm that determines the order of search rankings changes all the time and it's the job of the SEO team to stay on top of these changes to ensure clients' websites and online presence continues to perform as best as they can.

Within the past month there have been three significant updates to Google's algorithm. These are summarised as follows:-

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Job Title: Online marketing and web conversion executive

Primary Location: Glasgow
Reports to: Stephen Moore & Gavin Ward

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MLT are pleased to announce the completion of one of our latest projects, the complete redesign and optimisation of www.superiorofficeinteriors.co.uk.

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Further to our recent post announcing the inception of Google+ Local which has replaced Google Places and subsequent comments, Google has recently announced that it is now possible to merge your Google+ Local listing with your Google+ business page (if you have already set one up).

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As Austin Lafferty, the new president of the Law Society of Scotland says, all lawyers are now salespeople. With the rise of Alternative Business Structures, increased competition both from within and without the legal services industry and altering consumer expectations, all lawyers, at every level from trainee to senior partner, must become adept at selling. This isn't as hard as you might think, and almost certainly won't involve trudging from door-to-door hawking your services (unless , of course, you want to!). Here are Moore Legal Technology's top 7 sales tips for lawyers.

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Significant changes are taking place with Google’s search engine algorithms and it’s important for all SEOs to keep up-to-date and understand the changes, but it is equally important for lawyers to know that their SEO teams can be trusted and aren’t using black-hat tactics to get them to the top of the Google rankings.

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Google is in the process of changing its search engine so that sites that are 'overly optimised' will be penalised in the search engine rankings.

According to CNET News, Google aims to 'level the playing field' for other websites who do not concentrate as heavily on search engine optimisation ('SEO'). CNET cites an audio clip from Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land in respect of a panel discussion at the recent South by Southwest conference ('SXSW'), where Google's Matt Cutts discusses the proposals.

Schwartz quotes Cutts as saying that Google aims to "level the playing field" regarding "all those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO--versus those making great content and great sites...We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect."

Schwartz notes that the changes should start to affect search engine results "in the upcoming month or next few weeks."

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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:

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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.

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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.

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As search engines and search engine marketing continue to evolve, Google has announced in a blog post that it is making one of its most radical transformations ever. Following on from their introduction to Social Search, they are continuing their transformation with the rollout of their “Search Plus Your World” format, comprising three main features:- personal results, profiles in search and people & pages.

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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.

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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.

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Its an accepted generalisation that lawyers are seen as being good with words, not numbers. At school this manifested itself in good results for subjects like English, History and French whereas Physics, Chemistry and Maths were given a body swerve. Weren't they? Is this just me?

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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.