Tag Archives: law firm web marketing

Evolution of Legal Blogs Continues to Impact SEO

I had a chance to compare some of our legal blogs published in 2009 v. 2014 and the comparison is startling.sample legal blog

When we started in 2007, you could publish a legal blog and see it three times on page 1 of Google — the blog, the homepage and the blogfeed often all returned as separate results.

Ahh, but those were the good old days.

Looking back, those blogs often said very little and did very little, other than to unabashedly plug the firm. While confidentiality and duplicative content issues keep me from republishing those blogs here, you can see by the screen captures to the right that the old-school blogs contained relatively little text and had half-a-dozen links back to the firm.

By contrast, today’s blogs and articles produced by our legal blog writers are 500-750 words, Copyscape tested at least 85 percent original, and focus on informing the reader as a way to bring traffic to the firm.

People always ask us: “How do we show up in Google search results?” And we always say: “Post regular content updates to your site and have something to say.”

Cheap website content for lawyers is not hard to find. We can point you toward several resources where it’s as little as $10 page. If you have a $10 law firm, we suggest you buy $10 legal content.

In other cases, a law firm gets a quote for $25 or $30 legal blogs and inquires about whether we will match those rates. 2014lawblog On at least three occasions, they have sent me samples from these content farms, and I have tested them only to find they are being sold word-for-word to multiple law firms. In other words, law firms are paying for content to improve SEO, and the discount writing houses are selling them duplicative content that will be ignored by search engines and may even result in their site ranking being reduced!

And these are the blogs these companies are sending to lawyers as sample work product!

Again, people always ask us: “How do we show up in Google search results?” And we always say: “Post regular content updates to your site and have something to say.”

If your legal blog writers are busy plagiarizing themselves, why in the world would a search engine choose your firm’s “content” as desirable to display to their customer, who is conducting a web search in the hopes of finding worthwhile information?

If you want to know you are getting what you are paying for — if you want Internet marketing results you can count on in 2014 — look for the 

2014 Internet Legal Marketing Goals and Objectives

Welcome to 2014. Glad you made it.

It’s the 5th anniversary of the Internet surpassing yellow pages as the number one referral source for clients who select a firm via advertising. What are you doing about it? What are your legal marketing goals?

There are several reasons why law firms have been so slow to move legal marketing resources online, but confusion and misinformation top the list. Legal Marketing

Attorneys are rightfully confused, as they continue to be bombarded with (sometimes) well-meaning Internet legal marketing “experts.” Lately, it seems as though everyone is offering SEO for attorneys, legal blog writing and social media marketing. I know attorneys who have built firms and added partners with a $3,000 website and firms that have spent $30,000+ on website and it’s a secret because they are nowhere to be found in search results.

Another primary reason too many small and mid-sized law firms lag when it comes to Internet marketing is because lawyers are often decent writers, and so websites sit empty through an endless string of promises to add content pages or to begin regular legal blogging. In some cases, they have bought arguments against ghost blogging. Let me tell you something: The law firms dominating search results in your market are not worried about using ghost bloggers. And something else: I don’t want to hire an attorney who has that kind of time for blogging and website advertising efforts.

In still other cases, attorneys are reticent to shift money away from more tradition forms of legal advertising, like billboards and yellow pages. We still like billboards (they increase name recognition, which is critical search-result click thru) but yellow pages are Dead on Arrival. I have a friend who still spends $700 a month on a quarter-page yellow-page ad. I have another who has built a DUI defense firm in a major metro market using virtually nothing but our $200-month starter package and a Justia blog site.

In 2010, some scoffed when we said attorneys should do no marketing before spending the first $20,000 a year online. We think little has changed, although $25,000 to $30,000 might be more accurate today.

Often attorneys are overwhelmed with the options. We are here to help. Law Firm Ghost Writer works in 22 of the nation’s 25 most competitive metro markets, with blog writing packages starting at just $200 monthly. We never use long-term contracts and most of our clients have been with us for years. The proof is in the results.

Just look for the