Web Sites Archives - Lawyer Advertising Blog

Will Google Warn Visitors Away From Your Website?

By 7901 Comment2017-09-30+22%3A04%3A58

Beginning in October, if your law firm website doesn’t use SSL, Google will warn visitors who use your contact form that it is “Not Secure”. Potential clients will likely go to another lawyer’s website when they see the warning.

This is what a website without SSL looks like in the address bar of Chrome
This is what Insecure or Bad SSL looks like

This is what a website without SSL looks like in the address bar of Firefox

Law firm websites almost always have a contact form so potential clients can contact the law firm. If your website has a contact form, you need to switch your website to SSL immediately or Google will issue a warning to potential clients visiting your law firm website.

Google’s announcement stated:

Any type of data that users type into websites should not be accessible to others on the network, so starting in version 62 Chrome will show the “Not secure” warning when users type data into HTTP sites.

How do you know if you’re using SSL? Just look on the left side of the address bar of your browser to see if your website is using http: or https:

On Chrome, you will see a green lock with the word Secure just before https://

On Firefox, you will see a green lock with https://

At this time, on Internet Explorer you will only see https://

If your website is already using SSL, check to make sure that you don’t have any errors. You don’t want to have errors anywhere. Just type your domain name (website name) in one of these SSL checker tools:

sslchecker.com

sslshopper.com

Switching to SSL will also give your website a slight SEO advantage in Google search results.

If your law firm website isn’t already using SSL, check with your website company to find out when it will be done. If you need a company to do it for you and your website uses WordPress (most law firm websites use WordPress), there are SSL migration services such as wpsitecare.com which advertises they will not only convert your website to SSL but will take care of having the SSL certificate installed for you.

How Clients Search on the Internet

By 505Leave a CommentHow+Clients+Search+on+the+Internet2014-07-23+04%3A50%3A40

Potential clients are searching for lawyers on the Internet using longtail keywords. FindLaw found that longtail keyword searches where someone was looking for a lawyer accounted for 32% of all searches. 67% were less valuable research queries using regular keywords, such as “DUI laws in Texas”.

What’s the difference between a regular keyword, keyword phrase or Longtail keyword? A keyword could be “lawyer” while a keyword phrase could be “personal injury lawyer” or “Dallas personal injury lawyer”. FindLaw refers to this as a Head-Term query.

A longtail keyword is much longer and likely includes information pertaining to the searcher’s circumstances, such as “lawyer for drunk motorcyclist hit by a car in Dallas”.

Longtail keyword phrases are more valuable for a law firm because someone typing in a search like that is looking to hire a lawyer. This is just an example but before you think that you don’t want a drunk motorcyclist as a client, I recently obtained six figures for one.

Trying to rank for keywords is a waste of money. Somebody landing on a website who searched for “lawyer” or “attorney” is not the potential client you’re trying to attract. A lot of money is spent by law firms trying to rank for keyword phrases but this requires a costly investment and produces fewer potential clients. FindLaw found that only 1% of a law firm’s website traffic was accounted by short keyword phrases.

The problem with searches using research queries is that a lot of these people are not looking to hire a lawyer. FindLaw found that 71 percent of a law firm’s contacts come from long-tail queries; 26 percent from research queries; and only 3 percent from head-term queries.

Download the FindLaw white paper The Futility of Chasing Silver Bullets analyzing search-generated traffic to thousands of law firm websites.

This research isn’t surprising and can be found in many articles on the Internet about every kind of business, not just attorneys. Fortunately, it’s much easier to compete against other lawyers for longtail keyword searches that it is for shorter keywords or keyword phrases.

If you are now interested in focusing on longtail keyword phrases and wondering how to do that, the answer is in writing informative blog articles. Unfortunately, this takes a lot of time that most lawyers don’t want to spend.

I occasionally find a law firm’s website which has a substantial amount of informative articles. This is sometimes the result of a lawyer who likes to write a lot and sometimes a law firm with several attorneys each contributing articles or where one attorney is assigned to write articles.

Bing & Google – Search Engine Evolution

By 1952 Comments2011-05-18+04%3A02%3A32

Bing is now using Facebook data to display websites your friends have “liked”. This is influencing the ranking of the search engine listing results in a way that is personal to you and will display results on the first page which could previously have been several pages deeper.

If you don’t want to see results liked by your friends, you can avoid using this feature by simply not signing into Facebook. But I suspect the people you want to reach will be using it.

I was thinking a long time ago that if I owned Facebook, I would develop a search engine to correlate search results with sites that friends like. Although this is not something that I would like in a search engine that I use, I think this is good for Facebook and a good search engine niche.

Google has also transitioned from a really good search engine that I liked using to a yellow page type site with local listings that I don’t like. When I want local search results, I go to a yellow page site. With the Google and Bing transitions from a traditional search engine, this leaves the door wide open for a new search engine to take Google’s original place.

With Google and now Bing moving away from traditional search results, this will have a significant impact on search engine optimization aimed at appearing in the top natural search results and will spawn a new direction in search engine optimization.

Internet Advertising: Reality or Hype?

By 482 Comments2008-06-05+00%3A26%3A33

Lawyers have a lot of common sense. It’s probably the single most important trait of a lawyer, but when it comes to issues outside the scope of a client matter, some lawyers get lazy and put away their common sense.

I was at a seminar on May 20, 2008 about attorney advertising on the Web, where FindLaw was the featured speaker/presenter. FindLaw was presenting some useful information about websites and website advertising, but they also were promoting FindLaw websites for attorneys.

A FindLaw employee stated that “4 million people per month are coming to FindLaw to look for an attorney”. That’s quite an impressive figure. That’s not 4 million people per month coming to FindLaw. That’s 4 million people who are coming to FindLaw specifically to look for a lawyer! Surely, if even a very tiny fraction of that traffic should come to my website, it would be worthwhile. A lot of the lawyers at the seminar seemed very impressed and not one lawyer questioned this amazing statement.

The thought of 4 million people per month looking for a lawyer on one website struck me in the head, literally. I started wondering, are 4 million people in the US even looking for a lawyer each month?

The US population estimate for July 2008 is 303,824,646. That means approximately 1.3% of the US population, including children, are looking for a lawyer every month.

Another way of looking at it is that 4 million people per month equals 48 million people per year looking for a lawyer on FindLaw. 48 million! If you subtract out all of the children, there should be approximately 182,294,788 adults in the US. If you want, subtract out all of the lawyers and their families too! Subtracting out only the children means approximately 26% of the adult US population is looking for a lawyer on FindLaw at least once per year.

Consider the fact that only 64% of US households had Internet access in 2006 and that there are only 111,348,110 households with a TV in the US (Nielsen Media Research estimate as of January 1, 2007).

My common sense tells me that FindLaw is over exaggerating the amount of potential traffic they can send me. This doesn’t mean that it is all hype and that they don’t get a lot of people every month looking for a lawyer. It just means that you need to use some common sense to determine whether or not the price they or anyone else charges you is worth it.

The next time someone tells you how much business you will get from an online directory or any other method of advertising, use some common sense. Advertising is a tool and a necessary cost of doing business. It is not equivalent to winning a lottery.

Is your law firm using a .info domain name?

By 47Leave a Comment2008-06-04+04%3A44%3A45

Update: I’m sure Google no longer penalizes .info because it’s simply not necessary. Google can easily distinguish a spammy website. However, because .info domain names were sold so cheap ($0.99) spammers used .info extensively and .info is viewed as suspect too many website visitors. Even today, it’s so easy to find a .com by adding a word or letters before or after the name. I only use .com.

On March 3, 2008, Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s anti-spam team made several predictions for 2008, one of which was, “A top-level domain (TLD registry) will offer domains for under $4. The result will be another TLD blighted by spammy domain registrations.”

Because of the low cost of .info top-level domain names, they have been used by spammy web masters. What are spammy websites? That’s a topic for another article, but basically they are worthless websites, designed only to make money for the webmaster and which Google has no interest in presenting to their users. You can read about some of the characteristics of spammy websites here.

GoDaddy is now offering.info names for only $.99. Such a low cost allows a webmaster to cheaply set up thousands of spammy websites. Google has been trying to get rid of spammy websites for a long time through a myriad of methods. Google results have substantially improved over the last few years specifically because they have been successful in eliminating many spammy websites from the search results.

Apparently, Google has now started a new attempt to filter out spammy websites by identifying websites with the .info domain extension. Here is another discussion on a forum where webmasters with .info domains are complaining that they are no longer receiving any traffic from Google.

A law firm website using a .info domain extension is not a spammy website, but the .info domain extension may accidentally get you shut out of Google traffic.