Another Reason Why Your Firm Needs a Mobile Website

The New York Times’ Quentin Hardy (@qhardy) reports Intel’s earnings were down 27% with the decline of PC sales.

Why? Instead of PCs, more people and businesses are buying smartphones and tablets.

Microsoft’s release of its Windows 8 operating system did nothing to excite PC buyers. Consumers and businesses did not buy new computers in order to use the upgraded system, per Hardy.

Law firms are constantly discussing upgrades of their websites and drawing traffic to their websites. Mobile is thought of as an after thought rather than thinking mobile first, desktop second.

The vast majority of legal website developers design and develop for the desktop. One, there may be more money it for them, and two, it’s what they know. They look at the world like law firms – draw traffic to a website, a website we designed and developed first for a PC.

You ought to start looking at the Internet as opportunity to network by engaging your clients and their influencers where they are. Where they are is increasingly on smart phones and tablets.

Rather than asking how does our site appear on mobile or how do we get people from mobile to our website, think mobile engagement from the get go, it’s where your clients are headed.

-Kevin O'Keefe, Real Lawyers Have Blogs.

FindLaw Busted

This post is taken from Kevin O'Keefe's blog. Thanks, Kevin!

Dow Jones' Nat Worden reported this afternoon that FindLaw has been slapped by Google for shady SEO tactics and that lawyers are now questioning the SEO marketing product FindLaw sold them.

Worden explained that FindLaw came up with a 'SEM Advantage' product which cost some lawyers $2,000 per month.

Billed as a "high-octane" way to double or even triple traffic on his site, Newell [FindLaw lawyer customer] and others like him understood FindLaw's SEM Advantage product to be a package of well-placed links designed to lift a Web site's standing in a Google search. But now they're wondering if they're still getting their money's worth.

Worden reports FindLaw may have pulled the wool out from under these lawyers. Late last month, FindLaw quietly made changes to a link on one of its Web sites leading to Newell's site, which he had received as part of SEM Advantage. It also changed at least 99 other links to the Web sites of law-firm clients after it ran afoul of Google Inc. (GOOG) in the search giant's ongoing efforts to crack down on a practice known as selling "link juice," or Web links designed to boost a Web site's page rankings in a search engine. With the link juice trade springing up as a cottage industry across the entire spectrum of online marketing, Google views it as threatening the quality of its search engine, an asset that has made Google a dominant force in media.

Read on in Worden's article and you'll see that FindLaw made the changes adversely effecting lawyers like Newell because FindLaw had been caught by Google for selling links in violation of Google's guidelines. Something in my opinion, FindLaw knew or should have known it was going to get caught doing.

Worden concludes with what is most alarming, and perhaps why FindLaw is not owning up to its misconduct.

The controversy comes at a difficult time for FindLaw's parent company, Thomson-Reuters, which publishes a news service that competes directly with Dow Jones Newswires and is delivered on the same terminals. Its stock price is down about 20% over the last year amid concerns that the U.S. financial crisis will quash growth in its financial markets division. Investors are counting on its professional division to pick up the slack, and its legal services business, for which Findlaw is a small but important growth engine, made up 66% of that division's revenue in the first half.

Imagine if FindLaw confessed to duping lawyers for millions of dollars (not saying they did, just looks to me like they did). Imagine having to refund millions of dollars. Imagine having to refund these monies after paying millions of dollars in sales commissions on the sale of this 'high-octane SEM Advantage Product.' Imagine how investors would view Thomson Reuter's stock then. Scary stuff for FindLaw and their parent Thomson Reuters. Scary stuff for lawyers relying on FindLaw going forward.

Branding Your Expertise- Not Your Logo Part III

The effectiveness of an attorney's blog is only as good as the number of people it reaches. If no one is subscribing to your blog what's the point? Kevin O'Keefe addresses this issue in his CLE at the State Bar of Texas Annual Meeting last week. O'Keefe says he has managed to push his blog to the top of the Google search engine ranking by doing three things: updating his blog often, linking to other highly ranked blogs by embedding their URLs in his postings and closely monitoring who is visiting his site.

Let's start the how-to portion of this discussion by addressing the "update often" rule. Many attorneys shy away from blogging because they are already so busy they don't want to add one more job and they can't bill the time. But marketing is only effective if it is consistent. That's why mega-corporations like Coca-Cola and Xerox spend the most marketing dollars- just because right now you are at the top of the heap- doesn't mean you will stay there without disciplined marketing. That said- a blog should be short, not a lengthy paper encompassing citations and numerous facts. A blog should take no more than 15 minutes to write and post. Everyone has time to do that.

Linking to highly read blogs is simple as well. Looking for a topic to blog on today? Search for it! Chances are, some other blogger has put a great deal more time and research into a topic thats relevant than you have time for, reference their blog (as long as they are not a direct competitor) add some comment and enjoy the fruits of their labors while your ranking improves.

As with any marketing program, a measurement system must always be in place to determine how sucessfully your campaign is being received. There are services you can install that can tell you all about the traffic on your site. They range from simple hit counters that just display a total number of visitors, to more advanced statistics services that can give you information about referrers, browsers, visiting times, and more.

There are a number of sites that offer free services to help you track visits to your blog. Start by checking out some of these links:

Google Analytics
Site Meter
Bravenet Hit Counter
FreeStats

Branding Your Expertise, Not Your Logo Part II

To continue with the nuggets of wisdom on business development shared by Kevin O'Keefe of Real Lawyers Have Blogs, currently there are 2,000 law blogs on the Internet. Four new law blogs are added each day.

O'Keefe described blogs at the State Bar of Texas CLE last week as a huge rotary meeting. More reporters are using blogs as resources for investigative reporting and background research. O'Keefe and his blog posting have been quoted in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and many other online publications.

The method investigative reporters are using that directs them to lawyer blogs, according to Kevin O'Keefe is through RSS feeds. Many journalists simply utilize the Google reader to track blog mentions for topics they are interested in. The ranking or importance of a blog is dependent on the number of incoming links. Just like a website, the number of visitors to the blog and incoming links to the blog determine its importance.

Some tips on improving the ranking of your blog via incoming links coming tomorrow...

Branding Your Expertise, Not Your Logo

We learned a lot at the State Bar of Texas convention in Houston last week. One CLE I particularly enjoyed was given by famed law blogger Kevin O'Keefe of Real Lawyers Have Blogs. This guy started the law blog phenomenon and shared some great marketing tips he has learned along the way.

O'Keefe says today's lawyer business development needs to be centered around the theory that attorneys need to use "educational marketing" to go where the people are and connect with them. O'Keefe quoted Bill Gates recently as saying emails are an outmoded and essentially ineffective mode of business communication. If lawyers want to be seen as experts in their practice areas by future clients and their peers they need to learn how to maximize their presence on the Internet. Lawyers are to think of the Internet as one big Yellow Pages. People only use Google now instead of other information gathering guides, directories or search engines. The higher a attorney's name or Firm is ranked in what he calls "organic" results (the kind you don't pay for) the better.

A Firm's "Title tag"or the line that appears at the top of the page of a website should be optimized as to what it is you do, instead of a Firm name, this provides Google with a clear indexing reference so it will rank the site higher. O'Keefe says creating a law blog for a Firm or an individual attorney is a great way to rank higher in Google searches.

All week I will be sharing more tips learned from O'Keefe during his CLE so stay tuned and get optimized!