Law Firm Internet Marketing An Executive Summary Via Q&A - Part 3

Shouldn’t the vendor I select for law firm Internet marketing have built lawyer websites before

No. In fact some of these types of vendors that tell you how dozens, hundreds or thousands of lawyers have bought websites from them are probably the most expensive options in the marketplace for law firm Internet marketing with not nearly as much value delivered compared to what you can get from other vendors at a lower price. Remember that some of those "high end" vendors have high end overhead, stockholders, and come complete with sales reps that come to visit you in person even. That is all heavy overhead to bring to the law firm Internet marketing process. I have also found they want to sell you "marketing packages" (or tell you that you also need a blog with your website) that are pricey which usually include marketing on their heavily trafficked sites where they will list you with a group of your close competitors for the visitor to select from. I don’t know about you, however, I want my prospective clients to come directly to me from the search engine. I want them to fall in love with me and not look at my competitors and hope they pick me out of the group on these sites. So I will spend my money getting the folks directly to my CTPM/Middleton funnel site thank you. Also remember the competition on the Internet is all about keywords and has little to nothing to do with if you are doctors, lawyers, plumbers, or roofers. Keywords are keywords, content is content and all of the other issues I wrote about are the same in Internet marketing in general as well as law firm Internet marketing in particular. I am more interested in if they know what I know as an educated consumer and how their own site ranks in Google Page Rank, how the sites they built look via Google Page Rank as well as how they look with Alexa before I spend my money. Having said all of the above if you think you need a vendor who has done a lot of lawyer sites I have found a couple of vendors that are probably at the higher end of the price range that have done a lot of lawyer sites and have done them pretty well to very well in my opinion. These companies are not of the types I spoke about at the very beginning which are parts of major corporations with stockholders and sales reps etc. They are ConsultWebs.com Inc. at External Link and Foster Web Marketing at External Link. If you use one of them do be sure once you negotiate your purchase from them that you ask them for a discount since I noticed that ConsultWebs gives referral fees and I suspect Foster Web Marketing might as well.

You keep talking about the number of pages on the site with respect to law firm Internet marketing. Why is that important?

One of the reasons I tell you that you need at least 20 keywords to write content to is because it is believed search engines consider 20 to 80 pages or so to be a medium size site. One of the more major factors search engines use to determine page ranking is the total number of pages on the site. Most attorneys have small sites (less then 20 pages). You will be out in front of the pack with law firm Internet marketing if you have a medium size site. Lastly, you want to have as part of your ongoing marketing plan of your site to add on average one new page per month to your site. Why? Because over time you would be adding 12 pages per year which will push you up the rankings each month and one day you will have a large size site which will make you virtually unassailable you your competitors. Finally, if you have selected your domain names correctly you will have a salable asset worth a large amount of money since it will be a mighty law firm Internet marketing machine for you by then.

Whoooo. You just said, …selected you domain name correctly…. Is YourLawFirm’sNameLaw.com a good domain name for law firm Internet marketing?

Sorry to say no. Most lawyers have poor domain names on several counts for law firm Internet marketing purposes. Your domain name does affect your page ranking. First the name does not include one of your main keywords, which is the ideal or at least the domain name describes what you do. Second, using the name of the firm is often not a salable brand. Third it does not fit the psychographics of most prospective clients. Fourth often it is not easily memorable and often difficult to spell if you can remember the name. In fact, some attorneys don’t even own the domain name they do have since the vendor registered it they may own it. Lastly, a few firms may opt for more than one website since you may opt to have a website for each of your top two or three practice areas.

Is there anything else of an intellectual property nature I need to be aware of in this law firm Internet marketing process?

Yes. First be sure that you indeed own the copyright to the entire website including the code, graphics, text and photographs that created the website. It is all yours. If not then I would not go with that vendor. Also be sure the vendor warrants that it owns or has all permissions to use any copyrighted material that they use in building the website. Another issue is if the vendor is hosting your website be sure they have in place in the agreement what they are to do should the hosting equipment go down (like transfer your site to another server) and what are the remedies for interruption of service for more than short periods of time (short meaning hours at the most). Frequent loss of service should enable you to leave that service with no penalties. Some of the attorneys I have coached have said they had to buy their own website again when they wanted to move. This situation is no fun so don’t let that happen to you.

OK, we have completed part three of law firm Internet marketing and we are on to part four that will complete the series. In part four we will cover what your marketing budget might look like for your law firm Internet marketing, what you need to know about blogs and blawgs, pay per click, where to learn more should you want to dig deeper than this executive briefing and more so read on to part four.