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Web Marketing Ben Glass

Web Marketing, Part 2

By: Tom Foster
(Go back to part 1)

What to Add
Stuck on what to add to your site? Start with your own accomplishments. Have you had articles published in journals or magazines? Have you taught an MCLE pertaining to your specialty? Remember, you are a lawyer, which means you can talk about anything. Use all of those case files and everything you have written over the years and think about how valuable that information would be to someone else. Use your experience as content to add to your website. Most attorney and law firm websites do quite well by sticking to the basics: case results (if you can), frequently asked questions, testimonials, news, library of publications (this could be anything), links, etc.

Blogs: Perhaps the most significant web site advancement in the past two or three years is the Blog. Built on the old standard of billboards, which were popular in the earliest years of the Internet, Blogs allow site owners to add content – ranging from commentary, questions, tips and information to their site. On most blog sites, site owners can control who is allowed to post comments and in turn get that users name and email for their mailing list. Blogs are also great for SEO – people responding to posts and making comments is updating your website with fresh and new content, even while you are sleeping.

Pay-per-click Search Engines: Paying for Visits to your Site

Whenever you get results back from a search engine query, you’ll usually see that the top sites listed have the words “sponsored link” or something similar next to them. This means, of course, that these sites are paying to be listed where they are. How much does it cost? That all depends on the keywords they have purchased from the pay-per-click (PPC) search engine.

PPC search engine services auction off keywords to the highest bidder. While the bidding for every word starts at one penny, the price on competitive keywords quickly inflates to dollars. Once you have locked in a bid position for the keyword, your site appears in the top entries of queries for that keyword – not only on the engine where you made the purchase, but on their partner sites as well. Each time someone clicks on your link, your bid price is deducted from your deposit account. Participation usually requires an initial deposit of $50 or $100 (or more, depending on the price of the keyword you purchased), and your ranking is good either until your deposit runs out or another site outbids you. The PPC service will alert you when either these events occur, giving you an opportunity to make another deposit or re-bid to gain your position back.

Pay-per-click services are a good way to put a cap on what you want to spend to increase your web site exposure. Once you find a pertinent keyword at a reasonable price, you can invest $500 or $1000 toward that word and see how it does. Determining your return on investment then becomes a simple matter. For most attorneys, generating even one promising case out of a $500 investment is money well spent.

With most PPCs, however, there is one problem: getting a reasonable price. Many of the most competitive keywords out there have already been claimed and have very inflated values. Foster Web Marketing recently did a poll of a leading PPC, Overture, on practice area keywords that included “personal injury”, “medical malpractice” and “defective products.” The current top bid price for these words and several others on Overture was $5 or more, with some words costing as much as $20 per click! At that rate, generating 50 visits to your site would cost $1000. For many firms, those odds just aren’t practical.

Exclusive links: paying much more for visits to your site

You’ve seen the ads on legal sites that offer links to personal injury and medical malpractice attorneys. You click on the link, and you’re taken to a page with all 50 states and a heading that says: “Find an Attorney in Your State.” You click on a state, and the page either goes to a law firm’s web site or pulls up a flashy full page ad that sums up the credentials of the firm.

If $20-per-click sounds steep to you, then this option will be even more prohibitive. Services that host these ads charge top dollar for the visibility they generate for subscribers. Rates will vary across states and practice areas. In Virginia, for example, a personal injury firm that subscribes to one of these ads pays in the neighborhood of $30,000 per year for an exclusive state-wide personal injury link. Firms can also purchase a regional link (multi-state, about $75,000) and a national link ($100,000 +). This is almost always many times more than a firm pays to have its web site professionally designed and optimized.

In some cases, exclusive link advertising for some practice areas, such as workers compensation, can be purchased at relative bargains. But this is because the demographics in these particular practice areas aren’t typically looking for legal help on the Web, and advertising as an exclusive “worker’s compensation” attorney in Virginia doesn’t generate much business. The high dollar words, like personal injury and medical malpractice, are the areas that pay off…if you can get them.

Another point to note is that exclusive links are indeed exclusive. Even firms that have exorbitant funds to put towards marketing their web presence are usually out of luck here. The incumbent firm gets the first right of refusal in the re-subscription process. According to the advertising agencies that host and create exclusive links for law firms, a majority of firms involved in this strategy re-subscribe year after year, locking out new bidders altogether from the rewards of exclusive links.

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About Benjamin Glass
Ben Glass (www.BenGlassLaw.com) is a practicing plaintiff’s personal injury and medical malpractice attorney in Fairfax, Virginia. He is the author of The Ultimate Personal Injury and Practice Building Toolkit