Law Firm Internet Marketing An Executive Summary Using The Q&A ...

Law Firm Internet Marketing An Executive Summary Using The Q&A Format ? Part I
by: Henry Harlow
What do I need to know first about law firm Internet marketing?

?In modern business, it is not the crook who is feared most, it is the honest man who doesn?t know what he is doing.? Pablo Casals

There are tons of vendors out there who want to sell you websites and law firm Internet marketing services. Most are honest people who simply don?t know what they are doing. In many cases, they are attempting to sell you something that is overpriced and that won?t produce you any new clients at all, let alone good clients. The attorneys I have worked with report to me that the whole Internet marketing process confuses them. They don?t know who to believe. Some have spent considerable sums already on websites with little or no results. I aim to stop all that. So keep reading.

Do I need law firm Internet marketing?

Yes. According to Reuters News Services by 2007 there will be over nine million legal services searches done online each month. Additionally, prospective clients and clients expect you to have at least a website or think you may be behind the times if you do not. Finally, while the yellow pages are not a good attorney marketing vehicle today they are going away since people are searching the Internet and not going to the yellow pages.

What is/is not law firm Internet marketing?

Having a website is not law firm Internet marketing. At a minimum you do need at least a ?brochure website? of a few pages, however, that website is unlikely to get you new business and is definitely not Internet marketing. The rest of this article (in four parts) is going to help you get clear on what Internet marketing is all about.

Where does Internet marketing begin?

Law firm Internet marketing begins with you becoming an educated consumer and then keyword research. Researching your practice?s best keywords will tell us what words your prospective clients are using to search for legal services on search engines, what legal services your prospective clients are the most interested in, what your prospective client is thinking, how to attract these prospective clients to your site at the search engine instead of going to your competitors site, what your competitors are doing/not doing, what content to write for each of your top keywords (recommend writing a page each to at least the top 20 keywords), what are the words to use for PPC law firm advertising and how to begin search engine optimization. If you have not adequately completed keyword research using software tools like Wordtracker you have not done adequate keyword research and are likely to fail at your law firm Internet marketing.

You mentioned, ??what content to write for each of your top keywords??. What are you talking about exactly?

I am talking about what is known as the CTPM model of Internet marketing developed by Ken Evoy M.D. in 1997. This model works because it is in total alignment with how the Internet works. The C is the first part of the model and it stands for Content ? create in demand content (you determine what is in demand from the keyword research). The T is Traffic ? attract targeted traffic. The P is for pre-sell ? pre-sell the targeted traffic (using such things as newsletters, RSS feeds, free downloads, e-books, autoresponders, audio, video, and teleclasses). The M is Monetize ? this is where you convert these pre-sold prospective clients to clients easily.

You mentioned, ??tools like Wordtracker?? with respect to keyword research in law firm Internet marketing. What is Wordtracker?

Wordtracker is a software tool that can be used to thoroughly research your keywords. Wordtracker is at least arguably the best keyword research tool in the marketplace and there are others. You can go to http://www.Wordtracker.com to get all the details. Your vendor can use this tool easily and should use it for keyword research to put your law firm internet marketing on the right track from the beginning if at all possible.

You also mentioned ??how to begin search engine optimization.? What is meant by search engine optimization (SEO) and exactly what is it and how does it fit into law firm Internet marketing?

There is no mystery in SEO in particular and law firm Internet marketing in general so don?t let anyone bamboozle you on that one. As I said earlier SEO begins with appropriate keyword research. If you have not done that you are dead in the water since this is the foundation of everything that comes after in law firm Internet marketing. The next step is the ?C? or content mentioned earlier in the CTPM model. You will need to write ?keyword optimized? content to each of your top 20 keywords or another way to say this is writing your content in the way that search engines want to see it so they rank you higher than your competitors. Your content needs to fit together in a site plan (the term site plan refers to in what order your pages will appear and how they link to one another) that has an appropriate pyramid type structure. This pyramid type structure includes your home page (the peak of the pyramid) themed keyword phrase being supported by all the tier two pages (the next layer of the pyramid) and their tier three pages (usually the base of your pyramid although you could go deeper) support them resulting in higher rankings for all of your pages. There are some technical aspects to SEO as well like the use of clean HTML, heading text, meta tags, alt tags, site map, etc., however, mercifully I won?t go into those since they should be known to your technical person. The bottom line is put nothing in the way of the search engines spiders (spiders are sent out from the search engine to ?read? the sites on the Internet) being able to ?read? your site like fancy flash pages get in the way big time for instance. To know more in depth about keyword optimization you can go to http://www.Wordtracker.com where they have a really fine Keyword Research Guide if you want to know more of the details. All of what I just told you is known as ?on site optimization? strategies for law firm Internet marketing. There is also ?off site? optimization as well involved in SEO. Off site optimization means getting one-way links from high-ranking pages of other sites that are related to your top 20 keywords (there we are again with that keyword research being vital) that link to your site. Search engines see these links like a ?vote? for your site. The more high quality ?votes? you have the higher they will rank your site. The term ?link popularity? is used to describe this process in law firm Internet marketing. The royal road to high quality links is having (here he goes again) keyword researched and keyword optimized quality content on your website. You get these links from website directories, article directories, online forums, press releases, etc. I left out reciprocal links because most SEO authorities think they are no longer worth the effort since they are difficult to get and don?t really contribute much (or can even hurt) to your page ranking.

We have completed the first part of law firm Internet marketing at this point. In part two we will go into Google Page Ranking, dealing with your competitors, RSS, the factors surrounding costs of law firm Internet marketing and more. I am committed to you being a master of law firm internet marketing at least to the point you will get new clients from your efforts and not get taken to the cleaners by vendors who may not know any better.

About The Author Henry Harlow has individually coached well over 500 attorneys. You can get more free, in depth and objective information on increasing your revenue while reducing your work hours available now at http://www.law-firm-marketing-coach.com/

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An Introduction to Using Free Tools

I often find that keyword research is an overlooked part of the SEO process. Many SEOs will tend to stick with using Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool and as a result, they will most likely be targeting the exact same keywords as the competition. The ultimate goal with keyword research is to find those juicy, low-hanging fruit - the long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are sometimes defined as keyword phrases containing multiple words of four or more. However, this is not how I like to define them. For me, the long-tail keywords are those that have lower volumes of traffic and are less competitive to rank for. In other words, they may contain multiple words or they could contain as few as two words.
Anyway, I wanted to share my method of conducting keyword research in order to hopefully give some insights into the process. For this example, I am going to use the ‘greetings card’ industry in the UK. All the tools I will be using are freely available to everyone. So let’s get started!
I always like to start my research with a basic Google search using my most obvious industry keyword. This will give an idea of who my competitors are and who the big players in the industry are. So, a basic search for [greetings cards] in Google.co.uk produces the following results:

Two of the top four results (funkypigeon.com and moonpig.com) are well known brands that advertise regularly on television. However, the top 2 results are perhaps lesser-known competitors.
Now that you have an idea of who the big players are, it's time to see if we can find out what keywords they are targeting. Let’s take a look at greetingscards.co.uk. When we look at the home page, there doesn’t seem to be an awful lot of text, so let’s turn to using a keyword density tool. SEOBook has a pretty good keyword density tool but I’m going to use the tool from David Naylor Search Marketing. The reason I prefer to use this tool is because it has more options to customize your results and can provide phrases of four or more words in length. When we use the keyword density tool we are provided with the following list:

As you can see, it is a pretty comprehensive list of keyword ideas that we can also use. However, where did all these words come from, considering there was very little text on the homepage? A quick look at the source code reveals the answer. They are still using the Keyword Meta Tag and have stuffed it with around 30 keywords. This is exactly why you shouldn’t still be using the redundant tag as it just gives your competitor insights into the keywords you are targeting.
Übersuggest is a great tool that extracts all the Google autocomplete words for a base keyword. It is really simple to use. All you have to do is put your base keyword in the search box, select a language and country then hit suggest. For [greetings cards] we are presented with the following list of 352 suggestions:

The tool also makes it really easy to select all the keywords so that you can easily copy and paste them into Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool later.
For this next stage, I like to use a tool called mergewords (mergewords.com) to further advance our list. Before you use this tool you will need to think carefully about how to arrange the words in the three columns to get the right combination of words. Once you have done this, you can start filling the boxes with words. For greetings cards, I used the following combination:

This resulted in 468 keyword possibilities.
Having followed these steps, we now have a list of over 800 keywords. However, some of these may be duplicates and some may be unsuitable for other reasons. This is how I start the filtering process. First I input all of the keywords into an excel spreadsheet, then I use the ‘remove duplicates’ tool. I'm using Excel 2011 for Mac, which has a 'remove duplicates' function in the Ribbon's Data tab:

If you are using Excel 2007 or later then you should also be able to easily find this function. However, if you are using an earlier version of Excel, there are still ways to easily remove duplicates. MrExcel.com lists a variety of methods you can use to remove duplicates in both Excel 2003 and 2007.
Twenty-nine duplicates were removed, leaving me with a list of 851 keywords. The next step is to manually go through the list and remove any unsuitable keywords such as those containing brand terms. Unfortunately, there is no suitable way to automate this (that I know of) and you will have to go through the list manually.
After going through the list manually and removing unsuitable keywords, we are now left with 741 keywords.
Now we have a list of 741 keywords, it’s time to use Google’s keyword tool to start refining the list and find out information such as search volumes, competition and local search trends. When using the tool, remember to have all the parameters set correctly. So, make sure you set the tool to [Exact] match types in the correct location (UK in this case) and tick the box to only show ideas closely related to your search. To set the tool to show [Exact] match, just navigate to the left sidebar and select the check-box next to [Exact]. You may have to unselect the check-box for Broad match if it is selected:

After inputting the 741 keywords into the keyword tool, we further refine the list by removing any unsuitable words we may have missed from the previous manual check and remove any keywords with local search volumes of less than 10. This leaves us with a more manageable list of 126 keywords, which we can download as a CSV file. However, we are not quite done with Google’s keyword tool just yet.
We are now going to start adding some more keywords to the list by inserting our refined list of 126 keywords into the keyword tool. Once we have done this you should get around 800 keyword suggestions from Google:

The first thing we should do is to save all the keywords from our original list of 126, to our new list. Next, we can arrange the list of suggestions by competition from lowest to highest. Once this is done, we can now start adding all the keywords with low to medium competition and local monthly search volumes greater than 10. These are our 'juicy' low-hanging fruit keywords.
The final stage is to add all the important keywords from the suggestions that we may have missed previously. Depending on how many keywords you have added from this final stage, you should have a final list of around 280 keywords. To see the list I have created you can visit the blog at my site Crimson Penguin and download it for free!
Two of my favorite tools for keyword research that often get overlooked are Google Trends and Google Insights. However, Google has recently combined the two into a new look Google Trends. This is a great tool for finding valuable insights into your niche keywords and can often help you to make decisions about which specific keywords you should target. Let’s take a look at our example of the greetings card industry:

As you can see from the graph in the top, very slight changes in the keywords can produce drastically different results. Pluralising [birthday card] to [birthday cards] results in twice as much interest over the past 12 months.
Hopefully, I’ve shown you some useful tools and techniques that you can start to use in your own keyword research projects. Armed with this knowledge, I hope you can start to find more valuable long-tail keywords for your clients.
Adam is a professional SEO and owner/founder of Crimson Penguin SEO Services based in Essex. He also works for a leading SEO agency in London. You can connect with Adam on Twitter or Google+



View the original article here

An Introduction to Using Free Tools

I often find that keyword research is an overlooked part of the SEO process. Many SEOs will tend to stick with using Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool and as a result, they will most likely be targeting the exact same keywords as the competition. The ultimate goal with keyword research is to find those juicy, low-hanging fruit - the long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are sometimes defined as keyword phrases containing multiple words of four or more. However, this is not how I like to define them. For me, the long-tail keywords are those that have lower volumes of traffic and are less competitive to rank for. In other words, they may contain multiple words or they could contain as few as two words.
Anyway, I wanted to share my method of conducting keyword research in order to hopefully give some insights into the process. For this example, I am going to use the ‘greetings card’ industry in the UK. All the tools I will be using are freely available to everyone. So let’s get started!
I always like to start my research with a basic Google search using my most obvious industry keyword. This will give an idea of who my competitors are and who the big players in the industry are. So, a basic search for [greetings cards] in Google.co.uk produces the following results:

Two of the top four results (funkypigeon.com and moonpig.com) are well known brands that advertise regularly on television. However, the top 2 results are perhaps lesser-known competitors.
Now that you have an idea of who the big players are, it's time to see if we can find out what keywords they are targeting. Let’s take a look at greetingscards.co.uk. When we look at the home page, there doesn’t seem to be an awful lot of text, so let’s turn to using a keyword density tool. SEOBook has a pretty good keyword density tool but I’m going to use the tool from David Naylor Search Marketing. The reason I prefer to use this tool is because it has more options to customize your results and can provide phrases of four or more words in length. When we use the keyword density tool we are provided with the following list:

As you can see, it is a pretty comprehensive list of keyword ideas that we can also use. However, where did all these words come from, considering there was very little text on the homepage? A quick look at the source code reveals the answer. They are still using the Keyword Meta Tag and have stuffed it with around 30 keywords. This is exactly why you shouldn’t still be using the redundant tag as it just gives your competitor insights into the keywords you are targeting.
Übersuggest is a great tool that extracts all the Google autocomplete words for a base keyword. It is really simple to use. All you have to do is put your base keyword in the search box, select a language and country then hit suggest. For [greetings cards] we are presented with the following list of 352 suggestions:

The tool also makes it really easy to select all the keywords so that you can easily copy and paste them into Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool later.
For this next stage, I like to use a tool called mergewords (mergewords.com) to further advance our list. Before you use this tool you will need to think carefully about how to arrange the words in the three columns to get the right combination of words. Once you have done this, you can start filling the boxes with words. For greetings cards, I used the following combination:

This resulted in 468 keyword possibilities.
Having followed these steps, we now have a list of over 800 keywords. However, some of these may be duplicates and some may be unsuitable for other reasons. This is how I start the filtering process. First I input all of the keywords into an excel spreadsheet, then I use the ‘remove duplicates’ tool. I'm using Excel 2011 for Mac, which has a 'remove duplicates' function in the Ribbon's Data tab:

If you are using Excel 2007 or later then you should also be able to easily find this function. However, if you are using an earlier version of Excel, there are still ways to easily remove duplicates. MrExcel.com lists a variety of methods you can use to remove duplicates in both Excel 2003 and 2007.
Twenty-nine duplicates were removed, leaving me with a list of 851 keywords. The next step is to manually go through the list and remove any unsuitable keywords such as those containing brand terms. Unfortunately, there is no suitable way to automate this (that I know of) and you will have to go through the list manually.
After going through the list manually and removing unsuitable keywords, we are now left with 741 keywords.
Now we have a list of 741 keywords, it’s time to use Google’s keyword tool to start refining the list and find out information such as search volumes, competition and local search trends. When using the tool, remember to have all the parameters set correctly. So, make sure you set the tool to [Exact] match types in the correct location (UK in this case) and tick the box to only show ideas closely related to your search. To set the tool to show [Exact] match, just navigate to the left sidebar and select the check-box next to [Exact]. You may have to unselect the check-box for Broad match if it is selected:

After inputting the 741 keywords into the keyword tool, we further refine the list by removing any unsuitable words we may have missed from the previous manual check and remove any keywords with local search volumes of less than 10. This leaves us with a more manageable list of 126 keywords, which we can download as a CSV file. However, we are not quite done with Google’s keyword tool just yet.
We are now going to start adding some more keywords to the list by inserting our refined list of 126 keywords into the keyword tool. Once we have done this you should get around 800 keyword suggestions from Google:

The first thing we should do is to save all the keywords from our original list of 126, to our new list. Next, we can arrange the list of suggestions by competition from lowest to highest. Once this is done, we can now start adding all the keywords with low to medium competition and local monthly search volumes greater than 10. These are our 'juicy' low-hanging fruit keywords.
The final stage is to add all the important keywords from the suggestions that we may have missed previously. Depending on how many keywords you have added from this final stage, you should have a final list of around 280 keywords. To see the list I have created you can visit the blog at my site Crimson Penguin and download it for free!
Two of my favorite tools for keyword research that often get overlooked are Google Trends and Google Insights. However, Google has recently combined the two into a new look Google Trends. This is a great tool for finding valuable insights into your niche keywords and can often help you to make decisions about which specific keywords you should target. Let’s take a look at our example of the greetings card industry:

As you can see from the graph in the top, very slight changes in the keywords can produce drastically different results. Pluralising [birthday card] to [birthday cards] results in twice as much interest over the past 12 months.
Hopefully, I’ve shown you some useful tools and techniques that you can start to use in your own keyword research projects. Armed with this knowledge, I hope you can start to find more valuable long-tail keywords for your clients.
Adam is a professional SEO and owner/founder of Crimson Penguin SEO Services based in Essex. He also works for a leading SEO agency in London. You can connect with Adam on Twitter or Google+

View the original article here