Why Organic Search Rankings Are MUCH more valuable then Pay Per Click

Organic Search Engine Optimization /

Many law firms pay in order to have top rankings at the search engines via pay per click programs like Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing.  Each time someone clicks on the ad for a certain keyword, they pay a certain price to Google or Yahoo.  This can get very expensive if your bidding on highly competitive keywords, many times costing more then $10 per click. Organic search engine positions on the other hand are free!  They are the gift that keep on giving and if you have one of the top 10 or 20 positons, you will get a nice flow of traffic from people that are interested in your legal services.    The organic results are the ones on the left side of the page and people tend to trust organic results more then paid results, because anyone can buy their way to the top but with organic results, you have to earn your way to the top! EXAMPLE OF ORGANIC SEARCH ENGINE SUCCESS I have a legal client that does both organic optimization and pay per click marketing. Here is an example of how valuable organic results are for a law firm versus pay per click results.  This firm was doing a lot of PPC marketing for bankruptcy related keywords but stopped doing it because of how high the cost was.   The cost for the term chicago bankruptcy lawyer at Google adwords is an average of $12.62 per click for a top 3 position.  Same thing for most chicago bankruptcy terms, in the $10-15 per click range. Luckily for this client, we have been developing thier organic presense for the past few years and we not only optimized the firms main site, but we created a legal mini site for the chicago bankruptcy law practice.  So the firm has a very strong organic presence at Google and other search engines. At Google for the term chicago bankruptcy law the mini site is ranked #1 and the main site is ranked #6. So TWO top 10 listings for a competitive and very expensive keyword.  If they were paying per click and got just 20 clicks per site, it would cost more then $400 just for 40 total clicks on one keyword. The firm gets much more then 20 clicks and are top 10 for many other keywords in the organic listings at Google.  The senior partner told me the other day that they are getting about 2-3 referrals a week for bankruptcy work and its all coming from the organic listings because they stopped the pay per click campaigns for those keywords.  So they are saving huge money on the clicks and the traffic from the organic results are resulting in new business. Pay per click marketing is a great idea but in the long run, you must have good organic listings or your going to pay much more overall for your online advertising. We can assist your law firm with building its organic search engine presense, contact us today.

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Rapper 50 Cent Sues in New York over Internet ad

Uncategorized /

Rapper 50 cent on Friday sued Internet advertising company Traffix Inc. for using his image without permission in the graphic "Shoot the Rapper" ad, which he says promotes violence and threatens his safety. The lawsuit, filed in New York State Court seeks a minimum of $1 million in damages. The "vile, tasteless and despicable" use of 50 Cent’s image was "completely unauthorized" and "quite literally calls for violence against" him, the lawsuit says.

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Getting The Right Kind of Links to your Site

Legal Internet Marketing /

Its important that you have other websites that links to your legal site. Yet it’s not the number of links you get but the quality of the links.  Getting one link from a high ranking well ranked site is much better then getting a 100 links from link farms, sites that have nothing to do with your site or sites that have no existing search engine rankings. Getting links from established directories can be very valuable and are considered high quality valuablelinks. Links from the Yahoo directory, the Open Directory, .EDU sites and other business and legal directories can be very valuable in your overall search engine marketing plan.  Contact us today for more information.

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Upgrading Your Lawfirms Web Site

New Legal Web Design /

Updating your law firms website can be a good idea, especially if you have an older design with outdated content.  Clients expect to see a professional looking website that is easy to navigate and easy to find via the search engines.  If you have an older looking website that is not easy on the eyes or is not easy to navigate, you might lose some potential clients. We have helped a number of lawyers upgrade their sites from basic one page sites to larger sites with loads of content, upgraded images, firm logos and flash animation. The lastest law firm we have helped upgrade its site is The Law Offices of Robert Aronov, a New York Real Estate Lawyer.  We have expanded the site and included practice area pages for each of the firms practice areas, real estate headlines, legal resources and more. Each page is also optimized for the search engines and the site was built from the ground up with search engines in mind.

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SEO Doesn’t Guarantee Blog Visitor Loyalty

Legal SEO Marketing, Organic Search Engine Optimization /

Good post from Andy Beal about how most traffic to your blog will come from the search engines, BUT that its not enough, you must provide quality content relevant to what people are seeking for your blog to really flourish. ***  Mixed blessings for SEM come from a Boston University study entitled Traffic Characteristics and Communication Patterns in the Blogosphere. First, the good news: the majority of blog traffic comes from search engines. Search engines accounted for 43% of referral traffic in the blogosphere. Hurray for search engine marketers! Their diagram of referral traffic (below) does not include the 28% of blogosphere traffic without any referral data (probably bookmark or type-in traffic). Now for the bad news: “Despite the intimacy between traffic and search, however, optimizing a blog for search engine algorithms does not win the blogs retention or popularity,” as MarketingVOX put it. Yep, all the rankings in the world don’t make your blog well read, popular or sticky. You have to do that. SOURCE:  Marketing Pilgrim

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Google Still The Search Leader

Google Search Engine /

Hitwise’s latest numbers indicate that Google, already the clear leader among search engines in the US, is still growing at a pretty healthy rate. All the other major search engines have declined in the last year. Google, on the other hand, now drives 64% of US searches—10% growth over last year.   Google is obviously the most important search engine to have your law firms website listed at. SOURCE : Marketing Pilgrim

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Can Your Law Firm Live Without Microsoft Vista?

General Legal News /

Good article on the new Windows vista system from law.com. Vista is the successor to Windows XP, the PC operating system currently used by over 400 million people. After more than five years of intensive efforts, Windows Vista is finally complete. This new operating system is a major Windows update with lots of new functionality and features. The words Microsoft uses to present its new operating system are "Confident, Clear, Connected." It is a complex product and a big product, 50 million lines of code. It’s the first Windows version to provide developers with a major new programming model in ten years. This article looks at what is new about Vista, pros and cons of upgrading, hardware requirements and how this new operating system will impact the technology path of your office.

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Can Subdomains Violate a Trademark?

Legal Internet Marketing /

Article from ClickZ about a lawsuit involving how far trademark infringement can go when applied to a subdomain. A lawsuit that had the potential to define how far trademark infringement can go when applied to subdomains has been settled out of court. The lawsuit was filed by California non-profit religious organization Jews for Jesus against Google in response to a blogger who set up a blog critical of the group at jewsforjesus.blogspot.com. According to attorney and Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman, the case could have set some precedent about third-level subdomains (like the "blog" part of http://blog.clickz.com). While trademark law has been shown to apply to a regular domain name, it has not yet been applied to third-level ones, and it’s not clear that it would apply, he said. It would also help define Google’s responsibility in what subdomains it allows to be registered. The case was settled by Jews for Jesus and the blogger, who transferred the site over to them. Since the issues were never decided by a judge, the world will have to wait for the next lawsuit to find the answers to those questions.

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Law Firm Web Sites: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

General Legal News /

Good article about law firm web design by Jim Austin of The Legal Intelligencer. Some interesting highlights… Fewer firms are using "splash" pages — animated graphics or Flash presentations with little to no content. Splash pages increase download times, confuse search engines and can discourage visitors looking for content. Also, firms are moving away from tired legal clip art — columns, scales, briefcases, etc. The decrease in splash pages and big, boring graphics also lets firms make better use of the real estate on their home pages for constantly changing content, to highlight big news and upcoming events, and to tie print advertising campaigns to the firm’s Web site. "Lawyer bios are still the single most important part of a law firm site," Buchdahl said. He said he is particularly impressed with firms like Arent Fox, which has made of point of adding a "life beyond the law" section to lawyer biographies, outlining lawyers’ hobbies, interests and other details of the person behind the legal credentials.

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How To Setup Custom Domain Name For Blog

Domain Names /

You can create a basic blog using most blogging services like Typepad or Blogger but your then stuck with a generic domain name. If you want to use a customized domain name like www.legalsearchmarketing.com, you must first setup some advanced settings in the blogging software and then also with your web hosting or domain accounts. Here are the steps needed at Typepad to setup a customized domain name with your registar. 1)  Setup your blog with Typepad and then goto the control panel, choose "site access" and then "domain mapping". Then you need to run through the wizard to setup the domain. 2)  Setup your domain name with your registar like Godaddy.com and make sure the domain name is parked. 3)  At Godaddy.com, choose Total DNS Control and create a CNAME record and enter the information from the Godaddy wizard in step #1. 4)  Then once the CNAME record is setup, go back to the typepad blog and the domain mapping section and set the domaim name as "active". That’s it, now instead of having a long domain name with the typepad.com address, you can have a geographic specific keyword rich domain name like Chicago Estate Planning Law. Not all registars will allow you to make advanced DNS changes and sometimes you might have a domain name that is already setup with a web hosting account, in that case you can usually make the same kind of edits with your web host.

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