Legal SEO Marketing

Chicago Local SEO Citation Sources

TOP CITATIONS FOR CHICAGO LOCAL LAWYERS Chicago is the third most populous city in the United States, after New York City & Los Angeles. With 2.7 million residents, the Windy City is also the most populous city in Illinois and the American Midwest. O’Hare International Airport  is the busiest in the world, and it also has the largest number of U.S. highways. The city is a major hub for finance, commerce, technology, transportation & telecommunications & a place for businesses of all sizes to thrive. Citation Site D.A. Free / Paid / Recip Listing URL chicagotribune.com 95 Free Click here chicagomag.com/marketplace 77 Paid Click here chicagolandchamber.org 56 Paid Click here chicagochinatown.org/chinatown 49 Paid Click here wilmette.com 43 Paid Click here localfirstchicago.org 42 Free Click here albanyparkchamber.org 30 Paid Click here jeffersonpark.net/members.asp 27 Paid Click here chicagocrusader.com 26 Free Click here paseoboricua.org/business-directory 23 Paid Click here   Citations are important for the Google Local Map listings and its key that you not only have a listing, BUT that your NAP (Name, Address and Phone #) are the EXACT Same in all citation sources. This will help get your site better ranked in the local seo results, along with other things but these are pretty key to get.  Lawyers need other legal site citations, but its key to get citations in your local geographic area. Bright Local has published a list of the top citations for each city and I will be testing these out and reporting back how well these worked.  

Chicago Local SEO Citation Sources Read More »

Top Citations for Lawyers

Local SEO For Lawyers Local Search marketing is becoming even more important these days and getting your law firm to appear in the local search results in Google maps is very key to every online marketing strategy.  One thing you must be aware of are “Citations” of your law firm. WHAT IS A CITATION? A citation is an online reference to yourlaw firm’s name, address and phone number (NAP). Like links to your website, Google uses them when evaluating the online authority of your business. Unlike links though, citations don’t need to be linked to your business’s website in order for you to be credited for them. So, having your NAP listed in plain text is fine. A partial citation is one which includes only part of your NAP – maybe your name and phone number or name and address. This is better than nothing, but not as beneficial as a full citation. A full citation is one which includes your business’s complete NAP. It doesn’t matter how that information is visibly listed (horizontally or vertically), so long as it’s all there. This is an example of a full citation: For a citation to help with your local SEO strategy, it’s important that it exactly matches the NAP on your website and on your Google+ Local page. What format you choose for your citations isn’t important, but picking one format and sticking with it is. You need to be 100% consistent in the name (abbreviations? Ltd?), address (suite number? floor?), and phone number (+312? spaces or no spaces?) used when building citations. For Lawyers there are all kinds of places to get citations including Yelp, Yahoo and many different online yellow page sites. Below are some of the top legal specific places to get citations. Most of them are free and your probably listed BUT the key here is to make sure your listed EXACTLY the same as far as your Firm name, Address and Phone #.  Then also claiming and verifying your listing is always a good idea and usually you can add a bunch of info on your firm, including a link back to your site.   These sites below are listed by Domain Authority (DA) and the higher the #, the better it will be for you to make sure you have a solid listing and a link back to your site if possible. Citation Site D.A. Country Free / Paid Listing URL findlaw.com 92 USA Free Click here nolo.com 87 USA Free Click here lawyers.com 86 USA Paid Click here hg.org 85 ALL Free Click here avvo.com 84 USA Free Click here justia.com 82 USA Free Click here bestlawyers.com 75 ALL Free Click here lawguru.com 72 ALL Free Click here wallethub.com 71 USA Free Click here lawinfo.com 70 USA Paid Click here lawyers.uslegal.com 58 USA Free Click here divorcemag.com 57 USA / CAN Free Click here lawyer.com 54 USA Free Click here legaldocs.com 53 USA Free Click here leadcounsel.org 52 USA Free Click here lawresearch.com 50 USA Paid Click here canadianlawlist.com 50 CAN Free Click here morelaw.com 49 USA Free Click here attorneypages.com 48 USA Paid Click here uslawyersdb.com 45 USA Paid Click here lawlink.com 44 ALL Free Click here statelawyers.com 44 USA Paid Click here riabiz.com 44 USA Free Click here bestattorneyrankings.com 44 ALL Free Click here lawfirms.com 43 USA Free Click here legalhelpmate.com 42 USA Paid Click here findlaw.com 41 ALL Free Click here lawyercentral.com 41 USA Free Click here lawfirmdirectory.org 41 USA Paid Click here lawqa.com 40 USA Free Click here   Local Search Marketing for Attorneys If your law firm needs assistance with LOCAL SEO, contact us today and we will do a FREE Local SEO analysis on your site.  

Top Citations for Lawyers Read More »

Google Page Speed Insights Tool

Does Your Legal Site Load Quickly? Google Hopes So Making sure your website loads quickly is a very important thing and Google has talked a lot about how “High performance web sites lead to higher visitor engagement, retention and conversions”. They also talk about how faster loading web pages can be a factor in how your website can rank in the organic search results at Google. Google PageSpeed Insights Page Speed Insights measures the performance of a page for mobile devices and desktop devices. It fetches the url twice, once with a mobile user-agent, and once with a desktop-user agent. The PageSpeed Score ranges from 0 to 100 points. A higher score is better and a score of 85 or above indicates that the page is performing well. Please note that PageSpeed Insights is being continually improved and so the score will change as we add new rules or improve our analysis. PageSpeed Insights measures how the page can improve its performance on: time to above-the-fold load: Elapsed time from the moment a user requests a new page and to the moment the above-the-fold content is rendered by the browser. time to full page load: Elapsed time from the moment a user requests a new page to the moment the page is fully rendered by the browser. However, since the performance of a network connection varies considerably, PageSpeed Insights only considers the network-independent aspects of page performance: the server configuration, the HTML structure of a page, and its use of external resources such as images, JavaScript, and CSS. Implementing the suggestions should improve the relative performance of the page. However, the absolute performance of the page will still be dependent upon a user’s network connection.  You Can Visit Google’s PageSpeed Tool Here and test your site. Most sites are graphic heavy and have a lot of different things going on and have a lot of requests and things to load every time a person visits the home page. So there  are a number of things you can do in order to improve the load time of your site.   Google has a service now they are offering for free that helps your site load quicker but if your running a WordPress site, your can setup a number of different plugins designed to help your site load quicker.  You can also optimize your images so they will load quicker and a number of other things that can help improve your overall Google score. If your law firm needs assistance with how your site is loading, contact us today. [si-contact-form form=’1′]

Google Page Speed Insights Tool Read More »

Bing Search Engine for Attorneys

Bing Search For Lawyers Bing is never going to beat Google and it’s never going to be as popular, yet it’s still important because it does get a lot of searches and you never know where your next potential client is going to search for you. Also Bing has certain webmaster tools including a solid keyword research tool that can provide great value. So it makes sense that you setup a to make sure your site is submitted to Bing.  I personally like Bing better then Google and have been using it more and more. BING HISTORY Bing (formerly Live Search, Windows Live Search, and MSN Search) is a web search engine from Microsoft. Bing was unveiled by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on May 28, 2009 at the All Things Digital conference in San Diego for release on June 1. Notable changes include the listing of search suggestions while queries are entered and a list of related searches (called “Explore pane”) based on semantic technology from Powerset which Microsoft purchased in 2008. On July 29, 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced a deal in which Bing would power Yahoo! Search. All Yahoo! Search global customers and partners are expected to have made the transition by early 2012. Market Share Before the launch of Bing, the marketshare of Microsoft web search pages (MSN and Live search) had been small but steady. By January 2011, Experian Hitwise show that Bing’s market share had increased to 12.8% at the expense of Yahoo and Google. Bing powered searches also continued to have a higher “success rate” compared to Google, with more users clicking on the resulting links. In the same period, comScore’s “2010 U.S. Digital Year in Review” report showed that “Bing was the big gainer in year-over-year search activity, picking up 29% more searches in 2010 than it did in 2009.” The Wall Street Journal notes the 1% jump in share “appeared to come at the expense of rival Google Inc”.  In February 2011, Bing beat Yahoo! for the first time with 4.37% search share while Yahoo! received 3.93% SUBMIT YOUR SITE TO BING Submitting a URL from your website can be an important first step to being indexed.  There are two ways to accomplish this with Bing: Submission through the Submit your Site to Bing web form: this method is designed to allows web publishers to quickly alert Bing that there new site exist. Bing will crawl the URL you submitted and — provided it meets certain criteria — your page will get indexed over time. The Submit URLs feature in the Configure My Site section in Bing Webmaster Tools: this feature is much faster and allows you to submit 10 URLs per day and a maximum of 50 URLs per month for immediate crawl and indexation. To submit URLs using the Submit URL feature, simply add 1 URL per line and click Submit. The URLs are immediately evaluated for search indexation and when quality criteria are met we will begin to surfacing to searchers. Very useful in helping get important content indexed quickly, but there is a limit of 10 submissions per day, up to 50 (total) per month. Note: the Submit URLs feature in Webmaster Tools is currently restricted to root domains only. ********************* You should not only submit your site but also make sure to have a XML sitemap created and submit that to Bing as well.  Then within the Bing webmaster tools, there are a lot of tools to see how your site is performing within Bing.

Bing Search Engine for Attorneys Read More »

Getting Top Organic Search Results

One of the goals of every lawyer web site is to get ranked high at the search engines for keywords related to the firms location and practice. Especially at Google!   This is what Ive been doing for lawyers for the past 12 years! I remember working at the downtown Chicago law firm of Foran and Schultz and I was in charge of the firms web site, as well as the firms computer network.  Web design was a new thing and it was pretty cool putting up the firms first site, but I was more excited by the fact that the site could also be found at search engines like Alta Vista, Hotbot and good old Yahoo! Google wasnt even in the picture back then, but they were coming! I remember telling the lawyers at the firm that it was an important thing to be found at search engines, they werent so sure and told me not to put in any more overtime on what I called Search engine site optimization! They were wrong because as we all know now, having your site listed at Google in the top spots can make a real difference in getting new clients. There is more to do in todays age then just organic SEO, now theres pay per click marketing, videos, facebook, twitter, linked in, blogs and the list goes on.  Yet its always going to be key to make sure your site is coming up at the top of the search engines for your most important terms. WE GET GREAT RESULTS Getting top search engine rankings involve many things.  There is no one single thing to do, you have to do a lot of things over time. Its all about having a good domain name combined with great solid content and a solid social media and link campaign.   Most lawyers would never have the time to do all of this, so it makes sense to have an expert do it all. If your law firm is looking for assistance with their overall Internet marketing strategy, call us at 630-393-0460.

Getting Top Organic Search Results Read More »

Law Firms Finding Success With SEO

FROM LAWYER CASTING: Alyn-Weiss & Associates has just released a study showing that 59% of law firms have used SEO over the past 24 months(up from 20% in the prior 2 year period). And 20% of firms said they got new business from SEO in 2007-2008 (up from 8% in the prior 1 year period). The average size of firm in the study was 46 lawyers. I'd venture that the 80% of the firms who feel they didn't get new business from their SEO efforts weren't properly tracking traffic and conversions, didn't do the SEO right, or did a poor job of closing leads. Basically, it's somewhat difficult not to get new business (or least get new leads) over time when SEO is done right.  I would agree here that the firms that say they didnt get new clients with SEO, either didnt really do SEO or more then likely didnt track where the new clients came from.   Every lawyer that we have helped with SEO or PPC has gotten new clients as a result.  Josh is correct in that if the SEO is done right, its almost impossible not to get new clents!  Source

Law Firms Finding Success With SEO Read More »

Updated Legal Design & SEO = Top Google Results = New Clients

I blogged a couple weeks back about the first updated site we launchedfor Tax Attorney Ken Sheppard and I said I would be blogging soon about the Top Google Search rankings the site was going to soon have.  I didnt think it would be this soon! Sometimes you have to start over with a site to get the best possible results at the search engines.  In this case we moved the site to a new webhost, created a search engine friendly design with an additional 15 pages of optimized content and fully optimized the site for the search engines.  Just two weeks ago the site could not be found for any keywords, now the site is #1 for Ohio Tax Lawyer, #1 for Ohio Tax Attorney and its basically in the top 10 for all keywords related to Ohio Tax. Its even in the top 10 for national tax keywords such as irs tax attorneys and tax lawyers. These are harder keywords to get ranked for because your competing against everyone, not just attorneys in Ohio. This site is still not 100% done and we are adding more content to the site daily.  No coincidence that the traffic over the last week has more then tripled.  I talked with the client today and he told me he got a high number of calls this week and signed up a few new clients as a result.  So already not even before the site is done, it pays off bigtime with new clients!   Plus he has a better looking site that is easier to navigate, has more content and is ranked in the top 10 for all his keywords, how is every lawyer not doing this? It works!!

Updated Legal Design & SEO = Top Google Results = New Clients Read More »

Bigger Lawfirms Don't Do SEO

Most lawyers that contact me for doing organic search engine optimization or pay per click marketing are smaller law firms and solo attorneys. CAN YOUR FIRMS ATTORNEYS BE FOUND WHEN THEY ARE GOOGLED? I usually notice that bigger law firms websites aren’t optimized and sometimes you can’t even find key partners when "googling" them, let alone finding the firms site for keywords related to their practice areas. I would think that bigger law firms with big marketing budgets would do more with search engine optimization and pay per click marketing.  This is good news though for the smaller firms of the world, they can compete and beat the bigger guys in online advertising. MOST LAWFIRM MARKETING DIRECTORS DONT GET SEO I do have a number of bigger law firms that do recognize the value of search engine optimization and thats usually because of a sharp law marketing director.  Yet I find most law firm marketing directors don’t seem to understand how important it is to have some optimization done on the firms site, at the very least make sure your firm and its partners can be found at Google. I do see more and more lawyers recognizing that online marketing is the wave of the future and replacing the yellow pages and traditional ways to advertise. The latest large law firm client that we are working for is a Canadian law firm with multiple locations including Toronto, New York & London. If you law firm needs assistance with search engine optimization or pay per click marketing, contact us today.

Bigger Lawfirms Don't Do SEO Read More »

SEO Doesn’t Guarantee Blog Visitor Loyalty

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

SEO Doesn’t Guarantee Blog Visitor Loyalty Read More »

Top 5 Search Engines for Law Firms

Ive come up with what I believe are the top 5 search engines or directories that law firms should be most concerned with being listed in. Top 5 Search Engines and Directories for Law Firms: 1) Google – The King of the Search Engines is hard to beat and everyone knows the term "googled". Probably a good reason that Google is used more then any other search engine. So its important when a potential client is looking for information on your law firm and decides to google you, that your law firms web site appears. Its also important being found by key partners names. Usually this isn’t a problem but Ive noticed some big firms not coming up even by firm name. Since Google gets more traffic then any other search engine, its obviously the #1 place your law firm should  be listed in.  Just submitting your site isn’t enough though, you must have at least one other link from another web site. Its also very advantageous if you have a directory listing at both Yahoo and the Open Directory. In addition your site should have plenty of content that is updated on a regular basis. 2) Yahoo – Yahoo has been making a solid comeback after Google knocked them off as top dog in the Search Engine world. They are very important and get a lot of traffic.  Potential clients could very easily search for you at Yahoo instead of Google, SO its very key that your legal web site be found in all of the top search engines. Yahoo has a search directory that you can list your law firm in for $299 per year. Now usually this is a good idea for the value of a link from Yahoo, but the thing to keep in mind, is that you can get into the Yahoo search listings without buying the directory listing.    3)  MSN – MSN Search used to rely on results from the Inktomi index and the Looksmart directory. Those days are gone and MSN just launched a new search engine, so there’s a chance your firm is not in the new MSN.com.     I think its a much improved search engine and feel that Microsoft is committed to overtaking Google, so its obviously important to be listed with MSN. They have a built in user base from people that get computers with Microsoft Internet Explorer set with MSN.com as the starting page. 4) AOL – AOL has been changing things around but they are still basically using the Google results and most AOL and Google searches return identical results.    Still that will change soon and there will be another search engine to optimize for, because right now as long as your in Google, your in AOL.    Its important to be in AOL because they also have a big built in user base that will ONLY use AOL for search purposes, so its important to be in Google and the Open Directory. 5) OPEN DIRECTORY – The Open Directory on its own isn’t very important BUT because Google uses those results for its own directory, its very important be listed at.  Its a free listing IF you can get it. It sometimes takes me 6,7 attempts before I get my clients site listed. Usually it just takes the editor who is reviewing your submission time to get to it, because they aren’t paid and its all volunteer and many categories don’t have editors. Still once you get a listing, then your usually better listed with Google and your rankings improve.  Sometimes you can get multiple listings for your site if you can get listed in different practice areas OR if your firm has different geographic locations.   Its pays to be patient here and get a listing because it will pay off in the long run.

Top 5 Search Engines for Law Firms Read More »