Web Site Tips

Setup a Lawyer Chatbot Virtual Assistant

Chat Service, Chatbots, Legal SEO Marketing, Live Chat, SEO Tips, Web Site Tips /

Chatbot Virtual Assistants for Attorneys I wrote about using a chatbot for your legal site over the last month and there are two different types of chatbots.    One is the kind you will use at Facebook with facebook messenger and facebook ads.  THEN the other kind is the virtual assistant kind that is specifically for your website that I am writing about here. REPLACE YOUR LIVE CHAT TODAY LIVE Chat has been the next big thing for awhile now and a LOT of law firms have those chat boxes setup where they have a “Live” agent ready to answer any questions and collect names, phone #s and email lead info.   They are trained on what to say….almost like ROBOTS!  Wait, how about just using a robot, or BOT?  They pretty much do the exact same thing and the Bot here via AI (Artificial Intelligence) can get smarter as it learns and it can suggest new questions and answers to use. SO usually these Live chat services are PRICEY, like a monthly fee and then a per lead fee.  So for every lead they collect, it can be like $20-30 or more. Maybe its less now but I know its a pretty high fee and if you get 10 leads thats awesome, but for $300 over the week?!   Plus a monthly fee and another vendor to deal with. WHAT IS THE SOLUTION? It’s using a Virtual Assistant Chatbot.    Ive tested this out and its a really awesome system.  It allows you to have a chat box come up where your asking the person if they have any questions.  THEN you can have some answer buttons that they can click on, and you can also program the BOT so that it has answers to many different questions.  SO if someone asks the question “Do you give free consultations”, the BOT will respond with YES if you do, along with some info and links to the form.   Then if they ask for directions or hours or anything related to a specific practice area or attorney name, the BOT will have the answer and will try to engage the user and will have the person leave their name, email and phone #. CHATBOT VIRTUAL ASSISTANT FOR LAWYERS Setup this chatbot box on your website so that you can capture users that might otherwise leave.   Here they might click on the chat and wind up leaving an email or phone number, which is a HOT LEAD!  Plus when someone is looking for info, they appreciate it if you make it easier for them.   So you can program the bot here to answer a lot of questions,     You could also do some pay per click marketing and send the user to a landing page that has the chatbox come up to engage them right away and hopefully at least get the contact info.   ALSO another difference with this system vs the facebook chat system, is that YOU can jump in to the chat and take over and answer any questions live with the person.  OR you can leave it to the bot to follow a script and have a big FAQ library.   This makes sense and the thing here is that once this is setup, it works like a charm.   The BOT works 24/7, 365 days and will email any new leads it gets of any new chats. What answers can my Legal Chatbot Agent provide? You can teach your Agent answers on dozens of questions.  The best part of it is that your Virtual Agent includes Self-Learning features that will automatically detect valuable questions for which it has no answers. More about Self-Learning It is quite complex for website owners to find out what visitors look for (in their own words), what questions they have, and what the best answers are, in order to convert. This is exaclty what your Agent will learn for you, i.e. what questions/answers are most important for visitors to turn into leads. The Agent self-learning feature determines this based on analyzing previous chats against lead generation rate.This in turn enables it to identify important question that have no answers.   Your Agent will send you notifications on newly added “questions” for which it is recommended to provide answers.Once new answers are provided, it use them in chats with visitors, and it will measure the impact of the changes on the lead generation rate, and provide new recommendations. Over the course of weeks and months your Virtual Agent becomes smarter and smarter, making it your best skilled salesmen into the art of converting visitors into leads! Give your Legal Bot a Personality! Your Bot doesnt have to be lame!  Make it so it has a big fun personality, while keeping a professional tone as well.    Yet you can make it so it has non robotic answers showing a good sense of humor.   You can even have it suggest a good joke once in awhile.  Clean of course and maybe even a lawyer joke.  The main thing you want your bot to be is SMART and Helpful. If its also funny, well that a triple threat that your not going to get from most human assistants! HIRE US TO CREATE A BOT FOR YOUR LEGAL WEBSITE We can help you setup a bot like we have on this website.   Your bot can be pretty basic where its just collecting basic info from anyone who engages in a chat. It can also be more advanced where you program it with answers to questions related to your firm and practice. —> Fill out online BOT Contact Form —> Chatbot Marketing For Lawyers —> Facebook Messenger Chatbot (Use now)

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Top 7 WordPress Plugins for Lawyers

Legal Internet Marketing, SEO Tips, Web Site Tips, Wordpress Plugins, Wordpress Software /

Top WordPress Plugins for Attorneys WordPress plugins are great tools for adding and extending functionality to WordPress. Below are the top 7 any law firm or any other business site should have setup. They are all FREE and most of them have some kind of premium version you can buy to expand plugin further but all the free versions are usually plenty for what your going to need from them. There are plenty of handy plugins in WordPress framework which reduce lots of work on your part. The official plugin repository has over 47,000 WordPress plugins and counting. That means there are plugins for almost every function or feature you need on your website.   TOP 7 WORDPRESS PLUGINS FOR LAWYERS #1 – Jetpack (Freemium) A powerful plugin from the brilliant team behind the WordPress software itself (Automattic), Jetpack is a must have plugin for every WordPress website. As the name suggests, it offers a pack of awesome features for your website to fly up high and make it a success. Jetpack takes care of your site security, website performance, traffic growth, image optimization, website appearance and a lot more. Most of all, it protects your website security by preventing brute force attacks. It also monitors your site every five minutes for downtime and instantly notifies you for any issues found. —> Download for FREE #2 – YOAST SEO PLUGIN Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) is one of the most popular WordPress plugins. It allows you to optimize your WordPress site for search engines. It not only helps you add meta tags, it optimizes your site as a whole.  Yoast SEO is an awesome plugin which guides you all the way to create better content and improve your ranking on search results. It focuses on creating the content which is useful to the users as well as technically SEO friendly. The goal is to help the users, gain trust and sustain the rankings which they call sustainable SEO. —> Download Here ************************ #3 – Akismet (Freemium) Akismet is yet another plugin developed by the people behind WordPress (Matt and his team at Automattic). It is one of the default plugins of WordPress that comes with every new WordPress core installation. It is basically an anti-spam plugin which checks all comments and filters out the spammy comments. The plugin provides a status history for each comment so that you can learn which comments were found spammy by Akismet or the moderator. Moderators also can view the number of approved comments for each user, see the URLs in the comment body and remove the suspicious links. The plugin is free for the personal site and blogs while you have to subscribe its monthly plans for commercial sites. The premium plans provide advanced security solution besides spam protection. —> Download Here for Free ***********************  # 4- W3 Total Cache (Freemium) Speed is one of the most important SEO factors. Faster websites rank higher in Google, this means more visitors for your business website and more conversions. W3 Total Cache allows you to serve compressed and cached files to your visitors. This reduces the load on your server and your website becomes faster. W3 Total Cache WordPress plugin is one of the most popular plugins and probably the best caching plugin for WordPress. It features page cache, database caching, object caching, browser caching and a lot more. Besides, it lets you integrate CDN services to reduce page load time. Besides, it has options to minify and HTTP compression of the HTML, JS, and CSS files so that you can save bandwidth up to 80%. —> Download here for free # 5 – All in One Schema.org Rich Snippets Rich Snippets are special markup that you can add to your content and describe your content more precisely to search engines. This information is then used by search engines to show your content differently. For example, star ratings below your product listings, maps when someone searches for your business, and so on. All in One Schema.org rich snippets plugin provides you an easy user interface to generate that markup and use it in your WordPress posts and pages.   —> Download Here  #6 – Everest Forms (FREE) One of the fundamental pages you need in a website is ‘Contact‘ page. No matter how big or small website you have or whatever type of website it is, you definitely need a contact page from where your website audience can contact you. The purpose of contact can be anything; to provide you feedback on your work, reach you out for business deals, or suggestions in general, a well-designed contact page is a must. So, to create contact forms, here is a plugin ‘Everest Forms‘. It’s a modern WordPress contact form plugin with drag and drop interface that lets you build beautiful contact forms easily and quickly. It has a set of general fields along with advanced fields which you can easily drag and drop to create forms. View Everest Forms demo, and learn how it works. The plugin is available for free, however, it comes with a complete set of features to enable you to build full-fledged forms. It features Google reCaptcha support, editable email settings, redirect page options after successful submission, editable form validation message etc. Summing up, it’s an incredible plugin for WordPress contact forms. —> Download here for free   #7 – WP Smush (Freemium) Images are the great assets for your post/ page which easily grab the users’ attention. Uploading images helps you deliver the message many times better that simply the texts can. They make your page look attractive, catchy and engaging. While being so helpful to make you site more appealing to users, images also take up a lot of storage space and slow down your website. You can’t simply afford to ignore the slow site speed and look for the disaster to happen. Wait a while, here’s good news – you can compress images! Yes, you can compress and optimize the images without reducing the quality of the images using WP Smush plugin. It optimizes

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WordPress Plugins for Lawyers: Smush It

Web Site Tips, Website Speed, Wordpress Plugins /

In 2014 everything is starting to become more about SPEED and how fast your site loads.   Google has made a lot of comments about making sure  your site loads quickly and that it is Mobile Friendly.  There are a number of things you can do to make sure your site loads quickly, including making sure you dont use that many large sized images. Yet if you are going to use images, make sure they are optimized and load as quickly as possible.  If you are running wordrpess, then the plugin of Smush It is a very useful plugin that will help optimize your images and hopefully make your site load a little quicker. How does it work? Every image you add to a page or post will be automatically run through Smush.it behind the scenes. You don’t have to do anything different. Existing images You can also run your existing images through Smush.it via the WordPress Media Library. Click on the Smush.it now! link for any image you’d like to smush. As of version 1.4.0 there is a new, experimental Bulk Smush.it feature. You can find the link under the Media Library tab. You can see below that some of the images have been reduced in size. This can add up if you have a lot of images in your site. Errors Sometimes the Smush.it service goes down or is under heavy load. If the plugin has difficulty connecting to Smush.it then automatically smushing is temporarily disabled (currently for 6 hours). You can always re-enable it via the Media > Settings screen or manually smush the image from the Media Library. Yahoo’s excellent Exceptional Performance series recommends optimizing images in several lossless ways: stripping meta data from JPEGs optimizing JPEG compression converting certain GIFs to indexed PNGs stripping the un-used colours from indexed images Smush.it offers an API that performs these optimizations (except for stripping JPEG meta data) automatically, and this plugin seamlessly integrates Smush.it with WordPress. Download the Smush it Plugin here…

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SEO Tips for Lawyers: Use Unique Titles

SEO Tips, Web Site Tips /

What is a Title? The TITLE is one of the most important things to focus on with organic SEO.  A title shows the name of a web page and is displayed by the browser, usually at the top of your computer screen, and tells a reader what page they are on. Meta titles are “read” by search engine robots and seen by site visitors. What you put between the <TITLE> and </TITLE> element is very important so try to get it right. The metal title is very important for helping the page rank higher in search engine returns and should be written to cater to search engine robots first and to site visitors second. Meta titles should make sense to the reader, but the wording should be based on keyword search popularity and relevance to the rest of the web page including other meta data and content. USE UNIQUE TITLES ON ALL PAGES Most lawyers don’t even realize that they are using the same TITLE on every page, they dont know what a title is or how important it is to organic SEO.  You want to make sure that for every page you have, especially your more important practice area pages, that you create a unique title for each page and include your most important keywords in the Title. You don’t want to overdo it though and stuff your title with as many keywords as you can think of, this is not a good idea. You want to limit your TITLE to about 65-70 characters and include two keyprases that are related to the page and that you want to be ranked on at the search engines. So if your a Chicago Criminal Lawyer and have a practice area page devoted to Drug Charges, then you want to have a TITLE that includes keywords related to your location (Chicago and Illinois) and the practice area of Drug Law. So a sample TITLE would read Chicago Drug Lawyers | Illinois Drug Offenses It’s also a good idea to include these two main keyword phrases that your using in the title on the actual page within the content of page.  Having unique Titles is important and can make the difference in getting ranked for your most important keywords at Google.

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Make Sure Your Legal Site Loads Fast

Legal Internet Marketing, Web Site Tips, Website Speed /

Making sure that your legal web site loads fast is important for a number of reasons.  The obvious is that you want to make sure the site loads quickly for any visitor that comes to your site, if the site doesn’t load right away or takes over a few seconds, then that potential client may just leave your site. Another reason is that your site may not rank as high at the search engines if its not loading fast. Sometimes you might not even know that your site is loading slowly and at times it could be that your web host has issues with its web server or database server.  It can happen at times where your site just doesnt come up at all for a few minutes. Its important to check your site out and test the site load time.  You can access this tool in the Google webmaster account to see how fast your site loads. EXAMPLE OF A WEB HOST CAUSING ISSUES I had noticed a few sites of a clients loading very slowing at times and I checked with their web host and got the usual excuses and run around.  Yet the more I looked at the site and examined why it was not loading faster, I came to the conclusion it was the web hosts database server causing load time issues. SO what I did was move the site to another web host and almost instantly I could tell the site loaded much faster. I also checked with the Google site speed and it went from like an outrageous load time of 9 seconds to 2.2, which was much better.  Also a week later, I noticed a sharp increase in organic SEO rankings.  SO make sure your web site is loading fast! GOOGLE ENJOYS SITES THAT LOAD FAST! Google has talked a lot recently about how its important for your website to load fast and how that’s now related to your organic SEO rankings.  So if your site loads slowly, that might be a reason your sites not better ranked at Google.  Also important is that if your site is loading slow, it might be turning visitors who are potential clients off and having them leave the site out of frustration. FROM GOOGLE BLOG ABOUT IMPORTANCE OF SITE SPEED At Google, we are passionate about speed and making the web faster, and we are glad to see that many website owners share the same idea. A faster web is better for both users and businesses. A slow loading landing page not only impacts your conversion rate, but can also impact AdWords Landing Page Quality and ranking in Google search. To improve the performance of your pages, you first need to measure and diagnose the speed of a page, which can be a difficult task. Furthermore, even with page speed measurements, it’s critical to look at page speed in context of other web analytics data. Therefore, we are thrilled to announce the availability of the Site Speed report in the new Google Analytics platform. With the Site Speed report you can measure the page load time across your site. Uses for the Site Speed Report Content: Which landing pages are slowest? Traffic sources: Which campaigns correspond to faster page loads overall? Visitor: How does page load time vary across geographies? Technology: Does your site load faster or slower for different browsers? WORDPRESS PLUGIN – W3 CACHE W3 Total Cache IS A WORDPRESS PLUGIN for Lawyers that improves the user experience of your site by improving your server performance, caching every aspect of your site, reducing the download times and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration. – DOWNLOAD HERE

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Getting Rid of Spam in Your Contact Forms

Contact Forms, Web Site Tips, Wordpress Plugins /

If you have a contact form on your lawyer web site or legal blog, then odds are you have gotten your share of spam contact form emails. If you dont have proper CAPTCHA Security, then you might get 1000’s of spammer contact form emails, which are really irritating. You can beat the spammers easily by making sure you have the latest wordpress contact form plugin with captcha security. WHAT IS CAPTCHA? A CAPTCHA is a program that protects websites against bots by generating and grading tests that humans can pass but current computer programs cannot. For example, humans can read distorted text as the one shown below, but current computer programs can’t: The term CAPTCHA (for Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) was coined in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas Hopper and John Langford of Carnegie Mellon University. So the bottom line is that you want to have the Captcha security feature on your contact form. If you have a WordPress site, then it can be much easier to set this feature up.  Most of the contact form plugins today have some sort of Captcha security you can setup that forces the user who filles out the form, to have to put in the 4 digit code before hitting submit. CONTACT FORM 7 – Download it here Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on. This is a pretty simple form and one that Ive used in the past but sometimes I have found that if you dont update the plugin or the Captcha plugin, spam can sometimes still get through or an error message will come up on the captcha portion of the form. SO I would now recommend using the contact form plugin below, the Fast Secure Contact Form. FAST SECURE CONTACT FORM – Download it here This plugin allows a webmaster to easily create and add contact forms to WordPress. The contact form will let the user send emails to a site’s admin. An administration panel is present, where the webmaster can create and preview unlimited forms. Features a super easy admin panel, multi-form feature, autoresponder, no templates to mess with, and an option to redirect visitors to any URL after the message is sent. Includes CAPTCHA and Akismet support to block all common spammer tactics. Spam is no longer a problem. This is a VERY GOOD contact form solution.  You can create multiple forms, you can add them to pages and to your sidebar easily as a widget.   You can setup a confirmation page that the user is taken to after filling out the form, this is a good idea for multiple reasons. Once this is setup, you can then setup a Google performance goal in Google analytics or a conversion in Google adwords. If your site is not in WordPress, then there are other ways to add the Captcha security feature.  Don’t let the spammers win! Upgrade your site today, and as long as you have this form, you wont get many spams via the contact form, its a great solution. CAPTCHA: Telling Humans and Computers Apart Automatically A CAPTCHA is a program that protects websites against bots by generating and grading tests that humans can pass but current computer programs cannot. For example, humans can read distorted text as the one shown below, but current computer programs can’t:

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