Will Google Plus become the most widely used online social network? Or will the majority of Google users hate it?
I have no idea.
But I do know that Search, Plus Your World is having a huge impact my search results.
search engine marketing
As the end of the year approaches, the web and search prognosticators have ramped-up their prognosticating. There’s no shortage of articles about why Siri is a Google killer, and to the contrary, why Siri is no threat to Google whatsoever. So what does the future look like for Google, Siri, and your law firm?
According to Divorce Discourse’s Lee Rosen:
Law firm owners obsess about ranking well on Google. That game is coming to an end. It’s time to focus on Siri.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the science of refining your website so that it attracts more visitors, thus producing new business leads and calls from potential clients. Research shows that firms that the top fact that the No. 1 online marketing tactic used by high-growth firms is search engine optimization.
Do you know the difference between organic and paid search results? According to a 2005 Pew internet user study:
38% of searchers are aware of a distinction between paid and unpaid results; 62% are not.
Admittedly, 2005 is a long time ago when we’re talking about the web. And it’s very likely that those numbers have improved in the last 6 years. Nonetheless, it has come to my attention that many lawyers are still unfamiliar with the differences between organic and paid search results, and what role they might play in law practice marketing.
A recent post here on Lawyerist highlighted an adjustment that Google has recently made to its algorithm to affect the display order of search engine results pages (SERPs) based upon the authority of the author in addition to the the authority of the actual page or domain. While it is likely that this change will have some effect on Google’s algorithm and will help to make authority more portable and somewhat less domain-centric, this adjustment does not likely represent a tectonic shift in the way the algorithm works or, for that matter, how content is published on the Internet. On the contrary, the adjustment is simply an additional means to accomplish what Google has sought to accomplish from its beginning, i.e. use signals, often social signals, to attribute authority to relevant content that is high-quality and order the SERPs accordingly.
Blogging, Facebook, Twitter, online review sites… In a very short time, the Internet has evolved into a publishing platform for the masses. And with this widespread growth of access to Internet publishing, has come a cacophony of Internet noise and information overload. However, in the marketplace of ideas, “the true and sound will survive; the false and unsound will be vanquished.” And helping us navigate this Internet tapioca is the aim of search engines, like Google.
Is a legal blog effective for business development? In Inside Straight: Business Development (Part 3), Above The Law contributor, and former prolific niche legal blogger, Mark Herrmann, concludes that “it depends on what you want.” Here are seven positives that he took away from his legal blog experience:
- He became a better lawyer.
- He influenced the law.
- He became plugged in to events in his area of the law.
- He raised his, and his firm’s, professional profile in his particular field of law.
- He received invitations that further raised his profile in the field.
- He got a book deal.
- He had fun.
Guest post from Troy Lightfield.
There are many law firms that allocate large marketing budgets to pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. But when asked, they have very little data or knowledge of what they’re actually getting for their spend.
Questions around conversion, what a lead is worth or even which keywords they are buying can send them into a defensive position. It’s not their fault….entirely! With thousands of self-proclaimed SEM gurus online, it can be hard to determine which ones are legitimate professionals.
What follows is a timeline from point-of-sale to the end result : how to easily recognize the snake oil salesman when hiring a pay-per-click management firm.
http://flic.kr/p/6M7fJN
As we anticipated, the Google local experiment has become a reality. On October 27, 2010, Google announced a significant change that, in my humble opinion, will have a huge impact on local search visibility for law firms. According to Google, Place Search is,
. . . a new kind of local search result that organizes the world’s information around places. We’ve clustered search results around specific locations so you can more easily make comparisons and decide where to go.
If Place Search hasn’t rolled out in your area, you can preview the differences with this link.
Let’s take a look at how this change will impact localized legal services searches.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/subcess/
Without fail, the most difficult part of creating and maintaining a website is the content development. Your website content should be constantly updated with the help of the blog that your website is built on. However, creating the initial information and getting it published can be a painful process and will invariably drag on without a few guidelines. Use these five steps to help outline your process and create the momentum to get it done. Another helpful tip is to give yourself a deadline – this should not take more than a week.
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