The Search

Most people still begin their search for a lawyer by asking family, friends and other people they trust.

And of course, people don’t refer people that trust them to just anybody. People refer those that trust them to lawyers that they trust.

And so building trust with the people around you is the most important part of business development.

But not everyone knows a lawyer they trust. And so sometimes, people search elsewhere to find the right lawyer for them. And even those that are referred by someone they trust will probably want to get more information about the lawyer to whom they were referred.

And it should really come as no surprise that people turn to the internet to find information. For the most part, that means search engines (read Google).

But people don’t search in the ways that you might think. For example, many lawyers think that their potential clients search for them with some variation of:

[their city] [their practice area] [attorney or lawyer or law firm]

And there’s no doubt that some people do search like this, I’ve seen the web analytics. But these tend to represent a smaller number of the total relevant search universe even for lawyers that command prominent positions in search engines for these terms.

Instead, most people are looking for information more generally. They might have questions about their particular legal circumstances. Other times, they might be investigating something that happened to them and not even yet realize that they should discuss their situation with a lawyer.

And the lawyers that supply this demand with both relevant and quality information will find their pages bubbling to the top of search results, and their listings getting clicked generating a visitor.

But visitors don’t pay office overhead, clients do.

Conversion

Marketing people talk a lot about conversion. For us, conversion ultimately means converting a potential client into a paying client. But before we get to paying clients, we need to convert visitors into potential clients. In other words, lawyers must motivate their visitors to inquire about their services.

And this can be much more difficult than you realize.

You see, many lawyers can wrap their heads around generating visitor traffic. But visitor traffic that doesn’t convert into potential client inquiries is largely meaningless. So, when they churn out crappy web content that gets indexed and even drives visitor traffic, they can’t figure out why the phone isn’t ringing.

And the answer is that when they arrived at the lawyer’s site, they weren’t impressed. At least not impressed enough to contact the firm. And so they head back to continue their search.

Visitor traffic is only valuable if it supplies your visitors’ demand for information.

Clearly, there are other types of visitors worth attracting to your web pages. Friends, family, other lawyers, etc. And what these people find when they arrive at your pages will have an impact on them too. Don’t kid yourself. They might not tell you, but if they think your pages are trash, it has an impact on them. And sometimes, if they’re sufficiently “trashy” it might make them hesitate to send people who trust them to you.

Of course, the conversion process goes well-beyond what people find on your web pages. There are unlimited reasons why someone who inquires about your services ultimately decides not to hire you. Maybe they perceive you as too expensive. Maybe you don’t seem experienced enough to handle their situation. Maybe they just don’t like the clothes that you’re wearing.

The point is that all of these dominoes must fall in the right place and at the right time in order for someone to go from searching for a lawyer to hiring a lawyer.

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Identifying Web Traffic by Source

Before we get into how to increase traffic, we need to understand these traffic sources and how we’re going to measure them. Assuming you’re using Google Analytics, viewing your traffic by source is quite easy. Simply navigate to Traffic Sources > Overview:

By default, assuming you’re receiving traffic from these sources, you should see Search Traffic, Referral Traffic & Direct Traffic. Unless you’ve specifically implemented campaign tracking, you probably won’t see traffic from Campaigns:

Search Traffic

As its name implies, the search traffic report includes visitor traffic from search engines. It’s important to note that the search overview report includes search traffic for both organic and paid search visitors. It also includes traffic from a variety of search engines, not just Google. If you’re running paid search advertising (PPC, Adwords, etc) it’s important that you have Analytics properly implemented to distinguish between organic and paid search traffic. I’ve seen inexperienced (read unscrupulous) internet marketing consultants report paid search traffic as organic. That’s not cool.

As you probably already know, increasing search traffic is done in two primary ways. First, regarding paid search traffic, you simply pay search engines for this traffic. This is how search engines make most of their money. It’s how search engines like Google make a little over thirteen billion dollars per quarter.

Admittedly, having success with paid search is a bit more complicated than merely paying search engines. There are a number of factors that will dictate whether you realize a return on your paid search investment. Keyword selection, bid management, ad copy, landing pages, cost per acquisition, quality score, etc, must all work in harmony to get from impression, to click, to conversion, to profitable client. Unless you know what you’re doing, it’s likely that you’ll fail to generate a return and conclude that paid search advertising simply doesn’t work.

Second, there’s organic search traffic. Generally speaking, when we talk about increasing organic search traffic, we’re talking about search engine optimization (SEO). But SEO is an umbrella term that has come to mean a lot of things to many different people. I think AJ Kohn’s definition of SEO in 2012 is helpful:

SEO is about generating productive organic search traffic by matching query intent with relevance and value. The implication of this definition is that SEO must draw upon an increasing number of disciplines including design, user experience, information architecture and conversation rate optimization.

Put a somewhat similar way, SEO is about supplying a search engine user’s demand that motivates the user to take a desired action.

That desired action can be a variety of things. For example, the desired action could be to buy something from the website. Alternatively, it could be to subscribe, comment, link to, share or otherwise help publicize something.

In many ways, SEO is becoming more and more like marketing your law firm before the internet. Sure, there is a web-technical component to SEO, after all, search engines, while sophisticated, are just software. Which means, they don’t speak fluent human, at least not yet.

But SEO activities shouldn’t be limited solely to online activities. In fact, there are a lot of things you can do offline that can have a profound impact on your visibility within organic search results.

Referral Traffic

Next up is referral traffic. Referral traffic is made up of visitors to your site who came from another domain/page from somewhere else on the internet. The referral traffic report:

lets you see traffic levels from expected sources, but also lets you see whether there are unexpected sources, such as a product review or news story you didn’t know about, or a popular blogger who discovered your site.

Referral traffic can be an extremely good indicator of the effectiveness of your online marketing activities. In a nutshell, referral traffic means that someone clicked on a link from somewhere else to your site. Here are some common examples of how this happens:

• You leave a thoughtful comment on someone else’s blog and your name is a link back to your site.
• Your work is cited by an online author and the citation includes a link back to your article, page or post.
• You are interviewed by a journalist who provides a link to your site so that their readers can learn more about you.

These are just a few really basic ways that referral traffic is generated. Again, if you’re doing real “stuff” online, this referral traffic will help attract real people who are interested in learning more about you, what you write and what you do.

On the other hand, if you’re comment spamming, article spamming, or otherwise link spamming, you’re probably not going to earn healthy referral traffic. In fact, if you get referral traffic from these methods at all, it’s likely that it will be unwanted and potentially do harm to your reputation.

So, what can you do to increase meaningful referral traffic? Here are a few ideas:

• Commenting – Go find some local news sites and relevant legal blogs to follow. Read the articles/posts. When you have something meaningful to say, leave a comment. Where the site prompts you to add your website, include a link to your site. Even better, include a link to a specific page on your site, perhaps your bio, perhaps a post you did that furthers the discussion.
• Write Good Stuff – Admittedly, easier said than done. However, your best source of natural links that will lead to referral traffic is going to depend upon the quality of the stuff you publish. If you write stuff that resonates with people, they’re more likely to link to it and share it. If people are reading them or following them, you’ll pick-up referral traffic from them.
• Profiles – Claim, updated and optimize various legal and social profiles. Include links to your site. Legal profile sites like Avvo, can be an excellent source of referral traffic.
• Q & A Sites – Likewise, answering questions on Q & A Sites, again Avvo is a good example, will generate referral traffic back to your site. The better your answers, the better the quality and quantity of referral traffic that you can expect.
• Video – Video is the future of the web. And video is very effective for engaging internet users and motivating them to embed, like, share, link to, etc. If you produce videos and publish them to a YouTube channel, it’s likely that YouTuve will very quickly become a major source of referral traffic.

Direct Traffic

As Avinash defines it:

Direct traffic contains all Visits to your website where in people arrived at your site directly (by typing the url) or via a bookmark.

The direct traffic report provides insight into which URLs your visitors easily remember, appear in auto-completion or are bookmarked. Direct traffic includes visitors that type your domain into their address bar.

Direct traffic can come from people who are regular readers of your blog. It can include former and current clients. A certain segment probably includes word of mouth referrals. Or people driven to your site by some form of offline marketing campaign.

Steadily rising direct traffic is an excellent sign of a healthy growing professional reputation. These are people that are by-passing other channels to get directly to you!

You can increase your direct traffic in a variety of ways. Here are some of the most effective:

• Create a great web resource – Creating a great online resource will motivate people to bookmark your pages for later reference.
• Make friends – Making friends in the real world will help increase direct traffic. People will type your site or blog’s address directly into their browser to learn more about you.
• Offline Stuff – Be sure to include your web address in offline marketing materials. Put it in your business cards, direct mail pieces, etc. Experiment with using different landing pages. This can be a really good way to test what copy motivates people to visit your site.

If you’re working to increase direct traffic, be sure to make your URLs clear, logical and easy to remember. They also need to be pretty short. People aren’t going to bother with long, confusing URLs that include a lot of hyphens.

Campaign Traffic

If you’re a more sophisticated Google Analytics user, you should begin to explore implementing various campaigns. This is where you can really dive into some key intelligence about how and from where people are arriving at your site. If you’re using Adwords, you can chop-up your data down to the keywords, specific landing pages and ad copy that generated a phone call or a form-fill conversion.

You should also set-up campaign tracking for your email marketing campaigns. This will help you understand what people on your email lists want to receive from you.

If you’re interested in learning more about increasing, measuring, monitoring and tracking your website traffic from a variety of sources, sign-up for our free website audit service. We’re happy to help you understand your traffic and provide our opinions as to your best opportunities for growth.

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Content is king.

Just write great content.

If you write it, they will come.

But what do these mean?

What’s the best word? What’s the best sentence? Paragraph? Book?

There’s little doubt that one-hundred people will have one-hundred different opinions. And this is really true for any content. Including, of course, web content.

In fact, it seems that the most we can say about content is whether it achieves the purpose for which it was created. Of course, the purposes for content creation are numerous.

Some content is created because, “A writer’s gotta write.”

There is content created to communicate a very specific idea.

There is content for explaining a technical system or process.

Some to elicit an emotional response from readers.

Some content is created solely for the creator, not to be viewed by others.

And all of these purposes exist in all of the media in which content is created.

Books, television, paint and steel, to name a few. And yes, also on the internet.

But when we talk about “great content” online, it’s often thought of in terms of the content’s effectiveness to attract readers, subscribers, comments, likes, shares, links, etc.

Of course, there are a lot of content creators, even online, who couldn’t care less about who sees what they create and how others respond to it.

But in terms of creating great web content as it is commonly understood, “greatness” is better described as ability to achieve an intended result.

And at least one purpose of content creation, for some people, is to earn meaningful attention for their business.

Effective Online Business Content

Even within the very narrow sub-universe of online business content, there are seemingly limitless purposes, goals and objectives for content creation.

While most business content is ultimately created to earn more business, it can serve many other important functions before earning new clients.

For example, one very popular purpose for content creation is to earn attention that increases visibility in search results. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of content created for that purpose fails to meet its intended goal. And that’s largely due to two main reasons:

1. People think that they can “trick” search engines into deeming their content great.
2. People have little to no understanding of how search engines work, and more importantly, what they’re trying to achieve.

So, let’s talk about what search engines mean by “great content.” Well, at least what one search engine means:

One key element of creating a successful site is not to worry about Google’s ranking algorithms or signals, but to concentrate on delivering the best possible experience for your user by creating content that other sites will link to naturally—just because it’s great.

When you’re writing a post or article, think about:

Would you trust the information in this article?

Is the article useful and informative, with content beyond the merely obvious? Does it provide original information, reporting, research, or analysis?

Does it provide more substantial value than other pages in search results?

Would you expect to see this in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?

Is your site a recognized authority on the subject?

And there’s little doubt that the more useful, informative, valuable, etc, that a piece of content is, the more likely people will be to read, subscribe, share, link to, etc.

But there’s an important assumption built-in there:

That the content resonates with its audience in a way that motivates them to take action.

Let me put it a different way, you can show Shakespeare to a 7th grader, but most won’t be motivated to read it, like it, share it, etc.

On the other hand, you can show them a video of Psy, and they’re likely, not only to share it, but to re-create their own versions and dress up as him for Halloween.

Get it?

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