December 2007
GET ON THE WEB EFFECTIVELY
BY MARK ROSCH, INTERNET FOR LAWYERS
Why Have a Web Site at All?
Because many attorneys have been successful at marketing their services via traditional means, including Yellow Page advertising, brochures, business cards, and perhaps even radio and television ads, some might wonder “Why do I even need a Web site at all?”
According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, nearly three-quarters of American adults now have access to the Internet at home, and more than half of American homes have high-speed Internet connections. Earlier Pew studies found that “On a typical day… some 70 million American adults logged onto the Internet [to find some sort of information].” Lawyers who do not have a Web presence will not reach these people.
Law firms of all sizes have gotten this message, but solo attorneys have been the slowest to take advantage of the Internet’s marketing capabilities. As early as 2003, 100% of law firms with 50 or more attorneys who responded to the American Bar Association’s Legal Technology Survey had a Web site. While this might be expected of firms with 50+ attorneys, even smaller firms are building their Web presence. According to the recently-released 2006-2007 edition of the ABA’s technology survey, over two-thirds of small firms (67% of respondents with 2-9 attorneys) responding to the survey have a Web site (up from over 50% in 2003 and only 6% in 1997). Surprisingly, only 32% of those solo attorneys responding to the recent ABA survey have a Web site; however, this is nearly double the 16.9% who indicated they had a Web site in the 2003 survey.
Insuring the Usefulness & ‘Find-ability’ of Your Web Site
While law firms of varying sizes are all competing for the same business on the Internet, the cost-effective nature of Web sites can somewhat level the playing field between large firms, small firms, and sole practitioners.
Whether you are launching your first Web site or updating an existing site, it’s important to examine a site from a strategic marketing perspective (focusing on whether potential clients can easily find and use your Web site), rather than from a strictly aesthetic perspective.
To be most effective in attracting potential clients, a law firm Web site must be:
· Usable
· Informative
· Aesthetically Pleasing
· Findable
Elements of a Successful Web Site
The purpose of a successful Web site is to attract and retain clients and address their legal concerns. To reach these goals, first consider the site’s overall presentation, much of which will depend upon the selection of its programming language and graphics.
How showy should the site be?
Should it be developed principally in plain HTML or with Flash (an aptly named Web design application)?
Should the site include any audio component, such as music or spoken words?
How creative or complicated should the graphic elements be?
A labor law firm that represents management might want a more straightforward-looking site designed in HTML. A “showier” site, designed using the Flash multi-media programming language, might alienate a potential client looking for a more conservative image. However, an entertainment lawyer’s potential clients, who are members of the entertainment industry, may expect a site with some panache, even from their lawyer.
When Flash is used to design the entire homepage, it is common practice to post a prominent link that allows users to skip that introduction. By offering this bypass, visitors who cannot view Flash elements (because they have yet to download the Flash plug-in), find it too slow to load (because they lack high-speed Internet access), or simply want to get to the meat of the site without fanfare, will not be excluded or put off.
Most attorneys’ Web sites will likely need to tread between the extremes of plainness and ornamentation. A way to conceptualize the right balance is to design the firm’s site to be as inviting as the firm’s reception area, which presumably looks neither dowdy nor garish.
Can Potential Clients Find Your Site?
“Find-ability” refers to the ease with which potential and existing clients find your site among the Internet's (estimated) one trillion pages, when they do not know your URL (Web site address) or even your name.
If a consumer needs a lawyer to handle a bankruptcy matter in Las Vegas, it is unrealistic to assume that the majority of prospective clients will know the name of a firm that can help them, let alone the URL. Instead, this prospective client might type “lawyer” into a search engine's search box and receive an unwieldy result list with nearly 50 million web pages. Narrowing the search to "bankruptcy lawyer" results in over 1.1 million web pages and finally, adding in "Las Vegas" to the search phrase "bankruptcy lawyer" results in over 245,000 pages. Most searchers don't look past the first two or three pages of results before giving up, so those attorneys whose sites are ranked near the top are most likely to attract more potential clients to their site (and hopefully generate more business).
Memorable Domain Names
The first element of a Web site that potential clients encounter is its URL or domain name. It should be descriptive enough to grab the attention of the firm’s intended audience but short enough to be easy for a potential or existing client to remember. For example, a lawyer who represents dog bite victims who uses the domain name dogbitelaw.com or dogbitelawyer.com rather than the lawyer’s own name would be more likely to attract new clients. Adding geographical information to the domain name—for example, pahrumpdogbitelawyer.com—may also be useful.
However, the vast majority of the American Bar Association’s 2006-2007 Legal Technology Survey respondents (97%) use their firm name, or some version of it, as their domain name (up from just over 50% in 2001). If a firm’s intended audience is its current and former clients only, using the firm’s name for the domain name may suffice. Because people may not remember a firm’s full name (especially if it is longer than two names), it is best to limit the domain name to the first one or two named partners to make the URL easier to remember. Avoid using the first letter of each partner's last name as your URL.
Surprisingly, the American Bar Association’s 2004-2005 Legal Technology Survey found that only 14.4% of respondents use a generic domain name relating to one of the firm’s practice areas (up from the 5% that reported doing so in the 2001 survey). (This topic is not addressed in the most recent ABA Technology survey results.)
Give Current & Potential Clients a Reason to Visit Your Site Repeatedly
The personal injury firm of Parker, Waichman, Alonso, Mark (www.yourlawyer.com) hosts numerous discussion forums where potential clients can discuss their injuries and seek emotional support from others in similar straits. Topics are wide-ranging, from clergy abuse to specific defective medical devices.
If you’ve written articles for bar journals or other publications, the text of those articles should be included in an “Articles” area of your site. If you haven’t written articles, consider including links to, and abstracts of, current news articles related to your practice to show potential clients that you’re staying on top of the latest legal developments. The news on your site should be kept current; otherwise, the site will quickly look out-of-date instead of up-to-date.
Many attorneys list cases (or clients) on their Web sites along with their most successful verdicts and settlements. A “Major Cases” component might include brief summaries of the firm’s major cases, while a “Significant Settlements” component might highlight verdicts. For those who list cases, verdicts, and settlements, it is best to list the most recent cases first. If it has been some years since there has been a reported or memorable case, listing the largest verdict, settlement or the case that features the most well-known parties first (without dates) can be useful.
Another common practice is to include newsletters (current and archived) and offer visitors the option to have newsletters sent to them electronically. A searchable database for the newsletter archive helps visitors find the information they are seeking. To increase the marketing value of the newsletter, consider posting it as a PDF to keep the formatting and graphics (especially the firm logo) intact when visitors print them. This increases the chance that visitors will keep the pages they print out-- and remember where the information came from when they refer back to it later.
Some firms add content that would be useful to clients, such as a collection of government forms for potential clients to download or a collection of links that relate specifically to their practice area.
An Internal Search Engine is Important
As sites expand, they should include an internal search engine to ensure easy navigation. Not every Web user wants to click on icons or navigate through topic pages in the hope of finding desired information. This is especially true when a client wants information about a specific attorney or issue; the internal search engine is the most direct route.
Make it Easy for Visitors to Contact and Find the Firm
Some Web visitors would rather communicate with a person than search a Web site. To facilitate intake, some firms add an intake form that potential clients can fill out online.
At a minimum, an attorney’s Web site should include an e-mail link to send a message to the firm, and an address and phone number. When including a contact e-mail address, you must respond to those e-mail queries in a timely manner. Attorneys should also consider including a map and/or driving directions to help locate the firm’s office.
Be aware that Formal Opinion No. 32 (March 25, 2005) of the State Bar’s Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility (available at
http://www.nvbar.org/ethics/Opinion%2032%20atty%20client.pdf) held that, "an unsolicited communication to an attorney from a person having no reasonable expectation that the attorney is willing to form an attorney-client relationship does not give rise to the duty of confidentiality; however, such a duty may be implied where the communication is in response to an advertisement or a web-site. Attorneys who advertise or maintain websites should therefore take appropriate precautions such as warnings and disclaimers."
Keywords
When calculating a Web page's ranking, most search engines consider the words contained in the page's text. The more often a researcher’s keywords appear on a Web page, the more relevant the search engine considers that page to the researcher's search.
Keywords to include in the text of your site should be any search terms that potential clients might use when searching for an attorney in your practice area. A family law attorney might use the keywords “family law lawyer” and “divorce” in their site. They should also consider synonyms such as “matrimonial attorney” and “dissolution of marriage” as well as the names of localities in which they practice and words that describe various aspects of their practice (e.g. child custody, pre-nuptial agreements, child visitation).
Old tricks, such as repeating keywords in meta-tags, hiding keywords in small white type in the white background of a Web site or using popular search terms like "sex" or "Britney Spears" (when a site is related to neither), no longer work to generate high search-engine rankings. Over the past five or six years, search engines have gotten smarter about sniffing out the tricks some Web site designers have used to manipulate sites into the top of the rankings result list. These outdated tactics should be avoided, as they can get a site banned from certain search engines.
Meta-tags
There was a time when “meta-tags”-- “invisible” descriptive tags included in the coding of Web pages-- played an important role in the rankings of Web pages. However, the most recent reporting indicates that while most major search engines put less weight on the the meta “keyword” or “description” tags that once were so important, it’s still worthwhile to make them as descriptive as possible. One meta tag that is still given substantial consideration is the “Title” tag. This is the Title that is displayed in the blue bar at the top of your Web browser when viewing a Web page. Most major search engines do still consider a page’s title when indexing that page. Ironically, this is a tag that many Web designers ignore.
Registering Your Web Site is Important
There are thousands of search engines on the Internet, but a relatively small number are used most often. The most effective way to get a site indexed and potentially included in a search engine's results, is to manually submit the site for consideration. Statistics show that Google is currently the most popular search engine on the Internet, followed closely by Yahoo. Therefore, Yahoo and Google should be the first search engines with which you attempt to register your site. They both offer a free submission option for businesses. However, Yahoo requires you to have a (free) Yahoo account to complete the submission process.
Because of the volume of new sites added to the Internet every day, there might be CONSIDERABLE lag time between submitting your site and when a site actually appears in a particular search engine's index. Once your submission is accepted and your site is indexed, you may notice that your site's rankings vary from engine to engine. There is no way to be guaranteed a high ranking on every search engine because each one "indexes" (catalogs and categorizes) Web pages differently. In an effort to keep unscrupulous site designers from manipulating the process, search engines do not list their indexing or ranking criteria. However, search optimization Web sites, such as SearchEngineWatch (http://www.searchenginewatch.com), have conducted extensive research to determine which elements each search engine examines when indexing pages of a site and assigning rankings.
Who’s Linking to Whom
Another important element that search engines use to rank their results is by ascertaining the number of other sites that have links pointing to your site. When calculating your site's ranking, for example, Google weighs the number of other sites that have links pointing to your site (as well as the content of those other sites), the rationale being that if numerous sites link to your site, it must have good, relevant content.
To discover which sites already link to your site, go to either Alltheweb, AltaVista, Google or Yahoo and enter "link:www.(type your Web site URL here).com" into the search box (e.g. link:www.netforlawyers.com). When asking others to link to your site, choose sites that are complementary to your practice and not ones with which you directly compete. If you are a family law attorney, consider asking family therapists to add your link to their sites for instance. Sites that have related content to your site will carry more weight when calculating your site’s ranking than sites with unrelated content.
The more links to your site from relevant, but non-competitive sites, the better for your relevancy rankings.
Web Site Traffic
Once your site is launched, it is important to determine how visitors find your site (e.g. via a search engine search or by linking from another site) and what visitors are viewing when they visit your site (including which pages they visited and how often).
Some Internet service providers (such as Earthlink, http://www.earthlink.net) include traffic statistics as part of their web hosting services. A number of services, including Hitslink (http://www.hitslink.com) and SiteMeter (http://www.sitemeter.com), offer tracking services starting from under $10 per month. Google’s Analytics product offers free traffic and usage statistics (http://www.google.com/analytics/). SiteMeter also offers a less detailed version of its traffic information service for free.
What About a Blog?
Some attorneys may find that developing a full-featured Web site is more ambitious a project than they want to take on. A more simple personal Web log (or “blog”) may be sufficient to help them manage a Web presence for their practice. To the viewer, blogs function the same as “regular” Web sites and can include many of the elements discussed above. Generally, however, blogs are easier to set-up, update and maintain.
Law-related blogs, often referred to as “blawgs,” may cover a single legal practice area (such as intellectual property or tax law), or they may cover a broader topic such as how to manage your practice. Many respected blawgs are maintained by lawyers who are experts in a particular area of practice and use their blawgs to track pertinent case law or legislative or regulatory developments. Ernest Svenson’s “Ernie the Attorney” (www.ernietheattorney.net) and J. Craig Williams’ “May it Please the Court” (http://www.mayitpleasethecourt.net/) are some well-known blawgs.
Blawgs can also be created in addition to a “regular” Web site to give you a greater Web presence and allow you to easily share current awareness issues with potential clients or other attorneys who might refer cases to you. Despite all of the buzz surrounding blogging, only 5% of respondents (at firms of any size) to the ABA’s Legal Technology Survey reported that their firm had a blog.
Getting Online
While there are innumerable options for creating a Web site, it does not necessarily require a large initial investment, as free options are still available. Justia.com (http://www.justia.com/) offers lawyers free template-based Web sites in addition to its fee-based, custom-built design and search engine optimization services. Similarly, anyone can use the tools available at Blogger (http://www.blogger.com) or Live Journal (http://www.livejournal.com) to create and host a free, entry-level blog.
No single presentation style will magically make your Web site successful. While it takes some time, effort and (sometimes) money to develop the initial site, periodically adding new components can keep the site fresh and useful to clients for a much smaller investment. It is important that any information included in a firm’s site be compliant with the Advertising Rules (7.1 through 7.6) of the Nevada Rules of Professional Conduct and any relevant ethics opinions. In addition, if you are licensed to practice outside of Nevada, you will need to comply with that state's rules and ethics opinions.
Regardless of what form your site takes, you need to decide who your audience is and then create a site that will meet the needs of that audience. Creating a Web site does not automatically guarantee that clients will find your site and hire you, but not having a Web site guarantees that they won’t.
Mark Rosch, Vice President of Internet For Lawyers (www.netforlawyers.com), speaks and writes about legal technology and how to use the Internet for research and marketing for numerous firms, Bar Associations, magazines and Web sites. He is co-author of “The Lawyer's Guide to Fact Finding on the Internet” (http://www.internetfactfinder.com) published by the ABA Law Practice Management section and is the Editor of Internet For Lawyers’ newsletter. Additionally, he is the developer and manager of the Internet For Lawyers web site. He can be contacted at mrosch@netforlawyers.com.