With hundreds of "social media" vehicles online, it is impossible for any human being to use them all. The two elephants in the room are Facebook and Twitter.

Should every DUI lawyer have a Twitter and Facebook page?

Absolutely…with a caveat.

The great thing about Facebook, Twitter and other social media outlets is that they are free. The problem with Facebook, Twitter and other social medial outlets is also that they are free.

All lawyers want to get business for free, but if all lawyers use the free media outlets and are competing for a fixed number of clients, the efforts of you and your competitors should cancel each other out. Right?

The answer, I believe, depends on how lawyers use these free media sources.

Why should DUI Lawyers Tweet?

If you just got a DUI and you are an intelligent and affluent person who is too embarrassed to ask a friend for a referral, you probably go online to look. You want good information, fast. You don't want to have to slog your way through a series of 140 character bursts. Unless you are looking for clients who speak in sentence fragments, Twitter is not the best direct source to get clients. But it is an essential piece of the equation.

If you do nothing else with Twitter, here's what I recommend:

Set up your Twitter account. Set up your blog's RSS feed to automatically post your entries on your Twitter feed. It's that simple. And with 10 minutes of setup, now each blog post you make gets broadcast to your "followers" on Twitter. This is unlikely to get you clients either, at least directly. But what it can do is drive targeted traffic back to your blog, where people can find out about you. If they like what you say, they may link to your content. If they link to your content, it is more likely that you will get more links to your content. After a while, if done right, it can turn into a beast that feeds itself.

Warning: Do not mix a personal Twitter feed with a business feed. Your clients don't want to know that you're sitting in Avatar and it's awesome. They don't want to know the cute thing your kid said, or your prediction for the Lakers-Celtics point spread. Keep it simple, keep it business, and keep it separate.

The same goes for Facebook.

You can set up a "fan" page for your practice and invite your friends to become fans of yours.

Wait a second… Do lawyers have fans? Do DUI lawyers? Huh? Don't despair, you can always learn to play the guitar. And in the meantime, some of your friends will join up to be nice. The benefit of the fan page is that you can run your other feeds through it. Your posts appear on your fan site. Your fans then serve your stuff through their Facebook profile for their friends to see, and it can grow exponentially.

A highly attenuated Facebook friend, perhaps an old girlfriend or somebody you haven't seen since high-school who might not otherwise know what you do for a living might become a person-to-person referral source. That's the real world magic of Facebook.

Once in a blue moon somebody who is a friend of a friend who happens to have a pending DUI case might see your stuff through a feed, become a fan, and even a client. But I wouldn't hold my breath.

Facebook and Twitter are absolutely essential supplements to anything else you are doing online. Just don't rely on them as primary or secondary sources for  client development. And for the love of all that is sane and simple, don't pay somebody to "manage" or set up a Twitter or Facebook page.

You can't afford to not use Facebook and Twitter. Twitter and Facebook are stop-loss measures in today's Internet economy. If you don't use them and your competition does, you will incrementally lose market-share. But understand that only exclusive things, things that your competition does not have and can not get, really give you the edge online and increase your piece of the pie.

Back in the 1990's, the search engines depended a lot on what was included in a web page's meta keyword tags. Meta keywords died off in importance long ago. In fact, although we add or modify dozens (and sometimes hundreds) of pages on DUIAttorney.com each week, we no longer add meta keywords. This article will briefly explain why, and hopefully save you some wasted time or money in regards to keywords.

For those you who are unfamiliar with what meta tags are, they are data descriptors that are not viewable by the human eye in a browser. These tags carry various instructions, mostly to the search engines, about what to do on or with the web page. A "meta keyword" tag contains a list of keywords, separated by commas, that the author of the page wants the search engines to index the page for.

When search engines were much less sophisticated than they are today, they relied heavily on meta keywords to determine which phrases or concepts a page should rank for. Back then the results returned for searches were much less relevant and useful to their human users than they are today. Why? Because the search engines relied heavily on human authors of web pages to tell them what was relevant.

It didn't take much back then for people who wanted to rank for keywords that were unrelated to their site to realize how to do it. Simply put, stuff the meta keyword tag with irrelevant keywords.

Why would anybody want to do that? Here's an example: Say you have a web page that isn't very popular. You want more traffic, but your site is about drunk driving in Apline County, California. With a population of around 1,200 people, not much of a demand for your page, right? Well, what if you stuffed your keywords with phrases like Los Angeles, or New York to attract larger populations, or even with the name of a celebrity to attract a wider demographic? It worked in the infancy of the internet, but today meta keyword stuffing no longer works (thank goodness). In fact, it can cause a web page or an entire site to be devastated in the rankings.

There are three major search engines that comprise the vast majority of search market share. They are Google, Bing and Yahoo. Google has an overwhelming market share, although Bing (Microsoft's search engine) has a good product and may be slowly gaining ground. So when it comes to your web strategy, it just makes sense to look at what Google is doing, first and always.

If your webmaster is still charging you to optimize your meta keywords, it's time you gently break the news to him or her that, frankly, you are not interested. If they try to argue with you (and I have actually talked to several attorneys recently who have been, apparantly, brainwashed by their webmasters), you might point them to an article on the Google Webmaster Blog entitled Google does not use the keyword tag in web ranking. A good webmaster should not worry, because there are still plenty of other meta tags to tend to. Here's a basic list of meta tags and what they do. There are many more than this too.

Here's a video featuring Google's Matt Cutts that explains it:

It's funny, because I have recently seen DUI attorneys stuffing the names of their more seasoned or well known competitors into their keyword tag, presumably hoping to divert people searching for the other lawyer.

I've heard webmasters recently make the argument that keywords should still be used because there is a chance that Google and other search engines might decide to use them again in the future. While that is possible, I don't see why it's worth investing in now. In all reality, your website will be completely redone every two or three years anyways. Plus, it's very easy to go back in and add keywords later should the need ever arise. Why waste money on it now?

If meta keyword stuffing was a problem in the past, and meta keywords were eliminated to return better results, what future purpose could they serve? I could see a potential for sites that are algorithmically trusted to be allowed to pass some weight from the meta keywords to influence search placement. They can also be used for custom searches, but this would be useful only in larger websites. The typical DUI law firm's website with 10 to 150 pages of content should not need a custom search solution.

It's your money and time, and you can spend either or both on meta keywords. But don't be surprised when it doesn't work, and don't let your webmaster make excuses or blame it on you.

February 23, 2010

Dear DUI Attorney,

There are many aspects to an efficient internet strategy. If any of them are ignored, the whole strategy may be destined for mediocrity.There are more DUI attorney web pages in circulation than DUI attorney phone book ads, billboards, TV and radio commercials combined. If your website strategy is to "build it and forget it," then your strategy is likely doomed.In my decade of DUI defense practice, I was able to consistently rank well compared to my competitors because I make an effort to understand what I was doing rather than blindly copy others, and always searched for the next "gateway" opportunity. A lot of the web is guesswork, but there are some immutable laws and high probability plays that you ignore at your peril.

This issue of the DUI Attorney Internet Strategy Newsletter focuses on the five simple things that your firm's web presence can't ignore and still be effective. Your web presence must be:

1.    Easy to find;
2.    Easy to load;
3.    Easy to navigate;
4.    Easy to read and understand; and
5.    Easy to differentiate from other websites.

Notice the common theme? It's "easy."

People like the web because there is a vast amount of information available. They use it as the primary method to research and verify legal information because it is easy to use. It's convenient.

If your web presence inconveniences a user, it will lose the user.

Let's examine each element in a more depth.

Can people easily find your website?

Most of the people who try to make their livings on the internet live and die by this category. It is the genesis of every "search engine optimization" (SEO) scam, and the reason why there are 184 million results for the keyword "SEO" on Google. 99-percent of what is passed off as SEO is fiction by scam artists and idiots. When it comes down to it, optimizing a website is very easy, but very time-consuming.

There are several ways that websites are found, including pay per click ads, organic search traffic, referral traffic and direct traffic.

The search engines make billions of dollars a year selling cost per click ads. These are the ads that are served at the top and on the side of a Google search results page. Without the unpaid organic (or natural) results, Google would make very little money from selling the ads that surround the organic results. This is because people generally do not search for ads. People search for people and information. The ads that come along with almost everything online are a necessary byproduct of every search you ever do.

Cost per click advertising can be targeted (based on user requests to see pages that contain the information) or general (run of the network or run of a website). The more targeted, the higher quality the traffic, and the more costly.

As of this writing, the average click for the keyword "dui attorney," was $23.85. The phrase "los angeles du attorney," currently goes for an average of $32.78 per click, and "phoenix dui attorney" goes for a mind-blowing $46 a click." These are "wholesale" prices and don't account for management fees and markups if you use a consultant or middleman.

The economics of paid search advertising are deceptively simple. Just beneath the obvious surface, however, is a world that is still evolving and is at a stage where basic economic maxims are still impossible to define.

For now, let's look at it simplistically. Let's say that it takes an average of 30 targeted local visitors to produce a new client for your firm for any given key phrase. In Phoenix, that would mean that each new client obtained through the term "phoenix dui attorney" would cost an average of $1,290.00. That's an expensive client acquisition, which begs two questions. 1) Is that client profitable to the firm at that cost? and 2) was there a way to get that exact client at a lower cost?

Studies have shown that consumers trust organic search results (unpaid results) over pay per click results (one study says 86-percent of the time) because people tend to mistrust obvious paid ads. Studies show that organic results have a higher click through rate, and a higher conversion rate.

As more people learn the difference between organic and paid results, the gulf in performance will likely increase further.

Pay per click ads certainly have their place.They are good supplement to nearly any smart marketing campaign.

A new website will take between several months and a year or more to rank well in organic search results (assuming that it's built and maintained correctly), so pay per click ads can be a great supplement in the interim.

I strongly caution you against relying exclusively on pay per click ads in the long term. This is because the moment you turn off the ads, your flow of traffic, and therefore business, will cease. Any present pay per click strategy should be supplemented with a sensible and incremental organic growth strategy. Over the long-term, investment in your infrastructure will pay dividends.

Let's say that a high quality website or directory listing costs you $24,000 per year to build, maintain and promote (not using cost per click advertising). Let's say you are in a market where the average click will cost you (a very low example number of) $8 using pay per click bidding. At 8-bucks a click, you can buy 3,000 clicks instead for the same $24k you would spend for the year. (And given that organic clicks convert better than paid clicks, the 3,000 organic clicks should produce more business than the 3,000 paid clicks.)

A well optimized state or local website should get anywhere between 500 and 5000 or more organic clicks a month, depending on the population of the applicable area, and the relative number of DUI arrests. In a small market, your $24,000 in pay per clicks buys you 6 months worth of clicks (if you can even attract that many). In a large market your $24,000 worth of clicks would be less than a month's worth of organic clicks (again, if you could get that many clicks in a single month).

For a market like Los Angeles, at $23.85 per click, $24k would buy you just over 1,000 clicks. From those 1,000 clicks, how many new clients would you need to get to justify the $24k in expenses? Most well-run DUI practices can't be sustained at a cost-per-acquisition of more than $1,200 per client, and the comfort zone is somewhere between $300 and $500 spent per new client acquired. With efficient online marketing, the cost per client acquisition can be lower than that… much lower.

How easily does your website load?

How long will you wait for a web page to load? Would you wait 2 minutes? One minute? Would you wait 30 seconds? Most web users with a high speed connection will not wait 30 seconds on a page.

Most web users don't want to see your logo dance, or see a fancy but meaningless graphical introduction. They want to make a quick decision about whether the content on your page is useful to them, and they want to make it in a matter of seconds. Sites that have flash or splash introductions that you have to wait through or click to see any of the main content are obsolete and harmful to your practice. If you have been lost at sea since 1999, then a splash page might excite you. But take it from me, your users will hold it against you.

Flash elements on a page such as an interactive map or video are good if deployed well, but nobody cares that some graphic artist is able to make the letters of your firm dance around and then come together with a flourish. Nobody cares to see an animal mascot make a threatening sound as it breaks through your logo. Users value quick load times, and so do the search engines.

Can people easily navigate your website?

What do newspapers do with less important stories and less expensive ads? They put them below the fold. Most websites have a "fold" too. The "fold" is the bottom of the viewable area of the screen when the page first loads. Anything that you have to scroll down to see is "below the fold."

The challenge is that screen and browser sizes vary. What is well above the fold on my 27-inch monitor is below it on my 15 inch laptop.

Where is your site navigation located? If it is all or partially below the fold, you may have a problem. Attorneys seem to run into this problem when they hire "artists" to design their pages.

While a jury trial may be a contest of who has the best lawyer, the contest for a DUI defendant's business online is rarely won based on which attorney's web designer has the coolest Photoshop skills. Would you choose a heart surgeon based on who has the best montage of an aorta, a scalpel, a hot nurse and a doctor with Photoshop whitened teeth?
Your client's case is usually the most serious thing in his or her life when they are looking at your website. Your online presence must be business oriented and helpful. It must be comfortable and predictable.

Do your links clearly communicate where the visitor will go when they click on them? One misleading internal link title (a link from one page in your site to another page in your site) and you risk losing the trust of your visitors. Is there an easy way to get back to your main page, and to contact you from every page in your site? If a visitor has to hunt for a way to contact you, they will figure that it is not important to you to be contacted.
Is there a search function on your site? If there is, you risk sending your visitors to irrelevant pages and frustrating them. A user of average intelligence should be able to find their way around your entire site without  having to resort to a search.

Your navigation structure largely dictates the "flow" of traffic through your site. I recommend staying away from cartoon-ish or highly automated menus. When hovered over, a link should NEVER change size or font, but should ALWAYS either change colors or become underlined or highlighted. The user needs to know that it is an active link without having to readjust their eyes.

If moving through your navigation moves any element that is not navigation, you have a problem. Some older sites push main body text around as menus expand. This looks unprofessional, and if a visitor thinks your website is amateurish, they will think it about you as well.

I recommend avoiding too many image links. In a misguided attempt to be fancy, some web designers make separate images for each link. Some call them buttons. This is a bad idea from a usability perspective, and equally bad for the search engines. Plus, the heavy reliance on multiple images can slow your site down.

My national site, DUIAttorney.com has over 20,000 pages of content. There a lots of links on the homepage to articles on a range of DUI-related topics, and these links are repeated many times in other places. Although on first glance it looks like there are merely hundreds (rather than thousands) of pages, as people navigate through the site, the menus change depending on the state or section the visitor is in. With such a large site, it would be impractical to put all the links on one page. Links should entice people and get them to where you want them to go in an honest and straightforward way. No fanciness. No surprises.

When it comes to navigation, simple and easy is best.

Can people easily understand your website?

Can you write about your state's DUI laws in clear, simple and easy to understand layman's terms? Can you discuss your qualifications in prose that can be appreciated by a person who has never had any experience with the legal system? If you either can't, or don't have the time to, use caution when you delegate.

If you hire somebody without any legal training to write your content, don't be surprised to see that it has either been copied from your competitor's site or that it doesn't make legal or grammatical sense. Sometimes you get all three problems in one shot. This is especially prevalent when you outsource the responsibility for the content on your website to a foreign country on the cheap.

Even if some of your DUI clients speak bastardized English or slur their words, your website should not. If you can't or won't write your own website content, make sure you hire somebody with a demonstrated history of writing good legal-to-layman copy. That person should also know how to write for the web (a subject which can and does fill volumes in and of itself).

Can people easily tell you and your competitors apart?

Over the past decade, I have changed my website regularly. Sometimes it's because I felt like it, or because the law changed. Other times it was because my competitors (some of whom were also my friends) copied my message.

There can only be one "premier," or "best," or "top" law firm, right? So if everybody claims to be the premier law firm, it loses its meaning. Even more dangerous than an overused superlative losing its objective meaning is when consumers start associating your message with other firms.

Educated and discerning potential clients are going deeper and deeper in the search results. They are verifying your claims through additional searches. If you say you are "The Top Metropolis DUI Firm," you can bet that some of them will go to Google and search for "Top Metropolis DUI Firm." When they do, what will they see?

If they see you on the first page (even if you paid for the click), and your website says you are the "top" or "premier" firm, and then they see your competitor's nearly identical looking site and message, they may reach their decision-making threshold at that point and call your competitor because they are at his or her page, but think they are seeing you again.

What can you do about people ripping off your look, feel and message?

The short answer is "not a lot."

This is because there are only so many ways to lay out a web page, and only so many ways to describe the law and process. You don't have a monopoly or copyright on the law. But what you can, and should do, is stop using the same messages as everybody else. Don't talk about yourself much at all. Talk about your potential clients. That's what they want to hear anyways. Plus, it's more honest than saying you are the "top" firm (in most cases… no offense if you really are the top firm, as this newsletter has over a thousand subscribers). Even if you are the top DUI lawyer in the whole world (and a few subscribers to this newsletter could legitimately contend for that title), your potential clients can't easily tell that your true claims are any different than the 40 other websites in your state that say essentially the same thing.

I once had a local law firm copy my site to the point that it was blatant and provable. The attorney, who I knew to be a stand-up guy, was shocked when I called him and told him that my bio was on his bio page, and my name had been "found and replaced" with his name. It didn't even make any sense because he had about 5 years more experience than me, yet his website indicated my level of experience. His web guy did it without his knowledge, and he did the right thing and made his web guy change it immediately.
So if you see somebody copying your stuff, don't assume that it was done intentionally by the attorney. And if you are copying another lawyer's stuff, cut it out. If you see a blog post by another DUI lawyer that you like, don't copy it verbatim. That is stealing from her and potentially hurting both of you. Instead, write a blog post of your own, and make reference to the other lawyer's blog, and give credit to the other lawyer. She might just acknowledge it and return the favor.

As the search engines get better and faster at crawling websites, they are starting to know whose website produced the original content. On DUIAttorney.com for example, most of our new articles get indexed by the major search engines within an hour. The many "leech" websites who regularly copy our stuff can't usually find our articles until they are indexed, and by then the game is up.

The search engines have a vested interest in preventing copying and stealing of content. If you hire somebody to scam other websites, it is likely you who is getting scammed.

The Free Flow Of Ideas

The Internet is about the free flow of ideas. Those who give credit where it is due are typically rewarded with the same respect from their like-minded peers.

The gutter of the internet is clogged with copycat and unoriginal materials. But the search engines are getting better at determining what is relevant and what is not.
If your web presence makes life easy for your potential clients, and makes the job of the search engine spiders easier too, you are 90% of the way there.
Starting with next Tuesday's edition, I will discuss, in detail, topics that make up what I like to refer to as the remaining 10% of the job. These are the little things that make a huge difference and, I believe, account for the stratification between websites that get the first 90% right.

I hope this newsletter is helpful to you, and I'm looking forward to working on next week's edition. If you have any suggested topics or questions you want me to address, please let me know.

Sincerely,

Dan Jaffe