CASE STUDY: How We Helped One Lawyer Rank #1 On Google, Sell His Practice, And Retire in Hawaii

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Andrew Stickel

How Important Is Your Blog?

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A genuinely interesting blog, updated frequently, is central to almost any successful social media marketing strategy. Your blog is the place where anyone can learn about your company, your industry, your products, services, and mission. Providing great content attracts, keeps, and expands your audience. When your blog is shared by your audience with their own friends and followers, you’re doing it right. Ideally, your blog will also entice them to visit your full website and become your customer or client.

However, one impediment prevents some companies from taking full advantage of the opportunities a blog offers. The content that many businesses produce is not what prospective customers want or need. It’s focused back on the company, and like a company newsletter, it may interest employees and their friends, but not outsiders.

If you want to introduce a new product on your blog and brag about its features, that’s fine occasionally, but your principal focus must be on your readers, their needs, questions, concerns, and lives. These are just a sampling of the kinds of topics your blog posts should address:

  • How to Write a Living Will
  • How to Have a DUI Conviction Expunged
  • How Wine (or Whisky or Vodka) Is Made
  • Tips for Sleeping Better and Having More Energy
  • How to Spruce Up a Home Before Putting It Up For Sale
  • How to Apply for Social Security Disability Benefits

Posts about your company picnic or your move to a new location are simply not going to be shared or attract readers to your full website. Your blog is more like a magazine than a legal document or a textbook. Break up big blocks of text. Short paragraphs are better. Keep your text under 600 words whenever possible; 500 is better. Use graphics, bullet points, sidebars, and links.

Consider how the best magazines and websites deliver content; learn from the pros. If you’re not the world’s most creative person, don’t hesitate to hire a freelance writer or a social media marketing firm to create fresh, interesting, consumer-oriented content on your behalf. As a central element in your social media marketing strategy, your blog simply must be consistently interesting and effective.

Time For An Update

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Your website needs to be updated, probably now. In fact, it might need a complete overhaul. If it’s been two or three years (or more) since you’ve updated the site, it probably even looks old. It takes a lot of energy, time, and thought, and it’s something that easily gets set aside to do “later.” The only consolation is that you’re not alone.

If you’re an attorney (and this holds true for other professions as well), you probably already know that the internet is by far the top place consumers go when they seek legal help. In the 21st century, your website is analogous to your law office’s front door and lobby. It must be attractive, up-to-date, and meet the expectations of 21st-century consumers. Here are several strong indications that it’s time to have the website brought up to speed:

1. Does your website look like a museum piece from the 1990s? A page counter or a blinking .gif is a sure giveaway. But even if you’re clearly in your own century, if it’s been more than a year, update. Your clients will be appreciative.

2. Did you start a blog and never pursue it? Scores of legal websites have a page that says something like “Welcome to our new blog” with a 2009 or 2011 date and no actual blog entries (or several outdated ones). Get that blog working for you; a freelance writer or a social media marketing firm can help you create regularly updated blog content and eliminate that embarrassment on your website.

3. Website navigation should be user-friendly, and information on the site should be thorough and accurate. Organize the site logically, and make sure it appears properly on mobile devices.

4. Do your website’s attorney bios sound like they were written by a criminal defense attorney? If you’re an attorney, you already know that potential clients are more interested in your last ten years than in what you did in 1973 or which state Supreme Court justice you worked with in the 1980s. Will you return calls? What kind of cases are you really good at winning? What do your former clients say about you? And watch it with the adjectives and adverbs; after three or four paragraphs about being “exceptionally skilled” and “extremely knowledgeable,” you sound like you’re trying too hard.

5. Consumers expect social media integration. Make it easy for visitors to find you on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other sites. A social media marketing firm can help you create and coordinate your marketing across the web.

Local Search

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“Local search” allows search engine users to locate businesses and services in their own communities. For potential local customers and clients to find you quickly, your site should be fully optimized to take advantage of local search. Local searches are “explicit” or “implicit.” A search that includes a location, such as “San Francisco attorney” or “southern California real estate” is an explicit local search.

A search for products or services that are available locally, such as “criminal defense lawyer” or “auto parts retailer,” is implicit. Local search lets you precisely target those closest to you who are seeking your products or services. A website optimized for local search is one of the surest ways to help new clients locate you. Here are several ways to help optimize your website for local search:

    • Include your NAP (name, address, and phone number) on every page of your website.

Printed information included in an image doesn’t count; contact information has to be text so that search engines can “crawl” it. Identify your location in your title tags and text. Your title tag should be something like “Grand Rapids Personal Injury Attorney” or “Orange County Real Estate Broker.” Text somewhere on each page should include that same phrase.

    • Establish a business page on Google+.

This helps Google establish your identity and rank you in local search results. Be sure you’re listed at your professional or trade association’s local site and on local Chamber of Commerce websites. They provide “local citations” that Google uses to improve local search.

    • A consistent NAP across the web is imperative.

Your contact information should be identical on your website, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Angie’s List, and everywhere else on the web. A good social media marketing firm can help you maintain a strategic, consistent, and up-to-the-minute marketing campaign across the internet.

Tags:seo tips.

Trade Shows And Social Media

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How do you best take advantage of the opportunities offered by an industry trade show or convention? Social media can go a long way to help you get the most out of industry trade shows. Here are some tips to help you succeed when the next convention or trade show rolls around:

Exploit Facebook and Twitter.Create excitement. When your people know you’ll be at a trade show with great offers and special promotions, they’ll look for you there. In the weeks before the next trade show you attend, post something on Facebook and Twitter to remind your friends and followers that you’ll be exhibiting there. Use your email list too. Provide information about the event and about your exhibit and any deals you plan to offer.

Use social media to promote contests and events. You attract a lot more interest at a trade show or convention with contests and special events. Create some giveaways, offer some raffle-style prizes, or schedule a product demonstration for a peak hour. Often when it comes to trade shows, the quirkier an idea is, the better.

Encourage others to share or retweet details about your display, contests, and giveaways. Especially in the final week before a show, this is a great way to inform additional people about the event.

Post and tweet from the trade show floor. Create a sense of excitement like the old “remote” radio broadcasts. Give something away at a scheduled time and post a countdown.

Extend invitations specifically to bloggers. Untold numbers of bloggers visit trade shows looking for something that’s unique or offbeat to blog about. From free specialty items to exclusive interviews, bloggers are always ready to take advantage of what trade shows offer. And bloggers have readers.

Consider the future. Trade show marketing doesn’t end when the trade show ends. Collect as many names and as much contact information as possible, especially email addresses.

In both your social media marketing and in person, be welcoming and warm. Don’t worry so much about closing a deal. Some people are intimidated by the heavy sales pitches that often accompany trade shows, so they’re more likely to accept your low-key, no-pressure invitation.

If you’ve never been part of a trade show, make a commitment to do it this year. They’re exhilarating, and you never know what might happen next.

Tell Them A Story

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Yes, we celebrate Martin Luther King Day every year. And still, our society puts up with unfairness and inequality every day. Lawmakers, lawyers, and judges can really do very little to change it. We tolerate misogyny, racism, and prejudice against all kinds of people. Nevertheless, we find ways to be deeply offended by the pettiest slights and the smallest injustices.

When a teacher gives a student a better grade than the student deserves, we can be outraged. If someone on television uses a racial slur, the internet lights up with anger. More than a billion people on this globe live on 23 cents a day or less. Every 16 seconds, somebody in the world dies of hunger – usually a child. But what really gets people mad is what Miley Cyrus or Justin Bieber did on the news last night.

When Sheriff Bull Connor directed fire hoses and vicious dogs on innocent civil rights marchers in Birmingham back in 1963, viewers didn’t see centuries of racism, slavery, and violence. Instead, they saw one small story, one unfair and violent act. It summarized and represented the history of racism in a nutshell – in a brief moment. Two years later, the Civil Rights Act was the law of the land.

People are drawn to small stories and narratives, to something we can grasp, understand, and identify with. When you need multiple charts and graphs and studies from Harvard to get your point across, it’s going to be ignored or at best quickly forgotten.

In social media marketing, you gain one like, one follower, and one new customer at a time. Tell them stories they can relate to. Help them to focus on your message. There’s a reason so many ad campaigns use a theme like “tell us your story.” And there’s a reason so many TV commercials tell stories. Story-telling is one of the oldest – thus one of the surest – ways to communicate. Keep it simple. Keep it focused. Tell them a story.

Marketing With Instagram

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Instagram, with an estimated 150 million monthly active users, has emerged as one of the most rapidly-growing mobile applications ever, and its growth continues to accelerate. With millions of consumers already active on the platform, the benefits of Instagram are easy enough for marketing pros to imagine. But you’ll have to be proactive to maximize your visibility on Instagram; yours is not the only company using it as a marketing tool.

Instagram is not just about selling. In fact, using your Instagram account only to sell, sell, sell is a predictable way to lose the interest of your Instagram audience. You’ll need to kick off engaging dialogues, listen and respond to your followers, and post thought-provoking, inventive images that fire your followers’ imaginations. Here are some tips for mastering Instagram:

  • Make sure the Bio section at the top of your profile page is complete. Tell visitors who you are, what you do, and where to find you. Add a little something extra to encourage visitors to learn more about you.
  • Link your social media together. If you post a blog that already has some followers, embed your photos and videos from Instagram. Capitalize on Facebook’s integration of Instagram to reach both audiences. Making your Instagram account visible on your Facebook page inevitably increases dialogue and sharing.
  • Post quality, interesting visuals. Your photographs don’t have to be professional, but they do need to grab the eye and express some aspect of your company’s mission or vision. Give readers something they’ll find personally fascinating or intriguing; you want followers who “bond” with you. Most photos should in some way reflect the lifestyle of your customers. Don’t be afraid to use video, too.
  • Follow your followers. Reciprocation not only expresses gratitude for their support, but it opens new opportunities to be noticed by other Instagram users.
  • Consider hiring a social media marketing firm to create and coordinate your Instagram account and all of your internet-based marketing efforts. You’ll save hours every month, and you’ll know that your work is in the hands of marketing professionals on the Internet’s cutting edge.