The first was in the ‘Visual Effects’ category for a video we recently did for Denver personal injury attorneys Fuicelli & Lee, P.C. The original concept for the video came from Law Father President, Travis Luther: “The work we do at Law Father is meant to combat the negative stereotypes often associated with lawyers. I believe that attorneys stand at the forefront of protecting our consumer rights. Law Father’s focus is to help them do that important work”.

You can see the award-winning video right here:

The second award was in the ‘Public Service and Activism’ category for the ‘Be Aware‘ bike safety program we recently organized, also for Fuicelli & Lee. We made yard signs urging drivers to keep watch for bicyclists and pedestrians, and made them available for free at some friendly neighborhood bike shops (Listed below). For every 15 signs picked up by concerned citizens, Fuicelli & Lee donated one bike to Project ReCycle, a great non-profit that works to get bikes into the hands of deserving kids. It was a very successful campaign, with 20 bikes going to Project ReCycle.

Check out the video we created for the campaign:

Many thanks to our friends at Fuicelli & Lee for being great people to work with, and many thanks to the Academy of Interactive and Visual Arts for acknowledging our work.

And a big thank you to our other great partners on the Be Aware campaign:

Project ReCycle

Treads Bicycle Outfitters

Pedal of Littleton

Golden Bear Bikes

Cycleton

Green Mountain Sports

Contact Law Father Today

If you’re law firm is looking to give back to the community it serves, Law Father can help you do it. Contact us today, and let us help you make a difference. Call us at 800-325-7715, or fill out the contact form on our website.

The post Law Father Wins Two W3 Silver Awards appeared first on Law Father Law Firm SEO.

Panda was introduced to filter out websites that were of a “low quality” and had thin or duplicate content, while Penguin was meant to lower the ranking of pages that had used methods and techniques that violated Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Often this meant buying backlinks from other websites as a way to enlarge a website’s link profile, which is a big factor in how Google determines what your rank should be.

These “black hat” techniques used to be very effective at increasing a site’s ranking on the search engine results page, but didn’t do much to improve a user’s experience of searching the web, which is Google’s main goal, so Google effectively put a stop to them.

The changes created a lot of upheaval in the SEO world and fundamentally changed the way that many people viewed SEO.

Is SEO Dead?

Once the traditional techniques used to manipulate the search engines no longer worked, some commentators went so far as to speculate that SEO was dead. It isn’t, but it has been changed dramatically.

While the old methods are no longer effective and can even do damage to your site’s ranking, many of the factors those methods worked upon are still fundamentally important to ranking, just in more nuanced ways. This means that proper search engine optimization is still needed in order to improve rankings and will be for the foreseeable future.

But really SEO should be looked at as one part of a larger digital marketing plan, a plan that also includes PPC advertising, content creation, and social media marketing.

The explosion in popularity of social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn has revolutionized the way that businesses speak to their audience, and opened up powerful new channels of communication.

Putting the Power of Social Media to Use for Your Firm

So what is the value of social media for your law firm? How can Facebook and Twitter add to your marketing efforts, and why should you care? How do social media marketing and SEO interact with each other?

1. Getting Natural, Quality Backlinks to Your Site Through Social Media

Backlinks are still important to SEO today, but only if they are quality backlinks. When you post quality content to your social media network, it increases the general awareness of your brand, and when that content speaks to your audience in a meaningful way, the chances are increased that those people will share that content with their network, and if they have a website they may even link back to that content. That’s a meaningful backlink from what is probably a quality site (not a link farm) that won’t be subject to a Penguin penalty.

Read More: Your Law Firm’s Link Profile – Disavowing Bad Backlinks

2. Driving Traffic to Your Site Using Social Media

Traffic always has and always will be a huge determination in how you rank. If a lot of people are visiting your website, they must be doing it for a good reason right? Higher traffic numbers tell Google that your site is not only trusted but also a good source of quality content that people find valuable, both things very important to the search engine.

By sharing links to quality content with your network, you drive people to your site which will help your rankings, and will also increase the chance that those visitors will contact you for legal help when they need it.

3. Social Media and Google

There has been a lot of speculation about what, if any, signals get communicated to the search engines from social media networks. Do the number of “likes” your page has play a part in determining your website’s rankings? How about retweets?

In 2010, the head of Google’s Webspam team, Matt Cutts, came out and said that social media did play a role in search rankings. Things with Google aren’t usually that cut and dry tough, and just last year he came out and clarified the previous statement:

“Facebook and Twitter pages are treated like any other pages in our web index so if something occurs on Twitter or occurs on Facebook and we’re able to crawl it, then we can return that in our search results. But as far as doing special specific work to sort of say “you have this many followers on Twitter or this many likes on Facebook”, to the best of my knowledge we don’t currently have any signals like that in our web search ranking algorithms.”

So, while information like how many followers you have might not have a direct effect on your rankings for now, if people are linking to your site on social media and the pages they are doing it on are crawlable by Google, that will be taken into account.

Also, just this year Google and Twitter reached a deal (again) giving Google access to Twitter’s stream of tweets called the “firehose”. That means Twitter might end up playing a big role in helping to determine ranking in the near future.

4. Communicate Directly to the Audience You Care About

Page likes and retweets are fine and good, but that’s not what you really care about. What’s important to every law firm and every business is customers. If all those likes and followers don’t translate directly into people coming in the door or calling your firm, they don’t give you any real benefit.

The real power in social media marketing is the ability to communicate directly to the audience most likely to come looking to you for help.

One of Law Father’s clients came to us with zero likes on their Facebook page. Within 6 months, we were able to increase that to almost 2000 likes. We did this by regularly posting and promoting content, but not just any content, we promoted content that resonated with a key part of their audience.

The firm specializes in sexual harassment law so most of the content we were posting for them had to do with harassment. Since women are disproportionately affected by sexual harassment, the content we created and promoted on our clients behalf spoke to them in a meaningful way, and now 98% of the fans of their Facebook page are women. Not just that, most of these women are directly in their geographic practice area.

We were able to communicate our clients message to the exact audience that might have need of their services. And that’s what really matters. Knowing that your page has a big audience is nice, but it doesn’t really mean anything until your phone is ringing and you are able to advocate for the people who need your help.

Contact Law Father for Help Today

If your firm isn’t using social media to drive traffic to your site, increase your search rankings, or communicate directly to the audience you want to get your message to, you’re not doing everything you can to help your business succeed. For more information about the ways in which a smart social media strategy can improve your firm’s bottom line, contact the experienced marketing professionals at Law Father today. Call us at 800-325-7715 or fill out the contact form on our website.

The post The Value of Social Media for Your Law Firm appeared first on Law Father Law Firm SEO.

Restrictions on lawyer advertising have continued to loosen over the last few decades with changes in the professional conduct rules. By the 1980s the rules permitted advertising in most advertising media including billboards, but content had to be limited to lists of services, basis of fees and payment, second language abilities, and contact information.

Limitations on lawyers’ ability to advertise have seen regular challenges in court. In 2013, a Florida Supreme Court ruling loosened the ABA regulations to balance lawyers’ first amendment rights of free speech with the Bar Association’s concerns for protecting legal consumers and maintaining public trust in the judicial system. The issue of legal advertising seems to hinge on that balance of lawyers’ free speech against the damage law firm advertising appears to do to public confidence in the judicial system.

Public attitudes toward the legal profession and legal advertising have been pretty consistent over the last few years. Most recent studies suggest that the public accepts legal advertising, but strongly distrust it and wants to see it regulated. A large scale survey of public attitudes conducted in 2011 by the University of Florida Survey Research Center found that a majority of the public (nearly 70%) believed the content of legal advertising should be regulated. This is in contrast to advertising in other professions. Lawyers were singled out as the profession for which the public most wants to see advertising regulated. Only 29% of the public wants to see unregulated legal advertising, compared with 52% of accountants, and close to 40% of doctors, bankers and real estate agents.

If you are interested in creating a sustainable marketing and advertising campaign for your law firm, contact Law Father today!

The post Changing Attitudes Towards Lawyer Advertising appeared first on Law Father Law Firm SEO.

Traditional forms of lawyer advertising have included business directories, billboards, and yellow pages ads and covers. While these forms of advertising can work, most law firms realize a website and search engine optimization are also neccessary to promote their law practices. In the age of technology a law firm that does not have a website is at a big disadvantage compared to modern firms since more people than ever use the internet to find professional services. ANd it’s not just the convenience of websites that are attractive to potential clients. Websites offer a great deal more information to potential clients than a simple ad in the Yellow Pages.

According to Lawyernomics, 21.9% of prospective clients search for a lawyer on search engines. In order to take advantage of this traffic, you need to optimize your online presence to embrace it. Search engine optimization is an important strategy for getting in front of users searching online and converting them into legal clients.  Below are 4 ways to embrace SEO for your practice.

Keyphrase to Page Targeting

Google typically ranks one page of a website for any given query in the search results. Therefore, you will need to take a look at your law firm’s website and determine which page will best represent your personal injury practice. You can do this by either taking a look at your website to see if you already set up a page that is exclusive to your practice. If you do, then you are already half way there. Another way is to perform a site query in Google for: http://yourlawfirm.com: ‘personal injury’. You will be adding your law firm’s website there obviously. Doing this will show you what Google thinks are the most authoritative and relevant pages of your website. Taking this information, you can designate the best page as your landing page.

Google Places and Various Directories

Strive for driving in local traffic. When you are marketing locally, you should consider securing inclusion in various local directories, especially Google Places. By having a listing in Google Places, your website will appear on the SERP prominently in the Local Carousel and Google Maps. You want your website to rank in Google Maps for your immediate location since it will be a huge source of traffic. The citations you build will land you in more popular attorney directories and improve your ranking.

Website Design

The design of your website should be handled by a team of professional designers. They will focus on crafting your site so that it is appealing and easy on the eyes, but will also be constructed with a solid structure which includes things like HTML readability and a site map. Other things the designer will handle is the search engine optimization, a regular flow of relevant keywords, an evaluation of your website’s technical setup and inbound link building.

Create Sharable Content

Create content that will speak of your experiences, your clients’ experiences and provide real proof of your past successes. This will help to display the value your services provide. Your content should be sharable and include things like YouTube videos, Infographics and other content that provides useful information. Social media is your doorway for getting your content out there and building lasting relationships with both potential and current clients. It enhances your reputation and increases visibility. Also, search engines are putting more emphasis on social links and how much your content is shared to decide how to rank your sites.

For more information on search engine optimization services for your personal injury practice, please contact us.

The post Search Engine Optimization vs. The Yellow Pages appeared first on Law Father Law Firm SEO.