Google Trends For Websites Helps Sort Out Claims of #1 Status

Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 | Lawyer Marketing | No Comments

Last week Google unveiled a new use for their Google Trends analysis page; Google Trends for Websites. Like Comscore, Compete and Alexa ratings before it, this new tool lets users get Google’s traffic estimates for many of the most popular websites on the Internet. Before looking at anything specific, let me point out a few things.

1) These are still just estimates. Without someone totally sharing their traffic data with you, you can’t ever get a precise read on someone’s traffic. That being said, any inaccuracies should be comparable across most sites, so comparisons of two sites should still be pretty spot on.

2) Unlike the aforementioned traffic rating sites, Google has one big advantage; they’re Google. And being Google, they have access to all the data they choose to share with themselves. According to Google, Google Trends for Websites “combines information from a variety of sources, such as aggregated Google search data, aggregated opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in consumer panel data, and other third-party market research…”

Good enough for me.

So, that got me thinking. Last year the folks at Lawyers.com started sending out flyers to FindLaw customers touting Lawyers.com as being the #1 legal destination online, and even going so far as to include traffic results in the copy of the ad. Many of us who saw the ad knew it was misleading as it compared the traffic of ALL Martindale-Hubbell properties against FindLaw alone. Of course, what should be compared is the traffic of just Lawyers.com vs. FindLaw.com. From the standpoint of an attorney considering advertising on these sites, that is all that matters.

Of course, we always could show our Alexa or Compete rankings or compare Comscores, but there is something wonderfully impactful of essentially running a Google search on web traffic between two sites. So, rather than go into boring details of which site has more traffic, I’ll let a nice little Google graph do the talking.

FYI, the graph is showing DAILY UNIQUE VISITORS for each site. Click the picture if you want to see this analysis “live” on Google. I posted just the past 12 months, but you can pick from a variety of time-frames.

New Findlaw.com Site Launches

Monday, June 2nd, 2008 | Lawyer Marketing | No Comments

As of this morning, FindLaw.com has a new layout that I think will make the site even more useful than before. The first thing I noticed was the simplified search box at the top right corner of the home page. No need to decide to search by firm or attorney name anymore. Now you can search like you do on the search engines, which is what most people have become accustomed to doing anyway.

You’ll also find a lot more video on the site and a new section called FindLaw answers. The attorney profiles are much cleaner looking, and as of later this summer will have the ability to show recommendations.

Overall, this is another great step forward in the evolution of FindLaw and should help it remain the Premiere Destination for Legal Consumers.

If you would like to be listed on FindLaw, please contact me via my Internet Marketing for Lawyers website, http://www.losangeles-lawyer-marketing.com/.

To Pay Per Click Or Not Pay Per Click

Sunday, June 1st, 2008 | Lawyer Marketing | No Comments

Using Pay Per Click ads can be a great thing, but it can also be a dangerously expensive proposition. The key to using PPC wisely is to do the opposite of what many PPC resellers will tell you, and that is to think very NARROW in your PPC targeted keywords.

Let’s back up a bit.

When you do a search on Google, you generally get back two types of results: Organic search results and Pay-Per-Click ads. (These are two of the main components of what is called the Search Engine Results Page, or SERP). To use another “old media” analogy, if the Search Engine Results Page was a magazine, the organic results would be the articles and the Pay-Per-Clicks listings would be the advertisements. Take your lawyer hat off and imagine you owned a company that manufactured widgets. What would truly bring you more value from a marketing standpoint; an article in a magazine featuring your product in a positive light, or advertisements in that same magazine for your product. Obviously, most people would pick the articles.

It is for this reason I always advise my clients to consider building a strong website as the foundation for their online marketing plans. When you build a quality site with useful content (and follow other best practices for search engine optimization), you will almost certainly begin to show up towards the top of the Organic results. And best of all, there is no additional cost to do so.

For PPC ads, however, you literally get charged every time someone clicks on one of your ads. This can add up very quickly, and before you know it you’ve spent more than it would have cost you to build several high quality websites. And with click fraud still a huge problem (see this article), much of your money might be getting you nothing in return.

(Writing this I realize that there is so much to cover on this topic, it might warrant several articles, so I think I’ll get to my original point)

There are two times I think it is a great time to use PPC.

1) When you have a very new website that has still not cracked the Organic listings. Pick a handful of your most important (and competitive) search terms and sign up either directly with Google or one of the many PPC resellers.

2) If there are a few HIGHLY COMPETITIVE search terms where you really want to be found, but are not yet cracking the top 10-20 listings in the Organic results, purchase a PPC campaign for JUST THOSE TERMS. This will greatly reduce your cost. Then monitor how your site performs on the Organic Results so when you start showing up where you want you can cancel the PPC campaigns.

There is one more best practice I like to suggest to my clients who use PPC, and that is to make sure that their ads are using unique destination URLs.

The URL that appears on a PPC ad is called a DISPLAY URL. The actual web address that the ad points to is called a DESTINATION URL. Sometimes people use destination URLs just to direct clickers to an internal page of their site, but for our purposes we want to use them to track your traffic that is driven by PPC ads. When you purchase a PPC campaign you need to make sure that whomever sets up your account takes care of this for you, or it will be virtually impossible to track the value of your PPC campagin. If they play dumb or give you any flack, direct them to follow these steps.

1. Go to Google’s URL builder: http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55578&hl=en
2. Enter the URL of the website.
3. Fill in the Campaign Source (such as Google, Yahoo!/Overture), Campaign Medium (such as PPC, banner ad) and the Campaign Name.
4. Click on the Generate URL button.
5. Add the URL to the Destination URL field of the ad management console.
6. Repeat this process for all online paid ads.

Note: your PPC vendor could choose to do the above steps manually instead of using this tool, but this tool is good for ensuring compatibility with analytics tools. I also recommend keeping a spreadsheet of all the URLs generated for the paid ads, so that you can see how many campaigns you have running.

For more information, read my PPC overview on my Los Angeles Lawyer Marketing website.

Note: Google changed their polices on this a few months ago. See here for details:
New Google Adsense URL Policies