Google’s Search Wiki Explained

Sunday, November 23rd, 2008 | Lawyer Marketing, Uncategorized | No Comments

On November 20th Google launched a new version of their flagship search product that they are referring to as Search Wiki.  I actually came across this product back in January 2008 when I noticed it on the computer of a potential client.  I went home and tried to get it for myself back then, only to discover that it was being “bucket tested” for random selection of Google users.  Apparently those 10+ months of testing led Google to believe that the product was something that people would want and use, and that might eventually be true.  In the past 3 days, however, I have seen it cause a good bit of confusion with my colleagues and clients.

What is Search Wiki?  I’ve heard people describe it as a DIGG for search, and it certainly LOOKS like Digg with its up and down arrows.  I’ve also heard people who latch onto the term WIKI and insist that it is some sort of collaborative ranking system.  So far, neither of those seem to be true.  

As of this moment, whatever effort you put into “voting” for search results is only for your own personal use.  Your votes DO NOT affect the SERPS of any other Google user.  To see for yourself, log out of Google and see how the voting disappears (in fact, you can only vote if you logged in).

The only indelible mark you can leave on the SERPS is with comments.  Comments ARE viewable by other users, and the thinking goes that users will get the most out of searches if they get the SERPS from the traditional algorithm but can then discern value of those results by reading the comments of searchers who came before them.  It’s actually an idea with great merit (I look at Amazon reviews before buying anything), but unfortunately they still have to work a few kinks out.

The biggest problem so far is that it took about 5 minutes for spammers to start seeding the comments sections with their advertisements.  Likewise, I am sure that people will start to setup fake Google accounts so that they can write terrible things about their competitors.   The nice thing about the traditional Google algorithm is that it really cannot be gamed so easily.   We trust the Google “reference librarian” and assume that the sites that are recommended are given to us based on an objective, not subjective formula.  

So while I see some value to Search Wiki, here is hoping that Google keeps its impact to a minimum.  I’d also like to see them allow users to turn it off without logging out.  As a Gmail user it is getting annoying having to log out of Gmail just to do a traditional Google search.  

One final note to my clients & prospects who often meet with companies that tout how they can move you up in the Google results.  Anytime someone is demonstrating how well their sites do in the organic results, make sure they are LOGGED OUT of google.   If you see Green Arrows on the page, or their email in the top right corner, then they are logged in and potentially manipulating the results.  This has actually been a best practice for a while since Google has been personalizing results for a few years now, but Search Wiki has made it all the more important.  Don’t let some snake oil salesman fool you.

Google has posted a You Tube video explaining Search Wiki.  I’ve embedded it below.
Google SearchWiki video

Tags: Google, Search Wiki, SearchWiki

Why You Should Market Your Legal Services For Timely Events

Wednesday, September 17th, 2008 | Lawyer Marketing | No Comments

First, let me say that I realize this is a touchy subject.  No one wants to come off as an opportunist, and certainly that is something a law firm risks when they market their services to victims of a headline grabbing accident.

That being said, victims of accidents like these certainly do need representation.   A recovering victim or the family of a deceased victim are almost certainly not experienced (and too grief stricken) to navigate through the confusing waters of major litigation.   In fact, it is in the interest of the victims that a Law Firm with experience handling such cases SHOULD market those services. 

Case in point, the recent Los Angeles Metrolink Train Accident in Chatsworth, CA.  Twenty-eight people have died, well over one hundred have been injured.   There is no doubt that many of the victims and their families will require legal assistance as they determine their rights.  Some will have the resources to find the right attorney, but most will not.   How can these victims find the RIGHT attorney for their case, and how can attorneys make sure that their firms are found?

Clearly old guard marketing efforts like the Yellow Pages can’t help wih these timely events.  Radio/TV/Newspaper advertising can be timely, but when your audience is only a few hundred people it really doesn’t make sense to use such broad-spectrum methods.

On the internet front, Pay-Per-Click is an obvious answer.  You can change things on the fly and quickly adjust keywords so your firm shows up for certain searches.  But just having a Pay-Per-Click campaign isn’t enough.  It is also IMPERATIVE that you ammend your website to include content on the timely subject.  If your site is well positioned with the search engines you’ll be amazed at how quickly your new content will show results.  More importantly, potential clients will see that you are specifically reaching out to them once they get to your site.  That is precisely what my client Binder & Associates has done with their website, with content on both their homepage and on a specific Los Angeles Metrolink Accident page. 

Another great method for adding timely content is by having a blog for your law firm.  Since the nature of a blog is to have a constant update to the content, the search engines more readily index the pages of blog sites.  This can allow you to show up in the search engine results pages within HOURS of publishing, a great advantage for marketing to timely events.  The downside is that you really do need to keep your blog fresh at all times (at least a few times a week) or it will lose this quality, and most attorneys just don’t have the time. 

If you are an attorney and you are interested in blogging for your firm, or if you have someone on staff who can do it for you, please don’t hesitate to contact me to find out how to get started.  I can be reached via my website, www.losangeles-lawyer-marketing.com.

“Google Suggest” – The End of Long Tail Search?

Friday, September 12th, 2008 | Lawyer Marketing | No Comments

Let me first answer my own question:  No. 

But, I do think that Google Suggest will change the way people search.   If you use an iPhone you’ve most certainly experienced Google Suggest, but you’ve also probably encountered it if you’ve downloaded the Google Toolbar for Firefox or the new Google Browser, Chrome.

For those of you who do not know, Google Suggest has been a Google Labs project for a while now and what it basically does is predict what search you are going to do by what you have already typed.   This is based off data on Google’s servers, not previous searches that YOU conducted on your computer.

So basically, if I type “Divorce At…” it will offer up “Divorce Attorneys”.    But more interestingly, it also suggests several more searches, including some that are city specific, and one that is “Divorce Attorney for Men”.

Google Suggest - Divorce Attorneys

Imagine you are a man doing this search.  Might you be inclined to take this suggestion instead of typing in whatever search you were planning on doing.   Even if you were about to type in “Divorce Attorneys for Dads,” it is not unreasonable to think that you might switch.  Just like we users end up trusting Google’s results, we might decide to trust their search suggestions too.  

That being said, I think Google Suggest actually has a much bigger impact on Vanity Searches than on Long Tail search.  There are only so many suggestions that Google can make (7-10 usually), so they tend to concentrate on the obvious searches.  And Google also seems to not be targeting everything yet.  ”Divorce Attorney Pa…” gets the suggestion “Divorce Attorney Pasadena” but “Divorce Attorney Glen” does not get the suggestion “Divorce Attorney Glendale”.  

However, I do see a use for Google Suggest when it comes to SEO strategy.  Typing in “Pasadena Divo..” offers up “Pasadena Divorce Lawyers” & “Pasadena Divorce Lawyer.”  That’s it.  No “Pasadena Divorce Attorney” or “Pasadena Divorce Law Firm”.  If I’m strategizing on what comes first in my SEO plan, I use what Google is going to suggest.  

pasadena-divorce-lawyers - Google Suggest

As of today, I DO NOT believe that this is something that everyone needs to worry about.  No one should rush out and change their tags or keywords just yet.  But it is certainly worth monitoring.

If you need help with Law Firm Website Optimization, please visit my website at www.losangeles-lawyer-marketing.com

“Why Doesn’t Google Know How Important I Am?”

Monday, July 21st, 2008 | Lawyer Marketing | No Comments

While no one has ever used those exact words, I do often hear from attorneys who are frustrated that their own websites show up lower on Google searches than the websites of other, less experienced attorneys. I once even received a call from a non-client who was angry that my client was coming up #1 on a search for Immigration Attorneys. For some reason he felt the need to tell me off and let me know that HE was a much more accomplished attorney than my client, and that it was wrong that his site didn’t come up first in the search. (Sadly, he was so angry he refused to meet with me to discuss his own site.)

One of the analogies I like to use when first meeting with a potential client is the Library Analogy. To explain how Google works we ask the attorney to think of the Internet as a vast library and Google as the librarian. Continuing the analogy, we ask the attorneys to think about how Google the librarian decides what “books to pull from the shelf.” Obviously if you don’t have a book (website) or if that book isn’t filed correctly (SEO, etc), your not going to show up very high in the results. The “library analogy” has really helped many of our clients grasp why it is not only important to build a website, but to build one the right way.

And yet, it dawned on me this weekend that as much as I like the “Library Analogy”, it still comes up short in explaining how important it is to build a website the right way. That being said, it is still the best analogy we have, as nothing really compares to either the amount of data Google has in its reference or to the method at which it gets dispersed.

I was catching up on last month’s WIRED MAGAZINE and read Editor Chris Anderson’s article on THE PETABYTE AGE. The first thing that jumped out at me was the fact that Google processes 1 PETABYTE of data every 72 minutes. To put that in perspective, the entire printed volumes at the US Library of Congress take up about 10 Terabytes, which is 1/100th of a Petabyte. That is a staggering amount of data.

The other thing that jumped out at me was the concept that Google doesn’t “know” anything. As Anderson says, “Google can translate languages without actually “knowing” them (given equal corpus data, Google can translate Klingon into Farsi as easily as it can translate French into German). And…it can match ads to content without any knowledge or assumptions about the ads or the content.”

Most relevantly, he points out that “Google’s founding philosophy is that we don’t know why this page is better than that one: If the statistics of incoming links say it is, that’s good enough. No semantic or causal analysis is required.”

And so, it is not really that Google doesn’t know how important you are, it is that they neither need nor care to know it. Google merely uses applied mathematics to sort through its huge mass of data, and so far that has ruled the day. Might this change in the future? I suppose it could, particularly with growth of reviews that are included in things like Google Local. But even reviews don’t convey stature, so I think for the foreseeable future this will not be part of the equation.

What I am certain of is that if you want to grow your business using the Internet, it is more important than ever to have the guidance of an Internet Marketing professional. There are just too many moving parts and the system is too complicated to do this on your own, particularly if you are practicing law full time.

If you’d like help with your law firm site, please contact me via my website at http://www.losangeles-lawyer-marketing.com/.

Use of Flash Leaves No Doubt Who This Site is Being Marketed To

Monday, July 14th, 2008 | Lawyer Marketing | No Comments

A Beautiful New Design For Family Law Attorney Demetria Graves

Sunday, July 6th, 2008 | Lawyer Marketing | No Comments

Glendale Family Law Attorney Demetria Graves unveiled a new website last Friday, and I for one think it is one of the best looking sites I’ve seen. Family Law websites present tricky design issues since you need the sites to convey both the strength AND compassion of your law firm. Demetria Graves has accomplished this with the release of her new site. The site is loaded with information, conveys Demetria’s experience, and has an organic look to it that fits well for a Family Law site

The Law Offices of Demetria Graves were early adopters of using the Internet to market their services to people needing family law help in Southern California. For the past several years, the firm’s site was a template design with a few pages of content written about the firm’s services.

With the release of this new site, Demetria Graves can highlight all the work her firm can perform in many different aspects of Family Law, including:

Divorce
Child Custody & Visitation
Child Support
Community Property Division

Spousal Support & Alimony

Guardianships

Domestic Partnerships

Congratulations to Demetria on the release of this new site.

If you would like a website developed for your law firm, please visit http://www.losangeles-lawyer-marketing.com/ to learn about how we can make your firm’s website your leading source of new and better clients.

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

Great New Website for Pasadena Family Law Attorney Jesse Verdin

Saturday, May 31st, 2008 | Lawyer Marketing | No Comments

We launched a new custom designed website for Jesse Verdin on Thursday. Previously Jesse had a template site, and while that site provide him with his main source of firm marketing for years, I expect this new site will do much better.

Jesse’s site includes 14 pages of custom written content on such topics as:
Divorce
Child Custody & Visitation
Child Support
Spousal Support & Alimony
Community Property Division
Post Judgement Modifications
Paternity Suits
Domestic Violence & Restraining Orders
Prenuptial Agreements

With the release of his new site, I think Jesse can once again claim to have the best Pasadena Family Law Attorney site.