By Geri L. Dreiling, Esq.

“How do I get my law firm’s website to show up on the first page of Google results?”

This is the question I am asked most often by clients who hire Legal Media Matters to create a law firm website or write content for their firm. Lawyers understand the importance of ranking high in search engine results, but the process of reaching that goal remains a mystery to many.

Traditional advertising and publicity methods were fairly straightforward: If a lawyer wanted to generate more phone calls, the law firm bought a bigger ad or even a cover ad in the telephone directory. Search engine optimization, though, is much more complex. There are many factors at work, and achieving a good ranking takes effort.

In previous posts, Legal Media Matters has highlighted the importance of conducting keyword research and having a website map or diagram, the premium placed by search engines on fresh content, the optimal length of a piece of content and how legal public relations can help build trustworthy links to your site.

This week, The Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan published an excellent infographic explaining search engine optimization visually. The SEO “periodic table” is notable for several reasons. First, it lists the numerous factors that play a part in SEO. Second, it ranks those factors in terms of importance. Third, it highlights on-the-page and off-the-page strategies. Finally, it does an excellent job of showing pitfalls that can not only hurt your website but even result in its being blocked by search engines.

A guest post from Enrique Serrano

The Internet has changed the way in which we work and think. As Samuel Johnson once said: "Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it." With such a huge volume of information at our fingertips, the potential for finding and gathering knowledge seems endless.

Search engines play a vital role in the information-gathering process and, ultimately, in client development.  Every day around the world, an Internet user types a query, finds an answer to her needs on a website, and eventually becomes a new client.

If you want your legal website to get new clients through this procedure, you need to consider two important subjects:

• Search engine optimization, often shortened to SEO, is a process aimed at appearing in an easily visible position in a search engine’s results. If you aren't listed near the top position, your legal website runs the risk of being nearly invisible.
• User experience, describes the process that allows your users to find exactly what they are looking for in an easy way. If a user fails to find exactly what she needs, she will quickly leave the site dissatisfied.

The solution for a great-performing legal website in this very competitive environment is to have a lot of high-quality content, easily crawled by search engines and easily browsed by your potential clients. If your pages aren't easily read by search engines or aren’t delivered in a way that makes it easy for your clients to find them, the site won't succeed —- no matter how good your text is.

That's why determining how to arrange and link the pages of your website is so important. And that's where a website map comes into play.

What is a website map or web structure diagram

A website map is a graph of the pages that make up your site, depicting the links between them as connections. Each link provides a way for a user to reach a new page and distributes the importance that search engines assign to each page.

Website maps are site diagrams, readable by human beings, that structure development. They shouldn't be confused with the XML sitemaps used by search engines to find all of your content or with on-site maps that include in a single webpage HTML links to all of the other pages in your site.

Website maps as diagrams are a powerful tool, providing an easy way to determine what you need to write and where you need to place it in your main site structure.

Your goal is to improve your website’s user experience and SEO. Whether you plan to develop a new legal website for your firm or improve an existing one, creating a website map or website structure diagram is the first step toward making the most of your Web content.

The hierarchical structure of a website map

Website maps are usually depicted as hierarchical structure diagrams:

• Your homepage should be at the top, as the only tier 1 page. The homepage serves as a quick introduction of who you are and what you do.
• Tier 2 pages usually contain listings, or your main content categories, and provide an easy way to find the kind of information you were looking for.
• Tier 3 pages, the most numerous, provide a good way to access detailed, specific information.

If it takes too many clicks for a user to get to your target content, your site will be inefficient and visitors will probably abandon it before finding what they were looking for. To ensure a good user experience, make sure that important content is never more than a couple of clicks away.

A website structure diagram optimized for legal web sites

Any law firm could consider the following ideas when developing a legal website.

First, your homepage is your most important page. It is given high relevance by search engines and has the potential to draw many new visitors.

That's why your homepage should be simple and clear with just a few links that:

• Distribute the importance of link juice from search engines to your other pages.
• Allow users understand who you are and what you offer. The homepage should serve as a clean way to let them navigate to the relevant tier 2 page.

These tier 2 pages should mostly include listings of your main legal categories:

• Your main general practice areas (e.g., Auto Accidents.) This is the first step that a new user would take in refining her search.
• Listings of recent verdicts and press releases. This is a sign of healthy activity at any law firm.
• Listing of client testimonials. Again, this is an important way to build trust. (However, be sure to check first with your state bar to determine whether testimonials are permitted.)
• The categories of your articles, a listing of your main articles/FAQs or your legal blog. This kind of legal website content is essential to get good search engine performance. Including listings at this level of the map will prevent a cluttered navigation structure with too many articles as tier 2 sections while keeping your contents easily reachable for search engines.
• Your contact form. You need to provide an easy way for your users to call, visit and hire you, because that's your main goal.
• An About Us section. People need to feel reassured about the firm they are making contact with.

The tier 3 pages should be mostly focused on specific legal articles on very specific topics. You may cross-link the relevant tier 3 articles between them if they feel related. So tier 3 pages could include:

• Your specific practice areas (e.g.: Auto Accidents > Frontal Impact Collisions)
• A detailed verdict or press release per page.
• An article, FAQ or blog post per page. If you aren't sure about what to include in your blog, here are some legal blog ideas.
• A detailed client testimonial or case study.
• Your contact form should still be easy to reach from any of the previous pages.

Investing time and effort to write a complete piece of legal web content at each tier 3 page will prove being extremely effective getting search engine traffic and converting visitors, since it will contain exactly what they where looking for with enough amount of detail.

Writing a legal website map will let you organize all your content, identify what to include, highlight new ideas and ensure good SEO and usability properties.

Do you need to identify the best structure to improve your legal website? Contact Legal Media Matters and learn more about our website development and content writing services.

Enrique Serrano is a telecommunications engineer expert in online marketing and website development.

To ensure that you don’t miss out on these useful tips, subscribe to our regular e-mails or RSS feeds. You can also find Legal Media Matters on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.

Do you need to identify the best structure to improve your legal website? Contact Legal Media Matters and learn more about our website development and content writing services.

Jumpstart your content writing by leveraging these free resources

By Geri L. Dreiling, Esq.

On Tuesday, I highlighted three approaches I use when I’m feeling stuck and can’t seem to come up with content ideas for my own blog or the blawgs of my clients.

To get the ideas flowing once again, I discussed:

• Listing frequently asked questions
• Using keywords identified by Google Analytics
• Setting up Google Alerts

Here are three more free research and intelligence-gathering tools you can use to guide your legal blog content writing efforts and boost your traffic.

1.  Use Wordtracker to identify keyword questions

Wordtracker''s Keyword Questions is a nifty tool. Enter a single or short keyword phrase and you’ll receive a list of questions that people type into search engines. Use those questions to come up with blog topics. You’ll also want to use the question in your headlines.

For example, I typed in the search term “personal injury.” The questions Wordtracker identified included:

• Is a personal injury settlement community property?
• What is the average personal injury settlement?
• What to expect in personal injury mediation?
• What personal injury attorney handles dog bites in Tucson area?

2. Use Google Insights for Search to identify breakout searches.

Google Insights is a tool that allows you to look at search trends over time, then highlights predictions for the future. It allows you to track newspaper headlines and identifies not only the top search queries related to your keywords but also rising or breakout searches. It’s not unlike enjoying a great new restaurant before the rave reviews are printed: The breakout terms allow you to avoid the rush of the crowd and get the best seat in a soon-to-be-popular venue.

Once again, I typed in the search term “personal injury.” I limited the query to the state of Georgia. It identified seven breakout searches, including:

• Atlanta injury lawyer
• Personal injury cases
• Personal injury claims
• Personal injury settlements

3.  Use Google Sets to identify lists of words related to your practice area

Google Sets allows you to create a list of words related to your keywords. You can use the list generated as a word-association game to get the creative process going. Once again, you’ll have new words that you’ll want to incorporate into the post to make it more likely that prospective clients will find you.

I entered the following terms:  “personal,” “injury,” “lawyer,” and “attorney.”

The expanded list of Google Sets predictions included:

• Probate
• Legal services
• DUI
• Auto
• Car
• Truck
• Trial
• Insurance law
• Wrongful death

Of course, these tips are all helpful for Web content writing, too.

To ensure that you don’t miss out on this valuable information, subscribe to our regular e-mails or RSS feeds. You can also find Legal Media Matters on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.

At Legal Media Matters, we provide legal public relations, law firm marketing and attorney website content writing services.

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Feeling blocked? Follow these steps when content ideas are scarce.

By Geri L. Dreiling, Esq.

In addition to writing for my own blog, I help law firms keep up with the demands of their own blogs. That might mean anything from planning a blogging calendar to create content that conforms to their legal PR aims to writing drafts of blog content.

But even as a professional legal content writer there are occasions when I find myself blocked as I’m trying to come up with content ideas.

Here are three approaches that help me get unstuck and back on the writing track.

1. List Frequently Asked Questions

When I speak to prospective clients about law firm website writing, blog writing or legal PR work, the questions I’m asked tend to be similar despite differences in practice areas and geographical locations.

When a lawyer meets with a client or conducts an initial telephone consultation, the concerns raised are rarely novel. Clients want to know about their legal rights and options, legal procedures, the scope of the representation and the law firm’s fee structures.

I find it helpful to make a list of questions frequently raised in the initial consultation and use them to plan upcoming blog posts. Try writing down the initial questions a client raises during the meeting.  If you use  your client's terminology to frame your questions, you may improve the chances that a search engine query will lead to your blog post.

2. Use Keywords Identified by Google Analytics

Everyone should have his or her law firm’s website or blog configured with a program that measures traffic. One of the most popular free programs is Google Analytics. (In “How to install Google Analytics to measure your marketing campaigns,” Enrique Serrano provides step-by-step instructions explaining the process. )

Review the keyword phrases that are bringing visitors to your website. You can sort the phrases in a number of ways — for instance, identifying the most frequently used phrases that bring people to your site and the phrases that have received the most page views on your website. Consider writing a blog post that capitalizes on those keyword phrases.

3.  Set Up Google Alerts

If you scour the Internet in search of mainstream and legal media articles highlighting the latest news touching on your practice area, let Google Alerts do your Web surfing for you. You can enter your search parameters into Google Alerts, another free service, and receive a daily or weekly update highlighting the latest Google results on the basis of your topic or search terms.

The e-mail roundup is an efficient alert that pulls together late-breaking news and recent legal developments. Because you’re able to find out about it early, you can use the opportunity to weigh in or explain the debate on your legal blog.

These are just a few of my tried-and-true methods. Do you have any suggestions for overcoming legal content writing block? If so, I’d love to hear about them. Feel free to leave a comment to this blog post or email me at geri@legalmediamatters.com.

For our follow-up post on additional ways to generate story ideas, read "Blawg Topics: 3 More Brainstorming Tools."

To ensure that you don’t miss out on this valuable information, subscribe to our regular e-mails or RSS feeds. You can also find Legal Media Matters on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.

At Legal Media Matters, we provide legal public relations, law firm marketing and attorney website content writing services.

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The site’s purpose, the use of fresh content and tone often play a role in distinguishing between the two

By Geri L. Dreiling, Esq.

Last week a lawyer sent me an e-mail asking me to explain the difference between a blog and a website.

The answer is not as simple as it might seem. As methods of communicating information by way of the Internet evolve, differentiating between a website and a blog is sometimes difficult.

Here are some of the traditional distinctions between the two.

Law Firm Website

Generally a law firm’s website contains static sections with descriptions of the types of legal services offered. It includes basic information explaining who your firm is and what it does:

• A home page introducing the firm to potential clients
• A practice areas page listing the types of cases the firm handles. The website may also contain several subpages that explain the types of cases in further detail
• An attorney page containing the biographical information of members of the firm
• A contact page with the firm’s telephone number and address and an online contact form

Law Firm Blog

A blog is generally an easy-to-update collection of short articles known as posts.  Blogs are updated frequently, and visitors tend to read the newest posts. Common topics on law blogs, or blawgs, include:

• New or recent court decisions or rulings that affect the firm’s practice area
• Current events that involve the firm’s practice area
• Answers to clients’ frequently asked questions
• Legislative developments
• Opinion or editorial comments about legal news or trends

The Blurring Line Between Blogs and Websites

Increasingly firms are embedding blogs in their websites under the same domain. An embedded blog helps keep a law firm’s website supplied with fresh content, which provides some search engine advantages.

Firms are also using blog engines, or content management systems, as the skeleton on which a website is built. Content management systems such as WordPress and Joomla! are user friendly; when they are adapted for use on a law firm’s website, updating the website becomes much easier.

Choosing the Best Option for Your Firm

For firms on a limited financial budget or with limited human resources to devote to maintaining a blog, a website should be the priority. It will allow potential clients to gather more information about your firm and provide quick access to contact information. An outdated blog that does not have any recent posts could undermine your firm's legal marketing efforts.

To ensure that you don’t miss out on this valuable information, subscribe to our regular e-mails or RSS feeds. You can also find Legal Media Matters on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.

At Legal Media Matters, we provide legal public relations, law firm marketing and attorney website content writing services.

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Our weekly roundup of legal news links, legal PR client news and story ideas

By Geri L. Dreiling, Esq.

We’re heading into the second major U.S. holiday of the summer, the Fourth of July. Many businesses will be closed on Monday. I won’t be posting a blog entry on July 5, but here are a few stories to check out over the three-day weekend.

LMM Client News

A $1.5 million personal injury settlement obtained by Jim Lemonds and Andrea McNairy of St. Louis-based Brown & Crouppen and Greg Roberts of The Roberts Law Firm was highlighted in this week’s Missouri Lawyers Weekly.

Spencer Farris of The S.E. Farris Law Firm received the Missouri Association of Trial Attorneys’ President’s Award, which is given annually to an attorney whose efforts help Missouri citizens gain access to the civil justice system.

Notable Links for Lawyers

My Top Ten Rules for Job Search Success

Richard Russeth, the wise counselor behind The Last Generalist, shares his top 10 rules to follow if you’re in the job market. In addition to reminding readers that it takes work to find work, noting that doing some volunteer work at least once a week will give you a sense of accomplishment and encouraging us to say thank you, he gives us this quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Be silly. Be honest. Be kind.”

Essential Tools for SEO on a Budget

Analyzing your site with the use of Google’s free Webmaster Tools, researching keywords and obtaining inbound links are three strategies suggested by ReadWriteBiz’s John Paul Titlow for improving your website’s performance.

Keeping Your Online Reputation Up to Par

Rob Stretch’s guest post on The Saint Louis Social Media & Tech Report reminds businesses to monitor their online reputations, remain active on the Internet by using several different methods for reaching customers and remaining engaged on social media sites.

Six Ways to Manage International Relationships Online

Zachary Sniderman’s post on American Express OPEN Forum and Mashable is handy for anyone who conducts business internationally. Suggestions for researching basic country information, a time zone converter, translation help and quick faux pas checks to help avoid embarrassing etiquette breaches are just a few of the links provided.

To ensure that you don’t miss out on this valuable information, subscribe to our regular e-mails or RSS feeds. You can also find Legal Media Matters on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.

At Legal Media Matters, we provide legal public relations, law firm marketing and attorney website content writing services.

A professional design and typo-free, frequently updated legal content top the list

By Geri L. Dreiling, Esq.

What makes a law firm website a good one from the perspective of a potential client?

In 2002, the Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology Lab released the Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility.  Based on three years of research involving more than 4,500 subjects, these guidelines are useful not only when it comes to planning a website but also in measuring the effectiveness of your firm’s current website.

Here are the guidelines, adapted for use by law firms.

1. Make it easy for people to gauge your website’s accuracy. Provide third-party links to support your information.
2. Demonstrate that there’s a real law firm behind your website. Include your phone number, a physical address and representative client lists or links to news articles about your firm.
3. Highlight your law firm’s services and the expertise of your attorneys. In addition to providing information on undergraduate and law degrees, include the honors and awards an attorney has received and the articles he or she has written.
4. Show that honest and trustworthy people are affiliated with the firm and its site. Use the attorney profile page not only to highlight a lawyer’s expertise but also to allow the potential client to connect with the lawyer as a person and a problem-solver.
5. Make it easy to contact your law firm. Is your contact page clearly visible? Do you provide multiple ways for clients to contact the firm?
6. Does your law firm’s website appear professional? Forty-seven percent of website visitors base their evaluation of a site’s credibility on its appearance. A poor visual design, bad layout, formatting errors, typographical errors and amateurish images can hurt a website’s credibility.
7. Provide a website that is both useful and easy to use. Are your pages informative? Will potential clients find them educational? Can potential clients find the information they’re seeking easily?
8. Frequently update your law firm website’s content. Offering outdated content is like showing up in court wearing a tomato-red polyester suit and your best pair of white dress shoes: Your law firm’s website will stand out, all right — but not in a good way.
9. Use restraint when offering promotional content. Prospective clients don’t expect to see third-party advertising on an attorney website.
10. Avoid errors of all types, no matter how inconsequential they might seem to you. Does your website contain typographic errors, grammar errors or broken links?

At Legal Media Matters, we use our know-how to help your law firm’s website get positive notice. We create attorney bio pages; provide fresh, useful, easy-to-understand content that will attract the attention of potential clients and keep your website current; and offer copyediting services.

For more information, contact us by filling out our online contact form, e-mailing geri@legalmediamatters.com or calling 314-520-3897 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              314-520-3897      end_of_the_skype_highlighting.

To ensure that you don’t miss out on this valuable information, subscribe to our regular e-mails or RSS feeds. You can also find Legal Media Matters on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.

At Legal Media Matters, we provide legal public relations, law firm marketing and attorney website content writing services.

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Photos, videos and screenshots can give your legal blog zip

By Geri L. Dreiling, Esq.

I once participated in a focus group whose members were asked to share their opinions about a legal publication. We were to comment on the content as well as the overall look and feel of the paper.

I remember one lawyer in particular indicating that he preferred dense text, very little white space and a lot of legalese. In law school he had become comfortable with treatises and works that most find off-putting. He felt that photos, white space and the “plain English” approach to writing watered down the reading experience.

Having written for both mainstream and legal publications where the mandate was to make it as easy as possible for people in a hurry to absorb information quickly, I hadn’t considered the reader who actually enjoys settling in with a hornbook.

It was an “aha” moment for me.

Working with lawyers on website and blog content, I have noticed that some tend to prefer a screen filled with long paragraphs of dense text, devoid of images, white space or video because that is what they encounter day in and out, whether it is case law or statutes.

But prospective clients are often not so eager or patient when it comes to gathering information online. White space, images, headings and bold text make information more accessible.

A dense wall of words can be so intimidating that the would-be reader flees the page. (By checking your site statistics you can tell how long someone lingers on a page.)

I’ve found on my own site that the time spent on the page goes up and the bounce rate goes down when I incorporate images. Here are three ways in which you can liven up your legal blog, break up pages of dense text and increase the number of people who remain on your site for longer periods.

1. Incorporate video.

Short video clips interspersed with your text can be an effective tool with which to make your point. They’re also a good way to keep a reader on your blog — and remember it.

Here I’ll paraphrase Pee Wee Herman’s famous “Why don’t you take a picture? It’ll last longer!” Add video, and your visitor will linger longer.

2. Add photos and clip art that are free of royalty restrictions.

A number of free sites offer downloads of photos and clip art that aren’t bound by royalty restrictions.

One site that I often use is a free site from Microsoft’s Office.

3.  Add a screenshot of a Web page.

As anyone who regularly reads my posts knows, I love to incorporate screen shots of Web pages. It’s a convenient way to illustrate a point or walk a reader through a particular task.

For lawyers, the ability to take screenshots can be useful indeed. For example, divorce filings typically require the parties to fill out a variety of income and expense, property and child support calculation forms, and many states provide these forms online. A blog post explaining how to fill out the forms or addressing common questions about various aspects of the form could include screenshots of the relevant sections. Just below or above each screenshot, the attorney can provide a more detailed description or explanation of the information the form is trying to elicit.

I use a free web page capture plug-in called FireShot. It allows me to not only save screens with common photo extensions such as .png but also to edit what I save. Typically when I upload the screen shot to my blog I embed a link back to the original site.

Do you have a favorite tool for livening up your legal blog? If so, let me know.

To ensure that you don’t miss out on this valuable information, subscribe to our regular e-mails or RSS feeds. You can also find Legal Media Matters on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.

At Legal Media Matters, we provide legal public relations, law firm marketing and attorney website content writing services.

An in-house lawyer wants to reach executives and explain the services a general counsel offers

By Geri L. Dreiling, Esq.

Over the Memorial Day weekend, I invited my Twitter followers to pose a question (in 140 characters or fewer, of course) that I would take up on this blog. One lawyer sent a direct message wanting to know the best keywords to attract chief executive officers and chief financial officers who want to learn more about what their in-house lawyers can do for them.

The question is much more complicated than it might seem at first blush.

Here’s a driving analogy. If someone asks how to start a car, the easiest answer is: “Just turn the key in the ignition.” But there’s a complicated assortment of processes going on behind the dashboard and beneath the hood that are responsible for starting the engine.  Even though the key signals to the engine that it is time to start, it is the first piece of a complicated process.

In other words, simply possessing a key will not make a car run — and the same key won’t start every car.

As with cars, there’s often a multilayered process that is engaged in before keywords will work. As with car keys, the keywords that will deliver the best performance are going to vary; one size does not fit all.

Legal Keywords and Problem-Solving

Keywords help people sort through the huge pool of information provided on the Internet and find what they’re looking for. But vague keywords, or inefficient keywords in areas where there is a lot of expert competition, are like replacement keys that are almost exact duplicates: They’re not going to work in the way you want them to.

To discover what types of keywords might attract them to your website or blog, you must first figure out what keeps executives up at night. Once you’ve done that, you can explain how an in-house lawyer is a problem-solver and ally when it comes to providing solutions to those specific problems.

Is an executive looking for loan workout help or bankruptcy reorganization advice? If the company is located in the U.S., does the executive have questions about the new healthcare legislation and how it applies to his or her company? What are the legal pitfalls a domestic company looking to expand abroad must avoid?

Once you’ve brainstormed ideas, it’s time to test them. There are several free tools — among them Google Insights, Wordtracker and Google AdWords — you can use to conduct research. (For more on the mechanical steps of finding keywords used in actual searches and then including them in your content, read “Law Firm Websites: Seven Tips for Legal Content Writing.”)

For a test run, I chose the simple phrase “in-house counsel” to see what would come up.

At Google Insights, a worldwide search of the phrase revealed that the top searches involved finding jobs and salary information.

I went to Wordtracker and plugged in “in-house counsel” to see what would come up. The most-searched phrase turned out to be the most specific grouping of keywords (a “long tail”): “in-house counsel obligation regarding spoliation.” Several job search-related queries also surfaced. There were two searches recorded for the keyword phrase “evolving role of in-house counsel.”

At Google AdWords, the “in-house counsel” query once again pulled up several job-related searches. However, it also indicated that the phrase “general counsel” is extremely popular and that “attorney client privilege in house counsel” is one substantive area that receives some inquiries.

There are, of course, additional strategies and techniques to sort and sift the information, but this brief exercise illustrates four points:

1. When it comes to keywords, there is no virtual master key.
2. Avoiding certain keyword phrases, such as the ones related to job searches, is just as important as finding the phrases you want to use.
3. The best-performing site will have one page dedicated to each distinct phrase — for example, a page addressing spoliation, another explaining attorney-client privilege and a third discussing the evolving role of in-house counsel. (For more information on how to use your keywords on a page, read “Three Keyword Rules for Law Firm Website.”)
4. You must measure the performance of your Web pages and keywords. Most sites require monitoring and adjustment. Because keyword selection isn’t as straightforward as one might hope, you may find one set of keywords performing extremely well and another set underperforming. (For more information on measurement, read “How to Install Google Analytics to Measure Your Marketing Campaign.”)

Integrate Your Legal Keyword Efforts with Media Outreach

At Legal Media Matters, we research keywords, develop strategies based on the basis of our clients' goals and then write content. We also emphasize the importance of integrating online and traditional public relations strategies.

In addition to your online outreach, don’t forget traditional print publications as a means of reaching out to executives. Some of the best places for this type of outreach are the so-called industry bibles and trusted trade publications that accept guest articles. Review the editorial calendar to find an opening. (For more on this process, see “Writer’s Guidelines and Guest Articles,” and “Editorial Calendars and Guest Articles.”)

Another way to educate your audience is to post comments to articles related to your topics. In both instances, comments and guest articles can serve as the initial means of engaging your target audience. A website address or link back to your blog, if an executive is reading the information online, will allow him or her to continue the conversation — and may also provide valuable inbound links to your site, boosting its performance and the reach of your keywords. (For more ideas on finding your audience, see “Law Firm Marketing: To Draw Clients In, Reach Out.”)

If you need help researching keywords, writing content or devising a print publication placement strategy, contact Legal Media Matters. We can help you with your legal content writing project and tailor a legal marketing and public relations plan tailored to your firm’s unique goals.

To ensure that you don’t miss out on this valuable information, subscribe to our regular e-mails or RSS feeds. You can also find Legal Media Matters on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.

By Enrique Serrano

For law firms, an online presence is essential: It is a marketing tool for building your firm’s brand, a way to attract new clients, improve your reputation and ultimately expand your practice. Once your website has been set up, you may be tempted to judge its performance simply by the way your business improves or in terms of the number of new clients who tell you that they found you through your website.

But that's a narrow approach. Your website can generate valuable information if you install a statistics tracking program.

Why do you need stats tracking on your website?

Stats tracking is more than a traditional hit counter or a graph with the number of visits. It’s vitally important because it:

• Allows you to determine the most interesting content for your clients
• Helps you discover new business opportunities, keywords and markets
• Is a reliable way to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns
• Removes the guesswork from website-improvement tasks, making website optimization a scientific process

Your stats will give you new ideas about how to improve your site. They provide a reliable measure of what is working and which web pages are underperforming. In short, stats tracking allows you to experiment, measure and optimize.

Why should you choose Google Analytics?

I prefer Google Analytics as a stats tracking tool because:

• It’s completely free for traffic volumes of fewer than 5 million page views per month
• Google Analytics features an easy-to-use customizable interface that allows you to find the most important information, such as traffic volume, top performing pages, visitor locations, traffic sources and most effective keywords, at a glance. This is a straightforward way to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.
• It contains advanced stats tracking features such as dynamic graphs, site overlay reports displaying your most interesting links and Google Intelligence, which highlights important changes in your traffic. All of these tools are great ways to understand how is your site working and find opportunities to improve your public relations strategy.
• Google Analytics is easy to install. You just need to copy and paste a small piece of code inside your pages. You can even install it yourself, saving your time and your budget — which are better invested in understanding your reports and improving your website marketing.

How to install the tracking code of Google Analytics in HTML pages

Follow these steps to install the newest and fastest version of Google Analytics code on your website:

1. You need a free Google Account to create a Google Analytics account. You can create a Google Account here.
2. Access Google Analytics (or sign up for Google Analytics here if you’re a new user) through your Google Account.
3. Select your new account and create a new website profile, clicking the Add Website Profile link in the lower left corner of your account overview. You will need a profile for each site that you own.
4. Fill in the fields of your new website profile form. (Be sure to check 'Add a profile for a new domain'.) Type in your domain name and pick your country and time zone, then click Finish.
5. The next screen displays your Google Analytics tracking code. Your default options should work for this kind of installation. Copy the tracking code, which you will need to paste into all of your pages, and click Save and Finish.
6. Download your web pages (HTML files), using FTP. A variety of free FTP clients, such as FileZilla, are available. (Windows comes with a built-in FTP client.) You can use the Add Network Place Wizard in Windows, or just type ftp://yourWebsiteAddress.com into your Windows file explorer bar and then provide the user name and password given by your web hosting company. Once you’re logged in, copy your HTML files to your hard drive.
7. Edit your original files, pasting this stats tracking code just after the opening <body> tag. Any basic text editor (e.g., Windows Notepad) will work. (Be sure to keep the original file extension — .htm or .html. Finally, upload your files by way of FTP, overwriting the old ones.

How to install Google Analytics in WordPress

Not all websites are composed of HTML files. Many legal websites use content management systems. With a CMS you only need to paste your Analytics code in one place. If you are using WordPress, you can either install a Google Analytics plug-in or do it manually, following these steps:

• Access your site by way of FTP and go to yourWordpressFolder/wp-content/themes/yourChosenTheme/.
• Locate and download the file called header.php.
• Edit the file, pasting the Analytics tracking code just after the <body...> tag.
• Upload the new file, overwriting the old one.

How do you know if Google Analytics code is working correctly?

Once the setup process is complete, you only need to verify that Google Analytics is working as expected:

• In the overview page of your Analytics account, you should see the status of your tracking as an icon. Click the edit link in the right edge to check it again.
• In the upper right corner of the Analytics Profile Settings, click the Check Status link.
• In the Tracking Status section, confirm that your Google Analytics code is working correctly, displaying a Receiving Data message.
• If you still get an “Analytics code not installed” error message, confirm that the time of the last code check is the current time.
• You can also make sure that your Google Analytics code has been pasted properly. Navigate to your site and use the View Source Code option in your web browser (Page > View source code in Internet Explorer, or just press CTRL+U in Firefox or Google Chrome).

That's it! Now you only need to wait till the system gathers some statistical data. Use Google Analytics to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and to improve your public relations strategy through the process of experimenting, measuring and optimizing.

Enrique Serrano is a telecommunications engineer expert in online marketing and website development.

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