Looking for concrete examples of the benefits of investing in a web presence for your law firm? In his article, Using Social Networking as a Legal Tool, WSJ's Nathan Koppel reports on the successes Parker Waichman Alonso LLP has had leveraging informational sites related to the oil spill.
The New York-based plaintiffs' firm set up websites with names like bigspills.com, oilspillclaims.com and oil-rig-explosions.com, and it filled them with news related to the disaster and invitations for visitors to provide their names and contact information.
More than 1,000 people have now completed the forms on the websites, and Parker Waichman, which has 23 lawyers, has filed about a dozen suits related to the oil disaster.
Implementing news and informational resource sites in this manner has proven to be one of the most successful ways to gain exposure for law firms online.
When a visitor arrives at BigSpills.com, they are provided with breaking news about the BP oil spill, as well as, multiple calls to action to contact Parker Waichman Alonso:
While the site does an effective job in terms of conversion optimization, interestingly, at the time of this article, there is a lot of opportunity for improvement in terms of search engine optimization.
Taking a look at the home page title tag, we can get a sense of some of the site's core key phrases:
As you can see, the site is optimized for key phrases related to "oil spill lawyer" and "oil spill lawsuit". However, performing a quick rank check for these terms reveals that the site doesn't appear to even be indexed in Google for these key phrases:
Performing some quick link profile analysis with Yahoo's Site Explorer tool reveals a large part of the problem, Yahoo is only reporting a single link back to the site.
Performing some quick competitive anaylsis, we can see Google's top organic results for for the search, "oil spill lawyer":
Not suprsingly, each of these competitor sites has a much more developed link profile.
The good news is that despite these SEO issues, Parker Waichman reports that they are still generating results from the site. This is most likely a result of their aggressive content strategy.
By frequently adding new, fresh, and relevant articles, the site is undoubtedly capturing a large amount of "long-tail" search traffic. This site serves as a great example of the importance of adding frequently adding content to your site or blog.
More and more law firms are beginning to understand (or hiring consultants who understand) the advantages of building a web presence through the use of informational sites and blogs.
By coupling frequent, informative, and relevant content with search engine optimization strategies, resource sites like BigSpills.com can be a very effective form of Internet client generation.
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