By Amy Johnson Conner
If you think that by simply creating a law firm website you have fulfilled your obligation to market on the Internet, think again.
Most firm websites amount to little more than on-line business cards - and they produce similar results. Drop a load of business cards off at the local supermarket and you'll get about the same results as these generic websites produce.
But Internet marketing doesn't need to be this haphazard, nor does it have to be as ineffective as many lawyers have concluded after years of half-hearted effort.
Just ask Benjamin Glass, a small-firm personal injury lawyer in Fairfax, Va., who draws nearly a third of his income from clients who come to him via the Internet - and a much higher percentage if you calculate in those who contact the firm by telephone, are referred to the website and are sufficiently impressed to bring their business to the firm.
Not only does the Internet bring Glass more business, it brings him a better quality of business. He estimates that each year the Internet brings him approximately 250 potential ERISA clients, 20 potential med-mal clients and 30 automobile personal injury suits.
Of those, he accepts about half of the personal injury and med-mal cases and a fifth of the ERISA cases. Because his firm takes on only the cases that have a high potential return, that means "hundreds of thousands of dollars" are generated by the site, he said.
"In other words, there are both more cases and more good cases," said Glass, who operates a two-lawyer firm. "This allows us to be very picky about what we accept."
Since his website has really kicked into gear in the past two years, Glass estimates that his firm accepts 40 to 50 percent more high-quality cases - which translates into a huge boost in profitability.
Although developing and maintaining the website (www.BenGlassLaw.com) certainly has cost him a significant amount of time and money, he says the return on investment has been enormous.
"I would say easily 100 to 1," said Glass. "That sounds extraordinary, but now, the website is extraordinarily profitable for us."
Glass concedes that this figure doesn't include the time he spends tinkering with the site, thinking about ideas and implementing them. Nor does it include significant sums of money spent developing the site. But he emphasizes that that investment has paid for itself many times over.
"Two years ago I got three med-mal cases that would pay for the website until the time I can retire," said the 45-year-old attorney.
Time Well Spent
Glass is the first to admit that it takes a great deal of effort to create a good marketing-oriented website. He estimated that the initial cost to set up a robust website would run between $7,500 and $12,000. In addition, he spends anywhere from $500 to $1,000 per month in maintenance costs, which includes the time of his Web developer, Tom Foster of Alexandria, Va.
In addition to this, Glass himself spends about three hours per month updating his website and almost 25 percent of his time coming up with new ideas for the website and thinking of ways to implement them effectively.
"Certainly, 20 to 25 percent is a huge chunk of time, but if you run any business - especially a small business - you have to do those things that will get people to call you first," Glass said.
Glass believes that if you're willing to hire a good Web developer and spend the time creating new, consumer-driven content to post on a regular basis, the results will be well worth the effort.
"How many lawyers are willing to spend the time to think about ideas, then go change them [on their websites]? For the few of us who are, we have a huge advantage because stuff is always fresh," he said.
Glass said there are two elements that can transform a glorified business card website into a marketing engine: Ensuring that it comes up near the top of the list during Web searches and providing content that consumers can actually use.
"More consumers are expecting businesses to have a website," Glass said, adding that the types of people who shop and research products online expect the same kind of information from their legal counsel's website.
Glass also believes his strategies are transferable to any practice that markets to consumers because consumers of legal services in all areas - divorce, bankruptcy, drunk driving - need practical information they can use, and they want to obtain it from the Web.
Because a firm cannot market solely with its website, Glass has several other marketing activities. He mails his past and current clients a quarterly newsletter that includes articles on recent case wins and settlements, as well as practical information they can use, such as how to protect themselves from identity theft.
"The big thing is that we've developed a lot of useful client information packages," he said. One, titled "The 14 Ways to Guarantee Your Long Term Disability Claim is Denied," details common mistakes patients and their doctors make and outlines ways to avoid doing so.
Glass also offers recorded messages on a toll-free line that is available 24 hours a day. His Yellow Pages ad lists those telephone numbers, and potential clients call and listen to the recorded message that gives basic information about their type of claim. Then, they can record their name and telephone number so a member of the firm can return their call.
"The object is to give useful information," Glass said.
Winning The Search Engine Game
A website isn't going to attract potential clients if they can't find it easily through popular Internet search engines such as Google, Yahoo and AltaVista.
"People looking for a lawyer use a couple different sources. They ask for referrals, look in the Yellow Pages, and more are using the Internet. My opinion is that most people today, whether you're figuring out what to buy for Christmas or finding a lawyer, are using Google," Glass said. "They're starting with terms like 'personal injury attorney' and then they figure out they need one in Virginia or New York."
But for a search engine to know a website is there, the site itself has to be sensitive to the search engine - and for lawyers, that means sensitive to both practice area and geography.
"I hear people lecture at lawyer marketing seminars who pooh-pooh websites because you [Internet users] do get so many returns if they type in 'DWI lawyer.' But if you make it regionally sensitive to the town or county or state, no matter what your practice area is," that is unlikely to happen.
The science of the search engine has become much more complex as Internet use has exploded. Search engines use complicated algorithms to determine which sites are ranked at the top of a given search. For a search engine to find a website and rank it well, the site has to use enough of the right keywords, according to Foster.
"By designing their pages around specific and popular keywords and phrases, and placing those keywords in strategic areas (both on the visual page and in the code that creates the web page image), a website scores better against search engine evaluation criteria and ranks higher in results," Foster wrote in a Feb. 23, 2003, article published in Virginia Lawyers Weekly. (See "Help Search Engines Find Your Firm," Virginia Lawyers Weekly, Feb. 23, 2003; Search words for VLW Archives: Foster and engine.)
Linking your website to other, related websites also improves the ranking of your site, according to Glass.
Few lawyers are going to master the constantly changing criteria search engines develop for website placement. That's why Glass believes it's essential for a law firm to hire an experienced web developer, not only to design the site, but to continually update it so that it will continue to place well in Web searches.
Foster explained that a search engine like Google constantly weeds out web developers who "cheat," because if the search engine itself is to be successful and get return visits from users, it has to make sure users get quality returns on their searches.
"The search engines are always changing the rules because, unfortunately, so many web designers are trying to break the rules," Glass said. He explained that some create a page with a word or phrase, for example, "class action," repeated hundreds of times in a font that a reader can't see but a computer knows is there. This makes a search engine think that because "class action" appears on the page so many times, it must have useful information about the topic, and ranks it higher in individual searches, he said.
"It's important to have someone keep track of the search engine science. If you mess up and the Alta Vistas of the world think you're cheating, you can get dropped completely," Glass said. "If you're a lawyer, you need somebody who understands this and can keep up with what Google is doing today and what Alta Vista is doing today."
Although this may all seem tangential to the practice of law, it's an extremely important part of finding the type of clients that will make your practice prosper, according to Glass.
"You have to be spending as much time, money and attention making your site sensitive to various search engines, particularly Google, as you spend developing the site in the first place," he said. "You really have to do all these steps to make it interesting and ultimately ... attract clients, build business and help [your firm] make money."
Content Consumers Want
Clearly, one of the largest challenges for lawyers is to provide quality information that's actually useful to a consumer. In fact, the hardest part of working with lawyers, Foster has told Glass, is "getting them to do the work necessary to get the text to put on the site," he said.
When deciding what text to include on a website, Glass suggests thinking more "newsletter" than "business card."
"A site that says 'I'm great and have 20 years experience and we sue for you,' isn't very innovative," he said. "Everybody says that."
The more consumer-driven information a website offers, the more successful it will be, Glass said.
"There has to be some reason why people will come to the site and stay there and then maybe come back to it later."
One element he has added to his site recently is legal-related headlines and news feeds, which he buys from Lawyers Weekly USA for a monthly fee. With new headlines every day, visitors have a reason to return to the site.
The website also includes audio recordings of Glass commenting on current legal news or making various sales pitches to clients. Through a $35-a-month service provided by the Internet company AudioGenerator.com, he calls a toll-free number, records a message, then that message is made available to him to post on his website.
"People learn by reading, people learn by listening," he said. "I could come up with an idea right now and, in about 10 minutes, I could record my idea and put it on the website."
The main portions of Glass' site include separate pages giving consumers basic information on personal injury, medical malpractice and insurance disability claims, written in language and using terms they can easily understand. The pages provide answers to common questions and information about the case review process, legal hurdles, fees and expenses and the likelihood of settlement.
He also offers a library page with downloadable documents that discuss everything from Medicare lien issues and long-term disability claims to law office management and marketing. A password-protected area of the library page is available to lawyers and provides detailed Medicare information. His firm newsletters are also included on the site.
50,000 Hits Per Month
Glass' site gets 50,000 hits per month and users download about 35,000 documents per month "all because we're willing to put it out there," he said.
Tracking, he said, is a key part of ensuring the website is doing the job it has been designed to do. A software program runs in the background of the website that determines the number of hits and downloads the site gets, as well as the path a user takes through the site and how long the user stays.
This allows Glass to determine which portions of the website are drawing people, which ones visitors find most interesting and which portions of the site are no longer pulling their weight. Based on this information, Glass eliminates the low-performing areas of the site and focuses his efforts on updating those that draw the most interest.
The tracking software also records which search engine brought a user to the site, Glass explained. He and Foster then use that information to adjust the site's sensitivity to search engines. For example, if perhaps hits from Google were down in a particular month, Foster researches why that was and alters the site so that Google's own website searching software program gives Glass' site a higher ranking.
"At least as important as the site itself is getting that feedback that says we didn't get a lot of visitors from Alta Vista so [a determination can be made whether there is] something we can do to one or more of the pages to make it more sensitive or attractive to people using Alta Vista for searching," Glass said.
Although Glass hired Foster to handle most of the technical maintenance of the site, the consultant has also set up templates on an administrative Web page that Glass can use to build simple new pages and add important information himself.
"If I come up with an idea or I've got a newsletter I want to post, it's easy for me to do that myself," Glass said.
Website marketing is an ongoing learning process, according to Glass. He admits his first website was nothing more than that glorified on-line business card. But it's latest incarnation - the eighth version so far - will consist of a main page that takes users to three separate websites based on whether they're looking for information on personal injury cases, medical malpractice cases or ERISA disability cases. This offers the added benefit of expanding the number of ways - through both keywords and links from other websites - that Glass can attract a search engine to his website.
Reprinted with permission from Lawyers Weekly USA, the national newspaper for small-firm lawyers. You can get a free trial subscription to Lawyers Weekly USA by visiting www.lawyersweeklyusa.com or calling 800-451-9998.
© 2003 Lawyers Weekly Inc., All Rights Reserved.
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December 8, 2003
