Real Lawyers Have Blogs : Law Blogs, Social Media, Twitter

Fred Wilson, a New York City Venture Capitalist and top notch blogger, writes this morning that many websites get more traffic from social than search.

For Wilson's blog, AVC - musings of a venture capitalist in New York, social is the hands down winner.

...[I]f we break the top ten into three categories, direct is about half of the top ten [sources of] traffic, social is 40%, and search is 10%.

My blog has received six times as much traffic from social (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Stumbleupon, other blogs) in the last month as search.

For attorneys and law firms publishing blogs, social is probably much better than search as a source of traffic.

Being a trusted authority is what it's all about in getting hired as an attorney. Social traffic signals trust, rather than being the subject of a random search.

Who do you trust more as a source of news, information, and commentary? Someone you're following in social media because you trust them or Google?

This is why it is so very important to engage others when blogging and build social media equity through the effective use of ancillary social media such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

You need to get people following your blog, following your Tweets, connecting with you on LinkedIn, and connecting with you socially on Facebook. If you don't, you'll be relying solely on search, a bad bedfellow for the long run.

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North Carolina Divorce Attorney, Lee Rosen (@leerosen), points out that lawyers are going to disappear from search engines if they don't get people to talk about them in social media.

Rosen knows too well the importance of search, especially for lawyers in personal plight areas of the law (divorce, bankruptcy, personal injury, et al).

Ranking well in the search engines has become important in many of our practices. Google is the Yellow Pages of the modern age, and some lawyers are very dependent on marketing via the Web. No Google ranking sometimes equals no clients.

Traditional search engine optimization via good content, proper title tags, and incoming links is no longer going to be enough to get good rankings.

Google and Bing, the dominant search players, are increasingly emphasizing social signals in determining the rankings of their search results. In fact, Google made a huge change last week. Some lawyers game the system by putting out gobs of spammy, fake, anonymous tweets and other social endorsements of their work. That might work in the short-term, but it’s got huge potential to bite you later. I’d avoid that approach.

Just like in the offline world where an attorney's word of mouth reputation rules, you now need to get people to start saying good things about you in social media. Per Rosen:

The bottom line is that we need to increase positive word of mouth about our businesses if we’re going to show up in front of people in need of our services. Today, word of mouth is communicated via social media. You need people saying nice things about you—online.

It’s now more important than ever that people say positive things about you on the Internet. Ideally, they’ll “Like” your page on Facebook, share your information via Twitter, and hit the +1 button on Google. That’s all-important now and getting more important every single day.

That can be a problem per Rosen as folks don't brag about a divorce online. You're not going to see a tweet that says:

“My divorce lawyer @leerosen really kicked my spouse’s ass. He’s the best!”

Rosen is asking attorneys for their answers in how to generate positive word of mouth through social media. Share your thoughts in comments to his post. Here's my thoughts.

Begin with the premise that no one in social media needs to say you're a great guy/gal or fabulous lawyer (though it'd be nice) for you to receive social media signals impacting search. People sharing in social media what you said or commenting about it is enough, perhaps even a better social signal telling the search engines you should be trusted.

• Start to use social media yourself. Blog, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+. You can't expect people to share a positive word about you or share what you've had to say unless you're out there using these things yourself. Having someone do it for you is foolhardy.
• Engage. Don't just push your content at people. When blogging, reference what others are writing (blogging lawyers, reporters, etc). Referencing those folks will get you heard by them and allow you to build relationships of trust with them. They'll share what you had to say in social media and write about what you're saying so you'll receive greater exposure with people who can in turn share your content.
• Be an intelligent agent on Twitter. Share not just your own content, but information and news from others that is relevant to your target audience. You'll build a following and others on Twitter will retweet what you have to say.
• Engage friends and close business associates in Facebook. You'll build trust just as you do with exchanges in the real world.
• Use LinkedIn to connect with people you know, meet through through blogging or other social media, or would like to meet. LinkedIn will serve as another relationship builder which will lead to people sharing what you have to say online.
• If using Google+, build out a network like you do on LinkedIn or Facebook. Share relevant content. Comment on relevant content being shared by others in your network. You'll have people citing you.

I'm sure there's 85 other ways to gain social signals to impact search results that I am missing. I expect Rosen will pick up some in comments to his post and for him to share his own ideas in a later post.

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News broke yesterday of Google's implementation of a new search feature called 'Search, plus your World.'

The concept is to supplement your standard Google search results with results of items your friends have shared or highlighted that are relevant to your search. Google wants to transform search from not only understanding content, but also understanding people and relationships.

From Google's official blog, here's their announcement yesterday of Search, plus your World.

Google Search has always been about finding the best results for you. Sometimes that means results from the public web, but sometimes it means your personal content or things shared with you by people you care about. These wonderful people and this rich personal content is currently missing from your search experience. Search is still limited to a universe of webpages created publicly, mostly by people you’ve never met. Today, we’re changing that by bringing your world, rich with people and information, into search.

Search is pretty amazing at finding that one needle in a haystack of billions of webpages, images, videos, news and much more. But clearly, that isn’t enough. You should also be able to find your own stuff on the web, the people you know and things they’ve shared with you, as well as the people you don’t know but might want to... all from one search box.

As you'll see in the below Google video, your search results page will begin to display an icon next to the search box (I'm not seeing yet) by which you can search for 'personal results.' You'd then receive in the search results items that your 'friends' on social networks (now limited to Google+) had referenced which were relevant to your original search.

I don't see anything shocking with the news. The idea of social search has been in the works for a long time. You've seen for some time small pictures of people you know next to certain search results on Google. Google has previously had an option to display results of searches for items shared by your 'social network' in its social search feauture.

Google's received a ton of criticism over the last 24 hours, especially from Twitter, for not including social search results from other than Google+.

If you're like me you've got a much larger, robust, and mature (you've been using for a long time) social network on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Without Google's 'Your World' pulling in references from those networks, my social search is not going to mean much.

Matt Cutts, who works for the Search Quality group in Google, specializing in search engine optimization issues, and who has a reputation for being a straight shooter, responded this morning that 'Your World' will pull content from other social networks.

Search plus Your World builds on the social search that we launched in 2009, and can surface public content from sites across from the web, such as Quora, FriendFeed, LiveJournal, Twitter, and WordPress.

The team should be finishing the rollout of Search plus Your World in the next day or so, and I hope you enjoy it. Remember, to see the new results, you’ll need to be signed in with a Google account and search on google.com. Give this new feature a whirl: once you see how much better personal search can be, I don’t think you’ll want to give it up.

I look forward to the expansion of social search. I trust more what my trusted network of 'friends' is sharing and saying about items I am searching on more than a random search on Google.

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How can good law blogs published by lawyers who don't know about SEO (search engine optimization) rank well?

The answer comes from Matt Cutts, who works for the Search Quality group in Google, specializing in search engine optimization issues. And it's simple. Good content.

From a recent video on the subject, here's Cutts key points.

• Google tries to make it so you don't have to do SEO and Google will still find and display the good content.
• Just because someone is not SEO savvy does not mean they don't have good content.
• There are lot of things people can to do, ie, making content accessible, making it crawable, and having good titles, but that doesn't mean they have good content.
• Even if you do brain dead things and shoot yourself in foot as far as SEO, Google will still want to return good content in search so people can find it. If there's good quality content, Google tries to compensate if people make mistakes.
• If you put a little time into making sure your content is accessible and useful that will help, but Google does not want to penalize anyone if they don't do every single thing on the SEO checklist.
• First and foremost Google cares about getting the stuff people really will like - the good and compelling content - in front of them.

Here's Cutts video answer.

Thanks to technology professional, Joe Brockmeier, who turned me on to the video from Cutts in his post this morning at ReadWrite Enterprise entitled, 'Good Content Trumps SEO.'

Brockmeir also raises a great point for lawyers and law firms.

So if you're planning that 2012 site budget, you might want to think twice about hiring that SEO expert and find a content expert instead.

I see lawyers pay handsomely for SEO services. Two to three thousand dollars a month is not unusual.

There's nothing inherently wrong with that if you're working with someone you can trust. Bottom line though, you are still going to need to good content.

If you're a lawyer or law firm looking to get seen on Google, you may want to think about blogging in the coming year -- and doing a good blog -- as opposed to spending on SEO.

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From Neil Patel, Co-founder at Crazy Egg with strong search engine optimization expertise, on how social media effects SEO:

You need to get with the times and start expanding your presence on social media sites, instead of endlessly chasing the latest SEO tricks.......If you're truly interested in SEO, you need to wake up and start looking at how the Internet works today. It's about social media and social networking.......There's no doubt that traditional SEO is slowly fading in importance when you compare it with the new social optimization indicators. So if you aren't yet active in the social media world, you better start running because you don't have time to walk.

Read Patel's post entirety. It's well researched and well reasoned.

It'll serve as a wake up call if you're fixated on meta tags, links from countless websites, having mini-sites on multiple domains from multiple IP addresses, using website analytic tools, looking at PageRank, and what have you. The SEO gimmicks list goes on and on from the books authored by and seminars put on by SEO people looking to take money from lawyers.

Patel cites some strong authority for his position.

• From Matt Cutts, who works in the Search Quality group at Google, last December: "I filmed a video back in May 2010 where I said that we didn't use "social" as a signal [an item like a like that effects search performance], and at the time, we did not use that as a signal, but now, we're taping this in December 2010, and we are using that as a signal."
• In SEOMoz's 2011 Search Engine Factors Ranking report almost 132 SEO and social media experts predicted that social signals at the page level and domain level would have a greater impact on search engine rankings than traditional SEO factors. (SEOMoz is a leading SEO consultancy)

What's impacting SEO per Patel?

• Links shared on Facebook. Content shared by Facebook contacts receives preferential positions in the search engine results, as well as with a picture of the person who shared it. By increasing the social proof of these results, Google increases the chances that this content will receive clicks.
• Tweets or retweets of links by legitimate users on Twitter.
• Google Plus? As social media consultant and author, Chris Brogran, said, "A social network made by Google impacts search."

What action should you take if you're concerned about SEO? From Patel:

• Build an active, engaged presence on social networking sites - this isn't exactly rocket science... if social media engagement is a new ranking factor, you simply can't benefit if you aren't there. If you haven't already, now is the time to build profiles on these sites and invest time in connecting with your followers.
• Optimize your sites for social media sharing - if your sites are built on WordPress, installing a plugin like Sharebar to enable social sharing is something you have to do. Don't rely on your users reading good content on your website and then taking the time to navigate to social networks to share it on their own. Instead, you have to provide them with the tools necessary to get the job done in the easiest way.
• Encourage your readers to share your content - smart marketers know that assuming people will take the action you want without you explicitly telling them to do so is a lost cause. You have to use strong calls to action in your posts, encouraging readers to share your content via social networks if they found it useful.

SEO in its traditional form is not going to become unimportant overnight. Good content that's well indexed which is drawing organic links from strong relevant blogs and websites will continue to be important.

But chasing SEO gimmicks while you should be learning about social media and social networking is misguided.

Good news here for lawyers here who are personally offering valuable information and insight on blogs and in social media. Your content and insight will be cited on blogs, shared/liked on Facebook, Tweeted, and discussed on Google Plus and Facebook.

You'll be establishing trust, authority, and influence. Key factors for SEO going forward.

Interesting times ahead on the SEO front for lawyers. Maybe the good guys win this time.

Discuss this post at Google Plus.

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Seth Godin had a wonderful post last week on the dichotomy between Important and Measured.

Is something important because you measure it, or is it measured because it's important?

Does our new ability to see things with web data make the previously overlooked now visible, or are we giving weight to things merely because we've measured them?

God knows lawyers and law firms love to measure stats when it comes to websites and blogs.

• How are our web stats?
• How do our web stats compare to other firm web sites and blogs like ours?
• Are our web stats improving?
• How many visitors do our web stats show us getting?
• How are we performing on Google search for our areas of practice and locale?
• How many links are pointing to our blog our website?

But ask yourself, are you measuring web stats because they are important? Or are you saying web stats are important because you can measure them?

Not one lawyer or law firm over the last 8 years came to LexBlog saying "We need stats, and we hear you can give us some."

Lawyers come to us because they want to enhance their reputation as a trusted authority and grow their word of mouth reputation. Reputation and word of mouth are what's important.

Even though some things are difficult to measure. They may be more important.

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As reported this week by the Wall Street Journal's Scott Morrison, Google is making its search results more social by prioritizing in search results relevant content content shared by those in the user's social network.

The move is part of Google's effort to adapt to a rapidly shifting Internet in which users increasingly rely on such social media sites as Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. to discover content and products on the Internet.

Google first rolled out its social search feature in 2009, but social results were relegated to the bottom of the results page. With the changes introduced on Thursday, content shared by friends on Flickr, Blogger, or Twitter will be woven in among Google's main search results, a change the Mountain View Calif., company said will give users "even more information from the people that matter to you."

An example is my search on Martindale-Hubbell. Highlighted in Google's search results are blog posts published by Attorneys within my social network, Ernie Svenson and Doug Cornelius.

Google's highlighting social media makes a lot of sense if you think about it. What are you apt to trust more - random search results from Google or content shared or produced by those you trust within your social network?

Facebook 'likes' do not appear yet in Google social's search. In time I expect 'likes' to appear or in some way impact search results

As a lawyer your social network is now becoming more and more important. First, if you don't have a online social network of people you follow, the results you receive in Google will be a little less rich.

Second, without a social network you'll be seen less in search results. You simply won't have people sharing what you're saying (writing).

I blogged earlier this week about the growing impact of social media on Google search, that being the sharing and liking in social media may become more important than a link to your content.

The prioritizing of social search is growing evidence that change is on the way. Social media is becoming more and more important to lawyers and law firms.

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The lead story in the Business Section of Sunday's New York Times, 'The Dirty Little Secrets of Search,' ought to be a wake up call for law firms paying companies for search engine optimization - SEO.

Do you know what your law firm's SEO company is doing in an attempt to achieve higher search results for you? Is the SEO company using tactics that will end up sabotaging your firm's long term search results in order to achieve short term gains? You know -- gains you can see when you're paying the SEO company the big money.

J.C. Penney, under the gun from shareholders to achieve high Christmas sales last year, turned to a SEO company to get it high search results on Google. It worked.

• Key in dresses and Penney's beat out Macy’s, J. Crew, and the Gap.
• Key in area rugs and Penney's beat out Crate & Barrel, Home Depot, Sears, Pier 1 and even arearugs.com.
• Key in bedding and Penney's outranked Bed Bath & Beyond and Wal-Mart.

Note we're talking organic search results, not the paid for sponsored links that sit on the top of Google search results pages. The organic search results which are trusted by a three or four to one margin over sponsored links (advertising) by consumers.

How was Penneys getting this results? Through 'black hat' SEO techniques. Per the Times' David Segal:

...[B]lack-hat services are not illegal, but trafficking in them risks the wrath of Google. The company draws a pretty thick line between techniques it considers deceptive and “white hat” approaches, which are offered by hundreds of consulting firms and are legitimate ways to increase a site’s visibility. Penney’s results were derived from methods on the wrong side of that line, says Doug Pierce (search expert from Blue Fountain Media in New York). He described the optimization as the most ambitious attempt to game Google’s search results that he has ever seen.

You need to understand that a critical, if not the most important, factor in getting high search results on Google are incoming links from other sites. Per Segal:

If you own a Web site, for instance, about Chinese cooking, your site’s Google ranking will improve as other sites link to it. The more links to your site, especially those from other Chinese cooking-related sites, the higher your ranking. In a way, what Google is measuring is your site’s popularity by polling the best-informed online fans of Chinese cooking and counting their links to your site as votes of approval.

And whoever was doing Penney's SEO work went out and got a boat load of links.

Mr. Pierce found 2,015 pages with phrases like “casual dresses,” “evening dresses,” “little black dress” or “cocktail dress.” Click on any of these phrases on any of these 2,015 pages, and you are bounced directly to the main page for dresses on JCPenney.com.

Some of the 2,015 pages are on sites related, at least nominally, to clothing. But most are not. The phrase “black dresses” and a Penney link were tacked to the bottom of a site called nuclear.engineeringaddict.com. “Evening dresses” appeared on a site called casino-focus.com. “Cocktail dresses” showed up on bulgariapropertyportal.com. ”Casual dresses” was on a site called elistofbanks.com. “Semi-formal dresses” was pasted, rather incongruously, on usclettermen.org.

There are links to JCPenney.com’s dresses page on sites about diseases, cameras, cars, dogs, aluminum sheets, travel, snoring, diamond drills, bathroom tiles, hotel furniture, online games, commodities, fishing, Adobe Flash, glass shower doors, jokes and dentists — and the list goes on.

Google got wind of Penney's 'scheming links' last week and took corrective action. It didn't matter that Penney's allegedly did not know of the 'black hat' SEO tactics being performed on their behalf. Search results which had Penney's website pages at the top were now placing Penney's at 71.

Law firms are not immune from unknowingly paying for 'black hat' SEO. I receive multiple requests a day from SEO companies requesting links to law firm blogs or law firm websites. They'll often offer to pay for links.

SEO companies regularly leave fictitious comments on my blog leaving a link to a law firm website. When I contact the law firm to whose website was linked to in the comment the law firm tells me they have no idea what I'm talking about. They tell me they didn't leave the comment and link.

FindLaw got caught allegedly selling links to law firms so as to increase the search results of law firm websites. Within days of FindLaw's SEO practices being made public, FindLaw's PageRank (scoring importance of a link from a website) dropped significantly. Apparently because of corrective action taken by Google.

Many law firms are addicted to SEO like crack cocaine addicts. Even large law firms who you wouldn't think would chase search results for generic terms related to practice areas are hiring SEO companies to chase such results.

The problem for law firms is that they know as much about SEO and selecting SEO companies as they do about tuning up a '65 Chevy. You hope you got what you paid for.

In the vast majority of cases, it doesn't matter if you ask your SEO company what they they are going to do on your behalf. If they're going to cheat, they're not going to confess their sins. The others are not going to want to disclose 'secrets.'

Many law firms don't care what a SEO company does on their behalf. They'll pay for top search results, even if it's only for the short term.

If your law firm is looking to do the right thing for SEO, you have two choices. Ask around, there are some good and reputable companies doing SEO work for law firms.

The other, and the one that'll serve you best in the long run, is to publish content of value to your target audience.

And treat the Internet as a conversation. With links being the currency of Internet conversation blogs and publications reference each other by linking to each other. The more you 'converse' the more relevant links to your blog or website you'll receive. In time, you'll have more relevant links than you can shake a stick at.

Best of all, in publishing valuable content you'll be in control of your own destiny on Google.

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AOL's acquisition of Huffington Post for $315 Million seems to have been driven in large part by Huffington Post's ability to publish content that was trending upward on Google search. Rather than report on the news, report on what people are looking for.

From the New York Time's Claire Cain Miller yesterday morning:

The Huffington Post has hired veteran journalists to beef up its news coverage. But a significant chunk of its readers come instead for articles like one published this week: “Chelsy Davy & Prince Harry: So Happy Together?”

The two-sentence article was just a vehicle for a slide show of photographs of the couple and included no actual news. But “Chelsy Davy” was one of the top searches on Google that day, and soon after the article was published it became one of the first links that popped up in Google’s search results.

It was an example of an art and science at which The Huffington Post excels: search engine optimization, or S.E.O.

Online publishers use software that look at activity on search engines; generate headlines based on it; and assign employed writers and freelancers to write corresponding articles or blog posts.

Perhaps this is the road to profitability for print journalism, but we're likely to end up with low quality content that's written to appeal to the search engines, as opposed to people.

Rich Skrenta, chief executive of the search engine Blekkom, told Miller:

S.E.O. is “absolutely essential." Still, it can turn into a “heroin drip” for publishers. They had this really good content at the beginning, but they realize the more S.E.O. they do, the more money they make, and the pressure really pushes down the quality on their sites.

The outcome, as reported by Miller, 35 percent of The Huffington Post’s visits in January came from search engines, compared to 20 percent for CNN.com.

No question writing about what people are looking for can produce valuable content. And I am not implying that Huffington Post does not produce any good content.

The problem comes when publishers produce content just to garner traffic, not to produce something of value. The latter ought to sound very familiar to law firms who publish blogs solely for search.

There is hope for quality content. Social media is increasingly more important in the distribution of content. The better the content, the more likely it will be shared via Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Google is also going to take sharing into effect in pushing content to the top in search.

And at the end of the day, people do remember who's offering value.

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