Google’s transformation from just search to destination impacts law firms

Google’s transforming from just search to a destination website in the classic media sense posts Om Malik this morning.

Citing first comScore’s report at the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York.

Of some 1.2 billion search queries on Google during a one-week period in January 2008, universal results were presented about 17 percent of the time, according to research released by James Lamberti, comScore’s SVP, search and media. ‘The search result page is beginning to operate as a destination,’ observed Lamberti. ‘The consumers are a priority. Not the marketers.’ Plus, Google sent nearly 400 million search referrals to their own multi-media properties, such as YouTube, over six months. That includes 148 million referrals to YouTube and 173 million to Google Images, the comScore data show.

And then search expert and author, John Battelle:

To pretend otherwise is to ignore the reality of YouTube, Google News, Google Maps, Google Local, the onebox interface, Knol, and everything else Google owns that represent the chance for them to make money the way every other media company in the world makes money – by competing for your attention and monetizing it with advertising.

Consumers, business exec’s, in-house counsel, and reporters, all targets of your law firm’s attention are spending time at Google. Every sort of digital marketing your firm conducts must take into account Google.

Points to keep in mind:

• Any legal directory, Martindale-Hubbell, Avvo, Martindale’s lawyers.com, Super Lawyers or whomever, will need to do an effective job indexing at Google all lawyer bio’s, firm profiles, and in the case of larger law firms, their practice groups.
• Question the value of a directory that’s preaching we’re a portal drawing large traffic, as opposed to showing how well your bio appears at Google on a search.
• Any law firm website or blog needs to be search engine optimized from the get go. Begins with the development of the site or blog, it’s not an after the fact thing.
• Make sure your firm is registered in Google local search for ease of all clients who may be looking for you.
• Use YouTube for all of your video. Descriptions of videos and their tags are already indexed at Google. Expect consumer use of YouTube to grow to the point where people will begin to search it for subject matter video, as opposed to just for entertainment.
• Use Google Site Map technology and Google’s Feedburner for effective indexing of content and RSS feeds.
• Any content, whether articles stored on a website or distributed in email newsletters or alerts needs to be published on software generating an RSS feed (blogs are the easiest way to generate RSS) in order to have the content indexed at Google Blog Search, where thought leaders and reporters subscribe to keyword feed searches.

Fortunately Google and its tools are free. Some expense will be incurred by law firms in hiring people who understand how Google works. But the greatest cost to a firm would be to continue down the present course not understanding the true impact of Google.