Content provider ContentCrossroads.com recently developed an infographic about best practices for B2B marketers, including the most popular, most profitable and easiest content to develop for B2B marketers looking to gain the attention of prospects:
Category: Website Management
Using Google Alerts to Get Topical News Quickly and Improve Your Content
Time is of the essence when taking someone from prospect to client.
Obtaining quick notice about local accidents and injuries and/or defective products can provide a competitive advantage.
When an accident has just occurred and a victim is deciding whether or not to hire an attorney, you want to be easy to find. If you are aware of accidents or defective products and pharmaceuticals early, you may have the opportunity to get the inside track on a case.
Posting alerts and information on your website, blog and Social Media may help your firm be more easily found and give you increased opportunities to get cases.
One tool to identify possible newsworthy topics to post on your site and Social Media platforms is Google Alerts. Every time something new is indexed by Google on your chosen topic, you will receive an e-mail. You can also set Google Alerts to email you a daily or weekly digest that includes either only the best topical matches or everything associated with your selected topic.
There are multiple ways to utilize Google Alerts. You can sign up for your target city/town names, state, etc. for local news. For practice area-targeted news, you can sign up to be alerted for variations of car accidents (and injuries), truck accidents (and injuries, major highways, etc.), train accidents (as well as major train names), hospitals (and hospital injuries, negligence) and drug or product names you wish to target, for example. There are endless possibilities; your usage will depend on what works best for your law firm and schedule. You can even sign up for Alerts on competitors’ names to follow what they are doing. You should set Alerts for your firm and attorneys. Doing this will help you manage your firm’s reputation by alerting you to good and bad news and give you time to respond appropriately.
To develop a list for your Google Alerts entries, ask your attorneys (or have a trusted attorney decide) which topics and locations each person will follow for news or blog information, then sign up for Google Alerts on those topics at http://www.google.com/alerts. When you spread keywords among different people, the time investment is less significant, especially if you schedule a fifteen-minute block each day to read through your alerts.
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Survey Says: Fortune 500 Disclosing Cyber Risks
Ever since our 2013 prediction, an ever increasing number of public companies are adding disclosure related to cybersecurity and data breach risks to their public filings. We previously analyzed how the nation’s largest banks have begun disclosing their cybersecurity risks. Now, it appears that the rest of the Fortune 500 companies are catching on and including some level of disclosure of their cyber risks in response to the 2011 SEC Guidance.
The recently published Willis Fortune 500 Cyber Disclosure Report, 2013 (the “Report”), analyzes cybersecurity disclosure by Fortune 500 public companies. The Report found that as of April 2013, 85% of Fortune 500 companies are following the SEC guidance and are providing some level of disclosure regarding cyber exposures. Interestingly though, only 36% of Fortune 500 companies disclosed that such risk was “material”, “serious” or used a similar term, and only 2% of the companies used a stronger term, such as “critical”.
Following the SEC’s recommendation in its guidance, 95% of the disclosing companies mentionedspecific cyber risks that they face. The top three cyber risks identified by those companies that disclosed cyber risks were:
1) Loss or theft of confidential information (65%).
2) Loss of reputation (50%).
3) Direct loss from malicious acts (hackers, viruses, etc.) (48%).
Surprisingly, 15% of Fortune 500 companies indicated that they did not have the resources to protect themselves against critical attacks and only 52% refer to technical solutions that they have in place to defend against cyber risks.
The Report notes that despite the large number of Fortune 500 companies that acknowledge cyber risks in their disclosure, only 6% mentioned that they purchase insurance to cover cyber risks. This number runs contrary to a survey published by the Chubb Group of Insurance Companies in which Chubb indicates that about 36% of public companies purchase cyber risk insurance. For whatever reason, it appears that many of the Fortune 500 companies are simply not disclosing that they purchase cyber risk insurance as a means of protecting against cyber risk.
Almost two years after its issuance, the Report findings indicate that the 2011 SEC Guidance is in full swing and making its way into reality. As more large companies disclose cyber risks in their public filings, this will continue to trickle down to the smaller companies that rely on those filings for precedent and guidance. The Report provides a clear snapshot of where things stand in cyber risk disclosure by Fortune 500 public companies. The scope of the Report is expected to expand to include Fortune 1000 companies, and it will be interesting to see how this data changes, if at all, when comprised of a larger pool of public companies.
Stay tuned!
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Starting an Online Business: Licensing Requirements
Individuals interested in starting an online business are often confused or uninformed as to the licensing requirements for such businesses. In many ways, an online business is like any “brick and mortar” store and the owner will probably be required to obtain certain licenses or permits to operate.
Federal Requirements
Business Licenses. Most businesses do not require a federal business license or permit. However, a business engaged in one of the following activities should contact the responsible federal agency to determine the requirements for doing business: Investment Advising, Drug Manufacturing, Preparation of Meat Products, Broadcasting, Ground Transportation, Selling Alcohol, Tobacco, or Firearms.
Tax Identification Number. A federal tax identification number, also known as an Employer Identification Number (EIN), is a federal identification number issued by the Internal Revenue Service to identify a business entity. Nearly all businesses are required to have a tax identification number.
If a business is operated as a sole proprietorship, the owner may use his or her social security number in place of an EIN on all governmental forms and other official documents. However, most small business advisors recommend using a federal tax identification number instead.
To obtain a federal tax identification number, a business owner should contact the nearest Local IRS Field Office or call the IRS Business and Specialty Tax Hotline at 800-829-4933. The necessary form, IRS Form SS-4, can be downloaded directly from the Small Business Administration website.
State Requirements
Many states and local jurisdictions require a person to obtain a business license or permit before beginning business operations. A business that operates without the required license or permit may be subjected to fines or may be barred from further business activity. In some localities, a business operating out of a residence may require an additional permit.
While business licensing requirements vary from state-to-state, the most common types include:
· Basic Business Operation License – a legal document issued by a local governmental authority that authorizes a person to conduct business within the boundaries of the municipality. Many states have established small business assistance agencies to help small businesses comply with state requirements;
- Fictitious Name Certificate – a document, usually filed with a state agency, which is required to operate a business using an assumed name or trade name (essentially, any name other than the full, formal name of the individual or company);
- Home Occupation Permit – a permit which may be required to conduct business from a residence;
- Tax Registration – if the state has a state income tax, a business owner must usually register and obtain an employer identification number from the state Department of Revenue or Treasury Department. If the business engages in retail sales, the owner must usually obtain a sales tax license;
- Special State-Issued Business Licenses or Permits – these permits may be required for a business that sell highly-regulated products like firearms, gasoline, liquor, or lottery tickets;
- Zoning and Land Use Permits – may be required to develop a site or property for specific purposes
- Employer Registrations – if the business has employees, the owner must usually make unemployment insurance contributions;
Additional state licenses may be required for regulated occupations such as building contractors, physicians, appraisers, accountants, barbers, real estate agents, auctioneers, private investigators, private security guards, funeral directors, bill collectors, and cosmetologists.
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Social Signals Rank Highest for Best Google Search Results
A new study from Searchmetrics shows that of 44 ranking factors, social signals account for 7 of the top 8 most highly associated with Google search results, The chart below shows the ranking importance for the top 22:
The top findings from the Searchmetrics Ranking Factors-Rank Correlation Study show the following SEO trends for 2013:
- Keyword domains and keyword links are not nearly as relevant as in the past
- Social signals directly correlate with better rankings
- Good content continues to be key
- The number of backlinks continues to be of high importance
- On-page technology (URL length, keywords in page titles, page descriptions, H1 and H2 tags, etc.) is still an important basic
This latest study makes it clear that you can no longer ignore social media if you are interested in showing up in Google search results.
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Law Firm Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Five Common Mistakes to Avoid
Long gone are the days when you could rely only on meta descriptions, title tags, and directory links to boost your firm’s website rankings in search engines. Thanks (or no thanks) to sites using destructive black-hat techniques, Google is on a mission to penalize those who try to win using spammy shortcuts, and reward sites that provide a great user experience.
Below is a list of 5 common mistakes in SEO that can be easily avoided:
1. Content that is engaging.
Search engines are designed to deliver the highest quality results to the user; therefore, your content should provide the answer to the visitor’s search query as well as a great user experience. If a user comes to your website and is not impressed with the content, they will quickly leave. When this happens, it indicates to search engines that your site is not offering supportive and relevant content based on that particular search query. You do not want this! You want users to visit your site and be engaged. Remember: write for your readers, not search engines.
2. Duplicate content
Duplicate content, in simple terms, is content that appears on more than one Web page. This is akin to a constantly skipping CD. In short, it’s annoying.
Google can easily determine when content is duplicated. One of the relatively new Google features is Google Authorship
To ensure they are offering users high value content, search engines take pages out of the rankings that are a duplication of other, higher authority pages. Also, duplicate content can lead to Google not trusting the overall quality of the site and penalizing its rankings.
Search engines want to provide users with a varied amount of results, not 20 pages with the same content. To ensure this, search engines omit pages that are a duplication of other, higher authority pages. Omitted pages don’t rank.
Additionally, if Google finds your duplicate content to be spammy, deceptive or an attempt to manipulate your rankings, Google may penalize your site by dropping its rankings.
3. Not using correct keywords
If a user cannot find your website, then what good is it?
If a website’s content is written about the term “vehicle wrecks,” but the majority of users are searching for “car accidents,” the website will miss out on a lot of potential business. It’s crucial to use the correct keyword targets to drive optimal traffic to your website.Target the right words by looking for terms most commonly used in searches. Our SEO specialists use a variety of tools, including Google’s keyword tool,to determine the words and phrases that have the highest search volume for your area of law. However, targeting only the most popular keywords may not improve your rankings. The higher the search volume for a keyword, the more websites you will compete with for rankings, so it’s vital to find a happy medium between the two. Don’t forget, however, that long tail searches (lesser used phrases words and phrases) obtain more relevant traffic than the highest volume words and phrases.
4. Over-optimization
Yes, there is such a thing as over-optimization!
Tactics such as excessive interlinking,keyword stuffed content and tags, and duplicate content within the same site are common over-optimization practices that can hurt your rankings.
Typically, anything over 3% keyword density is too much for a page. Links should only be placed on a page if they are relevant to the content posted on that same page. Remember the saying “too much of a good thing is bad?” Well, that pertains to SEO as well.
5. Assuming that SEO strategies are static. SEO is constantly changing!
There is no such thing as updating a site and never having to do so again. Google constantly changes its algorithm (examples: panda, penguin, so a website has to be reviewed occasionally. What works today may not work tomorrow; it’s important to stay up-to-date on SEO practices used on your site.
Also, by having a blog on your site and adding new posts regularly, you are providing fresh, new content. Google loves fresh content.
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Price Transparency and the Legal Marketplace
My teenage children don’t know a world without the internet; a place where the sum of all human wisdom is a few clicks away.
Or where it’s really easy to research and buy the latest videogame.
Aside from the democratization of information and sharing enabled by the internet, the biggest impact of the web in most people’s lives is how it has transformed the consumer experience. It has done so in two important ways: by creating unprecedented levels of transparency and removing friction from the purchase process. In nearly every industry, a wealth of information is available to consumers prior to making a purchase: what the options are, differences between products, user feedback, and price transparency. With full information about products, including price, the internet makes comparison shopping easy.
And with all of that information, purchasing is smoothed out as well. Web services continue to refine the art of removing friction from the purchase process. Amazon aggressively knocked down reasons to purchasing goods in brick-and-mortar stores. Uber removed the transactional choke points from cab rides. iTunes made it easy to buy music on an a la carte basis. Much of the consumer internet continues to iterate and expand on the winning concept of blending ever-higher levels of information with ever-smoother transaction processing.
This online purchasing revolution has also reached beyond everyday consumer goods and services. Buying insurance, trading stocks, even government licensing – all have been streamlined online.
But there’s one notable area that has remained largely impervious: legal services. Despite some increases in transparency on lawyer backgrounds (Avvo) and do-it-yourself online legal forms (LegalZoom), the legal marketplace has seen nothing approaching the change in consumer empowerment and ease of transacting experienced in virtually all other industries.
It’s not as if legal services is a tiny economic niche. The market for legal services in the U.S. is worth over $250 billion per year, and nearly 40% of that is made up of consumer legal spending. Rather, a mixture of byzantine regulation, barriers to market entry, and restrictions on common forms of marketing have kept consumers from experiencing the same form of experimentation and innovation that has transformed the delivery of so many other goods and services:
- Until the late 1970’s, lawyers in the U.S. could not advertise in any meaningful way, and many states still have laws on the books prohibiting lawyers from using common advertising techniques.
- Non-lawyers cannot own even a minority interest law firms, preventing outside investment in the industry and removing the ability to offer equity compensation to talented non-lawyer leaders.
- Except in limited circumstances, attorneys are prevented from participating in services that attempt to match clients with lawyers based on specific legal circumstances.
- Rules based on the geographic location of an attorney prevent many forms of remote counseling, even when the matter in question is not dependent on a given state’s law.
- Legal obligations in most states make it difficult for attorneys to offer limited-scope services that attempt to counsel or coach consumers through specific legal issues rather than engage in full-blown client advocacy.
Some of these restrictions are rooted in a learned profession’s reliance on tradition and resistance to rapid change, and much of it stems from a desire to protect clients and ensure the quality of legal work. But a consequence of the locked-down nature of the industry is that many consumers who would otherwise use legal services do not avail themselves of them.
It’s not hard to see why. There’s no way to shop for a lawyer-reviewed estate plan the way you would for a pair of shoes or a flight to Mexico. And beyond price transparency, attorneys and law firm have shown little interest in marketing fixed-price, entry-level offerings that work fine for a large percentage of consumers. Instead of leading with such offers and then upselling to those needing more involved help, the vast majority of lawyers treat every client as being in need of a custom solution.
It’s a shame for both consumers and lawyers. Many consumers who choose to do without a lawyer’s help are no doubt getting suboptimal outcomes in their legal matters. And lawyers, by failing to deliver the transparency and ease of transacting that consumers have become used to, are missing out on a massive, underserved market.
– Josh King is vice president and general counsel of Avvo.com, the web’s largest legal Q&A platform, directory and marketplace.
“The #1 Client-Generation Tool:” The Web-Based Art of Legal Marketing
The business of law has always been important but today it is far more complicated due to the web which has allowed the channels of advertising and business development to grow exponentially. From product placement in movies to handrails featuring advertisements, commercial culture serves as an omnipotent force and has yielded two great premises: that we as a people respond to advertisements and that the Internet is a powerful tool for advertising.
Mark Britton, founder, CEO and president of Avvo, teaches attorneys and marketing professionals to have no legal fear when it comes to the business of law. In his upcoming address at Lawyernomics 2013 entitled “Issue Spotting: Turning 10 Legal Marketing Challenges Into Opportunity,” he seeks to instruct attorneys how to establish a marketing protocol in order to expand their practices. Mr. Britton sat down with me recently to further school the legal community on web-based legal marketing and how to “sell” one’s self in the modern legal landscape.
Attorneys historically self-promoted by attending large gatherings at rotary clubs but now there are multiple outlets for them to sell their services, such as LinkedIn, YouTube and blogging. According to Mr. Britton, a practitioner can utilize any “set of variables” for advertising purposes and this is important, given the rising number of lawyers and the resulting competition. Therefore, in order to truly succeed in today’s legal marketplace, attorneys must remain strategic and learn how to manage their businesses effectively.
The Internet, which Mr. Britton characterized as “central to life” as the law, serves as the most influential avenue for legal marketing. Facebook alone hold 8 million registered users—a small nation of its own. Practitioners must therefore act defensively—while they frequently rely on word of mouth, they must transfer this technique to such Internet sources as Yelp, Reputation.com and the Yellow Pages. Mr. Britton advises that the attorney who is aware of her “Google status” is ahead of the game.
In addition, attorneys must act on the offensive by making use of the Internet to increase clientele. Mr. Britton relayed how in his interactions with thousands of lawyers on a yearly basis, the common complaint is that the less experienced attorneys obtain more business because they advertise more. Regardless of the level of experience and professionalism, practitioners must utilize the web as a “tremendous strategic tool” to attain a larger client base. For example, they can join blogging spheres and practice groups that exchange ideas, build networks and develop business. This sort of self-promotion might be considered “unseemly” by some lawyers, yet the Internet serves as the number one tool to generate clients.
Mr. Britton acknowledges the challenge of thinking in a technology-driven, business-geared mentality when one comes from a legal background. He stresses that the objective should be to take on the role of an opportunity-spotter rather than just an issue-spotter. However, in law school, we were trained only to take fact patterns and analyze them and when we practice, we spot the issue and mitigate risks, all without placing any emphasis on the business aspects of practicing law. As a result, when it comes to a tool such as social media, nine out of ten attorneys will focus on its privacy issues, entirely missing the point of its social networking benefits.
For all the attorneys and legal marketing professionals who struggle with how to go about conforming to the marketing must’s, Mr. Britton offers his insights on five baselines of legal marketing with the ultimate intention of converting contacts into clients:
#1. Establish your target audience.
Who are you searching for? Future and existing clientele? Law firms invest significant resources into bringing in clients so figure out who you are trying to attract so you can tailor your marketing strategies accordingly. For example, after establishing that you want to attract clients, refrain from writing your blog posts in legalese.
#2. Target your time and money as it relates to your target audience.
This should be preplanned and reviewed on a quarterly basis and should be initiated with a goal in mind. For instance, if your aim is to acquire a higher number of lawyer referrals, find space in your budget and calendar to start an e-newsletter or present at a conference.
#3. Target channels that you think are valuable one at a time.
Be deliberate about your marketing tools. Learn if your channels’ ROI is worth the time and money and either maintain the channel or turn it off accordingly. After you start that e-newsletter, get Constant Contact or any other service that provides monthly reports to figure out how many people are reading them and whether it is a successful investment.
#4. Measure your targets by figuring out the benefits.
Hire a consultant to see if you are actually gaining benefits from your investments. Paying high fees to place an ad in the Yellow pages is pointless if you do not know how many clients you are actually attracting.
#5. Establish a strong web presence.
Your website is the modern-day calling card so certify that it is in fact well-developed. To exemplify, if someone were to raise a point on Twitter and you respond by saying you wrote about this topic on your blog, the potential client may go to your website and develop her first impression of you through your website. This is often how social networking works—it all goes back to the website where people first connect with you. Make sure you also have strong seo controls in place so you can zero in on the demographics of your website visitors.
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Generic Top-Level Domain Names Summit
The National Law Review is pleased to bring you information about the upcoming Generic Top-Level Domain Names Summit:
World Research Group is proud to announce the Generic Top-Level Domain Names Summit : The Challenges and Opportunities Facing the Financial, Pharmaceutical, Consumer Goods, and Other Branding Companies Since ICANNs Program, which will be held onSeptember 13, 2012 in Los Angeles, California. This event will discuss the implications and affects of ICANN’s new top level domain program, the risk and opportunities presented by this revolutionary transformation, and discovering what the next steps are for these companies.
Generic Top-Level Domain Names Summit
The National Law Review is pleased to bring you information about the upcoming Generic Top-Level Domain Names Summit:
World Research Group is proud to announce the Generic Top-Level Domain Names Summit : The Challenges and Opportunities Facing the Financial, Pharmaceutical, Consumer Goods, and Other Branding Companies Since ICANNs Program, which will be held onSeptember 13, 2012 in Los Angeles, California. This event will discuss the implications and affects of ICANN’s new top level domain program, the risk and opportunities presented by this revolutionary transformation, and discovering what the next steps are for these companies.