Google’s Penguin 5 SPAM Update Launches Today

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Strap in lawyers.  About an hour ago, Matt Cutts announced the launch of Penguin 2.1 (referred to in the SEO industry as Penguin 5 – don’t ask why).

Penguin 5

Today’s algo update is relatively minor (thus the “.1” instead of 3) but should impact 1% of searches.  Those negatively impacted will most likely have to-date gotten away with a dodgy, purchased backlink profile.  Beneficiaries may include sites that have been working on Penguin cleanup from past penalties.

Penguin Traffic Hit
Image from Hungry Piranah

How to Diagnose if You’ve Been Penguined

Penguin updates are immediate and severe.  Review your Google Analytics data for sudden and otherwise unexplained changes in (search) traffic associated with the dates of Penguin roll-outs (see below).  Additionally, you may receive notice in your Google Webmaster Tools account.  Past Penguin updates include:

  • April 24th, 2012
  • May 25, 2012
  • October 9, 2012
  • May 22, 2013

So, tomorrow morning, wake up, pour some coffe and compare today’s traffic to last Friday.  Then breath a sigh of relief if you’ve been doing all the right things, or panic and start reading Demystifying Link Disavowals, Penalties and More by Jenny Halasaz.

Sometimes the Technology (really) Matters

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Want an immediate 56% increase in your natural search traffic?

In most of my SEO 101 talks I invariably gloss over the technology aspect of SEO on the grounds that the platforms have evolved to  adhere to technical best practices for search.   However, identifying and fixing major technical issues is the one search tactic (outside of enormous Adwords budgets) that delivers massive and immediate performance improvements.  As an agency, this has the added benefit of delighting clients by associating confusing technical lexicon with increased phone calls from prospective clients.  SEO Agency Nirvana.  That’s what happened two months ago; and while I won’t share the client or the problem or the solution – I’m happy to share the end result:

Technical Fixes

That’s an immediate and persistent 56% increase in traffic – and if I squint really hard, it looks to me like a trend line that is continuing to grow.  Note also that we implemented the fixes at 2 am on a Saturday morning – futzing around with major technical changes is fraught with peril and best done well outside of regular traffic hours.

Was this cheap and easy?  No.  A full audit to weed out technical issues is time consuming, technical and requires access and working knowledge of advanced tools.

How to Tell if you Might Have a Major Technical Problems

This is by no means an exhaustive list . . .

  • Search engines can’t find most of your pages.  (When you do a google search for site:mywebsite.com, more than a third of the pages on are not included.)
  • Search engines find more than all of your pages.  What?  (When you do a google search for site:mywebsite.com, the number of pages returned are 2-10 times as many pages as you think you actually have – make sure you include “supplemental results” found by clicking the “see omitted results” link after the last result in your site: search.)
  • You change something and your site traffic plummets.
  • Your site isn’t built on WordPress
  • Your site was built more than 4 years ago and hasn’t been updated.
  • Your Google Webmaster Tools interface has anything under “Site Messages”.  (You do have GWT access don’t you?)

Lots of lawyers are looking for the easy SEO solution.  This may be it.

Are You Qualified to Hire an SEO Agency? A Simple Test

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Think you have the experience to hire a good SEO Agency?  Read the next two bullets before you go any further:

  • Search engines have difficulty distinguishing URLs in paginated results.  CMSs address pagination in different ways – from parameterized URLs to completely unique pages.  You  can solve this problem by using rel=canonical in the <head> or HTTP header of paginated pages that have a “view all” page.  If you don’t have a “view all” content page, use rel=next/prev to specify a paginated series.
  • NAP (name, address, phone number) consistency across  trusted directory sites is a key ranking factor in local search.  To address problems caused by tracking phone numbers, specify NAP values using the GREP command in your XML sitemap.  Alternatively use a 301 permanent redirect to proxy your canonical number.  Note:  The GREP command only works for single location businesses.

One of the paragraphs above explains a fairly simple concept in confusing technical terms.  The other is utter gibberish.  In English it makes as much sense as:  “helicopters use pancakes to shingle doghouses moonbeam excellent.”

This morning I’m doing some research in preparation for a kick off call with a new client.  These guys have gone through 4 agencies in the past three years (in general a huge red flag) – but as I look at their site it seems that it was created by the 12 year old nephew 5 years ago and never touched.  The technology is problematic, the link profile is anemic, the content stale, basic fundamentals have not been addressed.

Selling SEO services to lawyers is drop dead easy; its easy to confuse and intimidate with technical lexicon to make the sale.  Delivering on results is entirely different.  As my new client today has demonstrated, the web is full of search charlatans eager to hook law firms on lucrative monthly contracts.

If you can’t identify the balderdash in the examples above, you shouldn’t hire an SEO agency without input from someone who can.

LawyerEdge Website Underperforming? A Cautionary Tale of Duplicate Content

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Having trouble figuring out why your website isn’t getting more traffic?  Its possible the content on your site has simply been cut and pasted from another site – rending your SEO impotent.

Law Firm Website Almost Invisible

Initially, I couldn’t figure out why the law firm’s site was performing so badly – the technology was fine, the content seemed fairly well written and there was a reasonable link profile.  Despite this, the site was averaging less than 2 visitors a day from unbranded natural search –  and very few of those visitors were landing on the practice area pages.  Digging deeper, I found that the actual content on the practice area pages was cut and pasted across other LawyerEdge clients.

In the example below – we can see that Google has identified 58 other pages with the exact same content as this law firm’s page for pedestrian knock down accidents.

Duplicate content

When I looked across the website’s landing pages, I found that almost all of them had content that was duplicated across the web.  In the graph below, the vertical axis shows the number of pages found on the web containing the exact same content as the law firm’s topic pages.

Duplicate content on legal websites

Of the 40 pages I reviewed, just 13 had unique content.

Understanding Duplicate Content

Search engines hate duplicate content because it can generate a really bad user experience.  Here’s why:  Using the above example, imagine I do a Google search for “determining who is negligent in Pedestrian cases”.  The first result I click to doesn’t give me what I’m looking for, so I click back to the search engine and try the second result . . . . which leads me to the exact same content on another site.  Now I’m annoyed and instead of clicking back, I load up Bing to try to find something different.

The search engines minimize this poor user experience by identifying duplicate content across different pages and trying to identify the original version of the content (search geeks refer to this as the canonical).   Google and bing hide the other pages away from searchers in what is called “supplemental results” – which is of course, where I eventually found the law firm’s pages.  Supplemental results are shown here:

Supplemental Results

This is compounded when a large portion of a site’s content looks to be simply copied and pasted from other sites across the web.  Search engines reasonably deduce that the overall site is of pretty low quality wrt to unique, interesting content.  Google’s algorithm updated to try to identify (and weed out) these sites with the Panda update.  From the Google blog:

“This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful.”

Note that Panda is a site-wide penalty – which means that duplicate content on many pages will impact performance of the entire site – even those deliciously well written unique and insightful pages.  The bar graph above, which shows the majority of the law firm’s pages having duplicate content indicates they have most likely been hit by the Panda update.

In the pedestrian knockdown practice area example, all of the firms listed below are competing directly with each other with the exact same content:

  • Rochelle McCullough, LLP
  • Inkelaar Law
  • Eshelman Legal Group
  • Joshua D. Earwood
  • Saladino Oakes & Schaaf
  • Levenbaum Trachtenberg
  • Ellis, Ged & Bodden
  • Law Office of Bruce D. Schupp
  • Allen, Allen, Allen & Allen
  • Law Office of Kenneth G. Miller
  • The Law Firm of Kevin A. Moore, P.A.
  • Buchanan & Buchanan
  • S. Perry Penland, JR.
  • Ardoin Law Firm
  • McWard Law Office
  • LeBell Dobroski Morgan Meylink LLP
  • Cox & Associates, P.A.
  • The Gefen Law Firm
  • Echemendia Law Firm PA
  • McKinney Braswell Butler LLC
  • Law Office of Charney & Roberts
  • Johnson & Associates
  • Pistotnik Law Offices
  • Bledsoe Law Office
  • Law Offices of George A. Malliaros
  • Roberts, Miceli & Boileau, LLP
  • William E. Hymes
  • Law Office of Donald P. Edwards
  • Ferderigos & Lambe Attorneys at Law
  • The Law Offices of Fuentes & Berrio, L.L.P.
  • Robert B. French, Jr., P.C.
  • The Law Offices of Peck and Peck
  • Cherry Law Firm, P.C.
  • Dexter & Kilcoyne
  • Philip R. Cockerille
  • Brotman Nusbaum Fox
  • Stephen J. Knox Attorney at Law
  • Littman & Babiarz
  • The Law Offices of Weinstein & Scharf, P.A.
  • Friedman & Friedman
  • The Law Firm of Robert S. Windholz
  • Fahrendorf, Viloria, Oliphant & Oster L.L.P.
  • Conway Law Firm, P.L.L.C.
  • Head Thomas Webb & Willis
  • Charles B. Roberts & Associates, P.C.
  • Pistotnik Law Offices
  • Nordloh Law Office, PLLC
  • The Law Offices of Rosenberg, Kirby, Cahill & Stankowitz
  • Kerner & Kerner
  • McAdory Borg Law Firm P.C.
  • For a funny one – check out this:  The Law Offices of This is Arizona – a template, presumably available for purchase with ghost Attorneys John and Joan Smith.

(To be fair, not all of these firms are LawyerEdge clients – there is a smattering of different agencies.  This does highlight the extent to which content gets cut and pasted around the web by website developers.)

How to Tell if You Have Duplicate Content Issues

The most obvious sign of duplicate content, of course is zero to low inbound search traffic to specific pages.  You can diagnose this in Google Analtyics using the “Landing Pages” tab under content (make sure you filter for ONLY “organic search traffic”).

Another more accurate approach is to take a unique looking, sentence from your page and doing a search for it with quotations around the phrase:

Duplicate Content IV

If your search returns a ton of results . . . its time to start writing.

 

Are You Sending the Wrong Signals to Search Engines?

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Looking at the screenshot below, it is very clear to any human that this is a blog post covering Drug Sniffing Dogs and Search Warrants.  Unfortunately, the underlying code does a very poor job of telling computers what the article is about – leading to this page (and all the other pages on this site) performing extremely poorly in search.  Here’s why . . .

At a very high level, search engines scan web page code for indicators to deduce the subject matter of content on a page (reminds me of the old California Achievement Tests in 5th grade.) We’ll review three of the primary indicators:  Title Tags, URL, and Headers (H1s etc.).  Why are these so important?  Content contained within these indicators are intended to describe what the page is about – i.e. if a page is titled “Fuzzy Bunny Slippers” and has a similar heading – it is most likely a page about fuzzy bunny slippers.”

Justice Florida

Key On-Page Elements

Title Tag

The title tag defines the title of the page, shows up at the top of a browser and also is the link that appears in search result pages.  In this case, the page is done correctly.  “Drug-Sniffing Dogs and Search Warrants : West Palm Beach Criminal Lawyer Blog”

URL

Unfortunately, when this page was created, the URL ends with “drugsniffing-dogs-and-search-warrants”. The failure to separate “drug” and “sniffing” in the URL optimizes the page for the never searched for word “drugsniffing”.

Heading

Heading tags define the heading of the page.  The primary heading is the H1, with subheadings H2, H3 etc. To a human, the heading of this page is pretty clear “Drug-Sniffing Dogs and Search Warrants”, but when we look into the code, we find that that heading is not identified with an H1 tag:

Justice Florida Code

In fact, the primary heading, H1, tells search engines that this page is about:  “Palm Beach County Criminal & DUI Lawyer : Criminal & DUI Defense Attorney in West Palm Beach & Palm Beach | Criminal Attorney: DUI, Assault & Battery, Felonies”.  What a mouthful – that’s some ugly keyword stuffing and is only very tangentially related to drug sniffing dogs and search warrants.  Note above that the H2 and H3 above contain generic, templated content as well..  Predictably, we find that every single page on this website uses the exact same, keyword stuffed, H1 – sending a strong signal to the search engines that every page on the site is about the exact same subject matter.

Why This All Matters

Not surprisingly, even with an exact search for the page title including the misspelling, the attorney’s content fails to surface.  I’ll bet dinner that his analytics also show zero inbound search traffic to this page.

Justice Florida Results

Why This Happens

Generally, modern website and blogging platforms have most of these technical problems ironed out.  You should never have to get your hands dirty in the code.  But this example highlights the importance of having a modern, up to date platform.  The justiceflorida.com site in this example is built on an outdated version of Movable Type.  The simple obvious solution:  a recent version of WordPress.

How to Diagnose your Own Pages

You know where to look for the URL and the Title Tag – heading tags are a little more hidden, but not too hard to find in the source code.  You can access the source code on a website by using the “view source” function in your web browser (usually under “view” or simply by right clicking on the page).  Then search the page for “H1” and see if you have a unique description of the content of the page.  These tags show up in pairs – so you should only have two H1s (as there should really only be one primary heading for a page); multiple H2s, H3s etc. are fine.

Legal Linkbait

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Content is King – we hear this all the time wrt to search engine optimization, yet all too frequently I hear from attorneys suffering from a lack of inspiration about content.

“What am I going to write about?”

Writing successful legal blog posts requires equal parts of 1)a love of writing 2)training/experience in writing well (law school does NOT count) and 3)creative inspiration.

Fortunately the web is full of creative inspiration.  Amid all the royal baby news, yesterday was particularly ripe with legal leaning news stories begging to be transformed into interesting, well written linkbait legal blog posts.  For linkbait think Comso magazine titles – sex always works, as do drugs and celebrities.  Sex and drugs and celebrities all wrapped in one is a pretty good bet. Another approach is to take something popular in the news that is out of your jurisdiction and explain how it would apply (or not apply) within your jurisdiction.

So to answer the perpetual question “what am I going to write about” read on for some inspiration.  I’ve even rewritten the headlines with some fun, slightly salacious designed to draw clicks (and links.)

NYC Legalizes Bare Boobs 

This was the story (and accompanying picture) that inspired my post today.  Quote from the original article:  “It also notes that, should a crowd form around a topless woman, the officer should instruct the crowd to disperse and then respond appropriately if it does not.”  Good luck with that, men in blue.

20,000 Babies Hit By Falling TV’s

Our love affair with increasingly large screen area colliding dangerously with babies’ fascination with brightly colored objects.

Marines Bomb Australia’s Great Barrier Reef

This raises lots of legal questions – environmental, military, international – and  to date, the news coverage has been devoid of any legal ramifications.

Jesse Ventura Sues Murdered Navy SEAL’s Wife

This is an easy one – explain the legal mechanism that enabled Ventura to transfer his lawsuit to Chris Pyle’s wife after the sniper was killed; feel free to take an editorial swipe at the utterly classless move from the former WWF showman turned Governor turned plaintiff.

Your iPhone as Breathalizer?

Huge, widespread legal liability questions abound in this case.

Take me OUT of the Ballgame – Skydiver Lands on Baseball Player

Include the accompanying video for added benefit.

legal linkbait

Public Support for Boston Trooper who Leaked Tsarnaev Arrest Pics

The state trooper, who shared his own photos of the bloody arrest of Tsarnaev with Boston Magazine is fighting for his career against growing public support for his actions.   This is a great opportunity to discuss the balance of individual legal rights, professional conduct of public officials and employment law.

Pornless Britian?

Yesterday the Brit’s got a new King AND David Cameron’s plan to standardize an approach for limiting access to online porn.   Consider combining with the Topless New York story for added impact.

Billy Ray Cyrus and wife say “I don’t” to Divorce

Ahhh – People magazine, the eternal well of celebrity gossip, offers an example of how to get undivorced.  An interesting take on this would be. . . . “when is it too late to get undivorced?”  And if you get really desperate for celebrity smut inspiration, try US Weekly.

A Common Sense Law Firm Policy for Authorship

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Authorship is the hottest new innovation in search.  And like many changes that preceded it, authorship has the legal community spinning in circles trying to figure out what to do.

But first . . .

A Quick Primer on Authorship

At a very high level, authorship is the association of an individual writer’s reputation to a piece of content.  This manifests itself in two important ways.  1. As a ranking factor – i.e. Conrad Saam has accrued a strong reputation for writing about search and therefore his content about search will rank well regardless of where it is published.  2.  As a click through factor – to help searchers identify good content, Google is including a thumbnail of the author in search results.

Authorship for Lawyers

Authorship is a big deal.  At the latest SMX Advanced conference, a study (with what looked like an admittedly anemic dataset) claimed a 200% increase in clicks to results with authorship than without, regardless of position on the SERP. Later in the same session, a major newspaper editor suggested that a writer’s Author Rank (uggg – our industry’s latest nauseating   buzzword that is soon going to be misused by MBAs desperate to display some tech cred) would soon be a primary hiring factor.

 

Authorship has been written about ad nauseam – I’d recommend Ann Smarty’s cheat sheet overview if you need to quickly get caught up. For now, I want to focus on the perceived risks of authorship . . .

Why Law Firms are Afraid of Authorship

Authorship does raise some genuine questions.  To capture search traffic, more and more law firms are expanding the velocity at which they publish content to the web – using more firm lawyers, or with ghost written content.  This has raised policy issues around authorship. The two most common concerns that have some law firms completely balking wrt to authorship are:

“What if I publish something that could be used against me down the road in a case?”

This red herring actually has nothing to do with authorship.  The logic is pretty simple –something published on your law firm’s blog that is so damaging is probably not going to be more so with a picture attached to the results on a search engine query.  I hear this concern mostly from law firms using outsourced third parties to vomit out a huge volume of low quality content onto their sites.  If this is a question you find yourself asking – consider fixing the content problem, not the authorship problem.

“What happens if Bill leaves my firm – can he take his authorship with him?”

This is more nuanced question and mirrors a common firm partner concern:  I spend year’s building Mary’s reputation as a great lawyer, and then she goes and opens up a firm across the street from me.  Allaying this concern requires an understanding of how authorship works. Let’s go back to the central premise of authorship: content for reputable writers ranking regardless of where it is published. So, yes, a lawyer can build up their writing reputation on a firm’s blog and then put that reputation in their pocket and start a new firm with a new website and leverage that reputation to rank.  From an Author Rank perspective two things happen here:  1)as their reputation builds on their new site, so does the value of that reputation to the original content and 2)if they choose to disassociate themselves from the original blog, they lose the value of that reputation.  It is important to note that reputation isn’t built just because I’m writing on a specific blog, but also because of many additional associated signals (links, shares, etc.).  Just like in real life, the reputation for an author (or lawyer, or singer, or SEO consultant) transcends any individual publishing platform.  Therefore, there is no downside to using authorship to enhance your content’s ability to drive traffic.

This brings us to . . .

A Common Sense Law Firm Policy for Authorship:

Don’t publish anything you wouldn’t attach your name to.

Your Ranking Report is a Dangerous Waste of Time

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Lawyer:  “We’re ranking really well, but our phone just isn’t ringing.”

Me:  “Well, how much traffic are you getting?”

Lawyer:  “I don’t know”

You are wasting your time if you are looking at Ranking Reports to assess the success of your SEO campaign.  Worse – if you agency sends you a regular ranking report (and no traffic report), they are probably deliberately trying to hide their poor performance.

Ranking reports are often used by agencies to suggest success while they are delivering very little in value (i.e. more traffic.)  They distract from business goals and focus your search campaign on the wrong tactics.  They are used to rationalize exorbitant retainers that deliver little in the way of new business.

I recently talked to a lawyer who forwarded me her agency’s two most recent ranking report showing 172 different terms that “ranked” between 1-3. When we dug into the Google Analytics data, there were very few visits referenced for those terms.   Additionally, each ranking report had a different set of terms. I suspect her agency was simply using a third party rank checking tool, cherry picking the “good” results and sending her a rosy picture every month along with her bill.   I drew her the following graph cross referencing the ranking reports with her Google Analytics data to demonstrate why her agency’s glowing ranking reports weren’t driving inbound phone calls from prospective clients:

Ranking Reports for Lawyers

Why Good Ranking Reports Don’t Result in Traffic

So, how can a site rank for a term, yet fail to generate traffic?

Local

Remember that little thing called Google Local Maps Places that dominates the screen area for most localized searches (including legal searches)?  Ranking Reports completely ignore Places results.  Legal SERPs very frequently integrate Places – so your glowing Ranking Report displays a very misleading picture of your site’s ability to generate traffic.

Personalization

Search engines are increasingly delivering personalized results based on the individual searcher’s geography, previous search history and social graph.

Geography

A “divorce lawyer” search from my office will generate a results page with Seattle area divorce lawyers).

Previous Search History

My news related searches disproportionally return CNN.com because they know I visit that site on a daily basis; whereas my father may return Fox news results.  Attorneys will frequently sit in their office, run a ranking check for a specific term they want business for, be pleased when their site shows up #1, yet puzzled that their phone isn’t ringing with a flood of incoming prospects. What they don’t realize is that the search engines are personalizing their results based on previous surfing history. The Ranking Report is delivering a false positive because the single most frequented site by any attorney is their own site.

The big picture: With the exception of the false positives from previous search behavior, personalization isn’t taken into account by ranking reports.

Social Graph

My searches include results from people with whom I connected via the social graph.  Google calls this Search Plus your World.  (Bing functions in a similar fashion.)  Depending on the searcher and the subject matter, research has shown up to 60% of results can be influenced by the social graph.

Long Tail Terms

Searches are increasingly specific – think “trial for my third DUI arrest” instead of “DUI Lawyer”.  This is known as the long tail.  Focusing on ranking reports misses all of the traffic within the long tail.  To get a feel for how the long tail works – look at all of the different terms that bring traffic to the profile page on your website.  If you are like most attorneys you’ll see something like:  “William O’Smith”, “Billy osmith”, “Bill O. Smyth”, “Bill Smyth Avvo Rating.” “Bill Smith Lawyer”  “Bill Smyth phone number” etc.

Additionally, its very easy to generate a positive rank for an obscure term.  Think “fuzzy bunny slipper lawyer”.  As more and more consumers are accustomed to search engines automatically geographically targeting their query, (think “personal injury lawyer” instead of “Poughkeepsie personal injury lawyer” they are frequently dropping the geographic component of their search.  A lot of erroneous ranking reports I’ve seen have obscure geographic references in them that are never searched by anyone (zip codes, townships etc.).

 

The Alternative To Ranking Reports

Instead of monitoring the search engines for how your site ranks for a finite set of terms, use metrics that really drive your business. Look at the inbound traffic to a page or group of pages within a practice area.  This can be done easily in Google Analytics with the “landing page” report.  Alternatively, use a keyword or a group of similar keywords to track inbound search traffic for a specific practice area – “divorce”, “implant”.  Changes in traffic that include these keywords demonstrates progress (or decline) in your site’s ability to generate business – not just ranking.

The Final Word

I wrote a version of this post two and a half years ago for Search Engine Land – Excuse Me While I have a Ranking Report Rant.  In the ensuing comments, there were a number of defensive agencies insisting that clients still demanded ranking reports.  Matt McGee, one of the best SEOs I know responded to the anger:

I made a decision 3-4 years ago to never again provide a ranking report to clients. I tell prospects this before they commit to working with me and invite them to find another consultant if they want to track rankings, or to do it themselves. Best SEO decision I ever made . . . My clients hire me to help them make more money. The ones who seem more concerned with rankings than money get referred to other SEO consultants.

9 Questions your Legal Website Developer Doesn’t Want You To Ask

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To the best of my knowledge, the legal industry is the only industry that pays for their websites on an ongoing subscription basis.  Most companies pay a one off project fee for their website, lawyers tend to lease them on an ongoing basis – often at exorbitant rates with little or any value add.

If you have a monthly website bill ask your provider the following pointed questions . . .

1. Who owns the domain?

If you don’t own your domain, you have no control over the primary destination of your online presence.   Website developers who maintain ownership of a domain are essentially renting you space on that domain instead of building something that you own.  Consider a primary factor in search marketing success is the overall strength of a domain – including links to that domain as well as the age of that domain (i.e. how long it has been registered) – and you understand that owning your domain is essential.  As a most insidious business practice – some website developers will have you pay SEO consulting services to build the strength of a domain they own and then turn around and either raise your price (given it’s increased effectiveness) or sell it to your competitor across the street.

Paying for SEO services on a domain that you don’t own is like installing granite counters, stainless appliances and custom cherry cabinetry in your rental apartment.

2. How long is my contract?

Best Answer

“We’ll send you the final bill once you’ve approved development on your site.”

Good Answer

“We offer month to month subscription that you can cancel at any time.”

Very Bad Answer

“We require a two+ year commitment from our clients.”

Offering discounts for upfront payment is reasonable; forcing clients to lock into multi year agreements grants your vendor all of the power in the fluid and competitive world of technical marketing.

3. On what platform is the website built?

Best Answer

“Wordpress”

WordPress is the dominant website platform, which means that there is a huge community of developers ensuring it keeps up with the constantly changing technical world.  It’s also mind numbingly easy to use for anyone who made it through law school.  I’m an admitted WordPress fanboy – but I’m not the only one. Avvo’s legal websites are built on WordPress and Kevin O’Keefe from Lexblog moved his entire platform from Moveable Type to WordPress many years ago.

Good Answer

Various other commercially available platforms with easy-to-use content management systems that can be hosted at a variety of different website hosts.

Worst Answer

“We have a proprietary custom developed system . . .”

Very simply, the development resources required to keep a platform up to date with the changing technology of search marketing are considerable.  Vendors with proprietary systems may or may not keep up with these innovations.  Additionally, proprietary systems make it extremely expensive and difficult to transition away from (see question 9 below) – locking attorneys in with a sub-ideal vendor.

4. How should I tell if my site is performing well?

Great vendors will focus on growth in non-branded (i.e. NOT your name or your law firm’s name) traffic.  Poor vendors will send you ranking reports with extremely long tail queries (i.e. “north staten island tow truck accident lawyer”) that may rank, but never will generate any traffic.  For more on the dangers on relying on ranking reports – check out my Ranking Report Rant on Search Engine Land.

5. How much does hosting cost?

Exorbitant hosting costs are the primary way website developers justify translating a one time project (building you a nice and effective website) into an ongoing profit stream.

LawyerEdge charges $114 monthly for hosting and email – Findlaw sites range well north of this.  But website hosting is cheap. Very cheap.  For simple hosting and great customer service, Bluehost will take care of you for $3.95 a month. That monthly website developer fee is the same product that Danica Patrick pitches during every Superbowl that costs less than a cup of coffee.  If you have more than one zero on your monthly hosting cost, you are being taken for a ride.

Hosting Costs

6.  Are you charging me for “email maintenance”?

The only appropriate answer is no.  (Look closely at the image above and send it to your provider if you have a separate line item for “email”.)

7. How do I modify content on a page or add a page?

Best Answer

“Here is the username and password for your content management system.”

Worst Answer

“We are happy to provide you with consulting services on an as-needed basis for an hourly rate of . . . .”

8. What is the username/password for my Google Analytics account?

Good Answer

“Our system emails you a set of reports on a regular basis; you can also log into Google Analytics with this username and password . . .”

Bad Answer

“You don’t need to worry about that confusing lexicon – we create a monthly report to tell you how you are doing.”

Run Screaming Answer

“Your site doesn’t have Google Analytics on it, you don’t need it and we won’t install it.”  Even worse:  “Your site does have Google Analytics on it, but we won’t give you access.”

Any web development shop that won’t provide you access to Google Analytics – a free, easy-to-install, easy-to-use, easy-to-understand tool, is either exceptionally lazy or more likely deliberately hiding their own performance.  Relying on a vendor to define AND calculate the metrics of your success puts the fox in the henhouse.

9. If I decide to leave, who owns the content, imagery and code?

This is the second most important question (after domain ownership).  Look closely at your contract to see how your developer approaches you from a prenuptial perspective.  Divorce lawyers know that breaking up is hard to do, but breaking up with someone who doesn’t want to break up can be abject misery. (And very expensive.) A proactive developer will specify what you own (most critically, content, domain, and imagery) and provide you with username and password to a hosting provider. In the event that you want to break up – a really good developer will assist you in transitioning instead of relying on contracts, limiting access or content, and creative ownership claims to make it painfully difficult to move on.

 

If you have a monthly website cost that is more than $50 – be certain to find out exactly what else you are getting for your money.