Discover Canadian Lawyers

Many of you have asked me to share my insight and knowledge in search engine optimization, so I thought I would start the New Year off by doing just that. My overall stance has always been "It's not rocket science"; however, it is important that you follow the rules or else you could end up getting burned.

It is no surprise that inbound links to your website is an important factor in determining your website's search engine positioning. But it is critical to note that "the more the merrier" is not the approach to take. Not all links are created equal. Some links can dramatically boost rankings, while others can actually get you a penalty and drag your rankings down.

When building your own links, you should quickly evaluate a link's potential value and determine exactly how much effort and cost should go into acquiring it. This blog post, a first in a series, will provide you the top nine factors we use to determine link value when building links for our own sites and those of our clients.

Possible Penalties

If a website has been penalized then it has probably been stripped of their ability to pass PageRank, and it might even pass on a penalty to your site through association. Getting a link from such a website is useless when it comes to boosting your search engine rankings.

To determine whether or not to pursue a particular website as a potential link partner, consider the following:

1. Does the site rank in Google, Yahoo and Bing for its company name, website name and super easy, obvious keywords from its home page? If not, you probably want to avoid this particular site.
2. Does the site rank for terms it's trying to target? For instance, let's say the site is about "Family Lawyers"; does that site show up somewhere in the top 20 for searches for that term on most of the engines? If so, it's probably not receiving any penalties.
3. Is the specific URL you want a link on indexed in all three major engines? Can you find it doing a site:www.domainname.com search? If the specific url is not getting indexed, it's generally not worth much in regards to passing PageRank onto your website.
4. Does the site have any Google PageRank? If you're seeing some Green in the Google Toolbar tool, it has some PageRank. A gray or white bar indicates a low PageRank page and/or a penalized site.
5. What other links are on the site and the page you want a link from? Are these links on-topic, or are you seeing links to unrelated topics such as online casinos, loans, etc.? As a general rule, you should avoid acquisition of off-topic links, as it may ultimately be penalized in the future by Google.

If the potential link passes the "No Penalties Test", then we evaluate whether or not the website is structured in such a way that the Google PageRank (aka Link Juice) has the potential to be passed along. More on that in the next post.

Five hundred dollars to have a third-party consultant claim your Facebook Place on your behalf because it is "complicated to do if you don't have experience"?!

Give me a break. This is absolutely outrageous; but true. It is what is being charged by a high profile seo company located in Vancouver. 

For those of you who don't know, here is the "scoop" on Facebook Places in Canada and why you should care about it:

1. The Facebook Places feature, a mobile application, became available to Canadians in September of this year.
2. It allows Facebook users to "check in" at your place of business, literally telling all their Friends where they are.
3. With over 500 million Facebook users sharing information, Facebook provides a free way for you to reach an incredible number of potential clients.
4. By Claiming your Facebook Place you can manage your Place's address and other business information, thus ensuring the information always remains current.

My advice to You

• Claim your Facebook Place now, whether you intend to use it right away or not. The last thing you want is to discover someone else has "squatted" on your Place, or that the backlog of requests for claiming has led to an extremely long wait time.
• Save your money. Do it yourself. Use all the information readily made available by Facebook.

How to Claim you Facebook Place 

There is already alot of good content online about this, so I am not going to go into detail. Here it is in a nutshell:

1. Search for your Place on Facebook. If no Place exists, your will have to create a new Place using a supported web-enabled mobile device. Creating a new Place is the most difficult step in the process - but still a very easy one. 
2. Once you have found (or created) your Place in Facebook, simply click on the "Is this your business?" link at the bottom of the place.
3. Complete the verification process to claim you Place. This is either done through a phone call verification or through uploading of specific documents, such as a utility bill. (We used a Bar card the client's online Law Society database record as proof, because he leased office space in a Law Chambers and didn't have a utility bill with the address on it.)
4. Then you just have to wait. And wait and wait. We waited about 3 weeks for approval.

Bottom Line

Claim your Place. Do it now. And do it yourself. Save your hard earned money for the upcoming holiday season.

More and more we are seeing high profile cases in Canada where clients are in need of legal counsel. And these individuals are not reaching for the Yellow Pages or listening to friends, family or colleagues, but they are going online to find experts and trusted lawyers in Canada.

Just this week, at LawyerLocate.ca Inc., we received a request for a Canadian lawyer from a person involved in this Manitoba judge controversy. This is, but one example of many high profile clients that have come to LawyerLocate.ca to seek quality legal counsel in Canada. In fact, a first-hand witness to the tragic Greyhound incident in Manitoba in 2008 also used our service to seek legal advice.

Certainly this demonstrates, in a very real way, that the internet has become a respected and trusted method to seek professional services by Canadians. And clearly, based on the number of referrals we have received in the past 10 years, there is an significant upward trend in the quantity and quality of the requests we are seeing. Having processed over 82,000 referrals to-date, we believe the change has come to Canada, and that the wave of online sourcing is here to stay.

There has been a lot of international talk in the social media about the value of online legal directories. So much so I thought it warrented discussion here in Canada.

I Googled “legal directory” in Google.ca. The were 920,000 results. Searches for  “legal referral service” came back with only 50,300 results. Big difference. Not only in these numbers, but I also think a big difference in the results a lawyer can get from each of these services.

In the case of Directories (like Canadian-lawyers.ca by LexisNexis, Canadian Law List, or even the ever popular YellowPages) they typically offer a generic listing of the lawyer’ s name, firm name, address, contact information, etc. In some case there are extra fees to have a small biography, photographs, and email and website links.  But no referrals to speak of, and no real search engine optimization techniques directed specifically at the listers’ profile page.

Online referral services (like LawyerLocate.ca and LawyerShop) typically offer a great deal more. You often receive a “minisite” for yourself to list your practice details, contact information, etc. and you are provided referrals to individuals searching for your specific type of practice in a specific geographic area. Some referral services are specific to a certain practice area, such as the Canadian Family Law Lawyers Network, which charges not only a “registration fee”, but also a referral fee should you be retained.

Now,  some of you are already aware that I work for LawyerLocate.ca. So you may be thinking that this post is self-serving. Well it is…to a point. But it is also a post to inform you that there are differences between Directories and Referral Services, and to make you aware of this point. And to even make you aware that there are differences from one referral service to the next.

With so many online marketing/advertising options out there for you to choose from, it is important to your research first.  You all work hard for your money. So my question is this: Do you want to put that money into services that mirror the “Listing Book” of old, or do you want to invest in something that puts you and your practice on the cutting edge of internet information technology? Something that gets you internet exposure,  referrals to potential clients,  as well as something that can lead to superior search engine positioning?

Best advice: Search online for those referral services that rank high in the results. Research. Ask questions. Look for references from happy clients. And don’t put your eggs all in one basket.

Think again.

This photograph was taken this morning in the lobby of our offices. I have literally walked by this stack of Yellow Pages every single day for the past several months.

The building where we work is “home” to several law firms and sole practitioners. Even they do not feel compelled to pick up the copy that was designated for delivery to their office – despite the fact that many of them have paid to be advertised in them. 

It is becoming clear that the days of printed phone books are numbered. The Yellow Pages Group recently announced that the residential book is only delivered on request to those who live in major Canadian cities. But did you know that they also have an “opt-out” program for delivery of those printed Yellow Page directories? The questions to consider are:

• How long until that opt-out program becomes an “opt-in” program similar to the residential book delivery?
• With their physical distribution numbers trending downwards, are you paying less for that printed advertisement?

Even the Yellow Pages Group have recognized that peoples’ search methods are switching to online/mobile sources.  Stop and think about the last time you asked your assistant to source something for the firm. Where did they begin their search?  My bet is they started it online with Google, Yahoo or Bing.

So before you sink more of your hard earned money into your printed Yellow Pages advertising, consider these facts:

• Your target audience may have opted out of receiving a copy of the book, and
• Your advertisement may stay “trapped” inside a stack of unopened books (like the ones in our lobby).

My advice to you: consider spending your dollars on online advertising and marketing. Create a search engine optimized website. Combine that with an effective online marketing strategy. And don’t listen to your account executive from the Yellow Pages who continues to insist year after year that you still need a full page, full colour print ad in one of their books.

Google it up. These are the first words from the mouth of my 3-year son when I don’t know the answer to one of his questions. Not, “Let's get a book from the library”. Not, “Let’s find that number in the phone book”. But rather, “Google it up, Mommy.”

My 18-year old nephew has his own Smartphone. He sends thousands of text messages per month. And my 75-year old mother no longer owns a hard copy of the local telephone directory.

Times have certainly changed. Since I graduated University, the only connection my employer had to the outside world was dialup and an application called Gopher. And my cell phone, that was for emergency purposes only, weight about 2 pounds.  But today we are all connected digitally in a most “instantaneous” way. And the Rogers' new Next Is Now campaign (video to the left) really drives this point home. 

You would have to be living in a hole in the ground not to understand that your clients of today and tomorrow are all now “connected”. That their yellow pages are on their laptops and Smartphones. That when they want information about a product or a service, they want it now, and they all have the tools to find it fast. 

In the mid-90s when I needed a lawyer, there were literally next to no Canadian lawyers to be found on the internet. Today, with over fifty thousand Canadian lawyers with some sort of web presence, it is not enough just to have a website. Clearly, you must be taking steps to set your site and services apart from the rest of your competition. 

If your internet plan is to simply just “have a website”, and hope that your competitors keep their heads in the sand, then you are destined to get left behind in this fast-paced, digitally connected world we all live in.