Underpinning the Google Local algorithm is a number of data providers.  The more citations to your firm from these data providers, the higher you will rank.

So get listed!

Google Local – Get your Listing
http://listings.local.yahoo.com/csubmit/index.php

1.    infoUSA
Check – http://www.infousa411.com/Business.aspx
Listing – http://list.infousa.com/dbupdate.htm?Vendor=099842

2.    Superpages –
Check – http://www.superpages.com/
Listing – http://www.supermedia.com/spportal/quickbpflow.do

3.    Localeze
Listing – http://webapp.localeze.com/bizreg/

4.    YellowPages
Check – http://www.yellowpages.com/
Listing – http://listings.yellowpages.com/

5.    Yelp
Check – http://www.yelp.com/
Listing – https://www.yelp.com/signup

6.    InsiderPages
Check – http://www.insiderpages.com/
Listing – http://www.insiderpages.com/friends/new?header_link=true

7.    Niche Industry Sites (BBB, Vertical Directories)
http://www.justia.com
http://www.findlaw.com
http://www.lawyers.com
http://www.martindale.com
http://www.hg.org
State Bar Associations
Local Bar Associationes

8.    Acxiom
Check – http://www.databyAcxiom.com (Not yet online)

9.    Yahoo
Check – http://local.yahoo.com/
Listing – http://listings.local.yahoo.com/csubmit/index.php

10.    Citysearch
Check – http://www.citysearch.com
Listing – Click on Register in Top Right.

11.  MapQuest
Check – http://www.mapquest.com/
Listing – Data is pulled from InfoUSA.com http://list.infousa.com/dbupdate.htm

12. Local
Check – http://www.local.com/
Listing – http://www.yellowbot.com/submit/newbusiness

Also check out listings here – http://www.locallytype.com/pages/submit.htm

You may already know this, but I thought I would share anyways.

When you run the quick research, if you highlight all the rows of data and paste that into another program (say a blog post, MS Word, an email, or even notepad) you get the raw numbers of the costs per click.

I am not sure if its the average, high, or low cost – I am assuming average cost to be in that position.  It at least gets us into the game quicker and on the phone I can tell a client “Hey, consumer law protection costs $3.33 a click”.

Neato!  Now I don’t have to setup an Adwords account or do more research to get the exact figures for a potential client.

Here is the output that I copied from this screenshot.  As you can see it shows positions 1-3 are $17.50 for dallas criminal lawyer.  Great data to quickly share on the phone or with a client.

Law firms now need to pay attention to this area, if they have not already.  The good news is that getting a listing is relatively easy. Getting a top rank can be done with minimal effort.

Let’s read more though to understand the algorithm.

Business Quality Guidelines From Google

http://maps.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=107528

• Represent your business exactly as it appears in the offline world. The name on Google Maps should match the business name, as should the address, phone number and website.
• Do not create listings at locations where the business does not physically exist.
• Use the description and custom attribute fields to include additional information about your listing. This type of content should never appear in your business’s title, address or category fields.

Other Top Articles on Google Local Optimization

http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml

• One of the best articles to read.
• Top 41 Factors
• Top 8 Negative Factors
• Most important data providers
• Most important data review engines
• Must read

http://www.davidmihm.com/blog/general-marketing/local-seo-citation-is-new-link/

• There is a difference between a citation and a link.  Citation can just be address.
• You do not necessarily need links, but citations to your office address.
• “Plenty of sites that are only listing address and phone number, or otherwise unspiderable links, are showing up as citations.”
• For the most part, the businesses with lots of citations rank higher than those with a lower volume.
• Two of the top 10 Local businesses have MORE citations than they have inbound links!
• Submit your site to the typical InfoUSA, SuperPages.com, and InsiderPages.com, but also submit to all types of niche sites.

http://www.seorabbit.com/optimizing-for-google-maps

• Priority to City Center is Key.
• Title tag is important.
• Categories are important – but don’t be spammy.
• Create multiple listings, if you are in different cities.
• Add in details, photos.

http://www.naturalsearchblog.com/archives/2007/01/11/extreme-local-search-optimization-tactics/

• Tip # 1: Change your business name to include a few of the top keywords that users type into search engines when seeking your type of business in your area.
• Tip # 2: Change your business name so that the first characters will be earliest in the alphabet for your locality.
• Tip # 3: Move your business so that you can have presence closer to your city’s center.
• Tip # 4: Get a separate directory listing for every city in your area for which you provide services.
• Tip # 5: Customize your address by having your street renamed to include beneficial keywords.
• Tip # 6: Lightly influence user ratings to your benefit.
• Tip # 7: Add the common nicknames for your locality into your site’s front page text.

http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/10-likely-elements-of-googles-local-search-algorithm/519/

• Use of Google’s Local Business Center (LBC)
• Availability/Trust of other business data
• A Business Web Site
• Listings in 2nd-tier Local Directories
• Listings in Vertical Directories
• References from other Web sites
• Reviews
• Proximity to location
• Location Prominence and User Query
• Use of other Google services

Any other articles?  Let us know and we will summarize and link up.

Overarching Guidelines: For all Forms of Advertising

• Name of lawyer or law firm – Lawyer must advertise under their official bar name
• All forms of law advertising must disclose the town or city of one or more bona fide office locations of the lawyer. It is considered to be misleading if law firm lists offices in cities where there is no bona fide firm offices in those cities.   May only advertise that they are “available for consultation” in locations where they don’t have an office that they have furnished & have staff at.
• With regard to misleading information:  they basically cannot misrepresent facts or law, is in any way false/misleading/deceptive/omitting material information
  • Must not refer to past successes or results obtained
  • Promise results
  • Compares lawyers services with another lawyers services unless factually substantiated
  • May not contain statements describing or characterizing the quality of their services
    • May truthfully state ratings or awards if is legitimate, and uses the actual name of the award and the lawyer includes the name of the organization bestowing the award, and the year.
• May contain visual or verbal descriptions depictions as long as they are not deceptive, misleading or likely to confuse viewer.
• Lawyer advertisements may not include an area of practice in which the advertising lawyer or firm does not currently practice law.
• Advertisements cannot include statements that claim or imply a lawyer is certified, board certified, specialist, or expert in an area unless the lawyer is Board Certified in that area.
• Can’t state or imply that the Florida bar approves of them whatsoever.
• Cannot use illustrations only if they could confuse, deceive or mislead the viewer.
• Every advertisement which contains information about the lawyers fee must also disclose whether the client will be responsible for costs or other expenses in addition to the fee.
• Lawyers may not advertise under firm names that are false, misleading or deceptive.   Lawyer may not advertise under a trade name unless the same name appears on the letterhead, business cards, office sign, fee contracts and appears with the lawyers signature on pleadings and other legal documents.
• Cannot use any celebrity in advertising whose voice or image is recognizable to the public.
• Sounds – cannot use sounds that would confuse or be deceptive.   Cannot use sirens or car crashing noises.

Specifics for Web:

• Jurisdictions which attorneys are licensed – home page
• Office locations – home page
• Any past results, testimonials or quality of legal services, can only be supplied if requested – must have a disclaimer where the client must request to see these.   Any testimonials/past results etc must be secured in a way that they are not searchable within the site without signing off on the disclaimer, and must not be able to be found on a Google or other external general search without signing a disclaimer.

Specifics for Print / Direct Mail:

• Direct mail must have “Legal Advertisement” printed on the  outside of the advertisement in red in the lower left hand corner.
• Must contain statements as to how the attorney obtained the information about prospective clients legal matter, and a written statement detailing the lawyers of law firms background, experience.
• Direct Mail – must always include as the first sentence “If you have already retained a lawyer for this matter please disregard this letter.
• Any mailings must be sent by standard post mail & not be made to look like legal or court documents or anything else sneaky.
• Cannot have anything on the outside of the envelope stating the nature of the clients legal problem.
• No mailings can go to someone within a 30 day window of a personal injury, death or disaster.

Specifics for Email:

• Unsolicited Direct Mail & Email -
• Subject line of email must state “Legal Advertisement”.
• Statement of attorney or firm qualifications is required.
• Must contain statements as to how the attorney obtained the information about prospective clients legal matter.
• And must comply with rules above about geographic disclosure, board certification, and such.
• No mailings can go to someone within a 30 day window of a personal injury, death or disaster.

The best idea in the book, or at least in my opinion, is the part about being an expert.  Listed below is a quick summary of the advantages, how-to, and other ideas.  Note that this is a mix of the texts ideas and my ideas/comments on the subject.

Be an Expert

• Allows you to spend less on marketing
• People Seek you Out
• You get referrals
• Higher Value Service / Clients
• Respect in the Industry

Sounds like a pretty good list.  So how do you become an expert?

What you need to do

• Be good
• Be experienced
• Know more than anyone else
• Have the education
• Have confidence

Honestly, I think the most important part of this is “be good.”  If you are good at what you do, everything else falls into place.  Once you are good you can then tell everyone about your awesomeness.

How to Become an Expert

• Write a book
• Write articles
• Write newsletters
• Blog
• Speak
• Host Seminars

You need to get the word out.  The easiest way these days is via your web site, blog, Twitter and other social media.  Basically, your web presence.

Anyways, that is a quick summary.  Let us know your thoughts on the subject.

301 Redirect is the Best

If you are not going to build unique, indepdent sites, then 301 redirect all your domains into your parent site. A 301 redirect causes the domain to fully redirect and change its name to the site you are redirecting to.

It Creates a Nice Redirect

So if you 301 the domain www.paperst.com, then it becomes www.paperstreet.com when people visit www.paperst.com. This is proper as you don’t want two independent versions of your site running on the web under different domains – its bad for SEO.

WWW vs non-WWW

In fact, you really should not have a www and non-www version of your site, just redirect everything into the www version (or non-www version).  Have your tech person create a 301 redirect for your non-www version of your site into the www version.

301 Passes Over Link Value

A 301 passes over any link value (i.e. anyone linking to that previous domain).  So in our case, we are able to pass over all old value of www.paperst.com links to www.paperstreet.com.  This really helps if you have multiple domains with each their own value.  This is awesome when two firms merge as they get the benefit of both domains link power – if 301′d correctly.

No Direct Match for SEO Purposes with a 301

However, a 301 does not pass over any “direct match” value of the keyword phrases in the domain.  So any use of the domain is strictly from a link perspective and not “direct match” of the keywords.  Don’t let anyone tell you that buying 50 domains with keyword phrases in them helps, it doesn’t unless you create actual web sites with those domains.

You can see the full MS Excel report here:

PaperStreet Research – Directory Lists for Law Firms

Wow that is a lot of data, so what does all this mean?  Let’s break down a few sections:

TRAFFIC ESTIMATES

Most Traffic in December from Compete.com Metrics (top 5)

1. Business.com (3,300,000 visitors)
2. Yahoo Directory – (1,700,000 visitors)
3. DMOZ.org (779,000) – Ditto – big general directory.
4. Avvo.com (652,000)
5. Lawyers.com (600,000)

We realize that Compete.com is not completely accurate, but it is a guideline into shear size of the directories and approximate traffic volumes.  It allows us to see simply who gets more traffic in general.

Note that the top three sites are general directories, so the data is skewed towards all types on inquiries, not just legal.  The legal traffic would be much less.

Also note that Avvo has 2 million client visits per month listed on their site.  If this is the case, this bumps them up substantially.  Thanks for the quick link to the data on the site.  I  wish all sites were that easy to find info.

Finally, this is from Compete – “Compete has developed a unique methodology created by experts in the fields of mathematics, statistics and the data sciences to aggregate, transform, enhance and normalize data in order to estimate U.S. Internet traffic.”

Biggest Percent Change in Traffic Month to Month with Compete.com Data

This is the percent change from the previous report. 

1. Avvo.com (Up 62%)
2. HG.org (Up 45%)
3. Martindale.com (Up 26%)
4. Lawyers.com (Up 18%)
5. Findlaw.com (Up 10%)

SEO ESTIMATES

Google Page Rank

This is the PageRank of the various directories.  It is a 1 to 10 scale and higher is better.  PageRank is a great quick indicator of the value of having a link to your site.

1. Yahoo Directory – PR 8
2. Findlaw – PR 8
3. DMOZ.org – PR 8
4. A lot tied for 7 PR
5. Only two have a PR 6 and none are lower

Yahoo Links

Using Site Explorer, the number of links into the domain  – ex: linkdomain:lawyers.com -site:lawyers.com. This tells us how many people link to each directory.  The more links, the better.

1. DMOZ.org – 6,000,000 inbound links.
2. Business.com – 986,000
3. Yahoo Directory – 986,000
4. Lawyers.com – 890,000
5. BOTW.org & Justia – 472,000

Open Site Explorer

This is a great new tool to track inbound links and the overall authority of a page and domain.  Root Domains is the number of unique root domains (e.g. *.example.com) containing at least one linking page to this URL/domain.  In short, all of the directories have great domain and page authority.  All of them are in the 80’s and even 90’s.  This is due a lot to the fact that each site has thousands of root domains linking to their sites.

Page Authority

Page Authority predicts this page’s ranking potential in the search engines based on an algorithmic combination of all link metrics. Page Authority scores are on a 100-point, logarithmic scale.

1. Yahoo Directory – 98 out of 100
2. Findlaw.com – 93
3. Business.com – 88
4. Justia Directory & Justia.com 88
5. BOTW.org – 88

Domain Authority

Domain Authority predicts this domain’s ranking potential in the search engines based on an algorithmic combination of all link metrics. Domain Authority scores are on a 100-point, logarithmic scale.

1. Findlaw.com – 93
2. Mardinale – 89
3. Business.com – 88
4. Lawyers.com – 88
5. Yahoo Directory – 87

Conclusion

It all comes down to budgets.  If a firm has the budget, we would generally recommend obtaining a link from each directory.  All of these directories are worthy of getting a link.

DMOZ.org is free, so why not sign up – it just may take forever to get approved.  Other directories like business.com and Yahoo.com generally cost $299 a year.  We have a cool$50 off coupon for Business.com here if you decide to sign up.

Other major legal directories such as Hieros Gamos, Findlaw.com, Avvo.com, Justia.com, Martindale.com and Lawyers.com you would need to contact each directory to see the fee schedule.  Justia and Avvo are free initially, so why not sign up.  The others may be cost prohibitive depending on firm budgets.

However, from an SEO perspective you cannot go wrong with getting a link from each directory.  This will increase your inbound links and with the overall authority of each domain pass along a lot of “link juice.”

Final Notes

If anyone wishes to report their traffic to this documents, we can definitely update. We were using free tools available to us to estimate, namely www.compete.com.  It is a great tool and we would love to compare real-world numbers with their data in another report. We would also like to update costs so that we have a final chart of expenses for directory listings too.

Thanks!  Team PaperStreet

• Test, Test and More Test with Conversion Rate Optimization
  • Setup a CRO campaign to test out variables in copy, images, design.
  • See what works and does not work in near real-time.
  • Double your leads, by improving your conversion rate from 1% to 2% and beyond.  Small changes can make all the difference.
• Make your Web Site the best it can be.
  • Branding / Message
    • Focus on Key Benefits you Offer to your Visitors
    • Focus on Above the Fold Calls to Action
    • Focus on Calls to Action on Each Page
  • Review your Analytics
    • Bounce Rate – Keep below 40% and strive for below 20%
    • Time on Page
    • Exit Pages
    • Error Pages
    • Top Pages
    • Visitor Location
  • Test, Test and More Test with Conversion Rate Optimization
    • Yes, we said it twice.
    • Don’t just launch a web site and sit back.
    • Review your Analytics and Test
  • Integrate a Publishing Platform
    • Allow you to quickly update your site.
    • Allow you to blog
    • Allow you to get Social
• Consider Practice Sites
  • Specialty sites can bring in quality leads.
  • Can assist in keeping the firm branding on point by separating out competing practice groups or groups that take away from the firm’s main focus.
• Create a Blog
  • Decide whether to integrate a blog or brand the blog on its own domain.
  • Pick a niche topic and become the authority in that area.
  • Devote time to connecting with other bloggers
• Get Social
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIN
  • Facebook
  • Other Networks
• Set the Groundwork for Search Optimization
  • Build LINKS!!
    • Get links from top ranked sites.
    • See who links to your competitors, get those links.
    • Write interesting content and get free links
    • Press Releases
    • Articles
    • Social Sites
    • Reciprocate links
  • Write Quality, Relevant Content
    • Want to rank high on a topic, write an article (like this one)
    • Want to rank high for an area, write many articles
    • Don’t spam.
  • Use a Publishing Platform that is SEO friendly.
    • Site Architecture
    • SEO Friendly Page Names
    • Title Tags
    • Meta Description
    • H1 – Headlines
    • Content
    • Footer Text
    • Alt Tags
• Consider Traditional Pay-Per-Click Campaigns
  • Quick Traffic and Guaranteed Traffic
  • Key is to track and cut non-performing terms

What else are you doing?  Let us know.

1. Web Sites still dominate and are considered the core of the firm – a home base.
2. Firms got niche.  The rise of practice area sites, including blogs continued.
3. Better branding and focusing the web sites message / key benefits.  It’s good to see a firm truly brand itself with something professional and creative.
4. The convergence of technology (i.e. blogs, video, audio) on the web sites.  The web is becoming one.
5. Social Media efforts exploded, unless you were under a rock.
6. SEO became harder, as more firms want top rankings.  Not everyone can be #1.
7. Paid campaigns (PPC) made some clients a lot rich and others just poorer with bad targeting and overspending.
8. The rise of the use of Analytics to review performance.  You can track just about everything these days.

What trends did you notice?

It’s a quick read, includes a sample disclaimer, so download the Guidelines for Firm Websites here.

We will post our comments on the guidelines later.