Photo courtesy of Zagrev

The legal profession has been turned upside down by changes in technology, new competition, globalization and the recent recession.  Firms have been forced to rethink their business model, to reevaluate their practice areas, provide alternatives to hourly billing and implement new technology, all of which are radically changing the way law is practiced. But many firm websites don’t reflect these changes – and remain the same static law firm brochure websites of 10 years ago.

We’ve spent a great deal of time looking at these sites in conjunction with the work we do for our law-related clients and are truly surprised by what we see. While there’s some variation from site to site, we observed five troubling practices with these brochure style sites. Continue Reading →

Recently, a client asked us to post a video we produced for them on their website. Posting the video was pretty easy to do. But simply embedding a video on a page doesn’t guarantee your audience will find it. In fact, every minute 35 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube alone! With so much video content competing for viewer’s attention, it’s more important than ever to develop marketing strategies for your web video content and one strategy to consider is video SEO. Continue Reading →

Earlier today, Google unveiled the next evolution of its search engine. Considering that Google searches account for about 85% of the worlds search engine traffic, even small tweaks are headline news.  But Google is calling this latest development “… a quantum leap for search.” So the buzz surrounding this is going to be massive. But some of the doomsday SEO people are getting a little bit nuts.

What is Google Instant?

With the ‘old’ Google, you typed a search query and then clicked the ‘search’ button to begin returning results. Refining your search meant performing a series of individual queries to narrow the results. Google did prompt users with hints, but each query still resulted in its own unique results.

With Instant, Google tries to predict what you are searching for before you even finish typing. The search page is refreshed with dynamic results in real time based on the characters you’ve typed so far. So instead of browsing pages of results, you know in a fraction of a second if your search is on-target. (Google claims to save its users 11 hours every second with the new service.) The effect is almost instant feedback that seemingly reads your mind.

How does it work?

Google has apparently reworked their entire search mechanism to facilitate this feature. A combination of indexed pages and cached searches allows Google to predict what you’re searching for and selectively narrow and prioritize results. Then these results are updated in real time using AJAX.

Continue Reading →

I like that our agency has a variety of clients. Some are big, some small. They come from different industries. Each client contact has a different job description. That variety helps keep our work fresh. But it also allows us to see how smart our clients are, each in their own ways. They know their business, customers and business goals like the back of their hands. The reason they hire us is because they value what we do, and what we do falls outside of their areas of expertise. I would like to think that we do a good job of forming partnerships with our clients, to become the means to extend their brand, their presence and their business goals to exciting new markets. I hope that we help them articulate their frustrations and aspirations to find unique and successful solutions for them. I hope this is the case, because the alternative scares the hell out of me. Continue Reading →

Some SEO “experts” are saying it is too early to worry about search engine optimization for Microsoft’s recently launched search engine, Bing.  However, that wait and see attitude may be a mistake and a lost opportunity.

Bing.com

In the two months since it’s launch, Bing has earned respect in the high stakes battle with search engine giants Google and Yahoo.  The New York Times has an interesting article on Bing’s credibility.

The jury is still out on the long term impact, but Bing is clearly beginning to change the expectations of web searchers, and will only increase the importance of search engine optimization for businesses. Continue Reading →

Videos stand a much better chance than a text page of being shown on the first results page of a Google blended search, according to Nate Elliot with Forrester Research.  Their research shows, “…any given video in the index stands about a 50 times better chance of appearing on the first page of results than any given text page in the index.” Continue Reading →