When was the last time you “Googled” your law firm?  Did you find consistent results? If not, you are doing it wrong.

It is really important to pay attention to the information that is placed about your law firm on the internet.  Especially if you have multiple attorneys in your office.  Sometimes you have attorneys that like to go out on their own because they “are the best” at SEO. According to who? Last time I checked your associate had a J.D. right?  Unless things have changed, I am pretty sure Law School does not teach you about how to market your law firm on the internet.  You may need to talk to this person about a different problem if they actually have a degree in Internet Marketing instead of the J.D. claimed on their resume.

I apologize for my digressions. Moving on.

If your attorneys are creating individual profiles and linking those profiles to your law firm in any way; my suggestion is that you need to be clear that you will need to approve all of the content prior to the release.  The last thing that you want, I mean the very last thing, is for one of your associates to accidentally create an issue that will take you potentially years to clean up.  I know the time frame because, unfortunately, I have seen this first hand myself. This is what marketing firms call “SEO baggage.”  It is the clean up process that not only is frustrating, but very time consuming.  This can create a problem when it comes to achieving the results that you are looking for when it comes to the big “G” as well as those “other” sites. Plus, once you are able to find the error, and fix it, Google still will not see this correction for more likely, 90 days.  That is a very long time to wait.

The range of information that you will want to check into will be well….and I am serious when I say this. Everything. You will need to check the content in the description, the address, phone number, a few other things, even any photographs and the file names of the photographs.  This may seem like a lot of work initially, and you will probably laugh at this article and say “I’m an attorney, I am too busy to check stuff like that…it seems so unnecessary.”  But trust me when I say, I have been doing this a long time and if you do not take that five minutes to check to ensure consistency in ALL profiles that are submitted that have the potential to connect with your law firm. You will wish you had and so will your wallet. By your wallet I am referring to missed potential cases and having to pay someone the hours to clean it up.

Let me paint a little bit of a picture for you so that you understand what I mean.  Let’s say that you go to Google Maps and you type in the name of your law firm.  You see along the left hand side all of the results of what you have typed in.  You don’t just see your one Google + but you see that you now have seven!  Not only do you see that you have seven, these profiles all have different information.  If the first one in the results has the incorrect phone number, lets say the number actually was mis-typed and the phone number is actually a number to a preschool instead of to your personal injury firm. Your new potential clients are going to assume the worst and are going to move onto the next attorney. That’s a lot of potential money walking away! (Metaphorically of course.) Had you taken five minutes to ensure that all of your information going into different profiles was all the same…i.e. your phone number, you would not be panic stricken about how many potential new cases you could be working on at this very moment.  The kicker is that even if you get Google to fix the issue, chances are they found that information from some where else.  Guess what??  Google will not tell you where it came from and within a few days, it will change right back to the incorrect number. All because that one profile with the mistake will tell the Google “spiders” to change it back to the incorrect phone number.  Now you are on your own to find the inconsistency in one of thousands of directory possibilities on the internet.  So five minutes turns into years because the internet is a really big place.

The moral of this story is this:  Take your time!  Check everything that goes onto the internet about your law firm! Make sure that you create consistency in your web presence by checking the phone number, to the file names that your photographs hold, and everything else in between. If you don’t, you might regret it later. After all, the best line I ever heard from a movie was this: “The Internet is not written in pencil. It is written in ink.” (The Social Network, 2010) That is absolutely right on the money, literally.

So Google yourself if you haven’t done it lately.  You may be surprised at what you find.

As always, if you need me, let me know.  I am always here.

Signed,

The Attorney’s ATM Gal