Whether you are a seasoned family lawyer or are new to the practice of family law, maintaining and enhancing your reputation, especially your online reputation is critical to your success. Insufficient and/or unflattering information about you online is bound to raise concerns among prospective clients who Google you. And, we know they will Google you, even if you were referred to them.
This seminar will show you how to:
- perform an online reputation audit on yourself
- what to do if you cannot be found even when you Google your own name
- what to do if you found “bad stuff” about you
- how to enhance your reputation, even if you have a good one.
We will also answer these often asked questions:
- there are ratings about me as a lawyer that I disagree with. How did they get that?
- what can I do to influence these ratings on me?
- can I get bad comments about me removed?
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Dan Couvrette:
Welcome to this marketing teleseminar. My name is Dan Couvrette; I’m the CEO of a Divorce Marketing Group. My co-host for today’s seminar is Martha Chan, who is the VP of Divorce Marketing Group and also happens to be my wife.
We are both marketing experts for family lawyers and divorce professionals, and we specialize in working with professionals who provide services to the divorcing community. We are the publishers of both Family Lawyer Magazine and Divorce Magazine. We have seven websites that reach over three million divorcing people a year. This year, our company, Divorce Marketing Group, is celebrating its 20th anniversary. You can learn more about our company if you visit our website, DivorceMarketingGroup.com.
This seminar is a bi-monthly telemarketing seminar that’s part of a series. The purpose is to educate family lawyers and other professionals working in the divorce area. Quite frankly, we love working with clients who are more educated on the subject of divorce than on the subject of marketing because it just makes it easier for us to work with them.
This teleseminar will be recorded and will be made available at our website, divorcemarketinggroup.com, so you can share this with your colleagues if you wish to do so. If you wish us to send a link to you, please send an email to me and I will gladly send a link to where you can find this seminar. My email address is danc@divorcemarketinggroup.com.
Let’s begin. You probably wouldn’t be listening to this seminar if you probably weren’t already believing that online reputation is important to you as a family lawyer. I suspect that there are three types of family lawyers that are listening to this seminar. One group is listening because something bad may appear about you on the Internet, which may or may not be justified, and you’re listening to see if something can be done to correct or enhance your reputation. The simple answer is yes, things can be done. We’re going to talk about that.
The second group of people who could be listening is those who have very little in the way of an online reputation or no online reputation and want to know what you should do to develop one. We’ll talk about how you can do that.
The third group is listening because you have a good reputation online and you wisely want to see what more you can do to maintain and further enhance your online reputation.
Martha and I will discuss seven steps or strategies to enhance your online reputation, and all the steps will benefit you no matter what group you fall into. But some steps will be more important to one group or another. So, I suggest that you listen to the entire podcast as each piece will have some value to you.
I believe I’m preaching to the converted — otherwise you wouldn’t be listening. But I want to make certain you understand why your online reputation is important to you. The simple answer is when it comes to online reputation, you’re as good as your Google search results. If there’s anything bad about you online, you will not be there to defend it or to explain why it exists.
Martha Chan:
That’s right, Dan. Let’s say another professional or a former client has recommended you to a perspective client. What do you think the perspective client is going to do? More than likely they will Google your name so that they can get some information about you before deciding whether to contact you or not.
If they did that, what result will that perspective client see? It could be one of the following three scenarios. One is you could not be found or could not be found easily, especially if you have a very common name like mine, Martha Chan. Today, that name returned one million search results. I’m happy to say I’m on the first page of Google, seven times on the top of the list of all the Martha Chans that show up on LinkedIn and on Facebook. But how do you do that? Well, we’re about to tell you how.
The second scenario is that there may not be much of you online. They can only find your firm’s own website. I’m assuming you have a website for your firm. I want you to know that the situation is such that it’s not necessarily very encouraging for people to only find your website online because they may have two or three referrals given to them and they want to search out more information about you other than the information that you put out yourself online about you. That is what we call social proof, i.e., what other people are talking about you.
The third scenario could be that there is some bad stuff about you and your firm. Well, we all know that that is not a good thing. Well, not only is that going to be bad for the perspective client, meaning that they are not likely going to call you, but they may go back to your referral source and tell them: hey, guess what I found about them? In fact, that is what happened to one of the clients of mine who contacted our service to do reputation management.
Dan Couvrette:
So, the bottom line is you might be missing out on more than a few clients if you have no online reputation or if you have a tarnished online reputation. You could be very well undermining your referral sources as Martha said and the future success of your practice.
By now, most law firms and lawyers have websites and they used them to shape their reputation. Keep in mind, as Martha says, your website is an advertisement for yourself and is deemed as such by many bar associations, so don’t expect prospective clients to believe everything you put on your website.
To the contrary, perspective clients, particularly divorcing people, are using social proof online to decide who to choose. Social proof includes rating what they see about you by professional organizations and lay people. Blog posts you write tell them what your philosophy is and what it would be like to work for you. It can be very complicated and overwhelming. We’re here to point out that most important task to attend to and offer some tools that will help you have a better online reputation. Here are the seven steps to managing and enhancing your online reputation. Martha, let’s start with step number one.
Martha Chan:
The first step is make sure you have a good website or make sure you improve your website or get a website if you still don’t have one. It is 2016, so most people expect you to have a website. We’ve seen many websites for law firms that are really doing them a disservice because they’re so poorly designed, lack information, or both. Long gone are the days when any websites will do. Because you’re in a very competitive marketplace, if you’re not putting your best foot forward, your business will eventually suffer because consumers expect quality websites. We could devote a whole teleseminar on websites alone, but we just pick two or three subjects here so we can give you some high-level guidance regarding your website.
First of all, what do we mean by having quality websites? You must have websites that differentiate you from your competition and offer clear reasons as to why they should hire your firm. Your website has to be current. There are websites that I have seen that are so dated that one look would make you back out of that site.
Then there are websites that are not smartphone or mobile friendly, meaning it shows up poorly on a smartphone. Today, the majority of visitors to websites are viewing websites through their smartphones. You know that you’re on the go, you’re busy, and our statistics to our websites that we own tell us that about 60% of our visitors are coming through mobile. So, it’s important to make sure your site is mobile-friendly.
Then your website should have some basic information that the divorcing people are looking for. What is it that you can impart in terms of knowledge that would help them with their situation? What I’m really saying is that no longer can your website say how great you are. They need to have a resource to go to, and being resourceful allows them to pass on your website to friends that they know who may be in the same situation in search for a lawyer.
You also have to give the visitors a sense of what it is like to work with you and how it is that you could help them – not just a list of your credentials. We have seen websites of law firms where the lawyers just keep on listing all their initials and all their awards that they have accumulated through the years. One commonly done thing is, on their resume, they would start from 50 years ago, when they graduated, what school they graduated from, and then gradually work their way up to this year.
What we recommend is that you flip it. Tell people the most current things about you that are highly relevant to them. Sure, where you graduate may make a difference to some people, but what’s more important to them for the majority of divorcing people is evidence that supports how you have helped other people – maybe some cases that you have that you’re proud of, that you won. We fully understand that you cannot disclose confidential information. But certainly, if you have a landmark case that you’ve been involved in, you should be saying that.
Ideally, your website should feature new content on a regular basis in the form of articles, blog posts, newsletters, videos, FAQs, and podcasts that would let people know that you are a source of reliable information. Also, let search engines know that this website is worthy of being delivered on the top page when people are searching for information related to divorce lawyers and divorce. We, as I said, could spend the whole seminar on this topic alone.
Dan Couvrette:
Step number two: you need to do an online audit. Google your name and see what shows up. You may have heard the saying you are your search results, and this is especially true to perspective clients who Google your name after you’ve been referred by a friend, a business associate, or a personal referral source. Unflattering online information about you is bound to raise concerns and will not necessarily be dismissed out of hand just because it came from a referral.
One family lawyer, for instance, sent an email from this former client who had recommended service to a friend, and when the friend Googled the lawyer’s name and found unflattering information, he just chose not to hire that lawyer – despite his friend’s recommendation.
Your reputation may be tarnished by negative comments posted online, which you may not be aware of, that when you Google yourself, you may come across them. More often than not, you will know about bad comments, but there may be some you don’t know about. In fact, even if you do not have a website, or are not active on the Internet, you may have a tarnished reputation that’s completely out of your hands in many cases.
Whether it’s justified or not, once negative information makes it online, it is there indefinitely and needs to be dealt with as soon as possible. Most family lawyers we work with rely a great deal on referrals, so a tarnished one is going to do you harm.
When you use Google, you can use various searches to find as many references to yourself as possible. Of course, you would Google using your full name. You might use an abbreviation if you have a nickname or abbreviated name, such as Bob for Robert. Use your firm name, and use your name along with words like lawyer, family lawyer, or divorce lawyer. You might try a few additional search terms and include your name and the city, your county, your state – a combination to identify directly where you may appear on that wouldn’t pop up just by putting in your own name.
From that point, you need to make a list of the top ten or 20, or 30, places where you show up and what facts or comments they have about you. This would be a list that you’ll make sure you’re going to work on to make sure your reputation is as good as it can be on all of these directories and listings.
You will periodically want to take a look at this and make sure they updated if you provided additional information or send it to them if you can’t do it yourself. This can be a bit of a time-consuming task; you might have your associate or assistant do this for you. There are many directories out there that you might not be aware of. If there are bad comments about you, it will take you even longer because you might want to contact the website or see what you can do to remove these items or do further work to push bad comments down. We’ll talk about that a little bit later.
Martha Chan:
I’m going to talk about the third steps that you can take, which is that you should claim and perfect your online listings and social media pages. There are a number of lawyers and other rating websites where you’re likely to be listed on that you can claim your listings and add additional information to that is helpful and that would make your profile more complete and enticing. For example, if you have written a book, made a presentation, or been interviewed by the media and you have video FAQs, you want to put them all out there. There are a few of the websites where you could be showing up, such as the obvious ones like the state and bar association websites.
I’m going to mention a few directory listings that are highly relevant for lawyers. The first one is AVVO. AVVO is a very new entry to the Internet world, but they have surely made a big impression. Probably a couple of years ago, not too many lawyers have heard of AVVO, but by now, a majority of our clients are aware of AVVO. We actually did an interview with the founder ofAVVO and discussed with him as to how it is that they established their rating system.
By the way, for some of you, if you still haven’t heard about AVVO, you are likely listed there, and AVVO assigns their ratings to you, 1 to 10 with 10 being the best. We were interested in how is it that they come to assign ratings to all these lawyers. AVVO is not just covering divorce or family lawyers; they cover all lawyers in various practice areas.
What they’re saying is that the way that they compile the information is by going through what is available publically and online. Out of that information, they assign you a rating. The irony here is that your online reputation is actually going to impact AVVO’s rating about you. Not that the founder of AVVO was giving out their secret sauce. They have a particular algorithm that they have created for themselves for this exercise of collecting information and calculating what your ratings should be.
What they’re saying is that the more information there is out there that is positive about you, the more likely that your rating would be higher – so if you have the badges, I call them badges, and if you are a Super Lawyer, if you are a Best Lawyer, all those things you want to make sure that they are prominent on your website. Obviously, if you don’t have a website, you want to make sure you have a good website, with a good profile about yourself and all your attorneys within your office. That’s just AVVO.
Then, of course, we have FindLaw.com, Justia.com, Lawyers.com, Martindale.com, and Super Lawyers, all those are hopefully familiar with all of you. You would probably all have a profile there. You should go and take a look at what is on those profiles. I am really shocked that there are so many profiles that are basically blank and the only thing that it is there is the address. For some lawyers, the addresses are so dated, the company that they work for is dated, and there’s not even a picture of the lawyer. What you see is what I call the onion head, just a general icon with a shadow of a person. Make sure you go there and claim those and perfect those listings online.
Then, of course, there is Yelp, who in recent years has really become highly, highly valued website where people doing local searches are often finding services on Yelp. We have a full page that we will put up because, again, we don’t have enough time to talk about each particular listing. We will be putting up a full page about Yelp and how to maximize and optimize Yelp to your advantage. For example, I have posted today’s seminar on Yelp’s event section to let people know what it is about and why they should attend. On April 1st, we launched our brand new initiative called The Divorce School. So, I’ve got that up on Yelp as well.
I also want to take a moment to talk about social media. But now, hopefully, all of you know about LinkedIn and, hopefully, you all have a LinkedIn profile for yourself as well that you should create a LinkedIn profile for your company. So, what I’m saying is that every single lawyer in your firm should have a profile and also one for your company. There are currently 400 million LinkedIn users and about 100 million of those users are in the U.S. LinkedIn’s goal is to have 3 billion users. So, you can count on it that they are going to be continuously growing and adding features to LinkedIn. It’s bad news if your LinkedIn page is blank or is not fully optimized because a lot of people are using LinkedIn to look for professionals in their area.
You could certainly claim Google Map’s listing and create a Google Plus listing. So, those are the things that you want to spend some time in finding out what is the best way of filling out those pages so that you could show up on Google search results.
Now I’d like to talk a bit about Facebook. My God, when we told our clients to be one Facebook, thinking back maybe 10 years ago, a majority of them would say, “Why?” Why should I care about Facebook and who’s going to look on Facebook? I’m not on Facebook. Hopefully, we have passed that stage of how we view Facebook. Today, there are almost 1.6 billion active Facebook users. Your Facebook page could be about you and it could also be about your firm.
Make sure that you optimize those pages and are active on those pages. It’s not enough to just create the pages and let them sit there. You need to be posting. Some of our clients are very good with it. They post everything that talks about how they got the Super Lawyer designation, or they’ll talk about the charity that they contribute to – all of that is creating a certain reputation of their lawyers as well as their firm. Again, we could do a complete seminar on social media, but what we are doing today is just highlighting that so that you can pay attention to that.
Of course, we have Twitter and Pinterest, which are not necessarily on a lot of our clients’ radar because our clients think, Well, who wants to look at Pinterest? But I can tell you that if you do pay attention to those, you are going to see return. Obviously, you have to set your priorities and decide which ones you’re going to take on and which ones you’re going to master. I would say, for your time and money, the three to focus on would definitely be LinkedIn, Facebook as well as your Google Maps. Now Dan is going to tell you about the step four.
Dan Couvrette:
Step four is to get clients and peers to say good things about you. As Martha mentioned, we’ve been working with family lawyers for 20 years and we know that many family lawyers are reluctant to ask their peers and clients to endorse them. But doing so can help further establish your reputation. As an example, we mentioned AVVO before. You might invite your clients to go to AVVO, go to your profile, and say good things about you. You could also ask your peers, other lawyers, to go on and recommend you on AVVO, for instance. There are other websites, such as Yelp, where your recommendations would be very helpful.
Particularly if there is a negative comment out there, you want to work as hard as you can to get either clients or your colleagues to go on and say wonderful things about you to push down a bad comment. That may be the only thing you can do because some of these websites will not remove negative comments.
By the way, according to AVVO, pure recommendations do count towards your AVVO ranking as opposed to client comments – they theoretically don’t count towards your AVVO ranking. But the fact is the more good things that people read about you, the better it is for you anyway. Martha, step five.
Martha Chan:
Well, before I go to step five I want to add something because today I happened to receive a call from a person, from a law firm, who wanted to confirm that the seminar is on and that they could participate by just calling in. So, I did. We got into a conversation about online reputation. One of the comments that was made was that we can’t really ask our clients to give us positive comments.
Well, if you’re listening, and for all of you on this call, I want you to know that, yes, you can definitely ask clients. When we ask our clients for feedback, for testimonials, we are almost always pleasantly surprised by how willing they are to give us testimonials and by the great things that they say about us. If I were to write something about us, I tend to be more conservative than what my clients would say about us. So, I highly recommend that you go and talk to your clients about getting them to give you a testimonial.
Okay, so I’m going to talk about step five, which is to get yourself published online. There are many, many websites that are looking for content, and as a professional, you are in a good position to provide content to reputable websites. That will greatly enhance your reputation. For example, we own DivorceMagazine.com and we own DivorcedMoms.com. These are highly reputable websites that, if your articles appear on them, and we provide obviously a link back to your website, it would first of all raise your status as an expert in the area of divorce. It would also provide power to your website because powerful, valuable, relevant websites such as ours are linking back to yours.
When I say our website is powerful, we could compare website traffic, number one. Rarely would a law firm website get the kind of traffic that our site gets. We have 3 million visitors annually to our site. That alone should tell you the story. When you are able to get yourself published on these websites, I would say that majority of them would gladly provide a link back to you. There are sites where you can approach them, such as Huffington Post, AVVO, of course, your bar association, and your local and national newspaper’s websites. I’m just naming a few of them. Not only do these websites accept and welcome high-quality content, they will serve as a great way of promoting you.
Now, your articles cannot be self-promoting. Your articles should be offering valuable information, but when you’re writing these articles, you want to keep in mind the kind of cases and articles that you want to attract. For example, if you work mainly with, let’s say, men, then you would want to write an article about the common mistakes that men would make when they are going through a divorce. For example, they may move out of their home, they may agree on certain things before consulting a lawyer, so that way you are talking to the audience that you want to go after. Or, if your firm wants to get cases about high-net-worth divorce, then you want to write about high-net-worth divorce cases.
The time that you spend providing articles to these websites would be really well worth spent. You will get a lot of return. For example, we own seven websites and we’re always looking for high-quality content. But there’s something that you should also know is that we have content partnerships with other websites such as Huffington Post, meaning that if you write an article for us, you can be republished on Huffington Post. Well, if you think our website reaching 3 million people is big, well you should consider what Huffington Post would reach.
The other thing that I wanted to point out is that AVVO has reached out to us and asked if they could write for us, if we could publish articles on our website. So, if AVVO thinks it’s a good idea, I think that it’s not a bad one to follow.
If any one of you out there is interested in submitting articles for us or writing for our blog, by all means contact Dan. Again, the email address is info@divorcemarketinggroup.com.
Wondering whether you should write articles for your own website versus writing articles for other websites? If you can write articles for websites that reach millions of people, there is no doubt in my mind that I would recommend the latter. This is what I call playing in someone else’s much bigger sandbox. Because what is the point of playing in your own sandbox and no one comes to your sandbox?
Dan Couvrette:
I was going to move on to step number six Martha, and that is to create and promote new web pages and websites for yourself. This strategy is particularly important if you found websites where unfavourable things are said about you and when you did your online reputation audit.
Some web pages may contain poor reviews or comments about your services. This may be a simple one-page website that was created by a disgruntled individual who has some tech savvy abilities, and the sole purpose of them creating this page was to let the world know what a bad lawyer you are. This same disgruntled person, whether it’s your client or whether it’s the other side, their spouse is upset about the case and, you know, the terrible things that happen to them during the divorce. Well, they may be posting on social media pages or websites to allow Internet users to rate lawyers, such as LawyerRatings.com. We mentioned AVVO, Google places, Yelp, and LawyerReputation.com. There are many websites where you could be rated and people can write comments about you.
Your online reputation can be destroyed in just a few minutes or two and can result in damage to your practice and reputation when these negative comments appear. Of course, even more so if they appear on the first page of Google when somebody does a Google search about you. If it is difficult for anyone, including a perspective client, to know whether these comments are justified. In fact, a lawyer who does a good job for a client may end up getting negative comments and ratings from a disgruntled ex-spouse who has, of course, a different point of view. So, online comments can be used as a virtual assault on your reputation and can be posted by anyone and unfortunately at any time.
This may already sound like bad news, but here is the bad news. It’s highly unlikely that the negative information about you can be removed from the Internet – although you should always make every effort you can to convince the website where the negative comments are that those comments should be removed, and try and do it as gracefully as possible because getting mad at these websites is not going to be the solution. You have to make your case as to why the person may have said very negative things about you. If you have any evidence about threats or anything like that, share that information with the website who has the negative comments.
What can you do to minimize the impact of negative comments if they can’t be removed? Well, the strategy here is to what we call dominate search results by creating many web pages with positive information about you to push down the bad stuff. When people get to your search results on Google page one, they won’t find that information. It will be pushed down to page two because you’ve done some of the work that we already talked about like getting your Facebook page up on page one, getting your Yelp review up on page one, and getting your LinkedIn profile up on page one. When somebody does a search, that is all going to be helpful.
You may also create additional web pages that will get onto page one and push down negative comments and negative websites to page two, three, or four where people are going to be much less likely to find them. You can create many websites about you and your firm; for example, if your name is John Doe, you might look to see if you can create a website called johndoe.com, johndoelawyer.com, johndoefamilylawyer.com, or johndoedivorcelawyer.com – those sort of things. These website addresses with keywords like your name and divorce lawyer will likely end up at the top of Google search results when people go searching for you. You can create many websites that are a few pages about subjects that may be of interest to your clients. For instance, johndoechildcustodylawyer.com or johndoealimonylawyer.com, etc.
Martha mentioned earlier that when you go and look for her name on Google, there are 1 million plus search results that come up when you search for Martha Chan, yet she has seven of the results on page number one. If you do a search for my name, Dan Couvrette, only 10,000 search results come up, but I dominate the first four pages. Almost all of the listings relate to me because I’ve written a lot, I’ve been written about. We have many websites with my name on it, etc., etc.
At the same time, you can raise the visibility of website pages with further information by promoting pages to search engines. This again could be a whole other seminar. It is a whole other seminar about search engine optimization. There are a number of things you can do to help your website and pages on your website rank higher on the search engines. We won’t go into that, but that’s a very important as well. It’s one thing to create content, but you also want to have that content optimized. We do that work for our clients. You may want to talk to us or talk to other professionals who can help enhance your listings and your content on your website.
Martha Chan:
Step seven is to create and promote videos and podcasts. I’m going to quote you some statistics so that you can appreciate the potential of videos. According to research released in October last year by statisticbrain.com, there were 1.3 billion people using YouTube who viewed 5 billion videos every day. That’s 1.3 billion people viewing 5 billion videos every day. A recent report from Cisco suggests that by 2017, which is only next year, videos will account for 69% of all consumer traffic on the Internet. There is no doubt that video is here and the potential is enormous.
When we say create and promote videos online, what are we talking about? I’ll give you a few more details. You can create videos, multiple videos, that can be promoted for free through video websites like youtube.com, vimeo.com, and dailymotion.com, but by far, youtube.com is the biggest one. You can feature yourself answering simple FAQs and you could certainly have videos about you firm, which goes back to differentiating your firm from other firms, reasons why they should choose you. By the way, when you say reasons why they should choose you, it should always be the benefits to the clients, not just patting yourself on your own backs.
Once created, you can add these videos to enrich your website but you can also look to see where else you may publish these videos – for example, your LinkedIn profile, your Google Plus profile, your social media pages, all those places. You can shoot videos by hiring a professional videographer or having someone shoot videos by using an iPhone or by recording yourself on Google Hangout. Of course, each of these will produce different quality of video presentation, but do your absolute best to make your presentation as helpful and as professional as possible.
We have clients who have hired us to create 10 to 70 videos for them. The reason why the more the better is that becomes their way of adding new content to their website. What we recommend is when you create say 70 videos, you drip them over time. You don’t put up 70 of them all at once. If you have 70 videos, you could literally put up one a week or one very four or five days. That sends signals to search engines that you are updating your information and Google owns YouTube. More and more videos are part of the search results when someone Googles a key phrase. Video is definitely the way to go.
It is important to create what I call quality videos through Google’s eyes. When I say quality through Google’s eyes, I don’t mean that you just use a good camera and have solid information; I mean Google is measuring the quality of your videos by the length of time that people spend watching your video. The longer, the better.
We have known there are people out there who shoot videos for their clients that 30-second videos, quick and dirty – they’re not optimized. When I say optimized, I mean when we shoot videos for our clients, we make sure that the duration is longer. At minimum, we would say a minute, and it could go to two minutes and at the end of the video when we do editing, we make sure that we put forward more videos. The person who is watching the first video would be engaged and continue to watch a second one. Google values the amount of time that people spent watching the videos. Don’t go for those 20-second videos because it’s not quality in the eyes of Google.
The second thing that I would recommend you do is create and promote podcasts. We offer a service of creating podcasts as well. We don’t just create them, we promote them. Part of the great thing about us creating the podcasts and videos is that we are part of the media. Imagine yourself being interviewed by Divorce Magazine or Family Lawyer Magazine. It is way better than you presenting videos of yourself, talking about yourself, right? If video is not in your budget, podcasts would be a great way of creating content. What we do is aside from creating the videos and podcasts, we will also transcribe them so that you will have text to add to your website as well.
In fact, we believe in podcasts and videos so much that our new initiative, which I mentioned earlier, is thedivorceschool.com, which features divorce lawyers and experts giving guidance using only podcasts and videos. There is no text on that website. When you get a chance, you can go and visit www.thedivorceschool.com. The official launch is April 1st, which is tomorrow. Go there and visit tomorrow. If you are interested in becoming a faculty member of The Divorce School, by all means contact Dan Couvrette. I think that we have given out seven steps on how to enhance your online reputation.
Dan Couvrette:
We apologize for going over time. There’s just so much to cover that we wanted to give to you both in terms of information. Believe it or not, we cut out half of what we could have given you.
In summary, we just want to say that you have to be proactive and you’ve got to set your priorities. You won’t be able to do everything that we’ve recommended, certainly not in a short amount of time, but maybe over time you’ll get to everything. But, you know, most of us tend not to worry about a problem until we have one. We highly recommend that you be proactive if you’re listening in and you’ve got no problems now on the Internet. So, continue to be proactive.
By taking the steps we’ve outlined, you can drive more traffic to your website and you can establish a more prominent and positive online presence. Hiring a SEO company will give you more immediate results and may prevent you from having to rescue your reputation in the future. Creating the content, optimizing it for search engines… We’ve mentioned we do that type of work. There are lots of other firms that do that work as well. We just happen to focus all of our attention in the area of divorce and family law. You can also sign yourself up for Google alerts so you’ll be alerted to whenever something comes up that has your name on it. That would be a good thing to do.
I want to thank you again for listening to our presentation. I want to remind you that this teleseminar is being recorded and will be available on divorcemarketinggroup.com. Again, if you want us to send you a link to that, don’t hesitate to send me an email. My email address again is danc@divorcemarketinggroup.com. Our next teleseminar will be on Thursday, May 26th at 2 p.m. Eastern Time, and that topic will be about video marketing. We’ve touched on that here. There’s a lot more that we can say about it. You’ll learn everything you need to know about how to market your practice through videos.
You can learn about the wide range of family lawyer-related marketing products and services that we offer, including reputation management website design, videos as we mentioned, podcasts, newsletters, and divorce guides. We have seven divorce-related websites that get over 3 million visitors a year. Martha mentioned that we’re launching a new one called The Divorce School on Friday, April 1st. You can go to divorcemarketinggroup.com to learn more about it. Thank you again for your time. We wish you all the success in the world and in your practice.
Martha Chan:
Thank you and have a good day.