Berbay's Blog: Marketing for law firms, engineers, CPAs, architects and other professional services

In a typical Google move, the company has redesigned and upgraded its popular place-reviews site, Google Places. By doing so, it has altered some content that will greatly affect a rated firm’s SEO. Specifically, Google Places will no longer be drawing reviews from other mass-review sites from around the web like Yelp or Merchant Circle.

Google Places allows web-users to both post and read reviews of businesses when they search for that place in Google Maps. Google’s presence on the company review landscape has enticed many savvy, SEO-oriented businesses to take an active role in shaping their Place page.

Previously, Places pulled reviews and rankings from sites around the web, allowing, for example, a Yelp review to appear as a review on Google. Now, however, evaluations of businesses must be posted directly to the Places page to appear as a review.

By eliminating reviews from third party sources, Google retains greater control over reviews posted on Places, clearly spurred on by the belief that it has enough of a presence to stop piggy-backing on already established sites.

With this new awareness, your business should add Google Places to your roster of sites that help promote your services. In addition to monitoring reviews, you should request clients to post feedback directly on your Place page, rather than simply on sites like Yelp.

Although Google Places is relatively new to the scene, its influence cannot be overlooked, as Google has proven time and time again with its many other popular applications.

Have you ever gone to a diner that had a 15-page menu? Do you remember perusing the many menu options–corned beef, matzah-ball soup, steak and eggs, 15 different salads, etcetera—and thinking to yourself, “This is too much choice”?

The sheer number of options overwhelms. To choose any one dish, you must reject the 1,500 other dishes competing for your attention. This problem—which sociologist Barry Schwartz termed “the paradox of choice”—is remarkably universal. It could even be harming your professional-services marketing strategy—or at least making it much harder than it needs to be.

At its essence, the paradox of choice suggests that adding too many choices to your plate leads to decreased satisfaction and even decreased efficacy.

Whether you market legal, accounting or financial services, when you move into the online-marketing space, be prepared to be inundated with “paradox of choice”-like dilemmas. Consider, for instance, the myriad tactics you can use to market online these days:

• Employing social media like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook
• Search-engine optimizing (SEO) a website or series of sites to generate traffic from search engines like Google
• Setting up pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns to create leads
• Developing an affiliate marketing strategy
• Building a nuanced inbound-link campaign
• Posting information about your services in relevant online forums
• Networking with the leading bloggers in your niche to generate traffic and referrals

The list could go on and on! What’s more, the number of choices will only increase in coming years as new tools arrive on the scene.

The size of this menu of options creates an equally sizable risk: It makes it easy for people to hop from tactic to tactic. If your PPC campaign doesn’t deliver results, you can simply switch to Twittering, or vice versa. You can waste a ton of time learning and re-learning tactics without making headway. And even if you do succeed, the 20 zillion other tactics you haven’t tried yet will tempt you away. The whole enterprise can leave you feeling exhausted, overwhelmed and ultimately dissatisfied.

So what’s the solution to the “paradox of choice”? One piece is to prioritize some tactics and stick with those. What are your top two tactics right now? Focus on those. Get them up and running—then add another.

To effectively use a host of online marketing tactics you cannot wake up one day and just start utilizing all those tools; you woke up one day and focus on one tactic. Once you refine it, move on to the next.

It’s not just “slow and steady wins the race”—everyone knows that trope. It’s the harder-to-grasp, but ultimately much more productive, wisdom of “less is more.” Reduce your tactics. Limit your choices. Go on what Timothy Ferriss called a “low-information diet.” You might be surprised by the cool ways your business—and even your worldview—expands and deepens.

“All defense firms are going to have to have new websites,” is the way that Phillip Baker of Baker, Keener & Nahra, LLP wrapped up a session with a panel of three sitting judges at the recent Association of Southern California Defense Counsel conference. Why are defense firms going to need new sites? Because, by their own admission, judges immediately Google the lawyers and expert witnesses involved in a case they know they will be hearing. And, often, defense firms’ websites pale in comparison to those of their plaintiff counterparts.

Through a proactive campaign, astute firms can position themselves to gain market share through relatively low cost search initiatives, while competitors are losing qualified leads and busy explaining why general counsel won’t be searching for them online.

Firms marketing directly to consumers, such as personal injury, criminal defense and bankruptcy lawyers were the early adopters of search engine optimization (SEO). Some invested in pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns using Google adwords or similar programs; others relied on organic rankings, which places a website near the top of search engine results based on its relevancy to the search term, and many firms implemented both tactics.  The firms that recognized the opportunity early on captured more than their share of qualified leads with an investment in SEO/PPC while their competitors were explaining why SEO wouldn’t work for their firm.  Today, however, with more plaintiffs firms using SEO as an effective marketing tactic, it has become increasingly competitive and costly to achieve top rankings.

Firms still have an opportunity to get into the game before everyone has caught on to search’s effectiveness. Implementing a search initiative right now, does not mean that SEO will be your primary source of leads today, but its role in your business development will continue to grow as more businesses, institutions, entrepreneurs and in-house counsel turn to Google and similar search engines first. By being proactive and positioning yourself to capture top search engine rankings now, whether through PPC or SEO, you can create a solid footing to avoid chasing after other firms later.

What kind of information should appear in your professional biography, whether it’s on your website or a biography you furnish to an organization as a speaker?  Should your biography include personal information, such as where you were born, the high school you went to, or  the number of children you have?  If so, which information should appear first: personal or professional?

These questions are part of the great biography debate and often are raised by clients as we help them develop biographies for marketing purposes.  I have strong preferences in this regard, and even a visceral reaction.

The biography’s purpose determines how it is written. On your website, the biography’s purpose is to immediately establish your credibility. That means your professional experience and expertise belong right up front in the first paragraph.  Think about your bio as a resume with your current responsibilities and job position coming first, followed by your secondary information.

What type of biography would start out with personal information?  Maggie Lukaszewicz, one of our account managers, pointed out that general biographies are written this way – in chronological order.  This is the kind of biography you might see on Wikipedia or other sources of information on people.  But these biographies are not being written to establish credibility for business development purposes.

On a professional service website, a biography written in chronological order sends an unprofessional message.  It’s counterproductive to claim that your small firm is a hidden gem who can do the equivalent work of larger firms while the biographies on your website start out with where you were born and went to high school. From the get-go, let your biographies promote and substantiate the reasons your prospect should hire you.