Published in P.S., the journal of Probate Section, March 2001
Parts of this article also appeared in previous Pages on the Web in the Solicitors Journal

There are now well over 1,000 firms of solicitors in England and Wales with websites and an increasing number of other legal advice sites competing for your business. It is now no longer simply desirable but an imperative to have a web presence in order retain and increase business.There are many guides to setting up a website, including the Law Society’s own ‘Step by step guide to a successful web site’ at it.lawsociety.org.uk. This article considers the key issues of branding and promoting your new online operation.

What’s in a name?

Your first mission will be to secure your own piece of internet ‘real estate’, ie to register one or more domain names. You should register, for protection if nothing else, domain names that correspond with your firm name and obvious abbreviations thereof. You should also consider registering memorable generic names that describe your business. You will, however, find that most such names have already been registered, though many are available for sale from the registered owners, usually by auction.

The simplest generic names are of course the most valuable. In the probate arena:

• probate.co.uk has been registered for TrustHaven Finance Ltd, but is not in use and thus potentially available for purchase.
• trusts.co.uk has been registered by Offshore Consulting Group Ltd of Jersey, but is not in use.
• wills.co.uk is a wills resource site operated by Foreman Laws, solicitors.
• Thinking client-wise, death.co.uk presents a living will and a durable power of attorney for health care, but no other information at all is provided on the site!

An internet search for “legal names” will find a number of sites offering names for sale, including legalnames.co.uk which owns several hundred generic legal names, mostly of a form such as trustsolicitor.co.uk.

Though high reserve prices may be quoted, the bottom has rather fallen out of this market and you will probably be able to pick up a suitable name at far less than the advertised price.

Apart from the obvious benefits of such names, some will argue that they also significantly improve search engine rankings, but misinformation abounds on this – see below as to the principles applied by search engines.

Brand names

More important is to consider domain names as brand names – the advantages of the two coinciding exactly are large. Dozens of operations have recently set up branded Legal-This or LawThat and there are also increasingly businesses dedicated to delivering advice and documentation for particular types of legal problem – Employment-This, FamilyThat an so on. Many are operated by new limited companies set up to exploit the opportunities afforded by the internet. The majority of these are referral sites, aiming to attract custom for panel members for a fee or kick-back. But a large number are services run by existing firms of solicitors, conscious that a tag such as Smith Brown Jones & Co is not necessarily the optimum brand under which to deliver legal services on the web. Yet others are solicitors who have chosen to set up from the outset with a web-savvy name.

Telling the world

Whatever your brand, the quickest and most effective way to get yourself on the map is to advertise your web presence through the traditional media.

Quote your web address prominently in all advertisements, correspondence and communications. Overprint existing stock of notepaper with your web address and consider redesigning your letterhead at the next opportunity to incorporate the new name.

If your aim is to establish yourself as a national rather than a local presence, this needs to be part of a considered business plan and your advertising budget will need to increase accordingly.

Internet advertising

New business is unlikely to come looking specifically for you on the internet (unless so enticed by your traditional media promotions). Potential new clients will be seeking online solutions to their problems and will be directed to your site from elsewhere: from search engines, web directories and other links to your site.

Directories and listings

There are many online directories of law firms who will be happy to add your details for free. You won’t get much traffic from these sites unless they are well-known and heavily visited. You may be tempted to pay for a listing or a place on a panel on a site which promises actively to promote your services. However, such services need to be carefully evaluated and compared – experience to date is that they deliver little benefit (see Delia Venable’s article at www.venables.co.uk/n0101marketing.htm).

Negotiate links to your site with as many other relevant sites as possible, starting with those with the closest connection and/or which you know receive the most traffic. You’ve a better chance of securing a link if you offer reciprocity, though don’t expect one unless your site is of direct interest to the other’s visitors.

Getting to the top

Much new traffic to your site can be obtained by securing a good ranking with the major internet search engines and it is worth spending some time analysing and developing your site to promote its position.

Most search engines compile their indexes by crawling the web and automatically generating entries; others (such as Yahoo!) are the subject of human selection and compilation from submitted details. Results from a search will be listed in order of relevance. Relevance is calculated in many different ways. However, the following guidelines will be generally applicable.

Keywords

It goes without saying that your website should describe your services in terminology that the prospective client will understand. Think further of the words people are most likely to use in their searches. These are your keywords which you should take care to place optimally in your pages.

• Using your keywords in the page title is the most important. It is surprising how often this is forgotten, with pages sporting useless titles such as Home Page or Welcome!
• The main heading on the page and first paragraphs should also contain your keywords. Some search engines only index or give greater weight to the top of pages.
• Meta tags are a means of associating keywords with a page which does not otherwise contain them and controlling your site’s description in engines that support them. However, some search engines ignore meta keywords and their importance in improving search engine rankings is often overstated. They should be considered supplementary to the above.
• Some search engines also index folder and filenames, so using keywords as folder names (with _ as separators) can improve rankings.
• Remember that your domain name will also be read as words, so if you’re considering registering new names, all other things being equal a machine readable multi-word variant such as sue-grabbit will be preferable to the single-word name suegrabbit.

Read the text of your pages out of context to ensure keywords are appropriately qualified (eg ‘legal advice’ rather than ‘advice’ etc).

Submitting your site

The crawlers sent out by some search engines will index your pages automatically, and there are numerous services which will offer to submit your site to a number of search engines for a small fee.

However, it’s best to visit the major search engine sites yourself to find out their requirements and submit the two or three pages that best summarize the content of your site. The search engine will index the other pages on your site by following links.

Much useful information and help on using and exploiting search engines is available at www.searchenginewatch.com.