Protect Your Referrals Challenge Day 2: Take Inventory of Your Web Presence

Before we start our work, we need to take inventory of your current “referral” web presence. What I mean by referral web presence is what shows up in the search results when someone types in your name and your firm name. It makes sense that someone who is typing in your firm name or your name is doing that for only a few reasons:

1. They are a current client or prospective client and are looking for your phone number or directions.
2. They saw your name in some offline advertising you did, like a billboard, community sponsorship, or a magazine ad and are looking for more information about you
3. They were referred by someone to your firm and are looking to verify the referral meets what they need before they contact you

For all of those instances, as we explained yesterday, you want to make sure that you control as much of that search result as possible. But, let’s see where you stand right now, this will be our “before”.

Your tasks for today:

1. If you haven’t received a free Snapshot report for your firm yet, be sure to do that here. When you receive it, take a look at your grade on the directory listings portion and look at some of the actual issues. Is there a common phone number issue, maybe an old address or suite number, or maybe your business name is incorrect?
2. Do a Google search for your name, if you have an extremely common name or the same name as a famous person, you can put your name then the word lawyer after it. For example “Mark Homer lawyer”. Take a screenshot of the search engine results page (we will use the term SERP from now on). You may need to shrink down the font size to get all the returned page information.
3. Do a Google search for your firm name. Take a screenshot of the returned SERP.
4. If you have Google Analytics setup on your website, get the number of sessions for your organic traffic over the last 3 or four months. What is the average number of sessions per week?
5. Extra Credit: Repeat step 2 for other key client facing people in your firm. For example, not just the other attorneys, but maybe the assistant who does the most follow up and document gathering with the clients, or a paralegal they meet with often. Remember, people tend to refer names of people they liked working with, not just your firm name.

Print out your screenshots and circle all the listings where your firm controls (your website, Facebook page, etc.) or influences (directory listings). Save this in a file somewhere as we will refer back to it at the end of the program. Keep the average number of sessions per week number and the date range you used for the analytics report in this folder too.

That’s it for Day 2.

Tomorrow we will start creating your template so start thinking about the Business Description section of a directory listing. What do you want all the directory listings to consistently say about your firm?

See you tomorrow.