Search Engine Optimization — or SEO — is the art or science of search. Google, Bing, Yahoo and the others attempt to do the same thing: Match questions with answers. The point of SEO is to make what you post online line up with the questions your intended audience is asking.

Start by being helpful. For every 10 lawyers who object to giving away their expertise for free, another is building a reputation by answering pressing questions online, displaying his knowledge for the world to see. What is keeping your ideal client up at night? Write an alert, blog post or article that answers that question.

“Quantity isn’t really the key,” said Dan Goldstein, founder of Page 1 Solutions, which counsels professionals including attorneys about SEO. “Many times, lawyers equate more content with being better. But more important than that is how well can you answer the questions that people are asking. What research shows is that people start with a very broad query, but as you get more and more narrow and more and more specific, you are closer in the buying process for making a decision.” Ideally, your content will provide the answers potential clients are asking just before they decide whom to hire.

There are two types of searches: generic, such as “New York lawyer,” and “long-tail,” which involve strings of words. For example: “What do you do if you get pulled over without a driver’s license in New York?” There are far fewer of these searches, but the people entering these queries are closer to decisions about their legal position or whether to hire a lawyer. “If you provide great content — great answers — then that will support your ultimate goal,” Goldstein said. Create an article with a title or content that matches the questions people are asking, and these long-tail searches will lead potential clients to you.

There is no magic to this. Google is simply looking for the best answers to the questions people have, so by creating articles that are accessible, informative and that use the same words people are searching for, lawyers can use the search engines to get noticed and develop their reputations. Google used to make educated guesses in deciding which answers would rank as the best. Now, through social media, it has more direct data.

“When someone tweets a URL, this is a signal to Google and Bing that there is something about this content that people should take note of,” Goldstein said. If people are talking about your article via social media, Google sees that as evidence that your content is relevant. You can start the discussion by sharing the content on LinkedIn and Twitter.

“It is hugely important that you have a social -media presence,” Goldstein continued. “Don’t rely on a single platform — don’t just use LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook. Use a combination. Personally, I think Google+ will emerge as the most important. Online reviews are also becoming increasingly important. Positive reviews are very important: Yelp, Google+ and Avvo.”

A study released on Thursday by Greentarget, Zeughauser Group and Inside Counsel has shone a bright light on a topic that has seemed somewhat mysterious: How do general counsel really use social media—or do they really use it at all?

The report confirmed findings suggested by surveys conducted since 2010. First, LinkedIn remains the king of the legal social media jungle, with more than 67 percent of in-house counsel reporting having used it either during the past 24 hours or past week. Sixty percent of this group used LinkedIn to connect with outside counsel.

Second, GCs continue to value Wikipedia for researching outside counsel, with 69 percent using it during the past day or week for personal reasons and 49 percent for professional reasons.

Third, according to Greentarget’s John Corey, “is the ‘invisible user’ trend whereby in-house lawyers are operating in listen-only mode versus contributing to the on-line dialogue.” According to his research, 74 percent of in-house counsel used social media in “listen-only mode.” Which tells us that just because potential clients aren’t commenting on your blog, it doesn’t mean they aren’t reading it.

The study confirmed that blogging continues to be a sound strategy for attracting the attention of in-house lawyers. Fifty-five percent read blogs written by attorneys and 53 percent “envision a future in which a well-executed blog will influence hiring decisions.”

Perhaps more important is where in-house lawyers find and consume information. Although a healthy 74 percent continued to read print publications regularly, 53 percent read news on their smartphones, 39 on tablets and 23 via mobile applications or apps.

How are in-house lawyers finding your writing? This is where the data are more provocative. A scant 2 percent of in-house counsel considered Twitter a credible source of “legal, business and industry news and information,” while 11 percent viewed blogs that way. That latter number more than tripled when news aggregators like JD Supra, Lexology and Mondaq got involved: 35 percent viewed blog content distributed by these aggregators to be very credible and 37 percent found it somewhat credible.

Connecting the dots for you: If your firm does a substantial amount of writing and blogging, but doesn’t use aggregators to disseminate that content, you not only are getting fewer readers; your content is viewed as less credible.

While Twitter accounts may help connect lawyers with thought leaders and reporters, that’s not necessarily true with in-house lawyer clients. Use of Twitter by in-house counsel continued to be quite minimal, with a mere 7 percent using the platform during the past week and an additional 7 percent within the past 24 hours. A full 72 percent said they never use Twitter. The survey showed Google+, Facebook and even YouTube were more popular with in-house counsel for professional use.

The last finding, which may turn out to be controversial, is that 2 percent of in-house counsel “say their decisions to retain outside counsel are influenced to a ‘great extent’ by peer-driven rankings,” according to the survey. We’re talking about Chambers, U.S. News-Best Lawyers and the like. While these listing still have some influence, it appears to be declining.

The entire survey results can be found at http://insidecounselsurvey.com.

There used to be a time when layers of secretaries and executive assistants insulated decision-makers against strangers, including peddlers of services. It was hard to position yourself to meet and impress the boss. Social media—and LinkedIn in particular—have broken down those barriers.

Through an advanced search on LinkedIn, you can build a list of your ideal clients while gaining insights into how best to connect with these hard-to-reach people. The first step is finding them.

It doesn’t have to be complicated.

“I found the names and companies of 100 general counsel in the Kansas City area with just a simple search on LinkedIn,” Burton Taylor, a marketing consultant at Proventus, told me recently. He started by selecting “advanced search.”

Then he simply entered the title, “General Counsel,” added the zip code and set the geographical search limit for “50 miles.”

The result was a treasure of information. Not just because Taylor now had 100 names of GCs in his area, but because he had context to go with these names—including their connections and any connections he had in common with them.

The most important information you can turn up is how many people you know in common with your targets. In Taylor’s case, he shared one or more connections with a number of the general counsel on his list.

What’s next? Pick up the phone, call your common connection and ask her to introduce you.

Make sure you give her a genuine reason why she ought to, of course—something more than, “I’d like to do his legal work.” It could be very simple, like inviting the target to a continuing legal education program your firm is hosting. Perhaps you’d like to ask him industry-specific questions for an article you are writing.

You can also use LinkedIn’s “get introduced” feature; this allows your common connection to forward a message from you to the target.

The barriers to entry are falling. This means not only that you have an opportunity to prospect for clients you never could have reached before; it also means that your existing clients are exposed to your competitors.

Try out LinkedIn’s advanced search feature and find out for yourself how easy it is to identify, qualify and connect with a whole new list of potential clients.

Originally published in The National Law Journal on March 21, 2013

If you’re a lawyer, you likely have a profile on Avvo.com, even if you have never visited the site. Avvo.com, which bills itself as the largest online lawyer listing service in the world, has developed a database containing almost every lawyer in the country. Each gets rated from 1 to 10, with 10 being the best possible score. Clients and peers can post positive or negative comments.

“Why am I only a 6.5 out of 10?” A trial lawyer asked me a couple weeks ago. “And why does John [the lawyer across the hall] have a rating of 10?”

First things first: Why should you care? 

If you’re a corporate, business-to-business attorney, you might not need to care very much. If you’re a business-to-consumer attorney, your score might matter a great deal. The clients you’re interested in don’t tend to hire lawyers very often. They don’t understand what makes a great or even competent attorney. They might turn to Google, where they’ll be bombarded with advertisements for lawyers. But they don’t want ads—they want unbiased information. 

That’s where Avvo comes in. “We use a proprietary software that goes out and crawls the web to build an automated profile of these lawyers,” said Mark Britton, Avvo’s founder and chief executive officer. “Some lawyers are saying, ‘I’ll do good work and clients will come to me.’ But the problem is, if you don’t have an online presence it is extremely difficult for people to evaluate you.”

Avvo evaluates attorneys based on the information gathered by its webcrawler. “Avvo is replicating the process that someone sophisticated would go through in choosing a lawyer,” Britton said. “Think about what you would do for a family member trying to find a lawyer in another state. You would work the web. You might check their license, do a Google search and check LinkedIn—maybe blogs or even Facebook. Avvo starts with the bar records and then goes from there.”

Obviously, lawyers with strong web presences will score well. But Avvo also allows lawyers to supplement their profiles with information about any clerkships they served, the schools they attended and firms they have worked for. The technology-averse can even ship their resumes to Avvo, which will enter the information on their behalf. This added information could raise an attorney’s score.

If you have a common name—say, John Smith—”there is a much bigger need for adding in your own information, because the crawler has a hard time distinguishing,” Britton said.

Lawyers are especially wary of Avvo’s comments feature—what if a competitor attacks them or disgruntled clients try to destroy their reputations?

For one thing, the service’s terms of use forbid personal attacks; any information posted must be predicated in fact. ” ‘This lawyer sucks!’ would never be approved in our system,” Britton said. “We also require contact information for everybody who makes reviews.” Finally, Avvo scrutinizes every comment before posting it. Lawyers can challenge comments, and if a reviewer doesn’t respond, the comment comes down. If he or she stands by the comment, it stays up.

“There is a very real process to make sure it isn’t a competitor, and there is a place for the attorney to respond to the review,” Britton said. “They can say, ‘I’m not sure this is a client.’ Or they can say, ‘I had no idea you felt this way—this isn’t the way we normally do business and we would love to make it right.’ ”

There is also room for endorsements. “Having the right attorneys endorse you is valuable,” Britton. “Lawyers in your own firm will not be very helpful. Opposing counsel in a case will be very helpful, but it is capped how much it will help. Clients actually don’t affect lawyer ratings at all. Non-lawyers have a hard time evaluating the quality of legal services, especially if it is a one-off. Clients often have unrealistic expectations.”

One example Britton gave was a man accused of murder who was found guilty of manslaughter. His lawyer may have represented him very well indeed, but he might yet feel aggrieved.

It may be time to claim your profile. Avvo claims more than 5 million visitors per month and more than 125,000 participating lawyers. “It’s a win-win situation,” Britton said. Clients, he said, want a third party to provide more unbiased information and lawyers want to provide information in a trustworthy way.

“In the future, everybody will be world-famous for 15 minutes,” Andy Warhol said. Let’s say your time has arrived—your social media messaging has caught the attention of an old-media platform and you have the chance to be interviewed on national TV. Will you be ready? How should you prepare to make a great first impression? How will you make the most of your 15 minutes of fame?

I asked this question of Joel Staley, who has worked with celebrities, senior executives and brand representatives for Fortune 500 companies.

“Lawyers know how to do their homework” when preparing for a deposition or researching a brief, Staley said. “They need to take that same preparation when getting ready for the media. Don’t turn off your research and inquisitive approach, because you are going to need it. Keep that mindset.”

Your first question should be: Who is the reporter? “What is their interview style? Watch them online. Read them. Get a sense of their style. Are they a Diane Sawyer, who is so sweet and pretty then throws darts—these barbed questions that leave you looking like a deer in the headlights? Or are they like Ed Bradley, the machine gunner who relentlessly attacks people with questions? This tends to make a person look flustered and inarticulate. Inarticulate can make you look guilty.”

Staley advises interviewees to research how the reporter has handled the subject matter before. “You could be sucked into a story where the interviewer already has a bias. Be aware of what their slant is before you talk to them.” 

You’ll need to map out what your posture should be. “The key to success is to know your story,” Staley said. “This is not a time for improvisation; this is not a time for creativity. Know the key points that you need to insert into the story.”

Take a lesson from the presidential debates. The candidates typically take unfriendly questions and flip them around to make themselves look good. “It’s called re-framing,” Staley said. “You don’t have to answer the questions as it is given to you.” If asked, for example, “When did you stop beating your wife?” you reply: “I think what you’re asking is, what kind of a relationship do I have with my wife. In all honesty, it has never been better. We have a loving and close relationship, and I am lucky to have that kind of woman in my life.”

Avoid long-winded answers. “Make sure the first thing out of your mouth is what you want to be on air,” Staley said. “That short answer that is off-the-cuff is going to end up in the program.” This is no place for sarcasm. “They can only broadcast what you give them, so don’t give them distracting information or the key message will be lost.

What are a few simple things to keep people from looking unprepared?

“Arrive early for the interview—you don’t want to be rushed,” Staley said. Show up 10 to 15 minutes early, sit calmly in the studio and review your key messages. Gather your thoughts—you don’t want to be rushed. Turn your cell phone off—consider leaving it in the car—you don’t want to be interrupted.”

Dress conservatively so as not to distract from your message. Avoid tight patterns and stripes—”they don’t read well on the screen.”

Lately, Twitter and Facebook have made great sport of an image of Marco Rubio lunging for a bottle of water during his rebuttal to President Obama’s State of the Union speech. How could he have avoided that?

“Get a piece of hard candy and suck on it so your salivary glands can get primed,” Staley suggested. Personally, I have found that eating an apple or some citrus before a talk can be a big help. You just don’t want a small detail like that to become a distraction.

Staley recalled an interview in which Bill Clinton wore calf-length socks. “I don’t remember what he said, because I remember when he crossed his legs you saw his white Pirates of the Caribbean legs. Wear the socks that go all the way to your knees in a talk show interview. Also, pull the bottom of your coat under you so that your jacket doesn’t bunch. Avoid bright white shirts—generally, light blue will make things easier on the cameraman and won’t be as distracting from you or your message.”

One last thing: “As you arrive in the studio, the moment you step out of the car you need to step into character,” Staley said. “There have been so many gaffes when interviewees didn’t know the mike was on. Stay in character from when you leave the car until you are back in your car again.” This goes for any pre- or post-interview chit-chat with your host.

You may only have 15 minutes of fame in this life. So make sure, when the lights come on and the camera is rolling, you are ready for prime time.

In the movie Rudy, we get to know a young man with all the ambition in the world to play ­football for the University of Notre Dame. He is hard-­working, determined and has more desire than anybody else on the team. Unfortunately, he has one major drawback: no real athletic ability.

Many lawyers jump onto LinkedIn or Twitter with a similar ambition: to turn their career around by landing a big client through the magic of the Internet. It doesn’t work for many of them. It isn’t because they aren’t good lawyers; they have everything on paper that a successful rainmaker needs except for the ability to develop relationships and business.

LinkedIn amplifies our relationship skills — no skills equals nothing to amplify. “But I’m great with people!” you insist. Most lawyers are, but for the best business developers relationship-building is deliberate. They have a process. The process itself may be different for every attorney, but they all have one.

Fortunately, anybody can develop these relationship-building skills. To the extent that a lawyer finds it hard to break the ice with strangers, LinkedIn makes this process much easier. There are no awkward conversations as at cocktail parties — your messages can be much more direct. Online conversations must have a purpose, however.

Effective business developers understand the importance of making appointments. They also understand that the purpose of every appointment is to get another appointment. They don’t focus on closing the business or getting hired every time, but rather on building the relationship so that when the potential client has a need, he or she feels at ease reaching out.

If you feel you could improve your ability to network and market yourself, there are some great resources you can look to for help. One of my favorite books on the topic is Endless Referralsby Bob Burg. Introverts might try To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Othersby Daniel Pink.

If you want more specific direction, ask your marketing director for coaching. There also are some great business-development coaches who can help you get there.

If you’ve got the skills and you just haven’t jumped on the social-media bandwagon, you aren’t too late. The vast majority of LinkedIn’s users are such passive users that it doesn’t take long to build a great profile by comparison and start translating your legal savvy into new relationships.

In the movie, Rudy had one shining moment when the coach put him into a game and he slipped through the line for a tackle. This moment of glory meant everything to Rudy, but it was fleeting. Develop your business-development skills now so that you can enjoy enduring success.

If it helps, feel free to imagine thousands of fans cheering you on to your continued success: “Rudy! Rudy! Rudy!”

Originally posted on The National Law Journal on February 14, 2013

“What if someone says something negative about me online?” This is probably the most common question lawyers ask me. The sad truth is that many lawyers have nothing to worry about. They aren’t online. They have no online presence.

If your reputation is what people say about you within your community, your online presence is what everything posted about you on Google, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn or anywhere else online adds up to. Managing this material may seem overwhelming, but there is a simple place to start: LinkedIn.

Google your name, right now. What shows up? According to our research at Adrian Dayton & Associates, if you have a LinkedIn account there is a 74 percent chance that your profile will show up in the first three results. There is a 33 percent chance that your LinkedIn profile will show up in the No. 1 slot—ahead of your law firm’s web bio.

Why does this matter? Data from BTI Consulting Group tell us that more than 70 percent of business comes through existing relationships. Your potential clients meet you through referrals, but that doesn’t mean they hire you sight unseen; they use Google to do due diligence. According to the 2012 In-House Counsel New Media Engagement Survey by Greentarget, Zeughauser Group and InsideCounsel magazine, buyers of legal services trust Wikipedia and LinkedIn more than they trust your firm’s website.

They trust Wikipedia because it is difficult to upload nakedly self-promoting information to that site; the administrators allow only factual information. (That’s not to say you should believe everything you read on Wikipedia.) Does your firm have a Wikipedia page? Do you have a personal entry on Wikipedia? This isn’t about vanity. If you have spent your career building a reputation for doing great work, you owe it to yourself to make sure your online presence clearly articulates that. Nobody cares about your online reputation as much as you do.

LinkedIn is a different story. You can write anything you like on your LinkedIn page, as long as you follow your local professional ethics rules. You control your picture, your summary, your headline—everything. So why do people trust your LinkedIn page? Because it puts your experience into context. It combines what you have done with whom you know—the professionals with whom you share connections and endorsements. And it does it in a very public way that gives potential buyers confidence that what they see is what they get.

You also can create videos to post on YouTube; start using Twitter; write your own law blog. It isn’t about your résumé anymore; it is about your Google results. Keep doing things the way you always have done them, and you might be OK. But know that there are less experienced and less intelligent lawyers out there working like crazy to create the appearance that they are better than you. If they win business because they had a superior online presence, you will have nobody to blame but yourself.

A lot of lawyers had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to LinkedIn.com. Now that they are there, many realize that, besides being an ­effective way to connect with old colleagues and new ­prospects, it is perfectly easy to use.

“I will never use Twitter , though,” one such LinkedIn convert told me a couple of weeks ago. “It just doesn’t seem to serve any business ­purpose.”

I want to ask you to give Twitter a chance. Set aside your preconceived notions and take these three simple steps:

• Try Twitter as a search engine. The most common reason people give for not wanting to try Twitter is that they have no interest in hearing about what some stranger had for lunch. What they mean is that they have no time for irrelevant information. But Twitter has a search feature that allows you to go straight to what you are looking for. You don’t even need a Twitter account! Just go to ­twitter.com/search. It’s just like a Google search, except that you can search through all of the conversations about a specific topic in the entire world in this very moment — the “Affordable Care Act” if you are a health care lawyer; “payroll tax increase” if a corporate lawyer; “death tax” for estate lawyers. You find out what is being said and reported about these important issues and which articles are generating the most buzz. What are your clients talking about? What is keeping them up at night? Try Twitter search, and you may find the answer.

• Take 15 minutes to create an account. The great thing about a Twitter bio is that it doesn’t take hours to write; the key to Twitter, after all, is brevity. You need six things: a picture to upload; a 160 -character bio (about two sentences); a Twitter handle (i.e. @johnhancock); a link to your law firm bio or website; and the city you live in. With that you are done. Share a dozen tweets or follow a few dozen interesting people, and suddenly you look like you know what you’re doing. And you do. Twitter is that easy.

• Try Twitter as a business -development tool. Interested in connecting with potential clients, but not sure how to land on their radar? Follow them on Twitter. Take note of the articles they share, the sporting teams they talk about, what they are interested in. It will be far easier to break the ice when you finally meet face to face because you’ll have something to talk about; you can show interest in the client and his enthusiasms. To find a client, use the search tool I mentioned above. Once you find that individual’s profile, click “Follow.”

Following someone on Twitter is not a long-term commitment; people get followed and un-followed all the time without hurt feelings. The attitude is: Follow me if you find my tweets interesting or useful, un-follow me if not, and that is OK.

Twitter has a silly name, but don’t let that petty detail get in the way. Twitter continues to grow in popularity not because it is trendy, but because it is useful. I’m not saying you have to love it; I’m just saying you should try.

A lot of lawyers had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to LinkedIn.com. Now that they are there, many realize not only that is it an effective tool to connect with old colleagues and new prospects, but also that it is dead easy to use.

“I will never use Twitter though,” one such lawyer convert to LinkedIn told me a couple of weeks ago. “It just doesn’t seem to serve any business purpose.”

I want to ask you to give Twitter a chance, just for moment. Set aside your preconceived notions about it and just take these three simple steps.

1. Try Twitter as a search engine. 

The most common reason people give for not wanting to try Twitter is that they have no interest in hearing about what some stranger had for lunch. What they mean is that they have no time for irrelevant information. But Twitter has a search feature that allows you to go straight to what you are looking for. You don’t even need a Twitter account! Just go here. 

It looks just like this:

Look familiar? It’s just like searching Google, except that now you can search all of the conversations about a specific topic in the entire world in this very moment. For “Affordable Care Act” if you are a healthcare lawyer; “payroll tax increase” if you are a corporate lawyer; “death tax” for estate lawyers. You find out what is being said and reported about these important issues—and which articles are generating the most buzz. What are your clients talking about? What is keeping them up at night? Try the Twitter search, and you may find the answer.

2. Take 15 minutes to create an account. 

Have you googled yourself lately? If you have a LinkedIn account, it will show up as the first or second result when you Google your name. Twitter will likely show up third, and if you have a decent firm website it will show up first. The great thing about a Twitter bio is that it doesn’t take hours to write, like your LinkedIn bio does; it really only takes a few minutes, because the key to Twitter’s success is brevity. All you need to create a complete Twitter account is six things: a picture to upload; a 160 character bio (about two sentences); a Twitter handle (or @johnhancock) that you want to go by; a link to your law firm bio or website; and what city you live in. With that you are done.

Share a dozen tweets, or follow a few dozen interesting people, and suddenly you look like you know what your doing. And you do. Twitter is that easy.

3. Try Twitter as a business development tool. 

Interested in connecting with a potential client, but not sure how to land on their radar? Follow them on Twitter. Take note of the type of articles they share, what sporting teams they talk about—what they are interested in. It will be far easier this way to break the ice when the time comes, because when you finally meet face to face you won’t won’t be trapped into talking about yourself; you can show sincere interest in the client and his interests.

To find the client, use the search tool I mentioned in above and, once you find that individual’s profile, click “Follow.”

Following someone on Twitter is not a long term commitment. They will receive an email notification that you are now following them, but likely will never know if you later un-follow them. Twitter is far more fluid in this sense than Facebook or LinkedIn; people get followed and un-followed all the time without hurt feelings.

This isn’t to say that you mother wouldn’t be offended if you un-followed her, but generally speaking the attitude on Twitter is: Follow me if you find my tweets interesting or useful, un-follow me if not, and that is ok.

Twitter has a silly name, but don’t let that petty detail get in the way of you trying something you might really enjoy. Twitter continues to explode in popularity, not because it is trendy, but because it is useful. I’m not saying you have to love it, I’m just saying you should try. At least a few bites. Let me know what you think.

Adrian Dayton is a non-practicing attorney that speaks to law firms and professional groups all over the world about effective use of social media for business development. His first book Social Media for Lawyers: Twitter Edition (Ark Group 2012) is in its second edition and you grab a free excerpt at or you can follow Adrian on Twitter @adriandayton.