Long before the internet was invented, all important legal practices had a brochure. No one knew how much business it generated but if you did not have one you were not important and had no chance of ever acquiring a decent new client in the commercial sector. Often it seemed as if the brochure was just a device used by the bigger boys to patronise the smaller ones – and, boy were they expensive!
Then, in the early 1990s, the internet arrived. Within only a matter of years, law firms realised that they could now have an electronic brochure. Now they could get into some serious patronising at the same time as actually generating work. Firms rushed to put their brochure online and sat back and waited for the influx of new business – and nothing happened!
After my firm launched its website, we asked ourselves “why, when I search for solicitors, does Dyer Burdett not appear?” Perhaps it did somewhere, but who could find it? It gradually dawned on us that our internet brochure was just as ineffective as the old one.
How could we make it stand out from the crowd? This is a question to which we gave much thought. We did not take advice from any experts – after all, we are fully qualified lawyers and therefore experts in everything including marketing.
I had a great idea: to focus on our fields of expertise by giving each area of the practice a catchy name and its own mini-website, which was secretly just a page of the main site. I collected domain names such as willsontheweb.co.uk, marineontheweb.co.uk, conveyancingontheweb.co.uk and so on.
I loved the website when it was developed and I give great credit for that to Darren Gough at Island 23 – who happens to be my son-in-law, so please commission him! All the areas of expertise were standalone and yet it was still one site with a brand, ie the theme “ontheweb.co.uk”.
We waited for new clients – and nothing happened. We discovered that in a Google search, the word “solicitor” generates over 2.3 million entries most of whom are not solicitors at all.
We then discovered that there is a complete industry in existence to announce your presence to the Googles and Yahoos of the internet and to make sure that, of the 2.3 million entries, your site appears near top of the list and stays there. This costs money but unless you commit to it, frankly don’t bother with the brochure. We have now committed to a fixed price deal for a SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) package. By the clever use of knobs, switches, levers and all sorts of secret things, we are guaranteed to appear on page 1 of every search engine result in Europe and the world.
In all seriousness, I believe my original idea remains valid – to have a site that not only is found on the web in its own right, but also appears high up the list in certain specialised fields. We can still use the traditional methods of advertising and you should never forget the power of the good old magazine or journal advertisement: carefully selected they can be hugely successful. Yellow Pages remains an enormous source of new business. What we can now do is to have a catchy “paper” ad by using a unique web address – say conveyancingontheweb.co.uk – and get results from both conventional and internet advertising using the same basic format.
The techie bit
By Darren Gough
We wanted to acquire specific domains for Dyer Burdett which we could then redirect to the relevant area on the main site, dyerburdett.com. We register the domains with an ISP with whom we have worked to adjust the standard policy for web requests. The web server application has been set up to listen to all requests for a specific domain and pass all this new traffic to the main site in another location, using what is referred to in Apache as a redirect.
The various sections (areas of law) of the site are stored within a MySQL database and can be called out using a simple PHP query. For example, ?admirality sends a query asking for the data relevant to admiralty which is then placed within the returned page and presented as full content to the end user.
This allows the firm to advertise specific areas of law through relevantly-named domains. Site visitors are unaware of the redirection and are taken to their area of interest on the main site.
The domains we have set up are commerceontheweb.co.uk, marineontheweb.co.uk, mediaontheweb.co.uk, conveyancingontheweb.co.uk, familiesontheweb.co.uk, damagesontheweb.co.uk, clinicalnegligenceontheweb.co.uk,
Michael Dyer is one of the founding partners of Havant firm Dyer Burdett & Co.
Email mjd@dyerburdett.com.
Darren Gough runs web design company Island 23.
Email darren.gough@island23.com.
