Creator of RubyApps and RubyLaw, Content Lifecycle Management (CLM) platforms that make creating, managing, delivering, and analyzing digital content easy and effective
Leading technology products have proven that the most successful digital experiences are the result of ongoing iteration and refinement – an evolutionary process, not revolutionary. Yet, all too often, digital marketing experiences in the legal sector are built and left to wallow until just before their point of irrelevancy, followed (sometimes) by a rush to resuscitate and revive before all value is lost (often too little, too late). As vendors phase out technologies, the firm is under extreme pressure to replace or kill these systems, and the cycle continues. This is costly, resource-intensive, and fails to leverage the knowledge and experience a firm’s marketing team gains from the prior version. In fact, there may be little knowledge to gain from a system that is 5+ years old and hasn’t been considered in that long.
Contrast this with fast, iterative, continuous improvement of site systems and software, which ensures that your websites, proposal generators, and digital marketing experiences stay on the edge, delivering maximum value for your firm. This is similar to the modern agile process of development, and is critical for marketing leaders looking to maximize both their budgets and their value for their firm.
This webinar will address the topics including:
Comments and questions can be sent via Twitter to @RubensteinTech and by using the hashtag #RubyLaw.
FEATURING:
Katy von Treskow
Director of Marketing Communications
Winston & Strawn LLP
Jennifer Larivee
Director of Marketing
Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP
Jaron Rubenstein
Founder & President
Rubenstein Technology Group
Video Transcript
Jaron: Hello, everyone. Good afternoon and thank you for joining us for the 13th entry to our RubyLaw Thought Leadership Series: Strategies for Maintaining your Firm's Digital Brand. And we're gonna go ahead and get started. This is Jaron Rubenstein. I'm Founder and President of Rubenstein Technology Group. RubyLaw is a Rubenstein Technology Group product. It's a customizable enterprise level web content management platform that empowers user experience for both legal marketers and firm audiences alike. It's designed to meet the web, mobile, marketing, propose generation and experience management needs of leading big law firms. The RubyLaw Thought Leadership Series is Rubenstein Technology Group's effort to support a big opportunity firm chat to create a competitive advantage by adjusting to how and where law firm stakeholders expect to consume content. For those interested, all previous entries of the RubyLaw Thought Leadership Series are up on the Rubenstein Tech site for viewing in our event section, with topics ranging from Branding 101 to how to prepare your firm for website redesign and relaunch.
Today we'll be discussing strategies for mainting your firm's digital brand. Leading technology products have proven that the most successful digital experiences are the result of ongoing iteration and refinement, and evolutionary process, not revolutionary. As we're getting started, I do want to take a moment to thank the Legal Marketing Association Bay Area Chapter, and in particular Adam Stock and his team, for leading the 2015 Legal Marketing Technology Conference West in San Francisco a few weeks ago where we first presented this panel discussion. They'll be releasing the video from that presentation and others and on their website at LMAtechconference.com in the near future so I definitely encourage you to check that out. There was some great content that day and Adam Stock and his team just do an amazing job with that conference. The webinar today will take the form of a panel discussion, and we're lucky to have with us today two leading law firm marketers, Jennifer Larivee and Katy von Treskow. Jennifer and Katy, you on?
Jennifer: Yes.
Katy: Hi, yes.
Jaron: Okay. Hey hey, terrific. So I'll give just a little bit of brief background about Jennifer and Katie. Jennifer Reynolds Larivee is a Director of Marketing at Akin Gump. Excuse me, Akin Gump Strauss Hauer and Feld. She's passionate about legal marketing and possesses more than 20 years of experience in customer service, business development, strategic marketing, and communications. In her current role, she oversees all aspects of marketing, including design, marketing technology and proposals, along with handling large-scale projects for the firm, such as website, experience database, proposal system buildouts. Jennifer collaborates closely with the other departments in development of these systems, and during her seven year tenure at Akin Gump she has also served as director of Business Development leading the BDFS for the firm's corporate practice. Jennifer brings a lot of experience to the table today into our conversation. So thank you for joining us today, Jennifer.
Jennifer: Thank you.
Jaron: And Katy von Treskow joined Winston and Strawn in 2008 and currently serves as director of marketing communications. In this role she develops strategic profile raising initiatives for key markets and practices and oversees the firm's public relations efforts. She's responsible for managing the firm's ongoing branding and advertising efforts, online marketing initiative and business development training and coaching programs. Thank you for joining us today, Katy.
Katy: You're welcome. Thanks for having me.
Jaron: I think we need a little more volume on your end, Katy.
Katy: Okay.
Jaron: All right. And I just wanna also take a moment to thank Sara DiCaro, who's the Senior Digital Marketing Manager of Perkins Coie. Sarah participated in our panel in San Francisco and we will be going through a couple of her slides for content today. But unfortunately she wasn't able to join today due to a scheduling conflict. So we actually scheduled about 90 minutes for today's session to allow time to cover all of our topics and then your questions and our panel's answers. So we do strongly encourage you to ask questions throughout the presentation, throughout the panel, throughout the discussion. So that our panel here can actually address your questions and concerns. You can ask questions via the WebX chat. So you should be able to just find the little button that says Chat and you can connect the question right to Jaron Rubenstein. Just center your question in that chat window and submit it and I'll be monitoring that throughout out conversation today. You can also post questions and comments via twitter using the hashtag, the handle @rubensteinTech with the hashtag #Rubylaw. So whichever you prefer but please do provide your questions 'cause that's really where a lot of the most interesting parts of the panel conversation today will happen. So without further ado, I am going to get started. So I wanna start by maybe just talking a little bit about the goals for our presentation today. Our real goals when we came up with the topics and the questions and the discussion has to do with kind of sharing some actual examples from legal. So Jennifer and Katy have some amazing examples from their experience that we'll be talking through and sharing today. And hopefully giving you some action about takeaways, for each of the topics that we're gonna cover today. So we've narrowed in to five topics. Maximizing organic search, exceptional website search, leveraging analytics, compelling video and comprehensive attorney bios.
Katy: The way this whole program sort of came into being was we got the call for presentors for the Bay Areas presentation or program. And I reached out to Jaron and I said listen we work so closely together. We do so many great things. You keep me so on top of so many things. I've learned so much from this relationship. We should be sharing this information with people. Let's brainstorm. And so when we started talking about it and really thinking about it, it all kind of came back to a few things. One of which was the idea of technology changing so fast. For instance, we launched our website, I don't know, I think it's coming up on four years in January or February. And it was right before responsive design became a big thing. So our site is not responsive. And look how much has changed in just a mere four years and frankly, it actually changed faster than that. I think within a year, we were like Jaron, that would have been awesome had we been responsive, right? So this idea of technology changing so fast and the idea that you might have to actually rebuild a website every other year to stay on top of technology and offer all the different features really isn't practical. If you look at the budget for building a whole website. And so then that sort of leads us to this idea of having this really strong partnership with your outside consultants so that you can tweak and tailor and change your website over time in a way that never used to happen. I mean my experience in the past with websites I built, friends who built websites was they built it and it sort of sat up there for five years. And you might have changed content. And you might have changed one or two things but changing a section was really expensive back then. And it just, it sort of wasn't the process that happened. And I think part of why things are changing in this idea of a partnership and doing things to extend the life of your site, part of the reason that's become so necessary maybe or prevalent is because of this quick change in technology. One of the ways that we try to look at and figure out what we need to change along the way to try to extend the life of our site is we look at other companies. We look at big companies. We go out there, we spend time. We look at what other people are doing. And we find unique things and we talk to Jaron or we talk to each other. I have a fantastic marketing and tech team here and we brainstorm things. And so we stay on top of changes that way.
But another way that we stay on top of changes is through this partnership we have with RubensteinTech. And I highly recommend for anyone who is in charge of their site, develop that close-knit level of relationship with whoever your website provider is or your developer is. Because they're seeing what's going on there. They're out there living it every single day and there have been so many times when Jaron has come to me and said, here's a great example. Hey Jen, the European Cookie Directive is at a level where different firms are now offering popups on their site so that you're in compliance. We don't have that on our site. We're in the process of working on it. But I wouldn't have been on top of that as quickly if Jaron and I didn't have a close relationship or he felt he could come to me and tell me these things and I wouldn't feel like he was trying to upsell me. I didn't feel like he's trying to help me stay on top of things and make things better. So I really encourage folks to find a way to get that level of relationship with their outside partners. And just to sort of end how we came at this, with our last site, we really got into a situation of the band-aid solution. And you never wanna get into that situation. I look at our site before we rebuilt it and I used to call it the clown site. It had randomly placed images and content and colors because we couldn't make changed easily to the site and so you sort of just had to slap things up where they would go so we could get the right content up there. And it was terrible. So the more you can do things in sort of a thoughtful proactive way, even reaching out and looping your designers back in as necessary. A lot of the fixes or changes we do, we can do with just our developer. Because we have style sheets and we have our guideline for what our brand and our style is. But sometimes it goes above their level and we have to loop back in the designer. Again, I encourage you guys to do that because you don't wanna get in the situation when your site's just looking silly and it's so outdated that you have to do a complete overhaul. Maybe faster than you normally would have if you hadn't thought about things more thoughtfully.
Jaron: Yeah there's a sort of like downward spiral that a lot of sites tend to get into once they launch. And it's because of that, I think, right Jennifer? It's because there's just too many kind of band-aid on top of band-aid on top of band-aid. Quick fix on top of quick fix. And not thinking about the holistic picture of where we are gonna be in two years kind of thing.
Katy: Exactly.
Jaron: Terrific. Well all right, thank you. So I'm gonna move into our first topic now. Which is maximizing organic search. We've discussed this quite a bit at the conference. We discussed a lot about what kind of formal SEO strategy and which firms have a forrmula SEO strategy. And which ones are doing it internally or using an outside firm. And it was interesting to see from the audience in that group, we saw some folks that had a formal strategy. I would say probably about a third had a formal strategy and were handling it in-house. Maybe a third had a formal strategy and were using some external providers. And the other third weren't really doing anything at all with that. So we're gonna talk a little bit about that today. Jen, I know in your case, Akin handles it's SEO organically with your internal team. Can you tell us a little bit about your process there and how you manage that internally?
Jennifer: Yeah sure. So I wanna give a little disclaimer at the beginning. I was very involved in setting up how we handle SEO in the beginning. I am not the person who handles it day to day. I have an amazing marketing technology manager who's actually on this presentation. And she and her team are doing this day to day. So hopefully I don't say anything that makes her cringe but if anyone has questions, you should by all means feel free to reach out to me. If I don't know the answer, I'll get you in touch with her because she's just so awesome with this stuff. We do organically manage our SEO and we get results. But it is a lot of work. It is a lot of work for marketing technology and it's a lot of work for the business development people because it's a collaborative process and they need to do it together. The first step that we take when we're looking to elevate or start working on SEO is we sync with the business development folk strategically about what practice or industry or even a person who we want to elevate, get better SEO. We find it's better to focus on sort of smaller or niche areas. When you look at something like litigation, clearly that's just too broad. That's gonna be a really hard one to change results for. But if you're looking at something much more limited, for instance, Stark. If you're working on energy regulatory, that's a really nice narrow term that you can probably make some impact with. And so we use the Google keyword planner to assess volume. And when I say assess volume, we look at how many people are searching for those terms. And I should note, that when you're looking at volume, it's widely different than when you're looking at B to C volume. For instance, we look at anything that has over 10 searches. If something has more than 2.000 searches, we pass because the competition's gonna be too stiff. In some ways that's probably the complete opposite of what your B to C companies are doing with SEO. We also found, and a little bit we found this out the hard way. That anything with .gov is gonna be given more weight period. No matter what you do. So once we determine our terms, we run them through the Google planner. We see how many people are looking for those terms and we decide which ones we're gonna move ahead with. We google those. And we see who comes up currently for results. And if it's a lot of .gov websites, we walk away. Because we know that it's gonna be almost if not fully impossible to get ahead of them in the rankings. So once we identify proper terms, we focus on page titles and meta descriptions within Ruby Law. And this can take a long time. You have to remember that page titles are limited to 70 characters. Meta descriptions are limited to 120 characters. So sometimes the business development person will say I want these 50 terms on a page. Well that won't fit into your 70 character page title. So you need to work with them to slim down the number of concepts or keywords that they're wanna be found for on that page. And that can take a good amount of time especially with the level of work the business development folks have on them. Once we do those titles and meta descriptions, we google ourself. We see how we're coming up. And then we look to adjust content and add keywords into the content. We do it in a thoughtful manner. We make sure that the content makes sense. We don't just flat words in there. And we'll talk about that later on. But content is a big, big piece of what we do. And I know that can be really difficult because it usually involves lawyer work. So at that point when you're asking lawyers to work with you to rewrite pieces, sometimes that adds time to the process. But I would encourage all of you to stick with it. Because we've had situations where we were appearing on page 25 of certain search terms. And we were able to get it up to the first or the second page. And that's amazing. Because these were really key strategic words for the firm that would need it to be found for. One of the things, maybe Jaron would wanna talk about how google changed its algorithm in April to make mobile sites get higher rankings with SEO. And one thing I would note, we haven't experienced any issues with this. As I mentioned before, we are not a responsive site. Although we will be moving to that. We found that this is one of the times where Jaron reached out to us and said, hey, Google has this change. I wanna make sure you understand it and with this idea of partnership again, right? That he's trying to make sure we're really on top of what's going on out there so that we can make changes with our SEO that we need to. Maybe it made us focus a little different on certain terms. But that we also can look at the backend of the site and decide sort of how we wanna change things.
Jaron: Yeah, thanks Jen. That's a really good point. So, I think what was interesting about that Google Mobile Search change back in April was that, I would call it the common press but it's not even the common press. It was really the marketing trade as well so would have started freaking out about this change. I think there were some headlines that were basically suggesting that if your site wasn't mobile, by the date it went into effect, and I don't remember the specific date. It was sometime in the spring. But there were a lot of articles saying that you were in deep trouble if your site wasn't mobile by that date. And I think that is true for some audiences in some sectors but per legal our advice has been primarily that, as a sector, law firms, specially big law firms have a smaller percentage of their traffic coming from mobile than other sectors in other industries. So by way of example, we have some clients in real estate. And some of them are seeing 40, 50 percent of their traffic coming through mobile which is just amazing. And that's been rising to that level probably about 10 percent a year. So a couple of years ago it was approaching 30 percent. Now it's kind of beyond 40, approaching 50 percent. But if you look at most law firm websites, that's usually, they're usually seeing closer to between 15 and 20 percent now. Is that about what you guys see, Jen and Katy?
Jennifer: Yeah, I don't know the exact percentage but I will talk about that a little bit further on. It is low. Our clientele is mostly desktop computers, laptop.
Jaron: Desktop based, yeah. And Katy you're probably seeing a little more mobile, right? 'Cause of your focus instant.
Katy: Mhmm. That substantiated our investment in designing responsively. When we were going down that route, we were noticing an average increase of about 11 percent coming to mobile. And now we're at close to 32 percent are viewing from kind of mobile and remote devices. And that's a significant amount of people when you look at the overarching number of visitors to our site on a monthly basis. So yeah it's pretty significant.
Jaron: Yeah, excellent. So my point was that firms were seeing this number increase, right? And it's going to 20 percent, it's going to 50 percent. And just you know, as everyone knows, the legal sector tends to unfortunately lag behind a bit in that sense. But we know where it's going. It's clear that it's going up. And so it's definitely important to have a mobile-friendly mobile-optimized website. The google search algorithm changes, just to give you a quick recap if you don't already know this, and most folks on the call probably do. But the gist of it is that google changed their algorithm to start indexing and ranking mobile-friendly sites differently. And then to waive those search terms, the ranking of those results, excuse me, not search terms, but the ranking of the search results on mobile devices is different than it is on desktop. So essentially what that means is if you google a term on your mobile device, the results are more likely to show higher in rank precise to the mobile friendly. Which makes a lot of sense from a user perspective, right? Because if you're on your phone, you would prefer to read mobile friendly content than mobile-unfriendly desktop focused content. So they're pushing more mobile friendly sites to mobile users. On the desktop, the indexing supposedly has not changed so your rankings on the desktop for a desktop searcher should be the same as they've always been. So what that speaks to, as that translates to for the sector is that, firms that are still mostly desktop focused and do mostly have a desktop based audience, this change in April didn't really affect them much. But for firms mostly outside of legal, that is very high mobile audience. They definitely have seen a drop in organic search traffic or traffic from organic search because of that. If you wanna know more, I did write a blog post about this. If you actually go into, just a minor plug here, but if you go to Rubensteintech.com site, you can look at our innovate blog. It's already back from April but there's an article there that lays it all out, explains it all. So you can check that out. But yeah, mobile-friendly is definitely an important thing. And it's something that firms like Akin are really starting to think about now or HN. Because you know where the traffic's going. You know the direction is definitely going more and more towards mobile.
Jennifer: Right, for sure. But Jaron, I think that's also a nice segue into how a particular CMS can be helpful to you with your SEO to begin with. So we do all this organic work. But because of how the Ruby Law system is set up, we actually derive SEO benefit from that. Jaron, you wanna talk a little bit for people about how a good CMS can help you do that with proper headings being nested and things like that?
Jaron: Yeah, absolutely. So your website, the way it was built and the Content Management System behind it should definitely support what we tend to call the best practices ratio. And I actually think I have a slide in here about that. Here's just a bunch of them. This isn't everything. It's just what fit on a slide. The idea that Jen talked about using meaningful, keyword rich URLs. And using certain terms in the titles of the content and in the descriptions, of course in the text. So you wanna make sure that your CMS is allowing you to very easily manage this field. So manage the titles and the URLs so that they're meaningful URLs. If you go to a website, you see that the web address for a page is blah-blah-blah . firm.com /555222 and some really long number or something not really human-readable. You know the URL is a very big signal for google search indexing. So it's important to be able to control that. And most modern content management systems will allow that. Ruby Law makes it extremely easy. It even suggests terms for you. So you don't even have to do it manually. Other content management systems may or may not do that. So just definitely somethign to keep in mind is make sure you control your URLs. You wanna make the content easy for search engines to index. And that's actually specifically what Jen was just talking about. There's a concept of semantic page coding. And the idea is that when you have the content on the page, you want to follow the web standards for how that content is being tagged in html. So if you have headings on that page, you always wanna have those heading tags. If there's headers with h1 tags and subheadings with h2 and h3 and so on. Those of you on the call that know a little bit of html you should know what I'm talking about. But the ideas that you need to follow those web standards because that makes it that much easier for the search engine crawlers to interpret your content correctly. And they do weight your content based on that. So headings and text would be weighted differently than paragraph content. Making sure that the page is web standards compliant ensures that all of the content on you page will get indexed and brought into the search engine indexes when the website crawler hits your site for the search engine whether it's google or Bing or anyone else. So you wanna make sure that you're following those best practices. I think we already talked quite a bit about going mobile, making sure your site's mobile optimized if not responsive. So definitely, that's something that should be on your radar if it's not already. Keeping your content fresh is a big one. Google puts a lot of weight on sites that are constantly updating and changing. And within Ruby Law, other systems, it should be very easy to make those kind of changes that you're making to your site. Whether you're adding client alerts and case studies and news and publications. Attorney bio updates, that sort of thing. I mean those are all the things that are frequently being updated on the website. A lot of firms we work with are updating their site dozens of times a day. Gone are the days where you have to update your site once a day or once every week or two. There's just constant content marketing initiatives that are happening in most firms. The benefit to that is that you are constantly updating your site and assuming that you've registered a google site map with Google and possibly Bing, those search engines should be crawling that site and getting those updates in very short order. And that's gonna help your SEO because your content's gonna be indexed. Specially when it's a trending topic. When it's something, a lot of things happening nowadays with emerging topics around things like everything from crowdfunding to, I guess Bitcoin's getting a little old already. But if you're publishing content like that and it's not getting to search engines quickly then you're losing potential visitors. So you wanna think about that, keeping that content fresh. And another area that firms have really been moving to the past few months has been moving to secure HTTPS serving. There's a few reasons for that. There's some privacy reasons that it's a good idea to serve your content via https which encrypts it and ensures that you got a secure connection between the browser and your servers. It also helps you with privacy of what you're searching on a site, what you're doing on a site, and not allowing any kind of proxy servers in between to be monitoring that. On top of all that, because Google is a big advocate for privacy online, they recently announced that content served via https does get a small boost in SEO. Of course, Google doesn't diverge exactly how much of a boost but there's an improvement there. So not only is it better for privacy control and just overall site secutiry. But it also gives you a bit of a SEO boost. So we recommend that to clients. And again there somewhere on our blog there's an article about ensuring that your site's secure and there's lot of great information there as well. So I suggest you check that out if you're not up to date on that topic. And I mentioned semantic page encoding already and having proper page hierarchy . And that's just really important throughout. So those are just some of the key things that you can do for SEO. Moving on. So I'll ask you Jen. Google's constantly getting smarter. Do you have a couple of takeaways, kind of like quick SEO tips to outsmart Google and what would those be?
Jennifer: Yeah, sure. And I think some of this is gonna echo what you just said but let me start with the quote that the first time I read it, I was like holy cow. The technology is taking over the human race. This is a quote from Moz which is a company that produces search engine ranking factors report every other year. It's M-O-Z. Really interesting stuff, so something you might want to Google and take a look at. But they had a recent quote that said "Google is smarter about what pages mean "through related keywords, synonyms, close variants "and entities without relying on exact keyword phrases. "We believe matching user intent is of utmost importance." So what does this mean? This means gone are the days when you could stack a page full of the same word or four different ways to say that word and get good SEO results. What it means is that you absolutely have to take a holistic view of your SEO, of your content, of your page titles, of your metadata descriptions, of your headers. And it all needs to work together as a unified piece. And if you have tags that don't relate to the content on the page, your SEO's gonna fall. Or not be as high. So you need to really take a hard look at all of those things and make sure that everything is working together in tandem. So it's telling the same story. And I think that that's probably sort of the best takeaway, to "get around google" which you're really not getting around google, you're probably just doing what you should be doing anyway, right?
Jaron: Right, right. I think that's one thing that is easier for firms. Because you're often publishing so much content that you don't have to fake keyword rich content. Your content is already overly keyword rich to start, right?
Jennifer: Yeah, right.
Jaron: Okay, okay great. So we did have some time for questions around SEO. Does anyone have anything that they wanna ask our panel related to this particular topic before we move on to the next one? If you do, again please just, you can use the WebX chat window. And open up that window and just chat to either all attendees or directly to me Jaron Rubenstein in that little window and we will be happy to answer your questions as we go. I'll be monitoring that throughout. While we're doing that, I do have one question for Jen and Katy. Whichever of you think can answer this. Have you been doing anything different for Bing versus google in your SEO strategies and tactics?
Jennifer: I think Katy actually might have something to say on that. I don't. Actually it's not, I can't say for sure on that one. I think we do a little bit differently but I don't have all the details. And I'm sorry to sort of give that tough, that not good answer.
Katy: So yeah, we do. It's not a different strategy but we are noticing that Bing's paying attention to content more in the way they prioritize results in search. So we are studying kind of and paying, it's like I said paying attention to how they prioritize our pages. It's just spending a lot more time on the content. So translations matter. And it matters also throughout the page. So universal applications of content. So when you're on a bio page and certain sections like practice areas are static throughout every bio page, is that also translated? And is that negatively impacting the way a bio's indexed in Bing? So that's something we are paying attention to and we're spending a lot of time on right now especially as we're moving forward into the next phase of our site.
Jaron: Excellent, excellent. Yeah it seems like we're often being asked about the differences between Google and Bing. There are some subtle differences. But what's interesting to note is, just before our webinar today I did a little quick bit of research. It seems like Bing is really on the rise in terms of usage. The stats are showing that. And for those of you who don't know. Bing does power Yahoo's search as well. So if you're on Yahoo and you do a search, it used to be Yahoo search but now you're actually getting Bing behind the scenes. So between Microsoft's properties and Yahoo's properties, I just saw a report that Bing is providing as much as a third of search results.
Katy: We really noted that, yeah.
Jaron: You have noticed that on your end?
Katy: Yeah, definitely. I would say a year ago it was kind of in the top ten referral sources to our site. Now it's in the top three. So it's certainly has an increasingly large audience being referred to our site.
Jaron: That's amazing. I'd imagine that has to do with the rollout and the recent success of Windows 10 and other mobile initiatives that they have, the service and the tablets and all that. Yeah interesting. So definitely something to keep an eye on as you continue to evolve your site into 2016. All right. So we are going to continue on to our next topic here today which is Exceptional Website Search. So what we're talking about now is not search results from Google but the actual website search. The content search on your website. So maybe we'll start with you Jen. How important was search to you and your team when you realaunched akingump.com?
Jennifer: Sure. So we knew we wanted something more robust than the database search that we had on our prior site. And so when we were working with Rubenstein on our site we decided to go with the Google search. And it really seemed to work well for a long time. We recently needed to create landing terms for search words and it wasn't just a word, it would be like a string of words. For instance, we have a newsletter, it's called Red Notice. And we found when we put in Red Notice we got too many, it was doing an OR search basically, not an AND search. And we were getting too many results. And so we worked with Rubenstein to improve that and made some tweaks to it so that when you search for certain terms, you do just get what you need and then we can make these landing pages we need. We also realize that we needed to segment search more than we had from our original design. So again this is a way sort of through the partnership we worked together to expand the life of the site and make little changes along the way that are gonna service for longer. For instance we needed people to be able to search just the blog as separate from the rest of the site. So we enabled certain capabilities within the site to do that. I will say that our search I think is not as sophisticated as what has been coming up out there. And after I heard Katy and Sarah talk at the conference in San Francisco, I was sort of drooling over what they had been working on and wanting to implement that myself. So although I think what we have is good and works for us now, this is one of those things where I would love to partner with Jaron in a year and really work on the search. And I think that hopefully the two of you will get more into that 'cause I think it was such great stuff you're working on.
Jaron: Yeah, no, terrific, thank you. We've definitely seen as far as evolution of websites where search wasn't as important on a firm's website a couple of years ago. But as sort of the audience for a typical all firm website continues to be trained in Googling everything. And they have minimal time and minimal attention, the ability to search for something on a firm's site has become more and more important. So with that, I'll ask Katy. I know search was really important to you at launch but then you also really focused on evolving search after winston.com launched a couple of years ago. So enhancing that and focusing on significantly improving user experience for visitors, searching for content on winston.com. Can you tell the audience a little bit about that?
Katy: Sure. When we launched our site in October of 2013, we launched it with a specific search tool with refiners within each section of our site. So there was searching within what we do, where we are, who we are. There was targeted search refiners within each of those sections. And we still think that's a really smart approach. But one thing we noticed is our internal audience of users who are kind of latent users with our previous site were now really actively engaging with our news site. And it was almost too abstract. It wasn't giving them the results that they wanted because they were so used to a big, site-wide search experience that was the industry standard. And so it just wasn't, our initial intent with it was just hard for them to adopt and use efficiently. So they were going to who we are and expecting a search for the site-wide results instead of just searching for information related to that section of content. So we went back and listened to everything. Listened to their issues, studied their behaviors and then decided to relaunch with a customized tool that has some really interesting features and functionality and there are still search refiners within certain sections under thought leadership. For example there is filtering and search that automatically kind of generates results based on what's available in that section. So there are these refiners within certain sections of our site that are really smart and useful. But now under who we are, what we do, where we are, as well as in the top level search, you get the kind of site-wide search experience. And again it refines based on what you're typing in and it automatically generates results based on how you're typing. So it's still a very smart, smart tool. And it mirrors the experience that they really were looking for with the potential longevity to be a very smart, highly functional tool kind of looking at, anticipating what they're searching for and giving it to them as they're typing it in. That was why we spent a little more time on search after we launched. And how we relaunched it. It was a great tool that they built for us.
Jaron: Right, excellent. I think that was really helpful. And yeah, you can see some of that firsthand, audience members, if you just go to winston.com. And sort of a summary of what Katy was talking about.
Katy: One thing I would say to you also is we evaluated the success of, when we relaunched our search, our real true indicator of whether it was successful is whether people were happy and whether people were still coming to the table with issues. And the fact that people are using it and we're not losing their time on our site anymore. They're not bouncing off our site indicates to us, those analytics indicate to us that they're having a successful user experience on our site. And also, our internal base of users are attorneys aren't coming to the table saying how come I can't find this or can you help me find this? So the fact that they're kind of quiet is a good indication that it's working. Just in case you were wondering. How do we measure it's success? They're not complaining!
Jaron: It's interesting Katy, because I think that you are very, you are very in touch with not just your external audience which is of course clients and prospects. But your internal audience as well. And I think you more than most of the marketers I speak with really think about how internal users are using the site. I think you promote that quite heavily internally and you have people actually using it regularly since we launched.
Katy: Yeah, we do. I mean, that was a big, I thought that was a big opportunity for us. When I was doing, we did a ton of focus groups both internally and among our clients and constituents and even media partners. What we found was our attorneys were not actively engaging with the site. One attorney specifically said I can't imagine a scenario in which I would send a specific page of content to any client. That was an opportunity for me to turn this into a resource. So that was a big goal for me was to get our attorneys engaged and using this site launch. And really listening to their issues and developing something that would be a resource for them. And then leading up to the site launch everyday for five days we got a soft launch and every day leading up to it we highlight its special features and functionality and then we did a road show to really educate our attorneys. And everyone uses it. Everybody wants to use it. Everybody's coming to the table with different practice groups. And partners come to us I'd say everyday with a request for, you know, we wanna launch this type of content or how can we get an infographic that really highlights this specific service offering or differentiator for our practice? So people really do see the value in it now and use it as a resource. So that was an opportunity for us. There was a lot of white space for us to get them engaged. And we really created, focused on them as part of the experience. While at the same time recognizing that our primary audience is clients and constituents. When they have a different expectation and level of sophistication with technology, they're a lot more tech savvy so we had to balance that very carefully.
Jaron: Right, right. This is the challenge of speaking to multiple audiences is one we're all familiar with. You talked about some really great things about what you did at launch which I think are just real great ideas for everyone on the call. But also on an ongoing basis, do you have any particular methods in which you solicit feedback? Or is it mostly just, you're getting daily feedback anyway you don't need to solicit it?
Katy: Well that's true too. But no, we try to be really proactive. We do get a lot of feedback all the time. I fact I was in a meeting this morning. But what we do is we try to be really proactive and especially for certain sections of content and targeted areas that have a particularly dynamic base of content and contributions of content like our blogs or specific sections or areas where there's infographics or there's kind of a tiered approach to consuming content that has a highly visual element to it. We provide detailed reports and track it very proactively. That helps us prioritize the type of content that's important and valuable and has the most engagement. Yeah, we really carefully monitor specific sections of our site. And it's a monthly basis primarily for those detailed reports that we're compiling and tracking and then we send a summary and we pull out what the key features and takeaways are. And that often lead to discussions of, okay so this worked really well or this doesn't seem to be working well. How can we leverage this content or how can we, what can we do to increase traffic or maybe this isn't the right approach. What's another way to approaching this content, alternative approach to content?
Jaron: Right, right. To promote it and get the most value out of it. Excellent.
Katy: Did I answer the question?
Jaron: Yeah, that's terrific. I think that's really helpful. We do have a couple of slides up, Katy, about sort of defining the best search experience. And I think you spoke to some of these points. Is there anything more you wanna touch up on here before we continue on to the next topic?
Katy: I think there's a couple of things in search that are really valuable that we found valuable. One is topics that are associated with certain sections of content like our blog. It pushes our people to other related content. I think it allows visitors the opportunity to kind of dig deeper into specific areas of interest that maybe they didn't know we had more topics or we had more content on. So it's really engaging them. It's a smart kind of user behavior and topics are really influential in search. Both on our site, you know driving them to dig deeper into our site as well as offsite related to the search, organic search and holistic search strategies you guys were mentioning earlier. I also think type ahead functionality within all search bars is really important. You wanna make it as easy as possible, the user experience, You just wanna make it as easy as possible for users. You don't wanna have to have them dig, dig, dig. So yeah, I think those are the two things I definitely think are important to focus on and think about as it comes to search. I like search refiners. That's for me personally highlight that. That's how I search. That's how I think sophisticated users search. And I like topics. Those are the things that I think are particularly unique about our search experience that I would definitely emphasize.
Jaron: Okay, terrific. Terrific, excellent. All right. So if there aren't any questions on this topic, I think we can just move to key takeaways. So if you have a question, just please type it into the chat. But as far as key takeaways from this section, I think there are a lot of nuggets in there. But just something to think about, you should review analytics for your search queries. So most of you probably have your sites integrated with Google analytics or some sort of other analytics package. It should be tracking search queries, what users are searching not just in Google but before they come to your site which is also important. But it should also be tracking what users are entering into your own search box on your site. And we do encourage everyone to look at those analytics from time to time and see what users are interested in, what they're seeking out. Actually, do those searches yoruself and make sure that the results are matching what you would like them to be matching for, for your visitors, for your audience. And then think about how you can improve that experience. And definitely ,the more you kind of make your search smarter, the better. I think it's an important tool for every site and it's only increasing in utilization. All right, so I'm going to continue on to our next topic. Is there anything more, Jen or Katy you wanna add on to that or can we move on?
Jennifer: No, move on I think.
Jaron: All right, awesome. So we're gonna talk about leveraging analytics. And really creating a KPI scorecard for actionable analytics. Analytics is something that I think many firms are constantly struggling with because it takes a lot of effort to manage and to monitor analytics and review them. I'll ask you Jen, my first question. At Akin, I think you're using analytics to drive certain business decisions . Can you share an example with the group maybe for a firm that's not analytics savvy how they can get their feet wet to using analytics to drive decisions internally?
Jennifer: Yeah, sure. So let me start with an example of something we did recently to help us make the right decision for our firm. We know, and we talked about this a little before. We know from our analytics that our users buck the mobile trend. The majority of our users are desktop users. And although we believe that change even for our users is coming, and more and more of them will be mobile in the future, at this very moment, they're not. So when we were and have been evaluating whether to make our site responsive, we looked at those analytics and we factored that into the decision. And although we still believe that a responsive site is very important and needs to happen sooner rather than later, we decided that it was something that we can push off to 2016. And instead, the marketing dollars we had available we could spend on other things that were more pressing for us. For example the ability to search just the blogs which was actually hindering certain clients from getting info that they needed. So we found analytics very very hepful in that sort of situation. And as you're looking to make changes with you site, I would always kind of pause and take a look at what analytics are available to you and what information they might tell you about that section of the site that you're looking to change. Because you might be surprised with what you see. My initial gut reaction when we started talking about responsive design was we need to do this this instant, but when we delve deeper, we realized we can wait a little bit. And this is good for us, this is okay. We're not gonna cause a problem for ourself. A couple of really easy things and hopefully I don't exactly know the sort of level of this audience. So I'm gonna go with a couple of really basic things with analytics. But one of the things you could do to sort of get your feet wet is to see which of your practices or industry areas get more views. So if you're a large firm like us, you probably have nested practices, right? You have so many, maybe let's just call it 10 top level practice and industries. And then underneath those you have a whole bunch of subpractices and industries. If you look at the analytics to see what's getting views, you might be able to tell about what the hot new topic is gonna be. And it will inform you that hey, this subpractice is getting a ton of action. Something's going on here. Maybe we need to put a mention about it on the homepage. Maybe we need to move it to a top level. Maybe we need to do an alert on it. But it sort of informs not only your website decisions of placement of things, but it's also gonna inform your BD hooks and what they should maybe be looking at and focusing on. So that's one really easy way to get started with analytics. Another thing that people can do that's really super easy is review the keywords that google analytics provides. Usually it's akingump for us. But sometimes we see other words and we start to see trends of things that people are looking for. And again, we take those trends to our business development folks. And we say hey, we're seeing increased search for these words. What's going on in the marketplace or in your practice that's affecting this? Should we have a webinar? Should we have a live program? What do we need to do here to bolster our effort because something's going on out there and people wanna know. So I think those are two super easy ways for people to get involved with analytics and start finding ways to use them to their benefit.
Jaron: All right, well that's excellent. So I just wanna take a moment for a bit of administravia. We are coming up on the hour right now. We have 90 minutes scheduled today. So I just wanted to mention, for anyone who only scheduled an hour for today's webinar, do note that we are recording this and we will be posting it up on the Rubensteintech.com website at some point next week so you can watch it while you're digesting your turkey dinner. I don't think anyone's watching the webinar after thanksgiving. We will record it an you will be able to watch it in the coming weeks online if for some reason you have to drop off. But we do have another half hour of excellent conversation and content plan for you so don't go anywhere if you can stick around. So thank you Jen, that's really helpful. I guess my next question is for Katy. And next couple of slides talk about some actual points from Perkis Coie. These were topics that Sarah was gonna cover. Katy felt like she had a similar experience with the Winston and Strown site and so we thought maybe we could ask you these questions instead, Katy. So I know you focus quite a bit on analytics as well. How have you used analytics to drive decisions about website navigation or practice structure, things like that?
Katy: Well I think what this slide is demonstrating, I think a lot of people can relate to. Which is this mega menu monstrosity that we all have probably experienced or seen or come across within our industry with the legal services. It's hard to condense certain practices to have internally, certain priorities. What this really speaks to is when we were relaunching, we used the analytics to really support the structural change and move away from this huge, massive, mega menu in the way we displayed our practices. We used analytics to say hey, people aren't going to our site and browsing. They're not going to this page at all. Our analytics were closer to like 80 percent. And people were just not going to our landing page for services with this massive list of practices. They were not finding practice that landing pages from that page. And so that supported the structural changes that we made and condensing it to just the primary departments with a couple of outliers. But that's how we have been able to navigate that internally. 'Cause it really was an internal issue. And also, it helped, we've used analytics a lot to help us in terms of restructuring the content we condensed. There was nearly 12,000 pages of content on our former site and we condensed that to less than half. And we used analytics to support how to condense the traffic. How to structure our service landing pages and what we wanted to display there and what should it look like and what content. How do we approach content and make sure that we're not losing important key differentiators about our practices. But maybe consuming it and displaying it in a different approach. In the form of visuals for example to convey very big points. So it really helped us prioritize both the content as well as the structure of our site and navigate that really internally. Does that make sense?
Jaron: Yeah I think that's excellent. And to just fill you in on what you're seeing up on the screen. This is from Perkins Coie. Sarah DiCaro. You'll see basically that when they relaunched, they were looking at how do get those, specifically those 19 main practices and 135 related practices down to something digestible. And so in the relaunch, they did come up with a hierarchical menu. So it's not a huge mega-menu. And they actually have specific stats post-launch that Sarah shared which is that they increased traffic 50 percent for practice pages and 30 percent for industry pages. And I think that's amazing because I think one of the common things we hear from firms is that visitors are not hitting practice and industry pages nearly as much as they are hitting other content.
Jennifer: Yeah, that's very true for us. Hey Jaron, can I jump in with sort of a public service announcement here for a second? Hopefully everyone on this call on about status would just roll their eyes and be like of course we have that. But I'm almost embarrassed to say it but I'm gonna say it in case it helps anyone. We didn't have google analytics on our old site. I wanna fall off my chair when those words come out of my mouth. But we didn't have Google analytics. So we had almost no data to compare things to like Katy and Sarah had when they launched their site. They were able to go in and see how things were functioning before and how many different practices were getting hits and all of that good information. If you don't have google analytics on your site, get something. Get some kind of analytics. Make the investment and put it on your site because it is so telling and is so helpful when you're trying to make changes. It's not only good for the site but it's also helpful for you to make a case within your firm of why something should change. So I just wanted to make that plug because we were in such a bad position that we didn't have them.
Katy: We have two different analytics tools on our site. We have obviously Google analytics but we have also engaged another proprietary service in the form of Site Analytics for a different reason. And so we definitely, I second that. Analytics are really important. And think about what you're using it for. And explore different tools. Because Google analytics is great and there's a lot of different functionality within that but the behavior tracking is so much better in SiteImprove than Google Analytics from our perspective. So we decided to use that to really illustrate and understand how visitors are navigating to pages, where they go from there. It really tells us what's relevant. And that helped us kind of navigate structural changes we made in content and navigational experiences of our site.
Jaron: Yep, if you're on the webinar today and you're planning a relaunch in the coming year or two or whatever near future I would say, what you should know is that all good design and development firms, one of the first things they're gonna ask you for is the analytics for your site. And the way I think that conversation started with Jen and this was already four years ago or so but you know, was, can we have the analytics? And that's when the realization was oh, we don't have any. So I think correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you guys did put something on real quick and we had a couple of months of data.
Jennifer: We did. Exactly, exaclty. But it really wasn't enough to help us make the kind of decisions that Katy and Sarah were able to make.
Jaron: Right, right. Yeah so just to continue that public service announcement, make sure you've got good analytics on your site already. 'Cause if you're doing a relaunch it'll just help you later on. So anything more that we wanna talk about with analytics before we move on to the next topic, Katy or Jen?
Katy: No, I think that's it from my end.
Jennifer: Yeah, me too. It can help you with a lot of internal navigation. That's my big takeaway. Specially if you're redesigning or putting the band-aids on your site and you don't have the budget yet to do a full redesign. Just think really carefully, really can help you navigate those internal conversations. Productively.
Jaron: Right and I think that's one of these takeaways on this slide here. That one good way to convince internal stake holders can be just by using data to show the improvement or show the problem and what needs to be improved. And Sarah has some great topics about that as well. All right, terrific. So our next section is about compelling video. And this is the fourth of, we have this and one more topic about attorney bios coming up in the webinar today. So compelling video. Katy, Winston launched their site with videos kinda scattered throughout the various sections of content a couple years back when you relaunched. But then since then, and in the past few months, you really completely, I think, rethought how video works on the site. You developed an exclusive video blogging channel and really expanded video content on winston.com. Why did you go that route and why did you focus so much on video message marketing?
Katy: So a big priority with our new site and the branding elements was to make the design and visual elements really useful and interactive to not only tell our story but really show it. And I would say the analytics and just a strong SEO influence with videos as well as feedback from our internal audience. Both our internal constituents and external lead clients show that these interactive elements are really highly engaged. They're just, people love them. People hire people, so they like to see the people that they're hiring. They like to understand the differentiators and sometimes that comes across more strongly through a visual element like a video. So we kinda use it as an alternative way to approach content with the mindset that buyers of legal services really hire people they connect with, so let's get in front of that. So we sprinkled it at launch, tracked it, and had in mind a idea of really building this out. And we did, so we relaunched this summer with a kind of a disruptive video blogging channel that's on our site. I think it's particularly unique because of the sheer scale of it. There's such a huge variety of content that mirrors the navigation of our site. And the development of it was massive. It was a real achievement I think to build this huge section of the site with filtering capabilities, seamless site functionality like the ability to add it to binders or to share individual videos. And it complements our visual branding elements. So then in 30 seconds or less, you have a really clear idea of who we are and what do we do at the firm. And that's really what users are interested in and that's where the user behavior studies were pointing to. So we really wanted to kinda capture that, the visual interest of users. And then it's a great marketing tool. So videos live way beyond the site. Not only sharing it in a variety of environments but we can use it as supplement for when pitching somebody for a speaking engagement. Or if we are preparing a pitch on a specific topic or a specific issue, and this can be a great supplement. Maybe we have a specific video that's a compilation of talking points on a specific topic like trade secret issues. And that would be a great supplement to the pitch. Journalists love it too. So it's a great way to get in front of journalists when we're positioning somebody for expert commentary on a specific topic. So you know, there's a lot of different reasons why we invested in such a massive scale but I do think because of it's longevity and lifespan beyond the site, it's really been a valuable tool. And our attorneys love it. Clients have commented on it. Reporters have commented on it. So we're really seeing the return on investment with them, with videos.
Jaron: Right, terrific. At Akin, you haven't really done a lot publicly with video, Jen. Are you considering putting more constant development efforts to video for the firm going forward?
Jennifer: Yeah, you're absolutely right. Publicly we really just use video for the recruiting section of our site. So when recruiting is marketing to its target audience. And I think they've been really effective. They were sort of like a design difference when we built our site. The career portion, you'll notice uses very different imagery. It was designed to sort of draw people in to that tangible personalities of different people here. And that's why we launched with video in that section. Because when you're trying to bring in new lawyers, it's the person piece that really matters. And we would definitely like to broaden that to our full site. Internally, we do use video. And overall we do believe that video is a very important communications medium. One of the ways we use video now is we have new partners start and we do these sort of quick one to two minute videos where the partner introduces their practice, talks about what they do, their experience, all that kind of stuff. With so many offices across the world, new partners don't get to meet all the other partners face to face. And this was sort of a way to humanize them and let their personalities show through and it's been a very effective tool for us. And so we are looking to sort of expand that to the public and to the website in 2016. But we wanna make sure that we're doing it in a really thoughtful manner. So where we are right now is we're investigating resources. We need a company that can work in any office. Any location where we have an office on short notice. With little to no travel costs. So we've been looking for companies that can really solve that need because unlike Perkins Coie, and I'll sell them out a little bit here only because of the green eyed monster, I'm so jealous. They have two full time videographers on their team which is amazing. That they have invested so much energy into video. I think it's phenomenal. But unortunately we don't have the ability to add that headcount so we need to look for another solution that's very flexible and nimble for us. So hopefully we will get that in place in 2016 and start moving ahead with video.
Jaron: All right, that's terrific and good point. And I did, I am taking advantage of the fact that we've got a shared out browser. So I do bring up the winston videos and I brought up Perkins Coie site as well. So Katy, you've really made video a major focus of the Winston Strown content development efforts of 2015. We talked about adding that video section to the site. But what led to the investment? And what led to you getting, again, really serious about creating really high quality video content for the firm?
Katy: I think when we launched our new site, it was the first impression of our new brand. And our new brand was really emphasizing that we were result orien
