Findlaw vs. NY Personal Injury Law Blog: The Opening Salvo
Interrupting our Headway vs. Thesis Cage Match for just a moment, I wanted to share some thoughts prompted by the following tweet from BlawgWhisperer, the ABA Journal’s web editor and “keeper of the ABA Blawg Directory.”
And that led me to this blog post from the original New York Personal Injury Law Blog — relevant excerpt below:
I thought I was done blogging for the week, but I just learned that FindLaw, another one of those “venerable” names in the legal biz, has swiped my blog name. I kid you not.
They’ve created The New York Personal Injury Law Blog (all links here coded as “NoFollow”). [NB: Eric is more generous than I am - I've removed all links to the impostor blog and its cousins.] The person that allegedly writes it, “Emily Grube,” doesn’t even show up in the New York directory of attorneys when I checked. She also writes the Philadelphia Personal Injury Law Blog, The New York Criminal Law Blog, and who knows how many others that are in start-up phase.
Really? Really, Findlaw?
Let’s be clear. This isn’t a case of innocently or mistakenly adopting a geocentric keyword-rich blog name. Findlaw’s not staffed by idiots. They knew what they were doing. Eric’s blog has been around since 2006, is way popular, and has earned itself a PageRank of 5, which isn’t shabby at all (TIS is 4, by way of comparison, and most blogs average 3-4). And it was honored in the 2008 ABA Journal’s Blawg 100 list.
I’m not going to take Findlaw out to the woodshed any further than that, since I think Eric’s a big boy and has done a fine job on his own there.
That said, the BlawgWhisperer tweet raises another issue that concerns me: duplicate blog names, especially when the duplication is the result of innocent blogger error.
The Importance of Being Unique in Your Marketing
Whether you’re a lawyer, a doctor, a consultant, or any other kind of solo professional, you are your brand. It’s crucial to your success in marketing your business online to communicate that uniqueness to your potential clients. That’s why marketing consultants often preach ad nauseam about the importance of claiming your profile on social media sites by using names that are consistent with your name, or at least your business’s name, but being consistent across all platforms. That means blogs, URLs, social media profiles, the name you use to comment on other blogs — everything.
At the same time, it’s also true that sites with keyword-containing URLs and names get a bit more Google juice. (Probably not for the reasons you think, though: it’s generally thought that the boost comes from incoming links from other sites, because other bloggers will typically use the site’s name or URL as the anchor text — and it’s the anchor text that makes it juicy. Is there an additional boost from a URL like newyorkpersonalinjurylawblog.com? Maybe, but it’s probably small to insignificant, given Google’s predominant, overriding interest in the actual content on sites.)
So, solo business bloggers will frequently name their new blogs keeping those SEO considerations firmly in mind. They want a site that reads exactly like what the searchers are looking for.
The problem with that is obvious: there’s more than one personal injury lawyer in New York. There’s more than one solo services marketing consultant, too.
If you’re just getting started in the internet-presence building portion of your marketing program, you’re at a disadvantage. Your competitors, who may have been around longer than you, might have snatched up the good names.
Does that mean you just give up and name your blog “The OTHER New York Personal Injury Law Blog” or whatever? God, no.
You get creative. You brainstorm. You ask yourself “What is it about me that’s unique? What’s different in the way I do what I do, or who I do it for?” You use that self-knowledge to generate a list of potential names and URLs. Then you hit Google (or Bing, or whatever) and you make sure that those names are available. You search using quotes around your candidate names, so that the engines look for that exact phrase. You make sure you check out the major SMM/SNM sites, too (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn).
Does it suck when your first choice name is taken? Yeah, of course it does. You will undoubtedly encounter at least one competitor that makes you think, “Damn! Why didn’t I think of that first?!” That sucks, but it’s part of the cost of doing business. Mutter a little obscenity under your breath if you must, but then cross that contender off your list and move on to the next one.
Be uniquely you and let your business branding communicate that uniqueness. That’s all I’m saying.
I’ve always felt that titles, whether they’re the name of your blog, the subject line of an email, or the title of an article or blog post, are both one of the most essential aspects of marketing and one of the most difficult. Beyond increasing Google hits, the title is the first thing that your audience sees and if they don’t find it appealing, they’re unlikely to look further. In addition, for a website or blog name, you want something that will stick in a reader’s mind so that they’ll easily be able to remember it if they want to return.
At the same time, I think that the search for the perfect title also induces procrastination. Once you create a title, especially for a website or blog, you’re going to to be stuck with it for a long time, so people put off creating their website/blog until they have just the right name. While the right name is important, it’s better to come up with something you consider good enough and move forward with a project then to wait months for the perfect name to come to you.