San Fernando Valley Loan Modifications - Help from Lawyers or Real Estate Agents?

Loan Modifications is one of the most searched terms that lead internet users to this site. Often they are looking for help from an attorney to negotiate/modify a loan or they are considering actions against a company involved in the fraudulent modification of their loan . The power of search engine marketing opened another opportunity for me to help - a Real Estate agent contacted me after finding this blog online.

We spoke for some time, and she told me she has helped several homeowners whose loan modifications attempts were unsuccessful - and thus they required help in short-sales or other real estate matters. You can find her website and contact information here: Carol Otero, Northridge Real Estate Agent.

Los Angeles Internet Attorney quoted on CNNmoney.com

A quick congrats to FindLaw client Erik Syverson - he was quoted in an article on www.cnnmoney.com about websites for small business. He has several lines regarding web hosting, copyrighting, and complaints.

What a great way to add visibility, including a valuable link from a trusted source (CNN). Visitors from CNN will see tons of content about internet issues and the law - and the search engines see this connection from one trusted source to another.

If you would like to read the article, CNN Webhosting 101. Also check out Erik's site - Internet Attorney. You can also get there by a variety key word terms in the search engines -
los angeles internet attorney or LA lawyer internet website issues, and of course a ton of longer tail searches are productive means.

Woodland Hills Personal Injury Attorneys Website Upgrade

Congratulations to Freeman & Freeman, Woodland Hills Personal Injury Attorneys, on the launch of their upgraded website. The website design is a clean re-design of their prior site - but now incorporates flash for imagery and for scrolling case results.

Additional content has been added to the site, it is now over 25 pages - and details motor vehicle accidents, slip & fall injuries, dog bites, and more.

There is a lot of history to the internet marketing story of the law firm. Their original site was designed and supported by a competitor of FindLaw. The law firm decided to try FindLaw while keeping their original website - so FindLaw built a motor vehicle accident focused site - following the design of their original site.

Over the course of two years, the FindLaw site was consistently bringing calls and cases to their firm - in fact, they invested more into the FindLaw site via content add-ons just last year.

During a consultation visit - it was obvious that the smart thing to do was to combine the information from the competitor site into one FindLaw site. The money saved from cancelling the competitor site was re-invested into the newest FindLaw upgrade.

The benefits:
A consistent marketing message - one design - fresh with useful flash.
One domain to market on lettterhead, cards, voicemails.
Consolidation of interaction with upkeep and consultation.

Combining sites isn't always the best choice - but in this case it was. It allowed an efficient use of time and capital, and "trimmed the fat"!

Economic Effects: Child Support Modification Lawyers

One can't avoid the headlines - our economy has been in a downward trend for some time. However, there are thousands of people who need help from attorneys as a result of the economy's effects. Bankruptcy is one area, but there are several others.

As my post title suggests: situations involving child support may need to be restructured due to financial circumstances of a parent. Enforcement may also be a big issue. This article published last year (Women economic Stimulus Factsheet) highlights a few things that are very interesting:

• Women are over-represented in the subprime housing market.
• The unemployment rate for women maintaining a family is higher than for men and
• women, generally.
• The median income of female-headed families with children is 57% less than the median income of all families with children.

This doesn't mean that in every case modification or enforcement must be directed due to the circumstances of women - but it show that economic trends may disproportionately sway the type of cases coming to attorneys.

I can think of two attorneys in Los Angeles who are likely seeing things change week by week in this manner: Michael Nathans, Family Law Attorney in West Los Angeles and Robert Gantman, Family Law Attorney in Encino. Both their websites discuss child support, modifications, and enforcement.

Other factors involving family law and the economy include divorce (the obvious), move-aways, custody, and pre-nuptial agreements.

Search Keyword terms for Lawyer Wesbsites - Value of the long tail search

We at FindLaw stress that "Content is King" and when written properly allows you to be found for a variety of search terms. This is the essence and power of the long-tail search terms. To be brief, long tail is the description of the graphical representation of of frequency vs. search term. The graph has a very long tail as a result of the unique terms that dominate. It goes on ad nauseum.

I generated the graph on the left using real keyword data combined from two successful personal injury websites. There were over 25,000 different keyword combination searches used to get to these sites - as you can see, the list has a very very long tail (I only included the first 1000 in the graph).

• The top 100 keyword terms were 9.7% of the total.
• The top 10 were 4.3% of the total.

Clearly, the value is not concentrated at the left side of the graph.

Bill Tancer of Hitwise (an Experian Company) has published some similar results on his blog pertaining to general searches (not legal specific) that show the long tail.

The analysis:

• Top 100 terms: 5.7% of the all search traffic
• Top 500 terms: 8.9% of the all search traffic
• Top 1,000 terms: 10.6% of the all search traffic
• Top 10,000 terms: 18.5% of the all search traffic

Another development reported is that the use of longer search terms is on the rise -
Four-word queries are up 12% since 2007, and five-word queries are up 16%.

So what would you want your website to capture? "Personal injury attorney los angeles" or "child injured on backyard swing need lawyer in santa clarita" Of course, both would be best.