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Smith & Smith Attorneys

You may remember the blog article we posted, “Not Your Typical Lawyer Site,” which profiled Smith & Smith Attorneys, a family law practice in Augusta, Georgia. The ladies at Smith & Smith came back to Powerserve with a new goal; they wanted to take the new site to the next level and start driving some organic web traffic to it. Powerserve recommended a locally targeted search engine optimization campaign.

Zeroing in on a local search engine market can be extremely cost effective as compared to a national or global campaign. (National or global campaigns can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on the competitive landscape of the targeted key words and phrases). It can also produce very quick results, sometimes taking just a couple of weeks (although, there are no guarantees)! And often times local businesses will find that their competitors are pretty easy to beat in the rankings because their sites may not even be standards compliant, much less search engine optimized.

Our initial analysis of SmithandSmithAttorneysAugusta.com confirmed our suspicion—that the site seemed to be buried in the website rankings by a lot of other sites that, frankly, were winning the search engine game only because no one else was playing. Our first clue was the abundance of directories—not competitors’ websites—that were scoring above Smith & Smith in the rankings; these sites typically score well due to the abundance of semi-relevant content they aggregate. They can also be unseated in their search engine rankings by developing highly relevant content and by using some key SEO techniques.

The end result? SmithandSmithAttorneysAugusta.com jumped from page 6 of the Google search results to the second position on page 1! So anybody who searches the web for family law practices in Augusta, Georgia should arrive at the Smith & Smith Attorney’s website straight away, which also means that their phones are ringing a lot more!

The folks over at Mahalo.com posted a great primer for people just getting started with Google Analytics. (See “How to Use Google Analytics for Beginners”)

“Google Analytics is one of the best tools out there for analyzing traffic on your website. With a little bit of setup, it will give you an enormous amount of information about who is coming to your site, what they’re looking for, and how they’re getting there. In fact, it has so much information that it can be overwhelming! Don’t let it scare you away. With just a little training, you too will be able to use Google Analytics like a pro.” 

If you’d like to have Google Analytics tracking added to your website, send an email to updates@powerserve.net or call (706) 826-1506 and we’ll be happy to help you get started.

Did you know? You can access your Gmail account from any mobile device. Just type in m.gmail.com into your mobile device’s internet browser, sign in with your account information and you’ll be taken to a slimmed-down version of Gmail that’s perfect for checking email on the go. (If you have an iPhone or iPod touch, you’ll have a slightly different interface.) If you’re using a Blackberry device,  go to m.google.com/a and download a free application for checking Gmail on it.

Google is currently rolling out an update to Gmail to enable IMAP support on hosted accounts. IMAP is short for Internet Message Access Protocol and allows you to access your Gmail emails from other clients, like Outlook or Thunderbird.

The benefit of IMAP is that you’re able to check your mail directly on your mail server through a desktop mail client or mobile mail client, as opposed to downloading the messages to your computer.

To check and see whether IMAP’s been enabled on your account, go to http://www.google.com/a/ and enter your domain name. Then log into your email account. Once logged in, click Settings (up top right) and see if you have a tab named Forwarding and POP/IMAP. If you don’t have it yet, don’t worry… you’ll see the feature on your account in the coming days.

For more information on IMAP and Gmail, Google explains it in greater detail in this help entry.