Let’s keep Lawgical in our sights and if visitors have used them in the past, we’d love to hear from you.

Lawgical, the parent company of several trusted legal support networks, released their latest product called Lawgical Local. This service helps legal professionals achieve higher rankings in Google Places and other local search platforms, where according to Forbes.com, 70% of consumers are searching for services. Since most potential clients will use searches like “New York Paralegal” or “Chicago Criminal Attorney” to find legal professionals, local search optimization is an essential part of a successful marketing strategy. Lawgical Local is a great service for legal professionals who don’t have time for the overwhelming process of optimizing their online presence for local search results but want to make sure their name is in front of the bulk of their clients.

Stu Perlmutter, a process server who uses Lawgical Local in tandem with other Lawgical marketing products explains, “I was looking for more work and wasn’t happy with my ranking.” After two months Perlmutter’s rankings began to change and work coming from out-of-state went through the roof. As a busy professional, Perlmutter prefers to leave his marketing strategy to the experts. “I don’t care how [my clients] found me,” he says, “It’s just important that they found me, and the people and products at Lawgical make that happen.”

“The Internet is constantly evolving and the ranking factors for local search are always changing,” company co-founder Trent Carlyle explains. “We guide our clients through what they should be doing to interact with their customers and how that engagement can have a positive impact on their rankings.”

The Lawgical Local service allows legal professionals to focus on running their business instead of spending hours each month setting-up, managing and monitoring their business online. Lawgical Local includes:

1. hand submissions to dozens of the most critical local directories and social media platforms
2. optimization of primary local listings including Google, Yahoo and Bing
3. inclusion of business info in data feeds that populate the web’s most trafficked sites and online yellow pages
4. ongoing monitoring of data accuracy
5. ongoing guidance on strategies to continuously improve local and organic rankings.

About Lawgical

Lawgical provides online marketing and web-based solutions for legal professionals. The company’s portfolio is anchored by AboutBail.com, ServeNow.com, PInow.com, ProcessServers.com and ServeManager – all leading brands in their respective industries. Lawgical also develops and manages software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications for the legal industry.

BrightEdge pioneered enterprise-grade search engine optimization (SEO) in 2008 by delivering the first and only cloud-based platform that systematically allowed enterprises to grow their web site traffic and revenue through organic search. Today, it is the most widely used enterprise-grade search engine optimization (SEO) platform used by more than 2,000 brands and top digital agencies to attract customers from the billions of searches that happen on the web every day.

The company’s BrightEdge S3 platform is powered by a massive big-data foundation with an actionable analytics front end. In the past year BrightEdge has consistently delivered innovations that have led its market leadership position, including support for Facebook page optimization, Social signal measurement, Global SEO, SEO recommendations, and SEO tasks and workflow.

“We revolutionized how enterprises manage to be found when potential customers search for terms relevant to their business. Demand for BrightEdge S3 has been massive, and we welcome this funding to further grow our dominant market leadership position,” said Jim Yu, co-founder and CEO of BrightEdge. “Last year was a watershed year for us. We saw more than 400 percent growth, and doubling of our employee base. 2012 will be an even bigger year as we expand our business operations across the US and in Europe.”

“With consumer and business audiences competing for customers in search and social, BrightEdge’s platform is an elegant and effective solution that makes it possible to manage and optimize the process for companies that rely on the Internet to acquire users,” said Lisa Lambert, vice president at Intel Capital and managing director, Software and Services sector. “Their big-data technology, experienced cloud/SaaS leadership team and commercial success to date position them to be one of the core platforms for companies that rely on digital channels.”

BrightEdge has experienced tremendous growth in the past 18 months. It now serves more than 2,000 leading brands around the globe. BrightEdge currently serves 7 of the top 10 retailers, 8 of the top 10 digital agencies, and software leaders such as Microsoft, Facebook, VMWare, Symantec, Intuit and Citrix.

The funding will be used to continue its team growth, which has doubled in size as well as help expand the company’s footprint with offices in NY and London.

About BrightEdge
BrightEdge is the leading site, search, and social management solution for global enterprises, helping more than 2000 of the world’s largest brands stay ahead in the rapidly evolving Internet landscape.

BrightEdge S3 harnesses the power of analytics on big-data to drive revenue from web sites, search engines and social networks across the globe in a measurable, predictable way. social networks across the globe in a measurable, predictable way. BrightEdge is based in San Mateo, CA and is privately held with financing from Battery Ventures, Altos Ventures and Illuminate Ventures.

Source: BrightEdge

The one-hour webinar touched on the importance of ranking and visibility on search engines and the steps to increasing search engine ranking through the process of search engine optimization or SEO. “The Internet is the number one source of information for today’s consumer. Having a strong online presence is a must for any business,” explains Solomon Thimothy, OneIMS CEO and President. “Unfortunately, many business owners don’t understand the complexity of SEO and tend to ignore it altogether. It’s certainly not an easy concept to grasp. It requires dedication and a clear understanding of all the components that affect a website’s search engine ranking,” shares Thimothy.

The webinar attracted printing companies from across the country interested in learning how to make their business websites more prominent on the Internet. The presentation, aptly entitled “Keyword is King: The What, Why and How of Search Engine Optimization” gave a general overview of what search engine optimization is all about. Topics included capitalizing on search engine data to drive SEO strategy and improve rankings and attaining first page rankings through on-site and off-site optimization techniques.

While the presentation offered an overwhelming amount of material to anyone unfamiliar with SEO, it also provided easy actionable steps to take to get started on optimizing a website for better search engine ranking. “We’ve been doing SEO for a very long time. We know it’s not easy to do. Our goal was to provide attendees with a basic understanding of what SEO entails, but also, how they themselves can contribute to improving the SEO of their own website,” explains Thimothy.

The webinar also touched on creating an integrated online marketing strategy by combining SEO and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising for optimal results. “It’s the best of both worlds. Combining both SEO and PPC means you get powerful visibility in a short period of time,” says Thimothy.

OneIMS hopes to continue offering educational webinars for businesses in all industries. “We want to educate business owners about marketing innovations to help them grow. That’s our priority as a marketing company – finding solutions for business to grow,” says Thimothy.

Yodle’s business (not local search) relies on the lack of knowledge of their customers which are predominantly SMBs. It’s not to say that they have succeeded in helping many small businesses but my take is that we should employ better solutions and tactics for SMBs as they are the backbone of the US economy. In the long term, a customer centric solution will provide Yodle improved brand satisfaction and higher margins. Also, for god sakes, to Yodle execs please shift commissions from just acquisition (revenue) and tie it to margins which would force a focus on quality, acquisition and retention. Let’s hope Yodle listens to this bloggers call or has shifted already to be on the customer satisfaction front through quality, innovation, content and technology. By the way, having scoured there NYC offices, and meeting a few folks, I don’t recall ever meeting true online marketers? Hmmm!

Here are a few relatively old feedback from various folks on the web:

Yodle, ReachLocal, Yext – Scams or Just Hard To Please Everybody?
Lawyerist.com: Yodle Takes the Hard Sell to a New Level
DavidPirek.com: Is Yodle a scam?

Also a good attempt to improve search reputation by the Yodle which may have been outsourced: Yodle Reviews.

Speaking of small businesses, I’d love to hear from you folks. Have you used Yodle or any other local search provider? What has been your experience? How have they succeeded? How have they not?

Yodle, a leader in local online marketing, announced it has completed a transaction to acquire ProfitFuel, Inc. ProfitFuel, based in Austin, TX, is the largest and fastest growing provider of local search engine optimization (SEO) services to small businesses across the United States. With over 11,000 clients, ProfitFuel has achieved breakout growth serving small businesses that have a moderate marketing budget. Outrank, the company’s main service, is designed to generate inbound phone calls and emails cost effectively by delivering prominent rankings on top search engines for clients.

“ProfitFuel’s dedication to customer results and sales excellence made it a natural fit with Yodle. I look forward to bringing Yodle’s expanded suite of SEM, SEO, Social and Display marketing products to market more quickly in collaboration with ProfitFuel’s world class team.”

Historically, Yodle has focused its local online marketing services on small business advertisers that typically spend larger budgets of $1,000+ monthly and national brand advertisers; Franchise, Multi-location, and Manufacturer/Dealer organizations that advertise locally across hundreds of locations. With the acquisition of ProfitFuel, Yodle now adds a product and a sales force capable of serving a much broader set of clients who have smaller marketing budgets, but who still want the accountability of measuring their marketing performance.

“With ProfitFuel, Yodle is doubling down on its approach of providing a clear ROI to the local advertiser, delivered through a combined 450 person sales and client service team,” said Yodle CEO Court Cunningham. “ProfitFuel’s dedication to customer results and sales excellence made it a natural fit with Yodle. I look forward to bringing Yodle’s expanded suite of SEM, SEO, Social and Display marketing products to market more quickly in collaboration with ProfitFuel’s world class team.”

David Rubin, previously CEO of ProfitFuel, will join Yodle as SVP of Sales. Mr. Rubin has a proven 20 year track record as a successful CEO and sales leader in the technology space. Prior to ProfitFuel, Mr. Rubin was founder and CEO of HomeCity, an online real estate brokerage that pioneered utilizing web-based content to acquire clients. Before founding HomeCity, David held leadership positions at various companies including Intraware as Vice President of New Services Development, BITSource as founder and CEO and Computize as National Sales Director.

“We felt Yodle was the perfect choice to maximize our future potential for our clients, employees and shareholders,” said Mr. Rubin. “We spoke to many companies in the industry and felt that Yodle offered the best set of products, highest caliber talent and the most comprehensive vision to outperform the competition and transform this industry for many years to come.”

Founded in 2000, ProfitFuel has 220 employees and is consistently recognized as one of the best places to work by multiple sources, including Austin Business Journal and Texas Monthly. Yodle will now boast a 300-person sales force and many more talented staffers across marketing operations, client services and corporate departments.

Yodle plans to grow ProfitFuel’s Austin, TX office, making it a major hub, and to fully integrate the company’s infrastructure and technology by year’s end.

About Yodle
Yodle, a leader in local online marketing and named #35 on the INC 500 List of fastest growing private companies in the U.S., connects thousands of local businesses with consumers in a process so simple and cost-effective that business owners can’t imagine any other way to advertise. Yodle has developed an integrated approach to signing up and serving local businesses that are transitioning their marketing budgets online. Yodle is headquartered in New York, NY.

Source: Yodle

I’d like to cover two things in today’s post…1) the three laws of UGC and 2) the application of SEO…

Ok, first the three laws of Social Media and UGC:

1. Develop distinctive and meaningful content that attracts your target audience
2. Provide them with the ability to find, organize and share that information
3. Reward the activity, especially the active users who discover and proliferate the information…

Repeat Steps 1…you get the idea.

Now, the second…application of Search Engine Optimization:

This is actually the fun part from my perspective…

Create an editorial calendar that includes your target keywords, linguistic profile, and topics to produce content people care about
Ensure that you’re technology doesn’t create a walled garden, if it’s not findable in search, it’s not worth it. Part of the excitement is the fact that your visitors information, the stuff they’ve discovered, was found by being Google’d by others!
Let others know about your destination, particularly the editorial media…aka online Public Relations and link building.
Don’t be afraid to apply other social bookmarking options to your visitors, this is also part of the user’s reward.

This can all be done cost effectively, of course, it goes without saying you need a solid content strategy to facilitate my first law of UGC.

A few shouts to fellow online marketers and paid search gurus out there who’ve voiced some concerns or adulated Google Instant:

Les Jones pointed out how some marketers raised concern as to how this may impact impressions and click-through rates for better or for worse and whether Google Instant spells the death of long tail.

DigitalBuzzLog offers a video to offer up support for Google Instant. They take a more high-brow approach, will it change the SEO game from a visual and language perspective?

There’s no doubt, given Google’s highly data driven and user focused world that aspects of Google Instant, while daunting at first, wouldn’t be highly beneficial.

Here are the basic benefits of Google Instant for those not yet familiar with it:

Faster Searches: Google predicts your search showing results instantly as you’re typing. According to Google Instant this alone will save users 2-5 seconds per search.

Smarter Predictions: Google attempts to predict what you’re looking for when you may not know exactly what you’re setting out search for. As you type your sesrch query the top keyword prediction is shown in gray text directly in the search box, so users can stop typing as visually identify what you’re looking for.

Instant Search Results: The time between you typing in your search a letter at a time is extremely diminished as Google now displays search results litterly as you type. Many of my colleagues have confused this feature as “real-time” search results, that is not the case.

Now onto some stats on how this change has effected engagement as a result of search and Google Instant. According to Paid search management platform Marin Software, impressions and clicks increased in the two weeks after Instant’s launch compared with the two weeks before, while cost-per-click and clickthrough rates dropped. Overall costs increased slightly in the same period:

Research from search marketing solutions provider Covario, however, did not find the same increase in overall impressions, though it did record an increase in clicks on paid search ads—leading to higher, not lower, clickthrough rates. The company reported a shift in total search clicks away from organic and toward paid results, while cost per click remained constant.

Covario reported stable clickthrough rates for most search engines, but found Instant already had an effect on the search giant’s rates, bumping them up from 2.2% to 2.6% between Q2 and Q3 2010.

Whether you’re in the Marin camp or Covario camp, I’d love to hear more about whether there’s a sales correlation to this data. I’ll let you help me with my readers, how has Google Instant effected your business?

“Regardless of their size, online visibility is critical to the success of any business,” said Bill Wagner, chief marketing officer of Vocus, Inc. “As a result of our partnership, Hostway’s 600,000+ small business and web hosting customers will be able to affordably share the spotlight with even the largest companies.”

“AffinityWire can now provide our ValueWeb SMB (Small- to Medium-Business) customers a powerful online press release distribution platform to help maximize their success and visibility in the highly competitive online marketplace,” said John Enright, vice president of marketing and business development for Hostway. “We are pleased to partner with PRWeb to offer this easy-to-use service in one central online place along with our Search Engine Optimization and Online Advertising services.”

Utilizing PRWeb’s platform, AffinityWire offers direct-to-consumer distribution, SEO and social media tools, podcasts and fully integrated multimedia content in an easily accessible format. Press releases are indexed by major search engines and published on high-traffic news sites including Yahoo News, Google News, Topix as well as distributed through PRWeb’s over 2 million custom RSS feeds and email alerts to over 100,000 recipients. And an AffinityWire news release lives on the Web long after the release date, creating long legs for Search Engine Optimization purposes.

“Because AffinityWire is transactional – meaning customers pay as they go and only for what they need – it’s an ideal model for SMBs who don’t necessarily have a big marketing budget, but need to be able to get their news out,” added Enright.

About Hostway Corporation
Hostway Corporation provides domain name registration, Web hosting and ecommerce, colocation, managed dedicated hosting, SaaS hosting, Web design and online marketing services to more than 600,000 customers and over 2 million Web sites worldwide. It operates state-of-the art data centers that reduce the complexity and cost of Web-based technologies for small businesses and large enterprises. Founded in 1998, Hostway is one of the world’s largest Web hosting companies with a direct presence in 11 countries, 15 worldwide operation centers and more than 700 employees. Hostway franchises include: Affinity Internet, Bigstep, DiscountDomains, Hostway UK, Hostway Netherlands, Hostway Korea, Hostway Australia, Hostway Denmark, NetNation, PowerMedium, RegistryPro, Server Service, Service Over Internet, ValueWeb and WinSave.

About Vocus, Inc.
Vocus, Inc. (NASDAQ: VOCS) is a leading provider of on-demand software for public relations management. Our web-based software suite helps organizations of all sizes to fundamentally change the way they communicate with both the media and the public, optimizing their public relations and increasing their ability to measure its impact. Our on-demand software addresses the critical functions of public relations including media relations, news distribution and news monitoring. We deliver our solutions over the Internet using a secure, scalable application and system architecture, which allows our customers to eliminate expensive up-front hardware and software costs and to quickly deploy and adopt our on-demand software. Vocus is used by more than 2,200 organizations worldwide and is available in five languages. Vocus is based in Lanham, MD with offices in North America, Europe, and Asia.