New URL extensions add to online options

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By Douglas Levy
and Lauren Kirkwood
Dolan Media Newswires

Joining the likes of .gov, .com and .edu, the legal industry now is able to carve out its own space online.

Domain names ending in .lawyer and .attorney recently went up for general purchase, and legal marketers said firms that act quickly could see an increase in online visitors that could translate into more business.

“There’s now a custom domain name for the profession, so not only will that increase traffic, but it’ll also increase the kind of traffic that law firms are going to want to get,” said Larry Bodine, editor in chief of Lawyers.com and a former law firm marketing consultant. “Anybody visiting a .lawyer site is definitely looking for an attorney.”

The new domains will give lawyers the chance to match up their website address as closely as possible with what a potential client might search for, such as personalinjury.lawyer or mycitymalpractice.attorney.

“What law firms should do is think back to the keywords they’re trying to get ranked for in Google and try to claim those keywords,” Bodine said.

“It can be difficult to find a .com name, especially one that is short or contains some keywords about the practice,” said Brendan Chard of The Modern Firm LLC, a website consulting firm. “Also, since .attorney and .lawyer are singular, I think that these will skew towards being used by solo practitioners or lawyer blogs.”

Brandon Chesnutt, social media director at Identity, a public relations firm, agreed.

“If you think about it, this is almost a reset button for a lot of solo practitioners and law firms when it comes to their website,” he said. “They can start with a new, simple domain if they haven’t had the opportunity to get one in the past.

Just for us

The .lawyer and .attorney domains have an advantage beyond their descriptiveness. Because only licensed attorneys will be able to register for domain names with those endings, credibility may play a role in driving traffic to the new sites, said Carolyn Elefant, an energy lawyer and legal blogger.

Just as online searchers know that the .gov suffix will bring them to a legitimate government site, they will eventually associate .lawyer and .attorney with licensed attorneys, she said.

Law firms may want to use the new domain availability as an incentive to make a big splash, said John Reed of Rain BDM, a business development firm for law practices. He said that a well-planned campaign around a new .attorney or .lawyer domain can be an effective marketing and business development effort, “especially if it can be tied in to other significant news or milestones such as an office move, new website, important outcomes, etc.”

“I would say the best opportunity exists for lawyers that are, inexcusably, using Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, etc., as their primary email service, and firms that don’t yet have a website,” Reed said. “These new domains offer a tremendous chance for truly distinctive branding.”

But for law firms with well-established sites that rank highly in search results, jumping immediately to a new domain name might not be the best choice, Elefant said. A better option would be to register the firm’s name with .attorney or .lawyer at any popular naming site and then slowly build up the new site, she said.

“Definitely buy it, and maybe wait a couple months for it to evolve and take hold before forwarding everything from an already well-established site,” Elefant said. “If you’ve already built up really good SEO at your site, you’d want to keep it.”

Learning curve

It could take a while for the general public to become accustomed to new domain names, Chard cautioned.

“I think there will be a lot of mistakes early on where a law firm says, ‘My website is johnsmith.attorney and people will think that’s wrong, or that it’s johnsmith.attorney.com,” he said.

Consumers have developed an instinct to type .com for virtually anything, Chesnutt said.

“If another website has a similar domain, you risk running traffic to them versus yourself,” he said.

As such, not all legal marketers will be racing to scoop up domain names relevant to their firm.

Laura Perry, director of marketing and business development at Whiteford Taylor Preston LLP, said the domain names are a logical marketing tool for a business-to-consumer firm, but aren’t as useful to firms that serve national or multinational companies.

“In five years, it may be the place everybody goes to look for a lawyer, but my guess is at this point right now, Exxon is not going to go looking for a .lawyer site” to find legal representation, she said.

For the average consumer, though, a .lawyer or .attorney address might be the first stop when legal trouble arises, which will make Web addresses that incorporate keywords relating to common types of lawsuits valuable, Bodine said.

Chard added that simply owning a domain name is only a small part of the big picture.

“There still needs to be a good quality website or blog with unique content connected with that name for it to actually have any marketing value,” he said.