Search Engine Optimization Archives | Internet Marketing for Lawyers Attorney Web Design Tue, 06 Jun 2023 00:37:08 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.2.2 https://www.ilawyermarketing.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/cropped-favicon-32x32.png Search Engine Optimization Archives | Internet Marketing for Lawyers 32 32 Why does law firm SEO take a long time in 2020? https://www.ilawyermarketing.com/why-does-law-firm-seo-take-a-long-time-in-2020/ https://www.ilawyermarketing.com/why-does-law-firm-seo-take-a-long-time-in-2020/#respond Wed, 25 Mar 2020 14:54:41 +0000 http://www.ilawyermarketing.com/?p=2560 It’s the question everyone wants to know. “How long will it take till I start ranking on the 1st page of Google?” Especially with COVID-19 changing so many things for law firms all around the world at the moment, it...

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SEO in 2020

It’s the question everyone wants to know. “How long will it take till I start ranking on the 1st page of Google?” Especially with COVID-19 changing so many things for law firms all around the world at the moment, it is absolutely a question that you should be asking any potential SEO vendor. However, nobody can tell you with complete certainty. I’ve been doing SEO specifically in the legal industry for around 17 years now and our company has handled thousands of law firm marketing SEO campaigns since 2005. If I’m unable to tell you, literally nobody can. Not even someone working on Google’s search team would know the answer since their algorithm utilizes Machine Learning and AI, which means that it’s not completely controlled by humans. To quote every SEO ever, the answer is “it depends”.

Factors that impact the time it takes for a webpage to rank

1. Your Site’s Trust Level with Google

A lot of SEO people and legal industry sales reps like to throw out the words “Domain Authority” when it comes to ranking on Google. But did you know that Domain Authority is a metric developed by SEO software company Moz? Google does not use Moz Domain Authority in its ranking algorithm! While they do consider the “authoritativeness” of websites, there is no publicly available information on this for you or anyone else to see.  To make it plain and simple: what impacts the ability of your site to rank is the level of trust your site has with Google. The more that Google trusts your site, the greater ability your site has to rank. In 2009, Google filed a patent titled “Search result ranking based on trust”.  The abstract of that patent says: “A search engine system provides search results that are ranked according to a measure of the trust associated with entities that have provided labels for the documents in the search results. A search engine receives a query and selects documents relevant to the query. The trust ranks are used to determine trust factors for the respective documents. The trust factors are used to adjust information retrieval scores of the documents. The search results are then ranked based on the adjusted information retrieval scores“. While filing a patent does not guarantee it is being used, Google has talked about trust being a factor for many years now. There are hundreds (if not thousands) of factors that go into the level of trust Google has in your site, both on-page (the content on your site) and off-page (anything that occurs off of your website).

Content Quality

The quality of the content on your website is a very important factor when it comes to earning Google’s trust and, as a result, high rankings. Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines is a guide to help their quality raters help assess the quality of the web pages they review. In this document, it mentions E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness and trust) of the content on your website and gives insight into what Google considers to be quality content. While this guide does not tell you how the algorithm works, it does provide us with insight on how Google wants its algorithm to work. It’s clear that content quality is extremely important to earning Google’s trust and is a fundamental factor in ranking high on Google. Creating content that Google considers as high quality is the very reason we developed our own proprietary Content Enhancement Software.

content analysis

To Google, high-quality content doesn’t mean that your target keywords are repeated over and over or that you are using complex words. Those things, in fact, can hurt your rankings! The current algorithm wants to see comprehensive content ranking high because that usually provides a much better user experience. For every single search phrase, Google expects to see certain keywords. If I’m writing an article on the topic of “employment law” for example, Google is not looking to see the word “employment law attorney” in my content repeated 20 times. They want to see other semantically related words appearing as well. For example, our software tells us we need to use words like medical leave act, minimum wage, wrongful termination or equal employment opportunity commission (along with hundreds of other keywords, entities, and questions). Our software provides us with all the keywords Google expects to see in order to rank on the 1st page. While this alone doesn’t guarantee 1st page rankings, it’s a fundamental part of the process.

Quality of inbound links

The most commonly talked about ranking factor in the SEO world is inbound links, or links on other websites that point to your website. If you have had a company do SEO for you in the past, and they created low-quality links to your website, they may have lowered your site’s trust level and impaired your ability to rank. If your site has used over-aggressive anchor text from too many web pages, that can appear to the Google algorithm as an attempt to manipulate their search results. If you don’t know, anchor text is the words used in a link on a webpage.  For example, we can link to our SEO page using keywords like “best law firm SEO“. If we were to do too much of this, it could create a red flag for Google and cause a loss of trust and lower rankings. While there are many, many other factors that impact the level of trust Google has for your website, link related issues are the most common problem we have to overcome when we take on any SEO project for a law firm.

Brand mentions

Another element that impacts Google’s trust level is your law firm’s “brand mentions” on the web. Brand mentions are when your business is mentioned online on website pages, blog posts, social media, video or other web content.  For example, if an article on USA Today mentions your law firm name in their article, that’s a powerful brand mention from a site that Google has extremely high levels of trust for. A law firm that has been mentioned on many media outlets for many years is likely to have a much greater ability to rank than a law firm that has never been mentioned in the media. Of course, the sentiment in the brand mentions is also a factor. If people have negative things to say about your business on the web or are leaving negative reviews on Yelp and other sources, that can hurt your rankings.

Branded searches

Law firms that are heavy TV advertisers have an advantage when it comes to ranking on Google. This is because there are many more “branded” searches occurring. Branded searches occur when web users type in a specific brand name as part of their query. For example, if Google sees that there are 1,000 branded searches every month for a law firm’s name due to all the TV ads they run, that shows that people are actively searching for that business and this can help with rankings. Compare that to another law firm where there are only a small handful of branded searches, Google’s algorithm is going to think the firm with a much higher volume of branded searches should rank higher.

Building trust with Google takes time. Earning back trust when a domain has been damaged by poor SEO tactics takes even longer. Fortunately, we have had plenty of experience dealing with exactly this kind of situation.  In fact, we’ve had significant success both establishing trust and rebuilding it for law firm websites so they can appear on the 1st page of Google SERPs for a wide range of search terms.

2. Your current rankings

Naturally, where you currently rank for your target search terms is a factor in how long it will take you to rank. If you are starting out with a brand-new website, it’s going to take longer to rank than if you have an existing site and you are, say, on the 4th page of Google for your primary target keyword phrase.  The exception here being if your current site is being penalized by Google.

3. Competition on Google

Google Rank Scoring

One of the biggest factors in how long it will take to rank is the level of competition that exists for your target keywords and phrases. The stronger the competition is on the 1st page of Google, the longer it takes to pass those websites up. Google assigns a score to every page that is returned for any given query. You are going to have to “score” higher in order to pass those sites up in the organic search rankings. Take this search for “Chicago personal injury lawyer”. We see that Google has over 11,000,000 web pages in its index that are returned for this query. Ranking on the 1st page of Google for this search is no small task, especially in the uber competitive niche of personal injury SEO! That’s a lot of websites you need to score higher than if you want that prized 1st page visibility.

Generally speaking, the larger the metro area is, the more competitive it’s going to be. So a market like Los Angeles, California is going to take a lot longer to rank in than Temecula, California.

4. Crawl, Indexation and Serving

It’s important to understand that when it comes to optimizing for Google’s algorithm, virtually nothing is processed instantly by Google. Many parts of the SEO process like getting a ranking boost from links take weeks or months to have an impact on Google’s algorithmic scoring. Even adding content to your site takes time to have an impact. For example, if you update your site by adding content to an existing page or adding a new page, it doesn’t mean that you have the potential to rank for that new content instantly. Google has to first discover, crawl and serve those pages before that can happen.

Crawling: Googlebot (Google’s web crawler) needs to eventually crawl the specific page that has been changed or created. Googlebot does not visit most sites on a daily basis and they do not crawl every single page of a website. For some site’s on the web this can take weeks. Even then, just because Google has crawled your site, this doesn’t mean your changes will now show up in Google’s search results.

Indexation: Next, Google needs to try and process that page to understand what it is about. Google analyzes the text on your page, the images, videos, etc. and then stores this information on their servers. That process is called indexing. However, your page being indexed does not mean it will show up in search just yet.

Serving: The last step is serving, or ranking that content. After crawling and indexation, your page is now scored and ranked when a user types in a query on Google. The results we see on the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) is Google trying to match the intent of the web searcher’s query to the page in their index with the highest “score”.

5. Google algorithm updates

Google’s algorithms are constantly evolving. In fact, Google makes over 3,000 updates to its algorithm on an annual basis. Some are small updates while others are large scale and have larger implications that cause drastic swings in rankings. The SEO tactics that are effective today may literally be completely ineffective tomorrow. Google does not make announcements that they are going to update their algorithm. They do not give details about what parts of it have changed. However, we track nearly 20,000 law-related keywords on a daily basis, looking for fluctuations and swings.  As a result, we are able to identify days where large algorithm updates have occurred and quickly begin our research into what they changed. While it’s a challenge to chase a constantly moving target, the state of flux is what fascinates me about SEO and it’s why, even after nearly two decades studying Google’s algorithm, I still love what I do. This is the #1 reason why it’s impossible to know for sure how long it will take to rank.

Google protecting against ranking manipulation

One of the most challenging aspects of SEO is the “waiting”. When you are doing SEO work, you want to see if the changes you make positively (or negatively) impact rankings. However, it’s pretty rare in SEO to get instant answers. It takes a while to see the fruits of our labor. Take for example “link building”, one of the most important parts of the SEO process. On average, a single link built today will not have an impact on rankings for 60-90 days. This is intentional on Google’s part as they have learned through thousands of algorithmic iterations that this helps to prevent gaming of their algorithm. In years past, large volumes of links pointed at a website overnight would send rankings shooting upwards. Google’s algorithm was much easier to manipulate and as a result, the quality of Google search results was poor and filled with spammy web pages that were horrible for the user experience. Google knows that poor quality search results means they lose users, which means less people clicking on paid ads and lower overall profit. To safeguard against this, Google waits for a much longer period than ever before for links that they discover to have any significant impact on rankings.

Additionally, many links that used to help web pages rank better no longer help at all. Or worse, they can actually negatively impact your web rankings.  We have seen low-quality links and links from sites that are part of link networks have this effect time and time again. The truth is, many SEO companies still create low quality links that do absolutely nothing to help improve rankings. This is usually the case with low budget SEO providers who do not have the budgets necessary to do SEO the “right way” (although we see this in other law firm marketing providers as well). Never choose a law firm marketing vendor on price alone. The money you “save” in the end will cost you much more with the lost opportunity to generate cases from the Internet.

Plan accordingly

If you are waiting for SEO results to start working, you need to be considering using paid search marketing for your law firm as you wait for organic results to kick in. In fact, these days Paid Search advertising should absolutely be a part of your Internet marketing strategy. In addition to helping to generate leads, it can also provide incredibly valuable insight for your SEO campaign.

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Click Test Study for 2020: Do Consumers Click on Paid Ads or Organic Results When Trying to Find a Lawyer Online? https://www.ilawyermarketing.com/lawyer-click-test-study-for-2020/ https://www.ilawyermarketing.com/lawyer-click-test-study-for-2020/#respond Sat, 28 Sep 2019 15:40:34 +0000 http://www.ilawyermarketing.com/?p=2396 Many law firms wonder if consumers click on paid ads when searching for lawyers online. From our experience in handling marketing campaigns for law firms for the last 14 years and running research studies in the past, we know that...

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Many law firms wonder if consumers click on paid ads when searching for lawyers online. From our experience in handling marketing campaigns for law firms for the last 14 years and running research studies in the past, we know that consumers do click on Google Ads. However, we wanted to get updated data for 2019 and heading into the 2020 year to find out just where consumers are clicking after running searches on Google. Considering Google is always trying to add more ads into the SERPs, we expect Google to add another ad to the mix in 2020. For this test, we used a SERP image that displayed 4 text ads up top and 1 map ad.

The click heat map graphic below gives us insight into where the participants in our study actually clicked. Each participant was asked to click on 3 links on the page that they would click on if they had conducted this search. The percentage of clicks for each result on the page shows you the exact breakdown each position earned in the study.

lawyer search click test for 2020

Summary of Key Findings

  • 41% of clicks went to paid listings (the first 5 positions on the page, all which were paid, accounted for 40% of clicks)
  • 22% of clicks went to organic maps results
  • 31% of clicks went to maps results if you include the paid map listing
  • 31% of clicks went to organic search results
  • 16% went to the #1 organic position (the highest percentage of clicks for any result on the page)

Important Takeaways for Your Law Firm

  1. Smarter ad types with better quality ads will earn more clicks. Take a look at the 3rd paid listing on the image above. Even though it is in the 3rd highest position on the page, it only received 2% of clicks! Even with such a large percentage of consumers clicking on paid ads these days, simply having ads running doesn’t mean you are going to have success. Google Ads are much more complex than they have been in the past and it takes someone who really knows what they are doing to be running your firm’s ads on Google. If you aren’t A/B testing your ads on a regular basis to look for ways to improve performance, you’re not running an efficient campaign. The ad landscape is constantly changing and you should be trying to fine tune your performance on a regular basis.
  2. You should be creating smarter content on your website on a consistent basis in order to target more search phrases. When I look at the search results here, I notice that even the results that are appearing high on the page organically are still very far down on the page. The #2 organic result here is actually the 10th item down the page, no wonder why it only got 5% of clicks! Focusing only on the most obvious search phrases (personal injury lawyer, car accident lawyer, etc.) is an outdated way of thinking. Smarter marketers will create content that answers users questions related to their situation. Here at iLawyer, we use a combination of historical keyword data, competitive intelligence, keyword research, proprietary software that utilizes Machine Learning in order to generate smarter content ideas for our clients.
  3. Good reviews are still highly important to able to appear in Google Maps listings. It is also highly important to consumers who are looking not only at your star rating but also at the number of reviews you have. Both factors impact your CTR (Click Through Rate). Make sure you are providing EXCELLENT service to the clients you represent and ask them to leave you reviews on Google. While it’s against Yelp’s TOS to ask for reviews, it’s not against Google’s policy. These days consumers are going to leave reviews and they are much more likely to leave a negative review than a positive one, so don’t give them a reason to give you a poor review. As the chart below shows, nearly 88% of consumers want a law firm to have 4 stars or higher so make sure you are paying attention to your online reviews.
    Lawyer Review Stars Minimum
  4. If budget allows in 2020, you should be doing both Google Ads and SEO in order to give yourself the best opportunity to consistently generate cases online. The days of consumers avoiding clicking on paid ads are long gone as a result of Google improving the relevancy of ads and of course Google increasing visibility of paid ads and pushing organics lower on the page. If you aren’t running paid ads, you are missing out on a significant percentage of consumers searching for lawyers online as 40% is a huge number to be missing out on.So what kind of budget is needed to run paid campaigns? That depends on the market you are in. As we have talked about in the past, the price you pay per click can be very expensive. In some of the medium to larger markets in the country, aggressive advertisers will often spend between $50,000-$250,000 a month on paid search (or more). While you don’t need to spend that much, you will typically need to spend at least $10,000 a month or more to get good results although this can be less in softer markets. But if the average cost per click is $100, a $10,000 budget only gets you 100 clicks! SEO on the other hand on average will start at $5-10k a month in a competitive market (less expensive in less competitive markets) and generally provides a much better “Cost per Click” average as long as you have agreat law firm SEO company running your campaign.

Note: The click test image and reviews chart above are taken from our latest study that analyzes how consumers choose lawyers online in 2019-2020. We will be releasing more details of this study at MTMP in October so please contact us if you would like to learn about the study findings.

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When should you start the SEO process? https://www.ilawyermarketing.com/start-seo-process/ https://www.ilawyermarketing.com/start-seo-process/#respond Sun, 07 May 2017 20:56:37 +0000 http://www.ilawyermarketing.com/?p=1705 One of the most common questions we get asked when we are taking over a law firm marketing campaign where we are doing a site redesign is “When should I start SEO?” It’s an important question to ask in order...

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One of the most common questions we get asked when we are taking over a law firm marketing campaign where we are doing a site redesign is “When should I start SEO?” It’s an important question to ask in order to make the decision that is best for you and your practice. For most law firms, it makes the most sense to start the optimization process as soon as possible. The logic here is pretty simple:

The sooner you start SEO, the sooner you will start to see your rankings improve.

Before you can start ranking high for competitive keywords, Google needs to develop trust for your domain. Building trust for a domain does not happen overnight. This is actually a good thing, as it is what helps to prevent most websites that use “spammy” tactics from appearing high on Google search results. The process of Google crawling the web and discovering new trust signals for the domain being optimized takes time, and it’s the reason why the SEO process typically takes 4-12 months to see substantial ranking impact. Certain keywords where many law firms are competing for the same term in an ultra competitive geo area can take even longer. The sooner we can start optimizing your website and start building those trust signals with Google, the faster we can improve your rankings.

One of the most important elements of getting high rankings on Google is getting links from websites that Google trusts. The process of acquiring the right types of links that send positive trust signals to Google is not easy and it takes a lot of time. What is not commonly known however is that a link built today will typically take 10-12 weeks to have any impact on rankings. This is intentional on Google’s part, as it helps Google improve the quality of their search results. For this reason, if your goal is rank as soon as possible, waiting to start the link building process doesn’t make sense when your competitors are ranking ahead of you and you are trying to catch up in Google’s search results.

Website Redesigns: When to start SEO and when to wait

Are you keeping your domain name? If yes, start SEO

If you are using the same domain name, 95% of the time the answer will be yes, start SEO a soon as you can. While the design of a website plays a big part in how well you convert your site visitors into leads and cases, the design does not impact most off-page SEO efforts. This means we can begin optimizing your existing website. When it comes to SEO, there is on-page and off-page SEO. On-page refers to optimization of HTML code and content in your site.  Off-page refers to all the measures that can be taken outside of the actual website being optimized. The heavy majority of the time we spend each month optimizing a website involves off-page SEO so it has nothing to do with touching the HTML of the website at all. While most people only think of link building for off-page search engine optimization, there is a lot more involved with conducting smarter SEO campaigns. Our off-page SEO process involves many things, including:

  • Citation building
  • Citation cleanup
  • Google profile analysis
  • Link profile analysis
  • Google analytics analysis
  • Search console analysis
  • Keyword research
  • Link building
  • Influencer outreach
  • Link monitoring
  • Disavow file submissions
  • Competitor link analysis
  • Competitor content analysis
  • Competitor paid ads research
  • Content gap analysis

All the things listed above can be done without editing any code on your site. Since most site design and development projects take 90-120 days on average, the timing of the site launch will work well with the new trust signals that Google will be gathering for your domain from the SEO process that is already taking place.

If you are changing domains or starting on a new domain, wait to begin SEO

For some of our clients, their domains have been damaged as the result of bad SEO practices and they are better starting over on a new domain. If this is the situation you are in, you should wait to engage in SEO until that site is live. Yes, there is the occasional situation where it could make sense to start the SEO process, especially if it involves cleaning up bad links, disavowing links and NAP consistency issues. However, in most cases we prefer to wait until the new domain has been launched to begin SEO. Similarly, if this is a brand new website starting on a new domain, you will need to wait until the site is launched for SEO to begin.

Questions?

If you have questions on this topic, feel free to reach out to us anytime!

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Google Announces Mobile Friendliness as a Ranking Factor https://www.ilawyermarketing.com/google-announces-mobile-friendliness-ranking-factor/ https://www.ilawyermarketing.com/google-announces-mobile-friendliness-ranking-factor/#respond Sat, 27 Feb 2016 18:46:45 +0000 http://www.ilawyermarketing.com/?p=747 Google has been pushing and promoting mobile friendly web design since last year so it’s no surprise that Google has announced that “mobile friendliness” will be a ranking factor for those searchers on mobile devices starting on April 21, 2015. You may...

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Google has been pushing and promoting mobile friendly web design since last year so it’s no surprise that Google has announced that “mobile friendliness” will be a ranking factor for those searchers on mobile devices starting on April 21, 2015. You may have seen warnings in your webmaster tools account if you have a site that is not mobile friendly as they started sending those out recently. If you haven’t checked your webmaster tools account, you probably should. Regardless of whether you have or have not received a warning, if your site is not mobile friendly then it’s time to seriously consider a responsive website design.  If you are not sure if your site is mobile friendly you can use the Google testing tool.

Above is an example of a mobile friendly test using the testing tool. That’s the message you want to see as Google says your site is mobile friendly.

This is the message that tells you your site is not mobile friendly. You can see the reasons in the above image. Text is too small to read, mobile viewport  not set and links too close together. All this makes for a bad user experience which is why Google is  implementing mobile friendliness as a ranking factor.

Also check your “mobile usability” inside webmaster tools. You can see where to find this here:

The message you want to see here is what you see in the screenshot above: “No mobile usability errors detected.”

Google is giving you a two month notice here which they often do so take advantage of it. If you care about your rankings on mobile (and you should considering how high mobile usage is) it’s time to consider getting a responsive website design.

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Why SEO is Expensive https://www.ilawyermarketing.com/why-is-seo-expensive/ https://www.ilawyermarketing.com/why-is-seo-expensive/#respond Thu, 12 Feb 2015 18:51:00 +0000 http://www.ilawyermarketing.com/?p=755 Actually a more suitable title for this post is “Why is good SEO so expensive”. While it wasn’t always the case, these days there is no such thing as good SEO that can be done for cheap. Why? Because the...

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Actually a more suitable title for this post is “Why is good SEO so expensive”. While it wasn’t always the case, these days there is no such thing as good SEO that can be done for cheap. Why? Because the best SEO takes a lot of hard work, creativity, and expertise. 

While there are hundreds of factors that go into how Google ranks webpages in their search results, the most influential factor to this day remains inbound links. If anybody tells you otherwise, they don’t have a good grasp on how search engines like Google work. In fact, Google actually has tested out an algorithm that excluded links as part of the ranking factor and admitted the results were much worse so links will be part of the ranking equation for quite a while longer. Search engines use links as a measure of a site’s worthiness to rank and in the past Google’s algorithm relied much more heavily on the volume of links coming to your site. Today, it’s much more about the quality of those links. Getting quality links requires a lot of hard work. I’ll get into that shortly but first let’s talk about how low quality links can give your website the unwanted super power of invisibility. 

Cheap SEO = Low quality links = Bad rankings

Over the past 3 years, we’ve handled a large number of law firm websites that have been slapped with penalties or whose rankings were negatively impacted by Google’s Penguin algorithm. Before Google released Penguin in April 2012, many websites earned high rankings on Google simply by creating lots of links to their site with the keywords they wanted to rank for. For example if you wanted to rank for “Omaha personal injury lawyer” the general method used by most SEO’s was to get as many links as possible with those keywords in the hyperlink pointing back to your site. This included cheap and free directories, blog comment spam as well as many other low quality links.  This isn’t just small fly by night type of SEO companies either. Many lawyer marketing companies (including larger ones like Findlaw) would purchase directory link packages that offered thousands of submissions for really cheap. There are still companies offering SEO that still use these tactics today. This results in Google preventing your site from ranking for the very terms you want to rank for. Ultimately this means trying to save money by choosing a low cost SEO provider you end up losing much more when your website fails to produce leads and cases because consumers using Google cannot find you. 

Link building is harder than ever in 2015

The reality is most high quality websites do not want to link to other websites, especially a law firm’s website. Link out to the wrong website and you risk getting your own site penalized so people are very hesitant to link out, more than ever before. Unless you have content that is link-worthy or share-worthy, you’re going to be swimming up-steam without a paddle when it comes to link building efforts. Content doesn’t just mean the text on a page, it could be images, video, interactive pages. For example take a look at this dangers of prescription drugs interactive here or this map we recently created for Ramos & Associates (static image below):

Content like this is much more likely to be linked to from quality websites. It’s not impossible to build links without great content but links are much, much harder to acquire.  The truth is the majority of content on most law firm’s websites are pretty damn boring so who would link out to that?

What does it take to build high quality links?

The link building process, when done right, requires a lot of time and effort. Our typical campaigns involve:

  • Daily research to find potential sites that we would want a link from.
  • Auditing the quality of those websites and an assessment of whether or not Google will value links from the website.
  • Research to find contact information from webmasters, site owners, authors, bloggers, journalists, etc.
  • Collecting and maintaining a list of potential prospects
  • Outreach to prospects via email, social media, phone, mail, etc.
  • Relationship building with contacts
  • Negotiating with websites in order to get links placed
  • Content ideation in order to come up with ideas for link-worthy content

I’ve been running an SEO company for 10+ years now and I can tell you from experience that most companies that provide SEO services are NOT doing this. The good ones are….but really good SEO companies are far and few between. I know because I’ve interviewed hundreds of potential SEO’s over the last few years and I can count on one hand the ones that come from companies that are doing things the right way. When I ask candidates I’m interviewing what their SEO process is like, most are doing things that will cause sites to be penalized or hit by Google’s Penguin algorithm (such as buying directory links, submitting to low quality directories, being over-aggressive with anchor text, comment spamming and even outsourcing their link building to India).

While there are many other factors on top of building links when it comes to ranking, this is the part of the SEO process that is most important and for white-hat SEO agencies it is (at least for us) the most time consuming part of SEO.

There’s more to good SEO than just link building

Even though links are the most important factor, SEO involves a lot more than just link building. It also involves:

  • On-Page Optimization – This involves customizing title tags, meta descriptions (for enhanced click through rates as they don’t factor into rankings as much as they used to), image alt text, linking between pages, schema, rich snippets, etc.
  • Content analysis – Content is a big factor in rankings and the wrong content can cause major ranking problems. If the content on your site is duplicate or even too similar it can cause big ranking problems. Also content that is over-optimized (a mistake made by many websites trying to manipulate rankings) can have ranking issues.
  • Inbound link profile analysis – A link profile that has too many low quality links, over-optimized anchor text or has an unhealthy variety of links can cause serious problems. Additionally negative SEO is now a major concern. We regularly monitor the link profile for this.
  • Site architecture analysis – Sites structured poorly often have a hard time ranking, especially if the site is not set up properly.
  • URL structure analysis – Keyword friendly URL’s are important to have although many abuse and over stuff their URL’s with too many keywords. A proper balance is important for optimal rankings.
  • Site speed testing and optimization – We test site speed of the sites we are optimizing to make sure load time is not negatively impacting rankings. This is one aspect of SEO that is gaining importance as Google knows slow loading sites (especially on mobile) is bad for user experience. What’s bad for user experience is often bad for SEO.
  • Competitor analysis – Using a large SEO tool set, we analyze what your online competitors are doing with their SEO to uncover areas of opportunity for our clients campaigns.
  • Content amplification – When content is really good we use content amplification to help spread the word about the content to increase awareness of your content and your firm.
  • Public Relations – For certain campaigns we create PR strategies to help improve awareness of your law firm. Often PR goes hand in hand with our link building efforts.
  • Keyword research – Consumers don’t always use the same words that you would use when trying to find a lawyer. It’s important to know what keywords to rank for, not just the “head tail” terms that only deliver a very small fraction of total traffic.
  • Social sharing – We aim to get your content in front of influencers in social media if your content is share-worthy. Our experience and software helps us find which influencers to target.
  • Website traffic analysis – Analyzing Google analytics helps to identify areas of opportunity on your site, what content is being most visited or not visited at all. This can be a great source for ideas on which pages should be improved on the site.
  • Visitor engagement metrics analysis – If people are coming to certain pages of your site and leaving right away, this can be bad for SEO as it tells the search engines that visitors do not like the content on your site. That in turn can be bad for rankings. Additionally we monitor what pages on your site are most visited, the time visitors are spending on your site and which links on your page are clicked on most.
  • Crawler/bot accessibility analysis – Errors in robots.txt files can prevent the search engines from indexing your site.

There is a lot involved when it comes to search engine optimization. The bottom line is good SEO cannot be done for cheap when it comes to optimizing for anything competitive. The legal industry is one of the most competitive out there because there is big value in good cases. Don’t make the same mistake that many other law firms do in choosing an SEO provider based on price. If you are missing out on generating leads and ultimately cases as a result of a poor web presence…that is what’s truly expensive.

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Google Penguin Analysis for Law Firms https://www.ilawyermarketing.com/google-penguin-analysis-for-law-firms/ https://www.ilawyermarketing.com/google-penguin-analysis-for-law-firms/#respond Thu, 28 Mar 2013 21:25:26 +0000 http://www.ilawyermarketing.com/?p=843 If you are a law firm and have had your website rankings and traffic crushed over the past year you are not alone. If you hired a SEO company based on price to handle your law firm’s SEO, you shouldn’t...

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If you are a law firm and have had your website rankings and traffic crushed over the past year you are not alone. If you hired a SEO company based on price to handle your law firm’s SEO, you shouldn’t be surprised. Of course keeping costs down is important for any business, but choosing a search engine optimization company based upon price can cost you much more in missed opportunities. Those that have learned their lesson the hard way will make better decisions about who to hire to handle their Internet marketing in the future.

The reality is there are very few law firm marketing companies that are great at what they do and for that reason, I love Google Penguin. Specifically, Penguin is helping to weed out those SEO’s that use cheap tactics for link building. Having quality and authority links to your website are key to ranking well because that is what helps in the level of trust Google has for your website. If Google doesn’t trust your site, you will not rank high in the organic results. So what are quality and authority links? That’s what our SEO team knows better than pretty much any other law firm marketing company out there. When it comes to cleaning up your link profile, you had better know which links are hurting your rankings and which ones are helping.

While we do not offer Google Penguin clean up services, we are offering Google Penguin Penalty Analysis for law firms. This entails a review of your website, confirmation of penalty, and the specific actions that we recommend for you to take. This can include a detailed link analysis of all links coming to your website, anchor text analysis, categorization of all links that are low quality, suggestions for which links need to be to removed, on-page over-optimization analysis, website on-page clean-up, content quality assessment, suggested removal of content pages and list of action items you need to take.

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