Sloppy Code and Losing Clients to Competitors….

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First things first… I don’t have a horse in this race and I didn’t even find the example (Hat tip: my good buddy, Gyi.)  But… it does serve as an example of just how easily poor code can really hurt your business. FWIW, Gyi and I covered this specific example during a recent Lunch Hour Legal Marketing Office Hours session.

I haven’t written a blog post in a long while, but this example has some very small, but important visual content that wasn’t going to come through well in any other medium. So here goes.  Check out the following image and see what’s wrong….

If look really closely at the URL in the bottom left hand of that image, you’ll notice that the click through on the call-to-action “no fee unless you win” goes to…. another law firm’s website (chicagolawyer.com).

And further, if you check out the actual page URL, it’s devernalaw.com/copy-of-home (not their actual homepage) and when I check out the actual homepage, the design is fundamentally different.

So Why Is a Law Firm Site Sending Prospects to a Competitor?

The cynic in me wants to believe this is an underhanded attempt by Staver (chicagolawyer.com) to steal business from a Personal Injury competitor. Maybe the site was hacked, maybe the ‘agency’ that built Deverna Law was a family member of Staver’s (and don’t believe that doesn’t happen). However, the firms are in different geographic markets. In reality, it just looks like the have a common agency, who when building Staver’s site started by doing the WordPress equivalent of a copy and paste of the Deverna site. In doing so, they unintentionally copied an earlier design iteration of the homepage that now links back to Daverna. It’s a lazy approach to building sites and because there clearly was limited, if any Q/A upon launch created this problem. (And FWIW, Gyi thinks this is more intentional than lazy… I’m just being generous here.)

How Can I Check My Own Site?

I don’t want to dismiss the nefariousness of some agencies in deliberately pulling tricks like this.  I’ve seen it happen numerous times – more often as a linkbuilding tactic than directly stealing clients (which would be grossly brazen). So it’s important to occasionally run a query on outbound links coming from your site, to see just what you may be unintentionally promoting. You can do this through a simple audit in numerous tools including: Outlinks in Screaming Frog, the Backlink Audit tool from SEMRush, or the Outgoing Links tool in aHrefs.

Tony Colleluori Taught me to Love Lawyers

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The first time I ever met Tony, he interrupted and upbraided me in front of about 400 lawyers at a New York Bar Association event.

I just learned from Jeena Belil’s Facebook post that Tony died and I write this hoping that one day his sons might come across this post. I don’t write blog posts that often anymore, but some stories just belong written down.  I’m going to share two Tony stories – they day we met and the last day I ever saw him.

So back to that NY Bar Association event back in 2008… I was the only marketing dude for a little known (at the time) start up called Avvo.  Our CEO, Mark Britton and I were on a charm offensive, introducing the concept of Internet-As-Marketing-Channel to lawyers through appearances at Bar Associations around the country. I had a talk about this new thing called SEO and in one of the slides I talked about the importance of Name Search.  The example I sited was a lawyer named Ashley Dupree Russell whose Avvo profile exploded after the New York Times identified Ashley Dupre – the woman involved in the Eliot Spitzer scandal. My talk went something like this:

“…so, now you have traffic to this lawyer’s profile exploding, because her name is getting misidentified by Google as the hooker”

It was at this point that Tony stood up and castigated me in front of the audience:

“Stop!  Stop right now!  Don’t you ever call a woman a hooker.  That lady is someone’s daughter, someone’s wife, someone’s sister.  Don’t you ever dare disrespect a woman like that.”

I sheepishly stumbled through the rest of the talk; afterwards Tony approached me and Mark.  We ended up going out for lunch, along with Jeena and Andrea Cannavina, to a deli nearby and talked for hours about the web and lawyers. I remember asking him if there was anything we could do for him and he gave me a very sad answer: “You can’t do anything for me.  The only thing I really want is something no one can do.  Unless you have a cure for scleroderma.” It’s a horrible disease which his wife, Mary Rose was suffering from (and eventually succumbed to.) At the end of a long lunch, Tony offered to drive Mark and me to La Guardia in some oversized black American car. That day, in one instant, Tony taught me more about lawyers and the meaning of (many, but not all) lawyers and ultimately lead me to crafting the first of our Mockingbird’s 10 Commandments.

1. We Love Lawyers – Attorneys who represent individuals are the primary counterbalance to corporate malfeasance, the greedy insurance industry and the widespread abuse of police and political power. We are honored to play a small role in this system.

My second story is much more personal and fun.  Mockingbird’s VP of Ops, Robert Williams and I were headed to New York. Rob had never been east of the Mississippi and I wanted to give him the ultimate New York experience so I told Tony I’d be in town and I wanted to go out for an Italian meal.  We met Tony (and Andrea again) at some ridiculously Italian restaurant – our waiter was a heavily accented dude named Michaelangelo. Tony showed up late and took another 20 minutes to get to the back of the restaurant where we were seated b/c he had to stop and talk with half of the people in there. We quaffed overpriced wine and devoured plate after plate of impossibly good Italian food. After dinner, as we were leaving, the proprietor insisted on getting picture of us – we were joined by some lady who I believe was the owner’s wife and I have hopes that there’s a pic of Rob, Conrad, Andrea, Tony and this lady sitting on the wall in some amazing Italian restaurant. Many diners recognize Tony, but have no idea who the two Seattleites are. Tony regaled Rob and me with stories over lawyering and those times he took off his JD in pursuit of Justice. We talked about parenting and his boys who he adored and of course his wife, who I never got to meet. It’s around 11:30 and Tony insisted on taking Rob and me for a tour of Manhattan – b/c back in the day, he used to drive a cab and cabbies used to get paid to take tourists around on an unofficial tour.  So we piled into his oversized black Lincoln or Caddy and Tony narrated a tour of the city for Rob. We’re uptown when it hits Tony that the only way to finish the night is to have a pastrami sandwich and this downtown, famous 24 hour Jewish deli.  Now, I’ve just finished about half my weight in linguine vongole as we hurtle through Manhattan on a suspension that clearly needs to be replaced and I’m trying to imagine downing a pastrami sandwich, but Tony insists. We finally arrive and thank Yahweh it was some Jewish holiday and they were closed.

The picture accompanying this post is from that day in 2008 and thanks to Jeena for sharing it. Tony was New York the way you wanted New York to be… Italian, gruff, connected, bombastic yet entirely welcoming.  NYC is a little less NYC than it was last week.

When SEO Wins Create Fewer Clients

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We recently reviewed two law firm’s reports showcasing Traffic and Leads that showcased two diametrically opposed Traffic/Lead patterns – one of which showcases a counter to the predictable (and excusable) assumption that more traffic = more business.

Law Firm A

This is a long standing client – showing long standing SEO growth and a corresponding growth in leads over time.  This is a volume, personal injury shop in an aggressive growth mode; our SEO strategy has successfully supported their office expansion over the past 3 years, both in Organic and Local SEO. This is very much what you would typically expect to see.. growing traffic, growing leads, growing firm.  Note the conversion rate (Leads:Traffic) stays roughly constantly at slightly above 1%.

But it doesn’t always work out that way….

Law Firm B

This firm is the exact opposite… organic traffic growth is actually leading to a decline overall in inbound Leads.  This firm is much less typical – they operate within a very very specific niche and their traffic:lead ratio is off-the-charts low (and trending lower). Put simply – due to their niche, their SEO strategy operates very very high up in the funnel – from a business perspective it takes tons of traffic to generate a small number of highly valuable leads.  This site has historically converted traffic into leads at a rate of 0.25% – much lower than Law Firm A’s more typical 1%.

So what’s going on here? This is a firm that wins at the highest level of the sales funnel – primarily informational site for research based searches that sometimes, eventually, perhaps, maybe a convert a small portion turn into actual customers. And we’ve been successfully optimizing the site for these high funnel research queries for years now. And then things changed…

The reversal in the total number of leads… that happened in conjunction with a Google Core Algo Update of March ’23.  While we’ve continued to improve the site’s overall traffic, absolute volume of leads has declined meaning their already low conversion rate has dropped by an additional 22% down to 0.20%.  We’ve now got three consecutive months of increased traffic corresponding to decreased Leads. If we were measuring our success on traffic, we’d be golden, but traffic doesn’t pay the bills. Time to readjust the site’s overall strategy – specifically it’s content strategy to realign with conversions.

Search Generative Experience for Lawyers – What We Know

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From a marketing perspective, the real magic of AI generated content is not the efficient propogation of more and more legal content – but instead,  AI’s  potential to change the way people interact with search.  ChatGPT was a existential threat to Google, because of its potential to flip the consumers behavior from going to a search engine to find a pre-existing piece of content, to interacting with a computer to generate in real-time a 100% customized result for that individual.  The infinite long-tail.

Google’s Search Generative Experience, announced at Google.IO on May 10th is exactly that.  From my perspective this is the most radical change to search in more than a decade.  If it sticks (and I have no reason to think it won’t), SGE is a fifth marketing channel crowding the SERPS, with it’s own algorithms, nuances and competitive realities to compete in.  LSAs, the current darling sitting atop the SERPS will be, at best, pushed down, or disappear entire – note that in the beta we’ve played with LSAs have disappeared in the interface with SGE is present.  Organic listings will be further deprecated and zero click queries will explode, robbing traffic (although less so on conversions) from every single website.

Conclusions from the SGE Beta:

  • Google Business Profiles – From what we’ve seen, GBP is heavily integrated into SGE and do feature heavily in queries – the Local 3 pack in the traditional SERP is replaced by 5 results.  The interesting question (unanswered for now), is are these results driven from the Local algo, or is this an entirely new computation that just happens to use GBP profiles, albeit differently.
  • Google Ads will be incorporated directly into the SGE and you won’t (for now) be able to segment ads or even reporting for SGE vs non SGE campaigns.  This keeps more and more advertisers in the bidding ecosystem, which ultimately drives overall revenue higher for Google.
  • YMYL – exhortations from Google that SGE won’t show up for Your Money Your Life categories does clearly NOT apply to legal based on what we’ve seen.
  • Directories – the Large Language Models that drive AI generated content seem to rely heavily on Directories when assessing the quality of lawyers. Obvious example – Avvo Rating scores lawyers from 1-10, this is very easy for a LLM to “interpret” that the lawyer is quality. Thus, SGE may  actually be the savior of the legal marketing dinosaur that is legal directories.
  • Authorship – Google is going big on transparency in results; the 10 year old concept of authorship (i.e. using the digitally assessed reputation of the actual author as a ranking factor) may have never actually disappeared even when Google Plus died due to spam (see my article on rel=author spam here: FindLaw Selling Pre-SEO’d Websites). SGE results suggest their drivers use author reputation as a ranking factor.
  • Perspectives and About This – Google simultaneously launched two additional products that provide more transparency as to the actual results AND are focused on showcasing an array of opinions about issues. From their own words: “we’re going to be expanding the range of helpful information” I believe this is Google’s attempt to counteract criticisms of the echo chamber effect of search, in which current results are influenced by previous behavior, leading to self-reinforcing bubble of results.
https://youtu.be/gSS9KDtJzB0

Is Ngage’s Chat Selling Your Leads?

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To not bury the lead (sorry for the pun): yes, Ngage is funneling leads who contacted your firm through their Chat product to other law firms through one of the Internet Brands lead buying products. It’s a combination of gross business practices, simplistic technology, a horrible user experience and creates very angry consumers and lawyers.

First Some History

In February of 2021, Ngage launched the beta of their Ngage Consumer Assistance product via an email they sent to clients with an attachment about the product (read details: NGage Consumer Assistance) and an invitation to opt in to their Beta program via a page here.  Key to that webpage is the phrase:

“There’s no commitment or obligation. If a feature comes along that you like, you can opt into it. If you don’t like the idea, you don’t have to.”

The bold is my emphasis.  The first email was followed up in September of 2021, presumably after low opt-in enthusiasm and/or the product coming out of “beta”, with another email about the product, and this is where things get gross:

We’re offering a new feature, Consumer Assistance, to reduce the time you spend responding to leads you don’t want.
Attached is a short infographic with updated terms we’ve put together so you can see how it works! In short, if a chat is not relevant to your firm, with this new feature, we will automatically no-fee it for you, and attempt to help the visitor by providing them with helpful general legal articles or connecting them with an attorney appropriate for their inquiry.
To better serve our clients and your website visitors, we will be deploying Consumer Assistance to all Ngage legal clients. If you’d like additional information on this feature or if this does not seem like a good fit for your firm, please let me know.
Again, the bold emphasis is mine.  There’s a lot to unpack here, starting with, they auto-enrolled their entire clientele into this program via a nondescript email.  Secondly, they are providing consideration (later this would increase to include a $10 payout, which raises all sorts of ethical legal concerns) for participation in it. Finally, there’s an extremely vague explanation of how it works, “if a chat is not relevant to your firm, we will automatically…” How exactly is “not relevant” automatically determined?
The actual implementation of the program descends further into an ethical and end-user quagmire.  From what I have been able to determine, the product tries to ascertain the prospect’s geographic location and practice area interest via either area code, (captured during chat), IP address, or through the chat itself. The problem is that it’s not good at doing so. (I did contact Ngage on three different occasions for clarification on how this works, but no one got back to me, so for now, you’ve got my conjecture on how it works bolstered by real life examples of their geolocation not working.) So for example, if my good buddy Gyi still has his 734 cell phone number from his glory days as Tom Brady’s 7th string understudy at the University of Michigan, but now lives in Chicago, and calls a law firm while visiting Las Vegas, NGage may determine that he’s “not relevant” to a Chicago lawyer. The program then automatically shoots Gyi’s contact information, collected during the Ngage chat, to multiple non-Chicago area lawyers who are enrolled in one of Internet Brand’s lead purchasing programs.  And those firms, aggressively follow up with Gyi.

Think it can’t get worse?

Ngage impersonates the law firm when communicating with the ultimate end client. The example in the image below (I was asked to block out all names from the law firm in question, as a condition for me sharing this as they are deeply concerned about the ethical ramifications of being auto-enrolled in this program) was sent to a brand new client of a law firm, ostensibly from that law firm.  And yes, if you dig a little, the actual email comes from @robot.zapier, but the From is the “Smith and Jones Law Firm” and it’s signed from the Intake Support Coordinator of the Legal Intake Division at the “Smith and Jones Law Firm”.  Again, I can’t stress this enough – law firms were auto-enrolled in this, have never seen these emails being sent on their behalf and aren’t involved in the evaluation of which matters which get forwarded.
So this is the logical conclusion of what can happen: prospect fills out Ngage chat – law firms signs prospect – due to the product not accurately geo-identifying the prospect, Ngage erroneously determines prospect is “not relevant” – Ngage impersonates the law firm and sends newly signed client an email ostensibly from the law firm declining the engagement – client’s personal contact info is forwarded to three out-of-state law firms – client gets bombarded by law firms who assiduously hit up client via email and aggressively automated texts – client, who already distrusts lawyers, is confused and furious – law firm loses client – client writes scathing Google review – Ngage profits.

But The Disclaimer…

When confronted with these concerns, NGage highlighted the fine-print disclaimer in their chat (below).
We respect your privacy. Your personal information will be supplied to the chosen business. If the chosen business is unable to provide you with the services you requested, we may provide your personal information to another business who can assist you. Those who will receive your information may contact you using modern phone equipment, which may include auto-dialers and text. Consent is not a condition for purchase or hire. The information disclosed in this conversation does not constitute or create a lawyer-client relationship.
But come on… if you are going to pull this, at least use the technology that works.
I’ve never been a big fan of Ngage:
  • Salespeople market chats as low “cost-per-lead”, when the chat is a conversion mechanism, not a marketing channel.
  • “Cost per” business model is outdated – there’s lots of fixed chat options out there.
  • Because Ngage is a conversion mechanism and installed on (most, if not all) pages, they can generate a ton of business intelligence data for the Internet Brands legal keiretsu (Avvo, Nolo, Martindale, Lawyers.com, Captora and others) about what is driving conversions for any given firm.  Data is power.

Now, I get what they are trying to do – arbitrage leads from lawyers who can’t use them. In theory it’s not a terrible concept, but the implementation of the grossly monikered Consumer Assistance Program and the way it was rolled out was deliberate – they knew lawyers would hate this and snuck it in via email. Furthermore, if a vendor is going to take it upon themselves to refer out leads, they had better be 100% infallible in identifying relevant vs. irrelevant leads; that’s just not the case here.

Finally, even if all of this worked perfectly, I’d argue Ngage clients should leverage those unqualified leads (by either practice area or geography) to generate their own referral revenue or at least leverage those leads to forge relationships instead of thinly monetizing them through an automated third party referral service.

NOTE: As a courtesy, I did share this with Ngage prior to publishing and received the following reply which does nothing to elucidate how their product works, how it was rolled out nor clarify any of the facts above.

Unfortunately Conrad Saam is completely misinformed. Ngage clients can find an accurate report of how consumer assistance works here or they can contact their Ngage account representative at any time and we are happy to help.

ALERT: Google Business Profile Suspensions

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In general, agencies who rely on fear for their marketing annoy me, but this is a situation in which Google’s moves have massive ramifications, so I’m sharing our experiences here so hopefully you can avoid these problems.

Transcript:

So I need to give you an urgent and super important update about something that’s going on with Google. Do not under any circumstances, do not touch your Google My Business profile right now. Google is in a complete mess on this and they are suspending accounts like crazy. We recently had one of our clients that account suspended.

We just added a UTM parameter, to their click to link and boom. Suspended not great. And there’s a couple other people who are experiencing the same thing. , These are two people that I know in the agency world. Not neither of them are legal specific, but these are two of the best, Blake Denman.

Until Google my biz fixes their shit, it’s highly advisable to not edit a single thing in G gmb, one of our clients just had their listing suspended for suspicious activities along with Blake Demond. We have the amazing queen of local Joy Hawkin, hearing a lot of agencies report in increase in Google business profile suspensions in the last week.

 Jason Brown has commented on this as well, so the people who are in the know right now hands off on making any changes to your Google business profile. Because getting suspended or getting out of being suspended is a huge pain in the ass.

Dark Social Done Right: Dean Blachford’s Charity Softball Tournament

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I’ve talked and written recently about Dark Social for Law Firms.  I keep getting asked for examples of firms that are doing it right.  In this talk, Dean Blachford talks about how he establishing a targeted referral source in his brand new law firm in a city where he “knew nobody”.  The key – leveraging the power of social media to drive success for an in-person event and making it better year over year.  It’s an inspirational talk and Dean shares some of the tactics he’s picked up to make the event amazingly successful.

Google’s Helpful Content Update (Lawyer Edition)

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It’s not often that Google announces an upcoming algorithm change, and when they do, it typically means a major changes in overall SERP results. My prognostication is that the Helpful Content update, announced late last week and scheduled for a two week roll-out starting this week, is no different.  While the legal industry is not specifically called out as being problematic, I do anticipate large fluctuations due to many overly aggressive tactics deployed by legal, especially as it pertains to content. Google directly described the upcoming change as “meaningful”.

The Helpful Content Update (seriously – why can’t we just call this HICUP?) update in Google’s own words:

These launches are part of a broader, ongoing effort to reduce low-quality content and make it easier to find content that feels authentic and useful in Search.

What does this mean concretely for law firms?

Last week, I presciently posted this ad for a content development tool that uses AI to pump out pages and pages of content: “Let Jasper Write Your Marketing Copy for Free Artificial intelligence makes it fast and easy to create content for your blog, social media, website, and more!” From what I can tell from Google’s announcement, it’s tools like Jasper that are firmly within the targets of the “Helpful Content” algo update.  

This update is extremely similar to the Panda update from February, 2011.  For those of you who weren’t in the SEO game at that point – what happened in the past may be instructive of what to expect over the upcoming months. Panda was designed to root out content farms that were daily vomiting out thousands of pages of well ranking pages and monetizing that traffic through advertising. While the key targets were Demand Media (eHow) and Answers.com; many many other sites were caught up in the resulting algo update which focused on content.  The key issue here is that the Panda algo update had site-wide ramifications, which meant that a predominance of low quality content on a domain would negatively impact the traffic to high quality pages as well. Following Panda, Google noted that it impacted 12% of searches – meaningful indeed.

Prognostications

I spent the weekend reading through posts and prognostications of some of my favorite SEO nerds and Google directly.  Based on my experience with Panda and parsing Google’s announcement, here’s my expectations of what’s going to happen:

  1. Some legal sites are going to get utterly destroyed. Especially those that have deployed AI written content.  I’ve long been a critique of the blog blog blog mantra and believe this is going to come back to roost. There are a slew of legal marketing agencies who utilize AI generated content and then mark it up to human rates to their clients… meaning the law firms (may) have no idea they’ve been deploying a steady diet of vapid computer generated content that will be targeted. If your relationship with your SEO vendor includes something along the lines of…. “post 11 pieces of content every month”, I’d be particularly concerned. This goes for the small consultants as well as some of the big box providers.
  2. Given that there’s so much long tail content out there, and much of that has been AI driven, I’d expect to see large variability in ranking results for long tail terms.  This is, by definition, statistically difficult to ascertain, especially for lower traffic sites.
  3. In general, I’ve avoided Word Count guidelines (ie. Google like to see X number of words on pages).  However, over the past 24 months, we’ve seen a trend towards longer format content ranking – 1,000-1,500 words. It’s very possible that this trend reverses – Google specifically calls out word count as NOT being a ranking factor.  Google even calls out Word County focus as a particular concern: “Are you writing to a particular word count because you’ve heard or read that Google has a preferred word count?” From a precedent perspective, Panda specifically hit pages with inflated word count that thematically recycled concepts in order to bolster keyword density.  From a user perspective, overly verbose, redundant and repetitive prose (see what I did there) doesn’t always serve to easily elucidate consumers as to their legal issue and options.
  4. I think there’s a mild warning for those sites that heavily utilize Practice Area + Geo Pages to rank in nearby cities.  “Rockville Criminal Defense Lawyer” “North Rockville Criminal Defense Lawyer” etc.  Those pages have always fallen in the (very) gray hate area wrt to search guidelines; however, they do perform very well.  They are also painstaking to recreate with unique content. It’s possible poor executions of this tactic may be impacted as well.
  5. I don’t believe those pages sites that are plagued with thin useless pages that are either unintentionally generated through technology (think WordPress /tag pages) or those blog posts that are particularly useless (2 sentences in the “Mary Jones Won Superlawyers in 2014” blog post) are going to be hit any harder than they already are (which would be a departure of how Panda impacted sites). But again, this is just my conjecture from parsing Google’s wording – “search engine-first content is less likely to perform” and I believe that Google has long abandoned the notion that posting frequently is the key to SEO (despite the fact that many agencies and content consultants still preach this garbage).
  6. While Google specifically doesn’t call this a penalty, this is purely semantics b/c it’s going to look a lot like a penalty (allbeit not manual). This also means recovery is going to be dependent on Google’s algo deciding when things are better (not a human).
  7. This is English only (for now)… so those of you with already garbage Spanish pages and technical implementations have nothing to fear other than competitors doing it the right way.
  8. Very loose construct, if you have over 1K indexed pages with extensive content, I’d be worried.  Check out my article on calculating the Useless Content Ratio to see how poorly Google considers your content already.

What to Expecting (When You Are Expecting an SEO Nightmare)

  1. This algo update is going to take two weeks to roll out.  Starting roughly today(ish).  The next two weeks may showcase banana-boat-crazy fluctuations in your site’s ranking and traffic performance.  Ride it out.
  2. If you do get hit negatively, possibly expect a long recovery – even assuming you can identify and solve problems expediently, Panda recovery took many months b/c Google didn’t rerun updates for a long period. Helpful Content is different from Panda in that is constantly running; but I believe fixing this problem is a human, non-scaleable solution.
  3. Instead of going a comprehensive Content Strategy Audit and review (which is painful, takes time and gets exponentially harder the larger your site) consider just no-indexing a bunch of pages as a short-term bandaid. John Mueller gives this approach a qualified endorsement: “noindex is fine. Consider if all we see are good signals for your site, that’s a good sign.”
  4. This won’t be ambiguous… In an interview with Glenn Gabe, Danny Sullivan noted “if a site is impacted by the Helpful Content Update, then that impact should be visible”.
  5. The worse your overall content is the bigger the impact.  From Sullivan: “sites with a lot of unhelpful content on the site, like content created for search engines over humans, then you could see a stronger effect…”

Human Content Alternatives

Get ready to yell at your agency about your content strategy. And if you are already panicking now, it’s time to a)start looking into managing your low end legacy content and b)start writing good great stuff!  A great starting point for solid, legal specific content is John Reed at Rain BDM and Allen Watson at Blue Seven Content. Yeah – they expensive but if your site tanks, will look like a bargain.

Calculating the Useless Content Ratio (UCR)

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The Useless Content Ratio

This post is long long overdue… I’ve been using and talking about he Useless Content Ratio for years.  Google’s upcoming “helpful content” algo update is forcing my hand, because it looks much like the Panda update from the past, during which we made extensive use of the Useless Content Ratio.

The UCR is very simple: the ratio of pages on a website that have generated traffic during a specific time period.  It’s application is twofold. First, to determine in aggregate, how Google views the overall content quality of a site, simply put, if lots of pages aren’t generating traffic, it indicates that the site either lacks the authority to support the volume of pages it has and/or that the content is overwhelmingly garbage.  In the case of Panda (and the upcoming Helpful Content update) which both have sitewide implications, a preponderance of pages that don’t generate traffic indicates that these algo changes will negatively impact the good content that exists on the otherwise bloated site.   The second application of the UCR is to guide firms into how much they should be investing in additional content.  Put simply, if 90% of pages have generated traffic during the past 6 months, then fire up the keyboard, because those new posts are likely to generate traffic.  Conversely, if only 10% of a site’s pages have generated traffic during the past 6 months, why on earth would anyone continue to barf out vapid blog posts that no one is going to see? This is typically done in search of the elusive long tail searches.  What many don’t grok is that without the authority to support a huge pagecount, these long tail pages will never surface in search results.

UCR is a Blunt Instrument

Now – its very important to note that UCR does NOT provide a page level analysis – we are looking at the site overall. So a high UCR doesn’t mean you shouldn’t publish that key piece of content for which you want to be hired.  Instead, it’s an overall indication of how Google views the quality of content on your site vis-a-vis the site’s overall backlink authority.  It not only provides us with guidance as to the aggressiveness of ongoing content development efforts, but also reveals those sites who may be solid candidates for content pruning – the process of going through content page by page and determining if that content should be kept, killed or consolidated. The subsequent reduction in pagecount actually results in greater traffic and more conversions (leads) which turn into consultations because ideally you are keeping the business-relevant content and jettisoning the irrelevant useless content. I’ve written Case Studies extensively on this for Search Engine Land back in 2017: More Content Less Traffic Part 1 and More Content Less Traffic Part 2. Here are two graphs from those articles that showcase how a reduction in pagecount correlates with an increase in traffic:

Calculating the UCR

Calculating the UCR is very simple.  First, the denominator is the number of pages on your site.  You can use a simple “site:example.com” to find an index count; however, I find that number to be very inconsistent. Instead, you are better off utilizing page count data out of Google Search Console. I wouldn’t recommend using your sitemap for this, b/c in many cases sitemaps contain errors, or more frequently omissions either deliberate or unintentional. Next you need to calculate the numerator of the fraction… this is done (relatively) simply straight out of Google Analytics through the Landing Pages report.

  1. Select a reasonablly long timeframe.  The lower your overall traffic volume, the longer this timeframe should be.  At a minimum look at 3 months of traffic if your site generates >2.5K users/monthly.  Below that volume, I’d probably look at 6 or even 9 months.
  2. Segment by Organic Traffic only
  3. Open the Landing Pages report under Behavior (don’t get misled by the other “Behavior” report which can be found under the Audience reports. Why Google has two different reports called Behavior is beyond me.)
  4. This will generate a list of landing pages (i.e. the first page someone saw on your site) from organic and local search queries over the specified timeframe.
  5. Scroll to the bottom right hand corner to get a total number of these landing pages.

Now you now the percentage of your pages that drive traffic (or don’t). Use this to mathematically evaluate the priority of continued content posting or if you should consider a content reduction as part of your Content Strategy (which is more likely the case for firms who have been aggressively chasing the SEO golden goose for years.)