A *strong* Case for Avvo Pro

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Avvo has done really well with email marketing – and they are very good at using email to drive business to their advertisers.  And I just received a great email from Avvo that reinforces that point oh so very visually:

 

So – Heidi’s direct contact information shows up not only directly in Avvo’s search results pages, but also in their follow-up emails.  Would this tip the scales in favor of contacting Heidi over Stephen?  Not sure…. but if I was reading this on my phone, and speaking with an attorney was just a click away.  At $50, if you have reasonable volume of views on Avvo, that may be some $ well spent.

Full Disclosure here:  I still hold a bundle of early stage Avvo stock.

Legal Connect with Google Workshop – Two October Events

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We’re happy to announce not one, but two Legal Connect with Google events for October.

This is a free, day-long, hands-on Workshop specifically designed to assist lawyers in evaluating their online marketing effectiveness.  Classes are focused on local, natural and paid search and are taught by Google employees and Mockingbird founder, Conrad Saam.

So if you wanted to attend the pilot event this week at Google HQ in Mountainview, but were unable to, there’s now a second and third chance.

Victoria Fabiano, Google Strategic Partner Manager
Victoria Fabiano, Google Strategic Partner Manager

Dates and Venues

October 7 and 8 in New Orleans.   Details and Sign Up

October 17th in Google’s New York City Office.  Details and Sign Up

Workshop Description

During this intensive Workshop, experts from Google and Mockingbird guide attendees through a 12 page worksheet to evaluate the efficacy of their current online marketing efforts, with an eye towards identifying specific weaknesses or missed tactics. This is NOT a conference with talking heads delivering thinly veiled sales pitches from sponsored powerpoints, but instead a hands-on, interactive education, empowering attendees with actionable tools & tactics.

This is a HANDS ON workshop, you will need a laptop and access to your Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools and AdWords accounts, as well as your firm’s website CMS.

Elizabeth Olinger, Google Account Manager
Elizabeth Olinger, Google Account Manager

The Agenda

  • 8:30am-9:00am | Registration & Continental Breakfast
  • 9:00am-9:15am | Kick off & Welcome
  • 9:15am-10:00am | The Online Legal Marketplace
  • 10:00am-11:00am | Google Analytics & Business Metrics
  • 11:00am-11:15am | Break
  • 11:15am-12:15pm | Search – Organic
  • 12:15pm-1:15pm | Networking Lunch
  • 1:15pm-2:15pm | Search Local + Advanced Linkbuilding
  • 2:15pm-3:15pm | Search Paid

 

Best Free Legal Directories: 2016

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There are thousands of legal directories out on the web and more popping up each day. Some are awesome and some are atrocious. In this post we’ll focus on what Mockingbird has deemed as the best free legal directories from 2015.  Why best?  Because they deliver … clients, or search authority that delivers clients.  But mostly… clients.

First, let’s review 4 compelling reasons every lawyer should be actively creating listings on these sites.

  1. Clients – As with any marketing effort, your end goal is to gain more clients at a lower cost. It doesn’t get easier or more cost-efficient than acquiring a new client through a free listing on a third party website.
  2. Citations – When Google sees citations for your business showing up consistently across the web (same name, address, and phone number), the more inclined Google will be to serve up your business in localized search results.
  3. Links – It’s all about the links baby! Linkbuilding is one of the most daunting tasks we face as SEOs. Directory listings are the lowest hanging fruit in terms of legitimate linkbuilding. (Be careful though, low quality links can do my harm than good.)
  4. Directory sites dominate – More often than not, legal directories command much of the real estate in SERPs (search engine results pages). The screenshot below shows results for the search query “Nashville Divorce Lawyer” – notice how 4 of the 7 results show are for directory sites rather than individual firms? If you don’t have a listing on the sites that are consistently dominating search results, then you are missing out on a lot of eyeballs and potential clients.  We’ve been saying for years that this is going to change… and we’ve been wrong year after year. So play the directory game, because they are already winning.

Nashville Lawyer Search Query

Best Free Legal Directories – Ranked by Mockingbird

Below are Mockingbird’s favorite free sites ranked by our (incredibly official) Birdie Rating that accounts for things like: ease of use, whether or not the link is followed, competitiveness, and search presence.

Avvo

Birdie Rating 5
Link: No follow
Why we like it: Industry leader; attorney endorsements; continually does well in the search results.  Unfortunately Avvo’s removed the follow link on your profile a few years ago; but you can still drive business with a robust profile and/or aggressive engagement in their Q&A section. (Oh – and Conrad used to run their marketing back in the day when it was just the speck of an idea.)

Justia

Birdie Rating 5
Link: Followed
Why we like it: ROT (return on time) is maximized – along with a link from Justia, you also get a listing in the Oyez directory and in Cornell directory.  We also love their founder, Tim Stanley, who is mad-scientist-smart about all things legal marketing and the original founder of ehmmmm… FindLaw.

Lawyer Legion

Birdie Rating 4
Link: Followed
Why we like it: Ties to NORML and NCDD so it’s especially great for DUI lawyers

Lawdeeda

Birdie Rating 4
Link: Followed
Why we like it: Strong link; non-competitive; we love the founder Brint Crockett who has done more than his share to expose legal marketing chicanery.

 

Lawyer Central

Birdie Rating 3
Link: No followed
Why we like it: User friendly

Findlaw

Birdie Rating 2
Link: Followed
Why we like it: High authority site offering a strong link (listing bonus includes free calls from commission-driven sales people in perpetuity)

Martindale Hubbell

Birdie Rating 2
Link: No link – citation only
Why we like it: Uses birth date as safeguard against manipulation and spammy tactics; strong domain that consistently performs well in legal search queries

Popular Membership-Based Legal Directories

Listed below are niche practice area sites that require paid memberships and/or an application for acceptance into the directory. 

Bankruptcy:
nacba.org

Consumer Advocates:
naca.net

Criminal/DUI:
ncdd.com
aapda.org
norml.org
nacdl.org

Elder Law:
nelf.org
naela.org

Employment:
nela.org

Family Law:
nacchildlaw.org
aaml.org

General:
nlg.org
bestlawyers.com
superlawyers.com

Immigration:
aila.org

Mediation:
attorney-mediators.org

Trial:
thenationaltriallawyers.org
nlg-npap.org

Trust & Estate:
actec.org
naepc.org

Looking Ahead

It’s a new year; do yourself a favor and take a few hours out of your weekend to create listings in the above directories.

If you would like to see the slide deck from Mockingbird’s webinar, view the recording, or just say hi, please feel free to email me directly.

Google Erroneously Labelling Lawyers with Professional Misconduct

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Google’s Answer Box is a simple function that provides answers to basic questions directly in the search results. For example, “what time is it in London” or “how many square miles in an acre?”  The goal is to utilize content from extremely trusted websites to answer simple user questions without requiring a click through.

Answer Box results haven’t shown up heavily in legal.  Although that might have just changed – specifically for lawyer name searches.  Google is now pulling data directly from Avvo profiles for name search information – pulling Titles and work history directly into the search results on a simple name search.  This also includes a click through to the Avvo website – which could provide Avvo with a huge traffic jump.

Legal Answer Box

But note the horrible implementation – the title of the Answer Box is “Professional Misconduct” (not say…. the lawyer’s name).  At first blush (don’t make me think) it looks like poor Martha has been sanctioned in all of her jobs, going back to 1984.  (If you actually click through to the result, you’ll find that the Martha Patterson listed does NOT have any professional misconduct history.)  So – great idea, but horrendous implementation from Google.  This is a particularly tricky match – there are probably hundreds of Martha Pattersons in the US – and seven Martha Patterson profiles in the Avvo directory.

Now its highly possible that Google is just testing this among professional service providers (and the bad user experience above suggests that is the case) and is going to ratchet it back; although my instinct tells me your are going to get more and more information about individuals directly in the search box.

Online Reputation Management: How to do Reviews

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Reputation management is yet another candidate in a long list of considerations you need to take into account when managing your online presence. In addition to proactively keeping your citations correct, building links, posting fresh content, structuring your site, and on and on, it can be tiring to know there’s one more thing that threatens to undermine your hard work and past successes. But anyone who tells you marketing is easy is a liar. There’s a reason this is our job.

 

What is reputation management? Why is it important?

The concept of reputation management is as simple as it sounds. If you want to be found (and subsequently hired), you need to put your information out on the internet. Moz’s 2014 Local Search Ranking Factor survey listed review signals as having 10% of total influence on search rankings. In addition, online reviews are trusted more than ads in almost every medium, and 35% of clients say they use online reviews to research new attorneys (thanks to the legal technology team at Software Advice for going out of their way to provide the raw info from that study). Having profile pages on sites like Avvo, Yelp, Google+, etc., makes you more likely to be found when someone searches for your practice. But getting clients isn’t just about whether your online presence is big or small, it’s also about whether that presence is good or bad. It doesn’t matter if you’re the top of the local pack for “personal injury lawyer New York” – if you show a 1-star average from 10 reviews, people will skip over you and go to the next attorney in line.

Managing your reputation means getting high-quality reviews from clients across multiple platforms, making sure those ratings are glowing and natural (no spam!), and dealing with bad reviews as they occur. It also means ranking well for search results directly related to your business, so that your results stand above any bad PR pieces that show up in the SERPs. But that’s a lot of moving pieces, so this post is just going to focus on one of the most obvious parts: getting good reviews. Let’s look into what you can do to have a great online reputation.

 

Getting clients to review you

The most important step towards getting good reviews is providing excellent service. You will find it very hard to get praise if you don’t deserve it. But once you’ve jumped over that minor hurdle, the next the best catalyst for reviews is asking. If you don’t ask for reviews, the only people who will give you any are the ones who seek out opportunities to do so. This usually lends to you looking worse online than in real life because angry clients are far more likely to go out of their way to review than happy ones.

At Mockingbird, we find that the best way to ask for reviews is in person after the case is over, then letting clients fill out the review in their own time afterwards. Strike up a conversation when the client comes by to fill out paperwork or make a payment, and tell them how much a review means to your business. Getting a verbal agreement from your client is one of the most effective means of guaranteeing they will review you afterwards. Look them in the eye, and gain their approval with a handshake. After that meeting, make the process is easy as possible by following up with an email linking them to your relevant profile(s) – except for Yelp, more on that in a bit. Another benefit of asking for reviews individually is that you can pick and choose who you want to represent you online. If you won a case but you don’t think the client will be receptive, consider not reaching out for a review.

Some people just don’t have the time to watch all their review sites and check in with each individual client, so they turn to automated review management tools like GetFiveStars or other automatic review solicitors. The usual trick with these is to send an initial email asking for feedback. If the reviewer gives a low score, they are thanked for their opinion and nothing else is done. If the review gives a high score, they are instead prompted to voice their opinions on one of several sites. We’ve tried this before, but our conversion rates were almost non-existent. The major problem is that this tactic is used for business with large client volumes, like restaurants or hair salons. Law firms and attorneys don’t deal with nearly as many clients, so you end up with a pretty bad return on investment. If you’re still interested in watching for reviews, consider a tracking software like ReviewTrackers so you don’t have to constantly visit your Justia and Avvo profiles.

 

Optimizing your impact

The strength of reviews is dependent on a lot of factors beyond your average ranking. Moz’s 2014 Local Search Ranking Factors survey emphasizes the following:

  • Quantity of reviews
  • Authority of sites hosting those reviews
  • Diversity of sites hosting those reviews
  • Freshness of reviews, and the rate those reviews were added
  • Whether your rating shows up next to your search result (need 5 or more Google+ reviews)

The first on that list is quantity, which has become more important over the past year. Only about 8% of potential customers consider a business trustworthy if there is 1 review. For 85% of potential clients to consider you trustworthy, it’s good to have at least 10 reviews. Now these should be quality reviews so you can’t expect this to be done in a few days or even a few months. Like everything in SEO, good reputation management takes time.

In addition, you should be aware of what sites your reviews show up on, because there are a lot of options. A surprisingly large amount of users go through Yelp, along with Super Lawyers, Martindale-Hubbell, and Avvo. You can get reviews on Google+, Avvo, Justia, Yelp, and other directories, but ask your clients where they found your business so you what to focus on.

Yelp is a unique beast in that they don’t want you to ask your clients for reviews, something we’ve discussed in one of our LMQ videos. However, Yelp’s suggested ways to “remind customers”, such as profile links in your e-mail signature or stickers on your business door, aren’t effective for attorneys (and can be very tacky). We firmly believe that you should still proactively ask your clients for reviews, but avoid invoking Yelp’s ire by not explicitly stating where to go. A softer approach is more appropriate: “We really appreciate reviews because it helps our web presence, several places you can go are: [your top 3 targeted directories]”. In a follow-up email, don’t send them a direct link to your Yelp page, but ask them to search for your name.

Important Note: Even though you won’t be regarded as trustworthy if you have no reviews, potential clients will find you even less trustworthy if you have mostly bad reviews. Do not ask for a review unless you’re confident it will be a positive one.

 

The evils of astroturfing

It’s common to want an easy way out of this problem. Despite your best efforts, clients may not be likely to review you and not every review will be a raving 5 stars. At these times it may be tempting to look for another way to get your ratings up. But fight the urge. In addition to be less than fair to potential clients, it’s also dangerous for you.

Yelp is big on keeping reviews legitimate. They’ve sued attorneys for faking reviews before (we blogged about that incident), and they go over reviews to make sure nothing looks spammy or forced. Avvo will investigate reviews by hand multiple times, even to the point of asking reviewers to provide evidence that they worked with given attorneys. Remember that these sites make their livelihood off of consumers’ trust, so they are just as willing to crack down on scummy review practices as potential clients are. Even state governments have taken action against fake reviewing companies.

There are other tactics out there from attorneys and firms trying to slip under the radar. But this is the same story with so much of SEO – people try to game the system, and sometimes succeed for a short time, then get smacked once the system improves. Remember that if you want a good reputation, the best thing you can do is provide excellent service. Once people are willing to talk about how great you are, just nudge them in the right direction.

 

We’d love to hear your feedback in the field of review management. Have you used review management software? What do you think is the best way to get reviews? What do you think of Yelp’s opinion on review solicitation? Let us know in the comments.

You can find the sequel to this post here: Dealing With Bad reviews

8 Questions to Determine if your SEO Expert is… an SEO Expert

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What follows is an admittedly arrogant post.  And I’m transgressing on a principle I teach my kids – you can’t build yourself up by knocking others down.  BUT… I keep talking to law firms, flummoxed by the lack of results from their SEO experts, only to find some really rudimentary mistakes.  What follows are a few questions to suss out just how expert your SEO talent really is.

1.  My site was hit by a Penguin Penalty – how do I get my traffic back?

Platitudes around the disavow process are often the answer to this question – and while disavow is important (and easy, if not tedious) – it is NOT sufficient.  A Penguin Penalty recovery involves not just removing the offending links, but replacing the value they had previously delivered to your site with new links. White hat linkbuilding is the hard, creative, uncertain, expensive and most valuable thing SEOs can do.  In fact, it is so difficult, that many “SEOs” don’t even try.

2.  How do you use Screaming Frog?

Screaming Frog is an extremely flexible tool used to scrape and analyze key elements of a domain at the page level.  It can identify everything from your duplicated title tags to broken links on competitors’ pages.  As analytics rock-star, Annie Cushing said,

“if you aren’t using Screaming Frog, you aren’t really doing SEO.”

Wait for the awkward silence when you ask this question…

3.  What are the last conferences your staff has been to?  Have you spoken at any?

Technology is ever changing – and agencies have a responsibility to keep up with those changes.  Reading Search Engine Land is a good starting point, but ultimately there is nothing to replace being in the middle of the action, interacting with the experts at geek-centric conferences such as SMX, Mozcon, and Pubcon.  Ideally your SEO expert has spoken at some of these conferences (and I don’t mean pay-for-shill talks, thinly veiled as legal marketing conferences.)

4.  We’re writing about 4 blog posts a week, should we keep it up?

SEO “experts” often quote the tired “Content is King” refrain to answer this question and perhaps delve into the vagaries of long-tail theory.  The reality is, vomiting out more low quality content does nothing more than convince the search engines that your site is full of… low quality content.  This problem was greatly exacerbated by web marketers between 2012 and 2014 who did little more than parrot “Content is King” at legal marketing conferences.

The, “should I keep spewing out more content?” question is best answered by using Google Analytics to review your posts for traffic and links.   If you find that 90% of those pages have no inbound traffic, very few pageviews and that no-one has linked to your rewrites of local car accidents thinly copied from the local newspaper, you might want to switch up your content strategy. Conversely, if you find all of your content is seeing action, then by all means, keep writing.  Read more here: SEO Regicide.

5.  We use Yext, so we don’t worry about NAP consistency.  Right?

Yext is just one tool in the NAP consistency fight (NAP – Name, Address and Phone Number) and while Yext handles roughly 50 major second tier directories, it does NOT manage the top 4 data aggregators; Moz’s Local product does.  Therefore, if you’re relying on tools to improve your NAP consistency, it’s important to utilize more than one — both Moz and Yext, for example.  Additionally, both tools need to be proactively monitored and managed to have a real impact – especially if you are dealing with a name change, address change, cleaning up geo-spam or eradicating poorly implemented tracking numbers.  Finally, neither Moz or Yext handles legal specific directories such as FindLaw or Avvo.  Solid legal SEOs have a list of legal specific directories that require manual management as well.

6.  Are heading tags built into my site’s template?

This is a question you can diagnose yourself.  Just because someone can (poorly) code a website, does not make them an SEO expert.  Review the heading tags across your site to see if a lazy or uninformed web developer has used them to style the template.  We had one site with the H1 tag copied across every single page of his site.  Oh – and it read “original text”.  This issue seems so simplistic, yet I see it repeatedly.  To do this, you can view source and search for H1, H2, etc., install SEO quake into Firefox and use the Diagnosis button for a page by page review, or if you are feeling ambitious (and have a site with fewer than 400 pages), use the aforementioned Screaming Frog.

7.  We want to launch a new website focused on <insert specific practice area>.

This is a favorite request for website developers who pretend to be SEOs.  They’ll churn out “SEO optimized” websites upon request and delivery of a nice fat check.  Of course, they are missing the aforementioned difficult part of SEO: linkbuilding (see question #1).  The reality is, from a linkbuilding, NAP and citations perspective, marketing two sites is more than twice as expensive as marketing one.  And if you go off the deep end with a full blown multi-domain strategy, you’d better have a very deep bank account.  Multiple domains can be appropriate for a firm with disparate practice areas – say DUI and Family law – but note that you’ll be investing extra marketing dollars to push both of them successfully.

And for my bonus question, we get #8 about social media…

8. Will you help us get more Facebook Likes and Twitter Followers to help our SEO?

This goes back to another SEO theory that has been dead for at least 3 years – that social media popularity drives search results.  Multiple spokespeople from The Google have been crystal clear that this is NOT the case.  Note that there can be a correlation between the two – with savvy content marketers using their wide and active social network to push great content to key influencers, which drives links, which drives traffic, but… ignore the social media marketers parading as SEOs who suggest the key to ranking for “Atlanta Divorce Lawyer” is a few thousand more twitter followers from Uzbekistan.

Except for Pinterest.  You totally should do that.  Really – it works.   Trust me, I’m an SEO Expert.

Upcoming Google Algorithm Update – Say Goodbye to Doorway Pages

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Google announced yesterday that they will soon be releasing a ranking adjustment to address the prevalence of doorway pages and warns “sites with large and well-established doorway campaigns might see a broad impact from this change.”

Brace yourself – big things are coming. Due to the pervasiveness of spam within legal, we’re predicting this may be a bigger shakeup than Pigeon (which really only hit spectacularly flagrant local spammers) or even the upcoming mobile change.

Wait, what’s a doorway page?

In the words of Google, “doorways are sites or pages created to rank highly for specific search queries. They are bad for users because they can lead to multiple pages in user search results, where each result ends up taking the user to essentially the same destination.”

Don’t confuse doorway pages with landing pages. Landing pages provide useful, relevant information to the user whose purpose is to get users to do a certain action. Doorway pages contain irrelevant information whose only purpose is to get users to the site.

If you’re not sure if your site is full of doorway pages, Google created this handy dandy list of questions you can ask yourself (or your SEO):

  • Is the purpose to optimize for search engines and funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of your site, or are they an integral part of your site’s user experience?
  • Are the pages intended to rank on generic terms yet the content presented on the page is very specific?
  • Do the pages duplicate useful aggregations of items (locations, products, etc.) that already exist on the site for the purpose of capturing more search traffic?
  • Are these pages made solely for drawing affiliate traffic and sending users along without creating unique value in content or functionality?
  • Do these pages exist as an “island?” Are they difficult or impossible to navigate to from other parts of your site? Are links to such pages from other pages within the site or network of sites created just for search engines?

What does this mean for the legal industry?

Our guess? Big things. Although the most typical culprits of doorways are large brands and franchises, the legal industry is not only notorious for spammy SEO tactics, but also for trying to act like large brands and franchises.  Andrew Shotland of Local SEO Guide summed it up nicely when he said: “This update may be no big deal, but when I see Google use the phrase “broad impact”, I tend to get a bit paranoid.”

Our guesstimates of what might be coming:

  • Legal is rife with low quality spammy directories with nothing but doorway pages – highly possible that this adjustment negatively impacts law firm sites that rely heavily on doorways for links. (And there are tons of these sites.)
  • Lots of law firms have successfully implemented doorway pages across multiple domains. They are going to get hit – expect a reshuffling of website traffic at a rate legal hasn’t seen in a very long time.
  • Possible changes in the structure of the two remaining large legal directories directories, Avvo and FindLaw.

This may also be the long awaited fulfillment of Google’s move away from the directories and towards the small businesses that populate those directories. Of course, this has been our prognostication ~2 years and we’ve been wrong so far, but, fingers crossed.  (Think we’re crazy? We’re not alone in this sentiment — in his coverage of the doorway update, Shotland goes so far as to suggest shorting Yelp.)

Hasn’t Google been rather busy lately?

Yep. If you’re wondering if there’s something in the water at Google lately, you’re not alone. They’re penalizing doorway pages, implementing mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal in mobile search, putting everything in the knowledge graph, releasing all sorts of new tools, and more.

However, doorways aren’t a new thing, so it’s about time Google addressed the issue. Matt Cutts, infamous head of Web Spam at Google currently on leave, wrote about crappy doorway pages back in 2005. As in, the 2005 that was 10 years ago. (Note: its a good read if you’d like to see the primary spokesperson of a billion dollar company perfect the implementation of the word “asshat.”) Plus, all of Google’s actions have been consistent with their mission to provide more helpful, user-friendly search results.

Regardless of the impact of the update, we’ll keep you posted on the fallout. I don’t know about you, but I’ve got high hopes this one will be nicknamed Platypus.

Citations – Overlooked Boon for Legal Industry

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What is a citation?

Citations are a key determinate of your firm’s success in local search engine optimization.

Definition – mention of your business name, address, and (ideally) your phone number on webpages across the Internet. The distinguishing factor of a citation: a link to your website is not required.

Citations come in different forms. It could be a mention of your business name all by itself; a mention of your name and phone number; name, phone number and physical address; or name, phone number, physical address and website link.

The two main types of citations are structured and unstructured.

Unstructured citations are exactly how they sound – they are less formal and may only mention one of the NAP (name, address, phone number) components for your business. You will see this type of citation on blogs, in job descriptions, online news articles, etc.

Structured citations are what you see most commonly on the web. These are listings found in directories like Yelp, Citysearch, Manta, etc. We spend a lot of time at Mockingbird ensuring structured citations are listed consistently. They are the most complete representation of your business and, for the most part, the easiest to update (with some noted headaches).

Why citations are vital to your firm’s local SEO

The legal industry is arguably one of the most competitive verticals on the web. Lawyers need to utilize every tactic available, and acquiring citations is seldom done correctly if at all.

Citations are a critical component to major search engine ranking algorithms. Moz explains the different ranking components in their 2014 Local Search Ranking Factors study. Screen shot from this study below.

Local Search Ranking Factors Pie

In English: search engines pull basic business information from your website and a multitude of directories across the web in order to integrate that information into a single listing to show users. Google and Bing only want to present results that they trust are accurate. Why? Their success depends on it – sending a user to an incorrect address is the easiest way for a search engine to lose trust with that user.

So how can you build trust that your physical location is actually where you say it is? Consistent citations.

Google will trust that you are in fact a local business if your basic information, also known as NAP (name, address, phone number), is exactly the same across multiple authoritative sites and directories (think Yelp, Yellowpages, Avvo…). This helps separate the real businesses from the fake, spammy ones trying to game the system.

Let’s talk about something we all know; lawyers long for the coveted number one spot in the local pack. We can’t blame them. If you’re unfamiliar with the term local pack, it’s the group of local business listings that appears directly above the actual search results.

For example the local pack for the search term “Seattle marketing firm” looks like this:

Google Search Seattle Marketing Firm

Moz explains in their local search ranking report that external location signals (or citations) are the third most important factor used to rank businesses. If you’re wondering, the first two are on-page and link signals. Your name, address, and phone number should show up exactly the same across the web if you hope to show in local searches.

It’s an important task and something that every law firm must do.

Where to start

Starting is hard. It’s long, tedious, and frustrating work. Trust me I deal with this dirt every day.

Your first step is to choose a name, an address, and a single phone number that represents your business. Then find and edit every inaccurate listing out on the web. Tip: Keep an excel file that documents all of this information as you go. You can use this simple template we’ve created. Here are the top-tier directories and data aggregators you need to get right:

  • Acxiom
  • Factual – can’t edit
  • Infogroup
  • Localeze (Neustar)

Google trusts these sources because they are not easily polluted. Learn more about updating these main data aggregators, and the level of difficulty for each.

Top tier directories/citation opportunities

  • D&B
  • Bing Places for Business
  • Facebook
  • Foursquare
  • Google+ Local
  • LinkedIn
  • Yelp for Business

Google and people alike trust these sources and actually use them.

Low-hanging fruit (not included in Moz Local or Yext subscriptions)

  • Thumbtack
  • Yellow Pages
  • Manta
  • Angies List
  • Yellowbook
  • Kudzu
  • BBB.org
  • InsiderPages

Not the SEO savior you are searching for…

4 Citations Local Pack

Citations are not the be-all and end-all SEO solution that everyone is searching for (in case your hopes were rising). However, they could be your demise. Solid NAP consistency may be taken for granted if you have it, but if you don’t have it, you may never find yourself in that local pack.

Obligatory lawyer example

You are a personal injury attorney in NYC. Competition is cutthroat because of your practice area and geographic location.

Here’s the case. While crossing the street, an unfortunate New Yorker is struck by a taxi. Upon release from the hospital, the victim takes the obvious next step and searches for an experienced PI lawyer. He searches for “New York Personal Injury Attorney” and lands on your law firm’s listing in Google’s local pack. BOOM. All your hard work to improve your local visibility has paid off. All you have to do is pick up the phone and turn that lead into a lucrative client.

Local Pack Show Me Money

But that doesn’t happen. Instead of getting your firm’s front desk, the disgruntled New Yorker has called your old number, which is now the local UPS office. I highly doubt the victim wants legal representation from the men in brown. This is annoying, but only a slight inconvenience for him because he calls another listing from the local pack. Now your qualified lead is a client for your most loathed competitor, Joe-from-down-the-block. Don’t send clients to your competitors. That’s not good business.

The Facts

  1. Citations help your local SEO.
  2. You need proactively monitor citations for consistency.
  3. There’s a partial citation, and a complete citation – aim for the complete.
  4. It’s not easy work but it pays off.

Parting notes:

  • Evaluate the situation – https://moz.com/local/overview is a great place to start.
  • Start with your Google+ profile – fixing this is easy and will have the maximum ROI (or really ROTI).
  • Consistency over quantity – get it right before you run wild with building citations.

Go forth and take citations into your own hands. Or call us for help… that works too.

Call Tracking for Law Firms – Jenny, I Got Your Number: 867-5309

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Here at Mockingbird, we love data. We love data because data allows us to make decisions based on what works, rather than what we think might work. We love data because it allows us to explain to our clients why they should be spending less time, money and effort on X while spending more on Y. Have I mentioned that we love data? Ok great.

This love for data is why all of our clients have their phone number displayed clearly at the very top of their website – and not just any number, a call tracking number.

Call Tracking We Love Data

What a Phone Number Can Tell Us

Phone numbers in marketing can do much more than connect your clients to your business (connecting your clients to your business is priority number one). Here’s a short list of all the information a phone number can give you:

  • How many calls your business receives,
  • Which marketing channel generated those calls (organic traffic, PPC, referrals from Avvo, etc),
  • How long each call lasted,
  • The location each call was placed from,
  • How much you spent to acquire that call,
  • Whether you converted that caller into a client, and
  • Your ROI on said client.

Don’t go calling your phone company just yet… This is all done by using call tracking software, which masks your firm’s main telephone number with a unique (sometimes toll free) tracking number. This number changes based on how that person found your website, allowing the software to track how many calls came from AdWords vs. Bing Ads, and so on.

Panicking at the thought of losing your catchy number? Take a couple deep breaths; it may not be as important as you think.

Let Go Of Your Catchy Phone Number

**Insert some Disney song reference here**

I have a confession: I have no idea what my girlfriend’s phone number is. I think it starts with a two.

I have another confession: I call my neighborhood Teriyaki restaurant once a week. I don’t know their phone number, either.

If a number is really important to me, like my girlfriends’, I save it in my phone as a contact. If it’s not so important, like the teriyaki restaurant, I do a quick Google search for their name, and then click-to-call their number.

On the rare day I’m without my cell phone, I search for phone numbers on Google, and then immediately dial – retaining the numbers just long enough to press each button. I like to think I’m using this brain space for more important things (maybe I’m not).

My behavior is representative of many people in 2015, and brings up a noteworthy point: information is so accessible these days that the actual phone number is becoming less and less important. Gone are the days of keeping a Rolodex. Now, we can easily save a new phone number into our phone or quickly look it up through search.

And unlike humans, computers don’t care if that number ends in 1-2-3-4 or rhymes with “DUI”.

Area Codes and Local Phone Numbers

Area codes can factor into your local search efforts, so you should have a local, direct phone number that rings to your law firm. Use this number in all of your website directories (especially Google My Business). However, don’t let acquiring a local tracking number keep you from using call tracking software. Since they aren’t hard coded into your site, tracking numbers don’t affect local search efforts. Additionally, they’re highly dependent on what the phone companies release to the public/tracking companies, so you could be waiting a while.

Whatever you do, don’t hard code a bunch of different numbers in a bunch of different places. Make it as easy for Google to connect the dots. Call tracking software doesn’t actually change the phone number on your site, it just masks it; your NAP (name-address-phone number) consistency is safe.

Call Tracking Software We Like

We use Avvo Ignite whenever a firm lacks an intake process. Avvo understands lawyers. They also understand SEO. They’ve put both of these things together and made a product that can help a firm not only track the number of leads, but the leads within the purchasing funnel. Warning: you have to use it to get the most out of it.

When intake software isn’t necessary, or when a client doesn’t utilize a majority of the features within Ignite, we also recommend Call Rail. This product seems to have a nice selection of local and toll free numbers, and integrates very easily into WordPress via a plugin and API key. As an added bonus, it plays well with multi-location firms with more than one number displayed throughout your website.

There are many, many more companies that offer solutions similar to the two above. What call tracking software is your firm using and which channel is driving the most leads? If you’re not sure, we’re happy to help you figure that out.

Don’t listen to Tommy Tutone, Jenny. Change your number so you know how your potential clients are finding you. It will help make you more successful.