Ahh Twitter…. and the oft mis-understood, oversold, empty promises from Social Media Marketing Consultants. I ran into the following tweetstream (why is that a word) over the weekend. Its nothing more than variants of “[insert geography] [insert practice area] [lawyer]” repeated ad nauseam.
And it seems that these tweets are so interesting among a trio of CA based law firms (Eisner Gorin, Furman & Zavatsky, and Cron Isreals Stark) that they all just can’t stop themselves from retweeting and favoriting the awesomeness of each other’s mundane geo practice area marketing garbage. I added a small shot of Eisner Gorin’s Twitter account on the right so you can see just how fascinating this isn’t.
Now presumably no one at any of these firms is proactively doing this. I smell the workings of a low end marketing expert with some program automagically vomiting out tweets and retweets. Perhaps there’s a report at the end of each month victoriously celebrating Social Media engagement – impressions, followers, retweets, favorites etc. And of course, none of this is going to generate an inbound phone call – in fact in the sad event the firm’s’ twitter account shows up in a branded query (a distinct possibility) after an offline referral, I suspect Joe Prospective Client is smart enough to be turned off by this pathetic ploy.
And while I don’t know if this is the inner workings of some bad agency, remember…. just because your don’t understand it, doesn’t mean you should pay for it (or do it yourself). Hopefully these firms aren’t paying some SEO expert to boost their SEO rankings with this by either a)linkbuilding and/or b)build social followers. Set the record straight. Links in tweets isn’t linkbuilding. The number of twitter followers, retweeters, favorites etc. has NOTHING to do with search algos. Same goes for Facebook, Snapchat, Pinterest, Blab, Meerkat… the list goes on (and on and on. And then it keeps going some more.). If your agency tells you otherwise, at least now you know why your SEO efforts aren’t generating clients.
I can’t tell if the parrot on the ball is dancing or in love. But Google thinks that Rick’s George’s legal technology blog is about parrots and tennis balls. We’ll come back to this later….
I’ve been reading LexBlog founder, Kevin O’Keefe’s anti-SEO commentary for years now and suffice to say, he and I sit on opposite ends of the spectrum. For the most part, I’ve bit my tongue; but thought it is time to write a measured counterpoint to LexBlog’s anti-SEO stance. I’ve outlined the fundamentals of our disagreement so you make up your own minds. But first, let me give away the punchline as to why I believe LexBlog has consistently pushed an anti-SEO agenda:
LexBlog’s product – stand-alone blogs – runs counter to widely accepted SEO theory, to such a strong extent that if you believe the search is powerful in generating clients for law firms, you’d never remotely consider a stand-alone blog.
Here’s a smattering of LexBlog posts on the dangers of SEO:
Top 10 Signs your SEO company is a quack.
SEO shenanigans pose a danger to law blogs
Do Law firms Needlessly Worry About SEO?
SEO Ain’t Cheap
Is your Law firm SEO company doing more harm on Google than good?
Good law blog content trumps SEO
5 Myths about SEO
Blogging for SEO or meaning?
Law blogs are solely for SEO and law firm rankings?
Right before Christmas, I unintentionally ended up in a snarky exchange with Kevin in the comments on yet another anti-SEO post called: You Don’t Need to Game Google. The genesis of the interaction, was my pointing out that the results he was claiming (top google rankings without worrying about SEO) just didn’t pan out in the actual search results. Kevin cited a post from aforementioned attorney Rick Georges who claimed that he ranks at the top of Google for the term “legal technology” without requiring SEO to do so. A tempting thought – especially if you are a law firm dropping 4, 5 or 6 figures on search agencies like mine.
However, a little digging showed Kevin’s example to be 100% inaccurate. You’ll note below a quick review of the SERP results for “legal technology” are entirely devoid of Rick’s presence – I scrolled through 8 pages and never encountered his blog. Try it out for yourself and see. So much for ignoring SEO right?
And this isn’t the first time Kevin has made unsubstantiated claims about SEO success without the need for engaging in SEO fundamentals.
The blogging lawyers I mentioned above do not spend one cent on SEO. Yet they rank above most all of the lawyers who do.
This refrain – “ignore SEO and you’ll outrank those who pay for it” – is a dangerously expensive misrepresentation to broadcast to the legal industry. What follows is the explanation of my opinion of why Kevin tenaciously sticks to his anti-SEO message.
The assessment is very simple: SEO is a threat to stand-alone blogs and remember, LexBlog sells blogs as a standalone product. When you are a hammer everything is the world is a nail. Make up your own mind, but if you are considering a standalone blog – critically consider these four talking points from the Lexblog sales pitch before overlooking the importance of SEO.
“Blogs Belong on Their Own Domain”
It’s common sense that a blog is an independent publication.
In my opinion, LexBlog continues to badmouth SEO simply because their primary product – standalone blogs – runs afoul of foundational SEO theory. The widely accepted theory, that in almost every case, you should consolidate authority (links) to create a single, strong powerful domain. Mathematically (and grossly oversimplified) – 20 links to one domain are more than twice as effective than 10 links to two. And that domain should be the law firm’s website that is listed in directories and cited by local media sources; not a social media driven blog. Put differently, marketing two websites is more than twice as expensive as marketing one.
And Kevin understands this entirely:
Blogs by their nature are link magnets. And links from relevant blogs/websites are the holy grail of SEO.
In hypercompetitive markets like legal, links are the differentiator in both organic and local search. Linkbuilding is the tough, expensive, uncertain practice that, as Kevin notes, drives SEO success. And SEO success leads to traffic and in turn, more business. Due to their more causal and timely nature, blogs can be extremely effective in generating links. Segmenting blog content onto a stand-alone domain guts a site’s linkbuilding potential. We saw one beautiful example of this: after watching traffic dry up to their stand-alone niche blog, one client landed a $1.5 million check simply by migrating their good content from their impotent blog, onto the firm’s primary domain. The traffic returned, as did the phone calls, and then the client. More: How Our ex-Client Made $1,500,000 by Firing Us.
Kevin understands that blogs are link magnets and that links are foundational to good SEO. This is the reason Kevin’s own blog lives on LexBlog.com, instead of as a stand-alone publication:
“Traffic Doesn’t Matter”
The goal is not to draw traffic and attention.
There’s a full LexBlog post on this: “Traffic is not the measure of a law blog’s influence” and I couldn’t disagree with this statement any more. SEO generates traffic and website traffic – especially traffic from within your geographic market – generates inbound inquiries at a rate of about 3.3 calls per 100 sessions (4.5 for PI lawyers). So if the goal for your firm is new business, a reasonable objective of your website is traffic. It’s a very direct and indisputable correlation. Saying traffic doesn’t matter is like having your retirement planner telling you the size of your 401(k) is immaterial.
“SEO Doesn’t Build Relationships”
I don’t know about Rick, but there is a world of lawyers who get their work by word of mouth and relationships, with the Internet just enhancing and accelerating this.
Its nice to build relationships – we all like to do so. But, building relationships with new prospects requires attracting new prospects with which to build relationships. There’s simply no easier, more scaleable way for the Internet to enhance and accelerate your relationship building than SEO initiating new relationships with prospects who are searching for what you offer, but don’t know who you are.
And those SEO sparked relationships frequently turn into clients.
“Content is King”
Kevin is right that content is king.
The legal marketing industry has been preaching the garbage about content is king for years now. Let’s face it – there’s not a paucity of content on the web about legal issues. Today’s question is, which content surfaces, not does it exist? The focus on content – more content – more pages – more blogs – has been used by lazy agencies for years to shift the responsibility for the agency’s marketing failure to the feet of their clients. “You’d finally get a client if you blogged twice a week instead of twice a month.” So law firms have dutifully hired hoards of underemployed English majors and vomited out content…. and nothing has happened. The agency’s answer…. keep writing. Think I’m overstating the case here? try looking for a “lesbian car accident lawyer in atlanta”:
There’s a wealth of individual pages, gay specific layer directories, as well as a gay friendly result for directory behemoth Lawyers.com. Think your little Atlanta PI firm can compete by simply launching a lesbian car accident blog into this mountain of content without considering SEO? Think again. You need SEO to compete. (Note – if you scroll far enough you will find a blog in the search results for lesbian car accident lawyer in Atlanta – but this content lives on the law firm’s primary domain – not as a standalone blog – which incidentally helps drive traffic to the entire site.)
Mockingbird has taken the anti-content perspective so far as to deliberately prune content from (many of our clients’ sites – and we’ve seen an increase in traffic and business for our clients. (See – there’s that pesky correlation between website traffic and new business again). Here’s the analysis I posted to Search Engine Land: More Content, Less Traffic Part I.
More content alone isn’t going to build your business; this is simply an inconvenient truth that most legal marketers would have you believe because it conveniently absolves them of accountability.
Why Rick’s Blog Doesn’t Perform to its Potential
Back to the parrot and the tennis ball….A quick review of Rick’s site showed a litany of technical SEO failures – no H1s, thousands of erroneous indexed pages (including our friend the parrot) etc. so I wasn’t surprised in my findings. Further, Ricks’ perceived success was most likely due to personalized results – he saw his own Google Plus page… on the third page of results. A classic false positive. In the parrot example – Rick’s dated blog has an entire page with nothing on it but the amorous parrot – and a stupid computer has no way of knowing that this parrot page is more or less important and relevant than the legal technology pages on the site.
The technical infrastructure behind Rick’s site is horrendously dated. There are numerous Google indexed “pages” with similar imagery:
And the heading for hundreds of pages is the exact same or missing altogether:
Furthermore, depending on your browser configuration – Rick’s site displays horrendously (see below) because it is running scripts from an unauthenticated sources on a site with an SSL certificate. (The SEO culprit here is a simple hardcoded link to his stylesheet that wasn’t updated to include the”s” in https, which causes it to be unauthenticated and not load.) Don’t understand the technical lexicon? You shouldn’t have to, but know that this is what you might look like when you ignore SEO:
Rick could build so many more relationships with prospective clients if the Google thought his Legal Technology Blog was about legal technology or could differentiate the content in the pages on his blog by their distinct headings or if his blog’s technology wasn’t broken. These are basic, SEO 101 errors. It makes me sad to see attorneys working so hard on the wrong things, convinced otherwise by erroneous ranking reports.
In the end, this is why SEO matters:
The SEO reality is, a well done blog will generate just as much, if not more business for the entire firm when housed on the firm’s primary domain.
I thought instead of penning another Top 11 things for Online Marketing for Lawyers in 2017, I thought I ‘d write a post on what inspires the way we do business at Mockingbird.
Fat City – located under Seattle’s iconic World’s Fair monorail.
In the past 12 hours I’ve had interactions with two different local companies that have inspired me over the past 5 years or so. One is Tutta Bella, a small local pizza chain – the other Fat City German Cars, a single location, independent auto service shop.
I’ve been a repeat customer with both of them for years and every time I go, I’m inspired to make Mockingbird more like this restaurant and auto shop instead of other online marketing agency. Fat City is unlike any other mechanic you’ve ever been to. Buttoned up. Squeaky clean. Impeccable service. Punctual. Even their facility – located in a historic building near the space needle – screams “we are so much more than local dealer”. Fat City stands out in an industry renowned for sales upsell chicanery.
Benchmarking within your own industry makes you just as good as they are. But it doesn’t inspire going above and beyond to reach for greatness. Greatness that creates unexpected moments of inspiration for your clients or prospects.
Here’s a smattering of why I love these two Seattle based companies:
Expertise and Excellence
I once watched a chef at Tutta Bella pull a gorgeous pie out of the oven and dump it right in the garbage. Well, it looked gorgeous to me – but to the chef, imperfect. Expertise and Excellence should be an obvious requirement for online marketing agencies, yet very few invest in the training, persnickety attention to detail and sense of ownership required to truly be experts.
Blunt Honesty
I used to drive an old, beat up VW Jetta, that I suspect was the first to get off the production line when VW moved their operations from Germany to a brand new factory in Mexcio. The car was a disaster and I would bring it in to Fat City to ask Lance what to do. Now there was always a litany of issues that could be addressed, but Lance would always help me figure out what had to be addressed. “You can get another 6K miles on these brakes, but you have to fix the…..” Lance knew his job wasn’t to maximize his share of my car repair wallet – it was to keep me on the road (and safe) within what I had to spend (which frankly was – “as little as possible”).
Explaining
Bedside manner is that important yet rare ability of a doctor to explain things in plain English. Bedside manner applies to mechanics and SEOs as well. I recall picking up the Jetta at Fat City one day – they had saved the worn out parts of the wiring harness (apparently a car item that very very rarely fails, but did so in my car’s case) and walked me through what was wrong with them. Being able to translate the highly technical nature of what we do, into simple business terms is key to our communication at Mockingbird.
Tenure and Training
Being Awesome requires Awesome people who are thoroughly inculcated into your culture, and methods. I recognized Leslie, the manager at Tutta Bella, yesterday as the server who we had been our regular a good 5 years ago. (And yes, I know both Lance and Leslie by name…. little things matter.) After a few years she disappeared from the restaurant, so I asked what she had been doing. Turns out, she had been tapped to open one of their new restaurants, got that up and running, managed another one for a year and then returned to the one where we had first met. The only way to turn great people into awesome people is to a)have them around for a long time and b)train them like crazy (especially in the constantly changing world of technology).
Oh – and the company itself? Fat City’s been around since 1973. There’s a level of excellence that comes with specialization and longevity… kind of like and legal SEO starting out in 2006.
Generosity
Great firms know what to give away, and what to charge for. When the Jetta finally bit the dust I spent some time research and shopping for used Audis. Found one the exact one I wanted 400 miles away and had it checked out by a dealer who sent me a written report that I didn’t understand at all. Lance didn’t charge me a dime to review it.
So today, I drove past thee Audi dealerships, with their certified Audi professionals to an inconvenient part of town to drop my new car off with the only mechanic I’ve ever trusted.
I received a disappointing email today from a law firm who I’ve been helping assess the efficacy of their current marketing efforts with Scorpion. Our discovery process centers around performance through Google Analytics and I find again and again agencies who have failed to a) add GA to their clients’ sites (FindLaw is notorious for this) b) refuse to provide any access to the account or c) fallaciously believe that the law firm’s data actually belongs to the agency. The latter is the case we are dealing with for this Scorpion client.
But let’s stop first and make these points very clear.
Your site’s data is your data. Not your agency’s.
You should control how it is configured (even if they do it for you).
You should control who has access to it.
You should be able to take it with you if you leave your agency.
You should be able to kick your agency (or ex-agency, or ex-employee) out of the data if you want.
And if anyone is hesitating in any way to provide you with access to your site’s performance you must ask yourself:
What are they trying to hide from me?
Imagine investing in a 401(k) plan without knowing what your annual rate of return was? Well that’s what you are doing if you don’t have access to your GA account. And don’t rely on your agency to tell you how well your agency is doing with your agency’s proprietary reporting platform. Everything you need to know can (and should) be housed in GA – putting you in full control of both the data and the analysis.
Now back to my client’s email:
You told me that I needed to get control of the Google Analytics account. I made the request to Scorpion and they provide “view access” for my gmail user account. They said that they cannot transfer G.A. because it is a mixed account. Ignoring the technical feasibility of the transfer, it doesn’t appear that they are willing to transfer the account.
My question- is view access to G.A. account sufficient to obtain valuable information for future effort? Unfortunately, I don’t have permissions to delegate views to others.
<sigh>
And to the law firm’s last question…. is view access to GA sufficient? The answer is usually no…. because depending on the configuration of the account, you can’t even view all of the data. But would Scorpion really hide critical information from you through their configuration of Google Analytics? You bet they would. In the graphics below (taken from another Scorpion client), note how the limited Client Access doesn’t show data on things like….. conversions.
Kind of important if you are dropping $75,000 monthly on Google Adwords don’t you think? Wouldn’t you want to be able to see if people are actually calling? filling out forms? chatting? Without that conversion data, you just have to rely on what your agency tells you.
As far as Scorpion’s explanation that “they cannot transfer G.A. because it is a mixed account” goes… remember, we put a man on the moon in the 70s, we should be able to provide appropriate access to a simple website tool. And Google Analytics has had this functionality for years. Mockingbird does this for all of our clients, as have most of our reputable agency cohorts. And Scorpion, if you are stuck…. here’s Google’s guide to their User Permissions.
It’s Halloween so, a perfect time for a scary post about a ghoul in our midst….
You’ll remember about a year ago, we knocked out a website for Kendall Coffman in 24 hours after FindLaw pulled the plug on his site – leaving it looking like this:
So yesterday, we got the same call – another law firm abandoned by FindLaw, leaving their site naked in the breeze. This time, we turned around a new site same day. Now that’s not easy – it involved pulling our fire alarm – getting all hands on deck and working with our Echo WordPress template to push something live really quickly. And we didn’t engage in rounds and rounds of creative revisions or discussion on the shade of blue in the background. BUT…. within 8 hours of getting his inquiry – the new site is up and running and 100% technically sound. Designed from our Echo template, it includes:
attorney bio pages complete with attorney specific testimonials
removed FindLaw’s toll-free “tracking” numbers.
contact forms
legacy GA code
on-site search
social media integration
contact us page complete with Google maps integration
mobile responsive design with sticky phone number header.
Oh – and while I’m ranting about FindLaw…. unfortunately the firm had been paying FindLaw to write blog posts for them – except the devious, self-serving, underhanded, fine print in their agreement meant that FindLaw retained ownership of that content. So while Echo can handle blog functionality, unfortunately the firm’s new site will be blog naked (for now.) Imagine that – here’s a law firm paying FindLaw to develop content for them – that they, in fact do not own. Kind of like buying a house only to find out your mortgage is actually a lease.
Technical Roadmap for Leaving FindLaw
And for law firms, or other agencies facing a similar FindLaw induced marketing disaster, here’s a roadmap of the technical issues to handle:
Here is a summary of everything we did – taken from our instructions to our client, Justin:
Moved all content that we could find archived on the web except for the blog roll as well as leveraged the Word document you provided – please use your sitemap to go through the content. Please also review the disclaimer and Privacy Policy.
Updated all the phone numbers in content/meta descriptions/header/footers to your direct line and removed toll free “Findlaw” numbers.
Copied the Google Analytics code as it was on your previous site. We highly recommend verifying you have ownership over this Analytics account. If not, try to obtain.
Kept the Google Search Console verification tag. We highly recommend verifying you have ownership over this Search Console account. If not, try to obtain.
Created a Bing Webmaster Tools account and gave you ownership.
Updated ALL the internal links. Since your site is now on WordPress, all the URLs end with a slash (/) instead of a combination of slashes and “.shtml”. Since we were manually migrated the content we could get our hands on, it was easier to update these on the go.
Migrated all the page Titles and Descriptions. Again, easier to do on the fly.
Created 301 redirects for:
all URLs ending in .shtml to point them to the new URLs with “/”.
Duplicate legacy contact form we found during migration
Attorneys URL to force lower case “A”.
Blog roll and blog. Note: This redirect will need to be revised if you choose to utilize the blog feature on your new site.
Setup and configured Yoast SEO
Updated Robots.txt and included your XML sitemap location
Configured contact form with a ‘thank you’ destination page and Google Event Tracking. Tested and confirmed working.
Crawled post-launch site
No internal 404 errors (this means all the links on the new site work!)
No internal 301 redirects on pages (this means that all the links go to the final destination, which is how it should be!)
I’ve also added 3 more “properties” to your search console account. The one you want to use is XXXXXXX. We can cover this during the demo.
I was also afraid that FindLaw would see my updates so I have added us as owners to these tools and removed permissions for the email you provided to manage users. I would recommend giving us a gmail account (or you can register your current email, which is through Office 360, to be used with google products) so that we can add that as owner for everything. This prevents FindLaw from taking access away.
Finally, I submitted the new site to be indexed by Google through Search Console. This should help get those blog posts you don’t own out of the search results. It will also help Google understand what in the world just happened.
Allowed site to be indexed by google
Added you as a user to the new site – you should have received an email with a PW
Added you as a user to your new host (WP Engine) – you should receive an invitation email to create a PW
Added your website back to your Google My Business listing and it was immediately published
Double amputee Rudy Garcia-Tolson, crushed Paul in the swim.
Brief side note for today. For years, Mockingbird has supported my brother’s fundraising efforts for the Challenged Athletes Foundation – a non-profit that provides grants to help physically challenged people with the tools they need to pursue an active and healthy lifestyle. Their seminal event was held last weekend – a triathlon in San Diego.
Notes from Paul’s thank you email:
My Challenged Athletes’ weekend started on Friday night as I rushed from coaching soccer practice to the annual Celebration of Abilities event held in conjunction with the San Diego Triathlon Challenge. The evening serves as a kickoff for the weekend, a ceremony for annuals awards, but mostly as an opportunity for introduction and socializing between and amongst challenged athletes and fundraisers. I’m always struck by something on these evenings be it a particular inspiring story or a chance encounter. This year the biggest impact was the realization that many of the attendees, particularly the younger ones, were meeting their heroes for the first time. Unlike a wide-eyed kid meeting LeBron James in complete awe, these kids’ motivation was entirely different. They didn’t want an autograph or to see a championship ring, they wanted to ask questions like, “how did you deal with kids teasing you about your prosthetic leg?” or “What do you do when you feel like the world is unfair?” These interactions reminded just how important the community that CAF builds really is. As Lorna Day, mother of Sam, who unfortunately lost his life to cancer in August but not before having years of incredible experiences generated by CAF, stated:
“This community nurtured Sam’s spirit in a way in which we, his family, could not.”
The other highlight of the Celebration of Abilities evening was the introduction of these sixteen members of the US Paralympic team (45% of the US team was supported by CAF) who had returned from Rio, many sporting medals of gold, silver and bronze. Hearing their passionate description of the life changing experience was inspiring.
As part of the second wave of Gold Team members who had raised significant funds above the minimum requirements, I dove into the water on the heels of 94 Challenged Athletes who had entered in the first wave to start my mile swim. Twenty-three minutes later I was the first Gold Team member to exit the Pacific. My enthusiasm was only slightly tempered when Lisa noted that I had swum about thirty second slower than Rudy Garcia-Tolson a double leg amputee who had led the Challenged Athletes wave.
To my Mockingbird clients – a trickle down thank you for making my support of this outstanding organization possible.
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
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.
Most of the time, when people drop hashtags all over their posts and tweets, like rabbits pooping in a garden, they are really saying:
“I don’t really know how social media works, but it seems to be a big deal, so I’m going to drop a “#” in front of random words. #IGetSocialMedia #Really #Hashtag”
Sometimes it means,
“I really don’t get this so I decided to hire someone to do it for me (its, just that they don’t understand it either, but I don’t know that.”
The proliferation of hashtags in legal marketing, without a clear understanding of how they work, has led to the subsequent proliferation of hashtag marketing consultants. This practice, is reminiscent of the SEO “gurus” of 5 years ago, whose primary role was to “tag” content so “The Google can understand what it is about”. This practice, of course led to WordPress sites with a massive proliferation of duplicated garbage tag pages – lawyer, attorney, law firm, car accident, car crash, car wreck. You get the idea. We’ve spent thousands of our clients’ dollars unravelling these garbage pages, but I digress….
#BackToHashtags
Why?
Why are we so enamored with hashtags? We hear about them all the time. I’m going to go to Wikipedia for the definitional reason:
A hashtag is a type of label or metadata tag used on social network and microblogging services which makes it easier for users to find messages with a specific theme or content.
“Makes it easier to for users to find message with a specific theme or content.” Remember that. It means that either a)people are looking for your specific hashtag or b)its part of widespread trend. So just because you’ve heard about hashtags for #savethewhales or the #superbowl or maybe an #smx conference or a loved brand like #patagonia, doesn’t mean people are looking for #caraccidentattorney with hashtags. And, in the off chance, people are going to click on your #lawyer hashtag – all they are going to see is a bunch of…. other lawyers who want their business as much you do. Great idea marketers.
In all the examples below, I’m pulling tweets from a twitter search for “car accident lawyer” – and let’s not get further distracted talking about the idiocy of that tactic…. i.e. people don’t start their search for highly personal, highly private issues like an accident lawyer, divorce lawyer, dui lawyer, domestic violence lawyer etc on twitter, but I digress again.
There are a variety of garbage hashtag mistakes:
The Useless Single Word
This is done #simply #by #inserting #a #hashtag #in #front #of #words #the #writer #thinks #are important.
#lawsuits #lawyer #litigation? It does read like those old “tagging” strategies for website content doesn’t it? The presumption here of course, is that someone is doing a hashtag search for #lawyer…. or there’s some degree of virality to this content. Right…. anyone else think, all of a sudden, #Litigation, is going to start trending?
The Useless Concatenated Words
The next variant is smushed together words. Think #BlackLivesMatter – that has a big following and is regularly searched. But….. probably not #caraccident or #personalinjury. Sorry #Pribanic&Pribanic.
And in my example above, note that if someone is looking for #pittsburgh (which isn’t out of the realm of possibility), its probably NOT because they just got rear ended by a Lexus on Main Street, Pittsburgh.
The Epically Bizarre Phrase
If two words are good, what not more? #doineedalawyerafteracaraccident This looks like my cat walked across my keyboard. What possible marketing/social media/google juice/twitterverse explanation can you possibly have for this?
Interestingly “Legal Monthly” describes itself as “The official Tweets of the San Diego Legal Times Monthly” Except, of course, there is no such thing as the San Diego Legal Times. And their feed is nothing more than thousands of tweets with #hashtaggarbage from law firms and law firm newsletters across the country. Now I could be wrong here, but someone is presumably paying for this “social media marketing consulting”. Like the Porter Law Firm in the example above.
Hashtags and SEO
But Conrad, I was told this will help my Google rankings!
I’ll keep this simple: The number of Twitter followers or Facebook friends or Pinterest Pins or Meerkat Meerkats are NOT an SEO ranking factor. Same holds for #hashtags. Or #hash #tags. Social media marketing gurus who suggest otherwise understand neither (or they are deliberately bilking you).
Think critically about why you spend money on marketing consultants. What are they doing? How does it work? Does it pass the sniff test? And just because you don’t understand it, doesn’t mean that you need to spend money on it – otherwise your marketing dollars are a cost, not an investment.
Local SEO rockstar, Joy Hawkins and I discuss Possum – the unfortunately named Google algo update impacting local SERP results. While we have seen Possum as a win for most of our clients – Possum seems to impact businesses in shared locations with multiple providers in the same categories. This includes practitioner listings. Listen along for more details and get a surprise opportunity to hear me defending FindLaw!
UPDATE: “the unfortunately named…..” – turns out this was coined by…… wait for it….. Joy and Darren (among others). Nothing like insulting your guest. My coworkers are enjoying my foot in mouth a little too much.
This is the biggest change in local since Pigeon back in 2014
I added a small shot of Eisner Gorin’s Twitter account on the right so you can see just how fascinating this isn’t.
