#Hashtag Idiocy: #JustBecauseYouDon’tUnderstandItDoesn’tMeanYouShouldDoIt

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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.

idiocy

#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.

overloaded-idiocy

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?

hattag-words

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.

#StopBlowingYourKidsCollegeFundOnStuffYouDon’tUnderstand

Review of Google’s Possum Algo Update with Joy Hawkins

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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

How to Generate Personal Injury Cases for About $100.

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Alternate Title:  PPC Isn’t Too Expensive – You’re Just Doing it All Wrong

I have a variation of this conversation with attorneys all the time:

I tried Adwords, but its just crazy expensive.

I spent $800 on our first day with Adwords, with no phone calls, so we turned it off.

Everyone is in Adwords, its just not worth it.

The general consensus among lawyers (many of whom have been burned either by an uninformed agency or their own missteps) is that Adwords is expensive and therefore ineffectual.  But…. the very system they are complaining about is based on a Pay per Click model – and we get to choose how much to pay.  So its not that its too expensive – its just that you aren’t doing it right.  Attorneys – always driven to be at the top – spend a lot of “stupid money” trying to “win” Adwords.  This is driven by the misperception that marketing is a cost not an investment.  If you learn to view your marketing as an investment, you’ll start asking questions like how much am I spending, and how much is that returning?  And when you do that, you’ll find that Adwords is a great investment when handled correctly.  Adwords too Expensive

Now, I’ve admittedly cherry-picked the following data from our best campaign from last week to demonstrate my point. This is an entire week, where we spent less than $250 for a small personal injury firm in a secondary market and generated 4 conversions.  (In his case – these were phone calls, not chats or form fills, but all three conversion channels should be counted in your assessment.) Not all of our clients look this amazing and this client’s investment doesn’t return this well every week. But the data below is demonstrative of a well run Adwords investment.  A few things to note a) this is NOT a ton of volume.  The phone’s aren’t ringing off the hook.  b)average position is high – meaning we are looking for clients outside the typical pool and c)CPCs are much lower than what it takes to “win” in a typical Personal Injury campaign.  Like any investment, the results are in the numbers:

  • 1 week
  • 4 calls
  • 2 clients
  •  $236.07 spent

Oh – and those four phone calls…. turned into two clients.  So, if you think Adwords is too expensive… you’re just not doing it right.

SEO Ranking Upheaval

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While there’s no official word yet – SEO nerds around the world are chattering about two large algo updates happening right now.  And I’ve fielded no fewer than three chats/emails/phone calls  from lawyers wondering whats going on.  So what’s going on?

The two different algo updates are impacting both natural and local search (and these two are driven by mostly independent factors.)  In the organic search world There’s speculation if this is a Penguin update, or the core algo update – and again, no word from Google confirming anything.  On the local side – and this is a bigger deal for lawyers – the overriding sentiment is this is a move to combat what has become a heavily spam laden channel.  You’ll remember we reported on the adult webcam site showing up in local for “Seattle DUI Lawyer” not that long ago.  And anecdotally, from the inquiries I’ve received, the changes to the local results have negatively impacted spammed locations.

KelimeInterestingly, at Mockingbird, we’ve been watching an (almost) across the board, significant increase in traffic for our clients over the past month. Among our larger clients – this has been an average 22% increase in just the past 4 weeks.  While this might be a seasonality issue (i.e. people getting back to serious business at the end of the summer) – it does make it hard for us to monitor these changes – but we’ll see what the results look like at the end of this week.

 

 

 

 

Google Review Penalty in the Works?

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Mike Blumenthal
Mike Blumenthal

Last week, we posted about the upcoming SEO penalty for obnoxious chat interstitials – this week, its a change in Google’s guidelines around local reviews.  In this particular case, we are talking about law firm websites that feature reviews of the firm.  The story, broken by Local SEO expert Mike Blumenthal, doesn’t specify how Google will either identify abuses or what they will do in response. But, we know exactly how they’ve treated content that falls outside guidelines in the past.

But first…. the updates are pretty significant in legal.  In the bullets below, I’ve bolded those that should have a particularly large impact on the legal industry:

  1. Snippets must not be written or provided by the business or content provider unless they are genuine, independent, and unpaid editorial reviews.
  2. Reviews must allow for customers to express both positive and negative sentiments. They may not be vetted by the business or restricted by the content provider based on the positive/negative sentiment of the review before submission to Google.
  3. Reviews cannot be template sentences built from data or automated metrics. For example, the following is not acceptable: “Based on X number of responses, on average people experienced X with this business.”
  4. Reviews for multiple-location businesses such as retail chains or franchises can only be submitted for the specific business location for which they were written. In other words, reviews for multiple-location businesses cannot be syndicated or applied to all business locations of the same company.
  5. Aggregators or content providers must have no commercial agreements paid or otherwise with businesses to provide reviews.
  6. Do not include reviews that are duplicate or similar reviews across many businesses or from different sources.
  7. Only include reviews that have been directly produced by your site, not reviews from third-party sites or syndicated reviews.

Point 2: No Vetting

I’ve been dealing with law firm reviews since back in 2007 – and the one thing lawyers have feared (and Bar Associations across the country have struggled with) is the lack of control over reviews.  This is an obvious issue on third party sites like Yelp (in fact early Avvo days – some state bars proscribed Avvo’s client reviews even though the attorneys had zero control over them.)  But now – imagine lawyers NOT having control over the reviews on their own websites.  I suspect this might be a bit too hard to swallow for many; although, the brave forward leaning ones will benefit from the stars that show up in the SERPS.

Point 7: No third Party Reviews

This is a smaller issue; although it is very pervasive, as it pertains to lawyers copy and pasting their glowing Yelp, Google or other reviews from third parties onto their own websites. In fact, some third parties have enable this through plug-ins which automatically push (sometimes vetted) reviews to a law firm website.

In Conclusion

As Gyi Tsakalakis says: you can’t SEO your way out of bad service.  So – my take – this is an opportunity for lawyers who deliver fantastic customer service to shine, as many firms will shy away from posting reviews to their own site.  Counterpoint: this just incentives review spam at a much higher rate (already a major concern especially in legal).

Google SEO Penalty for Chat Pop-ups Coming?

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Ichat penalty‘ve long ranted against many of the implementations of chat conversions – especially on mobile devices – in which the chat is so aggressive that it covers up content, as well as all other forms of conversion – phone numbers and form fills.  In most cases, chat implementations are configured to maximize revenue for the chat provider, NOT the law firm.  Some providers have gone so far to refuse to allow customization of how aggressively their chat is implemented.  This is further exacerbated by most vendors positioning their service as a marketing channel instead of what it truly is – a conversion channel.  (i.e. just because someone ultimately converted through chat – the marketing cost for that user should still be attributed to SEO, Adwords, Avvo etc.)

This is even worse on mobile implementations – with both limited screen size and a (very) high converting device (a phone) being overruled by the obnoxious chat box.

Don’t get me wrong, chat works – just pick your vendor very very carefully.

But that may all change on January 10th.  Google has announced a penalty on sites implementing intrusive interstitials (those annoying pop up chat boxes would fall into this category). While chat isn’t specifically called out, the announcement does describe the concerns; including interstitials that cover the main content as they “provide a poorer experience to users than other pages where content is immediately accessible”.  Google very specifically calls this out as a SEO penalty for mobile – those types of pages “may not rank as highly”.

While Google has said “responsible interstitials” may remain – based on their description, I read the tealeaves as meaning chat pop ups that very quickly and aggressive cover content and all other forms of conversion most likely will incur an SEO penalty for mobile based searches.

SEO Traffic Generates 1 call per 30 visitors

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This is a review of a Benchmarking study I conducted for the American Bar Association quantifies the question:

How much business does SEO generate?

This has been an oft disputed theory – although frankly I’ve never understood the dispute – but there are certainly factions within the legal online marketspace who argue vociferously that SEO traffic should not be a law firm’s objective. And we’ve certainly seen many examples of low quality traffic; however, my personal thoughts echo SEO audit superstar, Alan Bleiwiess who commented on this issue:

Wait. Who says traffic from search doesn’t lead to sales? I need to meet such people. If for no other reason, than to laugh. Uncontrollably. In their faces.

So instead of letting theories clash (and to see if Alan is right)… I thought I’d actually look into the data.  Turns out, SEO traffic generates inbound phone calls at a pretty consistent and strong rate.  Utilizing call tracking software and and only counting first time callers we found:

SEO generates 3.35 calls  for every 100 visitors.

SEO and Phone Calls
Personal Injury firms highlighted in red. All others in blue.

Granted its a small sample size – and these are mostly long standing clients of mine – so they are well taken care of from an online marketing perspective (yes, I’m biased). For the most part, we’ve pruned out garbage content; focused traffic on local traffic instead of global traffic and heavily invested in high converting terms from a content perspective.  You will note, from the graph above, there still is a wide array of success here – from about 1 call/100 session to 6 calls/100 sessions. (And yes – we are digging deep into each of these firms to understand what those differences are – but that’s a study I’m keeping just for my own clients.)  We also found, those firms in the study who were PI firms – that average rose to 4.5.  And if you really want to nerd out and go back to your graduate stats course – the correlation coefficient between the two was .70.

Now of course, not all of these inbound inquiries are prospective clients – it may very well be someone’s spouse looking up his wife’s number to coordinate picking up the kids from soccer – or more frequently a PPC salesperson prospecting for clients.  BUT…. overall there is a clear and solid line between search traffic and prospects.

You can read more on the study in the ABA Journal or see the stats behind the study here.

 

 

Announcing our Relationship with Google

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Google Partner
Mockingbird Nerds at Google getting advanced Adwords training.

We have a variety of partnerships, friendships and other assorted business relationships. I’ve never felt the need to crow about any of them until now…. our relationship with Google. In fact, I’m guilty of mocking marketers who claim to have special Google access – those who imply they have special access to the algos because they have a picture of Matt smiling at their company’s trade show booth. And there are some who tell prospects they have office space in Google’s Mountainview HQ (you know who you are).

So I was thrilled at the beginning of the year to become one of a small handful of Google Small Business Advisors. For me – I serve as an expert in both SEO and Public Relations, happily donating time and providing advice and guidance to small businesses through Google’s Small Business Community – expertly quarterbacked by Google’s Elizabeth Porter.

It got better.

Earlier this year, Mockingbird was included in Google’s Partner Acceleration Program. There’s just one legal boutique – Mockingbird and I’m beyond proud of our talented team who made this happen.

This entails a lot more than the snazzy Google Partner badge to subconsciously influence prospects by affixing it all over our site and proposals.

  • We’ve earned the Google Partner badge. The Google Partner badge shows that we’ve demonstrated advanced knowledge in Google AdWords advertising products that help us deliver results and build long-lasting relationships with our clients.
  • We’ve recently sent Mockingbird’s senior staff for four days of advanced Adwords training with Google’s own Adwords account managers and specialists.
  • We’re co-hosting events specifically for lawyers at Google through my posting with the American Bar Association.
  • We have access to Google’s internal benchmarking data specific to the legal industry.
  • And most importantly – our PPC clients know that their accounts are tended by some of the best talent in the industry – supported directly by Google.

When we say that we’re calling Google, we’re not calling a 1-800 number, we have a dedicated strategic partnership manager and account manager to help us strategize, optimize and keep our clients ahead of the digital marketing curve.

Stay tuned – I’m committed to making Mockingbird’s partnership with Google extend to the entire legal industry.

 

Latest Fallacy: Technical SEO is Dead

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Update: Excuse the language that follows, but when alleged experts post dangerously inaccurate recommendations with consequences that can decimate a small business, it gets my hackles up.

Over the past week there have been two moronic posts circulated about the uselessness of technical SEO.  The first, by Clayburn Griffin, was surprisingly on Search Engine Land:  The role technical SEO should play: It’s makeup.  The article was dumb, misleading, misinformed and spectacularly sexist – essentially positing that the only reason agencies engage in technical best practices was to doll themselves up for a date with an apparently stupid prospective client, who will be easily wooed by complex technical jargon.

Being attractive is a nice advantage. People are more inclined to like you if you’re attractive. And makeup can make anyone look better. It can touch up blemishes and smooth out your skin. It can outline your eyes and make them stand out.

What’s an agency to do?  Most of the time, it seems like they turn to more and more technical SEO. Agencies are always on the lookout for great technical SEOs. More makeup to slather on their clients’ websites.

The article was widely pilloried across the nerd community – including a counterpost on SEL.

And yesterday, not to be outdone (and perhaps inexplicably desperate for the negative notoriety generated by Griffin), Jayson Demers posted this drivel at Entrepreneur: Why Modern SEO Requires Almost No Technical Expertise.  Included within this fetid pile of garbage:

Ignore all the technical terms, all the details of execution and all your preconceived notions for a moment and focus on this: the happier your users are when they visit your site, the higher you’re going to rank.

Modern SEO really is that simple.

So – a picture being worth a thousand words – let me demonstrate visually what happens when you totally fuck up the technology. Let’s see just how simple modern SEO is when you ignore the technology. =What follows are the results on two sites we have been called in to fix after they went through a website redesign that ignored technical fundamentals. We call this Janitorial SEO – the cleaning up of others’ messes.  And 90% of the time, those messes are created unintentionally by people who just don’t know better (sometimes called designers).  What’s more galling is idiots like Demers and Griffin (who should know better) espousing willfully and deliberately overlooking technical fundamentals.

But are they really wrong?  Do these two know something we don’t and is the future of SEO one devoid of technical hurdles? In both of the cases below, you are seeing the result of poorly implemented website redesigns that utterly scrambled the technical platform.  I haven’t seen anything more dramatic than the disaster that occurred when a law firm launched their “new and improved” website that ignored pretty basic SEO foundations. And lets not even consider the business ramifications of losing essentially 80% of their traffic overnight.

AG

The second tanking (below) is less dramatic and frankly more typical – a roughly 30% loss in organic traffic after a website redesign onto a new platform with a completely blind eye towards basic SEO technology.  In both cases, the financial implications to the firm were severe.

AG2

Still think technical SEO doesn’t matter?  Fortunately there are plenty of SEO “consultants” out there, eager to take your money and make your SEO traffic slide into the abyss.