Bird Droppings: Google Takes Its First Steps Toward Killing the URL…and More

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Welcome to another edition of “Bird Droppings.” A simple list highlighting recent articles relevant to legal marketing in order to help bring you up to speed with what’s been happening in the industry over the past few weeks! Make sure to check out our upcoming events at the end of the list!

Industry News

Do people care about flashy ad copy? What makes people click on search ads?

Google is notifying advertisers that AdWords Express has joined the Google Ads platform.

Google is partnering with Automattic and WordPress in order to develop a news publishing platform.

Google decides to make unsolicited changes to your campaigns. Advertisers get 7 days to opt-out.

Google takes first steps toward killing the URL

Why Is Content from Google Posts Appearing in Local Pack Listings?

Upcoming Events:

What: Chat Bots: Can AI Deliver a Better, Cheaper, More Effective Chat Experience?
When: March 13, 2019
Where: Webinar
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What: BEDLAM Conference 2019
When: March 29, 2019
Where: Nashville, TN
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What: Digital Marketing for Attorneys
When: April 17, 2019
Where: Webinar
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What: Practice 360 | A Day For Lawyers & Law Firms
When: May 17, 2019
Where: Washington, DC
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What: PILMMA Internet Boot Camp
When: September 12, 2019
Where: New Orleans, LA
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Law Firm Branding: Why Should Your Firm Rebrand

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In an earlier blog post titled, “What Is Branding?” our team member Branden outlines what branding means. Unfortunately, many law firms struggle with branding. In many cases, law firms created a brand years ago and haven’t gotten around to revisiting it since. The result? A dated logo, website, marketing collateral and/or a brand image that doesn’t fit the current agency’s personality.  Either way, there are plenty of reasons to consider branding or rebranding your firm.

1. Are you are getting fewer leads than in the past?

2. Are you are entering a new market?

3. Are you introducing significant new services?

4. Has your firm’s growth slowed or stopped?

5. Have new competitors entered the marketplace?

6. Does your visual brand look tired compared to the competition?

7. Do you struggle to describe how your firm is different?

8. Are you losing a higher percentage of competitive bid situations than in the past?

9. Has your firm changed significantly since you last adjusted your brand?

10. Are you struggling to attract top talent?

11. Have your customers changed significantly?

12. Are you trying to figure out how to take your firm to the next level?

Branding your firm, whether you’re revisiting, repositioning or starting from scratch, is a challenge that many law firms will eventually face. With the right plan and process, your firm can benefit immensely with a brand that will reflect your law firm’s identity for years to come.

Also, be sure to check out our eBook, What is Branding? It explains the basics of branding, what our process looks like here at Mockingbird and why you should invest in branding your law firm.

 

Bird Droppings: Google is now rolling out the Google Speed Update…and More

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Welcome to another edition of “Bird Droppings.” A simple list highlighting recent articles relevant to legal marketing in order to help bring you up to speed with what’s been happening in the industry over the past few weeks! Make sure to check out our upcoming events!

Industry Articles:

Attorneys that build links with press releases listen up! Google ignores those links and they don’t help your site in search.

Google is now rolling out the Google Speed Update, which impacts the mobile search rankings of the slowest sites on the web.

With Google’s pending Speed Update, gradual improvements to how quickly your law firm’s website loads can impact your rankings “a little bit”.

Avvo’s fixed-cost service discontinued by Internet Brands

Smart bidding is really smart, but its not perfect. Be careful when you make the switch.

Bird Droppings: Voice Search Technology…and More!

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Welcome to another edition of “Bird Droppings.” A simple list highlighting recent articles relevant to legal marketing in order to help bring you up to speed with what’s been happening in the industry over the past few weeks! Make sure to check out our upcoming events at the end of the list!

Industry Articles:

Turn your videos and webinars into major link magnets.

Google expands the “menu” option in GMB beyond just restaurants. Add your menu of services today!

Campaigns without keywords are the future!

If you weren’t already posting to GMB, you should now.

Trying to locate your law firm’s Google My Business CID number to keep track of merged or removed listings? Joy Hawkins from Sterling Sky explains how.

With significant changes in local search, contributor Wesley Young provides tips in order to keep your local business in the SERPS.

AdWords has FINALLY implemented notes within their dashboard! Just like Google Analytics annotations, you can now call out significant changes over time.

Google is cleaning up some reviews and is no longer counting reviews from “A Google User” in their totals.

How voice search technology is reshaping SEO in 2018.

Industry Tools:

May 2018 Adobe XD updates.

Upcoming Events:

2018 PILMMA Summit – Sept 12 | St Louis, MO

Local Business Marketing Summit – Sept 19 | Free Online Event

Wistia Releases New Video Player, Vulcan V2

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Video is a valuable tool that helps you connect with your viewers. Vulcan V2, Wistia’s new video player, is smaller and faster than their previous video player. The only issue is that videos can add a lot of weight to your site and slow it down. If your visitors experience slow page speed, they are more likely to leave your website. With the release of Vulcan V2, it shows that Wistia cares about the importance of website performance more than others.

Vulcan V2 is half the size of their previous player and is a quarter of the size of YouTube’s. Not only did they create a smaller player but also added a bunch of optimizations in order to increase page load time. Wistia claims that they are seeing pages with Vulcan V2 load 10% faster on average than pages with their last video player, Vulcan.

To learn more about Vulcan V2 or what Wistia has been up to, check out their video on their blog regarding Vulcan V2.

Bird Droppings: “Business Description” Returns to Google My Business…and More!

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Welcome to another edition of “Bird Droppings.” A simple list highlighting recent articles relevant to legal marketing. Find a variety of links that we have gathered to bring you up to speed with what’s been happening in the industry over the past few weeks!

Industry Articles:

Law firm in Louisville, Kentucky who incentivized people to review the business see all but one review disappear.

A guide to writing irresistible calls to action.

Google now showing answers without any additional search results for some queries.

Notes are coming to AdWords.

After nearly 2 years, editable business descriptions are again part of your law firm’s Google My Business page. Colan Nielsen show’s how to set them up and the guidelines for doing so!

Sites that follow mobile-first indexing best practices will be migrating over now.

Tools in the Industry

Jitbit.com tool “SSL-Check” crawls site for pages that aren’t secure.

February 2018 Adobe XD Updates

10 Things You Should Be Doing vs 10 Things You Must Stop Doing – May 18 | Seattle, WA

Bird Droppings: Google Q&A…and More!

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Welcome to another edition of “Bird Droppings.” A simple list highlighting recent articles relevant to legal marketing. Find a variety of links that we have gathered to bring you up to speed with what’s been happening in the industry over the past few weeks!

SEO Articles:

Multi-lingual firms – make sure Google can understand what language your pages are in, all the way down to the image alt attributes.

As more and more users utilize the Google Questions feature of GMB, you may be wondering how and when you can act on mis-information about your law firm.

Looking to take advantage of this new Google My Business feature? Columnist and local SEO expert Joy Hawkins explains everything you need to know about Google Q&A!

Google adds Q&A Notification options to GMB.

WordPress releases maintenance update to 4.9.3 and fixes 34 bugs from previous version.

Beginning July 2018, the popular internet browser Google Chrome will mark all HTTP sites as “Not secure.” Google continues to move toward a more secure web by encouraging sites to adopt HTTPS encryption. 

WordPress’ new maintenance release fixes a bug in 4.9.3, which will cause sites that support automatic background updates to fail to update automatically.

Is AMP trying to become Snapchat? These “interactive stories” look familiar…

Google removes “view image” button from search.

Upcoming Events:

Marketing in the Age of Assistance

Legal Connect with Mockingbird & Google – Austin, TX

Practice 360° | A Day for Lawyers & Law Firms Presented by the D.C. Bar

Bird Droppings: Video Added to Google My Business…and More!

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Welcome to another edition of “Bird Droppings.” A simple list highlighting recent articles relevant to legal marketing. We’ve assembled a variety of links to bring you up to speed with what’s been happening in the industry over the past few weeks!

SEO Articles:

Rebecca Sentance from Search Engine Watch explains why linkless mentions are the future of link-building.

The option to add video to Google My Business is now live!

Protect your advertising investment by removing click fraud in the Google display network.

Google AdWords will no longer support Review Extensions starting mid Jan 2018.

Starting in July 2018 Google will use mobile speed as a ranking factor for mobile searches.

WordPress released a security and maintenance update to 4.9.2. A vulnerability and a handful of bugs were fixed and you can read more about it here.

11 Methods SEOs can help businesses turn out good links

Local SEO expert, Miriam Ellis, shares over 25 FREE tools to help local SEOs.

Case Study: How proximity impacts law firm rankings in Google’s local pack.

Marcus Miller explains how to make the most of your website redesign and ensure and improve your existing search engine rankings and traffic.

Legal Related Links:

Ford is being sued by truck owners claiming diesel engines were rigged.

Misc Links:

CEO Mark Zuckerberg changes Facebook’s goal to help you have more meaningful social interactions by sacrificing public content, news outlets, total time spent and ads you see.

Upcoming Events:

Legal Marketing Brain Trust Event

Bird Droppings : Stop Googling Yourself! Google provides another reason to embrace mobile users. Legal Connect with Google and Mockingbird.

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Welcome to another edition of “Bird Droppings”. A simple list providing links to recent articles relevant to legal marketing. Using the Bird-droppings Slack channel in our office, we have provided another list of helpful links to get you through the holidays.

SEO Articles:

As 2017 comes to a close, Joy Hawkins provides a list of all the changes she’s tracked along with some things that are to come.

Celebrities can use Posts on Google to answer questions with video that are served up in search results (on mobile). Is this going to be expanded to Local Businesses too?

Bryson Meunier explains why we should care about Voice Search

Mockingbird’s Jason Arango explains why you should Stop Googling Yourself

Google announces a new web-based version of it’s SEO Starter Guide

Google officially extends search results snippets to a max of 320 characters

The High Cost of Thinking Your Local Search Visibility is Free

Early Christmas present from Google: Google now showing 12 months of data in Google Search Console!

(Comparison) The 12 Google My Business Bookings Feature Partners

Update! Google makes 14 Changes to the Review Guidelines

Key Findings from the 2017 Local Search Industry Survey

Is your new year resolution to clean up your tagging and track your campaigns effectively in Google analytics? Annie Cushing helps you learn from other people’s mistakes.

Legal related links:

Another reason from Google on why your law firm must embrace mobile users and create a great experience on smaller devices that is technically sound.

Misc Links:

Man makes his backyard shed the top rated restaurant on TripAdvisor

Recent and Upcoming Events:

Legal connect with Google – Austin

1st Amendment Rights & Blogging with Bruce Johnson

9 Things You Should Know About Local SEO