How Your Domain Authority Affects Your Firm

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Let’s clarify one thing right off the bat: Domain Authority is not the same as PageRank. Domain Authority (DA) is a tool created by Moz used to estimate your page ranking. It uses link flows and trust metrics to come to its conclusion, but DA has no effect on how well your site actually does from a technical standpoint. 

 

This doesn’t mean that DA has no effect on your site whatsoever. It has more of a sociological impact in the way that owning a fancy suit doesn’t mean you’re rich, but it might help you get a higher paying job. Having a high DA will improve link-building opportunities, which will, in turn, improve your PageRank.

 

Your PageRank comes directly from Google and isn’t accessible. You can try to calculate it, but your DA is probably a better estimate than you’ll come up with. The main thing is that your PageRank actually does determine where your page sits in the search results. As you can probably assume, higher is better. You want your page to show up at the top of the organic search results. PageRank says whether or not it will.

 

Improving DA and PageRank

Google and Moz determine your metrics through a number of factors but largely focus on links and content. Lucky for you, you have some control over both of these.

 

Link building is your best method for improving authority. By having a more trusted site vouch for you by posting an article with a link to your site, they are improving your trustworthiness. You can build links through guest-writing articles, negotiating with authors of relevant pages, or adding links to directories in which your firm is listed.

 

On the content front, the main advice Google gives is to prioritize quality over quantity. Google determines quality through E.A.T.: expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. If you want your blog articles to be used as resources, they have to be relevant to your firm and what people want to know regarding your expertise. You need to prove that you are a trusted expert, and your website needs to prove that you aren’t trying to steal anything from your clients. This means that anyone who visits the site needs to be comforted by the layout, so content extends beyond writing and into the design. 

 

What Comes with a Good DA

When you manage to improve your DA and your PageRank you will most likely see an increase in traffic relevant to your business, meaning an increase in leads and clients. You will have more opportunities for quality link building, the heavens will open up you will finally find inner peace. 

 

It’s never that simple. Maintaining good DA means maintaining your website, keeping up with search engine updates, and consistently producing quality content. It’s work, and not always work you have time for if you’re also running a law firm.

 

Mockingbird is here to help. We work in improving your website, content, and link building connections. If you would like to get more clients, contact Mockingbird today.

 

How Remarketing Benefits Law Firms

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You might have heard the term “remarketing” before, it’s pretty common in the digital marketing world. Just in case you weren’t fully sure what it entails, here’s a quick backgrounder on the basics of remarketing.

 

What Even is Remarketing?

Well, it’s marketing, again. You market to audiences that have already interacted with your ads. Since consumers often take multiple visits to a website before converting, it makes sense that they probably didn’t become a client the first time they clicked on your ad. Does this mean you paid for a click that didn’t end up having a conversion? Yes. Does that mean it was a wasted click? No.

 

The good thing about interactions, even if they don’t result in conversions, is that they show you who is interested in your firm. By targeting people who interacted with your ad, you are cutting out a large portion of the uninterested population, and saving money in the process. Remarketing campaigns often have higher return on ad spend (ROAS) and lower cost per click (CPC). 

 

So, in summary, remarketing is marketing to people who you know are interested but might need a reminder in order to become a client.

 

Where Does Remarketing Work Best for Lawyers?

Remarketing is an option on most ad platforms, from Google to Facebook to Microsoft. Each platform has its own unique abilities and allowances regarding how many times you can show an ad to one person in a day. Facebook is at the higher end of that spectrum, Google is on the lower end. 

 

As far as law firms go, the platform does matter. The impact of a Facebook ad and Google or Bing Search ad are very different and serve different purposes. Where Facebook may be able to relentlessly promote your brand through rigorous remarketing, Search will catch people when they are actively looking for a lawyer.  It’s all a balancing game. Luckily, we’re really good at balancing.

 

How to Take Advantage of Remarketing

Your law firm can start remarketing as soon as you have data from marketing. You will have to figure out which of your audiences are best to target, and then narrow it down from there. 

If you feel like your law firm could benefit from remarketing, and think that you might need some help in running your ad campaigns, contact Mockingbird.

Survey Says: Manage Your Reviews

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A recent survey by BrightLocal has shined a light on how important reputation management is for businesses. 

 

The survey, which polled over 1,000 Americans of varying ages, looked at what percentage of consumer left reviews, read reviews, and let reviews influence them. While the results shouldn’t be surprising to anyone in the marketing industry, they certainly help to prove the point that reviews are vital for the success of a business, especially with Google My Business’ new carousel review feature.

 

How Consumers Read Reviews

Time

Over 80% of consumers read reviews for local businesses, with younger generations being more likely to consult online reviews. They spend an average of about 13 minutes reading reviews before making a decision, with 18-34 year-olds taking upwards of 18 minutes and 55+ year-olds taking under 10 minutes.

 

Trust

As expected, good reviews are good. 91% of consumers responded that positive reviews make them more likely to use a business. Similarly, 82% said that negative reviews make them less likely to use a business.

 

 

This is especially telling, considering 76% of total consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations from family and friends. The level of trust increases with younger audiences, with 41% of 18-34 year olds saying they always trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.

 

Review Legitimacy

Of course, consumers don’t always trust every review they see. Some factors they pay attention to beyond the content include:

 

  • Recency
  • Star rating
  • Number of reviews
  • Business responses

 

 

The general consensus is that reviews over three months old are no longer relevant.

 

Consumers are particularly worried about fake reviews, with 82% claiming to have read at least one fake review in the past year. The increased number from 2018 suggests that there are either more fake reviews online than before or consumers are simply becoming savvier to them. Either way, you want to keep them off your platforms.

 

 

Responding to Reviews

Responding as a business owner may seem unnecessary and time-consuming, but is worth it. 71% of consumers responded that they were more likely to use a business if they had seen that the business had responded to reviews. This is an easy way to maintain control of your reviews and your image while still allowing your customer’s voice to be heard.

 

Requesting Reviews

One of the best ways to control your online presence is by asking your clients to leave reviews. Of the 67% of consumers asked to leave a review, 76% left a review. 33% of consumers were never asked to leave a review. That 33% is a huge missed opportunity for businesses, especially with so many options for reaching out to consumers.  

 

Businesses reached out to customers in a number of ways, including:

 

  • During the sale;
  • In a follow-up email;
  • Over the phone;
  • On a receipt;
  • In an SMS message;
  • In exchange for a discount; and
  • On a business card

 

Managing Your Reviews

Reviews are your opportunity to build your community around your clients. By responding to their comments, asking them to write reviews, and making accounts on multiple platforms you are setting yourself up for success. 

If you feel like your law firm could use some help with your reviews, contact Mockingbird. Reputation management is just one of our specialized services.

Handling Our Over-Performing Page

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We have a problem. One of our blog posts is doing really well. How is this a problem? The post doesn’t really have anything to do with our services.

 

The Story

In October of 2016, we published this post. It’s about how to set up an email when you already have an existing email account. It didn’t do much at first but slowly began to gain traffic. Two years later it was getting between 800 and 900 organic landing pages every week. The page peaked in mid-January 2019 with over 2,400 landing pages in one week. 

 

Screenshot showing that the blog post was relatively inactive for a couple years before gradually becoming more and more popular

 

The page has generated 227 goal completions and 99,700 sessions. It has a 0.23% goal completion rate, about half of the total average for our website. 

 

The Problem

So the page is generating leads. It has links to it. Where’s the problem? 

 

Well, it’s screwing with our data. I mean, how do you accurately measure how the site is doing if half of the sessions are for a three-year-old page that doesn’t actually have anything to do with legal marketing? Beyond that, since most of our visitors are looking for info on Gmail, does Google think we’re a Gmail support website and are ranking us as such? 

 

Screenshot showing the blog post making up over half of all organic landing pages for the website

 

The Solutions

In our brainstorm about this page we came up with a few solutions, but no conclusions. I mean, what do you do with a page that’s doing a lot, but not a lot for us. It’s mainly just being a pain when we try to do a quick check of our numbers. This is why we had to think of what to do.

 

Delete the Page

This was one of the first options to pop up. Maybe we should just delete the page. Get rid of it. If most of the traffic is organic, it’ll just go somewhere else.

 

But it’s linked to. Sure, not a lot of clicks are coming from links for this page, but we don’t want any of our link value. Even if we redirected the links our domain authority would be impacted. So don’t delete the page.

 

Deindex the Page

This was one of our more viable options. Deindexing the page would make it so that Google would no longer provide it in relevant searches. The page will still exist, would still be accessible, but wouldn’t get the same number of organic landing pages. 

 

“What would happen to the links?”

 

Well, we just don’t want to risk the value of our precious links by sending them to a deindexed page. That’s why we’ve gone with option number three:

 

Ignore the Page

The page isn’t harmful. In fact, it’s bringing in leads. Not a lot, but some. Until we find a way to safely amputate it or until we find out that it’s actively hurting our site, we can ignore it. We can subtract the number of sessions our overachieving page got from our total number of sessions. 

 

And so we concluded our brainstorm. As it turns out, our problem is very minor.

 

If You Have a Single Page the Drives the Traffic

We know we’re not alone with this issue because we spend all day looking at data from other websites. Chances are if you have one page that gets significantly more traffic than the rest of your site you might also be wondering what to do. Each situation is different, so we can’t give you any direct orders,  but we can give you a checklist of things to consider.

Considerations Before Deindexing or Deleting a Page:

  • How much traffic is that page driving?
  • How many leads/conversions is that page generating?
  • How many pages link to that page? Are they improving your domain authority?
  • Is the page relevant to your services?

 

Google’s November “Bedlam” Update

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Those of us in the SEO business began noticing that our website metrics were changing in mid- to early- November, and it wasn’t until November 12 that Google confirmed that they had rolled out an unannounced update, by that point coined as the Bedlam update (no relation to BEDLAM 2020, our awesome conference.) From there, it wasn’t until early December that Google revealed why there had been such drastic changes.

 

Neural Matching

The reason for the upset has been pinned down to Google’s update implementing neural learning, a form of AI that aims to prioritize user intent. This is designed to provide users with more relevant search results. This means that some website might be receiving less traffic but higher leads, some websites might be lower across the board, and some might be higher across the board.

 

The Local Impact

Local businesses have seen some of the more significant impacts, with rankings changing drastically to reflect relevance over proximity. Spam listings and keyword-stuffed posting seem to have benefitted from the update. They are likely to be taken care of as Google smooths out the kinks of neural matching. The best way to fight this is through local optimizations and spam fighting.

 

Stabilizing Post-Bedlam

While most of the initial upheaval and “bedlam” of the update has worn off, the full impact and time frame until it’s considered the new normal is still unclear. The best way to carry on after such an event is to make sure your website is following Google’s best practices, provide relevant content, and regularly check in with your marketing team to ensure nothing’s on fire.

 

What Our Clients Should Expect

Our team here at Mockingbird has led our clients through years of Google updates. We have consistently helped them back onto their upward trends. We expect Bedlam to be no different. Still, we have been taking every step to keep our clients on the right track.

 

If you have any questions about how the update may have impacted your site, contact your account executive.

How Digital Advertising can Work With Outside Advertising

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We see it all the time: lawyers come in having spent thousands of dollars on billboards and TV ads and aren’t seeing the results. They don’t want to give up their billboards but want to expand into digital advertising. Lucky for them, this is completely possible.

 

Visibility vs. Conversions

Advertising doesn’t have a singular goal, and different campaigns have different purposes. Some campaigns focus on increasing brand awareness or visibility, and some focus specifically on increasing conversions.

 

Outside Advertising

Billboards and tv ads are generally better for the former, as they can’t target specific audiences. This is beneficial since brand recognition can be a significant contributing factor to a consumer’s decision of which firm to choose. Even if they don’t need your services when they see your ad, they might remember your name when they do.

 

Digital Advertising

Digital advertising, search ads in particular, can target specific audiences to the point where your ad is only being shown to consumers in your area who you know are looking for legal services at that exact moment. If they happen to remember your name from your billboards, that could certainly help increase your chances of getting a conversion.

 

Combination

Certain forms of digital advertising, like Youtube and Display ads, work similarly to billboards and TV ads. You don’t always know who is going to see them, and they aren’t designed to increase conversions. By running a campaign of outside advertising as well as Display and Youtube ads, consumers will become aware of your brand. By sending them a targeted search ad as soon as they do need your services, you’ve almost guaranteed a conversion.

 

Mockingbird is proud of our expertise in digital advertising. We may flinch when we hear that a prospective client has been spending thousands on billboards and pennies on digital, but we are happy to design a campaign that will benefit our client without them sacrificing their billboards.  

If you would like to hear how your outside advertising can be made even more effective, contact Mockingbird today.

Why We Track the Customer Journey: 3 Good Reasons

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Quick question: should you invest more into the consumer who has searched for local auto-body shops, how to make an insurance claim, and then “car accident lawyer,” or the consumer who has just searched “car accident lawyer?” The answer is, of course, the former. We know that they have been in an accident, we know that they are making an insurance claim, and we know that they need a lawyer. What do we know about the second consumer, other than they want to know about car accident lawyers? 

 

1. Invest Where it Matters

Advertising is a game of wise investing and strategic placement. “Car accident lawyer” won’t be a cheap search term, no matter where you are. It’s important not to spend exorbitant amounts for each click by someone who isn’t even in the market for a lawyer.  By narrowing your audience down through search histories, you are saving money on PPC.

 

2. Reliable Customers

Visibility is vital for brand awareness and future conversions, but shouldn’t be the focus of targeted search campaigns. The customer journey is not vital for visibility campaigns, which largely appear on Youtube and Display ads. Search ads can be highly targeted and are a high-investment-high-return type of advertising. You can, and should, target consumers who you know are on the path to hiring a lawyer. Don’t use search ads to try and convert people who aren’t interested.

 

3. Actionable Metrics

Through Google Analytics and/or Google Search Console you can see where your clients are coming from. You can see their customer journey, how they found their way to your website, and at what step in their search they chose to convert. These metrics will show you where to invest in advertising and where to focus on link-building. Knowing how to connect with your clients before they even know they are going to convert is the goal of any good advertising campaign.

Deciding when to intercept a customer is a skill, and one that we excel at. We take pride in our experience running successful search campaigns. If you would like to discuss opportunities for your firm, contact Mockingbird today.

The Unseen Benefits of Building a New Website

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It can be hard to build your website up from nothing, especially if you already had a website before. There are a number of reasons why you might have had to do so: rebranding, lost your previous domain, your last website was a train-wreck. Whatever your reason, a new domain is a great opportunity to establish your firm.

 

Google’s Honeymoon Period

One of the main benefits of a new domain is Google’s honeymoon period, where your website ranks well despite not having sufficient metrics that might have earned it. This allows a well-managed website to desperately grab and hang onto decent rankings early. 

 

The key takeaway from that should be “well-managed.” A poorly run website will do poorly, and won’t help its firm. There is nothing sadder than a website that doesn’t utilize their honeymoon period.

 

Configuring Google Search Console (GSC)

Just like how it’s easier to furnish an empty room than a room full of old furniture, it’s easier to set up GSC on a new website than on a website that has already set up a network of illogical metrics. 

 

A properly set up GSC can provide you with the most accurate and up-to-date metrics on what is and isn’t working with your website. It can tell you where there are errors and, oftentimes, how to fix them. GSC can learn from the data from a fresh website, uncorrupted by confusing configurations.

 

Rebranding Your Firm

Sometimes it’s best to take an opportunity to rebrand your firm. This can mean changing your primary practice area, your logo, or the general image you want to represent you. Us here at Mockingbird have seen our fair share of outdated websites, and are always excited when we get the chance to create a shiny new site that truly represents the lawyers it advertises. 

Building a new website can feel time-consuming and inefficient, but we encourage looking at the silver linings. Alongside the opportunities it can present, the process of building a new website has been streamlined (especially for law firms) and can be made more easily scalable, accessible, and mobile than ever before.

3 Things to Remember When Leaving Your Digital Marketing Agency

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Splitting with your marketing agency is rarely a mutual decision with warm feelings all around. More often it involves pulling teeth and giving up access to your analytics and domain name. Many digital marketing firms take pride in making it difficult for you to move on, and the best way to fight back is by making sure you know what to fight for after your break up.

 

1. Protect Your Customer Information

If your marketing agency had control over your call tracking programs and/or access to your direct messaging ads they have access to your clients. They can use those client lists against you by leading potential customers away from your firm and maybe even towards your competitors. To avoid this, you need to ensure that you either maintain control over all your customer information or see that any programs that collect information are terminated.

 

2. Check Your Website Access

A lot of digital marketing companies that provide website building services will make sure that they own every domain they build. That means that if they build your website and you fire them later, they will keep your website. You will be left to build another or buy it from them. The best way to avoid this is to make sure you own your domain prior to signing a contract, or by working with an organization that ensures that you own your website.

 

3. Review Cancellation Penalties

Always review your contracts before firing your agency. It’s not unusual for there to be penalties for canceling your plan, and those penalties can be costly. Unfortunately, long-term contracts can prove to be more costly. It can seem like there’s no easy escape, but making your grievances public can certainly help your case. 

 

Digital marketing agencies often aim to make their profit by trapping their clients in contracts and hiding their spendings. Mockingbird works to provide full transparency and ownership to our clients, and never traps them in unnecessary long-term contracts. We have helped law firms escape predatory firms for our entire career, and know how to best do our job. 

 

If you have been used by your marketing agency, contact Mockingbird. We will help you build your brand organically and protect your assets.