Are Google Ads Messaging Extensions Right for You

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Google integrated extensions into Google Ads in 2016, providing a number of new options for businesses. One option that is currently available is messaging, which allows consumers to directly message businesses right from the ad. 

 

This featured felt almost overwhelming to some small businesses when it was first rolled out. The idea of having to be on call for countless consumers without knowing whether or not they even intended to use the feature wasn’t what business owners thought was the best use of their time.

 

But it’s been a couple of years now, and maybe we can help demystify the feature.

 

Do I Always Have to be Available?

No, you don’t. Google is smart and knows that most small businesses don’t have the capacity to have someone ready to respond to messages 24/7. That’s why you can customize your hours on your ads to ensure that the messaging feature doesn’t appear when your business is closed. Beyond that, you can craft automated responses and email forwarding to ensure that no message goes unanswered. 

 

Where do the Messages Go and How Do I Respond?

This is largely up to you. You can set up your account to have the messages sent to an email address or a mobile phone number of your choosing. When you respond to a message on either platform it sends it directly back to the client. 

 

What Counts as a Conversion?

You can determine what counts as a conversion, i.e. how many messages need to be sent by the client before Google adds it to your list of conversions. Not everyone who clicks on a messaging extension means to, and therefore shouldn’t be counted as a conversion.

 

How Do I Know That My Business is Eligible for Messaging Extensions?

You can find Google’s requirements for users implementing messaging extensions here. To briefly summarize, your phone number (if you’re using a phone number) must be active, domestic, and toll-free. You have to respond to messages promptly and relevantly, so no advertising products that weren’t in the ad. Finally, you need to make sure you’re not abusing the access messaging extensions are giving you to the clients.  You are not allowed to use their personal information or data, and you’re not allowed to upload unwanted software of malware onto their device.

 

So, Are Messaging Extensions Right for My Firm?

To answer this question you need to look at your firm. Is there enough staff available to answer messages during the day? Does your firm provide services that can be sold easier with an immediate personal connection? Are you not planning on spamming people who message you or uploading viruses to their devices? If your answers to these questions are all “yes” then you should consider messaging extensions for your next ad campaign. If the answer to any of them is “no,” you might want to either consult a PPC expert or wait until your next set of ad campaigns to add the extension.

3 Things a Customer Should See When They Land on Your Site

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The journey from initial search to conversion is often a long and winding one. It starts with intent, wanders through research, and eventually lands on a conversion. Your website needs to be there every step of the way and needs to show a consumer what they want to see in a law firm.

 

Ideally, the largest impression you want to make will happen while the consumer is in their research phase. If you can convince them that your firm is the most knowledgeable before they even begin shopping around you already have the upper hand. The best way to do this is by having properly set up landing pages.

 

A properly set up landing page should have three key elements, regardless of the content:

 

1. The name of your firm

    • The consumer should never visit your site and not know what site they are visiting. This leads to distrust and bad impressions. Not only will telling the consumer who you are early on help them to trust your site, but it will also help them remember the name of your firm.

 

2. Contact details

    • Having prominent contact details is like having a well-lit exit sign: just because a person doesn’t plan on using it doesn’t mean it isn’t comforting to see. By having contact details, you are showing that you have accountability and aren’t just blogging from an undisclosed location, luring unsuspecting passersby into your website to steal their cookies like some unholy child of cookie monster and a bridge troll. 

 

3. Easy navigation 

    • Easy navigation is more of a benefit to your website than to the consumer’s feeling of easy, but it is a good indicator of the latter. Having pages with internal linking and a user-friendly interface will encourage consumers to explore your website beyond their landing page. If the consumers are utilizing these features, you know that your website is well set-up for conversions. Good examples of intuitive navigation are well-designed menus, comprehensible H1s and H2s, and up to date plugins to ensure site-speeds remain high. 

 

These features are important for any website but are useless if the content on your landing pages is low quality. A meal is improved by being plated nicely, but all the nice plating in the world can’t save a bad meal. 

If you think your website needs to be improved, updates, or maintained, contact Mockingbird. We are experts in ensuring lawyers are never left with a mediocre website.

Data is Useless without Insights: 4 Indicators You Should Know

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Every decision you make when advertising is based on data and best practices that were formed by data. If you have a Google Ads account, chances are you have large amounts of data you might not know what to do with. Luckily, you don’t need to know the meaning or purpose of every number. Here are 4 insights you should be checking on in your analytics.

 

1. Page Views vs Leads

Pageviews go up and down and don’t always mean that more people are interested in your firm. Of course, more pageviews can lead to more leads just due to a higher volume of traffic, but fewer page views don’t always mean fewer leads. While page views seem like the obvious factor to look at, leads are a more productive insight to check to see where your business is and what ad strategies are working.

 

2. Channels

Knowing where your traffic is coming from will help you know where you should be spending your money. Sometimes you can spend thousands of dollars on an ad campaign just to get all of your clients from your newly set-up Google My Business Account. 

 

3. Landing Pages

Just as you need to know where your traffic is coming from, you need to know where it’s going. Knowing your website’s top landing pages will show you where you need to put your time and energy. Sometimes your top landing pages are not the pages with the highest conversion rates. Sometimes they’re the pages with the highest bounce rates. If this is the case, you need to spend some time making those pages more welcoming and leading for the rest of the website. 

 

4. Bounce Rates

The bounce rate for a page is the percentage of visitors who left the website after visiting only that page. Sometimes that’s fine, as with educational blog posts where people might find what they need quickly. Other times it’s a sign that something’s wrong. For instance, if your homepage has a high bounce rate, that really isn’t good. A high bounce rate can be due to a number of things, including a site that feels untrustworthy or a site that loads slowly. Luckily, all of these problems can be fixed quickly.

Sometimes it can be hard to run a successful law firm while also worrying about advertising and digital marketing metrics. If this is the case, you’re in luck. Mockingbird is here with the most comprehensive and accessible report out there, so you can let the numbers tell you how to run your business, and let us tell you where the numbers are coming from in a language you understand. If this sounds like something you could benefit from, let us know!

E-A-T: SEO 101

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Researching how to produce the best content can lead a person down a rabbit hole of optimization. Countless articles explain how H1s and H2s can both make and break a page. That adding images will improve your ranking until they slow your page down. Then you find E-A-T. You’re not sure what it is, but you know it relates to the quality of the page.

 

What is E-A-T?

Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These are the guidelines that Google uses to evaluate the quality of your page. Some of them can be achieved through simple quality content, and some need some outside work. This is why your content department needs to be multifaceted; creating great web pages is a team effort.

Expertise

Part of quality content is quality info. If you aren’t an expert in the area you are writing on, you need to cite your sources and maybe bring on an expert to help you write your piece. Google claims to use a holistic approach to ranking pages, meaning the actual content gets evaluated not just fed through an algorithm. 

A good rule of thumb: if you are providing advice or information, you need to make sure that the information your giving can be backed up by people way more qualified than you.

Authority

Authority is proving your expertise. It means that the author should be clear to the reader and any visitors can easily contact the company or learn more about it. If you are speaking with authority, you need to be able to explain where your attitude is coming from.

Domain authority is important for this and this is where you might need to do a bit of PR work. Chances are your website doesn’t have a high domain authority if it hasn’t been fully established yet, but luckily there are websites that do. This is an opportunity for link-building, or getting articles on more authoritative sites to link to your piece. Either that or you could reach out to more authoritative sites and ask if you can guest-publish an article on their site, linking to your site. Either way, it helps you look like you hang around with a good crowd.

 

Trustworthiness

Is your page a safe space? Do users feel like they might get a virus if they click on anything? Users should feel comfortable exploring your website. Beyond that, your web page should have a point. It should exist to help someone. The purpose of your page should be clear, as should the purpose of the website as a whole. 

 

How does E-A-T affect my page?

It’s important to remember that E-A-T are guidelines and not hard and fast ranking rules. Google has, on multiple occasions, explained that there are no algorithms that spit out ranking numbers based on E-A-T. Instead, there are hundreds of ranking algorithms that all work together to create a page’s rank.

Instead of thinking of E-A-T as a series of gymnastics elements that must be perfectly executed to achieve a score of 9.8, think of it as a way to ensure your posture, uniform, and style are optimized before going out and dancing before the judges (I don’t know gymnastics I’m sorry to any gymnasts who might be reading this). They don’t judge directly on those aspects, but they certainly help.

 

I’m still confused. Can you just do this for me?

If you are a law firm, then yes! Mockingbird works in website building and maintenance to make sure it looks trustworthy, PR for link building, and can help to plan content production. Contact us today to help you understand your website!

Making Your Website Scalable Helps Everyone (and Everwhere)

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There’s always room for growth. Whether you’re a two-person firm in a one-horse town or a multinational corporation with hundreds of employees, you want to leave room to expand. 

 

This room has to extend to your website, which you should build with the expectation that it will someday need to be updated for a larger, broader market. There are a number of reasons for this, but let’s focus on the main three for now.

 

Accessibility

Every state and country has different accessibility regulations, and you should pay attention to the strictest of the lot. If you follow the rules of the strictest, you’re following the rules of the laxest. 

The best way to cover your bases for accessibility is by following current SEO best practices:

  • Ensure images have thorough alt text
  • Make sure each page has comprehensive titles, H1, H2, and H3 labeling
  • Add title tags

 

Privacy Settings

Arguably more varied than accessibility, internet privacy laws change from country to country. Even within America, privacy regulations change. Some sites avoid state-by-state violations by simply showing cookie warnings to every visitor, regardless of location. 

 

Site Regulations

America’s must-haves for a website are different from the EU’s, and both of those are wildly different from China’s. This doesn’t necessarily mean you need different websites for different regions (you will probably need a different website for China). The best thing you can do is make sure your website follows the guidelines of every region it will be active in, and the best way to prepare for this is to have a website that is already easily upgradable. 

If you’re looking at building a website for your firm or simply maintaining the one you already have, it’s important to look ahead at where your business could go. These are the things we think about here at Mockingbird Marketing. If you would like to discuss your firm’s website, contact us!

How AI and Machine Learning are Helping Your Website

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Computer systems have been learning on their own since the 1960s, and they have been advancing rapidly in recent years. The most notable recent addition to the AI family is BERT, Google’s new user intent interpreter. BERT, like many search engine programs, is designed to improve user experience and can help to improve site metrics for webmasters. For it to do this, it first needs access to lots of data.

 

AI vs Machine Learning

AI and machine learning can look similar from a distance; both are programs that work to mimic and understand human behaviors. The difference between the two is largely semantic, and one cannot exist without the other.

Machine learning is a key aspect of how AI is designed. The process of machine learning is characterized by feeding the program huge amounts of data to the point where it can replicate and predict human behaviors. Machine learning is the process and AI is the product.

 

How they affect your website

Your website is constantly being reviewed by automated programs, whether they’re crawling, indexing, analyzing, or simply learning from it. The most benevolent of these programs can use machine learning to prevent employee fraud and track third party cookies. 

The more malevolent of the programs are searching for insecurities and opportunities to compromise the security of the website for its makers and users.

 

Optimizing for AI

Since AI is built from machine learning, and machine learning is built from large amounts of data created by humans, there is no solid way to optimize for AI-run search engines. That means that BERT cannot be negotiated with.

The best way to optimize for machine learning and AI is by producing good content and a website that follows SEO best practices.

Why You Should Be Checking Your Bounce Rate

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Relatively underrated compared to such metrics as “pageviews,” a page’s bounce rate shouldn’t be ignored. It’s important to know how many of your website’s pages were the first and last of your website a consumer ever saw. Knowing this might help you to improve your pages.

 

Judging Bounce Rates

Just like limbo at a party, you want it as low as possible for everyone. That being said, different pages will inherently have different bounce rates. Informational pages are likely to have higher rates due to the audience’s ability to get the information they were looking for and leave. Contact pages are likely to have lower rates because very few people click into a contact page from a browser. 

When looking at bounce rates, it’s important to remember page content and user intent. 

 

Improving Bounce Rates

If you want to improve your bounce rate you have to focus on user experience. This means optimizing everything.

 

Page Speed

Nothing gets a user to leave like making them wait. Compress your images, check your loading speeds, and making any necessary changes.

 

Page Design

Look at your pages as if you had never seen them. Are they visually appealing? Are they thematically consistent? Do they make you trust the website? Would it be easy to find an enticing next page to visit? 

If the answer to any of these questions is “no,” fix it. Your page is your front entryway. If a visitor enters and doesn’t feel comfortable they’re going to leave.

 

Optimize Content

Content should be optimized for fast reading. That means short sentences and short paragraphs. It also means that the content needs to be useful and relevant. Don’t sacrifice quality for brevity; you can write a longer piece if you really need to.

 

Internal Linking

If your page is well written, interesting, well designed, and loads quickly, one of the best ways to get people to go to a different page is with internal linking. This allows easy access to other pages on the website. We’ve all been down Wikipedia rabbit-holes and ended up learning about the history of some bridge in North Dakota.

If you think your website needs to improve the bounce rate on some (or all, we don’t judge) of its pages, contact us and we can help you figure out how to find and improve your bounce rate.

3 Marketing Strategies I Learned from the Virginia 2019 Elections

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Virginia’s entire state legislature was up for re-election last night (November 5th, 2019) and the Democrats managed to flip both the state house and state senate despite having the odds stacked against them. From blackface scandals to strong anti-choice lobbying, there was a lot that could have gone wrong. Lucky for the Democrats, just about every Democratic strategizing, organizing, and campaigning organization had nowhere else to lend their focus. 

I was lucky enough to get an inside look at a couple of these organizations earlier in the year, and was able to pick up a few tricks that helped them get elected, and might help you get some more clients.

 

1. Targeting is Everything

Many organizations knew which districts they would our resources into before the district even had a candidate. How did they know how to do this? Historical data is available to show trends, and that data was mined just about to death (you should see the spreadsheets). 

The point is, they knew which races were won and lost before the primaries and so they focused their time and money and what needed to be protected and what needed to be flipped. Or rather, what clients might leave and where conversions might occur.

 

2. Don’t Treat People Like They’re Stupid

Some of the top issues discussed during the race included education, improved access to rural broadband, handling the prescription drug price gouging, and improving rural infrastructure. The candidates knew that the issues were vital to the lives of their constituents, and so treated them seriously. Rhetoric isn’t enough when people’s lives are on the line.

The same goes for your firm. If you just tell your clients that you will fight for them, it’s something they’ve read on 50 other websites. Show them that you know what you’re talking about.

 

3. Be Prepared to Explain Why You’re the Better Option (Basic Opposition Research isn’t a Bad Idea)

You’re competing with other law firms, and you know that. What are you doing to prove you’re the best option?

State legislative candidates and legislators only really make the news when they do something particularly interesting, and for the most part, they don’t. That doesn’t mean that they’re angels. It only takes some basic research to know which bills they co-signed, blocked, or spoke against. Candidates trying to oust an incumbent would check if their opponent had been productive, and use their findings to make a case to the voters.

It’s not a bad idea to look into your competition. If you have potential clients who are on the fence, it might help them to know your win record compared to that of your competitor.

 

Politics isn’t for everyone. It’s divisive and dirty and is usually a real downer. This doesn’t mean you can’t learn from it.

 

Marketing and campaigning utilize the same skill set and techniques, and both can be equally unpredictable despite being thoroughly studied. That’s why you need to have plans on plans, all backed up by data.

If you don’t know where to start on your marketing campaign, don’t worry. We make it our business to set up successful digital campaigns for lawyers. Give us a shout and we’ll get you set up with the best marketing out there!

What’s So Special About You?

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I’m serious, what makes you special? Why should anyone be your client? There are other law firms, what makes you different?

 

How You Should Answer

All brands need answers to these questions, but law firms should spend some extra time thinking about it. Your clients are going through complicated and difficult situations, and are coming to you as a direct result of those situations. You need to be there to answer when they ask why they can trust you.

 

Prove Your Integrity

The best way to show you can be trusted is to show when you have been trusted. Client reviews are great for this. If a customer visits your site and immediately sees a list of reviews and testimonials you already have a solid starting point. 

Another method for gaining the customer’s trust is by sharing your story. What made you, personally, motivated enough to go to law school, work at various firms, and end up where you are. Every customer visiting your page is a job interview in which you have to provide your answers ahead of time. You need to come across motivated and up for their case.

 

Prove You’re Up For the Case

Just as important as your integrity is your capability. Unless this is literally your first case, you should have some proof that you’ve successfully practiced law before. Make sure your website lists cases you’ve won. For added specialization, list cases you’ve won in each of your practice area pages. The customer can trust you because you’ve done this before.

 

Prove You’re Different/Better

Chances are the customer is looking at multiple law firms. Let’s be honest, some of them might have better credentials than you, when to better-known law schools. Here’s where you really have to answer why you are special. If you’re not sure, ask past clients what made them choose you. Lean into that. 

 

Putting it All Together

So now you have a brand story and image that’s unique to your law firm. It shows why you’re different and why that’s good. Now you have to tell it. 

Like I said before, you’re website is your interview. You need it to look put together, qualified, and ready to help. That’s where we come in.

As a lawyer, you probably don’t have time for website maintenance or building web pages. We are proud to work with lawyers by getting to know them and building their online presence around their unique business. 

If you would like help identifying and conveying your brand’s character, give us a shout!