A *strong* Case for Avvo Pro

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Avvo has done really well with email marketing – and they are very good at using email to drive business to their advertisers.  And I just received a great email from Avvo that reinforces that point oh so very visually:

 

So – Heidi’s direct contact information shows up not only directly in Avvo’s search results pages, but also in their follow-up emails.  Would this tip the scales in favor of contacting Heidi over Stephen?  Not sure…. but if I was reading this on my phone, and speaking with an attorney was just a click away.  At $50, if you have reasonable volume of views on Avvo, that may be some $ well spent.

Full Disclosure here:  I still hold a bundle of early stage Avvo stock.

Picking a Winning Title Tag: No Easy Way Out

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As we know, title tags are a key element of on-page SEO (Ahrefs has a comprehensive analysis of just how important they are). And as Ahrefs determined, the use of exact match keywords in title tags has the second strongest correlation to higher rankings, right after the domain name:

So, What Should My Title Tags be?

To answer this question, some SEOs end up relying on PPC ads to see test keywords. They do this by plugging a potential title tag into a PPC ad, and based on the success (or failure) of that ad, decide whether or not to apply their trial title tag to a page on their site.

According to a recent study done by the Wayfair SEO team, this tactic is dangerous.

In this test, paid ads did not consistently predict winning organic titles:

“In our testing, paid ads did not consistently identify winning organic title tags. While trying to improve your title tags is definitely a very smart SEO play, relying on PPC might end up steering you wrong. PPC was able to identify some winners, but also mislabeled losers as winners, particularly when it came to promotional language.”

The Wayfair SEO team believes the reasoning for this to be that the success of a paid ad is different in nature to the success of an organic page in a key way: those clicking on PPC ads are not a random sample of people, they are the type of searchers who click on ads. These people tend to respond positively (by clicking) to promotional language (“sale”, “50% off”, “free shipping”). When the rest of us (those that don’t click on ads) see the words “50% off” in an organic search result, we think we’re being scammed, and keep scrolling.

Takeaway

If you’re looking for a quick and easy way to find optimal title tags, it looks like you have to keep looking beyond the success of PPC ads. Unfortunately, finding the perfect title tags may take a lot of time and data.

5 AdWords Tips You Need Before 2017

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AdWords is an extremely powerful marketing tool but can be confusing to even the most knowledgeable advertising experts. There seem to be endless settings, strategies and opinions on how best to set up, run, and manage campaigns. While we happily admit that we are constantly learning, we’ve found a few tricks that have undeniably helped a majority (if not all) our clients’ accounts.

Enable Ad Extensions

The easiest and arguably most effective upgrade to any campaign is to enable Ad Extensions. These little add-ons are a great way to claim more SERP space and generate more clicks. Right below your original text and link, you can extend your ad with valuable information for users to interact with. Our favorite Ad Extensions are:

  • Call Extensions – Users can click to call your law firm
  • Message Extensions – Users can click to text your law firm
  • Location Extensions – Users can click to get directions to your law firm, and this extension makes your ad eligible to be included directly in Google Maps.
  • Callout Extensions – Draws attention to your most valuable features (Free Consults, Open 24/7, etc.)
  • Sitelinks Extensions – Adds more links to your ad, allowing users to navigate to content they care about

Use Accelerated Delivery

AdWords’ description of Standard Delivery is a bit misleading: “Optimize delivery of ads, spending budget evenly over time (Recommended).” That small sentence is stuffed with a lot of nice sounding buzzwords. Optimize, spend evenly, recommended… However, a new client in the morning is just as valuable as a new client in the afternoon. Law firms are not restaurants. You do not need to save your advertising budget for the dinner rush. Use Accelerated Delivery to show as often as possible. If you want to make sure your ads show in the afternoon, don’t hold your budget back; increase your budget and get more clients!

Match Ad Schedules to Business Hours

While a click in the morning is just as valuable as a click in the afternoon, a click at night might not follow the same pattern. If you don’t have people answering the phone at night or on weekends, your conversion rates are going to be negatively affected. Clients are much more likely to move on to the next firm if they are greeted with an answering machine. Unless you are prepared to handle leads after hours, restrict your ad schedule to when you are actually able to answer the phone.

Upgrade to Expanded Text Ads

A few months ago, Google launched their new Expanded Text Ads (ETAs) which were a huge improvement over their old standard format. The new ETAs now include:

  • Two headline fields (up to 30 characters each)
  • A single, expanded description field (up to 80 characters)
  • A display URL that uses your final URL’s domain
  • Two optional “Path” fields, used in the ad’s display URL (up to 15 characters each)

Not only are these new ads much more effective, starting January 31, 2017, AdWords will no longer allow advertisers to create or edit standard text ads. If you haven’t upgraded already, now is the time.

Apply Bid Modifiers

Utilizing bid modifiers is a great way to gain a competitive advantage over other law firms. If you’re targeting a large area (50+ miles, multiple counties, statewide, etc.), a positive bid adjustment focused on a more precise 5 mile radius can be a beneficial. Additionally, people searching on mobile devices are usually more likely to place a phone call and convert into a client. A positive bid adjustment here will help make sure your ads get are delivered when these high value searches take place.

How To Implement

Most of these tips and tricks can be applied at the campaign level of your AdWords account. When in doubt, this is a great place to start when making high level changes. However, there may be times when diving into each Ad Group is a better decision (as with sitelinks). Make sure to stop and think about how each change will affect your AdWords campaigns before implementing.

Whether you’re optimizing old campaigns or starting fresh, these 5 AdWords Tips should help you get 2017 started on the right foot.

Happy Advertising!

The Beginners Guide to Facebook Advertising

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Tackling the many advertising options offered by Facebook can be a challenge. Do I want more likes on my Facebook page? Can I direct people to my website? What’s a boosted post? These and many other questions may be running through your mind, but don’t worry, I’ll be here to guide the way.

Why Facebook Ads?

First and foremost, you may be wondering why a lawyer would even want to advertise on Facebook. Although legal matters can be extremely personal, you have to think about how people make large purchases. They research, compare, and then buy. The traffic you receive from a Facebook ad may not be high converting, but they could be later, so think of these as branding campaigns. But with the extremely low cost of running ads on Facebook, it doesn’t hurt to dip your toes in the water.

Boosted Posts

Boosted posts are the easiest way to get familiar with Facebook advertising. A boosted post is essentially a post you might share with friends and followers, the only difference is you can now target people outside of that circle. You can target a specific location, a certain age group, and even narrow it down to job title and interests (this can be particularly helpful for workers’ compensation campaigns).

A boosted post could be a link to a recent blog on your site, or an update about your firm. Almost anything you share on your Facebook page can be used as a boosted post (consult their ad policies for more information).

Once you’ve published the post live on your page, you’ll find an option to boost underneath (there are other ways to get here, but I find this to be the easiest).

Boosted Post Button

You’ll then choose your targeting settings.

Facebook Boosted Post Demographics

And set your budget.

Boosted Post Budget

You’ll be able to preview your post before submitting in both desktop and mobile versions.

Boosted Post Preview

Once submitted, your post will be visible when someone matching your targeted audience scrolls through their newsfeed. With this kind of post, a potential client can click through to your website, visit your Facebook page, like your page directly from the post, comment, like, and share.

For these kinds of advertising campaigns, it’s usually best to run them for a short amount of time. The campaign pictured below ran for one week with a total budget of $200, yielding 169 clicks to our site, which equates to just under $1.20 per click. Not too shabby.

Mockingbird Boosted Post

Once you’ve mastered the art of the boosted post, you may be ready to start running even more targeted ads to generate leads, whether through video, geo-targeting, or larger branding ads.

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.

4 Google AdWords Tips You Should Implement Right Now

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Mockingbird is one of the newest members in the Google’s Partner Acceleration Program (humble bragging found here). With this exciting new partnership comes exclusive training from Google’s AdWords specialists themselves. During our recent training at Google’s offices, one thing was stressed over and over: MOBILE IS IMPORTANT.

I could tell you that people check their phone over 100 times a day, or that 66% of people turn to their smartphone to look up something they saw on TV, but really all you need to know is that more people are using their phones to research and make purchase decisions than ever before.

Below are some tangible, actionable tips that you can apply in your AdWords campaigns today to help capture that growing number of mobile searchers.

1) Take advantage of new expanded text ads for mobile

Why you should use them:

  1. Longer ad titles. You now get two headline fields (up to 30 characters each) instead of one headline with a 25 character limit.
  2. Longer, more readable ad descriptions. You now get one field (up to 80 characters) instead of two fields with 35 character limits.
  3. A display URL that uses your final URL’s domain
  4. Two optional ”Path” fields in the ad’s display URL (up to 15 characters each). This means you can now change your ugly URLs to something more targeted.

Most importantly, you should begin using expanded text ads because starting October 26th, 2016, AdWords will no longer give you the option to create/edit standard ads. You might as well embrace the change and get used to the new format now.

More info from the Big G here.

2) Use locations extensions

There are many boons to showing your location directly in your ad:

  1. Potential clients generally want to hire legal counsel close to them; you can show users your physical address to help with the decision process.
  2. Location extensions help your ad take up more real estate in the SERP (search engine results page)
  3. Push down bad reviews in the SERP. If you can’t seem to get rid of those pesky Yelp reviews, one strategy may be to run a branded advertising campaign with a location extension. With the bigger ad, users are less likely to ever see the negative reviews since that result will be further down the page.
  4. Location extensions make you eligible for the newly launched promoted pins. Although Local SEO’s will loathe seeing ads in Google Maps results, it’s inevitable. As a local business, it’s important to jump on board now while the competition is low.

3) Utilize “near me” keywords

These keywords have become increasingly important with the (not so recent) surge in mobile searches. There has been a 2X increase in “near me” search interest in the past year and 82% of smartphone users use a search engine when looking for a local business. If you are not bidding on “near me” related keywords, you are missing out on a large number of potential clients. Also, these keywords that show the searches obvious intent on finding a local business, are the same keywords that are most likely to produce the new local search ads referenced above.

4) Change conversion setting for calls down from 60 seconds

If you feel like you’re getting more calls from your call extensions or call-only ads than what Google shows you in the conversion column, there may be an explanation. Google’s default setting for phone call conversions is set to 60 seconds. If you want to measure every call received from your advertising rather than just the calls over a minute, you need to adjust your conversion setting accordingly. Here is a help article on how to change your conversion settings.

Wrapping up

If you would like to know more about Google AdWords, mobile advertising, or just want to tell us how awesome our blog posts are, feel free to give us a ring: 206-209-2125

Yelp’s Grossly Inflated “Lead” Reporting

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We spoke to a prospective client who was confused why his advertising on Yelp had yielded no clients, although Yelp’s reporting indicated a reasonable, steady flow of leads. Its commonplace for directories to stretch the concept of a “lead” in order to make themselves look as useful as possible.  I get it.  We all get it.  But if you look at exactly what Yelp is considers within their definition of a “lead” it just starts to feel, well, a little grossly overstated.

OK Yelp – let’s see what you’ve got for us:

Screen Shot 2016-06-24 at 12.44.02 PM

Now, I’d certain recognize calls, messages and sales as “leads”, but most others don’t even fall into my most generous concept of a lead.  Website traffic…. can you imagine Google suggesting all of your SEO traffic was a lead?  How about uploaded photos?  Any reason a diner in a restaurant uploading a shot of his spaghetti and meatballs should count as a “lead” for that restaurant?   And I’m not suggesting that some of activities aren’t helpful – looking at your location on a map, for example – but it’s a hell of a stretch to consider them new business opportunities.  In the legal realm, presumably if someone is looking up directions, they area bit warmer than just a lead – and its certainly difficult to attribute that prospective client as a Yelp lead.

So, I’m picking on Yelp here…. but remember the bigger picture is the importance of not trusting your vendors to tell you how well they are doing.  Understand – that for law firms, the definition of a lead is someone who contacts you with a prospective matter.  Everything else is just noise – noise frequently generated be vendors to camouflage the silence of your phone.

 

 

Top Announcements From Google Ads & Analytics Innovations Keynote

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This morning, we tuned into the Google Ads and Analytics Innovations Keynote at the Google Performance Summit. The theme, overwhelmingly, was a focus on mobile;  “mobile is everything” and we’re living in a “mobile-first world.” Here’s what we learned:

Upcoming Changes to Google AdWords

  1. 50% more ad text. Ads will soon be made up of two 30 character headlines and an expanded description (up to 80 characters).
  2. Display ads. Where as currently you (or your designer) must create different ads in different sizes for each device, the process will soon be made much easier. In the future, you will only need to submit an ad headline, description, and image, and site URL and Google will create responsive ads for you.
  3. Individual bid adjustments for each device type. Instead of desktop being the default, you’ll be able to choose a base keyword bid for whatever device matters most to you, and then adjust for the others accordingly.

Location-Based Advertising Changes

  1. Location Extensions Expansion. Location extensions will be richer and more expanded, and will be shown on google.com, the maps app, and Google Maps.
  2. Promoted Pins in Google Maps. Promoted pins will display to users as they’re navigating. For example, on your walk to the bus stop, you may see a promoted pin for a nearby Starbucks.
  3. Enhanced Accuracy. Using Beacon signals, accuracy will be improved allowing advertisers to better track in store conversions after a user clicks a mobile ad.

New Features for Display Advertising

  1. Similar Audiences for Search. Remarketing Lists for Search Ads currently allow advertisers to target users who have already been to your website. Using Similar Audiences for Search, you’ll be able to create a list of Google users who have not yet been to your site, but have similar demographics and interests to users who have visited your site.
  2. Demographics for Search Ads. This update will allow advertisers to adjust text ad bids based on age, as well as other user demographics.
  3. Extending reach of Google Display Network. The GDN will be expanded by giving advertisers access to Cross Exchange Inventory.

Finally, in the more distant future, advertisers can expect a complete overhaul to the AdWords user experience. There will be a new homepage dashboard, and a new campaign creation flow, among other updates. For a complete list of all changes announced, check out Search Engine Land’s coverage.

What do these changes mean for law firms?

The announcements, while exciting, have ambiguous release dates ranging from “in the next few months” to “2017”. So while you can’t implement these new features now, it’s a good time to make sure your advertiser is on top of these changes. If you run your own advertising, make sure you’re staying on top of release dates. If that sounds unrealistic, think about if now might be the right time to bring someone else in to help you out.