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.

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!

Webinar: ADA Compliance – From a Lawyer and Designer

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Listen to Mockingbird’s Design Lead, Ryan Sprouse and Taft Stettinius & Hollister’s IP, IT and Data Security Partner, Jeff Kosc to get down and dirty about ADA Compliance for websites. This webinar showcases what it’s actually like to interact with the web while disabled, reviews Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and discuss the most current legal thinking and precedent regarding ADA Compliance lawsuits related to websites.

 

https://mockingbirdmarketing.wistia.com/medias/i3q4yt2jkr?embedType=async&videoFoam=true&videoWidth=640

Screwing Lawyers: Calculate The True Cost of Your Agency’s Long Term Contract

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I hear this story about once a day from a frustrated lawyer… “Our marketing isn’t working.” “My agency doesn’t tell me what they are doing.” “Our rankings haven’t improved.” “The vendor won’t let us into Google Analytics.” And so on and so on.

Being frustrated with your marketing isn’t uncommon or even unfair.  Sometimes best efforts belly flop (even at my own agency.)  But the lemon juice poured in the fresh cut is recognizing that you are contractually stuck with the ineffective, lazy, useless, opaque “efforts” of your marketing agency for the foreseeable future.

I received this email today from a frustrated firm:

“Just a quick update: we unfortunately found some fine print yesterday that we had previously missed. It looks like we are stuck with FindLaw until November of 2020.”

The true cost of your long term marketing contract isn’t the value of the contract to the agency ($8,200 a month for the next 36 months…) but actually the opportunity cost of all of that lost business your firm could be generating if your agency was actually effective. Using extremely rough math…that $8,200 monthly cost equates to roughly $300K over the life of the contract, but it really should be measured as three years of your firm struggling to find clients while your bottom line bleeds…drip drip drip…into your agency’s top line.

Using basic business metrics, if that investment returned just a pathetic 4x (i.e. cost of client at 25% of the value of the matter) that $300K expense is really $1.2 million dollars in revenue your firm isn’t capturing. And, your underperforming agency has NO incentive to turn this around – because their profitability is inversely related to how hard they work for you.

So let’s be clear: entering into a long term contract with a marketing vendor benefits them, not you. As soon as you are locked in, as this is a service industry, your agency’s profitability skyrockets by doing as little as possible for you. This is compounded by the deliberate obfuscation of performance data. Ask yourself why your long term agency contract precludes you from access to your site’s Google Analytics or Google Ad campaigns. What do they not want you to see? What are they not doing for you?

You are supposed to be sophisticated savvy lawyers. Imagine how you would act if you could be hired under the same terms that you hire agencies: long term, guaranteed retainers with no requirements to share what you are allegedly doing for your clients? Would you do client work or instead hire hordes of cold callers to assail the front desks of your next prospective victim?

Oh, and before you sign…read the fine print.

On Being Different Instead of Better

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Once a week, on my commute in to work, I listen to a podcast called Two Bobs that helps agency owners make their agency outstanding. More often than not, the concepts that apply to the highly creative and technical world of online marketing apply just as readily to legal.

“Sometimes it is better to be different than to be better” – David C. Baker

Lawyers have a very hard time differentiating themselves among other lawyers – especially from the perspective of potential clients. It’s not that it’s hard to do, it’s just that most lawyers wrap themselves in lawyerly imagery – scales of justice, gavels, middle aged white men with red ties etc. Most lawyers make the mistake of positioning themselves as…lawyers…or at best, in David’s construct…the “better lawyer.”

Quite obviously, being a lawyer is not a differentiator from which a prospective client can select among a sea of potential legal representation. Even being the “best lawyer” is hard to truly assess. This, despite the slew of award icons prominently displayed on legal websites – AV Rating, Avvo Rating, and even entirely fake and bogus paid awards like “Lawyers of Distinction.” In the marketing world, we call these “trust marks” – and they are a visual attempt to convey “best lawyer” positioning. The problem, of course, is that there are a myriad of these trust marks, most of which are completely meaningless to average Joe Consumer. Being “best” is simply a very difficult position to hold – especially in the awards arms race of legal marketing. This extends to the personal injury world where the arms race is self aggrandizing award boasts. “Over $300K recovered…more than a million dollars in awards…largest settlement…” Blah blah blah.

Being different isn’t difficult.

Being different is easy.

It requires courage to embrace the fact that lawyers compete not on the “best lawyer” continuum, but on the, “why should I hire you?” continuum. And the reality is that most prospective consumers know they can’t accurately assess “best” and instead try to answer the second question.

Being different is a positioning that transforms the lawyer selection process in the prospect’s mind from, “which lawyer do I want to hire?” to “which person do I want to work with?” And in the prospect’s mind, being different never has anything to do with evaluating lawyers on the lawyerly continuum. Try as they might, lawyers simply can’t be more lawyerly than other lawyers.

On the other hand, a lawyer or law firm can be an openly gay lawyer, the expert in self driving vehicles, the immigrant lawyer helping others follow in her footsteps, the city’s oldest law firm, the lawyer who used to be a cop/prosecutor/in-house at Allstate, the law firm supporting black lives matter, the state’s largest law firm, the athlete who organizes local road races and happens to practice law (h/t to Turkowitz), the tech nerdy paperless firm, the ex JAG, or the small town lawyer who grew up just a mile from his current office.

To the right prospect, each of these differentiators above is much more personally appealing than sifting through countless lawyer profiles trying to identify the better best bestestest most lawyerly lawyer lawyer.

Because, sometimes, its better to be different than better.

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

Welcome to the New Mockingbird!

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The Announcement

Today, Mockingbird Marketing is proud to announce the new Mockingbird! In a little more than 5 years, we have grown from the stereotypical startup to a top-tier, full-service law firm marketing agency. Our mission and values have always stayed the same, but our capabilities and services have evolved. We’ve come so far that we decided to officially relaunch the brand.

Welcome, to the new Mockingbird.

The Logo

Few know the story of the original Mockingbird logo… most likely because there isn’t one. The logo was a randomly selected bird icon with MOCKINGBIRD typed next to it in all caps. Effective? Sure. Creative? No. We were following one of our 10 commandments, “done is better than perfect.”

Our new logo is custom made by our lead in-house designer. The wings are two M’s for Mockingbird Marketing. The bird is no longer standing still, but flying upward to represent the speed and agility of our agency. The curved, modern design reflects the smooth and polished aspect of our boutique level of service.

The Website

With the new logo comes a new website. The clean, consistent design follows our brand guidelines while the backend development focuses on speed and stability.

Of course we’re going to use this as an opportunity to showcase our best work, but more importantly, our site is meant to help law firms grow. We have resources, webinars, speaking events and blog posts with the latest law firm marketing strategies. Whether it’s as a client or as a newsletter subscriber, our job is to make law firms successful.

The Agency

As Mockingbird has grown, our tagline has evolved from “Search Experts” to “VP of Marketing” to “Outsourced Marketing Department.” Our level of service is rising, and our solutions are expanding. We’ve made invaluable partnerships around the industry, including a very important partnership with Google. As Premier Google Partners, we have been able to send teams to train at Google and bring back the latest marketing strategies. Our knowledge as an agency continues to grow, and our team is truly greater than the sum of its parts.

When you hire Mockingbird, you don’t just get a “Search Expert.” You get all of us. Your Account Executive will work with you to develop marketing strategies, we’ll have Marketing Managers implement technical SEO changes, you’ll get a Paid Search Manager to handle your advertising, and our design and development team will create websites, display ads, and custom imagery whenever you need. This is how we built the new Mockingbird brand – as a team of experts.

The Launch

With the new logo, more polished branding, and updated website, we are excited to officially relaunch Mockingbird. Our agency has grown, and our brand has evolved. We will continue to provide marketing solutions for law firms across the country, but now we have a brand, a logo, and a website that reflects our industry leading level of service.

“ROI” – The Marketing Catchphrase Agencies Don’t Get

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At every single legal marketing conference I’ve ever been to, I hear agencies, thought leaders, gurus, ninjas, and experts teaching pitching from the podium  returning to that good old standard metric:

“ROI”

It’s one of those easy ways for agencies to make it sound like they are business focused and have their clients’ well beings top of mind.  –  “maximizing ROI” – “ROI driven campaigns” “websites that deliver ROI”.

And I’m quasi guilty as well.  One of my favorite refrains is that marketing should be looked at as an investment and not a cost. And it should. But calculating ROI is so far beyond the reach of marketing agencies that none of them should be using the catchphrase at all. But let me step back first:

Let’s start with this:  you lawyers don’t know what ROI is. At the last conference I spoke at, I surveyed the 200 people in the audience asking someone to raise a hand and tell the group what ROI was.  Crickets.  So, as you are reading this, ask yourself, honestly, what is the formula for ROI?  What’s a good ROI and what’s a bad ROI?  How is ROI expressed…. a dollar value? a ratio?  a percentage?  Stumped?  Uncertain? Don’t worry – you aren’t alone – your agency probably has no idea how to calculate ROI either.  Ask them on your next review when they tell you they are optimizing your SEO for ROI.  Bleckkkk.

First you must understand the basics of ROI.  In investment terms, this is the (gain from the investment – cost of the investment)/cost of the investment.  To translate this to legal marketing, it is the (gain from the client – cost of the marketing)/cost of the marketing.  Simple right?  The key is the nuance around the word “gain”.  In the legal world, gain = revenue – costs.  So in the legal world, you need to know not only the revenue generated by a certain case, but also the cost associated with generating that revenue. Now, depending on your practice area, most of you can probably guess at the first: revenue.  But very few of you have internal cost accounting systems sophisticated enough to accurately track and report on the second (i.e. the cost of working on a case – not the billables, but the actual cost). And if you did have both revenue and cost – are you sharing those figures with your agency (you should, but that’s another conversation altogether.)

Without access to both of these numbers, your agency has absolutely no way of tracking ROI, yet alone optimizing it. Which is why, many of them talk about ROI in their marketing copy  and pitch decks, but none of them actually report on it in their monthly reviews. So the next time you hear an agency talk about ROI – ask them what it is.