Bird Droppings: Google Posts might impact search ranking!

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Welcome to our second “Bird Droppings” post, offering a roundup up recent articles relevant to legal marketing. Aside from a little Fantasy Football and College Football trash talk, our internal messaging is mainly for sharing our favorite SEO, marketing, and legal marketing content. It’s been a slower few weeks on the news side of things, but we’ve still found plenty of items worth reading and sharing. Check them out below!

SEO case studies, guides and news:

Do Google Posts impact ranking? A case study – A recent study by Joy Hawkins shows that frequently utilizing Google Posts may be a positive ranking factor in local searches.

No Manual Action? Don’t Submit a Disavow – More from Google’s constant fight against spam… If you have bad links pointing to your site, but don’t have a manual penalty against your site – you no longer need to submit a disavow file for those bad links.

Local SEO Guide published their Local SEO Ranking Factors Study for 2017!

Moving offices? Our local expert Dustin Curtis shares his experience moving an office properly online. <– Tooting own horn.

A great post on linkbuilding techniques by our friend, Ross Hudgins.

Get back to the basics with 10 SEO tips from Lawyernomics.

Legal industry related articles:

What Drives Clients to Love or Hate Their Attorney? – AttorneySync explores the question with a data-driven study.

Sorry to call your industry boring Legal, but most people don’t care about your content. Here’s how you can make your content not boring and give them a reason to care – Tangential Content Earns More Links and Social Shares in Boring Industries [New Research]

Small Thanks with Google – A google campaign to get small businesses thinking about their online reputation and to encourage other clients/customers to participate in leaving Google reviews.

Yelp is seriously cracking down on review requests. If Yelp determines your business is systematically soliciting reviews, your business listing may get hit with a ranking penalty. Read about Yelp’s solicitation penalty here.

Misc extras:

WordPress 4.8.3 Security Release – Security update released on Halloween preventing a vulnerability that may be introduced by some plugins and themes. This kind of security release is more important for sites hosted WITHOUT managed WordPress hosting like WP Engine. In fact our host – WP Engine rolled out this update automatically on Nov 1st. We love daily backups, host security measures, and automatic updates!

Did you find any of these articles helpful? Please share your thoughts with us in the comments below!

 

MyGooglePages.com: Or, “How To Verify if that Phone Caller is Really From Google”

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Tired of receiving those calls from “Google”?  We got this forwarded to us from one of our clients last week:

Free website from Google huh!  Sounds awesome.  Let’s call “Peter from Google” back….

“thank you for calling mygooglepages.com – if you know your party’s extension enter it now, for the special offer, press 1….”

Except of course that a quick search for the phone number Peter left, let’s us know that the number is actually registered to a company called “You Goo First”, a Search Engine Optimization company scamming bullshitter, John Cheliotis.

And if you happen to go to their website – you WILL see a callout (gray on gray text) that they are specifically NOT Google.  BUT…. if you rely on the voicemail (“Peter from Google”) you’d be none the wiser.  Which, is exactly how they want it.

So, if you think you are talking with Google – probably makes good sense to verify it by asking for an email, which should come from @google.com (not @gmail.com).  And Peter and John…. perhaps this is all a big misunderstanding…. perhaps Peter’s last name is actually Frahmgoogel.

Is Your Law Firm’s Website Mobile Friendly?

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The world is becoming increasingly mobile, and there are plenty of fascinating (and potentially frightening) statistics to prove it:

  • 91% of people have their phone within three feet of them at all times
  • 84% of worldwide cell phone users can’t go a single day without their device in hand
  • 71% of people sleep with their phones next to them

The trend towards mobility does not exclude the legal industry. According to The National Law Review, approximately 31% of law firm related website traffic comes through a mobile search.

Mobile traffic rates may vary from 21-57% depending upon practice area, but regardless of practice area it is likely that a significant portion of your potential clientele are entering your site from a mobile device. It is therefore extremely important to assure that your website is mobile friendly.

What does it mean to be mobile friendly?

Technically, for a website to considered mobile friendly, it must simply be responsive on mobile devices, but there are a few more requirements for a website to be considered mobile friendly by Google’s standards.

Google Mobile Friendly

If you’re wondering whether your site meets Google’s mobile friendliness standards, using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test is a quick and easy way to find out. Simply paste the URL of your site into the text bar and click “Run test”.

Let’s see what happens when we test the mobile friendliness of the Mockingbird Marketing website.

Google Mobile-Friendly Test Screenshot

Below are the results of our test…

Results of Mobile-Friendly Test

It looks like our site is mobile friendly – awesome! A few pages aren’t loading properly, but in our case (and in most cases), the loading issues for these pages aren’t affecting our mobile-friendliness, so we can ignore that warning for now.

Mobile-Friendliness & SEO

Being mobile friendly not only improves a user’s experience with your website; it may help your law firm to be found.

With 60% of searches now coming from mobile devices, it’s only natural that Google would take steps to assure that the results they are providing will be helpful for those on mobile devices.

Google is currently implementing a “mobile-first” version of its index. This means that Google will be treating the mobile version of each page of your website as the primary page to index, with desktop versions being indexed secondarily. This update is currently in effect for some users, but will take time to be implemented to all pages on the internet.

“You either change or get left behind” -Carol Cunningham

The mobility of your webpage is not to be taken for granted. As mobile devices begin to dominate the world of search, it is important that we keep up, and adapt our websites to meet Google’s standards, and more importantly, the standards of potential clients.

Know What your Agency is Doing: Buying Links

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New client just forwarded me the breakup email exchange from her previous agency.

We pay for links monthly.

Know what your agency is doing. The reason the firm reached out to us, was because, despite all the money they had invested, search traffic hadn’t changed.  And then we go and find out that their agency has been torpedoing SEO efforts through an unsophisticated link purchasing scheme.  Now the client is going to need to pay me an extensive sum to undo the efforts of their previous firm – just to get them back to a reasonable starting point. We call this Janitorial SEO – the cleaning up of the messes of others.  It’s expensive and unnecessary.

If you don’t know what your agency is doing for you – it’s reasonable to assume they are buying links, torching your site and you are in for a huge headache (and invoice) down the road.

Bird Droppings: The first of a (mostly) weekly Legal Marketing/SEO links post series

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There’s a lot of SEO news out there. The Legal Marketing landscape is constantly changing and the industry is talking about it.

At Mockingbird, we use a Slack channel to share useful resources, guides, and videos to keep each other up to date. We’ve created this Bird Droppings series to share these helpful links with you too!

First, some SEO/Marketing news:

Yext continues to add beneficial functionality for small business management. This latest update allows law firms to utilize Google My Business posts through the same tool we recommend for improving NAP accuracy and consistency. Create Google Posts Directly from Yext >>

We’ve been finding a lot of success with Google’s Call-Only Ads, AdWords is now recording some calls initiated by call-only ads and call extensions.

Search Engine Watch posted a great overview of what HTTP/2, how it benefits users and what it takes to set it up. The next step for law firms obsessed with site speed.

Just in case anyone missed this and you need another reminder – proximity is still the #1 local search ranking factor.

Get the recap and watch the “Google My Business Strategies and Ranking Factors Q&A” webinar featuring some of the brightest minds in local SEO.

Some miscellaneous extras:

We love Google Calendar and use it everyday. Google continues to push its’ Material Design principles across it’s most popular products. Google Calendar is getting an update Wednesday, 10/17/17, try it yourself.

In the wake of a series of recent hacking campaigns, Google will release “Advanced Protection” setting for Google Accounts.

We continue to perform an enormous amount of janitorial SEO work. We unfortunately, still need to share advice from Google’s Maile Ohye on how to hire (or not to hire) and SEO agency. Watch below:

 

Authentic Images Are Worth It

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Business Man Shaking Hands

We have all seen one of these photos. The man in a suit with the perfect smile doing “business things” in front of a blurry background. Stock photos are all over the internet. Many are high quality, but they often lack personality. Images can help humanize your brand. Instead of using images of freakishly good-looking young professionals in business suits, hire a photographer and block out an hour to take some group shots around the office. If money is tight and you have a digital camera, go the DIY route (just do some research on correct lighting as that will make a huge difference).

Don’t refrain from using an image of yourself or images of your team. Not only will it make your website more personable, there’s a good chance it will help your conversions. Marketingexperiments.com ran a case study on a consumer credit counseling service’s home page. The experiment ran a stock photo of a woman with a headset against a photo of the company’s actual founder. When the photo of the company’s founder was displayed, visitors were 35 percent more inclined to sign up for a free consultation.

If you have no choice but to use a stock photo, make sure it is high quality and relevant to the message you are trying to convey. Just because you like a photo, doesn’t mean you should use it. Make sure the image isn’t used too often or (more importantly) by any of your competitors. If you are using Google Chrome, right click on the image that you are considering and select “Search Google for Image.” This will bring up all locations and websites where that specific image is being used.

Google Reverse Image Search

No matter what your budget or time constraints may be, keep in mind that your customers want to relate and connect with you and your team. If there is any way to incorporate your own style over a stock image, you will stand out in the crowd.

Blogging for the Sake of Blogging

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the malleability of content
…You put content onto a blog it becomes the blog.

Sometimes you need to write a blog post. You might not have anything to say, but as the date since your last post gets further and further away you realize it’s time to publish something. Anything.

I’ve previously argued in favor of not having a blog unless you’re committed to updating it on a regular basis. Still, even the most committed of writers gets busy from time to time and starts visualizing tumbleweeds blowing across their blogroll and dust accumulating on that post from a couple months back.

There’s only one thing to do. Get motivated, get your ass in gear, and knock out a post to get things moving again. It might not even be good (this post sure isn’t), but it still beats continued procrastination.

Writing isn’t something you can force, but it is something you can jumpstart with a little creativity. There are a few ways you can rekindle inspiration if you’ve been distracted with “actual work” and haven’t had time to prioritize your blog.

Here are a few surefire tips for knocking out a quick blog post even when you’re completely swamped:

Write about what you know

The less research you need to do for your topic, the easier it’ll be to write something semi-intelligent. Topics you already know a lot about are great because you can pull from past experience or existing knowledge without having to spend hours fact checking or looking for sources. Oftentimes the knowledge you take for granted will be valuable to readers outside your field who may not share your expertise.

Focus on generalities

Not every blog post needs to be a deep dive into the specifics of your chosen topic. Sometimes a quick hitter, high level overview is more than enough. If enough readers find it interesting, you can always go back and write a follow up post later that tackles the same subject in more detail.

Link to other articles or people

Your blog doesn’t need to be 100% your own material. You’re more than free to share interesting articles and topics being written about elsewhere. Offering a quick analysis or counterpoint to something someone else wrote can be a great way to mine content.

Publish your post (and don’t second guess)

If you feel like you’re merely blogging for the sake of blogging, second guessing your own work is all too easy to do. As long as it’s not a habitual thing, you should allow yourself the occasional “lazy” article. What feels lazy to you could still be useful to some.

Meta bonus tip: use a list format

Lastly, if you’re struggling to structure a post or chunk a topic into easy to write snippets, turn your article into a list. There’s a reason no amount of mockery will stop Buzzfeed from continuing to knock out listicles at a breakneck pace. Lists work, they get shared, and they’re pretty easy to write quickly.

In Summary

Even though as an agency we’ve railed against the obnoxious misconception that “content is king,” there is still validity in staying consistent with your posting. You won’t always know which posts are going to resonate with your readers, and waiting for the perfect topic can quickly become detrimental to getting anything done.

None of this is groundbreaking, but it should be useful if you’re stuck wondering whether a blog that’s now three months from the last publication date could use a bit of a refresh. At a certain point you need to get back in the habit of writing…even if it feels a bit like word vomit at first.

As long as you’re still writing in your voice, sharing something (marginally) interesting, and staying (tangentially) on topic, there’s value to be gained from keeping active.

The alternative option is to shut down your blog and admit defeat. That works too. But if you’re going to maintain a blog you need to stay committed to posting (semi) regularly.

Directory Management Is Important: Here’s Why

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There’s been talk lately about the diminishing importance of keeping firm control over each and every directory listing, large or small, in your firm’s name. This talk is rooted in truth, for tools such as Yext and Moz Local do a pretty good job of cleaning up directories in your name across the web. In addition to this, search engines have a good idea of what directories/websites matter, and pay more attention to those. It’s VERY important to note, however, that some manual directory cleanup can go a long way. At a bare minimum, you must be aware of what’s out there.

Take for example, Peel Funeral Home’s placelookup.net listing. You’ll quickly notice the images of thick slabs of uncooked meat, a cheery butcher, and tags that list Peel Funeral Home as a place for “Eating & Drinking” showing up for… a funeral home:

Butcher Funeral Home

Based on the funeral home’s website, they don’t seem like the type to do this as a some sort of backwards publicity stunt. My best guess is that, when pressed to choose a business category whilst creating a listing, whoever made this chose “butcher”, perhaps not understanding that this tongue-in-cheek choice would not only show up on the listing, but decide the particularly graphic imagery as well.

Either way, THIS IS IS NOT WHAT YOU WANT TO HAPPEN.

Now, as a lawyer, you aren’t at risk of appearing to be a funeral home proudly selling human meat. The takeaway for a lawyer wondering how best to manage their directory presence is this: if you don’t have, at the very least, an awareness of what’s happening with your directory listings, you could be in for a surprise when you find out.

The Awesomeness of Google Partnerships….

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I haven’t crowed too much about Mockingbird’s Google Partner status. (OK – yes that’s uncharacteristic of me, but I digress….)

That picture to the right?  That’s Google’s Celena Fergusson, sitting down with Nate Bruns, our Director of Advertising to review our accounts.  That means… if we are lucky enough to count you as one of our clients, its not only our eyes, but also some of the best and brightest at Google ensuring that your Adwords spend is working as well as it possibly can.

Worth crowing about – great for me, but even better for our clients.