I took the time to review the ABA’s Top 100 Blawgs Blogs for 2016…. and must commend the selection team on pulling together a great list. My personal reflection is that there was a heavy focus on finding sites with interesting, well written timely and thoughtful content — exactly the stuff that can make a blog successful.
In doing so, I found a few very interesting patterns.
Less Than Half of the Blogs Were from Law Firms
By my rough count, less than half of the blogs cited were from actual law firms – leading me to believe there is still a lot of room for (extremely high quality) content development coming out of law firms. Naturally, there were a lot of law professors and news writers with a legal bent as well as advocacy/reform type content, like Prison Law Blog. (Which incidentally is written by a currently incarcerated, Christopher Zoukis, who plans on going to law school upon his release – inspirational story.)
BigLaw Dominates the List
Of the blogs that represented law firms – roughly two out of three were from large firms…. and down at the bottom end of the size market, just 4 solos made the list. Perhaps this is a reflection of the marketing/PR departments lobbying for list inclusion, but there’s got to be more room for the little guys!
Solo Sarah Poriss’s Blog utilizes the simple WordPress default theme from 2011.
Some Law Firms Don’t Own Their Blog
One of the most surprising findings was that two of the domains were not registered to the law firm, but to their agency instead. Historically, FindLaw has been notorious for this practice – in which the firm doesn’t own the asset they are paying for. If the domain isn’t registered to your firm, you don’t control that domain and your agency holds all of the cards. Put another way: you rent your site; you don’t own it. Nervous? I wrote a post on How to Use Who.is to See if You Own Your Domain; you can see from the WhoIs listings below that the blogs for Constangy Brooks Smith and Prophete and Franczek Radelet are registered to their agency, LexBlog instead of the firm.
80% of Blogs are OFF Primary Domain
Of the law firm blogs – 4 out of 5 of them live on standalone domains. This runs against foundational SEO theory – in which the consolidation of a blog’s natural linkbuilding prowess helps the firm rank in both local and organic search. I suspect much of this is due to the internal politics of getting a subject specific blog launched amidst a wide reaching BigLaw environment. Gyi Tsakalakis has argued that highly technical, subject specific, stand-alone blogs are very appropriate for law firms attracting referrals from b-to-b lawyers seeking specialists, instead of consumer-facing practices like car accidents or divorce. BUT…. from a marketing perspective when SEO is concerned, there is widespread consensus that blogs belong on a firm’s primary domain.
Ahh Twitter…. and the oft mis-understood, oversold, empty promises from Social Media Marketing Consultants. I ran into the following tweetstream (why is that a word) over the weekend. Its nothing more than variants of “[insert geography] [insert practice area] [lawyer]” repeated ad nauseam.
And it seems that these tweets are so interesting among a trio of CA based law firms (Eisner Gorin, Furman & Zavatsky, and Cron Isreals Stark) that they all just can’t stop themselves from retweeting and favoriting the awesomeness of each other’s mundane geo practice area marketing garbage. I added a small shot of Eisner Gorin’s Twitter account on the right so you can see just how fascinating this isn’t.
Now presumably no one at any of these firms is proactively doing this. I smell the workings of a low end marketing expert with some program automagically vomiting out tweets and retweets. Perhaps there’s a report at the end of each month victoriously celebrating Social Media engagement – impressions, followers, retweets, favorites etc. And of course, none of this is going to generate an inbound phone call – in fact in the sad event the firm’s’ twitter account shows up in a branded query (a distinct possibility) after an offline referral, I suspect Joe Prospective Client is smart enough to be turned off by this pathetic ploy.
And while I don’t know if this is the inner workings of some bad agency, remember…. just because your don’t understand it, doesn’t mean you should pay for it (or do it yourself). Hopefully these firms aren’t paying some SEO expert to boost their SEO rankings with this by either a)linkbuilding and/or b)build social followers. Set the record straight. Links in tweets isn’t linkbuilding. The number of twitter followers, retweeters, favorites etc. has NOTHING to do with search algos. Same goes for Facebook, Snapchat, Pinterest, Blab, Meerkat… the list goes on (and on and on. And then it keeps going some more.). If your agency tells you otherwise, at least now you know why your SEO efforts aren’t generating clients.
SEO theory can be broken down into 3 main pillars: technology, content, and authority. Technology is by far the most difficult aspect of SEO to jump into, just hearing about robots.txt files, XML sitemaps, internal link structure, minifying CSS, and all the other jargon can make your head spin. It’s best to hire an expert to deal with the technological side of your website. However, Joe the attorney down the street can actually do a lot more than you would think to improve the other 2 pillars of SEO for his website.
Many small business owners are aware that content is a significant aspect of SEO and have heard somewhere along the line that “content is king.” Every firm should work in house on creating high quality and unique content that offers valuable insight to the user (see: “Why You are Your Firm’s Best (and Worst) Content Writer“). Many firms (and agencies) actually overdevelop content while ignoring authority. We often see a lot of wasted investment in content on sites that don’t have the authority to support the amount of content on the site.
So, while the content of your website is a very important factor for getting people to find your firm in Google’s search results, it’s not the only one. Google needs other external signals to determine which website deserves to rank over other websites competing for the same search terms, this is where authority comes in.
In order to determine a website’s authority, the big G uses the number of links pointing from other external websites to yours. Think of each link as a vote of confidence for your website (that’s how Google views it). After all, what others say about you is more important than what you say about yourself. So, how can we get those all important votes of confidence (read: links) from other high quality websites on the web?
One of the easiest and most effective ways a law firm can get new links is through current community and organizational relationships. Think about the types of organizations, businesses, and non-profits your firm already supports and find a way to leverage that offline relationship for the online benefit of a link.
Common Link Opportunities:
Community Theaters and Arts Organizations
Local Universities/Colleges
Is anyone at your firm on the board?
Bio pages for speaking
Linking to course materials provided on the main website
Local Events
Local meetups organized by a firm member
Local events where a firm member happens to be a speaker. What is the organization behind that event?
Local Chapters of National Charities (Toys for Tots, United Way, Special Olympics)
Pro-bono work for local businesses or non-profit organizations
Local expert witnesses you work with
Organizations or clubs (even a recreational club like a sailing club) where a firm member is a board member
You can often link to the firm from the bio page. “Attorney smith is a partner at Smith & Smith PLLC”
Art purchased for the firm (Take a picture of where it’s now displayed and send to artist and they may link back to the site).
Community page for “Businesses we trust” in which you provide honest testimonials for any local businesses you’ve work with.
Service Providers: Janitors, Electricians, Moving Companies, Painters, Plumbers, Carpenters.
Caterers
Delivered Goods
Leased equipment
Employee training
Local IT company
Car Dealership (for company vehicle)
Making the ‘Ask’
The hardest part of linkbuilding is actually moving forward after you’ve identified a linkbuilding opportunity. If you believe the owner or webmaster is willing to provide a link to you on their website, send a friendly email to see if they can make it happen. There is by no means a perfect recipe for making the ask, but here’s my $.02: send an affable email that makes the simple ask “will you link to my website” and then follow up with a very friendly nudge a few days later if you haven’t head back. I would go so far as to recommend a phone call, if and only if, that feels appropriate. If you need inspiration, below is an example of an email we drafted for a client that is on the Board for her Alma Mater and listed on the college’s website…
“Hi [insert name],
I wanted to thank you again for the honor of including me on the Alumni Board of Directors. I was just reading through my bio and love that you mention my firm’s name. I am wondering if it’s possible to also link to my website?
Once my marketing agency found out I’m on the Alumni Board at Example University, their eyes lit up and they have been begging me to ask you about this since.
[Insert ending salutation] “
You know the person you are emailing… use your own voice and be brief.
Wrapping Up
Linkbuilding is tough work, but extremely important and completely doable for an attorney. So many law firms do great work within their communities — it’s important to show that online as well. If you would like help with linkbuilding or want to learn more, please feel free to drop me a line: dustin[at]mockingbirdmarketing.com
If you have ideas that you would like to share, please comment below!
I can’t tell if the parrot on the ball is dancing or in love. But Google thinks that Rick’s George’s legal technology blog is about parrots and tennis balls. We’ll come back to this later….
I’ve been reading LexBlog founder, Kevin O’Keefe’s anti-SEO commentary for years now and suffice to say, he and I sit on opposite ends of the spectrum. For the most part, I’ve bit my tongue; but thought it is time to write a measured counterpoint to LexBlog’s anti-SEO stance. I’ve outlined the fundamentals of our disagreement so you make up your own minds. But first, let me give away the punchline as to why I believe LexBlog has consistently pushed an anti-SEO agenda:
LexBlog’s product – stand-alone blogs – runs counter to widely accepted SEO theory, to such a strong extent that if you believe the search is powerful in generating clients for law firms, you’d never remotely consider a stand-alone blog.
Here’s a smattering of LexBlog posts on the dangers of SEO:
Top 10 Signs your SEO company is a quack.
SEO shenanigans pose a danger to law blogs
Do Law firms Needlessly Worry About SEO?
SEO Ain’t Cheap
Is your Law firm SEO company doing more harm on Google than good?
Good law blog content trumps SEO
5 Myths about SEO
Blogging for SEO or meaning?
Law blogs are solely for SEO and law firm rankings?
Right before Christmas, I unintentionally ended up in a snarky exchange with Kevin in the comments on yet another anti-SEO post called: You Don’t Need to Game Google. The genesis of the interaction, was my pointing out that the results he was claiming (top google rankings without worrying about SEO) just didn’t pan out in the actual search results. Kevin cited a post from aforementioned attorney Rick Georges who claimed that he ranks at the top of Google for the term “legal technology” without requiring SEO to do so. A tempting thought – especially if you are a law firm dropping 4, 5 or 6 figures on search agencies like mine.
However, a little digging showed Kevin’s example to be 100% inaccurate. You’ll note below a quick review of the SERP results for “legal technology” are entirely devoid of Rick’s presence – I scrolled through 8 pages and never encountered his blog. Try it out for yourself and see. So much for ignoring SEO right?
And this isn’t the first time Kevin has made unsubstantiated claims about SEO success without the need for engaging in SEO fundamentals.
The blogging lawyers I mentioned above do not spend one cent on SEO. Yet they rank above most all of the lawyers who do.
This refrain – “ignore SEO and you’ll outrank those who pay for it” – is a dangerously expensive misrepresentation to broadcast to the legal industry. What follows is the explanation of my opinion of why Kevin tenaciously sticks to his anti-SEO message.
The assessment is very simple: SEO is a threat to stand-alone blogs and remember, LexBlog sells blogs as a standalone product. When you are a hammer everything is the world is a nail. Make up your own mind, but if you are considering a standalone blog – critically consider these four talking points from the Lexblog sales pitch before overlooking the importance of SEO.
“Blogs Belong on Their Own Domain”
It’s common sense that a blog is an independent publication.
In my opinion, LexBlog continues to badmouth SEO simply because their primary product – standalone blogs – runs afoul of foundational SEO theory. The widely accepted theory, that in almost every case, you should consolidate authority (links) to create a single, strong powerful domain. Mathematically (and grossly oversimplified) – 20 links to one domain are more than twice as effective than 10 links to two. And that domain should be the law firm’s website that is listed in directories and cited by local media sources; not a social media driven blog. Put differently, marketing two websites is more than twice as expensive as marketing one.
And Kevin understands this entirely:
Blogs by their nature are link magnets. And links from relevant blogs/websites are the holy grail of SEO.
In hypercompetitive markets like legal, links are the differentiator in both organic and local search. Linkbuilding is the tough, expensive, uncertain practice that, as Kevin notes, drives SEO success. And SEO success leads to traffic and in turn, more business. Due to their more causal and timely nature, blogs can be extremely effective in generating links. Segmenting blog content onto a stand-alone domain guts a site’s linkbuilding potential. We saw one beautiful example of this: after watching traffic dry up to their stand-alone niche blog, one client landed a $1.5 million check simply by migrating their good content from their impotent blog, onto the firm’s primary domain. The traffic returned, as did the phone calls, and then the client. More: How Our ex-Client Made $1,500,000 by Firing Us.
Kevin understands that blogs are link magnets and that links are foundational to good SEO. This is the reason Kevin’s own blog lives on LexBlog.com, instead of as a stand-alone publication:
“Traffic Doesn’t Matter”
The goal is not to draw traffic and attention.
There’s a full LexBlog post on this: “Traffic is not the measure of a law blog’s influence” and I couldn’t disagree with this statement any more. SEO generates traffic and website traffic – especially traffic from within your geographic market – generates inbound inquiries at a rate of about 3.3 calls per 100 sessions (4.5 for PI lawyers). So if the goal for your firm is new business, a reasonable objective of your website is traffic. It’s a very direct and indisputable correlation. Saying traffic doesn’t matter is like having your retirement planner telling you the size of your 401(k) is immaterial.
“SEO Doesn’t Build Relationships”
I don’t know about Rick, but there is a world of lawyers who get their work by word of mouth and relationships, with the Internet just enhancing and accelerating this.
Its nice to build relationships – we all like to do so. But, building relationships with new prospects requires attracting new prospects with which to build relationships. There’s simply no easier, more scaleable way for the Internet to enhance and accelerate your relationship building than SEO initiating new relationships with prospects who are searching for what you offer, but don’t know who you are.
And those SEO sparked relationships frequently turn into clients.
“Content is King”
Kevin is right that content is king.
The legal marketing industry has been preaching the garbage about content is king for years now. Let’s face it – there’s not a paucity of content on the web about legal issues. Today’s question is, which content surfaces, not does it exist? The focus on content – more content – more pages – more blogs – has been used by lazy agencies for years to shift the responsibility for the agency’s marketing failure to the feet of their clients. “You’d finally get a client if you blogged twice a week instead of twice a month.” So law firms have dutifully hired hoards of underemployed English majors and vomited out content…. and nothing has happened. The agency’s answer…. keep writing. Think I’m overstating the case here? try looking for a “lesbian car accident lawyer in atlanta”:
There’s a wealth of individual pages, gay specific layer directories, as well as a gay friendly result for directory behemoth Lawyers.com. Think your little Atlanta PI firm can compete by simply launching a lesbian car accident blog into this mountain of content without considering SEO? Think again. You need SEO to compete. (Note – if you scroll far enough you will find a blog in the search results for lesbian car accident lawyer in Atlanta – but this content lives on the law firm’s primary domain – not as a standalone blog – which incidentally helps drive traffic to the entire site.)
Mockingbird has taken the anti-content perspective so far as to deliberately prune content from (many of our clients’ sites – and we’ve seen an increase in traffic and business for our clients. (See – there’s that pesky correlation between website traffic and new business again). Here’s the analysis I posted to Search Engine Land: More Content, Less Traffic Part I.
More content alone isn’t going to build your business; this is simply an inconvenient truth that most legal marketers would have you believe because it conveniently absolves them of accountability.
Why Rick’s Blog Doesn’t Perform to its Potential
Back to the parrot and the tennis ball….A quick review of Rick’s site showed a litany of technical SEO failures – no H1s, thousands of erroneous indexed pages (including our friend the parrot) etc. so I wasn’t surprised in my findings. Further, Ricks’ perceived success was most likely due to personalized results – he saw his own Google Plus page… on the third page of results. A classic false positive. In the parrot example – Rick’s dated blog has an entire page with nothing on it but the amorous parrot – and a stupid computer has no way of knowing that this parrot page is more or less important and relevant than the legal technology pages on the site.
The technical infrastructure behind Rick’s site is horrendously dated. There are numerous Google indexed “pages” with similar imagery:
And the heading for hundreds of pages is the exact same or missing altogether:
Furthermore, depending on your browser configuration – Rick’s site displays horrendously (see below) because it is running scripts from an unauthenticated sources on a site with an SSL certificate. (The SEO culprit here is a simple hardcoded link to his stylesheet that wasn’t updated to include the”s” in https, which causes it to be unauthenticated and not load.) Don’t understand the technical lexicon? You shouldn’t have to, but know that this is what you might look like when you ignore SEO:
Rick could build so many more relationships with prospective clients if the Google thought his Legal Technology Blog was about legal technology or could differentiate the content in the pages on his blog by their distinct headings or if his blog’s technology wasn’t broken. These are basic, SEO 101 errors. It makes me sad to see attorneys working so hard on the wrong things, convinced otherwise by erroneous ranking reports.
In the end, this is why SEO matters:
The SEO reality is, a well done blog will generate just as much, if not more business for the entire firm when housed on the firm’s primary domain.
One of my clients was recently contacted by Lawyers of Distinction, an online legal directory claiming to only list the top 10% of lawyers. But what are they using to determine who qualifies as the top 10%?
“Lawyers of Distinction uses its own independent criteria, including both objective and subjective factors in determining if an attorney can be recognized as being within the top 10% of attorneys in the United States, in their respective field. This designation is based upon the proprietary analysis of the Lawyers of Distinction organization alone, and is not intended to be endorsed by any of the 50 United States Bar Associations.”
Doesn’t get much more vague than that.
Let’s say you ignore these first warning signs because you’re struck by flattery, and you start to poke around the site to see who is listed and what perks come with the exceptional honor of being in the top 10%. You may stumble upon the membership page and notice that your award will cost you $425 per year, at the least.
What that $425 membership is really paying for is the link back to your site, and the plaque you can prominently display in your office. You also have the option to buy more plaques at $100 each, because who doesn’t need a plaque in the lobby and the restroom?
I was curious to know what the next steps would be for my client who had been nominated. Here’s the page I was taken to from the email he received:
Pretty basic information. But I wondered what would happen if I were to “Apply for Consideration” directly on their site…
Almost identical.
With a giant red flag waving in my face, I wondered how legitimate this company is. So I looked up their address using Google Street View:
Conrad wrote an eerily similar post two years ago about the American Institute of Personal Injury Lawyers whose corporate office was also located at a UPS store.
You’d think a company dealing with the top 10% of lawyers would have a physical location. Especially if they’re boasting their combined power with Avvo.
“Avvo has become an integral component of attorney marketing. Avvo provides comprehensive attorney profiles, client reviews and peer endorsements. The problem with Avvo membership alone is 97% of all U.S. Attorneys have Avvo profiles. With lawyers of distinction membership you can “distinguish yourself” and leverage your Avvo rating. The combination and synergy of these two memberships can make the difference in your push for top search engine optimization in your local geographic market and nationally, resulting in additional clients. Harness the power of this combination to fortify and solidify your strong legal reputation for excellence. We congratulate you!”
So in the spirit of the New Year, let’s cut out the shady directories and use our resources on more valuable marketing tactics.
But if you’re really just interested in the Costco discounts, they can hook you up.
I recently wrote a post on how to use Google’s Disavow Tool to disassociate your website from other sites that might bring unwanted attention from Google (Penguin). In that post I brushed over the most important part: choosing what links/domains to disavow. Here are some guidelines on what to keep in mind as you investigate a link to decide whether or not you should disavow.
Getting Started
Before you start axing links left and right, you want a strong understanding of what links are helping, and what links are harming you. A good place to start is Google’s Quality Guidelines. Here you can find an easy-to-understand breakdown of what practices Google does not endorse. If a website that is linking to you is breaking most or all of these rules, you should strongly consider disavowing that site. Amongst their quality guidelines is this principle:
“Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines”
This is arguably the most important rule to keep in mind as you assess your backlink profile. When investigating a link, always be aware of whether or not the site was built with people in mind. If a site was built with search engines in mind, the chances that this link is hurting, not helping, is high.
On-Site Considerations
Websites that you don’t want linking to you give you some hints that they might be harmful. Here are a few of them in no particular order:
Styling: This is the most immediately obvious factor. If a site has no color, images, or formatting, there’s a good chance it wasn’t built for people to use.
Contact info: This is the first thing I look for after styling. If a website is concerned about the people that are using their website (user experience, satisfaction, etc.) they will make it very easy for those people to reach out to them. If a site does not provide a phone number or email address, this isn’t a great sign. Many websites (directories in particular) will have a comment box in place of this information. Sometimes these boxes are used by webmasters as a valued means of communication with their users, sometimes they are just a guise to give the appearance that someone is monitoring a site. The only way to tell is to send in a form.
Office location: Do they have a physical location? If so, this is good for credibility.
Content: Does this site have any original content? Has this content been added to recently? Yes? Good for credibility.
Ads: What type of ads do you see? Are they high quality and relevant? Or do they seem spammy and cheap?
(hint, ads like these are a bad sign)
SSL: Is this site secure? If so, this is a good sign.
Reciprocal/Paid Links: If you can find anything on a site about engaging in reciprocal or paid linking, run.
Note: These considerations do not stand alone. There are many great websites that you want linking to you that don’t have SSL. Some great websites have poor styling. These considerations must be taken together, with the following off-site considerations, to get a broader picture.
Off-Site Considerations
You’ve poked around a site that’s linking to you. It breaks some of the guidelines above, but you’re on the fence about whether or not it could be a harbinger of Penguin. It’s time to look at some metrics to gauge how much trust you should place on this link. Depending upon the tools at your disposal, this process might look slightly different. I like to use a combination of Majestic, Ahrefs, and Moz’s Open Site Explorer.
What to look at:
Domain/URL Rating: Plug your questionable link into Ahrefs and check its Domain Rating and URL Rating. Just as it sounds, the Domain Rating ranks the entire domain, the URL Rating is only concerned with the page on the website that is linking to you. If you don’t have Ahrefs, Moz Open Site Explorer offers similar metrics (Domain Authority/Page Authority, respectively), while Majestic gives Trust Flow and Citation Flow. These Figures give a baseline understanding of a website. If a site has a Domain Rating between one and five, this should be cause for concern.
Number of Backlinks vs. Number of Referring Domains: This is one of the most decisive considerations. All three of the tools mentioned above will give you their best guess as to how many links are pointing to a page, as well as how many different domains these links are coming from. What you want to watch for here is an outrageous amount of links, coming from a small number of domains. It’s important to understand that 100 links from one (generally spammy) domain is not as valuable as 100 links from a rich, diverse group of websites. This comparison can make it obvious that a link is trying to cheat the system. There is no threshold for the highest allowable ratio of links to domains. If you are unsure, use this information in tandem with other considerations to decide on the quality of a website.
Spam Score: Moz’s Open Site Explorer spam tool feature attempts to put together many of the considerations mentioned so far. This tool isn’t always spot on, but it can give you an idea of what you’re working with. If a site has a spam score above three, this should concern you. If a site has a spam score of eight, it’s time to move on.
Momentum/Potential: Sometimes, if a site is new, it won’t have an established backlink profile. Its Domain Rating will be low, and if you’re on the fence about it, it might not seem worth keeping around.
As an example, take Wired.com. Earlier this year, Wired’s backlink profile was not nearly as impressive as it is right now. If Wired had linked to your website in March you might have been happy. But, because of the sharp improvement in Wired’s backlink profile since then, that link to your website is now worth much more. Today you’d be ecstatic. Basically, if a site links to you and it’s not impressive now but you think it has potential, or is already on its way, don’t disavow.
There You Have it
These are just a few of the many tactics you can use to look in to your backlinks.
It’s that time of year again. The SEO world is reflecting back on a year defined by unexplained shake ups in the search results. Rather than taking a look back on 2016, it’s much more fun to look ahead to 2017. Some writers were so excited for 2016 to end, they started their predictions as early as August. Other writers, like the brilliant David Mihm, have just recently published their predictions for 2017 (definitely worth the read). In this post, I want to look at a few different common SEO trends/predictions and offer my thoughts in a ESPN(ish) talkshow fashion called “Good news, bad news, no news.” Essentially, I’ll be sharing whether I think this SEO trend will benefit law firms, hurt them, or have no real impact.
More Traffic to Paid Advertisements than Organic on Mobile
…Bad news
Google has been stressing the importance of mobile experience since back in March of 2015 when the digital marketing world had a simultaneous heart attack about the impending “Mobilegeddon.” Mobile search has continued it’s astronomical growth and with that, Google is capitalizing on a huge opportunity for additional revenue. We’ve seen this trend already with new ad extensions (reviews and location data) and even more recently with the addition of local search ads on Google Maps like the example below.
Source: Google
So why is this bad news for the average small law firm? I say bad news because it’s becoming a pay-to-play game, and fast. Legal has always been a hyper-competitive market – while you can still get solid results from beating your competition organically – you now have to compete with more advertising than ever before with less room on the search results pages than ever before. 2017 may be a good time to start thinking about the various mobile advertising options.
Tracking Keywords Rank Becomes Obsolete
…Good news
Search queries are getting longer and more specific with the growth of voice search and shift in searcher behavior. Soon, tracking your ranking for broad terms like “bankruptcy lawyer” will become more difficult. This is great news. It’s very easy to use ranking as a measuring stick of success, but we shouldn’t, and soon won’t be able to. We’ve never used ranking as a measure of success at Mockingbird and never will. Our philosophy has always been to focus on the metrics that matter, which for law firms is new leads and ultimately new clients (not ranking for “car accidents”).
This inevitable shift will free up business owners and their SEO agencies to focus on optimizing their website in a way that drives revenue, not rankings. Instead of focusing our efforts on rankings, we can focus on the user’s intent and how to solve their problems.
HTTPS Becomes a Must
…No News
We’ve known that Google is using HTTPS as a ranking signal since they announced it back in August of 2014. Since then, Google has been running their own PR campaign to push site owners and SEOs to make their website’s more secure. Google even offers help articles, a post on why HTTPS matters, and a variety of tools to check your site’s security. They have been preparing us for the shift to HTTPS for the last two years and “Beginning in January 2017 (Chrome 56), we’ll mark HTTP pages that collect passwords or credit cards as non-secure, as part of a long-term plan to mark all HTTP sites as non-secure” (source). This should be “no news” to all of us. Our lead developer, Matt Stahl, wrote a great post on this: “Why HTTPS? Well that’s a stupid question.”
Looking Ahead to 2017
Things are changing fast and it’s important to keep on top of the trends. In summary, think about investing in mobile advertising, forget about keyword ranking, and make sure your site is secure with HTTPS. Please comment with your own thoughts and predictions below!
There is web design that works, web design that doesn’t work, and a whole lot in between. Design is holistic – it is not just the skin or wrapper for your website. That’s why we hear many different terms around design – Product Design, Web Design, UX Design, Front-End Design, Full-Stack Developer, etc… All of these are skills or job titles entangled in the web design/development department. Design is not based around one question – “Does it look good?” – that’s aesthetics. Design (look it up) encompasses different ideas to create a product or experience for a business or person to interact with. Is it easy to use? Does it relate to me? Does it relate to a business? Is it trustworthy? Does it look good? Is it ethical? Good design can answer all of these questions and more. When you introduce an ever evolving platform like the web, it complicates design further. My first ever “web design” book in school – “Don’t Make Me Think” – was old then, and the principals still apply today.
The design needs of websites definitely vary, depending on the purpose of the site, but for law firms, there’s a number of things that will definitely get you more clients.
1. Contact Information
Your contact information shouldn’t be hard to find! Too often we see law firm websites with no phone number in the header and not so much as a contact form or address on their home page. How are they supposed to contact you for a consultation? What if your contact page link is hidden away in a sidebar? At Mockingbird we have one hard and fast design rule – the phone number goes in the header. Visitors should not have to look around to find your phone number! We also like having your address in the footer on every page of your site and likely an email contact form on every page (this should also stand out!).
2. Space
Empty space makes information and design stand out. If I hear “above the fold” one more time, I hope it’s the last. This is a design term from the newspaper era that carried over to web design when users weren’t all familiar with the “scroll” function within a browser. Studies show that this is no longer the case – especially with the emergence of mobile devices and websites. Some users will start scrolling before a page finishes a 1 second load time! Sure, it’s good practice to have the most important information at the top of the page, but an interested user is likely to scroll until they find what they’re looking for. Empty space around your, logo, buttons, phone number, text, calls to action, etc… can help raise conversion rates. So if you’re forcing your web designer to cram as much information as possible “above the fold” – you should have some data behind it explaining why.
3. Simple Navigation
Navigation is so obvious that it’s almost not worth mentioning, but some websites are still getting it wrong. Make sure you have a top bar/header navigation menu, whether it has everything listed or as a drop down. This is a trend that today’s web users are going to expect and as a small business, you would be remiss without it. For users that don’t prefer navigating that way, you’re going to want to give them other options! This is why I like to include a variety of tools from breadcrumb navigation to home page icon buttons.
4. Buttons that Stand Out
Your buttons should be easy to find. A “Send” button that stands out is one of the quickest ways to signal a contact area to a user. Contrasting colors with some sort of differentiating design feature like rounded corners will make your buttons stand out. They quickly indicate to a user, especially fast scrolling ones, that this is an area where they can take action.
5. Calls to Action
Pair your buttons, links, or contact information with Calls to Action. This text will pull the user in, engage them, and encourage – you guessed it – “ACTION’! This text should be short and attention grabbing.
6. Custom Professional Imagery
So many websites and advertisements today use stock photography or clip art, it’s available cheaply or freely. Good designers can make this stock imagery look like it really belongs to your website and is important to your law firm. However, professional photography and branding that belongs to your firm takes your website to the next level. If the photography/branding can project some personality and feeling to a visitor, it’s going to create a much stronger connection. This connection can increase your website’s chance of conversion. I’ll lump video in here as well. If you have professionally created video on your website that engages a visitor it can seriously increase conversion. Custom imagery and video done correctly is another strong signal to search engines that you have quality, original content.
7. About Me
Your “About Me” page, or Law Firm Overview, or Team page, whatever you want to call it is another important aspect of design. It can be a high traffic, high converting page. Having strong, engaging content on your “About Me” page can really boost your conversion rate. Designers can highlight links to this page with buttons and calls to action. Further, you might want to include some special design on that page with professional imagery to further connect with visitors.
Wrapping Up
These 7 Web Design (focusing on aesthetics) basics are simple, important aspects that can seriously boost your conversion rate. If you’re missing any of these things, you should seriously consider addressing them and starting a discussion with your Web Designer!
You run a website. Perhaps you hired a bad SEO in the past, or you yourself have done some questionable link-building at some point or another. You fear you might get hit (or already have been hit) by Google’s Penguin algorithm.
Don’t fear. Google’s Disavow Tool is here, and I’m here to tell you how to use it. In this post you’ll find step-by-step instructions on how to use this tool and some background on why you should (or shouldn’t) be disavowing.
Before We Get Started, Some Notes
First, for those that don’t know, Google’s Disavow Tool is basically a way for you to tell Google “I don’t know that guy”, prompting Google to ignore certain links pointing to your site that it finds when crawling, and (ideally) not hit you with a penalty.
Second, it’s important to understand the gravity of what you’re doing before you start disavowing links left and right. The links coming to your website are an important signal (check out Pagerank) of how useful your site might be to users. If you have high quality links from credible websites, you REALLY DON’T WANT TO DISAVOW THESE LINKS. The only links you should be disavowing are those that are potentially harmful to be associated with online. That being said, you can always make adjustments to your disavow file. A link can be un-disavowed, although this will not happen immediately.
Third, nobody (besides Google) really knows the exact implications of submitting a disavow file. Some people say it doesn’t do anything, some swear by it.
Fourth, after you upload your disavow file, keep it. You’ll want to add to it (as opposed to replacing it) as more questionable links show up down the road.
Fifth, a link can be both potentially harmful AND helping you in rankings. It’s a fine line. Some links Google might not have identified as dubious, but they will, and when they do, you get hit with a penalty. It’s smart to preemptively disavow links you know to be potentially harmful now, and get busy building links to replace these with credible sites.
That being said, let’s get started, shall we?
Step 1. Identify Offending Links.
This is the hardest part. For more on this, check out my other blog post. To summarize, your goal is to identify the links that Google will perceive as dubious. What links does Google perceive as dubious? Those that are trying to trick it. If a link doesn’t exist to serve a purpose for the user, that’s a bad start. If a link exists because there was money or links exchanged to get it, now we’re in trouble. Google provides a set of guidelines to make this process of choosing links to disavow easier.
Run through and compile these dubious links into an excel spreadsheet.
Step 2. Contact Webmaster
Google recommends reaching out to each site you no longer want linked to you and personally requesting that they remove the link in question. You can do this by visiting the site and looking for an email address or filling out a comment box.
As you can imagine, this can be a tedious process. Send out your requests, then wait a week. Keep notes of which sites you contact, and which sites respond/remove links. Remove the links that webmasters have taken down from your spreadsheet. For the (many) links that remain, it’s time to disavow.
Step 3. Creating a Disavow File
This file should have one item per line, and follow these two rules:
1. Your disavow file must be a .txt file (At mockingbird we like to use Sublime Text, which automatically saves as a .txt file. This makes adding notes later on easier, and it’s free).
2. Your disavow file must be encoded in UTF-8 or 7-bit ASCII
To follow each of these rules, I copy and paste my links for disavow from excel into Sublime Text. You can, however, just save your excel spreadsheet as a .txt file.
It’s important to note that that you can either disavow one link, or all links from a domain at once. If you want to disavow just a link, include it in your disavow file in the following form:
In order to disavow an entire domain, include the domain in your disavow list like this:
domain: hackers.sketchy.com
We’re almost done! Before you submit, Google recommends that you annotate the domains and links that we send in for disavow. They give the following example:
These notes (following the “#”) are purely for personal use. They’ll come in handy when you’re adding to this list later.
By my rough count, less than half of the blogs cited were from actual law firms – leading me to believe there is still a lot of room for (extremely high quality) content development coming out of law firms. Naturally, there were a lot of law professors and news writers with a legal bent as well as advocacy/reform type content, like Prison Law Blog. (Which incidentally is written by a currently incarcerated, Christopher Zoukis, who plans on going to law school upon his release – inspirational story.)
I added a small shot of Eisner Gorin’s Twitter account on the right so you can see just how fascinating this isn’t.
