Getting the Most Out of Ahrefs

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We recently subscribed to an SEO toolkit called Ahrefs at Mockingbird. We did this because the overwhelming majority of voices weighing in across the web seem to agree that while Ahrefs is a little more expensive than, say Majestic or Moz, it’s more accurate. We like accuracy.

After playing around with Ahrefs, investigating features, and watching many of their help videos, I put together this guide that can serve as a how-to-get-the-most-out-of-Ahrefs manual, complete with basics, some cons, as well as some advanced features offered by Ahrefs.

What Ahrefs does:

Ahrefs brands themselves as:

“A toolset for SEO and marketing. We have tools for backlink research, organic traffic research, keyword research, content marketing & more.”

Basically, Ahrefs crawls the web and reports on what it finds. Its key functionality is its backlink checking capabilities. According to a study we found, Ahrefs reports on a higher ratio of live, accurate links than any other similar service. Based on our own experience with other tools, so far this seems to be the case.

Pricing:

The costs of different Ahref plans run as follows:

How to Use it:

Dashboard:

The first step towards using Ahrefs to the fullest is adding important sites to your dashboard (adding a “campaign”). This allows you to quickly and easily keep tabs on the websites you are most interested in. This is helpful insofar as you wont need to enter a url each time you want to check on a certain site, but adding a site to your dashboard also allows you to setup automated email reports. These reports give you your site’s vitals as they pertain to backlinks (new/lost/broken), keywords (are you still ranking for important keywords?), and online mentions (who’s talking about your website?) on a weekly or monthly basis, depending on your preference.

Backlinks:

Ahref’s backlink checker is its meat and potatoes. They have an easy-to-use interface that makes checking in on your sites’ backlink profile relatively intuitive.

To illustrate some of Ahref’s backlink checker tool’s capabilities, here’s an example that came up the other day; A co-worker noticed an unusual amount of dofollow links pointed at a client’s website in the past two months. She wondered if there was a way to quickly check in on backlinks that had been added in the last two months that were dofollow, and whether any of these links were related to each other. Let’s review:

  1. New links within last two months
  2. Dofollow
  3. Related to one another?

To figure this out, I used Ahref’s “New Backlinks” tool. Once inside, I adjusted the settings as follows:

As you can see, the date is set to include the last 60 days, the link type is set to “Dofollow”, and, perhaps most importantly for what my coworker was trying to accomplish, the links are set to show up as “One link per domain”. This last feature allows you to condense all links from the same (generally spammy) domain into something more easily digestible.

Once here, use the toolbar above the backlinks to further hone in on the information you’re interesting in seeing. Here you can prioritize how your backlinks are presented to you based on highest/lowest: Domain Ranking, URL Ranking, # of external links on page, social, date found by Ahrefs, or the number of times a domain links to your site.

Disavow tool:

This feature impressed me. Once you’ve added a site to your dashboard, the “Disavow Links” tool becomes available. This tool allows you to stockpile and organize links that you don’t want linking to your site. As you go through new backlinks, or all backlinks, you’ll see a small box waiting to be checked:

Once you click this box, you can choose to either disavow only that URL, or the entire domain. Once you’ve done this, the backlink is saved to your disavow list.

Once you’ve compiled a list worth disavowing, Ahrefs makes it easy to export the list as a txt. file, so you can send it straight to Google’s disavow tool (with the addition of some annotation on your part).

 

SEO: Beginner’s Guide to What Matters

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As a relative newcomer to the world of SEO I’d like to take a moment to zoom out.

There are a lot of things one can do to bring traffic to a website and get the phone ringing. In my almost two months here at Mockingbird my hands have been dirty redirecting URLs, nofollowing links, looking at content data to see what works and what doesn’t, answering the phone, getting Google Analytics certified, conducting onboarding audits, running competitive analyses… you get it. Trying to get stuff done, it can be easy to lose sight of what is most important to SEO and why we’re doing what we’re doing. That’s why I’ve made this SEO: Beginner’s Guide to What Matters.

Leads, Not Ranking

This list is not in order of importance, but I certainly didn’t list this first on accident. The one detail that has been emphasized to me the most, whether in my interview, training, or since, is that you can’t lose sight of the reason SEOs have jobs: to bring business to the client. It’s easy to get caught up in traffic, likes, shares, and yes, page rankings, when measuring the impact of your SEO efforts. Oftentimes these metrics are closely related to your end goal. But they aren’t it. Your end goal is to connect your client with people who want to pay them money in exchange for services. I would be happy showing up as the 2,573rd Google search result for all keywords if it also meant a steady, bountiful flow of leads. What I mean to say here is this: stay focused on goals that matter.

This article will mention ranking. Moving forward, keep in mind that ranking only matters if it generates leads. For more on this, check out Conrad’s blog post

Content

We’ve all heard it. Content is crucial. It might even be king. But what is a king without a queen, a couple knights, peasants and a jester? Just some guy. What I’m trying to say it this: content is valuable, but only when used in the right way. First, the content being posted to your website needs to be of good quality. Search engines can easily sniff out fodder, the stuff used to fill a page. The content being posted must be actually relevant and helpful to somebody who stumbles upon it. Next, high quality content needs to be regularly promoted and marketed. Today, people are starting to figure out that in order to get traffic (and, ideally, leads), they need to post a lot of high quality content. The gig is up. There’s ample high quality content out there. So in order for yours to be seen, you need to push it out.

Site Architecture

This is broad, but important. Site architecture is paramount to online marketing. It includes anything from website crawlability to mobile capabilities, site speed to duplicate content. In order for your website to garner attention from a search engine, in needs to be easy for the search engine to engage with. If Google has a hard time crawling your site because it has massive amounts of outdated, irrelevant content, non-descriptive URLS and no sitemap, it won’t be happy and there will be repercussions. But it’s important to remember that search engines aren’t ranking for themselves. They rank based on how helpful/effective they deem a site to be for the user. If Bing can tell that your sitespeed is in the pits, it’s going to recognize that this will annoy a user, and ding your ranking. When building a website, architecture should be kept in mind to easily accommodate search engines.

HTML

HTML, similar to site architecture, sends signals to search engines to help them determine what information needs to be put before a user. Title tags, meta description tags, and header tags all fall under HTML. When sifting through every piece of information on a site, tags give the search engine some guidance. Searchengineland aptly uses the example of a book; say you open a book shop with 100 books you’ve written. You happen to be a pretty bad writer, and you gave each book the same title, each chapter the same name, and put the same information in each sleeve. An interested reader who steps into your shop is going to have a hard time determining where to find content on their favorite genre, political intrigue. Or Vampires. The same is true for search engines. If a search engine can’t easily understand what content is stored on what pages, that content might be left by the wayside. Offer your content to search engines with plenty of explanation: relevant titles, descriptions, and header tags.

There you have it

An oversimplified summary of SEO priorities.

Why HTTPS? Well that’s a stupid question.

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Everybody is moving to their websites to HTTPS! Google says it’s a must. You even get a nice green shield on the url bar – see below – security proven! It’s clear that HTTPS is a good thing for your website and the entire web is moving quickly to adopt HTTPS.

HTTPS Example

Better get on board or your traffic is going to tank! Woah woah woah… That’s not necessarily true, but let’s explore they what, why, and how of HTTPS.

What is HTTPS?

HTTPS is a combination of two things – HTTP(Hypertext Transfer Protocol) and TLS(Transport Layer Security).  This security layer essentially encrypts communications between the website server and the visitors device. It doesn’t protect your device or server themselves from intruders (they should have their own security measures), but it does protect the communications from being read or altered by intruders. This way a visitor to your website can be ensured that their data is not being mined when they send you a contact form message or digital payment. If a website has HTTPS enabled correctly it will have a green shield in your browser’s address bar and “https://” before the site address – refer again to the image above. An incomplete/incorrect implementation will have a red shield, x, or some other error/warning message to go along with the “https://” to warn visitors of non-encrypted or unsafe data transfer.

How to HTTPS?

HTTPS requires an SSL(Secure Sockets Layer) or TLS(Transport Layer Security) be installed on the web server. To get more technical… these terms are now used interchangeably as SSL3.0 was the last SSL version in use and TLS1.0 is often referred to as SSL3.1. The latest production version as of writing is TLS1.3 which is probably what your “SSL” is using. All of that aside – you need to buy these “Security Certificates” through your hosting provider to apply to your domain name. Ask your hosting provider, web developer, or marketing company to set up HTTPS for you!

Why HTTPS?

Well it’s far from perfect, but it’s the best, most standard communications security that is currently have available. And guess what? It’s going to continue to be upgraded as attackers get more sophisticated – see SSL 3.0, TLS 1.0, 1.3, etc… Your hosting provider and your devices security systems will also be upgraded as intruders try new methods.  Google thinks you should use HTTPS. WRC – the international consortium that develops web standards thinks you should. Even the slow moving bureaucracy that is our government requires it for their websites. So clearly it’s a must have for security and visitors trust (this can increase lead conversion).

There’s one more reason that you probably weren’t even thinking about. HTTP2! Yes, that’s right, the first HTTP update since HTTP1.1 in 1999. Before HTTP2 came along, HTTPS could increase a websites loading times because of the extra time taken for encrypted connections. With HTTP2, your devices can access multiple resources from a website at the same time! Before this, a visitor would have to load a single websites average of 30-100 resources 1 at a time. This change allows HTTP2 to decrease load times by 17-50% as reported by WPengine and CloudFlare. What does this have to do with HTTPS you ask? Well HTTP2 doesn’t require a security certificate, but browsers require security certificates for HTTP2 to function. So if you’re host has HTTP2 enabled and you have a Security Certificate installed – you get a website speed increase AND a security increase. Win Win.

Down the Rabbit Hole

Internet security is a deep and interesting subject with lots of reading material. With the emergence of the “internet of things” powering unprecedented DDoS attacks and botnets infecting massive amounts of devices – the web is a warzone. For us little fish, we have to hope that the big guys have our backs. As we await “Quantum Computing”, you can be sure, Google and others are preparing TLS defenses for your small business website!

Complete Guide to Understanding and Transferring a Domain Between Registrars

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For this tutorial, I use examples and link to resources that explain how to transfer a domain name from GoDaddy to Namecheap. These specific examples will vary depending on which registrar you’re transferring from and which registrar you transfer to, however, this complete guide can serve as a basic outline for most registrars.

Cool blog Robert, just tell me the steps!

Glossary – definitions that you’ll want to understand

Domain name – Your browser (Chrome, IE, Firefox, Safari) uses these to identify one or more IP Addresses. You type a domain name into the address bar of your browser to get to a website. Amazon.com is a domain name. These allow you to remember words instead of a string of numbers to get to a website.

Registrar – An organization that manages the reservation of domain names. You can think of this as the place where you purchased your domain name. Popular registrars are GoDaddy, Name.com, Namecheap, iPage, Network Solutions, and Blue Host. I highly recommend Namecheap.

Website Host – Often referred to as a Host, it’s the place that has all the files and information pertaining to your website. This can be provided by your registrar, or a different third party company. Many of the popular registrars mentioned above are also popular website hosting companies. However, we use a managed WordPress hosting company called WP Engine for improved speed and security.

DNS (Domain Name System) – This is the system that the Internet uses to convert a domain name into an IP address (or IP Addresses).  You can think of it as a map of instructions on where the internet finds important information related to a domain name, like where a website is hosted.

NS (Name Server) – Technically I’m referring to a Root Name Server here: This server (which is a technical way of saying a computer that provides a service) points the internet to the place where your DNS is setup. When you purchase your domain from a registrar, it usually comes setup with two of their default name servers. You or the person who built your website may have changed these to the name servers for the hosting company your website is using. Common default GoDaddy name servers look like this: ns01.domaincontrol.com and ns02.domaincontrol.com.

A Record, CNAME Record, MX Record, TXT Record, SPF Record – DNS records that give the internet directions on what to do with certain things relating to your domain. Example: MX Records for a domain are the instructions for handling email. If you improperly move or configure these, your email could stop working.

Why you might want to transfer a domain name from one registrar to another

  • You’ve purchased your domain name through a website provider/CMS like Weebly and you’re cancelling their service.
  • You’ve purchased domains through a variety of registrars and are trying to organize and keep track of fewer logins
  • You hate your current registrar and you’ve heard about how awesome Namecheap is
  • You’ve bought or sold a domain and need to move it between registrars.
  • Someone bought and setup your domain for you and they no longer want/can/are willing to handle that for you

 

General Domain Name Transfer Process

Option 1: Call 206-209-2125 and have us to do this for you.

Option 2:

  1. Verify the domain name can be transferred and read through these steps entirely before beginning the transfer process.
  2. Prepare the domain name for transfer* at the current registrar and acquire an Authorization/EPP Code. This must be done by whomever has current registrar access for the domain.
  3. Initiate the transfer from the registrar you’re moving the domain name to and input the Authorization/EPP Code.
  4. Accept the domain name transfer request from the administrator email of the domain.
  5. Wait for the transfer to complete within 5 days.

*If you put in some extra work and setup a third party DNS, you will limit the amount of time your website is down (if any) during this process.

Step 1: Things to know before you begin to transfer your domain name:

  1. You can transfer a domain name if it has been registered more than 60 days ago.
  2. You can transfer a domain name if it hasn’t been transferred in the last 60 days.
  3. The domain must have a valid and accessible admin email address in the Whois database. I recommend that you disable any type of Whois privacy protection/private registration before transferring the domain. Some registrars require it.
  4. The domain name cannot be expired. Domain status must be ‘OK’ or ‘Active’ and unlocked.
  5. Once transferred, you cannot transfer the domain name again for 60 days (see #2).
  6. Transfers may be denied. Example of reasons for denial are:
    1. Evidence of fraud,
    2. court order by a court of competent jurisdiction
    3. Reasonable dispute over the identity of the registered name holder or administrative contact,
    4. Failed Payment
    5. The domain name is locked (see #4)
    6. A domain name is less than 60 days old (see #1)
    7. A domain name was transferred less than 60 days ago (see #2 and #5).

Step 2: Prepare the Domain name for Transfer

  1. Disable your domain name privacy/private registration
  2. Make sure you/someone has access to the Administrative Email for the domain.
    1. Look up the domain in a Whois database. Take note of the administrative email for the domain. Someone should have access to this!
  3. If the name servers are with the company you’re transferring your domain name away from, I recommend setting up your DNS through a third party and pointing the NS to this DNS before you transfer the domain. You simply copy all the A records, mx records, txt records, and anything else that is on your domain to this third-party DNS. This way, when the DNS is in limbo at the registrar level, your site and email will remain up on the web. I recommend using Namecheap’s FreeDNS service. Especially if you’re transferring the domain to Namecheap – they will change the NS to theirs and keep all the domain records intact. Keep in mind that NS updates take 24-48 hours to complete!
  4. Unlock the domain name
  5. Obtain the Auth/EPP code from the current registrar.

Step 3: Initiate the transfer to Namecheap

  1. Once logged in, select ‘Domains’ from the menu at the top and select ‘Transfer a Domain’.
  2. Enter your domain name & Authorization/EPP code separated by a comma. Example: domainname.com, E8R8;Q893*5SH00
  3. Click ‘Start Transfer’ and Namechep verifies everything in step 2 is correct and the domain is prepared properly. Pick the administrative email address for the domain to have the verification email sent to. Again, you or someone should have access to this! Click ‘Add to Cart’ and add any coupon codes you have lying around.
  4. Proceed to ‘Check Out’ for payment. Generally, around $20.

Step 4: Accept the domain transfer via email

Delivery of this email can take a couple hours, and it can often end up in the spam folder of the administrative email account for the domain. By now, you should have already verified that you or someone involved in the domain name transfer process has access.

Once you’ve accepted the transfer request via email, the registrar you’re moving the domain name from has 5 days to automatically release the domain. You should receive a confirmation email to the email address on file at the new registrar once it is complete!

Namecheap provides a lot of good resources, one of which is a matrix of Transfer Statuses and what to do in each situation.

Resources that I think are extra helpful outside of this complete guide:

6 (not scary) Steps to Setup a Google Account [Gmail] with an already existing Email.

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Be honest: how many email accounts do you have? Now actually be honest: How many email accounts do you use? If your answer is “one” to both questions, congratulations! You win at the internet! If it took you a while to count, please read on.

Logging in to tools is a major reason why many of us have multiple email accounts. Things like Google Analytics, Search Console, Google My Business, Google +, and Bing Webmaster tools all require emails registered with either Google or Microsoft to gain access. Nobody has time to keep track of all of this (unless we are your VP of Marketing).

I’m about to share with you a step by step guide on how you can clean up your logins and use a single email account with these tools. It’s as simple as setting up an already existing email account with Google. There’s a very similar process to setting up a Microsoft account with a non-Microsoft email that I’ll cover in a different blog someday.

I highly, highly, highly (did I say highly?) recommend that you create/dedicate an email on your company’s domain name rather than using a free Hotmail, yahoo or inbox account. If you don’t have an email on your firm’s domain give us a call so we can help.

Please note: if your firm’s email is hosted through G Suite (formerly Google Apps for Business), then you’re already registered with Google! If your firm’s email is hosted through Exchange or Office 365, then you’re already registered with Microsoft!

Quick Steps to Setup a Google Account with a non-Gmail Email:

Step 1: Log out of any Gmail account(s) you’re currently logged in to, then open https://accounts.google.com.

Step 2: Click the Create Account link below the gray “sign in with your Google Account” box.

Step 3: Below the “Choose your username” field, click I prefer to use my current email address link.

Step 4: Enter your non-Gmail email address you would like to register with Google.

Step 5: Finish filling out the new account form and accept Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms.

Step 6: Confirm your new account with the email address you provided.

Longer Explanation and visual guides for Setting up a Google Account with a non-Gmail Email:

Step 1: Log out of any Gmail account(s) you’re currently logged in to, then open https://accounts.google.com.

If you’re already signed in to a Gmail account and this is the same address that you’d like to use for Google’s suite of tools, you’re done! You address is already associated to Google.

Step 2: Click the Create Account link below the gray “sign in with your Google Account” box.

google account create new account login

Step 3: Below the “Choose your username” field, click I prefer to use my current email address link.

prefer to use current email for gmail

Step 4: Enter your non-Gmail email address you would like to register with Google.

Once you’ve clicked this link, you’ll be able to enter your current (non-Gmail) email address for this setup process. This is the most important step in this process. As mentioned, I highly recommend setting up or dedicating an already existing email that is on your domain (example: admin@bestlawfirmever.com).

fields for creating google account with current email

Step 5: Finish filling out the new account form and accept Google’s “Privacy and Terms.” This includes:

  • Name (first and last)
  • Password & confirmation of Password (don’t make it the same as your luggage combination)
  • Birthday
  • Gender
  • Mobile phone (use a number that accept texts messages for recovery purposes).
  • Default homepage (as if your homepage isn’t already Google.com)
  • Location

google privacy terms

**Google’s Privacy and Terms are likely to change**

Step 6: Confirm your new account with the email address you provided by following the final instructions given (normally this is to simply click accept in the email you’ve received to the email address you’ve just registered).

Now that you’ve registered your email address with Google, you can give access/ownership of Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google my Business and any other Google tools that you use to this email account. If you’ve taken my recommendation of using a dedicated email that’s on your domain, you’ll never have to worry about the temporary front desk/law student/in-house marketer from leaving and taking all your data with them.

Now Celebrate. You’ve just made your life a whole lot easier.

A/B Testing: How To Improve Contact Page Conversions Using Google Analytics

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What Is A/B Testing?

In our context, an A/B test is an experiment that tests two different variants of a webpage against each other to determine which one will deliver better results (more form-fill submissions, more phone calls, longer session time, etc.) The two different versions of the page will be randomly served to users on the website to determine the winner based on statistically accurate data.

How Can I Use A/B Testing On Your Website?

One of the best, most impactful ways to use A/B testing is on your website’s contact page. Currently, we’re running A/B tests across all of our client’s contact pages to see which page format is delivering the highest conversion rate. We’re testing the placement of the contact form — middle of the content versus before all other contact info and content.

How Do I Set Up A/B Testing?

There is a multitude of companies that offer A/B testing software (one of Mockingbird’s preferred: Optimizely), but in this post, we’re going to explain how to use Google Analytics “Experiments” feature to test your contact page.

Important note: the following process is for any website that is set up on WordPress and has Google Analytics installed on the site.

Step 1: Create an alternate page to test in WordPress and make sure the following Yoast SEO settings are set:

  1. Index
  2. Follow
  3. Set canonical to original page you’re testing

Yoast Seo Settings

Pro tip: I also like to make the URL the same as the page you’re testing but with “alt” at the end (ie: example.com/contact-alt/) but feel free to make the URL whatever you please.

Step 2: Install and activate WordPress plugin “Simple Google Content Experiments”

Step 3: Open Google Analytics and navigate to > Behavior > Experiments

Step 4: Create a new experiment and use the following settings:

  1. Name your experiment appropriately (ie: Contact Page AB)
  2. Assign 100% of traffic to experiment (assuming it’s not something extremely drastic)
  3. Email notifications to yourself
  4. Set 2 week minimum time to run
  5. Set a confidence threshold of 95%

Contact Page Google Analytics Experiment

Step 5: Configure the experiment

abtest

 

Step 6: Set up your experiment code

  1. Select “Manually insert the code”
  2. Edit the WP page and create a new custom field labeled “google_content_experiment_code” and insert copied code as value

AB Test Experiment Code

Step 7: Validate your experiment code and launch experiment.

Step 8: Sit back and wait for the results to roll in.

For more information on Google Analytics Experiments, view this help article: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1745216?hl=en.

#Hashtag Idiocy: #JustBecauseYouDon’tUnderstandItDoesn’tMeanYouShouldDoIt

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Most of the time, when people drop hashtags all over their posts and tweets, like rabbits pooping in a garden, they are really saying:

“I don’t really know how social media works, but it seems to be a big deal, so I’m going to drop a “#” in front of random words.  #IGetSocialMedia #Really #Hashtag”

Sometimes it means,

“I really don’t get this so I decided to hire someone to do it for me (its, just that they don’t understand it either, but I don’t know that.”

The proliferation of hashtags in legal marketing, without a clear understanding of how they work, has led to the subsequent proliferation of hashtag marketing consultants. This practice, is reminiscent of the SEO “gurus” of 5 years ago, whose primary role was to “tag” content so “The Google can understand what it is about”.  This practice, of course led to WordPress sites with a  massive proliferation of duplicated garbage tag pages – lawyer, attorney, law firm, car accident, car crash, car wreck.  You get the idea.  We’ve spent thousands of our clients’ dollars unravelling these garbage pages, but I digress….

#BackToHashtags

Why?

Why are we so enamored with hashtags? We hear about them all the time. I’m going to go to Wikipedia for the definitional reason:

A hashtag is a type of label or metadata tag used on social network and microblogging services which makes it easier for users to find messages with a specific theme or content.

“Makes it easier to for users to find message with a specific theme or content.”  Remember that.  It means that either a)people are looking for your specific hashtag or b)its part of widespread trend.  So just because you’ve heard about hashtags for #savethewhales or the #superbowl or maybe an #smx conference or a loved brand like #patagonia, doesn’t mean people are looking for #caraccidentattorney with hashtags.  And, in the off chance, people are going to click on your #lawyer hashtag – all they are going to see is a bunch of…. other lawyers who want their business as much you do. Great idea marketers.

In all the examples below, I’m pulling tweets from a twitter search for “car accident lawyer” – and let’s not get further distracted talking about the idiocy of that tactic…. i.e. people don’t start their search for highly personal, highly private issues like an accident lawyer, divorce lawyer, dui lawyer, domestic violence lawyer etc on twitter, but I digress again.

There are a variety of garbage hashtag mistakes:

The Useless Single Word

This is done #simply #by #inserting #a #hashtag #in #front #of #words #the #writer #thinks #are important.

idiocy

#lawsuits #lawyer #litigation?  It does read like those old “tagging” strategies for website content doesn’t it?  The presumption here of course, is that someone is doing a hashtag search for #lawyer…. or there’s some degree of virality to this content.  Right…. anyone else think, all of a sudden, #Litigation, is going to start trending?

The Useless Concatenated Words

The next variant is smushed together words.  Think #BlackLivesMatter – that has a big following and is regularly searched.  But….. probably not #caraccident or #personalinjury.   Sorry #Pribanic&Pribanic.

overloaded-idiocy

And in my example above, note that if someone is looking for #pittsburgh (which isn’t out of the realm of possibility), its probably NOT because they just got rear ended by a Lexus on Main Street, Pittsburgh.

The Epically Bizarre Phrase

If two words are good, what not more?  #doineedalawyerafteracaraccident  This looks like my cat walked across my keyboard.  What possible marketing/social media/google juice/twitterverse explanation can you possibly have for this?

hattag-words

Interestingly “Legal Monthly” describes itself as “The official Tweets of the San Diego Legal Times Monthly”  Except, of course, there is no such thing as the San Diego Legal Times.  And their feed is nothing more than thousands of tweets with #hashtaggarbage from law firms and law firm newsletters across the country.  Now I could be wrong here, but someone is presumably paying for this “social media marketing consulting”.  Like the Porter Law Firm in the example above.

Hashtags and SEO

But Conrad, I was told this will help my Google rankings!

I’ll keep this simple:  The number of Twitter followers or Facebook friends or Pinterest Pins or Meerkat Meerkats are NOT an SEO ranking factor. Same holds for #hashtags. Or #hash #tags. Social media marketing gurus who suggest otherwise understand neither (or they are deliberately bilking you).

Think critically about why you spend money on marketing consultants.  What are they doing?  How does it work? Does it pass the sniff test? And just because you don’t understand it, doesn’t mean that you need to spend money on it – otherwise your marketing dollars are a cost, not an investment.

#StopBlowingYourKidsCollegeFundOnStuffYouDon’tUnderstand

SEO Ranking Upheaval

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While there’s no official word yet – SEO nerds around the world are chattering about two large algo updates happening right now.  And I’ve fielded no fewer than three chats/emails/phone calls  from lawyers wondering whats going on.  So what’s going on?

The two different algo updates are impacting both natural and local search (and these two are driven by mostly independent factors.)  In the organic search world There’s speculation if this is a Penguin update, or the core algo update – and again, no word from Google confirming anything.  On the local side – and this is a bigger deal for lawyers – the overriding sentiment is this is a move to combat what has become a heavily spam laden channel.  You’ll remember we reported on the adult webcam site showing up in local for “Seattle DUI Lawyer” not that long ago.  And anecdotally, from the inquiries I’ve received, the changes to the local results have negatively impacted spammed locations.

KelimeInterestingly, at Mockingbird, we’ve been watching an (almost) across the board, significant increase in traffic for our clients over the past month. Among our larger clients – this has been an average 22% increase in just the past 4 weeks.  While this might be a seasonality issue (i.e. people getting back to serious business at the end of the summer) – it does make it hard for us to monitor these changes – but we’ll see what the results look like at the end of this week.

 

 

 

 

Google Review Penalty in the Works?

Written by

Mike Blumenthal
Mike Blumenthal

Last week, we posted about the upcoming SEO penalty for obnoxious chat interstitials – this week, its a change in Google’s guidelines around local reviews.  In this particular case, we are talking about law firm websites that feature reviews of the firm.  The story, broken by Local SEO expert Mike Blumenthal, doesn’t specify how Google will either identify abuses or what they will do in response. But, we know exactly how they’ve treated content that falls outside guidelines in the past.

But first…. the updates are pretty significant in legal.  In the bullets below, I’ve bolded those that should have a particularly large impact on the legal industry:

  1. Snippets must not be written or provided by the business or content provider unless they are genuine, independent, and unpaid editorial reviews.
  2. Reviews must allow for customers to express both positive and negative sentiments. They may not be vetted by the business or restricted by the content provider based on the positive/negative sentiment of the review before submission to Google.
  3. Reviews cannot be template sentences built from data or automated metrics. For example, the following is not acceptable: “Based on X number of responses, on average people experienced X with this business.”
  4. Reviews for multiple-location businesses such as retail chains or franchises can only be submitted for the specific business location for which they were written. In other words, reviews for multiple-location businesses cannot be syndicated or applied to all business locations of the same company.
  5. Aggregators or content providers must have no commercial agreements paid or otherwise with businesses to provide reviews.
  6. Do not include reviews that are duplicate or similar reviews across many businesses or from different sources.
  7. Only include reviews that have been directly produced by your site, not reviews from third-party sites or syndicated reviews.

Point 2: No Vetting

I’ve been dealing with law firm reviews since back in 2007 – and the one thing lawyers have feared (and Bar Associations across the country have struggled with) is the lack of control over reviews.  This is an obvious issue on third party sites like Yelp (in fact early Avvo days – some state bars proscribed Avvo’s client reviews even though the attorneys had zero control over them.)  But now – imagine lawyers NOT having control over the reviews on their own websites.  I suspect this might be a bit too hard to swallow for many; although, the brave forward leaning ones will benefit from the stars that show up in the SERPS.

Point 7: No third Party Reviews

This is a smaller issue; although it is very pervasive, as it pertains to lawyers copy and pasting their glowing Yelp, Google or other reviews from third parties onto their own websites. In fact, some third parties have enable this through plug-ins which automatically push (sometimes vetted) reviews to a law firm website.

In Conclusion

As Gyi Tsakalakis says: you can’t SEO your way out of bad service.  So – my take – this is an opportunity for lawyers who deliver fantastic customer service to shine, as many firms will shy away from posting reviews to their own site.  Counterpoint: this just incentives review spam at a much higher rate (already a major concern especially in legal).