Google SEO Penalty for Chat Pop-ups Coming?

Ichat penalty‘ve long ranted against many of the implementations of chat conversions – especially on mobile devices – in which the chat is so aggressive that it covers up content, as well as all other forms of conversion – phone numbers and form fills.  In most cases, chat implementations are configured to maximize revenue for the chat provider, NOT the law firm.  Some providers have gone so far to refuse to allow customization of how aggressively their chat is implemented.  This is further exacerbated by most vendors positioning their service as a marketing channel instead of what it truly is – a conversion channel.  (i.e. just because someone ultimately converted through chat – the marketing cost for that user should still be attributed to SEO, Adwords, Avvo etc.)

This is even worse on mobile implementations – with both limited screen size and a (very) high converting device (a phone) being overruled by the obnoxious chat box.

Don’t get me wrong, chat works – just pick your vendor very very carefully.

But that may all change on January 10th.  Google has announced a penalty on sites implementing intrusive interstitials (those annoying pop up chat boxes would fall into this category). While chat isn’t specifically called out, the announcement does describe the concerns; including interstitials that cover the main content as they “provide a poorer experience to users than other pages where content is immediately accessible”.  Google very specifically calls this out as a SEO penalty for mobile – those types of pages “may not rank as highly”.

While Google has said “responsible interstitials” may remain – based on their description, I read the tealeaves as meaning chat pop ups that very quickly and aggressive cover content and all other forms of conversion most likely will incur an SEO penalty for mobile based searches.

SEO Traffic Generates 1 call per 30 visitors

This is a review of a Benchmarking study I conducted for the American Bar Association quantifies the question:

How much business does SEO generate?

This has been an oft disputed theory – although frankly I’ve never understood the dispute – but there are certainly factions within the legal online marketspace who argue vociferously that SEO traffic should not be a law firm’s objective. And we’ve certainly seen many examples of low quality traffic; however, my personal thoughts echo SEO audit superstar, Alan Bleiwiess who commented on this issue:

Wait. Who says traffic from search doesn’t lead to sales? I need to meet such people. If for no other reason, than to laugh. Uncontrollably. In their faces.

So instead of letting theories clash (and to see if Alan is right)… I thought I’d actually look into the data.  Turns out, SEO traffic generates inbound phone calls at a pretty consistent and strong rate.  Utilizing call tracking software and and only counting first time callers we found:

SEO generates 3.35 calls  for every 100 visitors.

SEO and Phone Calls
Personal Injury firms highlighted in red. All others in blue.

Granted its a small sample size – and these are mostly long standing clients of mine – so they are well taken care of from an online marketing perspective (yes, I’m biased). For the most part, we’ve pruned out garbage content; focused traffic on local traffic instead of global traffic and heavily invested in high converting terms from a content perspective.  You will note, from the graph above, there still is a wide array of success here – from about 1 call/100 session to 6 calls/100 sessions. (And yes – we are digging deep into each of these firms to understand what those differences are – but that’s a study I’m keeping just for my own clients.)  We also found, those firms in the study who were PI firms – that average rose to 4.5.  And if you really want to nerd out and go back to your graduate stats course – the correlation coefficient between the two was .70.

Now of course, not all of these inbound inquiries are prospective clients – it may very well be someone’s spouse looking up his wife’s number to coordinate picking up the kids from soccer – or more frequently a PPC salesperson prospecting for clients.  BUT…. overall there is a clear and solid line between search traffic and prospects.

You can read more on the study in the ABA Journal or see the stats behind the study here.

 

 

Latest Fallacy: Technical SEO is Dead

Update: Excuse the language that follows, but when alleged experts post dangerously inaccurate recommendations with consequences that can decimate a small business, it gets my hackles up.

Over the past week there have been two moronic posts circulated about the uselessness of technical SEO.  The first, by Clayburn Griffin, was surprisingly on Search Engine Land:  The role technical SEO should play: It’s makeup.  The article was dumb, misleading, misinformed and spectacularly sexist – essentially positing that the only reason agencies engage in technical best practices was to doll themselves up for a date with an apparently stupid prospective client, who will be easily wooed by complex technical jargon.

Being attractive is a nice advantage. People are more inclined to like you if you’re attractive. And makeup can make anyone look better. It can touch up blemishes and smooth out your skin. It can outline your eyes and make them stand out.

What’s an agency to do?  Most of the time, it seems like they turn to more and more technical SEO. Agencies are always on the lookout for great technical SEOs. More makeup to slather on their clients’ websites.

The article was widely pilloried across the nerd community – including a counterpost on SEL.

And yesterday, not to be outdone (and perhaps inexplicably desperate for the negative notoriety generated by Griffin), Jayson Demers posted this drivel at Entrepreneur: Why Modern SEO Requires Almost No Technical Expertise.  Included within this fetid pile of garbage:

Ignore all the technical terms, all the details of execution and all your preconceived notions for a moment and focus on this: the happier your users are when they visit your site, the higher you’re going to rank.

Modern SEO really is that simple.

So – a picture being worth a thousand words – let me demonstrate visually what happens when you totally fuck up the technology. Let’s see just how simple modern SEO is when you ignore the technology. =What follows are the results on two sites we have been called in to fix after they went through a website redesign that ignored technical fundamentals. We call this Janitorial SEO – the cleaning up of others’ messes.  And 90% of the time, those messes are created unintentionally by people who just don’t know better (sometimes called designers).  What’s more galling is idiots like Demers and Griffin (who should know better) espousing willfully and deliberately overlooking technical fundamentals.

But are they really wrong?  Do these two know something we don’t and is the future of SEO one devoid of technical hurdles? In both of the cases below, you are seeing the result of poorly implemented website redesigns that utterly scrambled the technical platform.  I haven’t seen anything more dramatic than the disaster that occurred when a law firm launched their “new and improved” website that ignored pretty basic SEO foundations. And lets not even consider the business ramifications of losing essentially 80% of their traffic overnight.

AG

The second tanking (below) is less dramatic and frankly more typical – a roughly 30% loss in organic traffic after a website redesign onto a new platform with a completely blind eye towards basic SEO technology.  In both cases, the financial implications to the firm were severe.

AG2

Still think technical SEO doesn’t matter?  Fortunately there are plenty of SEO “consultants” out there, eager to take your money and make your SEO traffic slide into the abyss.

Why Ranking #1 Doesn’t Matter

Ok, let’s start with the obvious. Rankings definitely matter. If rankings didn’t matter, I wouldn’t have a job. What may be less obvious, is that ranking #1 doesn’t matter. At least, it doesn’t matter nearly as much as it used to.

In the world of digital marketing, ranking number 1 should never be your ultimate goal. Your business can be seriously mislead by tracking and focusing on rankings. Take a step back for a second and look at the bigger picture. Not only are there better business metrics, but search engine result pages (SERP) look a lot different than they used to.

Here are 4 major reasons why ranking #1 doesn’t matter:

1) Organic Results are Buried Under Paid Search and Map Listings

Even if you optimize well enough to rank #1 organically, you may be pushed half way down the SERP. Google recently added a 4th paid search result to the top of the page, taking up highly valuable real estate. Next, the map pack shows local firms in the immediate area. Finally, after all that, you get to organic position #1. In this example, the user would have to ignore a total of 14 links before getting to Avvo, a legal directory. Notice, after all these links, we still don’t see a law firm in the true organic section of Google. Make sure you don’t get caught focusing on this very low #1 position. There are other areas of the SERP that can help  you generate leads.

ranking - paid and map

2) User Location Changes Everything!

Search results change dramatically based on a user’s physical location. This is one of the largest hurdles to tracking rankings effectively – your law firm could rank #1 and #7 simultaneously for the same search phrase. Take for example, a user who searches for “DUI Defense Attorney” while in downtown Seattle. If they move just a mile north, that same user (with the same search phrase) is presented an entirely different set of results! No single firm truly “ranks #1” for this search phrase. Don’t waste your time trying to track this.

ranking - map 2
ranking - map 1

3) Legal Answers in the Knowledge Box.

Who is winning for the search phrase “how much does a divorce cost?” Is it HuffingtonPost sitting at organic position #1? Nope. The real winner here is LegalZoom, technically ranking #6. Google has recognized the information on their site provides the best answer to this question and rewarded them with a spot in the Answer Box. This is a very difficult thing to do, but a great way to stand out.

ranking - answer box

4) The Major Presence of the Knowledge Graph

Theory states that the top few organic positions get a majority of the clicks. However, it is easy to see that the Knowledge Graph draws a lot of eyes (and clicks) away from that number 1 position, removing a ton of value. For the search phrase “Lawyer Marketing Company in Seattle,” Mockingbird is obviously the best choice at #6, but Lawyer Marketing is also doing well at #1. FindLaw isn’t even on the first page organically, but their Knowledge Graph gives them a great presence for this search query.

Make sure your law firm has an optimized Google My Business page to try and take advantage of this space.

ranking - knowledge graph

Final Thoughts: Track What Matters to your Business’ Success

Ranking # 1 isn’t what it used to be. Not only do law firms have to fight for organic position, they have to fight an evolving SERP page with more and more features that pull clicks away from organic results. The best way to battle these additional features is to play the game. Add valuable content to your site that answer your clients most asked questions. Clean up your NAP (name-address-phone number) so Google knows who/where you are. Get reviews so your firm stands on in the Map Pack. Run a variety of paid search campaigns to catch valuable traffic and leads.

Most importantly, don’t worry about rankings. Focus on business metrics that provide valuable insights into overall site health. Use traffic, leads, and costs to evaluate your marketing performance. Rankings are worthless unless they drive traffic. Measure what matters.

Why Great Design and UX is HUGELY IMPORTANT for Law Firm Websites

Search Engine Optimization with a “VP of Marketing” mindset continues to be Mockingbird’s business focus. We focus on generating high returns for our client’s marketing investments. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) encompasses a broad set of tactics that bring more visitors to our client’s websites. Mockingbird often supplements our SEO engagements with measured Pay-Per-Click and Display advertising campaigns. Our strategies widen the top of our client’s marketing funnel. But, what about the website visitors? How can we increase the likelihood that they start a contact through the website they’re visiting? The real people using a website can be forgotten with the focus on analytics, traffic numbers, and number of leads generated.

Enter Design and UX (User Experience).

Design and User Experience

Design has historically been a constant factor in marketing and business strategy. Your branded website needs to convey your firms personality and garner trust. People connect with good design – they know it when they see it. There is no scientifically proven “best” design, color, or font, but your web design should communicate your brand and connect with your potential clients.

User Experience (UX) might be an overly broad term… It combines many different skills and professions into a job that ensures people are having the best possible experience with a technology product. This can start at the top of the funnel with the copy of your PPC ad, all the way to the experience they have on the phone with your front desk. Every interaction with your law firm matters, whether it’s on a Google results page, on your website, or on the phone.

UX is becoming more important with every passing year and each technological advancement, so there’s a reason UX Designer is the fastest growing design position at large companies. UX designers are becoming CEO’s and company founders at a great rate because of their broad understanding of data, users, design, and business. You might be asking… “Why are you telling me all this? UX might be important for big product companies, but not for me… I just want people to find my website and call me!” But, there are a lot of design and UX wins to be had for law firm websites that can grow your business.

User Experience Improvements Increase Conversion Rates

If you could double the amount of calls you get from your website by testing and improving user experience – would you? Of course! If your website is missing some of these easy wins, making these changes could significantly improve your conversion rates. Many of these items overlap with design, UI, SEO, content, etc… But together they make up the entire User Experience.

Easy Wins

See below for easy UX wins, or as Conrad would say – “low hanging fruit”.

Links

Do: Internal Linking. Don’t: Broken links, 404’s, broken images

Your website shouldn’t have any broken links! Images and/or broken page links will drive away visitors and potential clients. Internal linking or links to other pages from within your text content can improve conversions. A strong main navigation is important and a web design staple, but people navigate websites differently. Navigating to different pages should be effortless for your users – so provide them with more ways to do it!

Contact Information

Do: Easy to find, complete contact info. Don’t: Force one contact method or provide incomplete contact info.

Make sure your phone number is easy to find in your header! If they can’t find your contact information, how are they going to call you? Your site should include complete business contact information on your contact page to increase trust. Show that you have a real location, people, phone, fax, etc… Use simple calls to action, these will make visitors use your contact info.`

Contact Forms

Do: Use contact forms. Don’t: Require too many fields and overbearing security measures.

A strong contact form will generate a lot of leads. Your forms should have as few fields as possible, and as few required fields as possible. I suggest Name and Email as the only required fields. I would recommend against Captcha security fields – this can stop visitors from using your form. Try other security/anti-spam measures instead, and include a security message/disclaimer below your submit button.

Client and Peer Reviews

Do: Display reviews of your services, professionalism, and what sets you apart. Don’t: Create fake reviews or use reviews without permission.

Using select reviews from your clients and peers increases the trust level on your site. Real photos can take these to the next level. Visitors to your website will be more likely to contact you if they trust that your glowing reviews are real and personal.

Live Chat

Do: Use a subtle live chat. Don’t: Aggressively pursue chat leads with screen blocking popups, too much motion, and repeated offers.

Live chat can be extremely successful when used correctly, especially for certain practice areas. Everyone communicates differently; certain visitors will prefer a live chat option over any other contact method. However, don’t overwhelm and scare away your other visitors with overzealous chat options.

Original Photos

Do: Use professional, original photography. Don’t: Overuse stock photography or your iPhone office photos.

Professional photos go a long long way. A professional photographer will be capture your personality and law firm values. These images will communicate with your visitors on a personal level before they ever speak with you. Photos can make you look strong, powerful, friendly, professional, etc… Visitors are more likely to pick up the phone after feeling/seeing these emotions. Just reading your tagline isn’t quite the same.

Content

Do: Write your own content. Don’t: Fill your website with daily “legal” blog posts and news rewrites, or hire a content writer without them ever speaking with you.

Legal is different. It’s hard for content writers without law degrees to write law firm website content.  Most law firm websites use cookie cutter, outsourced content. Bloggers are hired to vomit news rewrites weekly. Marketers can add calls to action and some marketing spins, but you are your best content writer. If you can write 10-30 fantastic pages about your services, experience, personality, and answer clients frequently asked questions – you’re a cut above the rest. You know your clients better than anyone. What is helpful to them? What questions do they ask you first? What do they need to know before they contact a lawyer? How much do your services cost? You can answer all of these questions on your website better than anyone else.

Other UX Factors

I’ve already covered the easy UX wins that you or your marketing team can easily take care of. But, that was only the beginning!

Load Times

Google has claimed that site speed and loading times are a search ranking factor. Having a fast website isn’t easy or simple. Big box website providers and templates are inevitably going to load more web resources than your site needs. There are some easy tactics that can move the needle, but getting the high speed scores requires a large budget and talented web developer. I would suggest testing your website’s speed, your score isn’t going to look impressive, but the tests will hint at areas for improvement. Try some speed improvement suggestions below:

  • Resize images and save for web with compression. Try Photoshop, Light Room, or WP Smush Plugin.
  • Minimize HTTP requests, move away from templates and big box providers.
  • Use a fast, managed WordPress host like WP Engine (this will take improve caching, compression, and security issues to name a few).

Responsive, Mobile Optimized Design

Many people searching for services are going to make their first encounter with your website on a mobile device. Your mobile website should easily communicate your value and allow easy navigation. Try a click-to-call prompt and measure the results!

Professional, Consistent Web Design

Your web design should provide a consistent professional feeling to potential clients. If your office provides a professional and friendly environment, front desk, and legal services – your website has to do the same.

UX – The Never Ending Process

Web technologies continue to evolve at an alarming rate. There will be new tools and methods a month from now. If you stay away from the bleeding edge and use data and testing to improve your website experience, you’re going to see conversion rates improve. UX is one of the best investments you can make in your business – from the search discovery experience, all the way to their first meeting with you, the attorney.

Dumping hundreds of thousands of dollars into advertising to double your leads is insanely expensive. You might double your conversion rate, with the same old traffic, by spending fifteen thousand dollars on: a new website, UX testing/improvements, and a front desk audit. Choosing UX over advertising can mean a much better return on investment. However, make sure you watch out for vendors peddling UX Myths!

Where are the statistics?

Legal is a tricky industry. There are such differences between practice areas and geographic locations. I had a hard time directly correlating numbers from B2C and B2B studies to the legal industry as a whole. Work with your agency and their reporting data to find your “low hanging fruit” and areas with room for improvement. Below are the various studies that I have read and used as references for this blog post. Reading List:

There’s a ton of data in there all pointing to the same thing – UX is one of the best investments a business can make if they’re marketing on the web. 

To push the point home, here are some pretty graphs. Directly correlated or not, they still offer important insights. Sources – Adobe and Ko Marketing (listed above).

Graphs Graphs Graphs

Annoying Buyers Graph

Content Issues Graph

Content Sources Table

Design Value Graph

The End, Or Is It?

Investing in UX improvements can drastically improve your conversion rates. UX isn’t a cheap fix, or something that is ever finished. It’s not a one and done process. You should have the basics covered if you have a newly designed website, but there’s always room for improvement supported by research and data.

Talk to your agency, talk to your clients, test your product, make improvements, grow your business!

The .law TLD Sales Conspiracy

Lawyers – you’ve been duped into buying the new .lawyer, .attorney, and .law TLDs by a conspiracy of numerous “studies” all citing the same bogus example: Jacksonville.Attorney.  This newly launched domain, with the new .attorney TLD, was deliberately manipulated to suggest its success in SEO rankings was due to the new .attorney TLD.  This “case study” was  then shopped aggressively to the media and used as an erroneous example to sell more domains to unsuspecting attorneys.

I first became aware of the Jacksonville example when a lawyer forwarded me a glossy printed brochure from Rightside – a reseller of the new TLDs – touting the SEO benefits of the new TLDs. My client wanted to know if we should migrate his domain.rightsidew

This case study has been covered repeatedly by journalists regarding the efficacy of the TLDs as a magic bullet for search. Response magazine writes:

Due to the specificity of many TLDs, such as .lawyer, .mortgage, or .software, they often coincide with popular search terms and become valuable lead-generating tools while also boosting search engine rankings…

“Six months ago, it did not rank on any page at all for relevant searches,” Block said. “Without making any other design or content changes, we’re now starting to outrank our more established competition.

A Quick History

Recently, lawyers have been able to purchase new domains with .lawyer, attorney or .law replacing the traditional .com. (These are know as Top Level Domains – TLD). These new TLDs are available only to attorneys through a select number of resellers and are available at an extensive price premium from your typical domain.

Before we go any further, let’s be very clear that every experienced SEO should know where Google stands with regard to the SEO impact of these new  TLDs.   John Mueller has addressed this issue very specifically:

Keywords in a TLD do not give any advantage or disadvantage in search.
…understand there’s no magical SEO bonus…

So it is odd for so many case studies, by so many experienced experts, to be written with so many vociferous arguments pushing the SEO benefits of the new TLDs. All in direct contradiction with  fundamental search theory and Google’s crystal clear and specific remarks.

(My emphases in the quotes below)

Name.com.

Domain reseller, Name.com cites the Jacksonville example:

And while there is no definitive proof that it can give you a boost in SEO rankings, some websites that use New Domains are already beginning to rank on the first page of search results. Take, for example, jacksonville.attorney, which is the first non-paid result when you search for “jacksonville attorney”

FindLaw

Big Box legal player, FindLaw (one of the select few resellers of the new TLDs for attorneys) weighs in:

From both a consumer and an SEO perspective, a verified, restricted top-level domain provides a level of confidence that you know who you are dealing with online.

SEO for Lawyers

Luke Cicilliano (also a TLD reseller) at “SEO for Lawyers” penned an extensive, 6 post series outlining the virtues of the new .TLDs.  A few excerpts:

The new domain extensions are going to impact search in a big way.

Over the foreseeable future we see the use of the new TLD’s becoming a meaningful ranking factor in search.

Dot Law Inc

Yup – there’s a company set up whose entire business model is dedicated to selling vanity .law domains.

Search Engine Ranking – Since only lawyers can own .law domains, lawyers and law firms will be able to increase credibility in search results as compared to other top level domains.

RightSide

Rightside’s blog includes a deeper dive into the aforementioned Jacksonville example.  Excerpts:

At the same time, we’ve been more than happy to point to Jacksonville.Attorney—a site which has reached the top of Google’s search results—as a great success story for nTLDs….

The domain extension likely contributed to Jacksonville.Attorney’s high search ranking….

he made a move from EricBlockLaw.com, to his current Jacksonville.Attorney domain. Within months, Eric was seeing huge gains in traffic and search rankings.

But not all of the articles are directly from TLD resellers….

Search Engine Journal

A Search Engine Journal post touting the Jacksonville Attorney case study shows a screenshot of the site’s search traffic from Google Analytics before and after it launched. Pause and think about that for a second… you mean to say that the site has more traffic now that it did before it was launched?  This of course, is like comparing my 5 year-old’s height today to his height prior to conception.

SEJ 2

This article goes on to conclude:

We certainly have some proof that moving a site to a New gTLD domain or using a New gTLD domain for your brand new domain could help organic rankings, and it certainly won’t hurt rankings.

Which is a complete 180 about face from the author’s previous position regarding gTLDs.  From his blog post titled Will New Domain Name TLDs Carry Extra Weight in the Search Engine Rankings?…

So, with all of these new TLDs, will these new domain names carry any extra weight when it comes to search engine rankings? Absolutely Not.

You’ll also note in the GA graph above, the site is pulling in roughly 10 sessions a day.  Even assuming all of this is organic search traffic, its hardly a runaway SEO success by any measure and not fodder for an aureate case study.

American Bar Association

The ABA covered the new TLD’s touting their impact on search multiple times:

Search engine algorithms are notoriously byzantine, and the degree to which they weigh domain names, in balance with other factors, is clear only to the mathematicians writing the code. It is evident, though, that domain names are a factor.

Domain names alone don’t guarantee high ranking, but early data does suggest that new TLDs “are holding their own against, and in some cases outperforming, comparable addresses registered in legacy domains like .COM.”

Globerunner Case Study

Globerunner, an SEO agency out of Texas, was so enamored with the Jacksonville example, that they developed a slickly produced, 15 page case study that leads to the same carefully measured, data-driven conclusion:

Our research has led us to the conclusion that the uptick in organic search traffic on the firm’s rebranded website (www.jacksonville. attorney) was driven, at least in part, by Eric’s firm choosing to use a new, .ATTORNEY, domain name…  we believe that new gTLDs do offer multiple traffic generation benefits, especially because of the availability of exact match keyword domain names like Jacksonville.Attorney.

The Globerunner report does actually go deeper than all of the other “studies” and looks at the backlink profile for the new domain (which, would be my first obvious step in assessing success.)  It looks like the backlink snapshot was taken roughly just 6 weeks after the site went live and, it certainly doesn’t reflect the current reality of the site.  See the two different screenshots from Majestic below which show a more than threefold increase in the number of links.

So in this carefully researched case study – the obvious explanation for the site’s success (a bulletproof backlink profile) utilizes data that is, at best, grossly incomplete.

Globerunner’s Case Study Majestic Snapshot

Globerunner snapshot

Current Majestic Snapshot (taken 5/22/16)

Majestic

The backlink analysis brings up an entirely different question – how on earth does a solo practitioner’s brand new website generate over 200 backlinks across 70 domains in a scant six month period? I’ve been doing SEO for law for over a decade – the only way to develop this kind of backlink profile this fast is through an extremely aggressive campaign by experienced, SEO experts with deep contacts.

More pointedly –  why didn’t any of the ostensibly objective studies bother to take the 5 minutes it took me to review the backlink profile?  Didn’t anyone else notice or was this obvious point deliberately overlooked?

linkbuilding

 

The Legacy Site – Content, Platform and Design

Remember that comment about the site not being redesigned and no new content?  I started to wonder if this was true, so I reviewed the legacy site (ericblocklaw.com) on archive.org to see what it looked like prior to the migration to the .attorney domain. From a content perspective, is this a true apples to apples comparison?

Not only was the site completely redesigned and the platform updated, but the content was completely overhauled as well. The legacy site had a scant 14 pages and the new one…. 141. The legacy on-page was atrocious – not a single H1 and site-wide verbatim, generic title tags and meta descriptions.  Here’s the before and after for Personal Injury pages. Hmmmm… wonder why the early site wasn’t ranking for “personal injury lawyer”?

Content Comparison

 

 

 

 

 

Delving further into the content showed that many of the practice area pages were verbatim duplicated across 10-20 other law firm sites. Further, ericblocklaw.com was a carbon copy of itself on a domain that is still live today: http://thetriallawyer.org/. So we have a case of thin, copied, duplicated duplicate content.  Anyone still wondering why it didn’t rank?

block

A Wider Study

Making assertions that fly in the face of SEO theory with a single datapoint is dangerous at best…. and I would be similarly remiss in rejecting the premise of the top TLDs impacting SEO on that single example as well. So I enlisted the help of Dan Weeks to look at thousands of personal injury related queries across twenty large cities in the US and looked for instances of the new TLDs on page 1 results.  Just one .lawyer TLD.  No .law’s.  No .attorney’s. And that one domain was a redirect of a previously strong domain.

My OpinionGoogle Juice

Lawyers have been duped into buying things for their alleged magical SEO benefits for years. Press releases, social media consultants and virtual offices have all been sold to unsuspecting lawyers with the tease of a little Google Juice. This is just another example of lawyers being duped into ponying up money with empty promises of SEO success. Its a sophisticated, slickly produced, marketing and PR campaign supported by widespread “case studies” of a single erroneous example. And those case studies ignored the most foundational components of website success: content, platform and backlinks, in their analysis.

Jacksonville.attorney’s real success is due to a Pygmalian make-over of one of legal’s most sickly, pathetic sites with a comprehensive redesign, an upgraded infrastructure, a massive expansion of high quality content and a wickedly aggressive linkbuilding campaign.

But if you’d like some of that Google Juice, we have some available for purchase in our Legal SEO Store.

Evaluating Best Biz Local Lawyers (A case study in backlink analysis)

Estimated read time: 5 minutes

If the average person supposedly sees ~5,000 advertising messages a day, I’m positive lawyers see 20,000. There is always a new legal directory that “drives more clients than any other legal directory” or SEO’s promising #1 ranking for the search term, “attorney” in your respective geographical market.

What follows is the backlink analysis methodology we employ to evaluate the benefit (or harm) resulting from listing our clients on a specific directory.  It’s pretty simple and uses free tools…. so you can emulate our approach the next time tomorrow when you get hit with an email from a new legal directory.

The Value of Legal Directories

High end legal directories are great sources of prospective clients, citations (a critical factor in local SEO) and occasionally links (a critical factor in local and organic SEO).  Avvo, Justia, HG and (ahem) even FindLaw are the most obvious; but there are plenty of smaller effective ones as well.  We happen to like the guys over at LawDeeDa and practice area specific sites like DUI.com.

But not all directories are created equal – and a backlink profile relying heavily on low end, low quality, spammy directories is Penguin Penalty fodder.  But how do you separate the directory wheat from the chaff pending Google penalty.

But there are so many directories, it’s overwhelming. I know it’s overwhelming because my clients are constantly consulting me on whether this opportunity is legitimate or not. Here’s one of the more recent legal directories to hit my inbox for review:

Best Biz Local Lawyers

I’ll now walk you through my evaluation of Best Biz Local as a potential citation/link opportunity. You can follow these steps in the future when promising directories and link opportunities come across your inbox.

Step 1: How do I get listed? Ooh ooh I see a “Submit Link” tab in the main navigation. That looks promising, let’s go there… And any interest I had in this directory is gone. In order to submit a link you have to link back to bestbizlocal.com or you’ll “be declined automatically.”

Best Biz Local Link Exchange
Source: http://www.marketing.bestbizlocal.com/submit-link/

They only want me for my links? Ouch. Luckily I don’t want theirs either. This sort of “excessive link exchange” is frowned up by Google and could land your website in some hot water for participating. Number 5 on the Mockingbird 10 Commandments tells us to be white hat to a fault. We don’t want to engage in anything that could harm our clients long-term, even if does give them a short-term boost. For the sake of a learning experience, let’s pretend I didn’t see that red-flag and continue on with my normal evaluation process. On to step 2…

Step 2: Is this site authoritative in the eyes of the search engines? Google uses a site’s authority as a trust signal, for example if you get a link from the New York Times, your site must have something good to offer. The go-to tool to determine a website’s domain authority is Moz’s Open Site Explorer. While far from perfect, it scores a site based on a domains backlink profile. Let’s check out the results…

Moz Open Site Explorer For Best Biz Local

20/100 actually isn’t as bad; a 20 is on par with what we see for the average law firm website. It’s low for a directory, but not terrible. This would not turn me away from using this directory. Again, this is assuming I didn’t see their link scheme right off the bat.

Step 3: Does Google trust this site? If this website asked to borrow your phone on the street would you let them, or would you pull the “sorry it’s dead…” card?  The go-to tool to determine a website’s trust flow is called Majestic. You can use Majestic’s Site Explorer feature with no SEO expertise. If you are have a link or are considering obtaining a link from a website like Best Biz Local, you want the trust flow number to be as far from 0 as possible.

Best Biz Local Majestic Score

Bestbizlocal.com’s score is 3. For reference, the average we generally see on law firm websites is in the teens. A major directory with such a low score is very concerning to me. If you look more closely at the picture you’ll see why the trust flow is so low — this site has nearly 150,000 external backlinks from only 6 referring domains. Those 6 sites are linking to bestbizlocal.com A LOT. There is no way to “naturally” link to another site thousands of times like that, so that was red flag number 2 for me.  And its safe to assume that a)this site doesn’t get any natural traffic and b)given their own spammy backlink profile, any links or citations on the site are, at best not going to help.  Sites relying heavily on these types of directories are heavily at risk of a Penguin penalty.

Now, this is not the perfect evaluation method for a potential directory/link opportunity. Sometimes you know right off the bat the linkexchangeforfree.com (disclaimer: made up website) is not a good website to obtain links from. Smaller directories, especially local directories, rarely have a plethora of links themselves, but (done well) they also won’t have either the reciprocal link requirement or a litany of links from a tiny subset of domains.

Summary

If you are presented with a new legal directory, or any sort of link opportunity, first take a deep breath and then take 10 minutes to follow these 3 steps to evaluate if it’s worth it or going to hurt you.

  1. Check out the process for a listing submission. Are you required to link back to their site? Are you required to pay a monthly fee for the link? If you see anything that directly violates these guidelines, take heed.
  2. Determine the website’s domain authority with Moz’s Open Site Explorer. Higher is better, but low is not always bad.
  3. Find out the trust flow score with Majestic. Be careful with anything under a 5/100. If Majestic doesn’t trust the site, you probably shouldn’t either.

If you are curious about any particular legal directory you’ve seen lately, or would like my help evaluating a site before you submit a listing, shoot me an email (dustin at mockingbirdmarketing dot com) and we can chat!

Displaying Reviews with Schema

If you are following the proper guidelines for managing your web presence – providing excellent customer service, killing it in the courtroom, and asking clients for reviews – you should be able to build up a small wealth of reviews across the major portals. These reviews help build trust in prospective clients who visit your profiles on Avvo / Facebook / Yelp, and trust leads to conversions, which means the phone rings.

But that’s not where the uses of reviews end. Another benefit to multiple reviews is that you can mark them up, essentially putting little signs & labels around the content so that Google and other search engines can add rich snippets to their search results. Here’s an example:

Four and a half stars? Sounds like a good place to eat.
Four and a half stars? Looks like a good place to eat. Maybe I’ll check it out.

Rich snippets give a tremendous boost to click-through rates (the percentage of people who click a clink when it shows up in their search results). If you’re interested in some examples, an article of Search Engine Land compiled compiled several cases of rich snippets at work. A tactic we currently use at Mockingbird involves consolidating many reviews together and marking them up on our website in order to let visitors (and search engines!) know what the opinions of our work are. These reviews are marked up according to the instructions on Schema.org and Google’s review rich snippet guidelines. By following the instructions on those sites, you can turn a review or testimonial page into a signal that Google can use.

How to Mark Up Your Reviews

Hopefully by now I have convinced you to start gathering reviews and marking them up with Schema. Actually following through on this process can be a time-consuming exercise of copy and paste, but we have a tool that should be able to help. Check out our review markup generator to get started.

An exceedingly high-quality image of the review markup generator.
A beautiful screenshot of the review markup generator.

The review markup generator has several blank fields that you fill out with information from reviews. Technically, the only required field is an author name, but posting a long list of author names with no other information would be useless for website users and search engines alike.

Most of what you need to fill out is straight-forward:

  • Add the title of the review to “Review Title” (or leave it blank for no title)
  • Add the author’s name to “Review Author”
  • Choose whether or not to include a rating. Specify the maximum and minimum possible ratings (usually 5 and 1), and then what the author rated your service.
  • Add the date of the review to “Date Published” (or leave it blank for no date)
  • Add the body of the review to “Review Body” (or leave it blank for no body)
  • Add the URL that you got the review from to “Review Source”. You can leave this blank, but a URL source is the best way to prove your reviews are legitimate.
  • Add the review website (i.e. Facebook, Avvo) that you got the review from to “Publisher” (or leave it blank for no publisher).

The “Hide?” option allows you to choose whether or not that information shows up in a review. If you choose to hide your review source, for example, users will not be able to see the URL that a review came from. Google and other search engines still could. This can help keep your reviews informative for search engines even if you want to cut out some information to make the review aesthetically pleasing. Be wary of doing this with too much information, because hiding text or links can be seen as a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

After you finish filling out the review markup generator, click “Create Schema!” and a block of code will show up below, containing the complete Schema markup for your review. Copy and paste this to another page, rinse (Reset Fields), and repeat. When you are happy with the quantity & spread of your reviews, copy the second code block from the bottom of the page over to your website, and fill in the information about your law firm & reviews. Check your results using Google’s Structured Data testing tool.

If you have any questions, thoughts, or concerns about the markup process, let us know in the comments!

Top 5 Most Important Sections in Google Search Console

Previously known as Google Webmaster Tools, Google Search Console is a free tool that helps you monitor and maintain your site’s organic presence in Google search results. It is Google’s primary method of communication with webmasters, and is how you would be informed of serious site issues, such as manual penalties and potential hacks. The top 5 most important areas to pay attention to are as follows:

5. Crawl Errors

crawl-errors-google-search-consoleCrawl Errors give you valuable information on what is happening when Googlebot attempts to crawl your website. Errors show up when Googlebot attempted to crawl and was unsuccessful for one reason or another. For each error type, you can hover over the question mark to get more information.

Generally, crawl errors shouldn’t be too alarming – Google has said they are a natural part of the web ecosystem. However, if you’re seeing an increasing number of errors or an overall large number, it could mean users are having a poor experience when using your site. You can resolve crawl errors by manually correcting an incorrect link, or setting up 301 redirects.

4. Sitemaps

sitemaps-google-search-console

A site map is, quite literally, a map of your site that you can use to tell Google about the organization of your site’s content. Using this tool you can see all of the sitemaps that have been submitted for your site, the date they were processed, and any issues that have come up with them.

In a perfect world, the blue bar showing the number of pages you’ve submitted via sitemap would exactly match the red bar, showing the number of pages Google has indexed. This doesn’t need to be perfect, but if there’s a big disparity, it’s something worth checking out. It could mean your sitemap lists old/broken URLs, or Google is not indexing all of your pages.

3. Index Status

index-status-google-search-console

Similar to the sitemap tool, this section shows how many pages on your website Google has indexed (recognized). This tool can be very useful for identifying trends over time. Namely, if there’s a sudden drop in the number of pages Google has indexed for your site, there’s probably a problem.

2. Manual Actions

manual-actions-google-search-console

In this section, Google will notify you if you’re received a manual penalty. Here, no news is good news. However, if you do receive a manual penalty, it’s crucial you find out as soon as possible.

1. Security Issues

security-issues-google-search-console

Finally, in the security issues section Google will let you know if your site has been suspected to have hacking or phishing issues. Again, no news is good news. If you were to have a hacking issue, you can also find troubleshooting resources here.