6 Content Marketing Tactics for Lawyers that Actually Work

Posted on October 26, 2015 at 3:57 pm.

You may have heard that content is an essential element to driving traffic to your site. The problem is that most content out there just doesn’t cut it. You need to create unique and engaging content will make people want to share and/or link to it–the kind of content that Google notices and rewards websites for.

The question is, how do you get those links? As an attorney, it can seem like a struggle, especially when content from other “sexier” verticals are vying for attention, shares, and those ever elusive links. As an attorney, however, you have knowledge and expertise that, if presented properly and with the right timing, can be extremely successful.

Below are some tactics we’ve seen that could be the the ticket to driving more quality traffic to your website:

Write an Op-Ed piece About a Big News Story

As a lawyer, you have a unique opportunity to contribute your expertise to a specific issue or topic that people are talking about about on the news.

Here are some Op-Ed headlines that come to mind:

The big question about [New Law] that hasn’t been answered.
What the plaintiff in [Recent Controversial Lawsuit] needs to prove in order to win.
5 Reasons Why [New Proposed Law] will be difficult to enforce.

While many attorneys write about the news, most of what I’ve seen is a rehash of the story, lightly peppered with a few comments and opinions. Instead, write a piece that offers a real argument, and spends 750-1000 words supporting your argument with examples and evidence. Make it compelling, unique, and accessible. You can publish these op-ed posts on your own blog and share it on reddit, Facebook, or other social media channels. Also, in addition to writing about news stories on your own firm’s blog, you can reach out to local reporters and offer yourself up as a source to provide a legal perspective. This is usually easier to do if you have a few successful posts under your belt.

Use PR to Promote One of Your Own Big Cases

Are you working on a case that you believe has the potential to make the news? If so, you may want to consider doing some PR.

Let’s say you’re an employment lawyer working on a whistleblower case that you believe has some legs. Get in touch with a PR professional whom you trust to get an idea if journalists would want to pick up your story. If you don’t know anyone in PR, make sure you get a recommendation from a professional who will give you an honest opinion about your story (and not just bill you for their time).

If you want to make the most of your case’s publicity, be sure to create a webpage on your site dedicated to the case, with all formal complaints and official court documents available in one place so reporters don’t have to hunt for them. Also, post links to supplementary materials that relate to the area of law that the case is related to, preferably something from your own site is best but also be sure to include anything from an external website that could shine light on your topic. Essentially, you need to make a page so good, complete, and comprehensive that it would be silly for a reporter, blogger, or anyone talking about the case to NOT want to link to it.

When your story starts taking off, request that your PR person notifies you about every online publication that happens to pick up your story. If you manage to get on a high traffic site, see if you can’t find a way to participate in the discussion in the comments section–which can be a good way for you to drop a link to your resource page on the case if it already isn’t there in the body of the article.

Give a Legal Perspective About Your Favorite TV Show or Movie

You remember when Bane held the entire city of Gotham in The Dark Night Rising? Maybe you could write up a compelling reason for how that villain has a valid criminal insanity case, should it ever be brought up in court. Oh yeah, and when you’re done, see if you can post it to lawandthemultiverse.com and get a link back to your site!

Perhaps you’re a Harry Potter fanatic, and have read all of the books from front to back 5 times. How easy would it be to write down a list of all the laws that you can find in the non-muggle world and then submit that list to Reddit and promote that list through Facebook?

Are you an employment lawyer? You could spend a couple of weekends tallying down all the possible cases for harassment or wrongful termination in shows like AMC’s Mad Men or NBC’s The Office. Or, if you were really ambitious, you could create a chart comparing all shows that take place in an office made in the last 10 years. Do something like that, and you’ll probably never need to build another link again.

Chances are you have an interest or hobby that overlaps with your expertise in the law. This gives you an opportunity to tap into a much larger audience who will share and link to your content.

Provide a Comprehensive Resource Focusing on a Frequently Asked About Topic

While most Google searches will turn up an article or resource that provides the information you’re looking for, oftentimes it doesn’t provide content to the level of depth, detail or quality that you need. For example, while there are plenty of pages out there about how to file a workers compensation claim in a particular state, how many law firm websites provide a comprehensive resource with all the forms and special instructions for filing out certain form fields in one place? If you fill that content gap by creating such a resource on your website, that resource could eventually become the go-to page for anyone who needs to fill out a workers comp claim.

When creating an online resource, put yourself in the shoes of your clients. A comprehensive resource that gives potential clients a good idea about their situation will not only help prospective clients gain confidence in your knowledge as an attorney but is also a good signal to the search engines that you’re providing great content and that your site is worthy of ranking and getting traffic.

Unfortunately, if your site doesn’t have many links to begin with, chances are a lower quality resource on a more established site is likely to rank higher than what you’ve created. This is why it’s important to reach out to owners of other websites who may want to link to your resource. While outreach is beyond the scope of this article, you should check out this great resource from Page One Power.

Create a Community Page

One of the easiest and most effective things a law firm can do to get links is through the relationships that you already have in your community. What organizations and non-profits does your firm support? Show them a little love!

Create a page giving testimonials for local organizations and vendors you do business with and link to them. These might include:

Community Theaters and Arts Organizations
Local expert witnesses you work with.
Charity Runs/Walks/Bike Rides
Trade organizations
Labor Unions
Legal Organizations (The National Lawyers Guild, National Academy of Elder Law Attorneys, Local Bar Associations)
Small businesses (possibly former clients)
Local Chapters of National Charities (Toys for Tots, United Way, Special Olympics)
Pro-bono work for local businesses or non-profit organizations
Organizations or clubs (even a recreational club like a sailing club) where a firm member is a board member (You can 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 and send to artist and they may link back to the site).
Local businesses your work with. This includes
- Service Providers: Janitors, Electricians, Moving Companies, Painters, Plumbers, Carpenters.
- Caterers
- Delivered Goods
- Leased equipment
- Employee training
- Local IT company
- Car Dealership (for company vehicle)
- Local Restaurants (Company Happy Hour)
- Local Design Firms

Once you’ve created this page, shoot off some friendly emails saying that you mentioned each business or organization favorably on their site. If the website has a testimonials page, give them permission to copy the testimonial you’ve written and put it on that page–hopefully with a link back to the original testimonial on your site.

Create a Unique Scholarship Idea

One of the most successful link building campaigns that I’ve seen a lawyer do was based on a scholarship that a DUI lawyer did that required applicants to (confidentially) admit that they had driven while buzzed in the past. This scholarship offer caused quite a stir and the attorney received great links from high authority national news sites.

While most scholarships probably wont get the kind of publicity that the DUI one did, there’s still a lot you can do with them. For example, you could have each applicant write a short essay about some issue that people care about AND something that is relevant to your practice. If you’re an immigration attorney, for example, you may want to ask applicants to write an essay voicing their opinions on recent immigration reforms. The winning essay would then be posted on your website’s blog and then shared via social media. Perhaps you could even make social media traction (number of shares, etc) be a criterion for winning the scholarship. You get free content and content promotion, and a student gets a financial leg up. Win-win.

Creating Content is Only Half of The Picture

While it’s important to understand what quality content is and to be able to tailor your content with your audience, without links or authority on your site, you can’t expect that your content will just be picked up by Google and your traffic will roll in. If you’re writing about a story on the news, reach out to journalists in your area, take them out to lunch or coffee and volunteer yourself as a resource when it comes to certain stories. If you’re hiring a PR firm to publicize one of your cases, make sure you’re doing everything you can to promote your case on the social media/web side. If you’re creating a resource on your site, whether it be a guide, a video or a scholarship page, be sure to reach out the people who have the ability to amplify your content. When you combine quality content with targeted outreach, you’ll be surprised how far you can go.

Google Erroneously Labelling Lawyers with Professional Misconduct

Posted on October 20, 2015 at 6:45 pm.

Written by Conrad Saam

Google’s Answer Box is a simple function that provides answers to basic questions directly in the search results. For example, “what time is it in London” or “how many square miles in an acre?” The goal is to utilize content from extremely trusted websites to answer simple user questions without requiring a click through.

Answer Box results haven’t shown up heavily in legal. Although that might have just changed – specifically for lawyer name searches. Google is now pulling data directly from Avvo profiles for name search information – pulling Titles and work history directly into the search results on a simple name search. This also includes a click through to the Avvo website – which could provide Avvo with a huge traffic jump.

But note the horrible implementation – the title of the Answer Box is “Professional Misconduct” (not say…. the lawyer’s name). At first blush (don’t make me think) it looks like poor Martha has been sanctioned in all of her jobs, going back to 1984. (If you actually click through to the result, you’ll find that the Martha Patterson listed does NOT have any professional misconduct history.) So – great idea, but horrendous implementation from Google. This is a particularly tricky match – there are probably hundreds of Martha Pattersons in the US – and seven Martha Patterson profiles in the Avvo directory.

Now its highly possible that Google is just testing this among professional service providers (and the bad user experience above suggests that is the case) and is going to ratchet it back; although my instinct tells me your are going to get more and more information about individuals directly in the search box.

FindLaw’s take on the new .law domains….

Posted on October 2, 2015 at 9:40 pm.

Written by Conrad Saam

We wrote last week about the sales hype being drummed up for the new .law domains. Afterall, these babies are being advertised between $200 and $350 a year – a bit of a premium from the $14.99 you’ll get from GoDaddy. Afterwards the post, someone forwarded me an article from FindLaw’s Lawyer Marketing Blog “Understanding the New .law Domain.” Here’s FindLaw’s Mark Jacobsen’s take on the .laws TLDs (my emphasis):

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. Which leads us to today and the .law domain.

Note that FindLaw claims about these restricted top level domains provide a level of confidence for SEO run 100% contrary to Google’s guidelines. From John Mueller (of Google):

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

But if you are unconvinced and still think FindLaw might know more about Understanding the new .law domains than Google does, you can buy one from….. FindLaw.

Foolish Lawyers Lining up for .law domains

Posted on September 30, 2015 at 7:29 pm.

Written by Conrad Saam

So – this morning I’ve received emails from 3 smart(ish) people asking about an ABA Journal article titled the Latest Online Goldrush for Lawyers. Starting October 12, you can now buy .lawyer Top Level Domains (TLDs). Think billjones.lawyer or personalinjury.lawyer or seattledui.lawyer. The new .law TLD can only be purchased by lawyers (although apparently it can be transferred to a non lawyer as long as its initially purchased by a lawyer. Hmmmm.) Oh – and its just a cool $210 bucks a year. Per domain. Delicious if you are selling these things.

“It’s incredible,” says John Morgan, chairman of the new domain. “It gives everybody the opportunity to have a one-time reset for the domain name of their dreams, and it will probably never happen again when you have a domain like this in a field like ours.”

TLDs and the Promise of SEO Success….

The article goes on to espouse the .law domains as a key to SEO rankings and clients.

A firm’s search engine strategy should also be taken into account when choosing a domain name, Corcoran adds

So the pitch here is that one of Google’s ranking factors is going to be the TLD. From the nic.law site:

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.

Hmmmmm…. because presumably, notwithstanding structured markup identifying attorneys (https://schema.org/Attorney) and Google My Business Categories defining businesses as “law firm”or even “divorce law firm” the engineers in Mountainview are having trouble identifying sites owned by…. lawyers.

A (Very) Brief History of Domains and SEO

Back in the day, a long long time ago, in an SEO galaxy far far away, exact match domains did carry the day. Simply put – the site seattleduilawyer.com was presumably about Seattle DUI Lawyers and therefore would rank for that exact match term. This was killed in October of 2012. Some of the value of exact match domains was anchor text (now dead) driven – so if your domain was DUILawyerSeattle.com, people would like to you with the anchor text Dui Lawyer Seattle, which in turn would help you rank for …. yeah, you get it. But of course, anchor text got killed back in January of 2013.

Now, lawyers have been buying up vanity domains and exact match search domains for years. Its rare that a kick off meeting with a new client doesn’t include something like: “and I also own drug-lawyer-seattle.org and dui-attorney-washington.com and BestEverDrunkDrivingLawFirmLawyerAttorney.co.au and … and… and… and…” So far we’ve never done anything with any of domains. And the recent availability of .attorney and .lawyer TLDs has certainly NOT shaken up the online marketing world.

What Does Work (and why we don’t care about TLDs.)

I’ve yet to talk to any reputable search nerd espousing TLD tactics for success. Even the luster over backlinks from .edu’s and .org’s and .gov’s (which was the rage back in 2008 era) has dissipated as we’ve discovered that these domains don’t intrinsically carry any extra authority or value due to their TLD. What works is the hard part of SEO – a solid platform with great content sitting on a highly authoritative site. A new TLD isn’t going to solve any of those problems.

The only people who are going to make it rich here are those selling the domains – the registrar companies estimate lawyers will blow a cool $200 million on the new TLDs…. annually.

How to Use a 7.5 Billion Pageview Site Called Reddit for Referral Traffic

Posted on September 17, 2015 at 8:00 am.

Written by Kenji Crosland

I have a confession to make. Nearly half of my success as a content marketer has been thanks to Reddit.

Reddit.com is a place where people post links to their content, or questions for the community, and have other people vote on whether it is good or not. The more upvotes that a link gets, the more people see it (and they can upvote that link in turn). The website is huge–managing to bring in around 7.5 Billion Pageviews per month. All I needed to get was the tiniest fraction of that traffic, and my job was done.

For me, successful submissions to reddit has lead to thousands of visits, hundreds of tweets, hundreds of Facebook shares, and usually a few good links thanks to the exposure the content receives. While this is no substitute for building a dedicated audience over a long period time, when done right, a successful reddit post can give you the short term boost you need to expose your content to a much larger audience than your twitter followers or Facebook friends ever could (unless you happen to be Kim Kardashian). In this post I hope to give you a quick overview of just what reddit is and how to best use it to drive traffic to your site.

Subreddits

Because user interests are as diverse as the internet itself, reddit is divided into “subreddits”. Subreddits are communities within reddit organized around a particular purpose or catering towards a specific interest group. Subreddits can be started by anyone, and moderators within the subreddit have the power to delete posts or ban users. Each subreddit has a unique URL with the domain name, an “/r/” separator and the name of the subreddit:

Sometimes you can find an interesting subreddit just by typing in the subject name after the “/r/” separator. For example, if you happen to be interested in all the goings on in your city, you can usually type in http://www.reddit.com/r/yourcityname and find a whole bunch of content relevant to locals who live in your area. One example of this is Seattle’s subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle.

Just to give you an idea of what’s out there, here are some notable subreddits:

/r/todayilearned – A subreddit where people post interesting facts they’ve just learned. (usually with a reference to a wikipedia page or blog post).
/r/dataisbeautiful – A subreddit showing compeling data visualizations and infographics
/r/aww – Cute pictures of puppies, kitties, ducklings, hedgehogs, bear cubs, etc.
/r/changemyview – A subreddit where people actively engage in polite conversation and debate about a topic, fostering open-mindedness
/r/legaladvice – People ask for legal advice about a specific topic, and others respond with advice
/r/breakingbad – A subreddit for fans of the AMC TV show “Breaking Bad”
/r/monkslookingatbeer – The description is in the title

If you visit reddit as a non-user, you’ll see posts from a wide variety of subreddits, many of which cover topics that would not be interesting to any single user, that’s why reddit gives you an option to create an account and then subscribe to the subreddits you happen to be interested in. Then, when you visit reddit.com, you’ll start to see posts from the subreddits from which you happen to be subscribed. The more popular the subreddit, or the more subscribers it has, the more likely it will rank high on your personal front page.

Let’s say, for example, you post an infographic about the number of discrimination related lawsuits in each US State. The /r/dataisbeautiful subreddit is a pretty great place for this because they’re all about interesting data visualizations, also, on the right hand column of the subreddit you can see that they have 3,952,900 readers. You will also see a much smaller number that says how many people are currently on the subreddit page itself:

Your brand new infographic post to the subreddit will start out with zero votes, and will show up at the top of the “new” posts tab. If your post is really good, just a few votes will propel it to the front page of the subreddit. When it comes to ranking in reddit, vote velocity is extremely important, so if a post to /r/dataisbeautiful gets 5 votes within 10 minutes, it will likely reach the front page, and will temporarily outrank older posts with hundreds of votes. If vote velocity continues to increase in volume, your post could then be propelled to the #1 spot in that subreddit.

The #1 spot

The #1 spot is where the magic happens. Most people are only casual readers of any single subreddit, and will rarely visit that subreddit unless it that subreddit is focused on a topic of significant interest to them. Casual users of reddit will often stay on their “front page”, which happens to show only the top one or two posts from each subreddit they happen to be subscribed to. This means that you probably won’t reach most of your potential audience unless your post is fortunate to reach the #1 spot.

Depending on the subreddit, reaching the #1 spot can be either very difficult or very easy, and it usually has to do with the number of subscribers. Generally, the more subscribers there are for any single subreddit, the more posts you have to compete against. If you want to create content with the aim of reaching the top spot of a particular subreddit, your best bet would be to research what kind of content is popular with that subreddit, and then see if you can create something that reaches the same level of quality.

If you’re really lucky, you’ll be able to reach the top spot for one of the 50 default subreddits that happen to show for users who aren’t logged it. If one of those posts get enough votes, you have a chance of getting to the #1 spot for all of reddit, which can send an untold amount of traffic your way, so much so, that your servers better be equipped to handle it all.

Researching Subreddits

One of the first places I go to when researching subreddits is reddit search. For example, If I’m an employment lawyer and want to create some content about LGBT workplace discrimination, I can go to reddit search and type in “fired for being gay” and see what I get.

If you follow the link provided above, you’ll notice that the first section is a short list of the three most relevant subreddits:

Not surprisingly, the subreddits /r/politics and /r/lgbt are among the most popular subreddits for this search query. Below those subreddits you will then see the most relevant posts. This gives you an idea of the variety of content out there on reddit relevant to the search term “fired for being gay”:

If you scroll down to the bottom of the page, however, you will see a longer list of subreddits with the number of relevant posts next to it. This will often show you subreddits that you may have not thought about.

Just by looking at this list, one subreddit that stands out to me is /r/TalesFromRetail which may be appropriate place to post many different kinds of Employee law and employee discrimination related content, especially since the subreddit has over 220,000 subscribers.

Qualifying Subreddits

Not all subreddits are created equal. While you can post a link to more than one subreddit, relentless posting of the same link to several subreddits can be an indicator that you are a spammer. Ideally, you should only post to the most qualified subreddits for your content.

When qualifying subreddits, there are three factors that I look at:

Number of subscribers: Generally, I don’t post a link to a subreddit with less than 1,000 subscribers, and ideally my goal is to get to the front page of a subreddit with at least 10,000 subscribers. Also, unless I feel my content is really top tier, I generally don’t submit it to the most popular subreddits as it will often get drowned in a sheer volume of posts.

Subreddit Rules: Before posting a link to any subreddit, be sure that you read and understand all of the rules of the subreddit. For example, /r/TalesFromRetail requires that you only post stories about your own experiences. If I was an attorney wrote a blog post about a client being discriminated against at work, I would not be able to post that content. It looks like there is nothing against that client posting that blog post themselves. So while the rules don’t exclude the possibility of using that subreddit for promotion, I’d probably look elsewhere to promote my post.

Subreddit Culture: Each subreddit has its own culture, so it’s important to get a feel for the kind of posts that would be appropriate for it. If the subreddit likes in-depth thought pieces, then you should post an in-depth thought piece, if the subreddit likes fascinating data visualizations then you should post a fascinating data visualization. If you’re aiming for the #1 spot in a subreddit, it’s important to fit the mold of the subreddit you happen to be posting for.

Creating Content for Reddit

Although this can sometimes narrow your options when it comes to what other subreddits you can post to, sometimes it can be very helpful to tailor your content for a specific subreddit. Lawyers need to be especially creative. I did a search for law related subreddits and found the three largest ones, /r/legaladvice, /r/legal, and /r/law to be less than promising. Just a quick qualifying of those subreddits and I learn that /r/legaladvice is only a place for people to ask legal questions, r/legal doesn’t have many subscribers, and /r/law specifically prohibits attorneys from posting links to their own website in their subreddit rules.

Create content that matches your interests and hobbies

Just because you’re a lawyer doesn’t mean you need to write a blog post about the law. Perhaps you are an employment lawyer and you are also a fanatic of the AMC show madmen. One content idea could be to tally the workplace violations in every episode that could be grounds for a harassment lawsuit. This way you could reach the 42,000 subscriber audience of /r/Madmen who could then further amplify your content through Facebook and Twitter. Also, since this content could also make one heck of an infograph, you could probably also submit it to /r/DataIsBeautiful as well.

Create content that leverages your expertise

As attorneys, there are countless opportunities to provide a professional opinion about a certain case that is making headlines. Any post that can provide an interesting legal perspective about events in the news could have a lot of potential.

Create local content for your city’s subreddit

If you happen to live in a large enough city, chances are your city’s subreddit (like /r/Seattle or /r/Houston) could have a reasonable number of subscribers. You don’t need to write about national news to be successful on reddit. A blog post about something going on in your home town could be a perfect match for your city’s subreddit.

Some Things to be Aware Of When Posting

Once you’ve created your content and qualified that the content is appropriate for the subreddits you want to post to, it’s important to be aware of some of the potential pitfalls you might encounter when posting.

Avoid content that is overly self-promotional

Redditors are a savvy bunch, and can smell self-promotion or a sales pitch a mile away. A common theme with most legal blog posts is to append each post with cookie cutter text that says something to the effect of “If you or a loved one has encountered a similar situation as the one outlined in the story above, please call Smith & Smith at 555-555-5555 today!” Remember that the blog post is on a legal firm website, and if anyone needs your services it should be displayed clearly in the top right corner of your website header. No need to hit the reader over the head with it.

Be careful of SPAM filters

Occasionally, something I post will get caught up in an automated SPAM filter. These filters most often get triggered when you’ve posted to a subreddit you haven’t participated in before. Thus, it’s considered a best practice to upvote, downvote, and comment on other posts in a particultar subreddit before posting yourself. I must confess, however, that as a time constrained content marketer I didn’t always have that luxury. This is why I would be sure to click the “new” tab in the subreddit after posting. If your post doesn’t show up in the “new” posts section just after you’ve posted, it most likely has been caught in a SPAM filter. Best practice is to message the moderator of that subreddit to approve your post.

Sometimes it can be helpful to mention that you’ve created the content

Redditors can sometimes be ruthless when it comes to downvoting content that they believe doesn’t live up to their standards. While this is only an anecdotal observation, I have noticed that when I preface my reddit posts with “A blog post I wrote about…” it seems that the response is a lot friendlier than if I anonymously dumped my content on the subreddit. Mentioning you’ve created the content shows there’s a living breathing human behind the post, and the reception will be all the better because of it.

Rules!

While I mentioned this above this is worth mentioning twice. If your post doesn’t conform to the rules of a subreddit, it can get deleted by moderators. Sometimes you may even get nasty comments from mods or even get banned. Be sure to review the rules and if your post does not fit, it’s best to post elsewhere.

After Posting: Monitor Reddit Comments and Inbound Traffic

While usually it’s good enough to post a link. It can also be helpful to monitor the conversation that emerges in the comments of your post. I must confess that I don’t participate in much in the conversations of my posts, but oftentimes I am alerted to something I may have gotten wrong in my original post (which I then swiftly correct). You can also help keep the conversation going by responding to particularly interesting comments.

It can also be helpful to keep an eye on the real time traffic that comes through to your site. You can do this by following the real time traffic that comes to your site through Google Analytics. Once you’re there, you can see just how many people are currently visiting your site, and from where:

Watching how many people visit your site can be both addictively exciting and useful. It can be useful because you can see what happens to your content after you post to reddit. If, for example, someone posts to a forum and that forum happens to be sending a good number of visitors your way, it may be good to join the conversation there. Similarly if there are a lot of visits from Twitter, it may be helpful to see what is happening there as well.

Why Your Content Sends You Zero Traffic

Posted on September 3, 2015 at 8:00 am.

Written by Kenji Crosland

“So I’ve been blogging for a few months now. Why am I not getting any traffic?”

One of the most persistent myths in online marketing is that creating content will always lead to more traffic. Content is essential, yes, but with over 2 million blog posts popping up every day, the answer is likely that Google thinks one of those other 1,999,999 posts is more worthy of directing traffic to.

I know it sounds harsh, but hear me out. It doesn’t mean that your content is poor. Nor does it mean that it doesn’t deserve to rank. It simply means that the criteria Google uses to evaluate whether your content is relevant or valuable are not met. If you’ve been producing content for a while now and you haven’t been seeing an improvement, your content may be suffering from one or more of the following problems:

No One is Searching for the Topics You’re Writing About

One of the first things that you need to do as a content writer is to determine the kind of search volume there might be around your chosen topic. Search volume is essentially how many people are searching for the kinds of answers, information, opinions, or edification that your content aims to provide.

Use Pay Per Click data for Topic Research

One common tool that SEOs like myself use to research a topic’s search volume is Google Keyword Planner. Google provides this tool free of charge to give search marketers an idea of how much they should pay for a particular keyword when doing PPC advertising.

Using the keyword tool gives you a good idea of the kind of traffic you can expect should you get a piece of content to rank. It’s important to note that while the average monthly searches for each keyword seems relatively low, I have often seen successful pieces of content bring in more traffic than the average monthly searches for any targeted keyword. This is because the same piece of content will often show up for several different search queries. Also, because the numbers provided by Google Ad Planner are not 100% accurate, it’s important not to take them at face value; they are often best used for seeing the relative difference in search volume between keywords rather than the actual search volume for each keyword.

Try to build content around the keywords that have higher search volume and that you don’t see your competition writing about. Oftentimes you can succeed in getting this content to rank quickly, and send traffic to your site faster than with the more competitive terms. This is why it’s good to explore the Adwords Planner and see if there are any “out of the box” keywords to focus your content around. A quick look at the ideas for the search term “speeding ticket” shows this little gem:

Wow, a keyword with over 4,440 searches a month and low competition! This looks like an opportunity to create a post like: “Paying a Traffic Ticket Online? 10 Reasons Why You Should Reconsider.” As you can see, Adwords Keyword Planner can be a very powerful tool for content idea generation. Use it for keywords in your practice area and see what you come up with!

Use Quora and Reddit for Topic Research

Another way to research what kind of content people are looking for is to go to sites like Quora or Reddit and do a quick search. The questions on these sites are user generated, so they often reflect what searchers are looking for that may not occur to you. For example: I looked up “speeding ticket” on Quora and the first question that came up was “Are traffic tickets public record?” Answering this question would be a perfect topic for a traffic attorney. Chances are that many more people out there want to know the answer to the question than just the person who asked it on Quora.

Search Volume isn’t Everything

Although it’s important to be conscious about keyword search volume, this may not always be important for your business. Information about how to get out of a speeding ticket (Keyword: “how to get out of a speeding ticket”), for example, is information many people will find interesting or useful at some point of their lives. Information about how a particular law firm or attorney is good at getting people out of a speeding ticket (Keyword: “traffic attorneys in tacoma reviews,” on the other hand, will target a much smaller and more specific audience. A good rule of thumb here is that the more specific (or “long tail“) a search phrase is, the fewer people there will be searching for it.

Although it’s good to want more traffic, don’t neglect the long tail! The long tail search terms will bring in less traffic, but often the people using long tail search terms have much more specific intent. If you are a traffic lawyer, one website visit from someone interested in getting out of a speeding ticket in Tacoma will be much more valuable to your business than 100 visits from people who are just generally interested in how to get out of a speeding ticket.

Still no traffic?

So you’ve thoroughly researched a topic with high search volume, written about it, bravely pressed publish and…crickets. What went wrong? Well, it’s possible that…

You Don’t Have Enough Authority

If you have a brand new site, and happen to produce the most brilliant, engaging and informative page on on how to get out of a speeding ticket ever written, chances are that you still won’t rank very high for it. Even though a topic may have high traffic volume, and you write the perfect piece of content for the audience interested in that topic, you’re likely competing against many other high authority sites (Avvo, Nolo, etc) that have written similar content.

While Google uses many factors to rank content, authority is one of the most important. Google measures authority by the number of links pointing to a particular website. A brand new blog will have zero links pointing to it from other websites, and thus have little to no authority. The New York Times, however, has over 200,000,000 links from over 800,000 different websites. If the New York Times writes an article about getting out of a speeding ticket, chances are high that this article would rank in the top 10 results in Google within a day. Even though the Times article itself may have zero links to it, the authority of the site as a whole (or Domain Authority) helps boost this brand new page.

Since most web pages don’t get many links from other websites, domain authority is a very important factor when it comes to ranking content. A page with a lot of links (or Page Authority), however, even from an unknown blog with low domain authority, will tend to rank higher than pages from high authority websites with no links. A common strategy I’ve seen for many sites is to build a page with incredible content, promote that content through social media and direct outreach to webmasters, and once that content acquires a lot of links, it will start to rank and bring a lot of traffic. This organic search traffic will begin to attract links passively from people who visit the page from search and then link to it from their blog or resource page. These pages will not only have strong page authority, but will tend to increase the domain’s overall authority, which means your interesting content page will help your more “boring” link-less pages to start ranking.

How To Get Links to Your Content

In order to get people to share and link to your content, it has to provide some value to your target audience. Here are some reasons why people might share or link to your content:

It’s useful and informative
It mentions or talks about people (And the people you mention link to it)
It provides an unusual or unique perspective
It’s entertaining
It’s controversial
It’s timely
It’s funny
It has compelling data or data visualizations

When you have content that satisfies 1 or more of the above criteria, the next step is to make sure that this content gets in front of as many of the right people as possible. Ideally, you want to expose your content to as many people as possible within the first day of it being published. While discussing the tactics involved with content promotion could take up a whole book, here are my three favorites:

Research the names of social media influencers in your niche such as popular bloggers and create an outreach list. Email each influencer a personalized email, sharing your content and ask for their opinion or feedback on the content. Don’t ask for the share. If they like the content, they will share it. Ideally it’s best to establish rapport with these influencers by commenting on their blogs or sharing their posts on social media first.
Explore forums, Subreddits, Quora, and Google Plus Communities (yes, some people do use Google Plus very actively) and post your link if you feel the audience might appreciate what you have to share. Be careful not to just “leave” your link on a forum without thoroughly researching the forum and knowing the forum rules. Spamming forums will get you banned.
Advertise your content. Facebook advertising is one of the cheapest ways to get your content viewed by thousands of people in your niche. You may also want to experiment with advertising on Reddit and StumbleUpon.

While many of these tactics don’t lead to links directly. Oftentimes this will help your content get noticed by bloggers and webmasters who do have the ability to link to your content. Make sure that you concentrate all your outreach and promotion efforts in one day if you can. The more people that view and share your content within a limited window of time, the more likely that content is going to gain momentum, leading to even more views and shares.

Having trouble getting links? It’s quite possible that…

Your Content is Thin or Lacks Originality

What if you have content for a topic you know has high search volume on a website that has high authority and you’re still not ranking? What’s missing?

Answer: Your content could be thin or unoriginal.

What is thin content?

Thin content barely qualifies as content. Many websites are stuffed with pages that only contain a short paragraph that reads like a summary of a topic rather than an in-depth exploration of the topic. In my experience, you’re better off having 10 pages of great content than thousands of pages of thin content.

What is unoriginal content?

I’ve seen sites with innumerable pages optimized for every conceivable keyword. Although the content itself may pass a plagiarism check, it’s often virtually indistinguishable from all the other content on the site. While churning out content for the sake of search engine traffic used to be an effective tactic, the increasingly sophisticated Google Panda Algorithm has learned to weed out this cookie cutter content. Indeed, while there are plenty of law blogs out there with hundreds of posts, these posts have zero comments, zero links, and little to no kind of social media engagement. On average, most of these blog posts only get 1 to 2 visits per year from organic search, often with a high bounce rate. Instead of paying a blogger to crank out posts every other day, you’re probably better off spending that money taking your team out to lunch.

What can you do to improve your content so that it gets noticed by humans and search engines alike? You can:

Personalize it: How might your personal experiences give the content some color and humanize it?

Localize it: Is there something peculiar or unique about your city or region which would be useful or interesting to local readers? The legal field in particular has plenty opportunities to talk about state and municipal laws.

Deepen it: Is there some background you could add to the content if you did just a little bit of research?

If you don’t do at least one of these three things, don’t expect your content to rank. But if you have and you’re still not ranking, my guess is that…

You Have Non-Content Related Issues

While search volume, authority, and content quality are the main elements for getting your content to rank, oftentimes there are non-content related issues that can throttle your traffic. If you have great content, you’re promoting it well and the content targets the right audience, you probably have these issues:

Technical SEO Issues

Do you have a misplaced line of code in your robots.txt file that is telling Google to ignore all your web pages? Perhaps your site’s download speed is so sluggish that Google is deciding to rank pages from faster websites over yours. Or maybe you have a lot of pages from an old website that are improperly redirecting to your new one.

Although Google is getting smarter about looking past technical issues, there are still many technical issues that can cause problems with SEO. A solid technical audit is essential to ensure that your website properly set up to be crawled and indexed. Before you start running the race, make sure your shoes are tied.

Black Hat SEO

Another non-content related issue is black hat SEO. It’s possible you’ve hired someone to work on your site who has used black hat SEO tactics to help improve your rankings. Google is constantly on the lookout for evidence of these tactics. Once caught, your site could be slapped with a penalty that can take a lot of work to recover from. While diagnosing whether or not your site has been penalized is out of the scope of this article, usually if you see a huge drop in traffic (especially after an unusual surge in traffic) the possibility is high that you’ve received some sort of penalty from Google.

Be sure you know what you’re getting into before hiring an SEO agency. If you can, get recommendations from colleagues and friends that have been happy working with the same agency for more than a year. If an agency is doing black hat work for you, a penalty will likely surface within a years time. Also, be sure that you are aware of some of the warning signs that you could be working with a less than legitimate agency.

Go Forth and Create Great Content!

If someone in the past has told you that they tried getting traffic through content creation and it didn’t work, they probably didn’t know about or follow the above guidelines. You need content with great quality, a site (or pages) with good authority, and content that is relevant to what people are actually looking for. Satisfying these three criteria isn’t easy, but if you do, you’ll start seeing more traffic than you know what to do with.

The Snack Pack – A Follow Up

Posted on August 31, 2015 at 9:09 pm.

Written by Emelina Berkshire

Earlier this month, Google shook up search results by creating what is now being referred to as the local “snack pack” (you can read the Mockingbird coverage of the changes here). And no, for those of you reading this before lunch, unfortunately this is not Google’s way of announcing they will now be delivering pudding.

As shown in the image below from Casey Meraz, local business listings, previously shown in a local pack of 7 listings, have now been limited to a 3-business “snack pack.”

Like most changes to search results, many in the SEO industry are seconds away from declaring a state of emergency. Now you must be top 3, otherwise you will never get another visitor to your website ever again.

Is this really the case? Should you be panicking? Calling your SEO agency in a rage questioning why you aren’t in the top 3?

Like any good business school graduate, my answer is: it depends.

Let’s start by recapping a few things most of us can agree on:

PPC ads (marked in yellow at the top and right hand of the SERP) are not being changed as they are manipulated via AdWords efforts, not SEO.
Ranking #1 in any type of search result for any phrase is generally going to be better than ranking 10^th or 79^th. In general, more traffic to your website -> more client inquiries -> more money in your pocket.
The legal industry is notorious for web spam – from fake reviews to fake satellite offices. This is an unfortunate but very real reality; one that actively affects how your law firm performs in search.

At first glance, it would appear this update would be particularly harmful to those who were previously showing up in the local 7-pack in spots 4-7, and are now no where to be found. While many local businesses fall into this boat, the negative consequences are hard to quantify. As pointed out by Jennifer Slegg in her initial coverage in Moz, presumably, Google removed listings 4-7 in the local pack because they weren’t getting nearly as many clicks as the top 3. So, hypothetically, the update could not have much of an effect at all.

Along the same lines, in his heat map analysis, Casey Meraz demonstrated that ranking in the snack pack is not the end all be all of local search. Whether there are organic results above or below the snack pack, significant portions of users choose traditional organic listings over localized results.

Like nearly every update in Internet land, it’s impossible to predict how the snack pack will impact your site with 100% accuracy. Regardless of your situation, remember to focus on what actually matters: inbound requests for your business. Ranking #1 for “personal injury lawyer” is not always indicative of success – that’s why Mockingbird doesn’t provide ranking reports. More often than not, a large portion of your search traffic is coming from branded or long-tailed searches.

When determining what to do in response to the snack pack, ask yourself a few questions…

Has your local traffic decreased since the local pack update? Is that translating into a lack of calls and form fills?

1. Does your web presence suck? Does your “office” conveniently share an address with USPS? Is the phone number on your Google+ listing actually your phone number?

–> It’s not rocket science – fix this. Your contact information should be how people can actually contact you. Your business address should be the place that you actually work. Your phone number should be your actual phone number.\

2. Are you following best practices? Is your information up to date and regularly updated? Are you in a particularly competitive location/industry?

–> It might be time to consider the traditional suggestions – consider upping your investment in SEO efforts, place an increased emphasis on NAP consistency, and if you aren’t already, try PPC advertising for lead generation.

If you didn’t notice a change from the snack pack update, keep on keepin’ on. Continue to make improvements to your web presence and keep your business information up to date. If you experienced a positive impact, congratulations, you win the Internet! You are officially #1. Your job here is done. Also, consider sending your SEO agency cookies to celebrate; chocolate chip is always a fan favorite.

Online Reputation Management: Dealing with Bad Reviews

Posted on August 28, 2015 at 5:40 am.

Written by Alexander Darling

We previously wrote about how to build up good reviews for your firm or practice. If you’re on this page and you haven’t read that post, take a moment to do so. It sets the backdrop for the information here.

Unhappy customers are a part every practice area, and you can get negative reviews even if you do everything you can to keep your clients successful and happy. But negative reviews can hurt. It only takes one client in a particularly foul mood to rank you 1/5 on Yelp, tanking your rating and likely hurting the success of your firm.

There are a lot of tools and tactics at your disposal for dealing with reviews that cast you in a bad light, but you need to be familiar with them so you don’t inadvertantly hurt your business further.

Building a Safety Net

One of the most important ways to combat the effects of a bad review is to build up a safety net of positive reviews. Smart consumers also know that you can’t please everyone all of the time and psychologically, one negative mark lends legitimacy to the positive reviews.

The most direct part of creating your safety net is building up a strong review base, which you can read about in the previous article “How to Do Reviews”. A larger number of reviews means your average rating is more resistant to big outliers. Let’s look at an example. If you have a 5-star rating, but it’s only from one reviewer, just one 1-star rating can cut that almost in half.

That’s looks awful. You just went from looking like the top of the pack all the way down to looking mediocre. Now let’s compare this to a 5-star average from three reviews, or from seven.

As we can see, there is a marked improvement that comes from having a large number of reviews. If you’re curious, you can see the same pattern for a 4-star average.

Bear in mind that these are averages are determined using conventional wisdom for reviews – add up the total number of stars and divide it by the number of reviewers to get your average. Most sites, including Avvo and Yelp, round your rating to the nearest half. However there are exceptions like Google+, which uses an algorithm to estimate your true rating and could lead to a result slightly lower or higher than the average shown here.

Also worth mentioning is the spread of your reviews. We’ve talked before about not putting all your eggs in one basket, but it also tends to look suspicious if multiple sites have significantly different averages. If your reviews are stellar on Google+ but much worse on Yelp, it will look like you’re doing something artificial to boost your ratings. For this reason, you need to make sure you look good in many places. That will take a lot of work, but it’s worth it.

In addition, your safety net should also involve making sure your website ranks highly for branded searches. If you are “Jane Doe, Attorney at Law”, anyone googling that phrase should see your website ranked first, before review sites or online profiles. Having a strong search engine presence means bad reviews that grow legs (more on that later) won’t rank higher than pages you control. On a similar note, you should make sure you have control over your profiles on the 3rd-party review sites around the web. Make sure that you have access to your social media profiles (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), your Yelp page, Avvo profile, and so on.

The third component of your safety net is good customer service that follows your clients and keeps them happy… or as happy as is feasible. By providing clients the opportunity – even encouraging them – to rant at you, in your office, on the phone anywhere other than online, you both provide much greater customer service and avoid a negative review.

Bad Safety Nets
Building up a large base of reviews that reflect positively on your brand takes significant time and effort. You might be tempted to turn to the dark side of SEO in order to ensure your ratings stay high, but stay strong in your resolve. Unethical practices won’t guarantee your rankings, and they can backfire spectacularly.

Writing fake reviews to pad out your popularity is dangerous and has serious ethical implications. In addition, threatening action against people who have written (or might write) bad reviews is also bad form. At best you will temporarily, quietly cover up a problem that’s arising somewhere else along the pipeline without addressing it. At worst, you could face public outrage and get stuck on the wrong end of a lawsuit.

Monitoring Your Web Presence

In order to manage bad publicity, you will need to be aware of it. This means monitoring new reviews wherever they come in, and keeping an eye out for uncontrolled pages that rank in searches for your brand. Even news that isn’t necessarily related to you is something you might want to watch out for.

Instead of going by hand through every review website, you can use certain automated review management software to stay apprised. ReviewTrackers is an online review monitoring service that has a specialized section for lawyers – tracking the major legal specific directories that offer reviews. To keep updated on potential news that ranks in a search for your brand, consider using Google Alerts. Google Alerts allows you to input a search query (such as your brand) and gives you updates when that page is mentioned online.

Responding to Reviews

Now that you’ve built your safety net and you have a process in place for monitoring reviews as they occur, the next line of defense is actually dealing with bad reviews themselves. The most common way to handle reviews is by responding to them. Any online review site worth its salt will let owners issue both public and private responses to reviews from their clients, which is an opportunity to correct obvious inaccuracies and make a good impression.

A public response can have a greater impact on your business, because the audience changes from one unsatisfied client to any potential client who reads your response. This makes it vital that you are professional and polite in your response. In a public response, make sure to own up to the issue and explain how it won’t happen for future clients. A public response is more for prospective customers than anyone else, so you should show that your customer service is on point.

Your response to a negative review should showcase your professionalism, caring and commitment to customer service to all of the other people who read the review. It’s important to NOT get involved in a factual tit-for-tat with the reviewer and NEVER call them out as lying, irrational, crazy, or stupid. Nasty responses will make you look worse than if you hadn’t said anything in the first place.

Remember to use common sense. Every time you look over a response draft, consider what it looks like to a potential client with no outside information. Would that potential client be more motivated to pick up the phone and call? If not, you have some work to do.

But the best to get glowing customer reviews? Deliver exceptional customer service.

A Lesson on Understanding Your Website Data

Posted on August 20, 2015 at 4:12 pm.

Written by Dustin Curtis

Switching from one marketing agency to another probably feels a lot like trying to cancel your Comcast contract. However, it’s not only hard on the business looking for a new agency, it’s hard on us too. Taking over a client means taking over all of their baggage (good and bad). Don’t be mistaken; we love bringing on new clients regardless of the situation or agency they are leaving, but some situations are certainly more challenging than others.

Some of the common “joys” we experience during this transition include: tracking down login information, cleaning up dirty links, and struggling to get tracking and cost data. The latest joy I experienced was completely out of the ordinary…

The Odd Situation

Let’s take a step back. A couple months ago we took on a new client for a website redesign project moving in to a SEO/advertising monthly retainer (a typical type of engagement for us). We completed the redesign and launched the new site. We did very minimal “SEO” work prior to launching the new site; but we were careful to migrate all the existing content exactly as it was on the old site. Essentially the new website was the old site with a really, really nice facelift. However, something a little strange happened…

In the first period after launching the new site (Mockingbird reports on 28 day periods) we took a 37% drop in organic traffic. Hmmm. I expected traffic to be relatively flat since we hadn’t made any real improvements to the site, aside from adding a few plugins. I certainly didn’t expect a colossal drop in traffic.

Digging Into The Data Like Any SEO Nerd Would

Before conferring with the client, I took an initial dive into the Google Analytics data. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately?), I found no glaring issues or reasons as to why the site was seeing such a drastic drop. As always, I then called my client and proactively delivered the bad news over a screen-share. I delivered the bad news about their drop in natural search traffic and was ready for questions. Some theories we discussed:

We did site-wide redirects to remove the “.aspx” from the end of every URL. This may have confused Google and the search giant just needed time to adjust.
It was a holiday weekend and we’re dealing with small(ish) traffic numbers so that could have a large impact.
Lastly, we’re dealing with small numbers so a 37% drop seems more drastic then it really is.

After informing my client of the possible reasons for the drop, I had to tell them honestly, “I’m not sure.” That’s not a good feeling. I’m the expert and should know the answer.

On a side note, I will say that all the other data points looked to be going in a positive direction. Local traffic and number of leads generated was up, and the cost per lead was down. Other site metrics looked good too: the site speed had drastically increased, the number of indexed pages took a huge positive spike, our number of impressions grew since the last period, and the average rankings moved up by 5 spots.

Picture proof…

(Increase in website speed)

(Increase in # of indexed pages)

Feeling unsatisfied with our lack of answers, I dredged through the data again with the goal of finding exactly which pages lost organic traffic. If I could identify a trend in those pages, I could do my best to reverse that trend. This time I found something I missed before.

To find which pages were losing traffic, I looked at organic landing page sessions. If you want to look at your own organic landing page data follow these steps: navigate to acquisition > channels > organic search > change your primary dimension from keywords to landing page. (Full disclosure – there are many ways to parse this same data out of analytics. I outlined my steps.) Upon looking at the landing page URL’s I noticed something really wonky. There were a lot, and I mean A LOT, of URL’s ending in parameters that I had never before seen. Here is an example (very edited to keep anonymity for both my client and the past agency):

sampledomain.com/Criminal-Law.aspx?PPC=Google&PPCADID=3686PPCADEXID=KeywordID=9302&keyword=criminallawyerchicago&matchtype=e&adposition=1t1&random=2569&targetid=kwd-2451538036&network=search&device=m&deviceModel=&networkType=g&physicalloc=90746&interestloc=1022

Allow me to explain why this is so disconcerting (hopefully without losing you in technical jargon). We typically see organic sessions to normal website pages that look similar to this: sampledomain.com/criminal-law/ but instead we were seeing these crazy long and complicated URL endings. In the example URL you’ll see a bolded section “PPC=Google” which tells me this particular URL is used to track advertising (PPC=Google means pay-per-click advertising with Google). Now, it’s not weird to see a tracking parameter like this, but it is weird to see it in the Organic traffic bucket of Google Analytics. The website sessions to this URL should be counted in the paid channel and not an organic channel. Now I knew the data I had reported to my client was inaccurate.

The Results:

Organic Traffic increased by 28% and did not decrease 37%

We actually increased the number of organic sessions in the first period but initially failed to see it because of these “PPC” parameters messing with the data.

The Important Lesson

Dig deeper into the data and always investigate traffic drops and other anomalies to find causation. It’s imperative to report data accurately, don’t give up and settle for a theoretical answer (SEO lends itself to this) when you have an immense amount of data at your fingertips. This point becomes especially important when taking over a client from a different agency. Although Google Analytics is already completely free and built by some of the smartest people in the world, there are companies out there that elect to use their own data tracking software. Be mindful of this when delving into your own data.