Site Speed Matters – So how do you test it?

Written by

Site speed is important. Your website speed can influence site traffic and more importantly – conversions. If your site takes 5-10 seconds to load on a desktop with a high speed internet connection, it’s going to take even longer to load on a mobile network. This is not a good user experience and can cause visitors (potential customers) to move along.

There are many factors affecting your site speed… registrar, host, site platform, site code optimization, image size, external requests, the list goes on… However, there are tools available to get quick answers, as well as very detailed answers.

Our favorite tools are:

All of these tools have various scores, data points, pros, and cons. One test is not going to give you a definitive answer; multiple tests will be more telling as to how your site is actually performing. Webpagetest.org has more functionality and adjustable settings than the rest. Pingdom and Google will give you grades and scores; some of these data points are important, some are not.

Pingdom Website Speed Test

Pingdom has four data points that I find most important:

  1. “Your website is (faster/slower) than (%) of all tested websites.”
  2. Page Size.
  3. First Byte.

The “website is faster/slower than” metric is an easy way for you to gauge your site speed against others. It is also the perfect example of why multiple tests are important. This calculation uses “Load Time”, which is influenced by “Page Size”, host speed, server connection speed, and code quality. Mockingbird pages, for example, average around 0.8-1.4 seconds to fully load, but on a single test in Pingdom I received a 2.83 second “Load Time”. Multiple tests with other testing services are your friend.

Page Size is important, because it influences your load time and can be optimized. Is your page over 2 MB? If you don’t have many images or any videos – I would find this alarming. Are your images poorly optimized for web? Is your site code overly bulky? Are you loading too many large external resources? All of these are fixable by web designers and developers. Poorly optimized images are the most common increase in page size and has the easiest fix. “Save for web” in Adobe Photoshop or other image editing programs is a simple step to take when creating images for a website.

First Byte is something clearly displayed in the WebPageTest.org results – but is not clear in the Pingdom results.  Your First Byte time is the time it takes to DNS Lookup, Connect, and Load the initial HTML file. With Pingdom this can be seen as the time it takes to load the initial page file within the Waterfall graph.

Other Scores

Load Time can be useful especially for smaller sites – because this time should be low for small sites. There’s probably no videos, as many external resources, or as many images as larger sites. But for large sites this time can be hard to control. I prefer to stay within 0.5-3 seconds, but under 5 is ok. Performance Grade – this metric has some useful data for web developers. However, for a small business who is actively marketing – this score is useless. Just having advertising, analytics, and call tracking is going to bring this score way down, because the amount of externally loaded resources that are necessary.

Let me give you some “Pingdom” Load Time examples from our clients.

Client Who Moved From Slow Host to Our Favorite – WPengine:

  • Load Time: Old Host = 8-10 seconds | WPengine = 0.7-3 seconds (Wow!)
  • Page Size: 2.9MB

Huge Bulky Client Website on WPengine:

  • Load Time: 1-3 Seconds (This is amazing for a bulky, older, big box theme, WordPres site)
  • Page Size: 1.5MB
There’s always room for website improvement. But, anyone can use these tools to find glaring, yet fixable problems.

As you can see, a fast host like WPengine can really make a huge difference. For reference – big sites like newspapers or syndicated blogs will have load times of up to 12 seconds! This is because of their large amounts of content and advertising. But their “Start Render Time” is still going to be 0.5-2 seconds, allowing users to view content quickly.  This “Start Render Time” time may be influencing search results.

WebPageTest.org – Test a website’s performance

This is truly an amazing tool for developers. I won’t go into all the details here, because it’s not that useful for the average user. But there are a few features and data points I highly recommend using.

  • Connection (Can test your speed over Cable, DSL, 3G, 2G, etc…)
  • Number of Tests to Run (Here is where we weed out the outliers with up to 9 tests)
  • First View and Repeat View (Repeat View will allow you to test your caching by comparing speeds to First View)
  • “Start Render” data point (After you run a test – this will be one of the first items you see – it’s important for larger sites and ensures your visitors are seeing content quickly)

Google Page Speed Insights

This tool from Google gives you a Mobile Speed Score, Mobile User Experience Score, and a Desktop Speed Score out of 100. Your Mobile User Experience should be 100/100 or very close to it – to ensure a strong mobile user experience. The rest of the optimization suggestions contribute to your score, which I have mixed feelings about.

You might ask – why not just go for a 100/100 scores on the Google PageSpeed Insights? I could continue this rant and explain the technicalities of those scores. But to keep it simple, it’s not worth it, because it would require a huge web development budget with no tangible return on the investment. Check out this case study on earning a 100/100 score – Smashing Magazine Performance Case Study.

Go Test Your Site!

I suggest using a combination of the tools discussed above to assess your site. If your page speed and load times are super slow – you might consider a website redesign or host change. You might even discover that you have giant images over 1MB each! That’s an easy fix.

HOT: Google Updates Local Results

Written by

Fresh from the web comes this update about Google’s recent changes to the local pack.

The local 3-pack

Google’s local results, AKA the “Local” or “Map” pack, just got streamlined from seven results to three.

What is it?

The “Local Pack” is the list that appears on the left of your screen when you search Google for a local service or business. As an example, here’s an image from a post last year:

What’s Changed?

As you’ll note below, the local pack just slimmed down. It lost four listings, doesn’t feature a phone number and no longer shows the Google+ page. The number can be found by clicking the listing: More on that in a bit. Businesses still show star rankings where applicable. Street names are now used in lieu of full addresses. Hours of operation will show either opening or closing times, depending on the time of day.

Attack of the 3 Pack
LA Area Search for “Los Angeles Personal Injury Attorney” – 2:30 PM, 8/7/2015

Previously, clicking a link in the local pack would have the listing’s knowledge graph page fly-out to the right, as detailed here. In this new iteration, clicking the the listing (and not the website or direction links) brings up an entirely new pageLocal Pack Click-Through

This new page now features the business knowledge graph card. Users can now find the full address and phone number here. This page also features a total of 20 business listings, and links to more at the bottom.

So what does it mean?

The obvious first thought is that it just got harder for folks that were ranking 4-7. Does this mean it’s time to up your Adwords advertising spend? Perhaps. It could also be a boon to companies that rank #1 or #2 organically but don’t show up in the local pack. That the local list is now shorter means less scrolling to get to them.

Time will tell if users adjust to this new “local pack lite” and click through to the 20 listing page.

We’ll keep an eye on this for you. In the meantime, redouble your local SEO efforts: The bar just got higher.

Communication is Imperative to SEO and Life

Written by

Meeting with your SEO agency shouldn’t feel like a conversation with your mechanic, and calling your client shouldn’t be met with the same degree of dread as a Thanksgiving dinner with extended family. (Aunt Jody never stops bugging me about “finding a nice girl.”)

Instrument Of Communication Or Torture

What Happened to Honest Communication?

Unfortunately, SEO’s and online marketers work in an industry that enables us to easily fill our conversations with technical nonsense and acronyms that only others in our niche can understand. In this way, we’re able to avoid the tough conversations. If a less than scrupulous agency is failing to bring you clients, no problem, they can spin the metrics so that they still look favorable. (It helps having so many metrics to work with).

It’s likely when your agency should be telling you, “Google AdWords isn’t working for you as a marketing channel – it’s just not making your phone ring. We should kill our spend with Google and try investing in a different channel.”

They’ll instead offer up some technobabble bull like this, “Well the conversion rates were low last period, but we’re optimistic. The ad’s quality scores are all above 6, our CTR is at about 2%, and the average CPC is over $40.00 for your vertical.”

This might as well be Cantonese for a client who uses the Internet solely to share pictures of their grandchildren on Facebook. *Cough* my parents *cough*

If the client can’t even understand the answer to their question, what value are they receiving? Are they learning anything about the efficacy of their advertising spend? What return they are seeing from their investment?

If I’m starting to sound passionate, it’s because I am.

Important side note: I don’t speak for everyone in our industry – there are a lot of people doing really great work and an even better job communicating it.

Calling your Client Shouldn’t be Dreadful

Communication can be hard — especially for those of us who spend our life on the Internet. It’s twice as hard for those of us with an inexplicable phone phobia.

As someone who falls into both of the previous buckets, I would be lying if I told you I’m always excited and eager to deliver reports to clients. Proactively delivering bad news sucks. It just really sucks. But, in the end, my clients are important to me. When I don’t perform for them – yes it happens – I want my clients to know they can (and should) hold my feet to the fire. I want my clients to know they at least deserve an explanation, and one they can understand.

If you’re going to pour 15 hours of your life into broken link building, why not spend 15 minutes on the phone explaining what the hell link building is? I use SEO-related examples as the vehicle to drive my message, but really this holds true for any industry.

The fact is this: none of my clients care that I spent 15 hours compiling a list of over 1,000 sites we found with broken links to similar resources so we can perform email outreach. Why would they care? They care about the phone ringing. Communicating how building this list will lead to the phone ringing is a must.

Content Communication is King

Often times in SEO we hear all sorts of experts talk about how to be successful: “content is king” or “you need local links” or “mobile friendliness is top priority.” Yes all of these things hold some truth, but unfortunately, none of these things matter if you fail to explain their importance.

I’m far from an expert in communication. However, I know the value of doing it well. Communication is imperative to a client’s success and both parties need to care in order to be successful. Client won’t pick up the phone? Hound them. A few polite, “I’m following up on the follow-up to my initial follow-up” emails should get your point across. Clients: You hired an agency to do the work for you, but you’re investing in yourself here. You know your business and the ‘feel’ of the impact of the work being done. Be involved in the marketing of your business. Be available when your agency needs you.

The Conclusion

Our Director, and overall awesome communicator, always reminds the team to follow this simple principle. It can pay considerable dividends in client loyalty:

“If you’re thinking about your client, shoot them an email. If you’re getting ready to send an email, pick up the phone instead.”

Is LawDingo Rolling Over Dead?

Written by

I’ve watched the legal lead generation site LawDingo with a level of interest over the past year or so… the company matches prospective clients with an attorney in real time via phone or chat.  This is obviously the direction the industry is moving – as people expect expertise on demand.  Avvo’s foray into Avvo Advisor – which promises “a great attorney on the phone in minutes” is the other big example.   I personally believe the future of legal involves technology bringing lawyers increasingly close to new clients who wouldn’t have otherwise been able to afford counsel.

But LawDingo was in a tough spot – watching them early on they relied intensively on PPC arbitrage – i.e. buying leads through Adwords/Bing and then selling access to those leads to attorneys via a monthly subscription.  This business model is extremely difficult to maintain – especially in legal, where lawyers implement irrational (read: unprofitable) bidding tactics in their irrational desire to “win” SEM.  And for LawDingo, as a lead generation service, the upside value of those PPC clicks is much lower than for an attorney who can gain a new client. The other option – SEO driven traffic is an extremely expensive undertaking.  So – from a pure economics perspective, I thought it might be tough for LawDingo to make a go of it.

Because of these economics, I’ve never had a client on LawDingo (i.e. why pay a vendor to pay a advertiser, when you can go directly to the advertiser), but I’ve been curious to see how this direct access to attorneys model performs.

But it looks like this month, LawDingo may have pulled the plug on PPC:

LawDingo

Now the data above is from Spyfu – and for smaller sites, I’ve found their data is rarely accurate, but directionally relevant. I called LawDingo and they said that yes they had dropped their ad spend (although they didn’t specify how much), but that they were still up and running.   But if the Spyfu data is even moderately accurate, I’m not sure what their advertisers are actually getting.  I’d love to chat with any subscribers to hear your experience in inquiry volume in July…

 

 

 

 

7 Signs Your SEO Agency Might be Less Than Legit

Written by

black-hat-catPicture yourself in this situation: You hire an SEO agency and suddenly your website appears for every conceivable keyword. Traffic skyrockets. You hire a new receptionist just to handle the call volume. You clink champagne glasses with your team to celebrate your great success. Life is good.

Then, all of a sudden, traffic plummets. Your website drops from the top of page one in the search engines to the bottom of page ten. The phones fall silent. You switch from champagne to stale coffee. You begin to panic.

When asked about the change, the SEO agency gives you some excuse about Google algorithm changes, or rattles off some obtuse technobabble and assures you that everything is ok. You give it a few more months, and still no change. When you review the numbers with your accountant it turns out that your loss in business over the last few months far outweighs any benefit you may have gained from that initial ranking. At about this time, that same SEO agency stops responding to your phone calls.

The above scenario is a common one for anyone who has unknowingly engaged with a black hat agency. These agencies use manipulative and easily detectable tactics to get a website to rank temporarily, and then when Google catches wind of these tactics, the site gets penalized–a penalty that often takes months to recover from, even in the hands of the most experienced penalty recovery specialists.

While we haven’t found a black hat SEO firm that actually markets itself as “Black Hat” we do have clients whose sites have received heavy penalties due to a previous agency’s tactics. I took a look at some of these black hat firms’ websites to find some possible warning signs that you might be dealing with black hats. Here are some things I noticed:

1. There isn’t any mention of “white hat” on their website

If there’s one thing I’ve noticed from reading black hat forum posts, it’s that they typically disdain white hat tactics as being “unnecessary hard work”. This is why they tend not to falsely brand themselves as a white hat agency. Also, if  you market yourself as a white hat agency and actually don’t do white hat work, chances are you will ruin your reputation and perhaps even open yourself up to a lawsuit.

2.”Confidential” or “Proprietary” SEO Trade Secrets

The only “confidential” SEO tactics that I know of are black hat methods. Essentially, if they’re not willing to tell you how they work, they have something to hide.

3. SEO and Account Management are separate departments

If the representative of the agency you’re working with can’t answer your SEO questions and refers you to a “technical department” whenever you have a technical question, this could be a warning sign. After all, it’s easier for account managers and sales managers to sell you on a bad product if they themselves don’t know the product is bad.

4. “Guaranteed Rankings”

While a pay-for-performance system based on keyword rankings seems promising, they are often misleading. How are they misleading? First of all, it can often be very easy to rank high for keywords that have low competition or low volume in terms of people who are actually using that search term. Second, it can be very easy to temporarily gain a foothold for certain keyword rankings using spammy black hat tactics. These are tactics that will ultimately hurt your business in the long term.

5. Where are the Names?

If you go to a firm’s website and notice that not a single person’s name is mentioned, be wary. The last thing a black hat SEO or spammer wants to do is associate their name with black hat practices (should they get caught or get bad reviews). In these cases. it may be best to steer clear.

6.They Actually Mention Black Hat Tactics

Just because an SEO is black hat doesn’t mean that they won’t be forthright about what they do. One black hat SEO I know of actually mentioned to his client the black hat tactics he would use to get them to rank. Of course, the client didn’t know they were black hat tactics at the time. If your SEO agency mentions that they do any of the following, run:

  • Article Directory Submissions
  • Blog Networks
  • Doorway or Gateway Pages
  • Microsites
  • Mirror Sites
  • Comment and Trackback Link Building
  • Link Farms

7. What would Google Do (WWGD)?

Google’s goal is to serve to users the highest quality and most relevant content to its searchers. When interviewing an SEO Agency it’s important to keep that in mind. If your agency doesn’t actually help make your site more relevant to your target market, and instead uses an arsenal of “SEO Tricks” to get your website to rank, then chances are you’re being taken for a ride. If someone at an agency mentions questionable tactic to you, a simple question to ask would be: “Wouldn’t that incur a Google Penalty?” If their answer to that is less than convincing, you may want to start looking for another agency.

Have you had an experience with a less than legit agency? Please feel free to share some other signs of blackhattery in the comments!

Online Reputation Management: How to do Reviews

Written by

Reputation management is yet another candidate in a long list of considerations you need to take into account when managing your online presence. In addition to proactively keeping your citations correct, building links, posting fresh content, structuring your site, and on and on, it can be tiring to know there’s one more thing that threatens to undermine your hard work and past successes. But anyone who tells you marketing is easy is a liar. There’s a reason this is our job.

 

What is reputation management? Why is it important?

The concept of reputation management is as simple as it sounds. If you want to be found (and subsequently hired), you need to put your information out on the internet. Moz’s 2014 Local Search Ranking Factor survey listed review signals as having 10% of total influence on search rankings. In addition, online reviews are trusted more than ads in almost every medium, and 35% of clients say they use online reviews to research new attorneys (thanks to the legal technology team at Software Advice for going out of their way to provide the raw info from that study). Having profile pages on sites like Avvo, Yelp, Google+, etc., makes you more likely to be found when someone searches for your practice. But getting clients isn’t just about whether your online presence is big or small, it’s also about whether that presence is good or bad. It doesn’t matter if you’re the top of the local pack for “personal injury lawyer New York” – if you show a 1-star average from 10 reviews, people will skip over you and go to the next attorney in line.

Managing your reputation means getting high-quality reviews from clients across multiple platforms, making sure those ratings are glowing and natural (no spam!), and dealing with bad reviews as they occur. It also means ranking well for search results directly related to your business, so that your results stand above any bad PR pieces that show up in the SERPs. But that’s a lot of moving pieces, so this post is just going to focus on one of the most obvious parts: getting good reviews. Let’s look into what you can do to have a great online reputation.

 

Getting clients to review you

The most important step towards getting good reviews is providing excellent service. You will find it very hard to get praise if you don’t deserve it. But once you’ve jumped over that minor hurdle, the next the best catalyst for reviews is asking. If you don’t ask for reviews, the only people who will give you any are the ones who seek out opportunities to do so. This usually lends to you looking worse online than in real life because angry clients are far more likely to go out of their way to review than happy ones.

At Mockingbird, we find that the best way to ask for reviews is in person after the case is over, then letting clients fill out the review in their own time afterwards. Strike up a conversation when the client comes by to fill out paperwork or make a payment, and tell them how much a review means to your business. Getting a verbal agreement from your client is one of the most effective means of guaranteeing they will review you afterwards. Look them in the eye, and gain their approval with a handshake. After that meeting, make the process is easy as possible by following up with an email linking them to your relevant profile(s) – except for Yelp, more on that in a bit. Another benefit of asking for reviews individually is that you can pick and choose who you want to represent you online. If you won a case but you don’t think the client will be receptive, consider not reaching out for a review.

Some people just don’t have the time to watch all their review sites and check in with each individual client, so they turn to automated review management tools like GetFiveStars or other automatic review solicitors. The usual trick with these is to send an initial email asking for feedback. If the reviewer gives a low score, they are thanked for their opinion and nothing else is done. If the review gives a high score, they are instead prompted to voice their opinions on one of several sites. We’ve tried this before, but our conversion rates were almost non-existent. The major problem is that this tactic is used for business with large client volumes, like restaurants or hair salons. Law firms and attorneys don’t deal with nearly as many clients, so you end up with a pretty bad return on investment. If you’re still interested in watching for reviews, consider a tracking software like ReviewTrackers so you don’t have to constantly visit your Justia and Avvo profiles.

 

Optimizing your impact

The strength of reviews is dependent on a lot of factors beyond your average ranking. Moz’s 2014 Local Search Ranking Factors survey emphasizes the following:

  • Quantity of reviews
  • Authority of sites hosting those reviews
  • Diversity of sites hosting those reviews
  • Freshness of reviews, and the rate those reviews were added
  • Whether your rating shows up next to your search result (need 5 or more Google+ reviews)

The first on that list is quantity, which has become more important over the past year. Only about 8% of potential customers consider a business trustworthy if there is 1 review. For 85% of potential clients to consider you trustworthy, it’s good to have at least 10 reviews. Now these should be quality reviews so you can’t expect this to be done in a few days or even a few months. Like everything in SEO, good reputation management takes time.

In addition, you should be aware of what sites your reviews show up on, because there are a lot of options. A surprisingly large amount of users go through Yelp, along with Super Lawyers, Martindale-Hubbell, and Avvo. You can get reviews on Google+, Avvo, Justia, Yelp, and other directories, but ask your clients where they found your business so you what to focus on.

Yelp is a unique beast in that they don’t want you to ask your clients for reviews, something we’ve discussed in one of our LMQ videos. However, Yelp’s suggested ways to “remind customers”, such as profile links in your e-mail signature or stickers on your business door, aren’t effective for attorneys (and can be very tacky). We firmly believe that you should still proactively ask your clients for reviews, but avoid invoking Yelp’s ire by not explicitly stating where to go. A softer approach is more appropriate: “We really appreciate reviews because it helps our web presence, several places you can go are: [your top 3 targeted directories]”. In a follow-up email, don’t send them a direct link to your Yelp page, but ask them to search for your name.

Important Note: Even though you won’t be regarded as trustworthy if you have no reviews, potential clients will find you even less trustworthy if you have mostly bad reviews. Do not ask for a review unless you’re confident it will be a positive one.

 

The evils of astroturfing

It’s common to want an easy way out of this problem. Despite your best efforts, clients may not be likely to review you and not every review will be a raving 5 stars. At these times it may be tempting to look for another way to get your ratings up. But fight the urge. In addition to be less than fair to potential clients, it’s also dangerous for you.

Yelp is big on keeping reviews legitimate. They’ve sued attorneys for faking reviews before (we blogged about that incident), and they go over reviews to make sure nothing looks spammy or forced. Avvo will investigate reviews by hand multiple times, even to the point of asking reviewers to provide evidence that they worked with given attorneys. Remember that these sites make their livelihood off of consumers’ trust, so they are just as willing to crack down on scummy review practices as potential clients are. Even state governments have taken action against fake reviewing companies.

There are other tactics out there from attorneys and firms trying to slip under the radar. But this is the same story with so much of SEO – people try to game the system, and sometimes succeed for a short time, then get smacked once the system improves. Remember that if you want a good reputation, the best thing you can do is provide excellent service. Once people are willing to talk about how great you are, just nudge them in the right direction.

 

We’d love to hear your feedback in the field of review management. Have you used review management software? What do you think is the best way to get reviews? What do you think of Yelp’s opinion on review solicitation? Let us know in the comments.

You can find the sequel to this post here: Dealing With Bad reviews

Linkwheel Spam, The Truth Network and Judith Swift

Written by

The purpose of this post is to demonstrate just how far the search engines have to go in combating spam.  (Alternatively, its a callout to force the issue for law firms to make a very careful decision about where you want to stand on the black hat vs. white hat tactical spectrum.)

Mockingbird sees a lot of legacy spam tactics; in fact a large portion of our engagements start with what we internally call Janitorial SEO – cleaning up the messes generated by previous agencies to regain lost business. Every now and then we see one of those ancient tactics that still seems to work. What follows is a Link Wheel case study – a tactic that could have generated manual penalties back in the 2010-2012 era and should have been obliterated during the multiple Penguin updates, starting in 2013.  (And no, I don’t have a Dallas bankruptcy lawyer looking to burn this firm.)

First, let’s start with what looks to be a rudimentary implementation of a linkwheel.  Check out the Copyright notice in Judith Swift’s footer:

CopyrightOr should I call it the C o p y r i g h t (complete with spaces)?   Roll over each of those letters individually and whoo hoo…. its links to some new content on Judith’s page.  [And let’s ignore the geo spam while we’re at it, although I have to call out the spectacular brazenness of the “SEO by TheTruthNetworks.com” sitting right next to this.]

Linkwheel 2

Wonder what happens when I click through….

Linkwheel 3

That, my friends, is an old school linkwheel – a series of sites literally linked together in order to drive search engine traffic. Enjoy the disclaimer which includes “the links are provided solely as a convenience to users of this web site.”  Right, because someone looking for a bankruptcy attorney in Texas, might simultaneously be looking for a new home in Toronto, or a photographer in Colorado, or an English bookshop in Tokyo, or “premium virgin hair extensions”, which makes me wonder what non-premium, non-virgin hair is.  But I digress.

Of course, none of this matters – perhaps we’re really just looking at a dated legacy site – if the site doesn’t perform.  But we find that not only does it perform, it performs really well….

.  Linkwheel

That’s a pretty strong showing for Judith Swift – 2nd ad, 2nd local result and 2nd natural result.  So… is this really an active, functional linkwheel?  Are there unrelated sites propping up judithswift.com?  Let’s see….

Here’s one from a Canadian bridal boutique…

Linkwheel 6

And a retirement home directory…

Linkwheel 5

A Floridian patio furniture retailer…

linkwheel 4

My favorite is the UK based eyeglass retailer who includes the following disclaimer on their page:

The following links are not recommended or approved by us.  They are simply members of the same programme to help encourage visitors to each others sites…

Linkwheel 7

All in all, hundreds and hundreds of domains with these links – and you could suggest that perhaps they’ve gone through a disavow process BUT – the linkwheel is still alive and kicking on judithswift.com.

Summary

I don’t know Judith and I don’t have any clients in Dallas – for all I know, she knows nothing of her marketing tactics. I’m simply trying to demonstrate a) how very far the search engines have to go and b) that black hat tactics really do work – even tactics that should have been burnt years ago. This is why by-the-book SEO can be extremely expensive.

8 Questions to Determine if your SEO Expert is… an SEO Expert

Written by

What follows is an admittedly arrogant post.  And I’m transgressing on a principle I teach my kids – you can’t build yourself up by knocking others down.  BUT… I keep talking to law firms, flummoxed by the lack of results from their SEO experts, only to find some really rudimentary mistakes.  What follows are a few questions to suss out just how expert your SEO talent really is.

1.  My site was hit by a Penguin Penalty – how do I get my traffic back?

Platitudes around the disavow process are often the answer to this question – and while disavow is important (and easy, if not tedious) – it is NOT sufficient.  A Penguin Penalty recovery involves not just removing the offending links, but replacing the value they had previously delivered to your site with new links. White hat linkbuilding is the hard, creative, uncertain, expensive and most valuable thing SEOs can do.  In fact, it is so difficult, that many “SEOs” don’t even try.

2.  How do you use Screaming Frog?

Screaming Frog is an extremely flexible tool used to scrape and analyze key elements of a domain at the page level.  It can identify everything from your duplicated title tags to broken links on competitors’ pages.  As analytics rock-star, Annie Cushing said,

“if you aren’t using Screaming Frog, you aren’t really doing SEO.”

Wait for the awkward silence when you ask this question…

3.  What are the last conferences your staff has been to?  Have you spoken at any?

Technology is ever changing – and agencies have a responsibility to keep up with those changes.  Reading Search Engine Land is a good starting point, but ultimately there is nothing to replace being in the middle of the action, interacting with the experts at geek-centric conferences such as SMX, Mozcon, and Pubcon.  Ideally your SEO expert has spoken at some of these conferences (and I don’t mean pay-for-shill talks, thinly veiled as legal marketing conferences.)

4.  We’re writing about 4 blog posts a week, should we keep it up?

SEO “experts” often quote the tired “Content is King” refrain to answer this question and perhaps delve into the vagaries of long-tail theory.  The reality is, vomiting out more low quality content does nothing more than convince the search engines that your site is full of… low quality content.  This problem was greatly exacerbated by web marketers between 2012 and 2014 who did little more than parrot “Content is King” at legal marketing conferences.

The, “should I keep spewing out more content?” question is best answered by using Google Analytics to review your posts for traffic and links.   If you find that 90% of those pages have no inbound traffic, very few pageviews and that no-one has linked to your rewrites of local car accidents thinly copied from the local newspaper, you might want to switch up your content strategy. Conversely, if you find all of your content is seeing action, then by all means, keep writing.  Read more here: SEO Regicide.

5.  We use Yext, so we don’t worry about NAP consistency.  Right?

Yext is just one tool in the NAP consistency fight (NAP – Name, Address and Phone Number) and while Yext handles roughly 50 major second tier directories, it does NOT manage the top 4 data aggregators; Moz’s Local product does.  Therefore, if you’re relying on tools to improve your NAP consistency, it’s important to utilize more than one — both Moz and Yext, for example.  Additionally, both tools need to be proactively monitored and managed to have a real impact – especially if you are dealing with a name change, address change, cleaning up geo-spam or eradicating poorly implemented tracking numbers.  Finally, neither Moz or Yext handles legal specific directories such as FindLaw or Avvo.  Solid legal SEOs have a list of legal specific directories that require manual management as well.

6.  Are heading tags built into my site’s template?

This is a question you can diagnose yourself.  Just because someone can (poorly) code a website, does not make them an SEO expert.  Review the heading tags across your site to see if a lazy or uninformed web developer has used them to style the template.  We had one site with the H1 tag copied across every single page of his site.  Oh – and it read “original text”.  This issue seems so simplistic, yet I see it repeatedly.  To do this, you can view source and search for H1, H2, etc., install SEO quake into Firefox and use the Diagnosis button for a page by page review, or if you are feeling ambitious (and have a site with fewer than 400 pages), use the aforementioned Screaming Frog.

7.  We want to launch a new website focused on <insert specific practice area>.

This is a favorite request for website developers who pretend to be SEOs.  They’ll churn out “SEO optimized” websites upon request and delivery of a nice fat check.  Of course, they are missing the aforementioned difficult part of SEO: linkbuilding (see question #1).  The reality is, from a linkbuilding, NAP and citations perspective, marketing two sites is more than twice as expensive as marketing one.  And if you go off the deep end with a full blown multi-domain strategy, you’d better have a very deep bank account.  Multiple domains can be appropriate for a firm with disparate practice areas – say DUI and Family law – but note that you’ll be investing extra marketing dollars to push both of them successfully.

And for my bonus question, we get #8 about social media…

8. Will you help us get more Facebook Likes and Twitter Followers to help our SEO?

This goes back to another SEO theory that has been dead for at least 3 years – that social media popularity drives search results.  Multiple spokespeople from The Google have been crystal clear that this is NOT the case.  Note that there can be a correlation between the two – with savvy content marketers using their wide and active social network to push great content to key influencers, which drives links, which drives traffic, but… ignore the social media marketers parading as SEOs who suggest the key to ranking for “Atlanta Divorce Lawyer” is a few thousand more twitter followers from Uzbekistan.

Except for Pinterest.  You totally should do that.  Really – it works.   Trust me, I’m an SEO Expert.

Google Mobile Penalty Study Week 1 – mobile friendly +8%, unfriendly -4%

Written by

So we are a full week into Google’s well publicized mobile friendly algo update (or penalty, depending on how you want to market it) and at this point I’m regretting my decision to publish day-to-day updates as frankly, there’s been very little to update.  So far, in aggregate across the 59 sites we’re tracking, we’re seeing average daily mobile search traffic up 8% on mobile optimized sites and down 4% on non-mobile friendly sites.

Hardly the search traffic apocalypse forecasted by SEO geeks and The Google.  And remember, mobile natural search traffic represents just a portion of overall legal webite traffic, so this blip doesn’t register meaningfully on anyone’s radar.  Representatives from The Google assured us that the roll-out could take, a week, perhaps a week and a half to fully roll out so perhaps there’s more to be seen, but so far it looks like the only thing the Google mobile update has done is push a little more work to website developers.

In the graph below, the blue bars represent mobile friendly sites, the red ones, not-so-mobile-friendly.

mobile day 7