Yoast is an SEO plugin that can help your website meet the “highest technical SEO standards.”

One important feature is its ability to control how your site appears in search results. The search appearance settings include: general, content types, media, taxonomies, archives, breadcrumbs, and RSS. In this article we will review the best practices set up of each tab. Many of the settings you choose will be dependent on your preference, and we will cover how to make the best choice for your firm.

 

General

General Yoast settings include your default meta title separator, schema setting, and organization title and logo information.

Title Separator

The title separator is used in your default meta title settings. At Mockingbird, we use the pipe separator in all meta titles. We do this because this separator uses few pixels appears professional in search results.

Example

Schema Settings

It is recommended that you select “organization” for your schema settings regardless of whether you are a multi-attorney or solo practice.

Organization Information

Make sure that your firm name is entered as it appears in your Google My Business listing for NAP consistency. This information will be embedded in the back end code of your site for search engines to crawl. It may also appear in search results.

Content Types

In this section you will specify what the default search appearance should be for any type of content you have. You can decide which types of content should appear in search results and what the default meta title will be (SEO settings). You can also decide a default meta description, but we do not recommend using this field. Each page should have a unique meta description specific to the content on the page. You should either manually write one for each page (recommended), or allow search engines to determine which content to grab from the page for the meta description.

Pages & Posts

Your pages and posts should be shown in search results. We do not recommend showing the date of publication in search results for pages. The publication date of say the homepage is not relevant, and showing that a page was published multiple years ago may detract users. However, you may choose to show the publication date for a post; this is entirely up to you.

Other Content Types

Your settings for additional content types (based on your website development) is dependent on your SEO strategy. On Mockingbird’s website we also have FAQ and Event content types, which we have chosen to set up identically to our page settings.

Media Settings

Make sure that your media and attachment URLs redirect to the attachment itself. If this setting is set to “no” a page will be created for each file, inflating your website with unnecessary pages. These pages will detract search engine attention from your important content, such as practice area pages.

Taxonomies & Archives

In the context of content marketing, taxonomy is simply the organization of content. Most commonly, this includes categories and tags that are applied to posts. In the taxonomies sections of Yoast, you can decide whether your categories and tags will appear in search results and how they will appear. Should your category and tag pages be indexed? To answer this, ask yourself if the pages add value to users. If the answer is no, then these pages should be no-indexed, or removed entirely. Before making this decision it is best to check traffic to these pages using Google Analytics and ensure that there are no links being pointed to these pages using Ahrefs. The same advice applies to archive pages, such as post author and date archives.

Breadcrumbs

According to the Online Marketing Institute, “Breadcrumbs add another form of navigation for visitors to find their way around your Web site. They build out a logical path of what pages have been visited and where they are in relation to the site flow.”

Below is an example of bread crumbs appearing in search results and a post through the Yoast plugin.

To implement Yoast’s SEO breadcrumbs you will need to edit the theme of your website. Yoast has created an in-depth guide to enabling breadcrumbs. It is not critical that you have bread crumbs enabled on your website, but you may wish to enable them for usability purposes.

RSS

The RSS feed settings prevent web scrapers from republishing your content without credit. The default settings here should be sufficient, adding a piece of text to the bottom of a scraped piece of content with a link to your original blog post.

Here at Mockingbird, we are constantly getting asked about how law firms should run their blogs. Is it better to have a separate site? Should it be on the main site? If it’s on the firm’s main site, should it be on a subdomain (blog.xyzfirm.com) or a subfolder (xyzfirm.com/blog/)?  This is my attempt to answer these questions and dispel any misconceptions that may be floating around. Let’s dive right in.

Should my legal blog live on my firm’s site?

I’ll get right to it. For a law firm, the blog should live in a subfolder (xyzfirm.com/blog/) on the main site. How was that for short and sweet?

From an SEO perspective, this is critical. By merging the two sites, you are allowing both entities to benefit from the same backlinks. When one gets a new valuable backlink, they both benefit. Combining sites also allows for a seamless user experience and a shorter conversion journey for potential clients. If you have a blog that discusses the intricacies of employment law in Texas and you handle employment law in Texas, why would you want to send clients to a separate site?

I’d suggest checking out this case study that highlights the value of merging an off-site blog onto the firm’s main site.

Should my blog be on a subdomain (blog.xyzfirm.com) or a subfolder (xyzfirm.com/blog/)?

If you want to fully capitalize on the joint SEO value, it is extremely important to use a subfolder. Google looks at subdomains as separate websites and the value of the backlinks will not be shared between the main site and blog.

Did I mention the case study yet?

When does a separate blog make sense?

I know my answer to the first question was pretty definitive, but that is because we are discussing specifically legal sites. Outside the legal industry, there are plenty of situations that a separate blog makes sense. If you run a nature photography blog, there is no reason to connect that to your business site (well unless you own an outdoor recreation company). Or maybe you want to eventually sell the business, but keep running the blog (or vice versa). Then you should keep them separate.

In my experience, I have yet to run into a time where a legal

What do I do If my firm has an offsite blog?

Call Us! Our team has the experience and knowledge it takes to handle this migration seamlessly.  Let us help your firm fully capitalizes on your situation and turn two sites into one much stronger asset.

Third times the charm, read this case study. I promise you won’t regret it.

At Mockingbird we are always searching for and adopting tools that provide our clients with the best service possible. One of the tools that we use as a standard in addition to WPEngine for all of our website hosting and maintenance clients is Cloudflare. More than just a Content Delivery Network (CDN), Cloudflare provides enhanced security, performance, and reliability for our client’s websites.

Security

Cloudflare stops malicious traffic before it reaches your website by analyzing potential threats in visitor requests. Some of the characteristics that are analyzed are a visitor’s IP address, the resource requested, request payload and frequency, and defined firewall rules.

When specific DNS records are Proxied a Cloudflare IP address is returned when a DNS look is executed. This masks your origin IP address so attackers aren’t able to bypass Cloudflare and directly attack your origin web server using DNS records.

One security feature that we use frequently for clients is firewall rules. This allows us to block traffic to the website from a specific country, IP address, or bot. Helping prevent spammy form fills, potential attacks, and eliminate website traffic we know won’t convert into a client.

Performance

Cloudflare optimizes the delivery of website resources for visitors by using its robust network of data centers. These data centers serve your website’s static resources and ask your origin web server for dynamic content. Their global network of data centers provides a faster route from your website to a website visitor that would just be directly requesting the site. Helping to improve website load speed for clients across the united states and globally.

Reliability

Cloudflare’s globally distributed anycast network routes visitor requests to the nearest Cloudflare data center. Dynamically responding to website visitor requests providing predictability and reliability when bandwidth fluctuates. Cloudflare does not have bandwidth limits for domains to be able to provide reliable billing for CDN and DDoS expenses.

Why Not?

These features and benefits all help provide a faster and safer experience for your potential clients. A free service that runs silently in the background keeping the website your firm up and running. Let us know if you have any questions or would like information on our website maintenance package so you have more time to focus on your firm.

 

The past 10 years have seen constant chatter about voice search in the SEO world and beyond. What impact, if any, will the near ubiquitous access to voice command have on how people find information online? If someone is, say, looking to hire a lawyer, we can imagine that the query they’re using to find said lawyer is different when they’re typing, vs. when they’re talking to their Google Assistant. Initially, a surge of panic gripped SEOs to ensure that all content across websites was “long-tail” optimized. This was meant to ensure that queries that were a bit more rambling and long-winded due to the ease of speaking directly to search engines were captured.

Initial Growth

Introduced in 2011, voice search started off as more of a fun feature than something relied upon by users. I even remember using early siri with friends as a joke, anticipating, and often receiving, an answer miles off from the question asked. But over the years technology has improved and users have started to adapt voice search technology, no small part as a result of smart home assistants like Amazon Echo and Google Assistant. Now, in 2020, studies indicate that more than 50% of phone users take part in voice search on their device. eMarketer predicted that one third or more of phone users in the US use voice search on a monthly basis by 2019, and increases in the search for “Hey Google” paints a telling picture:

Plateau

Despite all the initial interest, things seem to have hit a wall. Survey data from Perficient Digital, which involves annual surveys of 1,000 US adults, is showing a pause in the increasing enthusiasm for voice search. They’ve been asking users, among other questions: “How are you most likely to ask questions on your smartphone?”. In prior years, search ranked as the second most popular answer to this question, only behind “mobile browser”. The most recent study done in 2020 however, tells a different story:

Voice search shows up as the fourth most popular option, after 3 other typed alternatives.

 

What does this mean for search? It’s hard to say. My two cents says that this is just a hiccup in a larger movement towards voice search coming into the forefront of online searching. If your benchmark is all the hype you’ve been hearing over the past five years, you may be disappointed. But common sense points towards voice search taking over type search in popularity at some point down the road, if for no other reason than shear convenience, it’s just a question of when.

Laws of UX are a collection of design heuristics created by Jon Yablonski to help designers leverage psychology to create more human-centered experiences. You can find explanations for each law on the website lawsofux.com, as well as an in-depth case study regarding his thought process on his website, jonyablonski.com

This will be a series of blog posts briefly covering the many laws and how they can help designers create better experiences for law firms.

 

1) Hick’s Law

“Users often perceive aesthetically pleasing design as design that’s more usable.”

Users tend to assume that things that look better will work better, even if they aren’t actually more productive. Users who visit your website may have a positive emotional response to the visual design of your website, making them more tolerant of minor usability issues while using your site. When I say “minor usability issues” I mean text with low contrast, spelling errors, or typography that isn’t consistent. The Aesthetic Usability Effect does have its limits and when the design puts aesthetics over usability, users will lose patience and leave your site.

For example, I have seen law firm websites that include huge hero images on practice area pages that cover the entire screen without including any information until moving down the page. The page may look appealing at first with a large, beautiful image at the top, however, the image that is taking up the entire screen may be seen as an annoyance once they are trying to complete specific tasks.

 

 

2) Jakob’s Law

“Productivity soars when a computer and its users interact at a pace (<400ms) that ensures that neither has to wait on the other.”

Fast websites are fun to use. Laggy, slow response websites suck. The longer it takes for your website to respond to a request, the longer your user is taking to think of what they want to do next. If you keep your users waiting, they will find what they are looking for on another law firm’s site. As a general rule, you want to provide feedback to a user’s request within 400ms in order to keep their attention.

If your website has any loading screens that aren’t imperative to the functionality of the site, fancy page transitions, or anything else that may slow down their experience with your site, you are doing more harm than good with those “cool” features.

 

 

3) Law of Common Region

“The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.”

A touch target is an area that responds to user input. Make sure that all touch targets are large enough for users to understand their functionality and easily accessible for users to interact with.

Many law firm websites (and websites in general) have touch targets that aren’t clearly visible or are located in hard to reach places from where a users finger can reach(looking at you hamburger menus located at the top left or right on mobile screens). Make sure any touch target on your website is easily recognizable and accessible to avoid confusing your users.

 

 

Stay tuned for the next post in this series where I go over Law of Proximity, Law of Similarity, and the Law of Uniform Connectedness.

Yesterday, I got together with two long term Mockingbird partners, Smith.ai and CallRail to discuss the practice of maximizing conversions, the reporting infrastructure required to evaluate marketing mix like an MBA would and the importance of monitoring the quality of your intake approach. Intake conversion epitomizes the need for a perfect mix of agency, technology and humanity required to optimize the delicate balance of the art and science of conversion.  Have a listen…

 

Hot off the Google notifications press…Google is updating their Ads Policies policies specifically to move against Clickbait. This seems consistent with their overall messaging around quality content and user experience. Google describes the policy:

The ‘Clickbait Ads Policy’ will cover advertisements which demonstrate clickbait tactics or use sensationalist text or imagery to drive traffic. Additionally, this policy will prohibit ads which use negative life events or strong negative emotions to pressure the viewer to take immediate action.

Now – a lot of legal issues do involve strong negative emotions and do require immediate action.

Further, the specific language Google uses to describe these upcoming changes seems to be directly targeting the legal industry:

Ads that use negative life events such as death, accidents, illness, arrests or bankruptcy to induce fear, guilt or other strong negative emotions to pressure the viewer to take immediate action.

I’m not quite sure how a bankruptcy, injury, or criminal defense lawyer can not run afoul of these specifications.  This holds true for other facets of law as well…divorce, immigration, etc.

The gray area here is around the end user’s personal mindset…but the reality remains that if we really can’t advertise around these issues a lot of the legal marketplace goes back to…organic!  (Ok – perhaps that’s some wishful thinking on my part, but…).

Stay tuned, I’ve invited Google to join us to talk through these questions as part of our Google Premier Partnership. If you’d like notification of when that talk will be (literally – I’m getting this info out to you before I can set up a date)… sign up for our newsletter.

We will get through this crisis stronger than we ever were, but first we have to get through it.

I’m glad to say that Cockroach has returned to Mockingbird.

It’s time to look towards our new normal of life after COVID-19. By now, most law firms have settled in to their new normal, with limited insight into how long this normal will last.  As the country prepares to “reopen” through a regional patchwork of varying approaches its important for Cockroach Mockingbird to help our clients emerge from this as well – ideally stronger than before.  I’ll leave the political squabbles about the wisdom of the reopening timing of reopening to the unqualified social media trolls. Now it’s time for us to focus on law firms not just surviving, but thriving after during COVID.

Lets be clear – this is not hitting all firms equally. The difference are marked by region and dramatically by practice area. Some are thriving, some are still struggling. Patent attorneys are swamped as idle minds spin at home coming up with newest new thing. Employment lawyers are flooded with eager, albeit baseless prospects. DUI lawyers have gone dark and are exploring temporarily pivoting to bankruptcy. Wills and estate planning attorneys are busy as the collective populace contemplates their mortality. Everyone we know has adjusted and altered their tactical outlook. I spoke with a client this weekend about cancelling their $12K/month linkbuilding retainer.  Smaller firms have updated their outdated sites with our free Frecho WoredPress website. Across our client list, as Google Ads costs have increased by 42% larger firms have reallocated their advertising budgets away from Personal Injury.  Oh yeah, and then Google decided to throw in a massive algo update to upset the entire apple cart in the middle of all of this.

We changed our brand temporarily from Mockingbird to Cockroach to focus on the survival of our clients during the CORONA Crisis. Cockroach – the adaptable, innovative, opportunistic, skittering, nauseating, and yes, disease-resistant arthropod that not only survives, but actually thrives in disaster. Whether you agree with it or not, the American economy is moving forward and its time for our clients to do the same.

Cockroach is now Mockingbird.