Avvo in SEO Traffic Free Fall

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The legal directory, Avvo looks to be in complete SEO meltdown mode.  As the guy who architected Avvo’s SEO ascendancy, I take no level of schadenfreude in this… but four different data points over the past few months suggest to me that Avvo is suffering a complete SEO traffic meltdown.

Avvo was sold to Internet Brands (parent company of Nolo, Martindale and a panoply of other legal brands) about two years ago and quickly saw the abrupt departure of most of the C suite. Since the acquisition, we’ve seen little (if anything?) innovative coming out of the company and it looked Internet Brands’ plans was to simply focus on operating efficiencies and milk the cash cow.

It looks like the cow may be dying. Four data points corroborate to paint a story of a site in rapid decline.

1.  SEO Ranking Failings

According to rank tracking data, Avvo’s appearance in high value Organic Search results (think “car accident attorney Seattle”) has plummeted from a consistent 2% of market share to….. zero. In general, I eschew using SEO ranking as an indicator of success; however, it can be used when looking at competitors… which include legal directories when you are a law firm competing for keywords.

The chart below showcases a study of 4 short tail legal keywords across the country as tracked by legal marketing nerd, Gyi Tsakalakis. This past week, Avvo fell below .05% marketshare and simply doesn’t register at all.  Now, their longer tail, Answers product may still be bringing in traffic, as may name search queries (although that has become much more competitive since I left) but they seem to be no longer appearing for high volume, high converting, money keywords.

2. Ahrefs Traffic Value Data

I looked at Avvo on the Ahrefs Traffic Value graph, which shows a record low number for Avvo.  The traffic value graph is essentially a combination of keyword rankings cross referenced with the value (defined by PPC data) of those keywords. Like all of these third party tools, its horrendously inaccurate; however, directionally informative, but if you lend any credence to this type of data, the value of Avvo’s traffic has dropped by 90% from its zenith. Also note while Ahrefs does show a drop in traffic overall, the traffic value shows a much greater loss – again suggesting these changes are in Avvo’s performance in high value keywords instead of the more generic name or longer tail, informational searches.

3.  Ad hoc Comments by Lawyers

This drop in marketshare has been noted by lawyer advertisers. We’ve been hearing from individual lawyers noting a precipitous drop-off in leads coming from Avvo. I’d be curious if anyone has similar experience…. feel free to share in the comments.

4.  Layoffs

About 3 weeks ago, Avvo quietly laid off a portion of their sales staff. I don’t know how large those layoffs were, but from what I’ve been told, employees were informed jobs were safe and secure only to have the firm do an abrupt about face just weeks later. How do I know this? I’ve been interviewing ex Avvo people (yes Mockingbird is hiring during this uncertain time.) The timing of the layoffs coincides with what we’re seeing as an overall decline in ranking performance.

This may be temporary, it may be addressable, it may be related to COVID, it may be a strange shuffle in Google’s algo, but at this point, the present doesn’t look great for Avvo. Note – I did reach out to Avvo for comment last week, but they have not gotten back to me.

Nofollow Links Can Be Useful Too

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The state of links is ever-changing, with new rules and guidelines to follow it can be confusing. Google’s John Muller was back recently challenging the way that we we think about links and ranks. As he fielded questions, Muller demonstrated that sometimes the way we think about SEO isn’t entirely correct. Offering advice on how to fight for top rankings.

Everyone knows the importance of links but what about dofollow versus nofollow? Over time most people have come to an understanding that dofollow links deliver greater value when fighting for top rankings. Versus nofollow links that may be easier to achieve but hardly bring any value at all. This is where Muller challenged this traditional thinking stating that dofollow links are no longer needed for rankings as well as nofollow links can be useful, too.

Google uses new rules that allow nofollow links to count as a link signal. This means that a normal nofollow link from normal websites may count as a link. This benefits sites that operate in niche markets where sites tend to link to each other with nofollow links. It could also apply to new websites that may only have nofollow links and have not had the time to gain dofollow links. Using this type of link as a signal for ranking is still beneficial for Google to be able to discover and display these sites in search.

It is important to remember that promoting your firm is about more than getting links. Building traffic to a website is about being proactive and similar to building traffic to a brick and mortar. In both instances, you have to figure out ways to make your business be different in order to be notable and better than competitors. Evaluate what top-ranking competitors are doing and focus on their innovations rather than traditional ranking signals. Continue to challenge what we know to know as the standard to look for innovation and continued to promote your firm in search.

 

5 Ways to Give Back During A Pandemic

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COVID-19 is hurting some more than others. We’ve all heard that those with compromised immunes systems (asthma, diabetes, heart disease), and the elderly are more at risk of becoming severely ill with the virus. On top of this, more and more we’re starting to see the economic fallout of much of the planet not going in to work. First we saw the food and hospitality industry hit particularly hard as large groups were banned, then airlines began to feel it as people started taking self-isolation more seriously and eliminated travel. Now we’re starting to see the ripples across most all other industries.

So this situation has a lot of people wondering how they can help. Here are a few suggestions.

1. Get Informed

First things first, get informed. Quite simply, knowledge is power, and the more you know about what’s happening in the world the easier it is to stay calm and help. As COVID-19 progresses, the medical community is quickly developing a strong understanding of the virus, how it works, and how it’s transmitted. For example, this videoconference with Dr. David Price of Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York (for the time being treating exclusively COVID-19 patients) gives valuable info on the virus:

  • The vast majority of cases are transmitted via hand to face contact. In only very rare cases is the virus transmitted through the air (i.e. 15 – 30 minutes in a small room with a known carrier coughing).
  • Don’t buy masks unless you have the virus.
  • We may be practicing social distancing for 3 months, 6 months, or up to a year.

Access to critical information (and not being duped by attention seeking headlines) is the quickest route to your own peace of mind, but more importantly stopping the spread of the disease.

2. Do What You Do Best

When it comes to helping out, it may very well be the case that your professional skillset is much-needed. Before you start donating to food banks (which, yes, do that), volunteer your skills where they’re needed most. Are you an employment lawyer that can help field questions from the many people who have recently found themselves out of work, or mistreated by an employer in time of crisis? Do you have manufacturing capabilities to build much needed supplies? Can you offer a product or service for free that might be otherwise unaffordable for someone going through hard times? This is the type of mindset to take when it comes to your business, even if you can only help in some small way.

3. Give Blood

On March 12th, Peter Marks, M.D., Ph.D., director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research issued a plea for people to continue to donate blood. For some time the rate of donation dropped significantly as fear over COVID-19 prevented people from scheduling appointments. During the drop in appointments we faced a risk of postponing surgeries and denying blood to those who need it. Pater Marks makes it clear that donation centers are still fully operational. Donation rates have since recovered, but the need for continued donation remains very real.

4. Donate

With such widespread economic implications from COVID-19, there are many places gladly taking donations to help. But before you start sending money out left and right, take a moment to make sure the organization you’re donating to is credible. There’s a great New York Times article with how to get money to areas of critical need:

Each city has different small business support funds, for the rest Google your city for geo specific donation opportunities.

5. Patronize Restaurants

To support restaurant/bar workers who have suddenly hit hard times, remember that most restaurants are still open and serving takeout. Don’t forget about your favorite neighborhood spot, they may still be open! Get out as much as you can to ensure that your favorite small businesses are still around when we finally come out of our social distance caves.

Important! (Temporarily) Stop Asking For Reviews!

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Before the COVID-19 pandemic, I was in the middle of writing a post about the importance of turning your clients into zealots of your business and leveraging that into a 5-star review profile and a successful referral program. Unfortunately, until everything returns to normal that post will have to sit in the purgatory of my drafts folder.

If you haven’t already, stop asking clients to leave reviews!

 

As of last week, Google has suspended “new reviews, new review replies, new short names, all videos, and all Q&A” on Google My Business. This was in response to many businesses getting flooded with 1-star reviews for issues concerning the outbreak. While Google’s response may seem extreme, its aim is to protect the digital reputation of businesses during this unprecedented time. You can read Google’s response here.

Yelp’s response is more conservative, but still is attempting to protect businesses’ reputation from unfair reviews.  The important points of Yelp’s response are below.

  • Zero tolerance for any claims in reviews of contracting COVID-19 from a business or its employees or negative reviews about a business being closed during what would be their regular open hours in normal circumstances.
  • Reviews flagged by the community will be evaluated by our human content moderators to ensure they comply with our content guidelines.
  • Content that does not meet these standards will be removed and not count toward a business’s star rating.

 

This is a situation we are continuing to monitor. We will update you as soon as reviews have opened back up. In the meantime, continue to do great work for all of your clients and keep a list of happy clients to reach out to in the future.

PR & Link Building During Crisis: What We Have Learned from COVID-19

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COVID-19 has quickly become a global pandemic, with far-reaching consequences that are unprecedented in the modern era. Its rapid spread has left most of us reeling, with more questions than answers.

These uncertain times are cause for concern at many firms, but as Account Executive, Kelsey Butchcoe stated in her recent article on the Mockingblog, this is also a time to focus on projects that may help your business in the long-run.

At the risk of sounding overly optimistic, Coronavirus presents an opportunity for attorneys to build positive brand recognition and improve organic search ranking for the future, while also helping the general public.

Offer Expertise, Provide Value

As an attorney, you have legal knowledge that is desperately needed. There are innumerable news publications, blogs, and nonprofits with questions to which you may have the answer.

Criminal law attorney? How is Coronavirus affecting prosecution?

Family law attorney? How are individuals handling custody during lock-down?

Employment attorney? What rights do employees have to refuse to come into the office if they feel unsafe in their workspace?

The outreach I have done to news publications has been incredibly well received. Why? Because legal expertise is immensely valuable in a time fraught with uncertainty.

Get Creative

Right now, getting interviews and features with your COVID-19 legal expertise is relatively easy, but there will come a time when this is no longer true. It is likely that as firms notice attorneys gaining recognition during the COVID outbreak, they will try to achieve the same, and publications will become flooded with interview offers.

If you would like to maintain momentum in your PR outreach you should consider creative ways to remain relevant moving forward.

Is there data that you can begin collecting? Perhaps you can turn this into an infographic that you can use as a link building asset as COVID-19 begins to settle down.

There is no set strategy that will work for every firm, it is up to you to consider what unique knowledge you have and use your creativity and communication skills to package it in a way that will attract interest from publications.

How to Handle Projects Started Pre-COVID

Did you have a PR project that you were working on before COVID-19 became a pandemic? How should you proceed? The likely answer is that you will either need to put your project on hold, or alter it for relevance. The last thing you want to do in a time of crisis is let your firm come across as tone-deaf or even disrespectful.

Example

Before the novel Coronavirus, my team and I were working on promoting numerous scholarships. As schools began to close for the year it became obvious that we would be the last people a high school administrator would want to speak with. We immediately stopped all outreach to schools and shifted our efforts.

We began working more heavily with scholarship websites, such as ScholarshipOwl. As these publications are dedicated to the subject, they will likely be happy to move forward with the promotion of scholarships, and unlike the schools, they have the time to do so.

Moving forward, we will adjust the scholarships we offer to be relevant to COVID-19, and of course, alter due dates.

Be Adaptable & Opportunistic

The main lesson we have learned from the Coronavirus crisis so far is that the agile firms will survive (or even thrive) with the right mindset.

In order to come out on the other end of this virus we must all have grit and utilize our creativity.

We must think like cockroaches.

Survival is what our clients (and in turn the agency) need. We are a Cockroach. The adaptable, innovative, opportunistic, skittering, nauseating, and yes, disease-resistant arthropod that not only survives, but actually thrives in disaster.

-Conrad Saam, Mockingbird Founder

 

MOCKINGBIRD IS NOW COCKROACH

Mockingbird Marketing is now Cockroach

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Last Thursday, in between obsessing over a Coronavirus growth chart and a Crisis Strategy Session for a divorce attorney trying to keep her lights on, I caught a tweet from inveterate Seattle tech entrepreneur, Buzz Bruggerman:

Survival is what our clients (and in turn the agency) need. We are a Cockroach. The adaptable, innovative, opportunistic, skittering, nauseating, and yes, disease-resistant arthropod that not only survives, but actually thrives in disaster.

In the coming months, many lawyers will go bankrupt. Despite our best efforts, some of those lawyers may be our clients. It’s the agency’s responsibility to fight, innovate and do everything we can to help every single one of them survive. Over the past two weeks, I’ve adopted the cockroach analogy with clients during Crisis Strategy Sessions….. creatively coming up with anything and everything Mockingbird can do to help them not only survive, but possibly even thrive in this chaotic, mad, uncertain environment.

The second of our Ten Commandments states: “We are Responsible for our Clients’ Livelihoods – Our performance dictates if our clients can pay their mortgage, their staff and their kids’ college tuition.” Today, clients are responsible for our survival as well. Its corny as hell, but employees and clients are both part of my extended family. We all have to adapt, evolve and fight to survive this. Like Cockroaches.

The following bullets come from the rebranding presentation I gave to the team:

    • Keep being amazing for our clients – remember we are responsible for their livelihoods – and now they are responsible for ours. (even if they can’t pay us).
    • This is the time to work overtime, to over deliver, to over communicate and to give everything we have to keep our clients afloat.
    • This is the time to step in and help clients with whatever they may need.
    • We are effusively grateful for every single client who sends us a check.

The cockroach mindset has led to some creative tactics, unexpected adjustments and occasionally brutally honest realizations over the past ten days:

    • What I believe to be the most effective linkbuilding campaign undertaken by a law firm in 2020.
    • Dramatic shifting in practice areas for a firm that has seen restaurant, bar and court closures decimate their business.
    • Worked with a handful of clients to accept that they should completely shutter their PPC budgets to preserve precious cash flow.
    • Tactical and data driven responses to the seismic shift in search volumes.
    • Forecasted changes in search traffic by applying changes in leading markets (Seattle) to lagging markets (Florida).
    • Doubling down on a PPC budget as competitors in a highly fragmented market scrambled to respond to inbound inquiries

Not everything we’ve done has been successful and some of the early successes are going to disappear as this crisis evolves, wears on and firms burn through cash reserves. But the cockroach survives. It evolves, pivots, and does whatever it takes.

So starting now, we are temporarily  a Cockroach – doing everything and anything we can to help our clients survive the Corona disaster. The old Mockingbird logo has been transformed and if you look carefully, the Mockingbird M cameos as negative space in the cockroach logo.  The Mockingbird is still there… it’s just waiting to come back.

At some point, we’ll go back to being Mockingbird – liberating lawyers from ineffectual marketing, one sided contracts, proprietary website platforms and opportunistic agencies. But for now we are a Cockroach – with a singular focus on our clients’ survival.

How to Use Your COVID-19 Downtime To Help Your Law Firm Grow

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There’s no doubt about it, we’re all having to change our daily routines because of COVID-19. Many law firms are finding themselves with more downtime than they’re used to, and that can be very scary as a small business owner.

We’ve been talking to our clients a lot lately about whether they should be pausing all advertising, switching focus on their current marketing projects, and even helping them learn new tools and technology to help them work remotely.

Since no one knows when things will start going back to normal, here’s a list of things you, as an attorney or an employee at a law firm, can do to help your business for the long-haul:

  1. Write New Content: You know that content you’ve been meaning to write over the past six months, or even six years? Now is a great time to revisit that list and start churning out your new practice types or sub categories. If you have the flexibility to add new practice types that might help your business now (think bankruptcy, divorce, wills & trusts), create content on those and add them to your website.
  2. Audit Your Site: Not sure if you need new content? Take a look at what you have on your website. If you’ve been in business for a while, there’s a good chance you have some outdated or irrelevant content on your site. Figure out what’s most important to your business and what you want your potential clients to be able to find, or not find.
  3. Audit Your Own Intake Process: If you’ve utilized CallRail’s recording capabilities, now is a great time to go back and listen to how your staff handles your inbound calls. If you don’t record calls, go through your front desk’s process or list of questions they use to qualify a new lead. Are there things missing from the list? Things that could be added?
  4. Work on Your Social Media Presence: With so many people at home and on their computers, you should come up with other ways to get in front of people. While social sites may not be the best converting marketing channel, it does help with your local brand exposure. It’s also a great way to build trust with members of your community. We’ve already seen a lot of really great stories come out over the past couple of weeks of local businesses helping their community through these hard times.
  5. Get Involved: If you’re able, use your legal expertise to help those who have legal questions. If you’re an employment attorney, many people are unsure if they qualify for unemployment. Even if you can’t help the person now, they may need your services in the future and will turn to you.
  6. Go Digital: For those of you still using snail mail and handwritten documents, switch over to something like DocuSign. Move all of your files off of your hard drive and on to the cloud. You can also embrace video conferencing and invest in a good webcam and microphone.
  7. Email Campaigns: Use that long list of emails you have from people filling out your website’s contact form and create drip email campaigns to hit people now while they’re doing research on potential lawyers.
  8. Create a Marketing Plan: For some, marketing is one of the last things you think about when it come to your business. Think about where you’d like to be in the next year, 5 years, or 10 years, and start planning what you need to do to get there. There’s also a lot of really great blog content out there that’s designed specifically for lawyers and their marketing…hint, hint.
  9. Watch Webinars: Use this time to learn something that can help your business later on. There are plenty of tools and marketing agencies putting on more webinars than normal.
  10. Attend a Virtual Conference: A lot of conferences have had to move to a virtual platform, including ours, but are still covering the same topics they would have at their physical events. Instead of paying a couple thousand dollars to attend a conference far away, spend a few hundred to get the same great information, but from the comfort of your own home.

Even though things are uncertain at the moment, you can use this time to do all the things you never had time to do before, and set yourself up for success once everything blows over.

If you’re interested in getting an experts opinion on how you should be handling your law firm’s business and marketing, give us a call.

 

 

We’re in it Together: Our COVID-19 Related Webinars

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Things are changing almost faster than anyone can keep up with. This is why we have been organizing webinar after webinar on how to maintain your firm during COVID-19. Currently coming down the line are two that tackle the issue of finding and financing clients.

 

Converting Leads During Corona – How to Maintain Marketing Campaigns During a Crisis with Outsourced Intake

When: March 20, 2020  12.30-1.30 PM PST

A lot of law firms are seeing the impact of COVID-19 in the form of court closures and reduced web traffic. So how can we make sure we all stay afloat during the coming weeks or months of uncertainty? 

The goal of this webinar is to bring together some of the best legal and marketing minds and figure out the best next steps for law firms of all sizes. From the best software and tools for working at home to how to manage your current marketing campaigns, we will help you build a comprehensive plan for moving forward and keeping your business running.

We’re all in this together, which is why we’re working so hard to get you the information you need, not the information we want you to hear. This is a no-nonsense discussion about how to prepare your firm for the current and coming disruptions. If this sounds like something you need, register below and we’ll see you on Friday.

Register Now

 

Client Financing Informational Webinar

When: March 26, 2020  12.00-1.00 PM PST

During these times in which clients might have more limited income, it’s important to think about how they will afford legal help. This webinar will be focused on client financing options for legal matters. These are the ways clients pay for their legal help, as opposed to Litigation Financing, which is a percentage of the final judgment or settlement. Matthew Moore from Justice for Me will be leading this discussion.

Some of the topics we will be discussing include:

      • Common legal payment methods
      • Common legal payment alternatives
      • The ethics of legal financing
      • Legal lines of credit

Register Now

How to Prevent the Coronavirus from Contaminating Your Conversions

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Preparing for Working Remotely

Things are scary right now, from both a health perspective and an economic perspective. We don’t know how long this is going to last, and we might be buckling in for months worth of changes. The CDC is recommending working from home and washing your hands regularly, but there’s less guidance on how to survive financially right now. If your business is your life, we’d understand if you’re panicking. 

Many folks are talking about the Coronavirus in the “macro” sense. It’s seizing financial markets. It’s wiping out 200+ conferences. It’s the “most pressing uncertainty” according to the IMF’s managing director. 

These “macro” effects are not under our control; our hands aren’t on these dials, and they’re not even within reach. But we can make a difference in our own companies. Leaders at larger businesses have been telling staff to stay home. Small and medium businesses are now following suit. If your company has the ability to convert to working entirely remotely, you should get used to it. I just got an email that a gathering of legal tech executives was canceled because the host company is closing their San Francisco office for the week.

What happens when you don’t have the virtual-office infrastructure and work-from-home policies in place that make working remotely no different than business as usual? Massive productivity losses. Canceled appointments. Missed deadlines. And a lot of missed calls. This means you need to get your systems in place. Now. 

Client Calls

If you’ve told your law firm staff to work from home this week, the absolute first step you must take is checking your phone system to ensure it’s routing calls to phones and extensions connected to real, live humans. Your staff won’t be at their desks so their calls shouldn’t be going there. If they aren’t checking their voicemail regularly when they’re in the office, they can’t be expected to check it when they’re at home. Your system can’t rely on voicemail.

 

Call Forwarding

Call forwarding is a good option for direct extensions. Those calls can ring through to staff members’ cell phones. You can even set boundaries so forwarding occurs only during normal business hours. If your staff is uncomfortable with having their direct cell or home lines available to your clients, they can set up a forwarding number that will help separate their professional from their personal lives.

 

Transfers

Transfers are a bit trickier, but chat apps like Slack allowing interoffice, real-time communication can help law firm staff connect with their coworkers to facilitate hand-offs. This will also allow your staff to stay in direct communication with each other. It’s no replacement for in-person conversations, but maintaining strong lines of communication between you and your staff can be the difference between a smooth transition into working from home and a complete breakdown of organization. 

 

Handling Your Main Line

Just as during a regular day at the office, how you answer your main line is vital to converting clients. If you let your main line go to voicemail or place the task of answering it all on one person, you are setting yourself up for failure. You would be sacrificing both that staff member’s productivity and the perceived availability of your firm. No one wants to hire the firm that doesn’t even have the time to answer their phone.

You need an answering service. I wrote it like that because it really is that simple. It doesn’t decrease your legitimacy or reduce your personal connection with your clients. You will need all the help you can get, and a good answering service is able to provide more than basic “call answering.”

While you and your staff are working from home, a remote receptionist service worth its salt will handle your lead screening, consult scheduling, and payment chasing. Getting all that work outsourced means freeing you up to help your new and existing clients. Being honest about what you can and cannot do on your own is vital in times like these.

As is important in any incoming client call, the option to transfer to a person on your staff needs to remain open. When there’s a true need for a transfer to someone in your office, a good answering service can call or text the intended recipient to see if they’re available to accept the call. Some agencies can even ping that Slack channel to see who, among your staff, is ready to claim the call.

Bottom line, don’t let the mature decision to keep staff at home and protect them from illness trigger a poor decision to burden those staff (who are likely trying to also care for kids kept out of school). Your clients should not suffer from your responsibility, and neither should your staff. 

If you’ve already enlisted a receptionist service, make sure they are providing the tools you need. Not all answering services are created equally, and now is the time that they will be tested. Find the one that works for you, even if it means getting rid of the one you have.

 

Keeping Up to Date

If you feel as though you need more information on how to best prepare, Mockingbird is hosting a webinar with the goal of sharing ideas and recommendations for how to proceed. Our webinar, titled “Converting Leads During Corona – How to Maintain Marketing Campaigns During a Crisis with Outsourced Intake” will be held through GoToWebinar from 12:30-1:30 PM PST on Friday, March 20th.

To register, follow this link. All firms are welcome, as we want to get as many minds on this as possible. We are making it our priority to help our clients strategize their next steps and provide support in any way we can. 

 

Smith.ai

If you haven’t yet taken action or are finding your current service lacking, we’re ready to serve you at Smith.ai. We can take one of two paths:

  • We can get your phones answered within a couple hours with our expedited setup. That’s the second option after you sign-up online.
  • Or, if you give us 1-2 days more, we can get more acquainted for handling those spiffy screening & scheduling tasks I talked about above.

You can even use my name and the code MADDY100 for $100 off. That’s worth like 15-20 free calls depending on your plan. And, that’s in addition to our 20-call free trial.

During the trial and after, we’ll:

🙋🏻‍♀️ Answer your phones

📲 Transfer calls to staff at home (pre-screening leads, as needed)

📆 Book (or reschedule) your meetings

And you can use us just for this short-term stint, or ongoing. We won’t be offended; we’re built for exactly these scenarios, as well as the day-to-day.

Now, go get your phones in order, so those leads Conrad and his team are generating for you receive the friendly, helpful, fast, and accurate response they deserve. We’ve got you!

NOTE: Maddy Martin is the Head of Growth & Education at Smith.ai. The services they offer are one possible solution during this current crisis that’s upending “business as usual” for firms across the country. Mockingbird is not paid by Smith.ai and does not profit off any signups resulting from this post. We’re publishing this post because we think Maddy is exceptionally awesome and you should be exploring all sorts of tech options right now.