Why Optimizing for Mobile is Necessary for Law Firms

Posted on December 26, 2019 at 10:00 am.

Mobile users are a growing segment of all internet traffic. Between 10-50% of traffic going to legal websites being from a mobile device, with some dependence on practice area. That’s a large audience that you don’t want to turn away with poor web design.

Why Law Firms

Law firm websites provide vital resources for people in crisis when they might not be able to reach their computer. This means that all aspects of the website need to be optimized, not just the home page. Blogs, FAQs, and any other resources need to be easy to access and fast-loading, and contact info should be on every page. You want to make it as easy as possible for a consumer to find your resources, get the info they need, and call you to schedule a consultation.

Why Optimize

There are a few different ways to set up your website, and not all of them work for mobile. Some websites are designed solely for desktop, so when a consumer visits the site from their phone it looks exactly the same as the desktop version. This doesn’t work because the differences between the dimensions and user interfaces of a desktop and phone are completely different. Navigating a desktop-designed website from a phone is difficult and slow, and users are just as likely to go find a different website and a different law firm.

Why Google Cares

One final, extremely important reason to optimize for mobile is Google’s Mobile-First Indexing (MFI). Beginning in 2016, Google started indexing mobile versions of websites as their primary version. That means that if a website’s mobile version is slow, it’s page rank will be affected. If the content isn’t the same, Google will take the content on the mobile version as the primary version. When a website has a terrible mobile user experience, it’s page rank will likely be affected.

What You Can Do

Make sure your website is optimized. Ensure the images are scalable and the text is legible. If you have an old website, you might want to consider getting a new one. If your website needs maintenance, invest in it. If you need help with any of that, contact Mockingbird.

Keeping Your Site Stable During Google Updates

Posted on December 23, 2019 at 10:00 am.

Written by Mockingbird

2019 saw a series of Google updates big and small, impactful and unaffecting. Many sites saw drastic changes in their rankings, traffic, and leads during this time, not all of the bad and not all of them good. But as with anything, even the small changes caused unrest in the SEO community.

Change is inevitable, so fluctuations in traffic should be expected whether or not an update has happened. That being said, there are measures you can take to reduce the influence updates have on your site. You can’t stop an earthquake, but you can make sure your furniture won’t fall on your bed while you’re sleeping.

Follow Best Practices

This should be relatively intuitive. Keep producing content that users find useful and Google finds relevant. By following best practices, you are showing Google that you are respecting their guidelines. Google likes that.

Organize Your Website

By properly organizing your title tags, meta descriptions, and headers you are telling Google exactly what is on each page on your website. This helps the search engine to properly categorize your content and provide it to the most relevant users. Simply keeping Google up to date with your website will help it maintain its traffic during updates.

Keep Your Finger on the Pulse

Things shift, sometimes at a glacial pace, sometimes extremely quickly. Take keywords: not too long ago, SEOs would pile keywords onto every page, taking into account every synonym and potential phrase. With AIs designed to determine user intent, exact keyword matches are no longer a priority. By keeping up with current events in the industry you are ensuring that you won’t be blindsided when updates reflect where the industry is naturally going.

No one knows what updates 2020 will bring, but the best way to be prepared for them is by keeping your website up to date and well maintained. If you think your law firm could use assistance in any of these areas, contact Mockingbird. We work hard to prepare for and manage changes from updates.

Finding the Secret Pages that Drive Conversions

Posted on December 18, 2019 at 10:00 am.

Written by Mockingbird

A lot of value is given to landing pages and top converting pages, and a lot of value should be given to them. They’re what hook consumers in and eventually turn them into clients.

But that isn’t always the whole story. Users tend to spend some time on the website before picking up the phone or filling out a form, so how can you know the full story? Which pages are consistently convincing clients halfway through their journey?

Luckily, Google Analytics can help show you exact user paths and accurate conversion assists.

What Won’t Help

Goal URLs

The Goal URLs tab in GA seems useful until you open it up and see that most of your conversions occurred on your “Thank You” page. Unless Ernest Hemmingway is writing your thank you page, it is unlikely that this is the place where consumers were truly convinced to become a client.

Assisted Conversions

Assisted conversions are a step above goal URLs, but still fail to tell the whole story. I set up my assisted conversion page to show landing pages, but the default for GA is to show sources. This is great for knowing if your site is driving conversions through SEO and content or through ads (it should be some combination of both), but it isn’t great for knowing user paths once they’re on your site.

What Will Help

Reverse Goal Path

Your reverse goal path tab is your friend. It will show you the three pages the user visited prior to converting, giving you some idea of what pages visitors find intriguing without yet fully convincing them to convert. They gain trust, build interest, and lead the user towards the last-click pages. Remember how a good chunk of our Goal URLs were thank you pages? Check out how many of our goal completion locations are thank you pages, and how many different paths the users took to get there.

Another benefit of looking at reverse goal paths is that you can see how well specific pages are doing. The page might not show that it assisted in any conversions, except it might show up in goal paths. If you’re curious, you can search for the page name and see how many conversions it actually assisted in:

Why You Should Know This

Knowing the path your users take is vital for designing your website. Think of the natural flow provided by internal linking, design, and access to contact info and forms when building your website and adding content. Your users’ goal paths, especially the successful ones, will tell you where to invest your time and energy.

If you feel as though you aren’t getting enough information from your Google Analytics setup or that your website could be improved, contact Mockingbird.

How Your Domain Authority Affects Your Firm

Posted on December 17, 2019 at 10:00 am.

Written by Mockingbird

Let’s clarify one thing right off the bat: Domain Authority is not the same as PageRank. Domain Authority (DA) is a tool created by Moz used to estimate your page ranking. It uses link flows and trust metrics to come to its conclusion, but DA has no effect on how well your site actually does from a technical standpoint.

This doesn’t mean that DA has no effect on your site whatsoever. It has more of a sociological impact in the way that owning a fancy suit doesn’t mean you’re rich, but it might help you get a higher paying job. Having a high DA will improve link-building opportunities, which will, in turn, improve your PageRank.

Your PageRank comes directly from Google and isn’t accessible. You can try to calculate it, but your DA is probably a better estimate than you’ll come up with. The main thing is that your PageRank actually does determine where your page sits in the search results. As you can probably assume, higher is better. You want your page to show up at the top of the organic search results. PageRank says whether or not it will.

Improving DA and PageRank

Google and Moz determine your metrics through a number of factors but largely focus on links and content. Lucky for you, you have some control over both of these.

Link building is your best method for improving authority. By having a more trusted site vouch for you by posting an article with a link to your site, they are improving your trustworthiness. You can build links through guest-writing articles, negotiating with authors of relevant pages, or adding links to directories in which your firm is listed.

On the content front, the main advice Google gives is to prioritize quality over quantity. Google determines quality through E.A.T.: expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. If you want your blog articles to be used as resources, they have to be relevant to your firm and what people want to know regarding your expertise. You need to prove that you are a trusted expert, and your website needs to prove that you aren’t trying to steal anything from your clients. This means that anyone who visits the site needs to be comforted by the layout, so content extends beyond writing and into the design.

What Comes with a Good DA

When you manage to improve your DA and your PageRank you will most likely see an increase in traffic relevant to your business, meaning an increase in leads and clients. You will have more opportunities for quality link building, the heavens will open up you will finally find inner peace.

It’s never that simple. Maintaining good DA means maintaining your website, keeping up with search engine updates, and consistently producing quality content. It’s work, and not always work you have time for if you’re also running a law firm.

Mockingbird is here to help. We work in improving your website, content, and link building connections. If you would like to get more clients, contact Mockingbird today.

Tools We Love: CallRail

Posted on December 11, 2019 at 2:30 pm.

Written by Kelsey Butchcoe

Call tracking has become a standard for anyone who’s focused on measuring the success of their website. There are plenty of tools out there that offer call tracking, but we’ve fallen in love with CallRail, and have stayed in love for many years now.

Over time, CallRail has added features and improved how effectively it tracks an individual’s call history.

What does it do?

Instead of showing your real business phone number, you can use a tracking number in places that a potential customer or client will see. If you choose to add tracking numbers to your website, CallRail will dynamically swap your real number with your chosen tracking number(s).

How does it work?

Within CallRail, you can either port (move) numbers you already own or create new numbers to use as your tracking numbers. These numbers can be displayed on your website, within ad copy, on billboards, or anywhere else you might want your number displayed.

When someone calls one of these tracking numbers, the information from that call is stored in your CallRail dashboard. The caller won’t notice that they’ve called a tracking number, and neither will the person answering your main line.

Implementation

For number swapping on your site, you’ll want to install CallRail’s script directly onto your website (we suggest using Google Tag Manager to do this).

You’ll also want to connect Google Analytics and Google Ads to CallRail in order to link your data together.

Setting up Tracking Numbers

If you’re running Google Ads, you should have at least two tracking numbers, one for mobile, the other for desktop. You’ll use both of these as extensions for your ads.

A good rule of thumb is to place a tracking number on any marketing or advertising you’re paying for. If you have a TV commercial, make a tracking number specific to that. If you still advertise in a phonebook, have a tracking number for that as well.

This is the best way to figure out which campaigns are driving leads, and from those, clients.

Keyword Pools are the best way to track calls that happen on your website. A keyword pool is essentially a bunch of numbers that are available to show on your website at any given time. If you have 5 people viewing your site at the same time, each will see a different number and their visit will be tracked individually. It doesn’t matter where the user came from (Organic, Direct, etc.); each person will be tracked accordingly in your CallRail dashboard. This eliminates the need for individual tracking numbers by channel source.

Form Captures

CallRail can also track the form submissions on your site. This is great for calculating ROI on forms, all in one easy place. You can easily search for a signed clients name, see their form submission, and see how they got to the site in that visit.

Call Recording

CallRail has an opt in feature to record calls on the tracking number level. If you wanted to only record calls from one of your numbers, you can do that. You can also customize the message that plays to the caller that alerts them they are being recorded.

If you suspect there’s an issue with your intake process, call recording is the best way to pinpoint the problem. It’s also a great way to track the quality of your leads. You might find that one of your advertising channels is only bringing in callers who can’t afford your services, who are outside of your service area, or the wrong kind of practice type.

Call Log

In the call log, you’ll be able to see all of the calls that have happened on all of your tracking numbers. You can switch to specific time periods, look at only specific tracking number, sources, and a number of other things.

You can also mark-up calls with notes about the call, or whether it was a good lead or a bad lead.

Call Attribution

The call attribution tab has the best breakdown of how many calls you had by channel for a given time period, as well as how many were first-time calls. It’s important to know how many first-time calls you’ve had in comparison to your total call volume. At Mockingbird, we only report on first-time calls because we’re trying to track new business, not current clients or people who have contacted you previously.

CallRail has a ton of amazing features that haven’t been covered here, and they’re constantly improving the tools they offer. As an official CallRail partner, feel free to contact Mockingbird if you have any questions. We’d love to help get you started with CallRail and improve your current tracking setup.

Handling Our Over-Performing Page

Posted on December 11, 2019 at 10:00 am.

Written by Mockingbird

We have a problem. One of our blog posts is doing really well. How is this a problem? The post doesn’t really have anything to do with our services.

The Story

In October of 2016, we published this post. It’s about how to set up an email when you already have an existing email account. It didn’t do much at first but slowly began to gain traffic. Two years later it was getting between 800 and 900 organic landing pages every week. The page peaked in mid-January 2019 with over 2,400 landing pages in one week.

The page has generated 227 goal completions and 99,700 sessions. It has a 0.23% goal completion rate, about half of the total average for our website.

The Problem

So the page is generating leads. It has links to it. Where’s the problem?

Well, it’s screwing with our data. I mean, how do you accurately measure how the site is doing if half of the sessions are for a three-year-old page that doesn’t actually have anything to do with legal marketing? Beyond that, since most of our visitors are looking for info on Gmail, does Google think we’re a Gmail support website and are ranking us as such?

The Solutions

In our brainstorm about this page we came up with a few solutions, but no conclusions. I mean, what do you do with a page that’s doing a lot, but not a lot for us. It’s mainly just being a pain when we try to do a quick check of our numbers. This is why we had to think of what to do.

Delete the Page

This was one of the first options to pop up. Maybe we should just delete the page. Get rid of it. If most of the traffic is organic, it’ll just go somewhere else.

But it’s linked to. Sure, not a lot of clicks are coming from links for this page, but we don’t want any of our link value. Even if we redirected the links our domain authority would be impacted. So don’t delete the page.

Deindex the Page

This was one of our more viable options. Deindexing the page would make it so that Google would no longer provide it in relevant searches. The page will still exist, would still be accessible, but wouldn’t get the same number of organic landing pages.

“What would happen to the links?”

Well, we just don’t want to risk the value of our precious links by sending them to a deindexed page. That’s why we’ve gone with option number three:

Ignore the Page

The page isn’t harmful. In fact, it’s bringing in leads. Not a lot, but some. Until we find a way to safely amputate it or until we find out that it’s actively hurting our site, we can ignore it. We can subtract the number of sessions our overachieving page got from our total number of sessions.

And so we concluded our brainstorm. As it turns out, our problem is very minor.

If You Have a Single Page the Drives the Traffic

We know we’re not alone with this issue because we spend all day looking at data from other websites. Chances are if you have one page that gets significantly more traffic than the rest of your site you might also be wondering what to do. Each situation is different, so we can’t give you any direct orders, but we can give you a checklist of things to consider.

Considerations Before Deindexing or Deleting a Page:

How much traffic is that page driving?
How many leads/conversions is that page generating?
How many pages link to that page? Are they improving your domain authority?
Is the page relevant to your services?

Creating a Content Development Plan

Posted on November 22, 2019 at 10:00 am.

Written by Mockingbird

A good website is like a good sandwich: it can look amazing from the outside, but if it doesn’t taste good then it’s a bad sandwich. The best way to make sure you have a good sandwich is to make sure you have the right ingredients and organize them in the right way.

In case my metaphor is too wandering, content is to a website as ingredients are to a sandwich. While you can accidentally throw together an amazing sandwich, your best bet is to plan ahead.

Auditing The Content You Have

Every law practice has a set of required pages for its site to be an adequate resource for potential clients. These include:

A homepage
A contact page
An about page
Individual practice area pages
A resource page, whether it’s FAQ or a blog

Before you even consider adding extra content you need to audit your current pages. Are they optimized and well written? Do you have the basics? If you don’t, fill out your pages with the barebones.

On the other side of things, some websites have way too much content. You might need to prune some of it back. If there’s duplicate content or orphan pages your site could suffer. You don’t want a sandwich full of iceberg lettuce. No one likes that.

Adding The Content You Need

Once you have figured out what your site is missing, you can get to work adding it. This is a great opportunity to optimize your site! If your existing pages haven’t been updated since 2009, update them now! You’ll be amazed at all the plug-ins available (also, no one uses Flash anymore; get rid of any plug-ins that require Flash ASAP). You need to make sure you have the fillings of your sandwich before you even think about condiments.

Adding Extra Content

Extras normally include pages like regular blog postings, successful case results, and in-depth resources. To make sure your pages are getting you the traffic and clients you want, you need to ask yourself a few questions before beginning work:

What types of cases do I want? You can control what type of audience visits your website through the content you produce. If you have resources in greater depth on a specific issue than any other website, people looking into that issue will find their way to your page. It might not get high traffic, but it will get the right traffic.
What type of expertise are my clients looking for? You’re a lawyer, so you’re in competition with every lawyer in your practice in your area. You need to show that you can not only stand toe-to-toe with any of them, but you are also more knowledgeable than them. Write about the specifics of your practice areas, things that might not show up on the practice area page. Prove you’re an expert.
What is my voice? Your voice is a vital part of your brand. Some firms put more personality in their blogs, some keep it strictly academic. You need to decide what voice you’re putting into the world and keep it consistent.

Once you have answered these questions about yourself, you’re ready to start writing.

Consider SEO

SEO is often considered something that can be accounted for later but is really much easier to just account for now. There are ways to optimize a page that barely even impacts writing. Four things you can do to improve SEO without even trying are:

Organizing H1s, H2s, and H3s. By setting up your headers that accurately summarize and organize your page you are letting search engines know the content and composition of the page.
Adding bullet-pointed or numbered lists. Just like with headers, lists help search engines know how you’re organizing your page. A header with a well-designed list can even create a nice featured snippet if you’re lucky.
Internal linking. Linking to other pages on your site not only improves the user experience by helping them visit the rest of your website but it also really helps with SEO.
Add relevant images. Images help to make your page look nicer, and relevant images with accurate alt-text are particularly appreciated by search engines.

If you’ve noticed that pretty much all of that advice has been used in this post, good job! Sandwich for you!

Getting Help

Not every law firm has the time or writing expertise to do in-house content audits or plan development. This is understandable since the law is a complicated subject with a lot riding on it. You can’t be expected to spend all your time brainstorming your next FAQ.

Mockingbird is here to help. We are proud of content audits and development plans and will help with link building and PR campaigns to improve your website’s rankings and increase your organic traffic. If you feel like your website could be performing better, don’t hesitate to call us! Helping lawyers is what we do.

3 Things a Customer Should See When They Land on Your Site

Posted on November 14, 2019 at 10:00 am.

Written by Mockingbird

The journey from initial search to conversion is often a long and winding one. It starts with intent, wanders through research, and eventually lands on a conversion. Your website needs to be there every step of the way and needs to show a consumer what they want to see in a law firm.

Ideally, the largest impression you want to make will happen while the consumer is in their research phase. If you can convince them that your firm is the most knowledgeable before they even begin shopping around you already have the upper hand. The best way to do this is by having properly set up landing pages.

A properly set up landing page should have three key elements, regardless of the content:

1. The name of your firm

- The consumer should never visit your site and not know what site they are visiting. This leads to distrust and bad impressions. Not only will telling the consumer who you are early on help them to trust your site, but it will also help them remember the name of your firm.

2. Contact details

- Having prominent contact details is like having a well-lit exit sign: just because a person doesn’t plan on using it doesn’t mean it isn’t comforting to see. By having contact details, you are showing that you have accountability and aren’t just blogging from an undisclosed location, luring unsuspecting passersby into your website to steal their cookies like some unholy child of cookie monster and a bridge troll.

3. Easy navigation

- Easy navigation is more of a benefit to your website than to the consumer’s feeling of easy, but it is a good indicator of the latter. Having pages with internal linking and a user-friendly interface will encourage consumers to explore your website beyond their landing page. If the consumers are utilizing these features, you know that your website is well set-up for conversions. Good examples of intuitive navigation are well-designed menus, comprehensible H1s and H2s, and up to date plugins to ensure site-speeds remain high.

These features are important for any website but are useless if the content on your landing pages is low quality. A meal is improved by being plated nicely, but all the nice plating in the world can’t save a bad meal.

If you think your website needs to be improved, updates, or maintained, contact Mockingbird. We are experts in ensuring lawyers are never left with a mediocre website.

E-A-T: SEO 101

Posted on November 12, 2019 at 10:00 am.

Written by Mockingbird

Researching how to produce the best content can lead a person down a rabbit hole of optimization. Countless articles explain how H1s and H2s can both make and break a page. That adding images will improve your ranking until they slow your page down. Then you find E-A-T. You’re not sure what it is, but you know it relates to the quality of the page.

What is E-A-T?

Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These are the guidelines that Google uses to evaluate the quality of your page. Some of them can be achieved through simple quality content, and some need some outside work. This is why your content department needs to be multifaceted; creating great web pages is a team effort.

Expertise

Part of quality content is quality info. If you aren’t an expert in the area you are writing on, you need to cite your sources and maybe bring on an expert to help you write your piece. Google claims to use a holistic approach to ranking pages, meaning the actual content gets evaluated not just fed through an algorithm.

A good rule of thumb: if you are providing advice or information, you need to make sure that the information your giving can be backed up by people way more qualified than you.

Authority

Authority is proving your expertise. It means that the author should be clear to the reader and any visitors can easily contact the company or learn more about it. If you are speaking with authority, you need to be able to explain where your attitude is coming from.

Domain authority is important for this and this is where you might need to do a bit of PR work. Chances are your website doesn’t have a high domain authority if it hasn’t been fully established yet, but luckily there are websites that do. This is an opportunity for link-building, or getting articles on more authoritative sites to link to your piece. Either that or you could reach out to more authoritative sites and ask if you can guest-publish an article on their site, linking to your site. Either way, it helps you look like you hang around with a good crowd.

Trustworthiness

Is your page a safe space? Do users feel like they might get a virus if they click on anything? Users should feel comfortable exploring your website. Beyond that, your web page should have a point. It should exist to help someone. The purpose of your page should be clear, as should the purpose of the website as a whole.

How does E-A-T affect my page?

It’s important to remember that E-A-T are guidelines and not hard and fast ranking rules. Google has, on multiple occasions, explained that there are no algorithms that spit out ranking numbers based on E-A-T. Instead, there are hundreds of ranking algorithms that all work together to create a page’s rank.

Instead of thinking of E-A-T as a series of gymnastics elements that must be perfectly executed to achieve a score of 9.8, think of it as a way to ensure your posture, uniform, and style are optimized before going out and dancing before the judges (I don’t know gymnastics I’m sorry to any gymnasts who might be reading this). They don’t judge directly on those aspects, but they certainly help.

I’m still confused. Can you just do this for me?

If you are a law firm, then yes! Mockingbird works in website building and maintenance to make sure it looks trustworthy, PR for link building, and can help to plan content production. Contact us today to help you understand your website!