Search Results for "keywords"

Google Screened Badge and Local Service Ads rolling out for Lawyers

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Earlier this week, screenshots of a new Google offering began to make its way around the SEO world.  The Google Guaranteed (or Google Screened for the legal industry) has been getting tested in select locations. Google is promoting this shiny new badge as an upgrade to your Google my business profile and a way to to “stand out”.

But you guessed it, there’s a catch. The badge is going to cost $50 a month* for eligible businesses. I know, I know I can hear you throw my computer. “This is just another money grab by Google”. That’s how the entire SEO industry feels about it too. Just take a look at twitter.

 


Here’s a spin zone for you (I promise I’m not a Google lackey). This is going to help clean up the map of spam. I have written about the spam problem in the past, and how your leads may be getting stolen. Spam has been a constant battle of whack a mole. Isn’t $50 a month a great investment to make sure your leads don’t get stolen?

Also, take a look at your competitors. How many of them break the Google guidelines and throw keywords into their GMB business name. “Smith & Smith DUI Lawyers Denver”. The good news is, they won’t qualify for the badge until they remove the added keywords.

I am also quite optimistic that now that Google has a way to profit off of this tool, they are going to allocate more resources to improving and expanding Local search.

 

*As of writing this the program is still not officially announced by Google. Pricing is based on screenshots of Google testing the feature. Pricing may be different for the legal industry.

What is Google Screened exactly?

In Google’s own words:

“Google Screened helps professional service firms build a trusted reputation online.

Businesses with this badge go through extensive background and license checks and must have at least a 3.0 rating.

On Local Service listings, you will see the Google Screened icon next to these businesses.”

 

What Practice Areas Qualify?

As of now, the practice area’s that are included on the requirements page are:

  • Bankruptcy lawyer
  • Business lawyer
  • Contract lawyer
  • Criminal lawyer
  • Disability lawyer
  • DUI lawyer
  • Estate lawyer
  • Family lawyer
  • Immigration law
  • IP lawyer
  • Labor lawyer
  • Litigation lawyer
  • Malpractice lawyer
  • Personal injury lawyer
  • Real estate lawyer
  • Tax lawyer
  • Traffic lawyer

You can read about the individual requirements for each practice area here.

Why this matters

Google Screened is the first step that a law firm must take before qualifying for the new ads variation that Google is slowly begging to roll out: Local Service Ads (LSA). This ad type is very atypical in comparison to the more traditional version of the ad approach that Google has typically adopted. Instead of a Pay per Click model (PPC) these ads will be a pay per lead, and you will only be charged when a client actually calls you directly through the ad.

 

What now?

To learn more about what the “Google Screened” badge and how to apply for Local Service Ads, reach out to our team. We will happily walk you through the process and get your firm on your way to getting “screened” and eligible for LSA’s.

 

 

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.

SEO Shouldn’t Be Everything

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4 SEO Practices You Can Ignore

 

The task of search engine optimization (SEO) is a never-ending one. Search algorithms change, user preferences shift, and plug-ins become outdated. Nevertheless, you can find countless listicles of advice on the basics of SEO (don’t worry, we see the irony of this post). This might give you the impression that SEOs know what they’re doing, or at least have worked out the failsafe paths to success. Despite all the knowledge and experience out there, there seem to be at least a few areas where the common advice can be ignored.

 

1. H1s (And H2s and H3s)

Let me preface this by saying that headers are important. Don’t abandon your headers. What I will admit is that H1s aren’t as vital as some might want you to think. As long as your headers are sequential, it really doesn’t matter if they start with an H1 or an H3. What’s important is that your content is organized in a way that both search engines and users will understand, and not necessarily in that order. 

 

2. Constant Content

We’ve talked about this quite a bit over the years, but it’s worth mentioning again: content for content’s sake isn’t as valuable as some SEOs might want it to be. This means that it’s better to produce a lower amount of content and focus on making it high quality rather than spewing out a fountain of low-quality content. No matter what anyone says, don’t invest time and effort in a blog that you don’t want.

 

3. Word Counts

SEO best practices say that the ideal length of a piece of content is somewhere between 800 and 1500 words. In reality, different websites have different needs. If you’re writing a comprehensive guide to all of the inconsistencies between state and federal criminal laws and how to handle a case that is impacted by those issues, you might need a bit more than 1500 words. If you’re adding case results, they probably don’t need as many as 800 words. Use your own best judgment when deciding how long a piece of content should be, but remember that fully fleshed out topics normally do better than brief summaries.

 

4. Writing for Keywords

Keywords are still a primary aspect of SEO, but you shouldn’t strain your writing to better fit a keyword. As AI becomes better equipped to understand users, the intent is becoming more important than keywords. As long as the topic of your content is clear and it answers a question in an authoritative way you shouldn’t try to fit in every synonym for your keyword.  

 

In Summary…

The three pillars of good content are E-A-T: expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. This means that the focus of your content should be providing quality advice from a platform that makes users feel secure. Your audience should be your priority, not the search engine. If you are creating a product that your audience appreciates, the search engine will follow.

How to Get The Most Out of Your Blog

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Maintaining a blog can feel like a fruitless chore, believe me, I get it. You can add and add to it and see no returns on 95 percent of your blog posts. So how can you turn it around and how can you know if it’s even worth it to keep going?

 

Breaking Out of the Spiral of Dis-Content

If you feel like your blog is going nowhere, chances are you don’t have a clear idea of where it’s supposed to go. Without a goal in mind it’s impossible to write functional content.

Your first step is deciding what type of audience you’re writing for, and what part of that audience you want to become clients. Write about what they want to know and, more importantly, what they need to know.  This will help you figure out where your blog is going and will hopefully inspire some interesting posts that drive traffic.

 

Linking to Your Practice

One of the important things to remember about your blog is that it doesn’t have to be directly related to your practice area. You can write about a specific subsection of the law that you find particularly interesting. This will help you stay interested in it while also starting to rank for those long-tail keywords. 

Once you’ve figured out your focus, you can try to find places where it might link to your firm as a whole. Think of where it overlaps with your practice areas. This will help traffic flow to the rest of your site and into your firm.

 

Find a Schedule That Works for You

Daily blogs can honestly be a bit excessive. Annual blogs are a bit sparse. Try to find a schedule that makes sense given your bandwidth and list of ideas. This might mean once a week, twice a month, once a month, or any period. 

Once you have found a cycle that works for you be sure not to get married to it. If a current news story is incredibly relevant to your practice or your blog, write a surprise post. Staying flexible will be your friend.

 

Guest Post

As far as publicity and link building goes, not much works better than guest-blogging. If you can write a post for a well-known publication, or get a well-known author write a post for you, you are building the authority of both you and your blog.

 

Stop the Blog if it Isn’t Working

Not all law firms need blogs. They aren’t a requirement for your bar membership and if no one’s reading it, it’s just costing time. Try to take steps to improve it, but if it still isn’t driving any traffic after a year or 18 months, don’t feel bad for abandoning it. You can pick it up again at any point if you feel the desire, but don’t feel bad for not doing that.

 

If you are worried about your blog and feel like your content could be improved, consider our content development plan. Mockingbird can help you audit your blog, cut what’s slowing your site down, and make a plan for building on what you need. Contact us to learn more.

What is a Manual Action and How Do I Fix It?

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Google tries to be vigilant about spam. It really does. Link building schemes, black hat tactics, and malicious software are some of the main things Google looks for. When it finds them, it might respond with a Manual Action.

 

So What is a Manual Action?

A manual action is when an actual, real-life member of Google’s team checks in on your websites and penalizes it for going against best practices. Manual actions can take a variety of forms and can be consequences of a variety of things.

 

Types of Manual Actions

 

  • Partial Matches (partial de-indexing)

If Google finds pages in violation of best practices it might de-index those specific URLs. This means that they will no longer show up in search results. This can be done to a page, sub-domain, forum, or any section of a domain. A partial match action is generally the best possible scenario for webmasters who are facing spam attacks, as the domain is still functioning and traffic can still find your site. It is still important to try and fix the issue and lift the action as soon as possible.

  • Whole Site Matches (total de-index)

If the problem is found to be larger than a few key URLs, Google may de-index the entire domain. This is a harsh penalty, but it can be reversed once the site complies with webmaster guidelines. Whole site matches are generally implemented when a site flagrantly ignores guidelines by cloaking content, redirecting users, and exposing users to malicious content. If your site is facing a whole site match, you need to consider what brought you there and if you need to change course.

 

What Might Cause a Manual Action

 

Google has a long list of reasons for invoking manual actions. Most of them involve spam links, as link building schemes are about the most forms of breaking best practices that webmasters do. The complete list includes:

 

  • User-generated spam

User-generated spam is spam that comes not from the webmaster, but the users of the website. This happens in forums and comments sections of websites.

  • Unnatural links to and from your site

This refers to link building schemes and spam attacks. If your site is suddenly sending thousands of links to a single, low authority site or is showing signs of spammy link exchanges, or has thousands of links from one low-authority site, Google might reprimand the URL or domain.

  • Thin or duplicate content

This is more subjective, as some sites do not need large amounts of content. That being said, many sites have unnecessary numbers of pages with practically duplicate content, which often sees penalties.

  • Cloaked content/images

This is a pretty old-school black hat technique, and Google is pretty good at finding when people try to implement it. Cloaking refers to showing different content to humans than to the GoogleBot. They can do this by having one image cover another, writing paragraphs of keywords in the same color as the background of the page, or stuffing keywords into gibberish text. Google really doesn’t appreciate these techniques and comes down pretty hard on those that do it.

  • Redirects

Redirects, whether desktop or mobile, refers to when a user clicks on a link to one website then gets redirected to another, completely unrelated, URL. The penalties are usually applied when the redirect goes to a site that is harmful or the redirect is malicious in it’s intent (i.e. sending a user looking for cartoons to a porn site).

 

How to Fix a Manual Action

Fixing a manual action starts by fixing the problem you were originally penalized for. If you were hit for displaying spam comments you might want to delete those comments and block the IPs they were sent from. If you were hit with a spam link attack, go through the disavow process and clean up your referrals. Google has recommendations on how to fix your website after all types of manual actions. 

Once you have made the changes you need to make, you can make a reconsideration request. This is a request for Google to re-review your website and lift the manual action. 

Sometimes you do the work, write the request, and get a denial. This means you didn’t do the fullest work you needed to do. Get back to work and draft a new reconsideration request. 

 

Final Thoughts

Don’t mess with Google. Even if they wrongly put a manual action against you, you apologize and follow the recommendations they give you. Google holds all the power.

Responsive Ads Might Be Your Best Option

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Google Ads offers a variety of ad options, but none might be better for small businesses than Responsive Ads, both search and display. We might be shooting ourselves in the foot here, but the reason I’m recommending these ads is because of their lack of a need for a marketing agency. Business owners can run them without needing in-depth knowledge of marketing, advertising, graphic design, or copywriting. 

 

How They Work

Responsive Ads work by taking pre-written headlines, body texts, and the URL of the page. For display ads, you will need a few high-quality photos as well. It then mixes and matches them to find which work best across their wide network. This means it only needs as much skill as it takes to come up with ten pieces of short text. 

 

Where Display Ads are Displayed

Google Display Ads are displayed on the Google Display Network (GDN). The GDN is made up of sites that run Google Ads in a variety of forms, and you can control targeting based on audience and website. The ads can show up as banners that show up in the lower third of videos, banners at the tops of pages, and any other way Google sees fit. 

 

Where Search Ads are Shown

Responsive Search Ads appear alongside all other search ads at the top and bottom of search results. Similar to display ads, you can target based on audience interests, location, and certain demographics (age, gender). 

 

How the Bidding Works

Google Ads’ bidding system works by giving the spot to the highest bidder, but for only $0.01 more than the second-highest bidder’s bid. This generally awards risk-takers, or those willing to invest high amounts in ad spend. This also tends to work in favor of larger competitors in the area who have more to spend, so it can sometimes be difficult to get your first choice keywords. In a market as competitive as legal, experience with the Google Ads bidding experience is definitely an asset. This is why marketing agencies are still relevant, even if you can make your own ads.

 

Other Things to Consider When Managing Your Ads

If you really do want to run your own ad campaigns there are a number of things you will have to think about and decide on. These include ad extensions, call tracking numbers, time restrictions, and further targeting. While marketing agencies such as Mockingbird have experience with this, you too will gain experience. If you truly believe you are ready to take your advertising in your own hands, all the power to you. Go, be free.

The Ultimate Citation/Directory Listing Checklist

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Running a business online can feel like trying to cook with multiple burners. There’s a lot to keep track of and if you forget about one aspect you might burn the house down. This stress is understandable, but not necessary. 

 

Get ready for a metaphor that, quite literally, sucks. A well kept online presence is more like having an army of Roombas (not sponsored): you can keep an eye on them doing their own thing, help out when one gets stuck under the couch, and end up with a clean house. But the first step is making sure the Roombas are set up correctly. In this metaphor, the Roombas are your various directory listings. Now you just need to know how to set them up.

 

Step 1: Claim Your Listing

Many directories offer free listings, you just need to claim your business. Many directories also offer paid options for free listings. This would allow you to make sure that your competitors aren’t advertising on your listing. Depending on how competitive your market is, you might not need to pay extra for this.

 

Step 2: Enter Your Business Information

We’ve talked about NAP consistency before, but for the newcomers, NAP stands for “Name, Address, Phone number.” NAP consistency refers to the practice of making sure your business details stay the same across all of your listings. You don’t want a client finding one address on Yelp and another on Google. There are plenty of services that offer consistency checks; reviewing all listings and citations to ensure everything is up to par. Having inconsistent NAP can be damaging to a business, but is remediable. 

 

Step 3: Add a Description

Your business description is the place for you to stand out and employ keywords. If you are locally owned, LGBTQ+ friendly, women-led, Spanish speaking, or anything else that makes you stand out in your field, use it. Make sure your description outlines what your firm does, its practice areas, and what sets it apart.

 

Step 4: Add Photos

Adding photos to a listing helps to prove legitimacy. Adding high-quality photos helps to prove professionalism. This is one reason why it’s always worth it to get a professional photographer to get high-quality photos of the firm, location, and lawyers for both the website and the listings. 

 

Step 5: Set Up Reviews

Reviews are vital for your online reputation. Bad reviews can tank leads, and good reviews can get them flowing. This is why it’s important to keep them active and keep them monitored. 

 

Step 6 (optional): Find a Monitoring Company

Why waste your time micromanaging your listings when you can pay professionals to manage them for you? There are a number of agencies that provide this service, but if I might be biased in suggesting Mockingbird’s Nest service for local SEO.

 

Keeping up with all of your listings can be difficult, but it doesn’t have to be. When you set up your online presence correctly, managing it is less of a chore. If you want to learn more about local SEO, contact Mockingbird.

A Guide to Using Ahrefs’ Internal Backlinks Tool

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Ahrefs has a plethora of useful tools and resources. Since the publishing of that post, a few new features have been added. One of these features in the “Internal Backlinks” tab:

Internal backlinks located under Backlink profile in the side menu

What Does it Do?

Put simply, it shows which pages link to which pages, all within your website. Internal linking is important for site organization, user experience, and crawling ease. The Internal Backlinks tool helps you to understand your linking structure, which pages could use more links, and which pages are only ranking well because of their internal linking. 

 

Before going into the functions, let’s go into the options.

 

Setting Up a Search

Group Similar/All

The first option to toggle is whether to look at all backlinks or just the unique ones. When All is selected, it will show you all of the links of every page, including the ones that are on every page. That means it will show the link to your contact page that appears in the upper-right hand corner of the page throughout the website. This doesn’t help if you’re trying to see if you need to link to your contact page more in your blogs. When Group Similar is selected, it filters the links that appear on every page with the exact same anchor text out of the listings. 

 

Link Type

There’s a pretty wide range of link types to look at. Some of the more important ones to know about are Dofollow and Nofollow.

  • Dofollow – These are links that search engines are allowed to follow when crawling a site. Dofollow links add authority with both internal and external links.
  • Nofollow – Nofollow links do not let search engines follow them while crawling. These should largely be the links you don’t need crawlers to crawl on every single page. This means the links in the navigation bar and the footer are generally safe to be nofollow. It is also a good link type to check to make sure links that can be dofollow are attributed as such.

 

Platform

What’s available to toggle in this section depends on how your website is set up, but chances are you have the options of “All” and “Blogs.” As you’ve probably guessed, it means you can filter what types of pages you’re seeing.

 

Language

As with Platform, the languages you can check up on are just the languages that your site has. If you have a multilingual setup then you can see which pages are being linked to in all relevant languages.

 

Traffic

In Ahrefs’ own words, traffic “estimates the total monthly search traffic to the referring page from the top 100 organic search results. It is…the sum of traffic from all organic keywords.” This metric is manageable by listing your lower and upper limits for which pages you want to see, with higher numbers being better. You can use this to see which pages are getting low traffic and trying to improve them.

 

Search Bar

The search bar is useful when looking at specific keywords and/or pages. It allows you to either include or exclude, with include being the default. This means that if you have one page that performs so well it’s an outlier, you can exclude it. 

 

Targets

The final section in the search box is what you’re targeting. You can decide to focus on URLs, titles, anchor text, and/or surrounding text, depending on your needs. 

 

Examining Functions

Now let’s get into the functionality. As for link structures and seeing where you can build out, there are some pages where it makes sense that it’s easily accessible from just about every page on the website. An example of such a page would be your contact page. 

 

If I wanted to find how many blog posts linked to the contact page, I might set up my search like this:

This will show me all of the blogs that link to the contact page and the value of those pages. Since there are only 20 blog posts that fit the description, there’s probably room to add a few more, especially to higher-performing posts. 

 

If you want to know if any of your higher-performing pages owe their rank to internal linking, or if you want to improve the ranking of some of your lower performing pages, you can find those in Internal Backlinks as well. 

 

Measuring Authority

To do this, sort all the pages in the Internal backlinks section by UR (URL rating, a metric calculated by Ahrefs). When you have found a page with a high UR, search for it in the search bar, narrowing the search to only include URLs of referring pages. This will show all the pages that it already links to. If you think you can add more links with making the page oversaturated, add more. 

 

On the flip side, if you’re wondering what pages could be improved by being linked to,  sort by lowest to highest UR. Once you find a page that you think could use some more traffic, search for that page or keywords relating to that page. You will find which pages are linking to it, and which pages cover the topics discussed on the page that could serve as anchor text.

 

Utilizing These Tools

There’s obviously more you can do with Ahrefs and with this tool in particular. Understanding your links and ratings is an important step to understanding your website. To learn about how Ahrefs can help your law firm, contact Mockingbird.

Why Does Search Intent Matter?

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In the early days of digital advertising, search engines used keywords to understand their users. This is how SEOs optimized pages to get higher and higher page ranks for their clients. Things have changed a bit since then, and not in the least regarding how search engines work.

 

The Great Intent Shift

Search engines have been getting better at understanding user intent over user keywords for the past few years now. Using open-source machine learning, Google created BERT, a robot designed to understand intent, and released it into the world in the Fall of 2019. 

 

The release of BERT indicated a shift of intent over keywords. If you want to know what this looks like, imagine a person trying to figure out the visa process of moving from Guatemala to America. They search “Visa process Guatemala to united states.” With the keywords being “Visa,” “Guatemala,” and “United States” they Google might give them an onslaught of news stories about new policies. Other than maybe influencing them to move to Canada instead, these results won’t help them learn what they need to do. 

 

When you change the situation to user intent instead of keywords, the person is more likely to get links to the DHS immigration page or a blog post from an immigration lawyer. The point is, they are more likely to get what they intended to get. 

 

How This Helps You

While keywords still matter, they no longer need to be the focus when you’re creating content. Instead of stuffing H1s and H2s with various repetitive synonyms, trying to rank for as many keywords as possible, you should focus on writing the most accurate and helpful headers you can. It’s a lot easier to write quality content if you’re not fighting for every word. 

 

So how should you focus on intent? Provide quality content and write out the straightforward questions with straightforward answers. This is where blog posts, FAQs, and other resources will benefit you. People want straightforward answers to their legal questions, and that’s something you can provide. Search intent might just be what helps you get the traffic (and clients) you want.