Search Results for "keywords"

How to Compete in a Saturated Market

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Breaking into a competitive market can feel like trying to be seen in a crowd of thousands. It might feel like this because that’s essentially what it is. You are struggling to catch the eye of a consumer who’s eyes are already full of ads. Some estimates put the number of advertisements the average American is exposed to daily at over 5,000. So how does yours stand out?

 

What are your competitors doing? Don’t do that.

Research your top competitors. Then research their top keywords. Finally, research their client base. Find out where your target audiences overlap and where they break apart. Focus on where they break apart. 

 

Once you’ve found your isolated market you can start targeting them. Remember those competitor keywords you researched earlier? Don’t use those. Find your niche and work for them. If you succeed in turning your target market into clients, you’ve started breaking in. 

 

Get your name out there

Name recognition can’t be undervalued. PPC ads help with this. Even if no one clicks on them, they still see them. Show them enough and they might even remember your brand name. 

 

The other way to increase name recognition is by getting your work into the news or collaborating with established publications via link building or asking them to publish a well-written article you wrote. The goal is expanding your reach within your market.

 

Quality content

It’s been said before and it will be said again, but creating original, high-quality content can make a substantial difference for your business’s visibility. If you decide to follow through with collaborating with an established publication, they will be more likely to work with you if they can see a dense portfolio of well-produced works. 

 

Content doesn’t need to be directly related to your business, but there should be a through-line. If you’re a personal injury law firm you can have a regular publication on interesting drug trials. It’s a niche group and can be linked back to your “Medical Malpractice” or “Defective Drugs” page. 

 

Focus on your assets

This might seem obvious, but it’s worth saying: put your best foot forward. Make sure consumers know the best aspects of your firm first. You can use keyword data for this as well. See what modifiers people use when searching for businesses. If any of them describe your business, advertise that. 

Visibility and advertising are difficult to get right and especially difficult to figure out if you don’t have a degree in digital marketing or years of experience. Fortunately, you don’t have to do this alone. Give us a call and we can discuss what’s best for your law firm! 

Should I Be Focused on My Rankings?

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When it comes to SEO blogs and advice it can feel like people talk about rankings like how people talk to teenagers about SAT scores; they are somehow both vital to your success, but they also don’t really matter if you know where your focus is. Because of these opposing viewpoints, it can be useful to take a look at where ranking high can help, and when to take a step back.

 

I’m Not Ranking High in Searches for “Lawyer Seattle”

Ranking high as a small or unestablished business online can be near-impossible, especially for competitive keywords. This is where you can make vast strides up the rankings by narrowing and improving your keywords. If you need advice on how to optimize your keywords, we here at Mockingbird have just about typed our fingers off with blog posts about keywords.  

 

Where Do I Need to be Ranking Higher?

To improve your online audience you’ll want to find your specific audience, possibly with some PPC help. You want to be ranking high with your consumer base. If 100,000 people are looking at your site but none of them care about your law-firm then you don’t have any clients. If 50 people look at your site but all of them need a lawyer, you’ll get new clients. Ranking high won’t help if you’re not ranking where it matters.

 

How Much Do My Rankings Matter, Really

As you’re probably picking up by now, that depends on your goals and where you’re ranking. If your website is ranking high for “Lawyer Seattle,” then congrats! You managed to get into a very competitive keyword race. If you are a general practice lawyer, this is great. If you only defend people whose neighbors steal their livestock, this probably won’t help you very much. You should be competing in the “livestock hustling lawyer” keyword rankings. Your rankings matter if they’re properly aimed at your audience. 

If you need help with your website’s rankings or ad campaigns, contact us to schedule a conversation.

See Your Competition’s Backlinks

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Whenever you set out to get more organic calls to your website, one of the first things you do is get links. As you can imagine, there are a LOT of ways to go about doing this, some tedious, some creative, some misguided, some lucrative. So before you get started training to set a world record for most knives juggled while blindfolded on a tightrope for a link from Guinness, make sure any easy, high-value opportunities have been identified.

What Easy Links Does Your Competition Have?

One of the first things to do for linkbuilding is to run a competitive audit. This is one of the best ways to make sure your bases are covered when it comes to easy backlinks, as well as a way to pinpoint creative strategies for down the road. In a nutshell, this article will help you identify which competitors to emulate, dig up their backlink profile, and recognize and acquire good opportunity links.

1. Identify Competitors.

To do this, simply run a search in Google for whatever keywords you want to show up for. If you’re a personal injury lawyer, these might be “personal injury lawyer”, “car accident lawyer”, “medical malpractice”, etc. Note the top organic search results for the range of terms you’re targeting. Skip the ads, the map, “People also ask…”, we’re looking for the first true organic landing pages. I recommend getting a list of 5 or so domains from these results (the highest in search results). What we now have is a list of competitors that are doing well at what you want to do well at. As a starting point, why reinvent the wheel when it’s possible to see what’s making their sites tick?

2. Competitor Backlink Scan

Now that you have a big list of competitors, it’s time to narrow that number down. For this part you’ll some sort of backlink analysis tool. I like to use Ahrefs.com, but Majestic and Moz Open Site Explorer do the same thing (note: only one of these, Moz, is free, and unfortunately you get what you pay for). All of these tools have some variety of a bulk domain upload. If you’re using Ahrefs, yours will look something like this:

 

From this list, depending on how involved you want to get, you can take a closer look at one or all of these domains, starting with the highest. I’ll typically take three.

3. Identify Opportunity

Once you’ve chosen your domains to zoom in on, plug that domain into the domain analysis tool you’re using (no longer on the bulk tool, but using the  individual domain tool) and navigate to the backlink list. in Ahrefs you’ll see this:

Where do we go from here? This is the more labor-intensive part. It’s now your job to comb through all the websites pointing to competitor’s sites and identify links that can be recreated. Particularly easy opportunities are directories. On the list above I see a “http://www.bdirectory.org/”. Now that we have a linking domain picked out, we have a few questions that need answering:

  • Is this a website that you want a link from? Check out the article I wrote on this here. Basically, is this a legitimate website that has users and a caring webmaster, or is it spam? If spam, opt out.
  • What’s involved in getting a link? Some of the time this can be as simple as building a profile and hitting submit. Sometimes this requires a bit more legwork. After assessing the site (by means of the article linked to above) determine how much time and energy is appropriate for what links. This takes some trial and error to get a sense of, but really boils down to reaching out to webmasters in creative and persistent ways asking them to feature content that already exists on your site.

Remember, linkbuilding is only limited by your creativity and persistence. Competitive auditing is one way among many of finding links and finding inspiration. As you go through competitor link lists approach each of them from a creative standpoint on how you might be able find an in and get a link, this can vary wildly from site to site. Remember that you will get frustrated. Of the webmasters that you reach out to, less than 10% will respond. That’s just part of the game.

The Role of Meta Descriptions in Your Business

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Meta descriptions often fly under the radar for both consumers and website builders. Google has crippled their authority by excluding them from the ranking process and often simply rewriting the descriptions webmasters created for their pages. Despite all this, meta descriptions can serve a vital role in your webpage’s click-through-rate. While a bland and boring meta description can disappear like hay in a haystack, an interesting description can make a link stand out during a search.

 

What Are Meta Descriptions

For those just joining us, meta descriptions are the small blurbs that appear below the website during a search. They give a brief description of the webpage and often highlight the keywords that appear in the consumer’s search.

Meta Description
The Meta Description for Mockingbird Marketing

 

Writing a Good Meta Description

Good meta descriptions can be the difference between you or your competitor getting a new client. The recommended length of a description falls between 135-160 characters, as longer descriptions get truncated to fit into the snippet provided. Google is also more likely to replace your pre-written description with an automatically generated one of their own, often composed of the first couple lines of the page. Sometimes this is unavoidable but doesn’t mean you should give up. 

A good description is brief and attention-grabbing. It describes the purpose of the page without being a summary. Think of a mixture of a blurb on the back of a book and the way coffee beans are described (it’s never just “dark roast with nutty flavors,” it’s always “an invigorating blend grown in the heart of South America with each bean individually roasted and infused with the spirits of warriors and hints of cocoa”).  Take advantage of the fact that the consumer probably isn’t sure what they want yet. Make them want to see what you have to offer.

 

Writing a Bad Meta Description

A meta description can be bad in more ways than it can be good. It can be boring, misleading, poorly written, and/or vague. This doesn’t guarantee that your page will fail, but it won’t help. Some common mistakes to avoid when writing meta descriptions include:

  • Stuffing in too many keywords
  • Not using any keywords
  • Describing the brand instead of the webpage
  • Copy and pasting similar descriptions for different pages
  • Neglecting rich result optimization
  • Simply not writing meta descriptions

When it comes to your firm’s search results it’s best not to leave things to chance or to Google’s algorithms. Mockingbird Marketing specializes in all areas of SEO for law firms, including designing meta descriptions. Contact us to learn more about how your site could be improved, from the bottom up.

Getting to Know Your Audience

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Google has announced an ongoing update for its ad partners and it promises to be a comprehensive one. Google’s new Affinity Audiences and In-Market Audiences allow ad managers to target groups of people more specifically than before, giving the option to exclude keyword search, connect with audience life events, and advertising based on previous URL visits. 

 

How Will Audiences Help My Firm?

Your law firm can now advertise to the exact type of clients you want. If you want healthy clients who have recently been in a car accident, you can narrow your audience to people who are looking for personal injury lawyers and were previously looking at fitness brand websites. Family lawyers can target audiences who recently got married but still search for hot singles in their area. The possibilities are endless.

 

How Many Audience Factors Are There?

Google’s “About Audiences’ page features 8 customizable factors for advertisers to work with:

  1. Demographics

Advertisers will be able to select as many demographic groups as they feel are relevant to their audience, with the option to go into further details of each demographic group.

  1. Affinity Audiences

Affinity audiences have shown a passion in a given topic, allowing advertisers to use a more “holistic” approach to curating their ad viewers

  1. Custom Affinity Audiences

Google creates custom affinity audiences by looking at their keyword phrases, interests based on URLs visited, apps the audience might be interested in.

  1. Life Events

Advertisers can select audiences based on recent life events or searches based on life events. This might be particularly relevant to law firms, as many practices relate specifically to large life events.

  1. In-Market Audiences

Advertisers can narrow down their audiences by selecting in-market audiences. This narrows the search to just people who are known to be in the market for their product. 

  1. Custom Intent Audiences

Custom intent categories are only available for Google Display and Youtube campaigns and show ads customized to keywords searched by your ideal audience.

  1. Remarketing

Remarketing allows advertisers to re-engage with consumers they already know are already aware of the brand. It connects with audiences who have already provided visited their page or otherwise interacted with their media.

 

So Which One Should I Use?

Let us figure that out! Mockingbird Marketing understands the differences in audiences for each law practice and how to coordinate general and local advertising campaigns. Contact us to learn more about our services and how we can help you build your business.

Setting Up Your Google Ads

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In today’s digital marketing climate, Google Ads are just about unavoidable. Google owns over 89% of North America’s search engine market, which rises to 92% worldwide. This makes advertising on the platform the best way to get to the eyes of consumers. Unfortunately, a lot of advertisers are completely clueless about how to optimize their Google Ad campaigns. Here’s how to not be one of those advertisers. For a more in-depth guide, check out Brittany Zerr of Kick Point’s article here.

 

Keywords

For an aspect of advertising that has been around since the beginning of search engines, keywords are commonly misused. Think about keywords like a description of a sandwich on a menu: descriptive, but not over the top. Describe the sandwich’s key features, but you probably don’t have to describe every ingredient. If your keywords are too broad you risk people seeing your ad who are searching for something completely underrated. A search for the keyword “sandwich” will bring the consumer a mountain of results that your ad could get lost under. If one of your keywords for your sandwich is “self-rising flour,” it might show up when someone is looking for a cake recipe. This results in you paying for an ad that the consumer didn’t want to see.

 

Just as important as regular keywords, negative keywords help to narrow your audience. If someone is looking for a vegan sandwich or classes at a sandwich school, you can make it so that “vegan” and “school” are negative keywords, meaning your ad won’t show up if the consumers searches for those terms. Finding the right negative keywords can take time, so don’t be afraid to look into your Google Analytics and see what keywords are bringing your ads to consumers. If any don’t align with your business, make them negative keywords.

 

Match Types

Google has many options that aren’t best for advertisers, but are best for Google, which is why they might be set as the default. “Broad match” is one of these options. Broad match allows Google to display your ad anywhere it feels like it might be relevant based on your keywords. Since Google profits off your ad being displayed, it’ll likely show up in places you don’t think are relevant. Get ready to see your sandwich on searches for what to do when your car gets crunched between the car in front and behind it. 

 

To start your campaign, try using “Exact match.” This will make sure your ad will only show up on searches that include your exact keyword. If you know your market, you will reach your clients more efficiently with the keyword “pesto aioli sandwich Cupertino” than the keyword “sandwich south bay.”

 

Calls to Action/Extensions

Efficiency is everything in the internet age, as are statistics. Having a call to action on your ad helps with both of these. If your sandwich ad gives options to “Order Online” or “Get Directions,” the consumer will be able to end their search with the click of a button, and you get click-through data. To get those calls to action on your ad, you’ll need to add extensions. 

 

Extensions help to broaden your searches and provide more info to your clients. Its best to just add as many extensions as you think are relevant to your campaign(s) and let Google do the rest. That being said, it’s up to you to make sure all your extensions are working properly with the right parameters. 

 

Location

If you are a local business make sure Google knows. Make sure your business’s address, hours, contact details, and description are all easily accessible and show up when a client searches for your business. This will help with local searches beyond any advertising campaign you might have, but it will also help your advertising campaign. If someone Google knows is close to your business searches “pesto sandwich Cupertino,” your ad will show up at the top of the list. If you can only serve customers in your nearby area, make sure those are the only people seeing your ad. You don’t want someone in Tangiers seeing your ad when they want a pesto sandwich.

 

If you’re unsure about where people are when they’re seeing your ad, you can see those on your GoogleAd page data sets. If a large group of people seeing your ad are in Tangiers, you might want to tighten up your location settings.

 

Campaigns

Finally, think about your campaign strategy. When it comes to Google Ads it’s best to have multiple campaigns with fewer ads in each campaign than the other way around. This gives you more control over each individual ad and more information on each campaign, letting you know what is and isn’t working. 

 

To make further sure that you are in control of your ads, make sure that you’ve selected to be a “Search Campaign” as opposed to Google’s default “Google Display Network.” The Google display network will restrict your ad to a text ad while handing the wheel to Google on where to show your ad. As a rule, you want to be in control of your campaign. 

Google Ads can be confusing and difficult to set up, and if you get it wrong you could be dumping money into a campaign that’s giving you nothing in return. If you are a lawyer who needs help setting up your Google Ads or designing PPC campaigns, contact us for a consultation.

Title Tags: What They Are, How They Work, and How to Write Them

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Those working with WordPress/Yoast SEO will know title tags from setting up their homepage, but not much beyond that. Due to this, it can be easy to neglect title tags when building a website. This is a mistake, and I’ll tell you why.

 

What they are

Title tags are incredibly important to SEO and page rankings by helping to communicate the purpose of the page in its code. HTML title tags are similar to page headlines but are often more to the point and describe the basic function of the page. A seen below, the page title for the New York Times is “The New York Times,” but the title tag (visible in the scroll-over text in the upper left-hand corner) is “The New York Times – Breaking News, World News & Multimedia.” 

 

How they work

Title tags work by telling search engines the content of the page. This is how title tags can improve rankings: a well tagged page will make it easier for the search engine to connect users with the website. If the tags are relevant to the page, it will show up in relevant searches, even if none of the keywords from the page title are searched.

 

How to write them

As previously stated, title tags need to be relevant to the content of the page, with specific enough keywords for search engines to be able to categorize them. This focus on keywords might make it tempting to cram your title tag full of any relevant word or phrase, but be warned: Google automatically trims long title tags. This can be seen above, where “The New York Times – Breaking News, World News & Multimedia” is cut into “The New York Times – Breaking News, World News …” If Google considers your tag too long or insufficiently informative, they will rewrite them. If your title tags are concise and informative, Google will probably leave them as you wrote them. In summary: you can make your title tags long if you want to, but Google might take over.

9 Keyword Research Tips and Tricks

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Simply put, you should be writing content that your customers need. The goal is for a potential client to stumble across a page on your site and think, “these people know what they’re talking about, I’ll give them a call”. Given that basic premise of content writing, there are a lot of ways to go about getting inspiration for what your customers need to find. Here are 9 quick and easy ways to figure out what you should be writing about, drawing on personal experience and two great articles by localvisibilitysystem and Moz.

1. Google Ads Keyword Planner

This is the default source for most SEOs. Log into Google Ads, “Tools and Settings”, “Keyword Planner”, “Discover New Keywords”, and start firing away. This tool will give search volume for any term you type in by location, which can guide you as you build out content addressing high search volume phrases to start competing in search results. It’s worth a look to check search results for content quality on a given search term to see you if might outperform it with better content of your own. At the same time, this tool is helpful for identifying content opportunities for lower traffic, more specific topics.

 

2. Google Trends

This tool is helpful for identifying popular search terms. I’ve found this to be more helpful on a larger scale, helpful at the beginning of your keyword research to get a general sense for where things are heading. This tool has location settings in addition to timeframe settings. A helpful tip for using this tool is the “Related Topics” section. Whatever keywords you add will be followed by similar but different suggested terms, very helpful when piecing together what you need on your site. Below I typed in “Family Law” and Google Trends came back with a number of specific related terms.

3. “Google Suggests”

It sounds simple because it is. Just type in the beginning of a search term and see what Google recommends you finish it with. These are popular searches that Google thinks you might be going for. Below are a few opportunities for content based on typing in “Family Law”

4. Competitor Analysis

Check out what your competitors are writing about. This will not only give you ideas of where you need to build out content on your site to start competing directly with those pages you find, but can also lead to inspiration for spin-offs and similar-but-different pages for you to start working on.

5. Moz Keyword Explorer

Similar to to Google Ads Keyword Planner, Moz’s tool will give you related terms for inspiration as well as SERP analysis and other functionalities for a new perspective. Unless you’re paying for Moz Pro, this has a monthly quota.

6. Your Own Reviews

Moving on to a few more creative ways to gather keyword research, try checking out your own review. After running down the reviews you’ve been collecting over time in Google My Business, Yelp, Facebook, Avvo, or anywhere else, see if you can pick apart any trends. Reviews will tend to mention the things that are important to them in reviews, wether that be a particular type of case, product, or service. It’s often the case that at least a few of the things mentioned in reviews are being sought after by other people and warrant a page of content.

7. Competitor Reviews

Just like your own reviews, competitor reviews can unearth valuable trends. See what your competitors clients liked/didn’t like, and write about that.

8. Competitor’s QAs in Google My Business

The QA section of your own and competitor’s Google My Business listings can bring valuable insights into what people want to know. This is basically a tiny version of a search engine with some users putting exactly what they’re wondering straight to your listing. Trends in what customers are wondering can often be valuable as pages.

9. Directory Categories

Run through some online directories like Avvo, Lawyers.com, or Superlawyers to see what categories they are using to segment out a given practice area. More often than not, these categories are heavily researched by the directories, doing some of the work for you. This can be used as a baseline to make sure any category showing up popular directories is showing up on your website as well.

 

 

SEO Copywriting: The Marriage of Content and Data

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The balance of SEO copy with quality content is difficult to find and often misunderstood.  How much copy should be in your content? How much content in your copy? How much should keywords play into what you post? The broad answers to these questions blend together into “it depends on the project and your team(s).” Luckily, we don’t have to leave it there. Here’s how good SEO copywriting can improve organic traffic and conversions.

Navigating Vs. Steering

Imagine a car with a driver and a passenger. The passenger has a map or, more likely, directions on their phone. For them to get where they need to go, the driver needs to trust the passenger’s navigation, and the passenger needs to trust the driver’s steering. SEO should function as navigation and content should be the driver.

If your company has separate SEO and content departments it is important to get them on the same page. They are working for the same goal, and they’ll go further together. It is key to remember that both departments have specific jobs that they excel at, and forcing those in SEO to try and design content or those in content to analyze SEO will only result in failure and confusion. The car will crash if the passenger tries to steer or if the driver tries to read. 

The Role of SEO

As previously stated, SEO should function as a GPS. Let the data show where to go, and don’t stop at your company’s data. Research your competitors, see what’s working for them and either beat them at their own game or focus on areas where they’re weaker. If your competitor is producing a lot of high-traffic content in the form of video blogs but is lacking in written articles: it’s time to get your content department to start writing.  

The Role of Content

Content writing is focused more on producing well-written, enjoyable, and/or useful pieces, as opposed to copywriting, which is aimed at increasing traffic and conversions. The two exist on a spectrum, in that copy needs to be well written in order to have conversions, and content needs traffic in order to be read. A good content department/writer can strike a balance between the two and should be familiar with the basics of SEO. This doesn’t mean they won’t benefit from guidance from the SEO professionals. 

Where They Blend

Keywords and formatting. Before content writers cringe, this doesn’t mean content should be dictated by how many keywords can be stuffed into an article. This leads to clunky writing and ultimately lowers organic traffic. Keywords should be used as a prompt. SEO research can provide content writers with topics consumers are interested in, as well as what formats perform best for that topic. From there the writer can get to work. Ideally, other keywords will naturally fit into the content. 

Good SEO copywriting exists in the gray area between data analysis and content. It cannot exist without collaboration between SEO researchers and content writers, and it cannot succeed without hard work on both sides.