Search Results for "keywords"

Getting the Most Out of Ahrefs

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We recently subscribed to an SEO toolkit called Ahrefs at Mockingbird. We did this because the overwhelming majority of voices weighing in across the web seem to agree that while Ahrefs is a little more expensive than, say Majestic or Moz, it’s more accurate. We like accuracy.

After playing around with Ahrefs, investigating features, and watching many of their help videos, I put together this guide that can serve as a how-to-get-the-most-out-of-Ahrefs manual, complete with basics, some cons, as well as some advanced features offered by Ahrefs.

What Ahrefs does:

Ahrefs brands themselves as:

“A toolset for SEO and marketing. We have tools for backlink research, organic traffic research, keyword research, content marketing & more.”

Basically, Ahrefs crawls the web and reports on what it finds. Its key functionality is its backlink checking capabilities. According to a study we found, Ahrefs reports on a higher ratio of live, accurate links than any other similar service. Based on our own experience with other tools, so far this seems to be the case.

Pricing:

The costs of different Ahref plans run as follows:

How to Use it:

Dashboard:

The first step towards using Ahrefs to the fullest is adding important sites to your dashboard (adding a “campaign”). This allows you to quickly and easily keep tabs on the websites you are most interested in. This is helpful insofar as you wont need to enter a url each time you want to check on a certain site, but adding a site to your dashboard also allows you to setup automated email reports. These reports give you your site’s vitals as they pertain to backlinks (new/lost/broken), keywords (are you still ranking for important keywords?), and online mentions (who’s talking about your website?) on a weekly or monthly basis, depending on your preference.

Backlinks:

Ahref’s backlink checker is its meat and potatoes. They have an easy-to-use interface that makes checking in on your sites’ backlink profile relatively intuitive.

To illustrate some of Ahref’s backlink checker tool’s capabilities, here’s an example that came up the other day; A co-worker noticed an unusual amount of dofollow links pointed at a client’s website in the past two months. She wondered if there was a way to quickly check in on backlinks that had been added in the last two months that were dofollow, and whether any of these links were related to each other. Let’s review:

  1. New links within last two months
  2. Dofollow
  3. Related to one another?

To figure this out, I used Ahref’s “New Backlinks” tool. Once inside, I adjusted the settings as follows:

As you can see, the date is set to include the last 60 days, the link type is set to “Dofollow”, and, perhaps most importantly for what my coworker was trying to accomplish, the links are set to show up as “One link per domain”. This last feature allows you to condense all links from the same (generally spammy) domain into something more easily digestible.

Once here, use the toolbar above the backlinks to further hone in on the information you’re interesting in seeing. Here you can prioritize how your backlinks are presented to you based on highest/lowest: Domain Ranking, URL Ranking, # of external links on page, social, date found by Ahrefs, or the number of times a domain links to your site.

Disavow tool:

This feature impressed me. Once you’ve added a site to your dashboard, the “Disavow Links” tool becomes available. This tool allows you to stockpile and organize links that you don’t want linking to your site. As you go through new backlinks, or all backlinks, you’ll see a small box waiting to be checked:

Once you click this box, you can choose to either disavow only that URL, or the entire domain. Once you’ve done this, the backlink is saved to your disavow list.

Once you’ve compiled a list worth disavowing, Ahrefs makes it easy to export the list as a txt. file, so you can send it straight to Google’s disavow tool (with the addition of some annotation on your part).

 

SEO: Beginner’s Guide to What Matters

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As a relative newcomer to the world of SEO I’d like to take a moment to zoom out.

There are a lot of things one can do to bring traffic to a website and get the phone ringing. In my almost two months here at Mockingbird my hands have been dirty redirecting URLs, nofollowing links, looking at content data to see what works and what doesn’t, answering the phone, getting Google Analytics certified, conducting onboarding audits, running competitive analyses… you get it. Trying to get stuff done, it can be easy to lose sight of what is most important to SEO and why we’re doing what we’re doing. That’s why I’ve made this SEO: Beginner’s Guide to What Matters.

Leads, Not Ranking

This list is not in order of importance, but I certainly didn’t list this first on accident. The one detail that has been emphasized to me the most, whether in my interview, training, or since, is that you can’t lose sight of the reason SEOs have jobs: to bring business to the client. It’s easy to get caught up in traffic, likes, shares, and yes, page rankings, when measuring the impact of your SEO efforts. Oftentimes these metrics are closely related to your end goal. But they aren’t it. Your end goal is to connect your client with people who want to pay them money in exchange for services. I would be happy showing up as the 2,573rd Google search result for all keywords if it also meant a steady, bountiful flow of leads. What I mean to say here is this: stay focused on goals that matter.

This article will mention ranking. Moving forward, keep in mind that ranking only matters if it generates leads. For more on this, check out Conrad’s blog post

Content

We’ve all heard it. Content is crucial. It might even be king. But what is a king without a queen, a couple knights, peasants and a jester? Just some guy. What I’m trying to say it this: content is valuable, but only when used in the right way. First, the content being posted to your website needs to be of good quality. Search engines can easily sniff out fodder, the stuff used to fill a page. The content being posted must be actually relevant and helpful to somebody who stumbles upon it. Next, high quality content needs to be regularly promoted and marketed. Today, people are starting to figure out that in order to get traffic (and, ideally, leads), they need to post a lot of high quality content. The gig is up. There’s ample high quality content out there. So in order for yours to be seen, you need to push it out.

Site Architecture

This is broad, but important. Site architecture is paramount to online marketing. It includes anything from website crawlability to mobile capabilities, site speed to duplicate content. In order for your website to garner attention from a search engine, in needs to be easy for the search engine to engage with. If Google has a hard time crawling your site because it has massive amounts of outdated, irrelevant content, non-descriptive URLS and no sitemap, it won’t be happy and there will be repercussions. But it’s important to remember that search engines aren’t ranking for themselves. They rank based on how helpful/effective they deem a site to be for the user. If Bing can tell that your sitespeed is in the pits, it’s going to recognize that this will annoy a user, and ding your ranking. When building a website, architecture should be kept in mind to easily accommodate search engines.

HTML

HTML, similar to site architecture, sends signals to search engines to help them determine what information needs to be put before a user. Title tags, meta description tags, and header tags all fall under HTML. When sifting through every piece of information on a site, tags give the search engine some guidance. Searchengineland aptly uses the example of a book; say you open a book shop with 100 books you’ve written. You happen to be a pretty bad writer, and you gave each book the same title, each chapter the same name, and put the same information in each sleeve. An interested reader who steps into your shop is going to have a hard time determining where to find content on their favorite genre, political intrigue. Or Vampires. The same is true for search engines. If a search engine can’t easily understand what content is stored on what pages, that content might be left by the wayside. Offer your content to search engines with plenty of explanation: relevant titles, descriptions, and header tags.

There you have it

An oversimplified summary of SEO priorities.

4 Google AdWords Tips You Should Implement Right Now

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Mockingbird is one of the newest members in the Google’s Partner Acceleration Program (humble bragging found here). With this exciting new partnership comes exclusive training from Google’s AdWords specialists themselves. During our recent training at Google’s offices, one thing was stressed over and over: MOBILE IS IMPORTANT.

I could tell you that people check their phone over 100 times a day, or that 66% of people turn to their smartphone to look up something they saw on TV, but really all you need to know is that more people are using their phones to research and make purchase decisions than ever before.

Below are some tangible, actionable tips that you can apply in your AdWords campaigns today to help capture that growing number of mobile searchers.

1) Take advantage of new expanded text ads for mobile

Why you should use them:

  1. Longer ad titles. You now get two headline fields (up to 30 characters each) instead of one headline with a 25 character limit.
  2. Longer, more readable ad descriptions. You now get one field (up to 80 characters) instead of two fields with 35 character limits.
  3. A display URL that uses your final URL’s domain
  4. Two optional ”Path” fields in the ad’s display URL (up to 15 characters each). This means you can now change your ugly URLs to something more targeted.

Most importantly, you should begin using expanded text ads because starting October 26th, 2016, AdWords will no longer give you the option to create/edit standard ads. You might as well embrace the change and get used to the new format now.

More info from the Big G here.

2) Use locations extensions

There are many boons to showing your location directly in your ad:

  1. Potential clients generally want to hire legal counsel close to them; you can show users your physical address to help with the decision process.
  2. Location extensions help your ad take up more real estate in the SERP (search engine results page)
  3. Push down bad reviews in the SERP. If you can’t seem to get rid of those pesky Yelp reviews, one strategy may be to run a branded advertising campaign with a location extension. With the bigger ad, users are less likely to ever see the negative reviews since that result will be further down the page.
  4. Location extensions make you eligible for the newly launched promoted pins. Although Local SEO’s will loathe seeing ads in Google Maps results, it’s inevitable. As a local business, it’s important to jump on board now while the competition is low.

3) Utilize “near me” keywords

These keywords have become increasingly important with the (not so recent) surge in mobile searches. There has been a 2X increase in “near me” search interest in the past year and 82% of smartphone users use a search engine when looking for a local business. If you are not bidding on “near me” related keywords, you are missing out on a large number of potential clients. Also, these keywords that show the searches obvious intent on finding a local business, are the same keywords that are most likely to produce the new local search ads referenced above.

4) Change conversion setting for calls down from 60 seconds

If you feel like you’re getting more calls from your call extensions or call-only ads than what Google shows you in the conversion column, there may be an explanation. Google’s default setting for phone call conversions is set to 60 seconds. If you want to measure every call received from your advertising rather than just the calls over a minute, you need to adjust your conversion setting accordingly. Here is a help article on how to change your conversion settings.

Wrapping up

If you would like to know more about Google AdWords, mobile advertising, or just want to tell us how awesome our blog posts are, feel free to give us a ring: 206-209-2125

The .law TLD Sales Conspiracy

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Lawyers – you’ve been duped into buying the new .lawyer, .attorney, and .law TLDs by a conspiracy of numerous “studies” all citing the same bogus example: Jacksonville.Attorney.  This newly launched domain, with the new .attorney TLD, was deliberately manipulated to suggest its success in SEO rankings was due to the new .attorney TLD.  This “case study” was  then shopped aggressively to the media and used as an erroneous example to sell more domains to unsuspecting attorneys.

I first became aware of the Jacksonville example when a lawyer forwarded me a glossy printed brochure from Rightside – a reseller of the new TLDs – touting the SEO benefits of the new TLDs. My client wanted to know if we should migrate his domain.rightsidew

This case study has been covered repeatedly by journalists regarding the efficacy of the TLDs as a magic bullet for search. Response magazine writes:

Due to the specificity of many TLDs, such as .lawyer, .mortgage, or .software, they often coincide with popular search terms and become valuable lead-generating tools while also boosting search engine rankings…

“Six months ago, it did not rank on any page at all for relevant searches,” Block said. “Without making any other design or content changes, we’re now starting to outrank our more established competition.

A Quick History

Recently, lawyers have been able to purchase new domains with .lawyer, attorney or .law replacing the traditional .com. (These are know as Top Level Domains – TLD). These new TLDs are available only to attorneys through a select number of resellers and are available at an extensive price premium from your typical domain.

Before we go any further, let’s be very clear that every experienced SEO should know where Google stands with regard to the SEO impact of these new  TLDs.   John Mueller has addressed this issue very specifically:

Keywords in a TLD do not give any advantage or disadvantage in search.
…understand there’s no magical SEO bonus…

So it is odd for so many case studies, by so many experienced experts, to be written with so many vociferous arguments pushing the SEO benefits of the new TLDs. All in direct contradiction with  fundamental search theory and Google’s crystal clear and specific remarks.

(My emphases in the quotes below)

Name.com.

Domain reseller, Name.com cites the Jacksonville example:

And while there is no definitive proof that it can give you a boost in SEO rankings, some websites that use New Domains are already beginning to rank on the first page of search results. Take, for example, jacksonville.attorney, which is the first non-paid result when you search for “jacksonville attorney”

FindLaw

Big Box legal player, FindLaw (one of the select few resellers of the new TLDs for attorneys) weighs in:

From both a consumer and an SEO perspective, a verified, restricted top-level domain provides a level of confidence that you know who you are dealing with online.

SEO for Lawyers

Luke Cicilliano (also a TLD reseller) at “SEO for Lawyers” penned an extensive, 6 post series outlining the virtues of the new .TLDs.  A few excerpts:

The new domain extensions are going to impact search in a big way.

Over the foreseeable future we see the use of the new TLD’s becoming a meaningful ranking factor in search.

Dot Law Inc

Yup – there’s a company set up whose entire business model is dedicated to selling vanity .law domains.

Search Engine Ranking – Since only lawyers can own .law domains, lawyers and law firms will be able to increase credibility in search results as compared to other top level domains.

RightSide

Rightside’s blog includes a deeper dive into the aforementioned Jacksonville example.  Excerpts:

At the same time, we’ve been more than happy to point to Jacksonville.Attorney—a site which has reached the top of Google’s search results—as a great success story for nTLDs….

The domain extension likely contributed to Jacksonville.Attorney’s high search ranking….

he made a move from EricBlockLaw.com, to his current Jacksonville.Attorney domain. Within months, Eric was seeing huge gains in traffic and search rankings.

But not all of the articles are directly from TLD resellers….

Search Engine Journal

A Search Engine Journal post touting the Jacksonville Attorney case study shows a screenshot of the site’s search traffic from Google Analytics before and after it launched. Pause and think about that for a second… you mean to say that the site has more traffic now that it did before it was launched?  This of course, is like comparing my 5 year-old’s height today to his height prior to conception.

SEJ 2

This article goes on to conclude:

We certainly have some proof that moving a site to a New gTLD domain or using a New gTLD domain for your brand new domain could help organic rankings, and it certainly won’t hurt rankings.

Which is a complete 180 about face from the author’s previous position regarding gTLDs.  From his blog post titled Will New Domain Name TLDs Carry Extra Weight in the Search Engine Rankings?…

So, with all of these new TLDs, will these new domain names carry any extra weight when it comes to search engine rankings? Absolutely Not.

You’ll also note in the GA graph above, the site is pulling in roughly 10 sessions a day.  Even assuming all of this is organic search traffic, its hardly a runaway SEO success by any measure and not fodder for an aureate case study.

American Bar Association

The ABA covered the new TLD’s touting their impact on search multiple times:

Search engine algorithms are notoriously byzantine, and the degree to which they weigh domain names, in balance with other factors, is clear only to the mathematicians writing the code. It is evident, though, that domain names are a factor.

Domain names alone don’t guarantee high ranking, but early data does suggest that new TLDs “are holding their own against, and in some cases outperforming, comparable addresses registered in legacy domains like .COM.”

Globerunner Case Study

Globerunner, an SEO agency out of Texas, was so enamored with the Jacksonville example, that they developed a slickly produced, 15 page case study that leads to the same carefully measured, data-driven conclusion:

Our research has led us to the conclusion that the uptick in organic search traffic on the firm’s rebranded website (www.jacksonville. attorney) was driven, at least in part, by Eric’s firm choosing to use a new, .ATTORNEY, domain name…  we believe that new gTLDs do offer multiple traffic generation benefits, especially because of the availability of exact match keyword domain names like Jacksonville.Attorney.

The Globerunner report does actually go deeper than all of the other “studies” and looks at the backlink profile for the new domain (which, would be my first obvious step in assessing success.)  It looks like the backlink snapshot was taken roughly just 6 weeks after the site went live and, it certainly doesn’t reflect the current reality of the site.  See the two different screenshots from Majestic below which show a more than threefold increase in the number of links.

So in this carefully researched case study – the obvious explanation for the site’s success (a bulletproof backlink profile) utilizes data that is, at best, grossly incomplete.

Globerunner’s Case Study Majestic Snapshot

Globerunner snapshot

Current Majestic Snapshot (taken 5/22/16)

Majestic

The backlink analysis brings up an entirely different question – how on earth does a solo practitioner’s brand new website generate over 200 backlinks across 70 domains in a scant six month period? I’ve been doing SEO for law for over a decade – the only way to develop this kind of backlink profile this fast is through an extremely aggressive campaign by experienced, SEO experts with deep contacts.

More pointedly –  why didn’t any of the ostensibly objective studies bother to take the 5 minutes it took me to review the backlink profile?  Didn’t anyone else notice or was this obvious point deliberately overlooked?

linkbuilding

 

The Legacy Site – Content, Platform and Design

Remember that comment about the site not being redesigned and no new content?  I started to wonder if this was true, so I reviewed the legacy site (ericblocklaw.com) on archive.org to see what it looked like prior to the migration to the .attorney domain. From a content perspective, is this a true apples to apples comparison?

Not only was the site completely redesigned and the platform updated, but the content was completely overhauled as well. The legacy site had a scant 14 pages and the new one…. 141. The legacy on-page was atrocious – not a single H1 and site-wide verbatim, generic title tags and meta descriptions.  Here’s the before and after for Personal Injury pages. Hmmmm… wonder why the early site wasn’t ranking for “personal injury lawyer”?

Content Comparison

 

 

 

 

 

Delving further into the content showed that many of the practice area pages were verbatim duplicated across 10-20 other law firm sites. Further, ericblocklaw.com was a carbon copy of itself on a domain that is still live today: http://thetriallawyer.org/. So we have a case of thin, copied, duplicated duplicate content.  Anyone still wondering why it didn’t rank?

block

A Wider Study

Making assertions that fly in the face of SEO theory with a single datapoint is dangerous at best…. and I would be similarly remiss in rejecting the premise of the top TLDs impacting SEO on that single example as well. So I enlisted the help of Dan Weeks to look at thousands of personal injury related queries across twenty large cities in the US and looked for instances of the new TLDs on page 1 results.  Just one .lawyer TLD.  No .law’s.  No .attorney’s. And that one domain was a redirect of a previously strong domain.

My OpinionGoogle Juice

Lawyers have been duped into buying things for their alleged magical SEO benefits for years. Press releases, social media consultants and virtual offices have all been sold to unsuspecting lawyers with the tease of a little Google Juice. This is just another example of lawyers being duped into ponying up money with empty promises of SEO success. Its a sophisticated, slickly produced, marketing and PR campaign supported by widespread “case studies” of a single erroneous example. And those case studies ignored the most foundational components of website success: content, platform and backlinks, in their analysis.

Jacksonville.attorney’s real success is due to a Pygmalian make-over of one of legal’s most sickly, pathetic sites with a comprehensive redesign, an upgraded infrastructure, a massive expansion of high quality content and a wickedly aggressive linkbuilding campaign.

But if you’d like some of that Google Juice, we have some available for purchase in our Legal SEO Store.

Should You be Advertising On Yahoo Gemini?

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So you’re running PPC campaigns on Google AdWords and Bing Ads… what about Yahoo Gemini?

Yahoo launched its advertising platform, Gemini, in February 2014, but it’s been slow to gain traction. In the spirit of trying new things (we also recently checked out Yellow Pages advertising), we decided to give it a try.

Overview of Yahoo Gemini

Gemini is composed of two parts, much like Google AdWords Bing Ads:

  1. Search – Ads in Yahoo search results.
  2. Native Advertising – similar to display advertising, ads are placed on sites throughout Yahoo’s partner network.

Yahoo Gemini ads are served up to 49% of the time on desktop searches performed on yahoo.com, inherently limiting the volume of searches substantially. Our Gemini Account Executive also warned us that the Search side of Gemini gets significantly less volume (in terms of impressions and clicks) than the Native advertising. However, given the majority of our clients are interested in PPC advertising, we decided to forgo Native for the time being.

We’ve been running our test campaign for two weeks with a budget of $500. So far, we’ve received a whopping 14 impressions and 1 click… To it’s credit, the click only cost us $0.06.

Analysis of Gemini’s Search PPC

Upsides:

  • In my opinion, this is the most attractive feature of Gemini – cheap clicks. If you were to ever get a client from Gemini, the ROI would be insane.
  • Account Executive. When you sign up for Gemini, you get matched with an Account Executive who holds your hand through the set up process. None of the three I talked to had any knowledge or experience with other PPC platforms, but were nice enough.
  • AdWords Import. As of 12/9/15, you can now import Google AdWords campaigns into Yahoo Gemini. As of now you can’t import Bing Ads campaigns, but our rep said this was on the list for future improvements.

Downsides:

  • Low volume. We were instructed “not to bother” with branded campaigns, as the expected search volume would be too low. Even using very broad keywords in our initial test, 14 impressions isn’t worth the effort required to set up the campaign, in our opinion.
  • Confusing. We had to go a lot of places to learn about and use Gemini. There’s this Tumblr, their “intuitive” bulk edits schema objects and fields guide, the actual Gemini advertiser platform, billing done through Yahoo Wallet (which is now Aabaco Small Business’ Yahoo Wallet?)… You get the idea.
  • The first three times we tried to sign up, Gemini gave us incredibly helpful “Server Error.” After some troubleshooting, we’ve gathered that if you don’t use Google Chrome and turn your ad block off, you should be okay.
  • Bulk Edits Are a Nightmare. Common features in AdWords and Bing Ads, such as ad extensions, are only available in Gemini via their Bulk Edits process. Unfortunately, this process requires downloading a 51 column CSV and manipulating it referencing the protocol outlined in their bulk edits schema objects and field guide.

The Verdict

I’d suggest holding off on Gemini for now, unless you’ve got lots of time to kill. New features claiming to make your life easier will continue to roll out in the coming months, but right now, Gemini is a little too difficult and doesn’t produce results. Clicks may be cheap, but the time spent setting up campaigns doesn’t seem to be worth the effort.

FindLaw’s take on the new .law domains….

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We wrote last week about the sales hype being drummed up for the new .law domains. Afterall, these babies are being advertised between $200 and $350 a year – a bit of a premium from the $14.99 you’ll get from GoDaddy.   Afterwards the post, someone forwarded me an article from FindLaw’s Lawyer Marketing Blog “Understanding the New .law Domain.”  Here’s FindLaw’s Mark Jacobsen’s take on the .laws TLDs (my emphasis):

From both a consumer and an SEO perspective, a verified, restricted top-level domain provides a level of confidence that you know who you are dealing with online. Which leads us to today and the .law domain.

Note that FindLaw claims about these restricted top level domains provide a level of confidence for SEO run 100% contrary to Google’s guidelines.  From John Mueller (of Google):

Keywords in a TLD do not give any advantage or disadvantage in search.
…understand there’s no magical SEO bonus…

But if you are unconvinced and still think FindLaw might know more about Understanding the new .law domains than Google does, you can buy one from….. FindLaw.

Why Your Content Sends You Zero Traffic

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YUNO

“So I’ve been blogging for a few months now. Why am I not getting any traffic?”

One of the most persistent myths in online marketing is that creating content will always lead to more traffic. Content is essential, yes, but with over 2 million blog posts popping up every day, the answer is likely that Google thinks one of those other 1,999,999 posts is more worthy of directing traffic to.

I know it sounds harsh, but hear me out. It doesn’t mean that your content is poor. Nor does it mean that it doesn’t deserve to rank. It simply means that the criteria Google uses to evaluate whether your content is relevant or valuable are not met. If you’ve been producing content for a while now and you haven’t been seeing an improvement, your content may be suffering from one or more of the following problems:

No One is Searching for the Topics You’re Writing About

One of the first things that you need to do as a content writer is to determine the kind of search volume there might be around your chosen topic. Search volume is essentially how many people are searching for the kinds of answers, information, opinions, or edification that your content aims to provide.

Use Pay Per Click data for Topic Research

One common tool that SEOs like myself use to research a topic’s search volume is Google Keyword Planner. Google provides this tool free of charge to give search marketers an idea of how much they should pay for a particular keyword when doing PPC advertising.

speeding-ticket-keywords

Using the keyword tool gives you a good idea of the kind of traffic you can expect should you get a piece of content to rank. It’s important to note that while the average monthly searches for each keyword seems relatively low, I have often seen successful pieces of content bring in more traffic than the average monthly searches for any targeted keyword. This is because the same piece of content will often show up for several different search queries. Also, because the numbers provided by Google Ad Planner are not 100% accurate, it’s important not to take them at face value; they are often best used for seeing the relative difference in search volume between keywords rather than the actual search volume for each keyword.

Try to build content around the keywords that have higher search volume and that you don’t see your competition writing about. Oftentimes you can succeed in getting this content to rank quickly, and send traffic to your site faster than with the more competitive terms. This is why it’s good to explore the Adwords Planner and see if there are any “out of the box” keywords to focus your content around. A quick look at the ideas for the search term “speeding ticket” shows this little gem:

pay-traffic-ticket-online

Wow, a keyword with over 4,440 searches a month and low competition! This looks like an opportunity to create a post like: “Paying a Traffic Ticket Online? 10 Reasons Why You Should Reconsider.” As you can see, Adwords Keyword Planner can be a very powerful tool for content idea generation. Use it for keywords in your practice area and see what you come up with!

Use Quora and Reddit for Topic Research

Another way to research what kind of content people are looking for is to go to sites like Quora or Reddit and do a quick search. The questions on these sites are user generated, so they often reflect what searchers are looking for that may not occur to you. For example: I looked up “speeding ticket” on Quora and the first question that came up was “Are traffic tickets public record?” Answering this question would be a perfect topic for a traffic attorney. Chances are that many more people out there want to know the answer to the question than just the person who asked it on Quora.

Search Volume isn’t Everything

Although it’s important to be conscious about keyword search volume, this may not always be important for your business. Information about how to get out of a speeding ticket (Keyword: “how to get out of a speeding ticket”), for example, is information many people will find interesting or useful at some point of their lives.  Information about how a particular law firm or attorney is good at getting people out of a speeding ticket (Keyword: “traffic attorneys in tacoma reviews,” on the other hand, will target a much smaller and more specific audience. A good rule of thumb here is that the more specific (or “long tail“) a search phrase is, the fewer people there will be searching for it.

Although it’s good to want more traffic, don’t neglect the long tail! The long tail search terms will bring in less traffic, but often the people using long tail search terms have much more specific intent. If you are a traffic lawyer, one website visit from someone interested in getting out of a speeding ticket in Tacoma will be much more valuable to your business than 100 visits from people who are just generally interested in how to get out of a speeding ticket.

Still no traffic?

So you’ve thoroughly researched a topic with high search volume, written about it, bravely pressed publish and…crickets. What went wrong? Well, it’s possible that…

You Don’t Have Enough Authority

If you have a brand new site, and happen to produce the most brilliant, engaging and informative page on on how to get out of a speeding ticket ever written, chances are that you still won’t rank very high for it. Even though a topic may have high traffic volume, and you write the perfect piece of content for the audience interested in that topic, you’re likely competing against many other high authority sites (Avvo, Nolo, etc) that have written similar content.

While Google uses many factors to rank content, authority is one of the most important. Google measures authority by the number of links pointing to a particular website. A brand new blog will have zero links pointing to it from other websites, and thus have little to no authority. The New York Times, however, has over  200,000,000 links from over 800,000 different websites. If the New York Times writes an article about getting out of a speeding ticket, chances are high that this article would rank in the top 10 results in Google within a day. Even though the Times article itself may have zero links to it, the authority of the site as a whole (or Domain Authority) helps boost this brand new page.

Since most web pages don’t get many links from other websites, domain authority is a very important factor when it comes to ranking content. A page with a lot of links (or Page Authority), however, even from an unknown blog with low domain authority, will tend to rank higher than pages from high authority websites with no links. A common strategy I’ve seen for many sites is to build a page with incredible content, promote that content through social media and direct outreach to webmasters, and once that content acquires a lot of links, it will start to rank and bring a lot of traffic. This organic search traffic will begin to attract links passively from people who visit the page from search and then link to it from their blog or resource page. These pages will not only have strong page authority, but will tend to increase the domain’s overall authority, which means your interesting content page will help your more “boring” link-less pages to start ranking.

How To Get Links to Your Content

In order to get people to share and link to your content, it has to provide some value to your target audience. Here are some reasons why people might share or link to your content:

  • It’s useful and informative
  • It mentions or talks about people (And the people you mention link to it)
  • It provides an unusual or unique perspective
  • It’s entertaining
  • It’s controversial
  • It’s timely
  • It’s funny
  • It has compelling data or data visualizations

When you have content that satisfies 1 or more of the above criteria, the next step is to make sure that this content gets in front of as many of the right people as possible. Ideally, you want to expose your content to as many people as possible within the first day of it being published. While discussing the tactics involved with content promotion could take up a whole book, here are my three favorites:

  • Research the names of social media influencers in your niche such as popular bloggers and create an outreach list. Email each influencer a personalized email, sharing your content and ask for their opinion or feedback on the content. Don’t ask for the share. If they like the content, they will share it. Ideally it’s best to establish rapport with these influencers by commenting on their blogs or sharing their posts on social media first.
  • Explore forums, Subreddits, Quora, and Google Plus Communities (yes, some people do use Google Plus very actively) and post your link if you feel the audience might appreciate what you have to share. Be careful not to just “leave” your link on a forum without thoroughly researching the forum and knowing the forum rules. Spamming forums will get you banned.
  • Advertise your content. Facebook advertising is one of the cheapest ways to get your content viewed by thousands of people in your niche. You may also want to experiment with advertising on Reddit and StumbleUpon.

While many of these tactics don’t lead to links directly. Oftentimes this will help your content get noticed by bloggers and webmasters who do have the ability to link to your content. Make sure that you concentrate all your outreach and promotion efforts in one day if you can. The more people that view and share your content within a limited window of time, the more likely that content is  going to gain momentum, leading to even more views and shares.

Having trouble getting links? It’s quite possible that…

Your Content is Thin or Lacks Originality

What if you have content for a topic you know has high search volume on a website that has high authority and you’re still not ranking? What’s missing?

Answer: Your content could be thin or unoriginal.

What is thin content?

Thin content barely qualifies as content. Many websites are stuffed with pages that only contain a short paragraph that reads like a summary of a topic rather than an in-depth exploration of the topic. In my experience, you’re better off having 10 pages of great content than thousands of pages of thin content.

What is unoriginal content?

I’ve seen sites with innumerable pages optimized for every conceivable keyword. Although the content itself may pass a plagiarism check, it’s often virtually indistinguishable from all the other content on the site. While churning out content for the sake of search engine traffic used to be an effective tactic, the increasingly sophisticated Google Panda Algorithm has learned to weed out this cookie cutter content. Indeed, while there are plenty of law blogs out there with hundreds of posts, these posts have zero comments, zero links, and little to no kind of social media engagement. On average, most of these blog posts only get 1 to 2 visits per year from organic search, often with a high bounce rate. Instead of paying a blogger to crank out posts every other day, you’re probably better off spending that money taking your team out to lunch.

What can you do to improve your content so that it gets noticed by humans and search engines alike? You can:

Personalize it: How might your personal experiences give the content some color and humanize it?

Localize it: Is there something peculiar or unique about your city or region which would be useful or interesting to local readers? The legal field in particular has plenty opportunities to talk about state and municipal laws.

Deepen it: Is there some background you could add to the content if you did just a little bit of research?

If you don’t do at least one of these three things, don’t expect your content to rank. But if you have and you’re still not ranking, my guess is that…

You Have Non-Content Related Issues

While search volume, authority, and content quality are the main elements for getting your content to rank, oftentimes there are non-content related issues that can throttle your traffic. If you have great content, you’re promoting it well and the content targets the right audience, you probably have these issues:

Technical SEO Issues

Do you have a misplaced line of code in your robots.txt file that is telling Google to ignore all your web pages? Perhaps your site’s download speed is so sluggish that Google is deciding to rank pages from faster websites over yours. Or maybe you have a lot of pages from an old website that are improperly redirecting to your new one.

Although Google is getting smarter about looking past technical issues, there are still many technical issues that can cause problems with SEO. A solid technical audit is essential to ensure that your website properly set up to be crawled and indexed. Before you start running the race, make sure your shoes are tied.

Black Hat SEO

Another non-content related issue is black hat SEO. It’s possible you’ve hired someone to work on your site who has used black hat SEO tactics to help improve your rankings. Google is constantly on the lookout for evidence of these tactics. Once caught, your site could be slapped with a penalty that can take a lot of work to recover from. While diagnosing whether or not your site has been penalized is out of the scope of this article, usually if you see a huge drop in traffic (especially after an unusual surge in traffic) the possibility is high that you’ve received some sort of penalty from Google.

Be sure you know what you’re getting into before hiring an SEO agency. If you can, get recommendations from colleagues and friends that have been happy working with the same agency for more than a year. If an agency is doing black hat work for you, a penalty will likely surface within a years time. Also, be sure that you are aware of some of the warning signs that you could be working with a less than legitimate agency.

Go Forth and Create Great Content!

If someone in the past has told you that they tried getting traffic through content creation and it didn’t work, they probably didn’t know about or follow the above guidelines. You need content with great quality, a site (or pages) with good authority, and content that is relevant to what people are actually looking for. Satisfying these three criteria isn’t easy, but if you do, you’ll start seeing more traffic than you know what to do with.

A Lesson on Understanding Your Website Data

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Switching from one marketing agency to another probably feels a lot like trying to cancel your Comcast contract. However, it’s not only hard on the business looking for a new agency, it’s hard on us too. Taking over a client means taking over all of their baggage (good and bad). Don’t be mistaken; we love bringing on new clients regardless of the situation or agency they are leaving, but some situations are certainly more challenging than others.

Some of the common “joys” we experience during this transition include: tracking down login information, cleaning up dirty links, and struggling to get tracking and cost data. The latest joy I experienced was completely out of the ordinary…

The Odd Situation

Let’s take a step back. A couple months ago we took on a new client for a website redesign project moving in to a SEO/advertising monthly retainer (a typical type of engagement for us). We completed the redesign and launched the new site. We did very minimal “SEO” work prior to launching the new site; but we were careful to migrate all the existing content exactly as it was on the old site. Essentially the new website was the old site with a really, really nice facelift. However, something a little strange happened…

In the first period after launching the new site (Mockingbird reports on 28 day periods) we took a 37% drop in organic traffic. Hmmm. I expected traffic to be relatively flat since we hadn’t made any real improvements to the site, aside from adding a few plugins. I certainly didn’t expect a colossal drop in traffic.

Digging Into The Data Like Any SEO Nerd Would

Before conferring with the client, I took an initial dive into the Google Analytics data. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately?), I found no glaring issues or reasons as to why the site was seeing such a drastic drop. As always, I then called my client and proactively delivered the bad news over a screen-share. I delivered the bad news about their drop in natural search traffic and was ready for questions. Some theories we discussed:

  1. We did site-wide redirects to remove the “.aspx” from the end of every URL. This may have confused Google and the search giant just needed time to adjust.
  2. It was a holiday weekend and we’re dealing with small(ish) traffic numbers so that could have a large impact.
  3. Lastly, we’re dealing with small numbers so a 37% drop seems more drastic then it really is.

After informing my client of the possible reasons for the drop, I had to tell them honestly, “I’m not sure.” That’s not a good feeling. I’m the expert and should know the answer.

On a side note, I will say that all the other data points looked to be going in a positive direction. Local traffic and number of leads generated was up, and the cost per lead was down. Other site metrics looked good too: the site speed had drastically increased, the number of indexed pages took a huge positive spike, our number of impressions grew since the last period, and the average rankings moved up by 5 spots.

Picture proof…

(Increase in website speed)

Time Spent Downloading Page

(Increase in # of indexed pages)

Total Indexed Pages

Feeling unsatisfied with our lack of answers, I dredged through the data again with the goal of finding exactly which pages lost organic traffic. If I could identify a trend in those pages, I could do my best to reverse that trend. This time I found something I missed before.

To find which pages were losing traffic, I looked at organic landing page sessions. If you want to look at your own organic landing page data follow these steps: navigate to acquisition > channels > organic search > change your primary dimension from keywords to landing page. (Full disclosure – there are many ways to parse this same data out of analytics. I outlined my steps.) Upon looking at the landing page URL’s I noticed something really wonky. There were a lot, and I mean A LOT, of URL’s ending in parameters that I had never before seen. Here is an example (very edited to keep anonymity for both my client and the past agency):

sampledomain.com/Criminal-Law.aspx?PPC=Google&PPCADID=3686PPCADEXID=KeywordID=9302&keyword=criminallawyerchicago&matchtype=e&adposition=1t1&random=2569&targetid=kwd-2451538036&network=search&device=m&deviceModel=&networkType=g&physicalloc=90746&interestloc=1022

Allow me to explain why this is so disconcerting (hopefully without losing you in technical jargon). We typically see organic sessions to normal website pages that look similar to this: sampledomain.com/criminal-law/ but instead we were seeing these crazy long and complicated URL endings. In the example URL you’ll see a bolded section “PPC=Google” which tells me this particular URL is used to track advertising (PPC=Google means pay-per-click advertising with Google). Now, it’s not weird to see a tracking parameter like this, but it is weird to see it in the Organic traffic bucket of Google Analytics. The website sessions to this URL should be counted in the paid channel and not an organic channel. Now I knew the data I had reported to my client was inaccurate.

The Results:

Organic Traffic increased by 28% and did not decrease  37%

We actually increased the number of organic sessions in the first period but initially failed to see it because of these “PPC” parameters messing with the data.

The Important Lesson

Dig deeper into the data and always investigate traffic drops and other anomalies to find causation. It’s imperative to report data accurately, don’t give up and settle for a theoretical answer (SEO lends itself to this) when you have an immense amount of data at your fingertips. This point becomes especially important when taking over a client from a different agency. Although Google Analytics is already completely free and built by some of the smartest people in the world, there are companies out there that elect to use their own data tracking software. Be mindful of this when delving into your own data.

7 Signs Your SEO Agency Might be Less Than Legit

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black-hat-catPicture yourself in this situation: You hire an SEO agency and suddenly your website appears for every conceivable keyword. Traffic skyrockets. You hire a new receptionist just to handle the call volume. You clink champagne glasses with your team to celebrate your great success. Life is good.

Then, all of a sudden, traffic plummets. Your website drops from the top of page one in the search engines to the bottom of page ten. The phones fall silent. You switch from champagne to stale coffee. You begin to panic.

When asked about the change, the SEO agency gives you some excuse about Google algorithm changes, or rattles off some obtuse technobabble and assures you that everything is ok. You give it a few more months, and still no change. When you review the numbers with your accountant it turns out that your loss in business over the last few months far outweighs any benefit you may have gained from that initial ranking. At about this time, that same SEO agency stops responding to your phone calls.

The above scenario is a common one for anyone who has unknowingly engaged with a black hat agency. These agencies use manipulative and easily detectable tactics to get a website to rank temporarily, and then when Google catches wind of these tactics, the site gets penalized–a penalty that often takes months to recover from, even in the hands of the most experienced penalty recovery specialists.

While we haven’t found a black hat SEO firm that actually markets itself as “Black Hat” we do have clients whose sites have received heavy penalties due to a previous agency’s tactics. I took a look at some of these black hat firms’ websites to find some possible warning signs that you might be dealing with black hats. Here are some things I noticed:

1. There isn’t any mention of “white hat” on their website

If there’s one thing I’ve noticed from reading black hat forum posts, it’s that they typically disdain white hat tactics as being “unnecessary hard work”. This is why they tend not to falsely brand themselves as a white hat agency. Also, if  you market yourself as a white hat agency and actually don’t do white hat work, chances are you will ruin your reputation and perhaps even open yourself up to a lawsuit.

2.”Confidential” or “Proprietary” SEO Trade Secrets

The only “confidential” SEO tactics that I know of are black hat methods. Essentially, if they’re not willing to tell you how they work, they have something to hide.

3. SEO and Account Management are separate departments

If the representative of the agency you’re working with can’t answer your SEO questions and refers you to a “technical department” whenever you have a technical question, this could be a warning sign. After all, it’s easier for account managers and sales managers to sell you on a bad product if they themselves don’t know the product is bad.

4. “Guaranteed Rankings”

While a pay-for-performance system based on keyword rankings seems promising, they are often misleading. How are they misleading? First of all, it can often be very easy to rank high for keywords that have low competition or low volume in terms of people who are actually using that search term. Second, it can be very easy to temporarily gain a foothold for certain keyword rankings using spammy black hat tactics. These are tactics that will ultimately hurt your business in the long term.

5. Where are the Names?

If you go to a firm’s website and notice that not a single person’s name is mentioned, be wary. The last thing a black hat SEO or spammer wants to do is associate their name with black hat practices (should they get caught or get bad reviews). In these cases. it may be best to steer clear.

6.They Actually Mention Black Hat Tactics

Just because an SEO is black hat doesn’t mean that they won’t be forthright about what they do. One black hat SEO I know of actually mentioned to his client the black hat tactics he would use to get them to rank. Of course, the client didn’t know they were black hat tactics at the time. If your SEO agency mentions that they do any of the following, run:

  • Article Directory Submissions
  • Blog Networks
  • Doorway or Gateway Pages
  • Microsites
  • Mirror Sites
  • Comment and Trackback Link Building
  • Link Farms

7. What would Google Do (WWGD)?

Google’s goal is to serve to users the highest quality and most relevant content to its searchers. When interviewing an SEO Agency it’s important to keep that in mind. If your agency doesn’t actually help make your site more relevant to your target market, and instead uses an arsenal of “SEO Tricks” to get your website to rank, then chances are you’re being taken for a ride. If someone at an agency mentions questionable tactic to you, a simple question to ask would be: “Wouldn’t that incur a Google Penalty?” If their answer to that is less than convincing, you may want to start looking for another agency.

Have you had an experience with a less than legit agency? Please feel free to share some other signs of blackhattery in the comments!