8 Questions to Determine if your SEO Expert is… an SEO Expert

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What follows is an admittedly arrogant post.  And I’m transgressing on a principle I teach my kids – you can’t build yourself up by knocking others down.  BUT… I keep talking to law firms, flummoxed by the lack of results from their SEO experts, only to find some really rudimentary mistakes.  What follows are a few questions to suss out just how expert your SEO talent really is.

1.  My site was hit by a Penguin Penalty – how do I get my traffic back?

Platitudes around the disavow process are often the answer to this question – and while disavow is important (and easy, if not tedious) – it is NOT sufficient.  A Penguin Penalty recovery involves not just removing the offending links, but replacing the value they had previously delivered to your site with new links. White hat linkbuilding is the hard, creative, uncertain, expensive and most valuable thing SEOs can do.  In fact, it is so difficult, that many “SEOs” don’t even try.

2.  How do you use Screaming Frog?

Screaming Frog is an extremely flexible tool used to scrape and analyze key elements of a domain at the page level.  It can identify everything from your duplicated title tags to broken links on competitors’ pages.  As analytics rock-star, Annie Cushing said,

“if you aren’t using Screaming Frog, you aren’t really doing SEO.”

Wait for the awkward silence when you ask this question…

3.  What are the last conferences your staff has been to?  Have you spoken at any?

Technology is ever changing – and agencies have a responsibility to keep up with those changes.  Reading Search Engine Land is a good starting point, but ultimately there is nothing to replace being in the middle of the action, interacting with the experts at geek-centric conferences such as SMX, Mozcon, and Pubcon.  Ideally your SEO expert has spoken at some of these conferences (and I don’t mean pay-for-shill talks, thinly veiled as legal marketing conferences.)

4.  We’re writing about 4 blog posts a week, should we keep it up?

SEO “experts” often quote the tired “Content is King” refrain to answer this question and perhaps delve into the vagaries of long-tail theory.  The reality is, vomiting out more low quality content does nothing more than convince the search engines that your site is full of… low quality content.  This problem was greatly exacerbated by web marketers between 2012 and 2014 who did little more than parrot “Content is King” at legal marketing conferences.

The, “should I keep spewing out more content?” question is best answered by using Google Analytics to review your posts for traffic and links.   If you find that 90% of those pages have no inbound traffic, very few pageviews and that no-one has linked to your rewrites of local car accidents thinly copied from the local newspaper, you might want to switch up your content strategy. Conversely, if you find all of your content is seeing action, then by all means, keep writing.  Read more here: SEO Regicide.

5.  We use Yext, so we don’t worry about NAP consistency.  Right?

Yext is just one tool in the NAP consistency fight (NAP – Name, Address and Phone Number) and while Yext handles roughly 50 major second tier directories, it does NOT manage the top 4 data aggregators; Moz’s Local product does.  Therefore, if you’re relying on tools to improve your NAP consistency, it’s important to utilize more than one — both Moz and Yext, for example.  Additionally, both tools need to be proactively monitored and managed to have a real impact – especially if you are dealing with a name change, address change, cleaning up geo-spam or eradicating poorly implemented tracking numbers.  Finally, neither Moz or Yext handles legal specific directories such as FindLaw or Avvo.  Solid legal SEOs have a list of legal specific directories that require manual management as well.

6.  Are heading tags built into my site’s template?

This is a question you can diagnose yourself.  Just because someone can (poorly) code a website, does not make them an SEO expert.  Review the heading tags across your site to see if a lazy or uninformed web developer has used them to style the template.  We had one site with the H1 tag copied across every single page of his site.  Oh – and it read “original text”.  This issue seems so simplistic, yet I see it repeatedly.  To do this, you can view source and search for H1, H2, etc., install SEO quake into Firefox and use the Diagnosis button for a page by page review, or if you are feeling ambitious (and have a site with fewer than 400 pages), use the aforementioned Screaming Frog.

7.  We want to launch a new website focused on <insert specific practice area>.

This is a favorite request for website developers who pretend to be SEOs.  They’ll churn out “SEO optimized” websites upon request and delivery of a nice fat check.  Of course, they are missing the aforementioned difficult part of SEO: linkbuilding (see question #1).  The reality is, from a linkbuilding, NAP and citations perspective, marketing two sites is more than twice as expensive as marketing one.  And if you go off the deep end with a full blown multi-domain strategy, you’d better have a very deep bank account.  Multiple domains can be appropriate for a firm with disparate practice areas – say DUI and Family law – but note that you’ll be investing extra marketing dollars to push both of them successfully.

And for my bonus question, we get #8 about social media…

8. Will you help us get more Facebook Likes and Twitter Followers to help our SEO?

This goes back to another SEO theory that has been dead for at least 3 years – that social media popularity drives search results.  Multiple spokespeople from The Google have been crystal clear that this is NOT the case.  Note that there can be a correlation between the two – with savvy content marketers using their wide and active social network to push great content to key influencers, which drives links, which drives traffic, but… ignore the social media marketers parading as SEOs who suggest the key to ranking for “Atlanta Divorce Lawyer” is a few thousand more twitter followers from Uzbekistan.

Except for Pinterest.  You totally should do that.  Really – it works.   Trust me, I’m an SEO Expert.

7 Traits of Our Most Successful Clients in 2014

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Now is the time of year for legal marketing experts to cement their expert reputation by offering prognostications on the whims of Google in 2015. I thought I’d offer a different take on 2015 by highlighting the traits of 2014, common to our most successful clients.

Last year, we worked with 69 companies – from multi-national firms to part time solos. Some of them were very successful. Some of them (really) struggled. What follows are lessons gleaned from the top 15 of those firms who really nailed it last year.

They Focus on Conversion More than Marketing

(Or more accurately – they know that improving conversion is the best marketing investment you can make.)

While lawyers may not understand the concepts of canonical tags or H1s, they do immediately recognize great customer service. Further, customer service (which begins with an extremely positive intake process) is something a firm partner has direct control over.
Successful firms don’t see their front desk as a gatekeeper to the attorneys’ offices, but instead as a welcoming committee that is professional, caring, available and polite. One lawyer insists on having a prim British accent (and accompanying professionalism) at his front desk. Another (PI guy) evaluates his front desk on their ability to have the prospect agree to an in-home meeting with an attorney who is literally in a Lincoln towncar on the way to that meeting by the end of that phone call.

They Engage With Their Marketing

One of the (many) dirty little secrets about online marketing for lawyers is that our clients can usually do a better job at the hard (at least hard for us) stuff than we can. The clients we saw consistently crushing it in the search engines were very actively engaged with the hardest, most creative, least certain aspects of SEO – content development, linkbuilding and review management. These were hands on clients who leveraged their expertise, network and established position of influence with our direction to deliver very successful SEO campaigns.

They Calculate Marketing Channel Effectiveness

Our best clients calculate marketing effectiveness by channel – and not just by asking prospects “where did you find us.” Through a combination of intelligent tracking infrastructure and onboarding management, they knew their cost per client by marketing channel – enabling us to have rational, math based decisions instead of emotive, theoretical debates. In many cases, we installed this infrastructure and the internal discipline to use it in order to make these math based conversations happen.
For one client we ran two simultaneous campaigns through a creative marketing concept for two very different practice areas. Each required a $20,000 proof of concept marketing investment. One was an utter belly flop – the other a run-away success. Had we been focused on debating the genius (or lack thereof) of the marketing concept instead of the business results, nothing ever would have happened.

They Don’t Have Social Media Consultants

Very successful attorneys recognize social media for what it is: a catalyst for their own personal networking. And they know that outsourcing personal networking just doesn’t work – either online or in person. Nor did they need to hire anyone to teach them to write in 140 characters or less. They never embraced the oft-touted fallacy that social media was going to drive search rankings or that prospective clients were going to tweet out their need for a DUI lawyer or begin their divorce process by announcing on Facebook their impending nuptial demise.

They (Often) Had Never Hired an SEO

There were a sprinkling of firms we worked with that had never ever hired an SEO before and started with old, somewhat dated site. Essentially – their backlink and content profiles were so squeaky clean, just by having done nothing, that a responsive website and a little professional guidance were all they needed to take off. Note that these were firms in niche practice areas (i.e. NOT Personal Injury) in secondary geographic markets – where a combination of simple best practices and white hat implementation were all that was needed to drive significant business.

They Work the Legal Directories

2014 was the year the legal directories took a jump up – specifically Avvo, FindLaw and Nolo – all of which benefited from Google algo changes this year. Successful firms didn’t see this as competition, but instead an opportunity to be leveraged through advertising and/or engagement.

They Don’t Care About Their Ranking

Speaking of search engines – our best clients never ever talked to us about where they ranked for whatever SEO phrase most heavily stroked their personal ego. They understood how search results are personalized and that the vast majority of converting traffic comes from the long tail and local. We deliberately parted ways with a few firms who were myopically more interested in a search engine rankings instead of getting their phone to ring. (And no – these things are not necessarily correlated.)

New Years is always a good time to reassess priorities – both personal and professional – mix in some of these lessons for your firm along with your January gym membership.

Shaming State Farm: A Social Media Experiment

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Two weeks ago, my wife and I woke up at 2:30 in the morning to a loud crash.  Tow trucks and police cars followed and in the morning, we found this in the backyard (minus the 2013 Lexus the formerly filled said hole.):

photo 2

Unfortunately, the following day no one knocked on the door to offer either apologies or insurance information, a few days of my sleuthing through police reports finally brought me to . . . State Farm.  Now as far as I am concerned, the insurance as a whole lives at the very bottom of the ethical business barrel – and while there are some exceptions (I’m an ardent fan of Farmers), my experience with both Allstate and now State Farm suggests value to their shareholders is delivered through screwing their own customers.  Frankly this is one of the reasons I love working with lawyers – at Mockingbird we’ve codified this into the way we think.  The first of our 10 Commandments is “We Love Lawyers” – this is explained in greater detail in our new employee training manual:

We Love Lawyers – Attorneys who represent individuals are the primary counterbalance to corporate greed, the widespread abuse of police and political power and the abusive Insurance industry. We are honored to play a small role in this system.

Now, back to State Farm and our little fence problem . . .

Two weeks have gone by – I’ve called state farm once, twice, three times a day during the interim.  I’ve spent roughly four hours on hold and been transferred between departments and managers.  I’ve been hung up on.  I’ve left innumerable identical messages.  I’ve been polite.  I’ve been a jerk.  I’ve been patient and I’ve been irate.  And yet – the fence looks just like it that first day.  I’m still waiting on State Farm to take step 1A.

So, I decided to create a billboard for State Farm.  They do lots of advertising, so why not inject a little truth into their advertising . . .

photo 1

 

In all fairness, I “may” have casually arranged some Lexus parts carefully on top of the fence for dramatic effect.  Unfortunately the remaining fence wasn’t big enough for my new tagline:  “Like a Good Neighbor, State Farm is . . . .Where?

(And the “2” looks like a “1”, because it used to be a “1” – not sure what happens once we get to “3”.)

Every Social Media Consultant is Lying to You

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Lawyers – I’ll let you in on a secret . . . .

Social Media Marketing Doesn’t Work for You

There, I said it.

We’ve done it to you again – the self proclaimed mavens, experts, gurus and (self) published authors who peddle social media marketing to you guys have been lying. Or we just don’t understand how marketing works in legal.  But probably we’re lying – because we’d really like to cash your retainer to help you republish your blog posts on your Facebook page, even though there are plenty of tools that will automate that process for free.  Just like the SEOs did do. And you’ve all fallen for it again.

Now, I’m not the first person to say this, but it seems like no one is listening.  To understand social media marketing for lawyers in soundbite, consider this from Sam Glover’s anti-Facebook diatribe:  

People aren’t interested in a law firm. At best, they are interested in a particular lawyer, but normal people are about as interested in a law firm as they are interested in a proctology clinic, and for similar reasons.

Legal is NOT a Social Issue

With few exceptions, legal issues are extremely private.  I’m more likely to publicly  “like” my anti-herpes medicine than my DUI lawyer.  It’s not because I hate my lawyer – in fact I love her – its that I don’t want anyone to know that I need her because I’m facing incarceration, divorce, arrest, unemployment, deportation, or the IRS.   And if I need a lawyer for one of these private issues, there is no way on God’s green earth I’m initiating that search on anything remotely public like social media.

And this is the mistake that most self proclaimed social media experts (especially those who don’t work exclusively in legal) miss.  Standard social media marketing practice recommends building social media-based relationships with thought leaders and leveraging those individuals to expand the conversation about your brand.  This works for sneakers.  It works for religion. It works for Chevys and Harley Davidsons.  It works for soap and soup and sex toys.  It doesn’t work for lawyers.

If you personally wouldn’t start your search for a plumber on Twitter, why on earth would you imagine anyone initiate a search for a DUI attorney on Facebook?

Classic social media marketing – chasing likes and fans and pluses and followers simply does not apply to the legal marketplace.  Let’s go back to the classic social media marketing strategy – identify key influencers and leverage them to broadcast your message and shower you with likes, pluses etc.  There is simply no consumer social media key influencer built around getting divorced, or incarcerated or slipping and falling or being in an auto accident.

There is nothing more lonely that a DUI lawyer’s social media profile – which may have a few likes from his mom and law school buddies but otherwise is a barren wasteland screaming “nobody likes me”.  And stop sending out those like requests – I get plenty of them every day and nothing does less to “build a relationship with your audience” than begging for them to publicly advertise how much they like your divorce firm.

Everyone Wants Your Social Media Dollar

It seems that everyone is getting into the social media marketing game – even Lexis Nexis is happy to take your money to “Establish a Presence on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter”.  Bleh.  The Lexis Nexis marketing drivel epitomizes the huge failure of applying generic social media concepts to the very unique legal marketplace:

Half of all online conversations take place on social networks such as Facebook® and Twitter®. And 47 percent of customers say social media sites influence their decision to purchase a company’s products or services.

Join these conversations, demonstrate thought leadership and improve your search engine rankings with social media marketing from LexisNexis®.

You’d think that Lexis, being well, errr . . . Lexis, would have taken the time to survey people about how social media sites influence their decision to purchase a lawyer’s services.   But they didn’t – because they already know the answer and the social media consultants don’t want to admit it.  They’d prefer the legal industry continue to believe in the false complexity and ever falser effectiveness of this latest marketing channel fad.

Even if social media were effective in legal . . . it is simply impossible to outsource the joining of conversations, and demonstration of thought leadership.  And don’t get me started about the suggestions of the links between social and SEO – other than to say that Matt Cutts continuously insists that Google Plus’ are NOT a ranking factor.  But I digress.

The Only Thing You Need to Know About Social Media Marketing For Lawyers

If (and this is a big if) prospective clients use social to vet a prospective attorney – consider what you want them to see.  Let me give you a hint:  what you don’t want them to see is a slew of third party outsourced regurgitations of local news articles thinly related to your practice of law all ending with an identical admonishment to quickly call your law firm – vomited verbatim onto your Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn/Google Plus.

This is what you want them to see:

Cory Hicks

This is a guy I want to hire – yes he’s a lawyer, but there’s no leather bound books, scales or justice of roman columns.  For the love of all things holy, he’s not even wearing a tie!  He’s a dad and the three most important things in his life are standing right next to him.  Kind of reminds me of me.  The is the kind of guy I’d be happy to spend some money on.  And I bet he’ll never ask me to add this silly page to my “circles.”

Or how about this guy:

Valentine's Day

This is from Jeffrey Lapin’s Google Plus account.  Jeffrey hates abusive debt collectors – and frankly, if I’m dirt broke and being harassed by some aggressive scumbag in a call center who threatens my house at every possible step I probably hate them too.  If I jump with fear when the phone rings, I’d be pretty happy if Bill the Debt Collector got dumped  by his girlfriend on Valentine’s Day and wish Bill a lonely miserable Valentine’s Day sitting in front of the TV all alone.

Jeff gets it.  He gets me.  Maybe I’ll give him a call.

And I’m sure the social media marketing peddlers will disagree . . . they’ll site the impact of social shares in driving links, they’ll mention “authorship” and assure you they can get your little picture in Google SERPs, they’ll convince you that social will improve your rankings.  Sounds like SEO to me, not social media.  There is a fundamental difference. Don’t entrust your firm’s marketing to someone who can’t make the distinction.

Oh – and if your social media marketing consultant mentions Pintrest, run screaming.

Update:  This post is getting a surprising amount of interest – so I thought I’d end it with this picture:  a post of all of the twitter results for the query:  “need accident lawyer”.  The results are embarrassing and utterly devoid of consumers starting their search for a lawyer on this most widely accessible (i.e. not through private connections) social platform.  Try a search for your own practice area here:  search.twitter.com and see if you don’t get similar results.

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