Google SEO For Lawyers Ranking Factors – #21 – 40

As many lawyers know, Google has recently once again updated how they rank sites and its now more important then ever to have authority on your site and demonstrate that you are an expert in your legal field.   That combined with links, content and other things will get your site ranked higher in Google these days.

Google recently released a document which shows that there are at least 200 Ranking Factors, 200!   Some obviously are more important then others, and some have almost no influence.   So its key to know what works in 2018 to get your lawyer website ranked higher, so you can start getting more leads from clients looking for your legal services

I am going to cover the next 20 ranking factors today and then make this a 10 part series that covers all 200 ranking factors.

Previous Post ====> RANKING FACTORS 1-20

21. Page Covers Topic In-Depth: There’s a known correlation between depth of topic coverage and Google rankings. Therefore, pages that cover every angle likely have an edge vs. pages that only cover a topic partially.

22. Page Loading Speed via HTML: Both Google and Bing use page loading speed as a ranking factor. Search engine spiders can estimate your site speed fairly accurately based on your page’s HTML code.

23. Page Loading Speed via Chrome: Google may also use Chrome user data to get a better handle on a page’s loading time. That way, they can measure how quickly a page actually loads to users.

24. Use of AMP: While not a direct Google ranking factor, AMP may be a requirement to rank in the mobile version of the Google News Carousel.

25. Entity Match: Does a page’s content match the “entity” that a user is searching for? If so, that page may get a rankings boost for that keyword.

26. Google Hummingbird: This “algorithm change” helped Google go beyond keywords. Thanks to Hummingbird, Google can now better understand the topic of a webpage.

27. Duplicate Content: Identical content on the same site (even slightly modified) can negatively influence a site’s search engine visibility.

28. Rel=Canonical: When used properly, use of this tag may prevent Google from penalizing your site for duplicate content.

29. Image Optimization: Images send search engines important relevancy signals through their file name, alt text, title, description and caption.

*** This is something not many other people do, so this can help not only get some traffic via Google images, but more important help establish RELEVANCY

30. Content Recency: Google Caffeine update favors recently published or updated content, especially for time-sensitive searches. Highlighting this factor’s importance, Google shows the date of a page’s last update for certain pages:

31. Magnitude of Content Updates: The significance of edits and changes also serves as a freshness factor. Adding or removing entire sections is more significant than switching around the order of a few words or fixing a typo.

32. Historical Page Updates: How often has the page been updated over time? Daily, weekly, every 5 years? Frequency of page updates also play a role in freshness.

33. Keyword Prominence: Having a keyword appear in the first 100 words of a page’s content is correlated to first page Google rankings.

34. Keyword in H2, H3 Tags: Having your keyword appear as a subheading in H2 or H3 format may be another weak relevancy signal. In fact, Googler John Mueller states:

35. Outbound Link Quality: Many SEOs think that linking out to authority sites helps send trust signals to Google. And this is backed up by a recent industry study.

*** This is no doubt IMPORTANT Lawyers, add links out to other authority sites within your blog posts.

36. Outbound Link Theme: According to The Hillop Algorithm, Google may use the content of the pages you link to as a relevancy signal. For example, if you have a page about cars that links to movie-related pages, this may tell Google that your page is about the movie Cars, not the automobile.

37. Grammar and Spelling: Proper grammar and spelling is a quality signal, although Cutts gave mixed messages a few years back on whether or not this was important.

38. Syndicated Content: Is the content on the page original? If it’s scraped or copied from an indexed page it won’t rank as well… or may not get indexed at all.

** You must create new fresh content on a constant basis.  You can borrow stuff and reword it, but the content must be fresh in order to rank better

39. Mobile-Friendly Update: Often referred to as “Mobilegeddon“, this update rewarded pages that were properly optimized for mobile devices.

40. Mobile Usability: Websites that mobile users can easily use may have an edge in Google’s “Mobile-first Index”.

Be mobile friendly for lawyers is an obvious one these days.  More people then ever will visit your site from a mobile device. It used to be 10-20%, now its like 60% or more. So think mobile first.

The next 20 Google ranking factors coming soon.

The bottom line with all these factors, it comes down to new fresh content, establishing your an authority and expert and getting solid backlinks to your website.

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