Legal Search Marketing

Legal SEO News for Lawyers

You are here: Home / Blog

Blog

Difference between PPC and Organic SEO listings (2005 vs. 2019)

By 1 Comment

What is the Difference between Google Paid Listings & Organic Search Listings?

*** This post was done originally in 2005! How much has changed in 14 years? Not much and a ton at the same time.  

Google Paid Ads vs. Google Organic SEO

Some lawyers are confused by the difference between the pay per click (PPC) sponsored listings and the free organic listings at Google, Yahoo, and other top search engines.

The free or “organic” search listings at Google are listed on the left side of the page and the sponsored PPC listings are located on the right side of the page under “sponsored links” and sometimes at the very top of the page, right above the organic listings.

—> 2019 Update….. The organic listings are still in the same place, but the paid ads are also on the left side of the page, usually above the organic listings and the map local listings.  

Organic listings take time and effort to achieve and are usually a result of a legal web site that has a lot of good content, is listed in the Yahoo and Open directories and has a lot of links pointing to it from other sites.

*** 2019 update — This is still true and actually organic rankings take a LOT of time and way more then they used to take. It’s much harder to achieve organic rankings at Google.        Yet the having good content, being listed in top business directories and having a lot of relevant and authority links is still the key to ranking higher in the Google organic listings. 

The pay per click or sponsored listings are a result of web sites that bid a certain amount per click on a keyword. The higher the bid, the higher the ranking. Even though at Google its a little bit of a different bidding process then at Overture. At Overture, its simply a matter of whoever bids higher, gets the higher listing, where at Google, its a combination of different criteria including amount bid.

GOOGLE SEO FOR LAWYERS

**** 2019 update —- Who the F is Overture?!?!  They used to be the main player in town as far as pay per click went, way back when!  Then Yahoo bought them a while back.  Now the main players in pay per click are Google ads and Bing/Yahoo ads, as well as Facebook ads, Pinterest ads and Instagram ads.  

Obviously you want to be listed in the organic listings because its like the gift that keeps on giving and you don’t have to pay every time someone clicks on your site.  Yet it takes time to get the free listings and sometimes you have no choice but to pay extra to visitors to your legal web site. Some lawyers do both, get great organic listings but then also pay for the sponsored links to cover all bases.

**** 2019 update —-  Organic listings and traffic from Google is still the gift that keeps on giving.  Getting top rankings is more important than ever.   Also, it’s the same thing where sometimes you must do paid ads if you want any traffic because you dont have good enough organic listings.   

Also you might have top rankings for most of your keywords, but you still might want to do some paid advertising if you really want to be aggressive and get more brand recognition.

SEO for Lawyers in 2019 Conclusion

The key in 2019 for Lawyers who want to do Attorney SEO Marketing, which by the way should be literally 100% of all lawyers.  The key is that you first want to make sure that Google trusts your Brand.

Your brand name is your firm name, SO you want to get your brand out there in a number of ways.

With link building, you want to make sure that the anchor text of the links pointing to your site are your brand name and going to your home page.

Then once you build up your authority and trust with Google, then you can create some Power Pages and then get more links that point to these pages.  Then you will want to some partial and exact match anchor text but not that many and not until you first establish your brand and home page links.

This can take 6-12 months or more and is a never-ending process.    One thing you want to focus on with your main pages is to create a lot of visuals like images, videos and infographics.   If you are a personal injury attorney, you want to create visuals to explain how the personal injury process works.

Welcome (back) to the Legal Search Marketing Blog (2019)

By Leave a Comment

Re-Launch of Legal Search Marketing Blog

Welcome to the relaunch of the Legal Search Engine Marketing Blog. We will bring you the latest news on the search engine industry with a specific focus on the legal community.   We will help your law firm be able to rank in the Google search results and improve your law firms Organic SEO, Local SEO, and even video SEO results!

Lawyer SEO

Holy Shit this Blog has been going since 2005! Thats frigging almost 15 years now.    So Im going to update this post with today’s date of February 5, 2019, and make this the relaunch of the Legal Search Marketing blog. 

This blog in the past was just put up in order to link to my lawyer clients sites and to just blog about the latest search engine related news, mainly Google SEO for lawyer news.

SEO FOR LAWYERS

Yet over the past year, I’ve made this into an SEO marketing blog for Lawyers, posting not only the latest Google news and other search engine marketing related news but also SEO tips for lawyers.    I am going to be posting as many valuable tips as possible for the legal community. We will focus on everything related to search engine optimization for attorneys including Keyword Research for lawyers, organic seo marketing, latest Google my business tips and everything else related to getting the best possible results for your law firm.

SEO CHANGES OVER THE YEARS

SEO is always changing and evolving each and every year it seems.  Yet some things remain the same as they were in 2005. Back then it was very easy to get ranked and you just had to optimize your TITLE and meta tags, and get a few links with exact match anchor text, and you would probably easily be in the top 3 at Google for most of your keywords.

Yet Google has made it MUCH harder to get ranked and to get quality traffic to your legal site.  YET if your a lawyer who writes a lot of content and has a good brand, then your probably going to be in good shape and don’t even need to do that much.

There are so many new things though that you must do in 2019, over 2005.  Social media accounts for one, earning backlinks from a lot of different sites, creating videos and the list goes on.

LAWYER SEO IN 2019

Today it comes down to a few different things as far as “how do you get your lawyer website ranked #1 at Google”.   First off there are a few different places to be #1.   The Local SEO Map results is one place, the organic listings is another, and then Google has all kinds of other ways they show content in the search engine listings.

You must create high-quality content that is 2000 words plus and is relevant to your legal practice.   You must get listed in the right legal directories and make sure your Name, Address, and Phone # (NAP) are all exactly the same.  You must have social media accounts set up and get social signals to your content.

This means people are sharing your content and engaging in it by making comments.   Your site must be mobile friendly and fast in order to rank higher these days.    Then getting links from other sites is usually what the secret sauce is going to be, but the right sites.  You need links from high authority relevant sites and they should be using your law firms brand name in the anchor text.

Updating Your Lawyer Blog Posts from Past

One of the many SEO techniques that you need to do in 2019, is to go back through your older blog posts and check for a few different things including:

  • Duplicate Content – (You can use the tool of siteliner.com to check your site for duplicate content)

  • Thin Content – This means content like this blog post that was maybe 100 words total.  I now am updating it to add another 600-1000 words of content, this way its not so thin.  I am also updating the date to let Google know this is new fresh content!

  • Non Relevant Content – Sometimes over the years your content might not be as relevant or might be a post that you just would like removed.   So what you need to do is 301 redirect these older posts to a new post or page that makes sense for user to find.   This way any link juice that these posts have, will be carried over to the new post or page.

Then also you might have blogged about the same thing 10 times over the years, so it might make sense to combine those posts into one main post. You can also do a 301 redirect of older duplicative posts where you are talking about the same subject as in a new post.

Nathan Gotch of Gotch SEO talks about the importance of not cannibalizing your keywords.  So I am going back through all of my older posts and making a number of updates and probably going to redirect like 150 posts or more.  Then maybe 50 of the posts will be deleted and 50 of them will be updated for 2019 lawyer Search Marketing. I am in the process of doing project for a few different personal injury lawyers, as well as updating my Chicago SEO website.

If you need any assistance with improving your law firms SEO results, contact us for a free SEO audit of your legal website.

WordPress Web Hosting for Lawyers

By Leave a Comment

BEST WEB HOST FOR LAWYERS

Who is the flat out best webhost for lawyers who have wordpress sites? 

The answer is WP Engine without a doubt. 

WordPress is the most common platform these days to run your legal website on, so your current site is probably already on wordpress. YET if its not, then it makes even more sense to upgrade today.

—-> We will Upgrade your website hosting to Wp Engine and Migrate you over for FREE – Contact us today……

If there is one thing to NOT be cheap on with your website, its the web hosting account Click To Tweet

If there is one thing to NOT be cheap on with your website, its the web hosting account.  $5 vs. $50 per month seems like a huge deal and no doubt people are going to be tempted to save some money by going with the cheaper hosting. HUGE MISTAKE….. Do not do it…

—> Your website hosting is the #1 factor in your Sites Speed Score and how fast it loads.  Go with the best to make sure your site loads as fast as possible.   Google uses the speed of your site as a SEO Ranking Factor. 

Ive been using WP Engine for the last few year sand they just have faster servers, better customer support and everything is easier. Vs these cheaper webhosts like hostgator and a million other of them.

There are so many confusing options and usually the hosting starts out with a super low $5 per month offer but then jumps up and usually your site gets hacked, or its super slow, or a number of other issues including bad customer support.  No thanks!

The Ghetto vs. The Gold Coast, which is the better Location?

The Gold Coast is the obvious answer and this is the place you want your lawyer website to live.   The $25-40 extra per month is really no big deal, especially for businesses who spend $50 and more per click at pay per click sites.

IF its obvious that a better web host will help with your organic SEO, why not go with the better web hosting? 

It just makes sense here because a better web host can:

#1- Make your site load faster in Google eyes

#2- Give you an SSL Certificate, another SEO ranking factor (httpS vs. http)

#3- Have better all around site security so you NEVER get hacked

#4- Have the best customer support in the business, so if your site ever goes down, they will get it back up ASAP

#5- Have the best backups in the game at your fingertips. They have multiple backups of your site which you can easily restore anytime.

Are you a  law firm that has a wordpress site? Or maybe multiple wordpress sites? Well sometimes web hosting can make a big difference in how your site operates.

WP Engine in my opinion is the BEST web host for WordPress sites, no doubt.  Take the pepsi challenge and you will see this is a WAY better host then what you have now.

*** Also its VERY easy to migrate your current site over to this new webhost.

Decide which WP Engine plan is right for you! – All Plans get your 20% off instantly… the discount is already applied. Take advantage of this and sign up for the year and save even more.   

WordPress Hosting for Lawyers – 20% off ALL Plans with Wp Engine

WebHosting_300w

Does your law firm use WordPress? Then you should use top of the line hosting made specifically for WordPress sites. Hosting that focuses on Speed, Performance and Security. WP Engine is a great web host and they are a little more expensive, but you get what you pay for and trying to save money on web hosting isn’t wise.

Your web hosting can make a difference in your organic SEO. Faster websites just get better results overall. Also you want a host who will help you if your site goes down or gets hacked. WP Engine is THE Best.

—> Does Your Firm Need Top Web Hosting?

—> Get Fastest, Most Secure Web Hosting

—> Web Hosting Special 20% Off all plans, pay annual and get months free.

WordPress sites can get by with super cheap hosting, even basically free web hosting. Yet like a Free wordpress plugin or theme, it might suck after awhile and let you down when you need it the most. Do NOT be suckered by cheap web site hosting, go with the best!!

The best hands down hosting for wordpress sites is WP Engine. Get 20% off your first payment by clicking on image below.

Decide which WP Engine plan is right for you! – All Plans get your 10% off instantly… the discount is already applied. Take advantage of this and sign up for the year and save even more.   

WP ENGINE WEB HOSTING FOR WORDPRESS

LEGAL WEBHOSTING FOR WORDPRESS SITES

Contact us today for a FREE Site analysis and to see how we can save your law firm money today. 

Lawyers Make Sure Your Content is Unique

By Leave a Comment

Content for Lawyers

If content is King, unique high-quality content is emperor and then some!   Everyone now knows what duplicate content is and how you don’t want to just cut and paste content from one site to another, or from one page to another in your legal site.

You want to make sure you high top quality content that is 100% unique and will pass the copyscape test.  You want unique content for all of your practice area pages, and then you want to create unique content on an ongoing basis via your blog.   Here you want to create content around long tail keywords that are related to your legal practice.

Your lawyer SEO depends on you having unique content all around.  It seems like Google really wants all of your content to be unique and you might not get a penalty if you use duplicate content but your for sure not getting any credit from Google if you simply cut and paste another article you found on the web.

Same thing if you take the content from your personal injury page and just paste it into a new blog post and add a few new lines of content. That will never work and you need to just from now on go by the motto of “Make every piece of content unique”.

This means you don’t want to just take an article you wrote and used as a guest post, as the same content on your site, or any other site.   From now on, you must only use content one time.  If you use it on your blog, never use it anywhere else. Google knows, believe me!

Use Copyscape to check for Unique Content

There are a lot of tools you can use to find duplicate content but the best way is to run it through the copyscape tool, this will check the entire Internet and even if there is just a chunk of that content on some other site, it will let you know.  You want to go for 100% unique content, not 95, 100 only.  Visit https://www.copyscape.com/

There are a lot of different tools you can use to help create your content and you dont want to take any chances of having duplicate content. You need to make sure you do a few different things with your attorney content, but the main thing is to not repeat things on different pages.

You want to make sure you have unique TITLEs and Description tags on each page.  Then you dont want to have the same block of content on every page, mix it up. Change things around and rewrite stuff.

Let the law firm SEO experts at Legal Search Marketing help you with your next organic SEO project for your law firm.

—> Google Organic SEO For Lawyers

—> Google My Business for Law Firms

—> Google SEO FREE Analysis

google_lg

Need SEO results for your personal injury law firm? Contact us today for a free analysis and seo audit of your lawyer website.

Free Keyword Research Tool for Lawyers

By Leave a Comment

Keyword Research Tools for Attorneys – Ubersuggest

Neil Patel is one of the top SEO’s in the world I would say, and hes my 2nd favorite SEO guru behind Nathan Gotch of Gotch SEO.     Yet Mr. Patel here has made paying for keyword research a thing of the past.   In the old days if you wanted great keyword data, you needed to pay a good monthly fee to one of many top sites that offered keyword research tools.   I would always use wordtracker back in the day, and many many others.

Ubersuggest is 100% free

Ubersuggest is a great keyword research tool and its one of these totally free things, where you dont need to enter your email or any other info.  He has bought this piece of software and then simply added it to his site and its just open for anyone to use.    It does a great job and from my research, it has solid keyword volume numbers.

Keyword Research Info

If you do a search for example for the term of “Personal Injury Lawyers”, it will tell you a number of things about that keyword. It will give you its overall search volume, in this case 40,500 visits per month.   Then it also gives you 1-100 rating difficulty scores for both organic seo and paid seo.     Then it also lists how much this keyword would cost on average to get a top 3 ranking with Google ads.

 

Other Keyword Research Ideas or Related Keywords

Then of course you want to get other keyword ideas for other related keywords.  As you see below, for personal injury lawyers, it will then list other keywords that you would want to use on your page.  These are LSI or related keywords and there are a few different ways to find these but the idea is that you want to let Google know exactly what your page is about.  Have the main focus KW is important, but if you also have these other related keywords on the page, it gives better signals to Google on what this page is about.

Other Keyword Research Tools for Lawyers

Google has the Google keyword tool, but this is only free for people who are running google adwords, now known as Google Ads.     Then there are other free tools, and then many of the other big SEO tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush, Moz and others all have some kind of built in keyword research tools that will show you keywords related to your main keyword.

Keyword Research for Attorneys on Budget

Using this tool can give you a lot of great ideas for keywords to use in your content. It will also show you how much competition keywords have and how difficult they might be to rank for Google organic seo for lawyers rankings.   It will also give you a good idea of how pricey some of these keywords can be, some can be over $150 per click, which is crazy and why you must focus big time on getting better organic rankings at Google.

SEO For Solo Lawyers

By Leave a Comment

Search Engine Marketing for Solo Attorneys

Are you a Solo Lawyer that needs SEO help?  You really should do all you can with SEO in order to give yourself a chance at beating the big guys of the world.  Its possible for a solo attorney or small law firm to achieve as good or better SEO organic and local seo rankings.

Its not easy but it can happen! The key is want to create a shit load of high quality content and just write your ass off.   Just like if you were preparing a brief for a big case and needed to do weeks of research, same thing here. Just write it all down and put it into blog posts.

Keyword Research for Lawyers

 You always want to do some keyword research to see exactly what keywords make sense to focus on.    Also if you are a personal injury lawyer who lives in Pennsylvania, then there are a lot of possible keyword combinations you could be ranked for.   You want to find keywords related to your practice and location, but also that you can rank for.   You cant rank for personal injury lawyers usually, or just ynt to create a LOT our town and lawyers. Sometimes you have to find long tail keywords and get multiple blog posts ranked for many different keywords.

Longtail Keywords for Attorneys

Longtrail keywords are just simply searches that contain more then 4 keywords, sometimes 10-12 keywords.    You want to try and rank for all things a user might search that relates to what you do. SO a good thing to do is check a site like Answer the public and find out what questions people are asking.  These are usually longer searches like “What do I do after a car accident?” or “how do I find a great personal injury lawyer?

SEO Audits for Attorneys and Law Firms

You want to have an SEO audit of your law firm website done and see where you stand right now.   You want to see where your ranked, how many links you currently have how many citations you have and a number of other factors that go into getting your lawyer website ranked at Google.   We can do a video audit that shows where your site is ranked and other key metrics using top paid search marketing tools.      ** Fill out the FREE Consultation Form

Content is King and Queen

Writing content for your solo law firm website should now be your side job.  Write articles related to your law firms practice areas and what you do in real life.  Do videos where you are talking to people and answering questions potential clients might have.   People like to see real people when hiring a lawyer and if someone sees you talking, it might make a big difference.  You want to write content, create videos, create images and infographics for your law firm practices.

Getting Links for Your Solo Law Site

You want to make sure you get links to your website and not just to your homepage.  You want to get authority links and relevant links, and hopefully they are DO Follow links, which means link juice passes to your site and you get credit for the link.    If you are a criminal lawyer, you want links from other legal sites, criminal law sites are best.   Yet you want links from everywhere you can get. Social accounts, client sites, directories, legal directories and everything else where you could possibly get a link.  This IS NOT EASY and it usually doesnt happen on its own, UNLESS You create great content that people find and decide to link to because its a great resource.