Welcome (back) to the Legal Search Marketing Blog (2019)
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!
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:
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Duplicate Content – (You can use the tool of siteliner.com to check your site for duplicate content)
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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!
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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
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.
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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.
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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.
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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!!
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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
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
Need SEO results for your personal injury law firm? Contact us today for a free analysis and seo audit of your lawyer website.
- 10 Quotes from Greatest Lawyers of all time
- Why all Businesses must have a good Lawyer
- Personal Injury Law in North Carolina
Free Keyword Research Tool for Lawyers
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.