Google Search Engine

Google My Business (GMB) For Attorneys 2019

Featured Content, Google My Business, Google Search Engine, Internet Marketing News /

Google My Business Lawyer Marketing Google My Business (GMB) is more important than ever and should be one of the first things that you do for your law firms Internet marketing strategy. This is basically a big part of what Local SEO is, getting your GMB listing to show up in the Google 3 pack for searches related to your firm’s practice areas. Google is obviously the most important search engine but most people think there is just one set of rankings at Google and usually think of the organic results. Yet there are multiple sets of search results usually. First, you will see the Google paid ads at the top, then you will see the Google map listings, which come from your Google my business listing.  Then you will see the organic search results. Yet really it’s possible that even if your firm low or no organic rankings, you can possibly dominate the local seo results.   What is Google My Business? Google My Business is a free service designed to make it easy for local businesses to manage their listings in Google search results. Anytime you search Google for local services in your area, you have likely seen Google My Business at work. It displays results on a map and lists other important details about businesses, including their contact information, website, and even reviews. Since Google is the premier search engine online, listing your law firm with Google’s My Business is essential for proper search engine optimization or SEO. Your Google my business listing is what controls your listing that comes up in the local search and map results at Google. LAWYER GOOGLE MY BUSINESS MARKETING TIPS 1. Claim your Google My Business Profile If you haven’t claimed your law firms GMB profile, which stands for Google My Business – also known as the local 3 pack – then you need to get this done right away. GMB profiles are some of the first organic listings people see when searching for attorneys and law firms. By default, many firms already have a GMB profile created by Google and sometimes you will find that certain lawyers will have a GMB profile that is created by Google, and sometimes your clients will find this and even though you haven’t claimed or verified this listing, they still can leave you a review. So it makes sense to claim these listings so that you can not only optimize it, but you respond to any reviews you might get. Walk through the following process to claim it: Search for your law firm or attorney name in Google When you see the Knowledge Graph card for your firm, click on the ‘Are you the owner?’ link near the bottom. Start the process of verifying the firm’s ownership. Note that Google will want you to verify ownership in one of two ways – either by phone or through regular mail.  Once you’ve verified ownership, you can edit your GMB profile. 2. Add Photos & Videos to your GMB Lawyer profile Make sure your GMB profile is complete and contains consistent contact information.  Then adding as many images as possible of your law firm can help it rank far better in the local 3 pack.    So add all the existing images you might have put on your blog and facebook. Then create more images and get creative.  Try to have a LOT of images, like 30 – 50! You can do it over time and it seems to make a difference. Here are some image ideas to get you started: show your legal offices on the inside and outside show your firms team, partners, and you describe the areas of law that you practice show your firms logo include your firms’ tag lines, quotes, or other marketing messages You do not want to put generic stock images or videos into your Google listing.  Google wants images that are related to your firm and what your firm does. So this means photos of the people who work at the firm, photos of your locations and the type of law you practice.   If you are a personal injury lawyer, you want to have a number of different images related to personal injury 3. Onsite Website Optimization Onsite SEO are the things done to your website structure to make it rank well, This is one of the most top tasks you can do to achieve good local rankings. Start with a location-based page: Create a location-based page for the keyword phrases you want to rank for. An example could be ‘Chicago auto accident lawyer’ or ‘Michigan Malpractice Attorney.’   Then you can create other location posts for all the different cities, zips, neighborhoods in your area and then interlink them together. Here are some other tips: Include the location in the copy of the page Include the keyword phrase in the title, the headings, meta description and URL of the page Include the keyword as an image file name of any images on the page Include the keyword in any alt attributes of images on the page Add your firms NAP (name, address, phone number) to the header: Your firm’s name, address and phone number should be on the header of every page, but especially on location-based pages or pages that link to your Google my business – GMB profile. This should also be the same information used in other listings around the web. Make sure it’s all consistent. Substantial quality content: Include a lot of useful content on your pages. Most short articles are like 300 words. So articles longer than 500 words is a good start and the longer the better. 2000 words is a really good start and if you are trying to rank for highly competitive keywords, then the longer the better. 4. Citation signals: Mentions of your firm NAP across the web Citations are like links and are the fuel towards getting higher Google local rankings. Building citations is one of the most influential strategies

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

Featured Content, General Search Engine News, Google Search Engine, Lawyer Marketing Tips, Legal SEO Marketing /

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: 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.

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Free Keyword Research Tool for Lawyers

Google Search Engine, Keyword Research, Law Firm Marketing, Ubersuggest /

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.

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2018 New Google SEO Ranking Factors for Lawyers – Part 3

General Search Engine News, Google Search Engine, Google Updates, Internet Marketing News, Law Firm Marketing, Lawyer Marketing Tips /

Google SEO For Lawyers Ranking Factors – #41 – 75 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 and 2019 to get your lawyer website ranked higher, so you can start getting more leads from clients looking for your legal services. I have gone over the first 40 in other posts and am listing the next 35 here.  Then I will create a post on what the TOP 20 overall ranking factors are out of these 200 possible factors.   Bottom line is there are a LOT of different things that go into ranking your website, so you cant go overboard on any 1 thing, other then creating high quality unique content.    If you do that, you will have a big advantage. Yet if everyone else is doing that, then it will come down to who is doing the most of these 200 different factors. Previous Post ====> RANKING FACTORS 1-20 – Google SEO Ranking Factors 21-40 SEO Ranking factors from Google for Lawyers: 41. “Hidden” Content on Mobile: Hidden content on mobile devices may not get indexed (or may not be weighed as heavily) vs. fully visible content. However, a Googler recently stated that hidden content is OK. But also said that in the same video, “…if it’s critical content it should be visible…”. 42. Helpful “Supplementary Content”: According to a now-public Google Rater Guidelines Document, helpful supplementary content is an indicator of a page’s quality (and therefore, Google ranking). Examples include currency converters, loan interest calculators and interactive recipes. 43. Content Hidden Behind Tabs: Do users need to click on a tab to reveal some of the content on your page? If so, Google has said that this content “may not be indexed”. 44. Number of Outbound Links: Too many dofollow OBLs can “leak” PageRank, which can hurt that page’s rankings. *** So this is interesting because it makes sense that you dont want to include a ton of links, BUT it can help to include a couple of outbound links to authority websites.   45. Multimedia: Images, videos and other multimedia elements may act as a content quality signal. For example, one industry study found a correlation between multimedia and rankings: *** No doubt having more images and videos will help you rank better and keep people on your site longer, which is key.   46. Number of Internal Links Pointing to Page: The number of internal links to a page indicates its importance relative to other pages on the site. *** So this means you should make sure that you links other pages together, especially when they make sense.  So if you do a blog post on divorce law, link to the divorce law practice page, and other related posts.   47. Quality of Internal Links Pointing to Page: Internal links from authoritative pages on domain have a stronger effect than pages with no or low PageRank. 48. Broken Links: Having too many broken links on a page may be a sign of a neglected or abandoned site. The Google Rater Guidelines Document uses broken links as one was to assess a homepage’s quality. 49. Reading Level: There’s no doubt that Google estimates the reading level of webpages. In fact, Google used to give you reading level stats: But what they do with that information is up for debate. Some say that a basic reading level will help you rank better because it will appeal to the masses. But others associate a basic reading level with content mills like Ezine Articles. 50. Affiliate Links: Affiliate links themselves probably won’t hurt your rankings. But if you have too many, Google’s algorithm may pay closer attention to other quality signals to make sure you’re not a “thin affiliate site“. 51. HTML errors/W3C validation: Lots of HTML errors or sloppy coding may be a sign of a poor quality site. While controversial, many in SEO think that a well-coded page is uses as a quality signal. 52. Domain Authority: All things being equal, a page on an authoritative domain will rank higher than a page on a domain with less authority. *** So here you want to get quality links from authority websites in your niche, this will help raise your domain authority score.   53. Page’s PageRank: Not perfectly correlated. But pages with lots of authority tend to outrank pages without much link authority. 54. URL Length: Excessively long URLs may hurt a page’s search engine visibility. In fact, several industry studies have found that short URLs tend to have a slight edge in Google’s search results. 55. URL Path: A page closer to the homepage may get a slight authority boost vs. pages buried deep down in a site’s architecture. 56. Human Editors: Although never confirmed, Google has filed a patent for a system that allows human editors to influence the SERPs. 57. Page Category: The category the page appears on is a relevancy signal. A page that’s part of a closely related category may get a relevancy boost compared to a page that’s filed under an unrelated category. 58. WordPress Tags: Tags are WordPress-specific relevancy signal. According to Yoast.com: “The only way it improves your SEO is by relating one piece of content to another, and more specifically a group of posts to each other.” 59. Keyword in URL: Another relevancy signal. A Google rep recently called this a “a very small ranking factor“. But a ranking factor nontheless. 60. URL String: The categories in the URL string are read by Google and may provide a thematic signal to what a page is about: 61. References and Sources: Citing references and sources, like research papers do, may be a sign of quality. The Google Quality Guidelines states that reviewers should keep an eye out for sources when looking at certain pages: “This is a topic where expertise and/or authoritative sources are important…”. However, Google has denied that they use external links as a ranking signal. *** Everything Ive heard is that this is a ranking signal, if you link out to the right sites that

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2018 New Google SEO Ranking Factors for Lawyers – Part 2

Featured Content, Google Search Engine, Law Firm Marketing, Lawyer Marketing Tips, Legal Internet Marketing, Legal SEO Marketing /

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: “These heading tags in HTML help us to understand the structure of the page.” 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. We help solo lawyers and small law firms with Internet Marketing services including: Create a new wordpress lawyer site, Social Media Management, organic SEO for lawyers, PPC Marketing for attorneys, MOBILE For Lawyers, Content Creation, Logos, Chatbot Marketing and Facebook Messenger Marketing. —> Read our 2018 Google My Business TIPS for Lawyers —> 2018 Social Media Marketing for Law Firms —> 2018 Social Media Management for Lawyers

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2018 New Google SEO Ranking Factors for Lawyers – Part 1

Google My Business, Google Search Engine, Google Updates, Lawyer Marketing Tips, Legal SEO Marketing /

Lawyer Google SEO Marketing in 2018 – Top Ranking Factors (1-20) 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 first 20 ranking factors today and then make this a 10 part series that covers all 200 ranking factors. RANKING FACTORS 1-20 ;  1. Domain Age: In this video, Google’s Matt Cutts states that: “The difference between a domain that’s six months old versus one year old is really not that big at all.” In other words, they do use domain age…but it’s not very important.  SO maybe its time to get some new domains? 2. Keyword Appears in Top Level Domain: This doesn’t give the boost that it used to. But having a keyword in your domain still acts as a relevancy signal. *** So this means that if you are a Las Vegas Accident Lawyer, there is some benefit of having a domain name of Las Vegas Accident Lawyer.com vs. Smithlaw.com. 3. Keyword As First Word in Domain: A domain that starts with their target keyword has an edge over sites that either don’t have that keyword in their domain (or have the keyword in the middle or end of their domain). 4. Domain registration length: A Google patent states: “Valuable (legitimate) domains are often paid for several years in advance, while doorway (illegitimate) domains rarely are used for more than a year. Therefore, the date when a domain expires in the future can be used as a factor in predicting the legitimacy of a domain.” ** SO This is one of those factors where its a NOBrainer and make sure you register your name for at least 5 years, if not 10.   Its a small thing, but they will add up. 5. Keyword in Subdomain: Moz’s expert panel agrees that a keyword appearing in the subdomain can boost rankings. 6. Domain History: A site with volatile ownership or several drops may tell Google to “reset” the site’s history, negating links pointing to the domain. Or, in certain cases, a penalized domain may carry the penalty over to the new owner. 7. Exact Match Domain: Exact Match Domains may still give you slight edge. But if your EMD happens to be a low-quality site, it’s vulnerable to the EMD update. 8. Public vs. Private WhoIs: Private WhoIs information may be a sign of “something to hide”. Googler Matt Cutts is quoted as stating: “…When I checked the whois on them, they all had “whois privacy protection service” on them. That’s relatively unusual. …Having whois privacy turned on isn’t automatically bad, but once you get several of these factors all together, you’re often talking about a very different type of webmaster than the fellow who just has a single site or so.” **** SO This means do NOT use privacy on your domain name 9. Penalized WhoIs Owner: If Google identifies a particular person as a spammer it makes sense that they would scrutinize other sites owned by that person. 10. Country TLD extension: Having a Country Code Top Level Domain (.cn, .pt, .ca) can help the site rank for that particular country… but it can limit the site’s ability to rank globally. PAGE LEVEL FACTORS 11. Keyword in Title Tag: Although not as critical as it once was, your title tag remains an important on-page SEO signal. *** This is super key to make sure you have unique TITLE tags for each page and try and utilize these to get higher rankings for a wide variety of keywords. Use YOAST SEO to accomplish this 12. Title Tag Starts with Keyword: According to Moz , title tags that starts with a keyword tend to perform better than title tags with the keyword towards the end of the tag.  —> So this means 13. Keyword in Description Tag: Google doesn’t use the meta description tag as a direct ranking signal. However, your description tag can impact click-through-rate, which is a key ranking factor.   Also Google will point out if you have duplicate descriptions tag, so it makes sense to optimize these all. 14. Keyword Appears in H1 Tag: H1 tags are a “second title tag”. Along with your title tag, Google uses your H1 tag as a secondary relevancy signal, according to results from this correlation study: **** You should only have ONE h1 tag per page. 15. TF-IDF: A fancy way of saying: “How often does a certain word appear in a document?”. The more often that word appears on a page, the more likely it is that the page is about that word. Google likely uses a sophisticated version of TF-IDF. 16. Content Length: Content with more words can cover a wider breadth and are likely preferable in the algorithm compared to shorter, superficial articles. Indeed, one recent ranking factors industry study found that content length correlated with SERP position. 17. Table of Contents: Using a linked table of contents can help Google better understand your page’s content. It can also result in sitelinks: 18. Keyword Density: Although not as important as it once was, Google may use it to determine the topic of a webpage. But going overboard can hurt you. 19. Latent Semantic Indexing Keywords in Content (LSI): LSI keywords help search engines extract meaning from words that have more than one meaning (for example: Apple the computer company vs. Apple the fruit). The presence/absence of LSI probably also acts as a content quality signal. 20. LSI Keywords in Title and Description Tags: As with webpage content, LSI keywords in page meta tags probably help Google discern between words with multiple potential meanings. May also

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Google AdWords for Lawyers: Example of how to save money for Law Firm Ads

Google AdWords, Google Search Engine, Pay Per Click Marketing /

Adwords for Law Firms – How to Save Money on Campaigns Google Adwords is the main way your going to do Pay Per Click Marketing for attorneys usually.   Its a pretty simple thing where you pay Google to show your ads when a user does a search for your practice area keywords. Is Google AdWords worth if for solo lawyers and small law firms? YES! 100% for sure if done right, you will get new potential clients contacting you. Yet many lawyers will waste 1000’s of dollars because the campaign is not setup right. There are a lot of different options with Adwords and the problem comes when your bidding on SUPER PRICEY Keywords for Lawyers.  Personal Injury, Bankruptcy, Family Law and a few others are really really expensive.  I mean its no big deal if your paying 40 cents a click BUT if your paying $30-200 per click, then it get get bad really quick. Ive seen a lot of lawyer campaigns where they are bidding way to high, or not setting a budget, or bidding only on broad match keywords and a number of other things that will make your campaign not a winning one. *** Here are a few TIPS to make your lawyer AdWords account work better. #1-  Setup Conversions in your AdWords campaign to measure the ROI of your campaign. #2- For Every Ad, have a Landing Page that fits the keywords you are bidding. Do not use the HOME Page. #3- Organize your campaign into different AdGroups #4- Have at least THREE Ads for each Adgroup #5- Research your competitors to see what Keywords they are using RECENT CAMPAIGN FOR LAWYER USING GOOGLE ADWORDS – Huge increase in Impressions, Clicks & Lower Costs I had a lawyer client recently who wasnt thrilled with the last couple of months of Google adwords advertising because they spent about $2000 and only had one conversion and no real leads.  This is what can happen when your bidding on personal injury or car accident terms. Lawyers will bid as high as $200 per click, Ive seen it as high as $721 and Im sure someone will pay $1000 per click if they feel it will lead to a new client. SO with this lawyers campaign at Adwords, I was able to login and review it and could see a few issues right away that could be improved. Some of the issues that I saw: The bidding strategy was setup so that Google would decide on the bid and the max bid was set to $75 The landing pages were almost ALL the sites home page instead of practice specific pages. No contact form on the landing page Broad Match keywords resulting in searches that were not related to personal injury —> Numbers from Previous Adwords Campaign for 12 day period…..  (7/23 – 08/03/18) (Practice Area Campaign #1…) —> Total Impressions = 389   (The ads didnt really run much because the budget was spent so quick after just 1-2 keyword clicks) —> Total Clicks =  7 —> Avg Cost Per Click = $35.00 —> Conversions = 0 —> Total spend = $230.00  **************************************** (Personal Injury Campaign #2…) —> Total Impressions = 777 —> Total Clicks =  12 —> Avg Cost Per Click = $40.00 …… —> Conversions = 0 —> Total spend = $474 + 230 = $704.00 So here you can see they spent $704 on ONLY 19 clicks from those two campaigns. Since they cost $35-40 per click, it was more expensive and the campaigns had to be shut down early and why the impressions are lower.      Then the even bigger issue was the ZERO conversions. 19 Clicks for $704  vs. 110 Clicks for $515  I created a new Campaign with multiple adgroups and ads.  Instantly the cost per click went from $35-150 down to $2-15 tops. Also because the past campaign was setup so the price was so high, the ads stopped running and the total impressions were low. New Campaign I setup for PI keywords and that has run for past 12 days… —> Total Impressions = 4,300  —> Total Clicks =  110  —> Avg Cost Per Click = $4.95  —> Conversions = 2 —> Total spend = $515  BETTER RESULTS IN 2 WEEKS – Lawyer PPC Marketing * Impressions went from 1000 to 4000 over same 2 week period. * Clicks went from 19 to 110 over same period * Total cost was lower ($515 vs. $704) and Per Click went from $40 to $5. Then even better the campaign got 2 conversions and a number of phone call clicks.  So this is an example of how you can #1 lower the overall cost and #2 Improve the Google Quality Score and conversion rate. Google AdWords for Lawyers  If your law firm needs assistance with Pay Per Click Marketing or Google AdWords assistance, please contact us for a Free Estimate. [Contact_Form_Builder id=”15″]  

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4 Reasons a High Google Adscore Will Save Your Law Firm Money

Google AdWords, Google Quality Score, Google Search Engine, Pay Per Click Marketing /

Google Adwords Marketing for Lawyers – Quality Score (QS) I would say most lawyers would NOT know what a Google adwords quality score is.  Im sure they would all make great educated guesses but most non marketing people would not know what  this is or why its important.   Yet when you say its the thing that can save you 1000’s over lifetime of your adwords campaigns. The quality  score in AdWords is very important and simply put, if you can make your ad near perfect, Google will reward you with a high quality score (1-10) and lower costs per click.  Yet if do everything wrong and have a low quality score, well then you will pay more for every click. What Is The AdWords Quality Score? In the simplest of definitions, the AdWords Quality Score is a numerical value given to a keyword that sits between 1 and 10, that then tells the advertiser how relevant Google thinks your keywords, ads, and landing pages are in combination. The lower the score, the more you pay per click. The higher the score, the less you pay per click on Google adwords. 4 Reasons a High Google Adscore Will Save Your Legal Practice Money Reason #1 – Quality score affects your CPC: Google has a tough job when it comes to AdWords. They want to make money, but, at the same time, they don’t want to lower the quality of their search results. So how do you balance this? Google came up with their ad rank formula. Since your ad rank is determined by some formula involving multiplying quality score by CPC, this means that one way you can decrease your CPC, is by improving your quality score. ** You want to make sure that your Ad Copy is top notch and that your landing pages are all optimized and setup correctly.  So if your a bankruptcy lawyer, you want to create different ad groups for chaper 7 keywords, chapter 13 keywords, general filing keywords.  Then in each ad group, you will have a small set of keywords related to the group and then your landing page should be about that topic.  SO if its the Chapter 7 keywords, then the landing page would be about Chapter 7 and have the keywords your bidding on that page, as well as a contact form.   THIS is a much better idea then making the landing page your home page or other not as relevant page. Any page with a high landing page quality can show up on the higher ad spots, which have a higher click-through rate and have an overall lower cost. The ad campaigns in this higher ad group have a higher quality score than those shown in the ad group on the right of the search engine. If someone wants to drive traffic to a low quality landing page with a high bounce rate, they’re going to have to pay much more per click. Obviously, the less you pay per click, the more likely it is that you can profit from the traffic, and vice versa. Reason #2 – You can also get lower bid estimates: When you set an advertising campaign on AdWords, you’ll get bid estimates. These are the amounts that Google recommends that you bid if you want to show up in the top few ad spots, when a relevant search query is entered. Reason #3 – A higher quality score equals a better ad position:  As you improve your quality score during an advertising campaign, you will notice that your average ad rank starts to improve as well (unless it was already in first position). This is due to the ad rank formula. The higher your quality score goes, the better your ad rank gets. Reason #4 – Some extensions require high quality scores: One way to get a higher clickthrough rate (CTR) on your ads is with ad extensions. These are special features that make your ad campaign stand out of the ad group to a potential customer, and will attract a higher CTR. There’s a few different common Google Ad Extensions: Locations Business contact info Star ratings Sitelinks (just more links to different parts of your site) Some are added automatically by Google, while you’ll have to set up others. In order to get these extensions to actually appear, you need a high enough quality score and ad rank. If you have a low quality score, it is very difficult to get them to show up, because your ad rank will be too low. You’d have to pay a ton per click and it probably wouldn’t be worth it. Increasing the quality score of your ad campaign will increase your ad rank.  The bottom line is that if your going to do Google adwords and pay per click marketing for your law firm, then you want to do whatever you can to cut costs and have your marketing dollars go farther. The key is the LANDING Page that you use. You want to have a lot of different landing pages, one for each of your practice areas, maybe more then one.  You want to test them out and there are a lot of different things you can do.  It would make sense to take a look at what your competitors are doing and see what kind of landing pages are working for them. Google Adwords for Lawyers – Free PPC Analysis Let us help you create a new PPC account at adwords OR fix an existing account.   Do you think your account could be working better? We will take a look and run a free PPC analysis and let you know what your doing right and wrong, and what your competitors are doing, exactly. —> Call us at 312-620-6190 [Contact_Form_Builder id=”13″]

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Google Adwords Quality Score (QS) Explained

Google AdWords, Google Mobile, Google My Business, Google Quality Score, Google Search Engine, Pay Per Click Marketing /

Google Adwords Marketing for Lawyers Quality Score, aka QS is super key when it comes down to how the whole Google adwords formula works.      Just because you spend the most money, doesnt always mean you are going to be #1 when bidding at Google adwords. ‘ Google adwords is actually now known as Google Ads but either way its the main pay per click marketing option most lawyers would use in order to drive traffic to the firms website and landing pages.    There are many things that go into doing a Google adwords campaign and its really easy to mess it up and if your bidding on high dollar keywords, which most lawyers are, then it makes sense to bring in a pro that has been doing Google adwords marketing for years and is familiar with everything that goes into it.    The main factor is your QS or Google Quality Score. What Is The AdWords Quality Score? In the simplest of definitions, the AdWords Quality Score is a numerical value given to a keyword that sits between 1 and 10, that then tells the advertiser how relevant Google thinks your keywords, ads, and landing pages are in combination. The lower the score, the more you pay per click. The higher the score, the less you pay per click (notice how I said “click”, not “conversion”). HOW GOOGLE ADWORDS WORKS – ITS NOT WHO BIDS THE MOST If you look at the graphic below, it shows how 4 different advertisers would be ranked based on factors like how much the max bid is, the quality score and then ad rank to determine the actual amount spent per click.     The main thing to notice here is how advertiser #1 has the lowest max  bid, but a high QS. So the bottom line is that they are only paying $1.61 as the #1 advertiser for that keyword, where the advertiser #3 had a max bid of $6 and wound up paying $4.01 as the #3 spot.   Doesnt seem to make sense but it comes down to the formula that I will explain and really its all about the QS, if you can get this higher, you will pay less no matter what. —>  The Max Bid TIMES the Quality Score = AD Rank —> Then the CPC = The Ad Rank of competitor below you / Your Quality Score + 0.01 SO in the example above, the #1 person is bidding $2 times his 10 QS = Ad Rank of 20 Then his cost is 16/10 + 0.01 = $1.61. It call comes down the QS and getting that higher. First here is some basics on Google Quality Scores for lawyers. Let’s start with the GQS basics… Any time that someone searches a term in Google, AdWords may show ad campaigns above and to the side of the organic search results.  I say “may” because ads will only be shown if advertisers are interested in bidding on the keyword contained in the search term. With AdWords, the ads are ordered based on their “Ad rank.”   Your ad’s ad rank is composed of 2 factors: how much you bid (cost per click – CPC) and your quality score. The quality score is Google’s best guess at how useful your landing page is for the searcher of that search term. This can be understood as the ad relevance. It’s composed of many different factors. Since it depends on the specific keyword searched, your landing page will get an individual quality score for each keyword in your advertising campaign. Usually they will cluster around one specific number (from 1 to 10), but sometimes you’ll see significant variation in quality score. —> Read more on PPC Marketing for Attorneys —> Free PPC and Google Adwords Analysis for Lawyers 4 Reasons a High Google Adscore Will Save Your Legal Practice Money Reason #1 – Quality score affects your CPC: Google has a tough job when it comes to AdWords. They want to make money, but, at the same time, they don’t want to lower the quality of their search results. So how do you balance this? Google came up with their ad rank formula. Since your ad rank is determined by some formula involving multiplying quality score by CPC, this means that one way you can decrease your CPC, is by improving your quality score. —> Read the full article on Google Quality Score Google Adwords for Law Firms – Free Analysis Google PPC For Lawyers Let us help you create a new PPC account at adwords OR fix an existing account.   Do you think your account could be working better? We will take a look and run a free PPC analysis and let you know what your doing right and wrong, and what your competitors are doing, exactly. Call us at 312-620-6190 —> Read more on PPC Marketing for Attorneys —> Free PPC and Google Adwords Analysis for Lawyers [Contact_Form_Builder id=”15″]

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Pay Per Click Marketing for Lawyers, Worth It?

Google AdWords, Google My Business, Google Search Engine, Pay Per Click Marketing /

Lawyer Google Adwords Marketing PPC for Lawyers, Good Idea?? –> YES 100% for Sure, if Done Right! Pay per click marketing for law firms is just another way to bring potential clients to your website.   Yet for some lawyers., its the only way!  Yet really you should always be doing something towards organic and local SEO for lawyers. It just makes sense when your paying $77 a click, or even higher.  I had a lawyer the other day have some bids at over $170!   This is what happens when you do personal injury PPC marketing for lawyers, it gets really really pricey.  So does Bankruptcy Law, Family Law, DUI, Criminal Defense and many others.   That doesnt mean your going to get a ton of cases if you decide to also bid, you might but its going to cost for sure and you have to test out things to see what works best. Lawyers Google Ads Marketing We have helped many lawyers save big money on ads advertising. Contact us today for a Free Google Ads Review. Google Ads for Lawyers Done Right A lot of lawyers and other businesses try to do Google adwords with not the greatest success.  Most of the time they are making one of many PPC mistakes such as: Allowing Google to choose how much they will pay for you so they can Maximize Clicks Doing only Broad Match keywords… Which is the default and seems like the right thing to do, yet its not big time Not setting up Conversion Tracking or Performance Goals Putting all the keywords into one campaign and one ad group Not bidding on the right keywords, or enough keywords Using the HOME PAGE as the Landing page, on every ad! Choosing a super high of an amount to bid and as a budget. This list can go on and on.  Its really easy to mess up Google adwords or just not set it up right.  This is why you have to constantly monitor it and check the results and how much you are paying per click.     You also need to make sure that you have a high Google Quality Score and this is done in a variety of ways but mainly via a great landing page Google AdWords for Law Firms Tips Google adwords is not the only game in town.  Instead of competing with everyone for the right to be #1 and spend $99 a click, why not instead goto Bing and take that $99-999 you just saved and invest it in a PPC campaign here? Usually the keywords are cheaper and you can make your budget last longer.    Not always the best conversions but really you never know where your next client is coming from.   You want to be covered and you really need to be everywhere these days.  Local, organic, video, Facebook, twitter, Youtube! So at Google adwords you want to make sure your doing keyword research and checking out your competitors for starters. ** PPC Marketing Tip #2 for Lawyers  —> If your competitors have been doing Google adwords pay per click marketing for years, odds are they have figured it out and its working. SO you can easily find out what they have been bidding on, how much they are spending, the exact ad copy and much more.    You can also figure out what keywords are working best and which ones you should be bidding on.  *** We can tell you EXACTLY what the ads and keywords are. Google Ads for Law Firms – Free Analysis PPC Marketing for Lawyers Free PPC Analysis & Quote

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