Lawyer Marketing Tips - Legal Search Marketing News

Mastering Backlink Strategies for Legal Websites

Backlink Strategies for Lawyers & Law Firms – Backlinks SEO Backlinks are a crucial element in improving the visibility and authority of your law firm’s website. In the competitive legal industry, having a strong backlink profile is essential for optimizing your website for search engines and attracting potential clients. The one thing that remains consistent over the years with SEO is that you need backlinks from other high authority websites, in order to rank higher in the Google results. It also remains one of the more difficult things to do and why a lot of law firm sites have a very small number of backlinks. Both referring domains and overall number of links. There are other things you need as well, like social signals from the different social media accounts, but links will always be a key factor. In this guide, we will explore effective backlink techniques specifically tailored for law firms, helping you improve your website’s authority and boost your online presence. Key Takeaways: Implementing backlink strategies is essential for improving the online presence of legal websites. Focus on generating quality backlinks rather than quantity. Gaining backlinks from authoritative legal websites, law schools, and reputable legal directories is crucial. Guest posting and utilizing legal directories are effective techniques to start with. Building relationships, providing value, and engaging with industry associations can lead to acquiring authoritative backlinks. Mastering Backlink Strategies for Legal Websites: A Guide The Anatomy of a Quality Backlink When it comes to improving your law firm’s online presence, understanding the anatomy of a quality backlink is crucial. A quality backlink is one that possesses relevance, authority, and is a dofollow link. Let’s break down each component to understand why these factors are essential. Relevance In the context of backlinks, relevance refers to the connection between the linking website and your law firm’s niche. For example, a backlink from a legal website or a reputable law school carries more weight than a backlink from an unrelated source. Search engines recognize relevance as an indicator of trust and credibility, boosting your law firm’s search engine ranking. Authority The authority of a backlink is determined by the reputation and trustworthiness of the linking website. Backlinks from high-authority sources in the legal industry, such as renowned legal directories or respected legal publications, hold more value than backlinks from low-quality or spammy websites. These authoritative backlinks help establish your law firm as a reliable and reputable source, signaling to search engines that your website provides valuable content. Dofollow Link A dofollow link is a type of hyperlink that passes on SEO value to your law firm’s website. When a search engine crawls a webpage and encounters a dofollow link, it follows that link and considers it as an endorsement of your website’s credibility. Dofollow links contribute to your law firm’s search engine ranking, helping it climb higher in search results. By understanding and implementing the anatomy of a quality backlink, you can focus your efforts on acquiring relevant, authoritative, and dofollow links. These high-quality backlinks not only improve your law firm’s online visibility but also enhance its reputation within the legal industry. Characteristics Importance Relevance Signals trust and credibility Authority Establishes reputation and reliability Dofollow Link Contributes to search engine ranking Getting Started with Link Building for Law Firms When it comes to link building for law firms, there are a few key strategies you can implement to start generating quality backlinks. Two effective methods to consider are guest posting and utilizing legal directories. By focusing on quality over quantity, you can establish a strong backlink profile that will benefit your law firm’s online presence. Guest Posting: Showcasing Your Expertise Guest posting involves writing and contributing articles to legal blogs, law school websites, or general news sites as a guest author. This strategy not only allows you to showcase your expertise to a wider audience but also provides an opportunity to include a backlink to your law firm’s website. When guest posting, it’s essential to create value-driven content that provides insights or advice to readers, positioning yourself as a knowledgeable authority in your field. Legal Directories: Increasing Visibility Legal directories are another effective avenue for acquiring backlinks for your law firm. These directories allow you to list your law firm’s information and provide a backlink, boosting your online visibility and credibility. When selecting directories, it’s important to choose relevant ones that are specific to the legal industry. Regularly updating your law firm’s information on these directories and encouraging satisfied clients to leave positive reviews can further enhance the SEO benefits. By starting with guest posting and utilizing legal directories, you can lay the foundation for a strong link building strategy for your law firm. Remember, quality backlinks are key, so focus on establishing relationships, providing valuable content, and leveraging reputable platforms in the legal industry. Benefits of Guest Posting Benefits of Legal Directories 1. Establish yourself as an authority 1. Increased online visibility 2. Reach a wider audience 2. Improved credibility 3. Drive targeted traffic to your website 3. SEO benefits through backlinks 4. Build relationships within the legal community 4. Access to potential clients Remember to approach link building with a focus on quality over quantity. Building strong relationships, providing valuable content, and utilizing reputable platforms will ultimately lead to a stronger online presence for your law firm. Leveraging Guest Posts Guest posting is a powerful strategy for acquiring backlinks and increasing your law firm’s online visibility. By contributing value-driven content to legal blogs, law school websites, or general news sites, you can establish yourself as an authority in the legal industry and cultivate relationships with other professionals and potential clients. When leveraging guest posts, it’s essential to focus on providing value to the readers. Consider sharing insights, case studies, or practical tips that showcase your expertise and address common legal concerns. By offering valuable information, you can engage and connect with the audience, positioning yourself as a trusted resource. Engaging with the comments section of your guest posts is

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Top SEO Tips for Lawyers: Boost Rankings

Lawyer Marketing Tips, Lawyer SEO, Legal Internet Marketing, SEO Tips / AI Law Guy

SEO Tips for Attorneys – Boost Rankings & Gain Clients As a lawyer, you know how important it is to attract clients to your legal practice. With more people turning to online search engines to find legal services, implementing effective SEO strategies is crucial to ensure that your website appears on the first page of search results. SEO Tips for lawyers can be a game-changer for your legal practice, helping you stand out in a crowded market and attract more potential clients. In this article, we’ll explore the key SEO concepts and strategies that lawyers can use to boost their online presence, optimize their website, and generate more leads and conversions. Key Takeaways: SEO is crucial for lawyers to attract more potential clients and stand out in a crowded market. Effective SEO strategies can help your website rank higher in search results and generate more leads and conversions. Understanding Lawyer SEO: Key Concepts and Strategies If you’re a lawyer looking to boost your online presence and attract more clients, understanding the basics of SEO is crucial. Search engine optimization involves optimizing your website so that it appears higher in search engine results pages (SERPs), ultimately increasing visibility and traffic to your site. However, SEO can be a complex and ever-evolving field, and implementing successful strategies can be challenging, especially for legal professionals. Attorney SEO strategy requires a unique approach that takes into account the legal industry’s nuances and challenges. To achieve SEO success, you must first understand the key concepts and strategies of lawyer SEO. Here are some essential elements to keep in mind: Key Concepts Strategies Keyword Research Conduct thorough keyword research to identify the most relevant and profitable keywords to target in your website content and metadata. On-Page Optimization Optimize individual pages on your website for specific keywords, ensuring that they include title tags, meta descriptions, headers, and content optimized for the target keyword. Mobile Responsiveness Ensure that your website is mobile-friendly, meaning that it is optimized for use on mobile devices and provides a seamless user experience across all devices. User Experience Create a user-friendly website with easy navigation, fast loading speeds, and high-quality content that engages and informs potential clients. Website Speed Optimize your website’s loading speeds to ensure that it loads quickly and efficiently for users, as slow loading speeds can negatively impact your SEO and user experience. Understanding Lawyer SEO: Key Concepts and Strategies In addition to these strategies, it’s important to keep up-to-date with the latest algorithm updates and best practices in the industry. Google’s algorithms are constantly evolving, and staying ahead of the curve can give you a competitive edge in the legal field. By understanding the key concepts and strategies of lawyer SEO, you can begin to implement effective optimization techniques that can help your website rank higher, attract more traffic, and ultimately, gain more clients. y elements, you’ll be able to improve your website’s ranking on SERPs and attract more potential clients to your legal practice. Creating High-Quality Legal Content: A Must for SEO Content is king, and for lawyers, this is no exception. Creating high-quality legal content is a must for effective SEO. By doing so, you can establish your expertise in your field, provide value to your potential clients, and increase your website’s search engine rankings. Here are some tips to help you create high-quality legal content: Do your keyword research: Use keyword research tools to identify relevant keywords and phrases that potential clients might use in their search queries. Incorporate them naturally into your content. Provide informative and engaging content: Write about topics that potential clients may find valuable and interesting. Make your content easy to read and understand, avoiding complex legal jargon. Use different types of content: Create blog posts, articles, videos, FAQs, and other forms of content that may resonate with your target audience. Optimize your content: Use on-page optimization techniques such as title tags, meta descriptions, and header tags to signal search engines what your content is about. By creating high-quality legal content, you can boost your SEO efforts and attract potential clients to your website. Remember to make sure your content is unique, informative, and engaging. Local SEO for Lawyers: Dominating the Local Market Now that you understand the basics of SEO for your law firm, it’s time to focus on local SEO. This not only increases your visibility to potential clients in your area but also helps you compete with other local law firms. First, make sure your business information is accurate and consistent across all online platforms. This includes your name, address, phone number, and website. Claiming and optimizing your Google My Business listing is also crucial and can help you appear in Google’s Local Pack and Maps results. Tip: Encourage your satisfied clients to leave reviews on your Google My Business listing. Positive reviews can boost your local search rankings and help establish credibility with potential clients. Another important factor in local SEO is the use of location-specific keywords on your website. This helps search engines understand the areas you serve and can increase your visibility for relevant local searches. Additionally, getting listed in local directories, such as Yelp and Avvo, can also help improve your local search visibility. Just make sure you choose directories that are relevant to your practice area and location. Keep in mind that while local SEO can be highly effective, it’s important to continuously monitor and update your local listings and website to ensure accuracy and relevance. “With the rise of mobile searches, optimizing your website for local keywords and local search is even more important for law firms. Don’t miss the opportunity to dominate your local market by ignoring local SEO.” – John Smith, Legal Marketing Expert Building High-Quality Backlinks: Enhancing SEO Authority Backlinks are an essential aspect of SEO for lawyers. High-quality backlinks from reputable and related websites show search engines that your website is trustworthy, relevant, and valuable. This, in turn, can improve your website’s authority and rankings in search results.

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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 / AI Law Guy

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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Lawyers Make Sure Your Content is Unique

Content for Lawyers, Duplicate Content, Featured Content, Law Firm Marketing, Lawyer Marketing Tips / AI Law Guy

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.

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SEO For Solo Lawyers

General Search Engine News, Google My Business, Law Firm Marketing, Lawyer Marketing Tips, Legal Internet Marketing, Solo Lawyer Marketing / AI Law Guy

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.

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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 / AI Law Guy

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 / AI Law Guy

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 / AI Law Guy

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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Why Chatbots Make Perfect Sense for Lawyers

Chatbots, Facebook, Internet Marketing News, Lawyer Marketing Tips, Legal Internet Marketing / AI Law Guy

Chatbots for Lawyers Chatbots are here to stay and I can see why. They basically are assistants that work 24/7 365 days a year. They can serve in a customer service function and make it easier for people to find answers they might have. They also can help generate leads and be used in combination with facebook ads. Chatbots are one of the hottest tech tools on the market today. Almost every business is looking to use chatbots for customer service. LIVE AGENT CHAT IS DEAD ALSO for a few years now, CHAT has been somewhat of a hot topic in the legal industry. It seemed that having a LIVE CHAT option available made perfect sense because you could get an overseas person to easily read a script and take down basic contact info, and then pass it along to the law firm, YET I aways thought that wasnt that great of a solution because Each lead can costs upwards of $30. As you can imagine, this gets expensive fast. Paying someone to collect data from prospects 24/7 often becomes too expensive for many law firms to utilize for the long term. Cost, therefore, is a major drawback when using live agent chat. CHATBOTS MAKE MORE SENSE People are worried about Robots and AI and rightfully so. When Elon Musk says hes worried about it, you take it serious. Yet at this level, bots can be very useful and provide a lot of value. I mean the chatbot can replace the Live Chat system that many law firms have right now. I mean whats the big deal about a live agent collecting info from a potential client? They are just reading a script and probably have a worse personality then most bots! Then they pass on the info to the lawyers, ok and for that firms are being charged a big setup fee, monthly fees and per lead fees? I would say WTF?! SETTING UP CHATBOTS You can setup the chatbot on your facebook page so that when someone trys to message you, the chatbot will take over and have answers to any questions the person might have. Then you can also set it up on your site in a few different ways, including like I have right now on this site at the top of the page. You can also setup a landing page where you can send people to engage with your bot, or send someone a link to your bot, OR you can also setup facebook ads and send people to messenger instead of your website. So once the chatbot is setup and programmed to answer questions, you can then connect it to your site and facebook page. Once its setup, then its ready to work for your 24/7, 365! There are many advanced things you can do here as well, like collect email info and pass it on to your email program. The language used in a chatbot should be: Short (one or two sentences) Conversational Simple (avoid heavy legal terms if possible) If you’re building answers into your chatbot, make sure you structure them in a way that it is easy for the user to read and understand. Effectively using chatbots on your law firm’s website can help improve the customer experience and save you time and money in the long run. You can also use Chatbots to generate new leads. You can use facebook ads along with facebook messenger to build up leads and usually for much cheaper then Google adwords. This is a more advanced service, but really just the customer service assistant part of this should be enough to convince any lawyer to utilize a chatbot. Also to replace any live chat system that is setup. I mean why not instead pay a fraction of the price to have chatbot for your firm that will serve as assistant, as well as possibly a lead generation machine. Contact us today at 630-202-9208 or fill out the contact form below. [Contact_Form_Builder id=”11″]

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Top Citations for Lawyers in 2018

Citations, Google My Business, Lawyer Marketing Tips, Legal Internet Marketing, Local Search Marketing / AI Law Guy

Lawyer Local SEO Marketing LIST OF TOP 2018 LAWYER CITATIONS Legal Citations are key to your law firms Google My Business (GMB) and Local SEO success. Citations are like links, the more QUALITY and legal focused you are, the better your overall results will be with Google. Bright Local puts out a listing of the top niche citation sites and have updated it for the current year. So here you can see the best citations for lawyers below. Lots of obvious sites like Findlaw, Avvo, Lawyers.com and most likely every lawyer are listed in those sites, so you need to differentiate your firm and have more focused citations. So first off you want to focus on some of the other not so obvious legal directory sites below such as Lawguru.com and then also you want to do some Paid legal directories and then also try and focus on getting some listings at any local related directory or site. Online directories (often referred to as ‘citation sites’) are crucial for local search optimization, and our recent research shows that consumers lose trust in businesses with inaccurate business listings. But which online business directories and citation sites are the best? The citation lists below are the outcome of a huge project to compile the most comprehensive list of niche lawyer citation sites available on the internet. These lawyer sites are all listed by DA or Domain Authority. Most of the sites give you a free listing and might already have one setup for you, and guess what? It might be WRONG and sabatoging your local SEO and Google My Business rankings. You need to have all of your citations have the correct contact info or NAP, Name, Address and Phone #. You want them all to be 100% the same if possible. Citation Site D.A. Country Free / Paid Listing URL findlaw.com 87 USA Free Click here nolo.com 81 USA Free Click here avvo.com 78 USA Free Click here wallethub.com 75 USA Free Click here justia.com 74 USA Free Click here lawyers.com 72 USA Paid Click here bestlawyers.com 71 ALL Free Click here hg.org 64 ALL Free Click here lawguru.com 59 ALL Free Click here lawinfo.com 57 USA Paid Click here lawyers.uslegal.com 56 USA Free Click here divorcemag.com 49 USA / CAN Paid Click here lawyer.com 47 USA Free Click here justgreatlawyers.com 43 ALL Paid Click here legaldocs.com 43 USA Free Click here canadianlawlist.com 41 CAN Free Click here leadcounsel.org 41 USA Free Click here attorneypages.com 40 USA Paid Click here lawfirms.com 39 USA Free Click here lawqa.com 38 USA Free Click here lawyercentral.com 37 USA Free Click here uslawyersdb.com 37 USA Paid Click here lawfirmdirectory.org 36 USA Paid Click here lawlink.com 35 ALL Free Click here lawresearch.com 35 USA Paid Click here gaylawnet.com 35 ALL Free Click here legalhelpmate.com 32 USA Paid Click here lawyerlegion.com 30 USA Free Click here bailbond.com 28 USA Free Click here findacriminaldefenseattorney.com 28 USA Free Click here town-court.com 27 USA Free Click here dilawctory.com 26 ALL Free Click here alphalegal.com 26 USA Free Click here dilawctory.com 26 USA Free Click here findafamilyattorney.com 25 USA Free Click here getlawyersonline.com 25 USA Paid Click here courthousesquare.com 24 USA Free Click here legalwebfinder.com 23 USA Free Click here mylegalpractice.com 22 USA Reciprocal Click here lawfiles.net 22 ALL Free Click here ilawyersource.com 21 USA Paid Click here findabankruptcylawyer.com 21 USA Free Click here bestattorneysrankings.com 20 ALL Paid Click here lawyers-and-solicitors.com 19 UK Paid Click here lawyerprofiles.com 18 USA Paid Click here lawyersdb.com 18 USA Free Click here pathlegal.com 18 ALL Free Click here lawreferralconnect.com 18 ALL Free Click here truckaccidentlawyerdir.com 17 USA / CAN Paid Click here attorneyslawyer.org 17 USA Free Click here divorceattorneydir.com 16 USA / CAN Paid Click here aplawyers.com 15 USA Paid Click here familyattorneydir.com 14 USA / CAN Paid Click here domesticviolenceattorneydir.com 14 USA / CAN Paid Click here indexlawyer.com 14 ALL Reciprocal Click here bankruptcyattorneydir.com 14 USA / CAN Paid Click here usaattorneys.org 13 USA Free Click here usattorneynetwork.com 13 USA Paid Click here list-lawyers.com 13 USA Free Click here caraccidentattorneydir.com 13 USA Paid Click here caraccidentlawyerdir.com 13 USA / CAN Paid Click here injuryattorneydir.com 13 USA Paid Click here braininjurylawyerdir.com 12 USA / CAN Paid Click here lawyerucla.com 12 USA Paid Click here lawyersolicitor.co.uk 12 UK Paid Click here legalfeefinancing.org 12 ALL Free Click here —> Read Full List of Citation Categories

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