Legal Marketing

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

What is the Difference between Google Paid Listings & Organic Search Listings? *** This post was done originally in 2005! How much has changed in 14 years? Not much and a ton at the same time.   Google Paid Ads vs. Google Organic SEO Some lawyers are confused by the difference between the pay per click (PPC) sponsored listings and the free organic listings at Google, Yahoo, and other top search engines. The free or “organic” search listings at Google are listed on the left side of the page and the sponsored PPC listings are located on the right side of the page under “sponsored links” and sometimes at the very top of the page, right above the organic listings. —> 2019 Update….. The organic listings are still in the same place, but the paid ads are also on the left side of the page, usually above the organic listings and the map local listings.   Organic listings take time and effort to achieve and are usually a result of a legal web site that has a lot of good content, is listed in the Yahoo and Open directories and has a lot of links pointing to it from other sites. *** 2019 update — This is still true and actually organic rankings take a LOT of time and way more then they used to take. It’s much harder to achieve organic rankings at Google.        Yet the having good content, being listed in top business directories and having a lot of relevant and authority links is still the key to ranking higher in the Google organic listings.  The pay per click or sponsored listings are a result of web sites that bid a certain amount per click on a keyword. The higher the bid, the higher the ranking. Even though at Google its a little bit of a different bidding process then at Overture. At Overture, its simply a matter of whoever bids higher, gets the higher listing, where at Google, its a combination of different criteria including amount bid. GOOGLE SEO FOR LAWYERS **** 2019 update —- Who the F is Overture?!?!  They used to be the main player in town as far as pay per click went, way back when!  Then Yahoo bought them a while back.  Now the main players in pay per click are Google ads and Bing/Yahoo ads, as well as Facebook ads, Pinterest ads and Instagram ads.   Obviously you want to be listed in the organic listings because its like the gift that keeps on giving and you don’t have to pay every time someone clicks on your site.  Yet it takes time to get the free listings and sometimes you have no choice but to pay extra to visitors to your legal web site. Some lawyers do both, get great organic listings but then also pay for the sponsored links to cover all bases. **** 2019 update —-  Organic listings and traffic from Google is still the gift that keeps on giving.  Getting top rankings is more important than ever.   Also, it’s the same thing where sometimes you must do paid ads if you want any traffic because you dont have good enough organic listings.    Also you might have top rankings for most of your keywords, but you still might want to do some paid advertising if you really want to be aggressive and get more brand recognition. SEO for Lawyers in 2019 Conclusion The key in 2019 for Lawyers who want to do Attorney SEO Marketing, which by the way should be literally 100% of all lawyers.  The key is that you first want to make sure that Google trusts your Brand. Your brand name is your firm name, SO you want to get your brand out there in a number of ways. With link building, you want to make sure that the anchor text of the links pointing to your site are your brand name and going to your home page. Then once you build up your authority and trust with Google, then you can create some Power Pages and then get more links that point to these pages.  Then you will want to some partial and exact match anchor text but not that many and not until you first establish your brand and home page links. This can take 6-12 months or more and is a never-ending process.    One thing you want to focus on with your main pages is to create a lot of visuals like images, videos and infographics.   If you are a personal injury attorney, you want to create visuals to explain how the personal injury process works.

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Top Citations for Lawyers

Local SEO For Lawyers Local Search marketing is becoming even more important these days and getting your law firm to appear in the local search results in Google maps is very key to every online marketing strategy.  One thing you must be aware of are “Citations” of your law firm. WHAT IS A CITATION? A citation is an online reference to yourlaw firm’s name, address and phone number (NAP). Like links to your website, Google uses them when evaluating the online authority of your business. Unlike links though, citations don’t need to be linked to your business’s website in order for you to be credited for them. So, having your NAP listed in plain text is fine. A partial citation is one which includes only part of your NAP – maybe your name and phone number or name and address. This is better than nothing, but not as beneficial as a full citation. A full citation is one which includes your business’s complete NAP. It doesn’t matter how that information is visibly listed (horizontally or vertically), so long as it’s all there. This is an example of a full citation: For a citation to help with your local SEO strategy, it’s important that it exactly matches the NAP on your website and on your Google+ Local page. What format you choose for your citations isn’t important, but picking one format and sticking with it is. You need to be 100% consistent in the name (abbreviations? Ltd?), address (suite number? floor?), and phone number (+312? spaces or no spaces?) used when building citations. For Lawyers there are all kinds of places to get citations including Yelp, Yahoo and many different online yellow page sites. Below are some of the top legal specific places to get citations. Most of them are free and your probably listed BUT the key here is to make sure your listed EXACTLY the same as far as your Firm name, Address and Phone #.  Then also claiming and verifying your listing is always a good idea and usually you can add a bunch of info on your firm, including a link back to your site.   These sites below are listed by Domain Authority (DA) and the higher the #, the better it will be for you to make sure you have a solid listing and a link back to your site if possible. Citation Site D.A. Country Free / Paid Listing URL findlaw.com 92 USA Free Click here nolo.com 87 USA Free Click here lawyers.com 86 USA Paid Click here hg.org 85 ALL Free Click here avvo.com 84 USA Free Click here justia.com 82 USA Free Click here bestlawyers.com 75 ALL Free Click here lawguru.com 72 ALL Free Click here wallethub.com 71 USA Free Click here lawinfo.com 70 USA Paid Click here lawyers.uslegal.com 58 USA Free Click here divorcemag.com 57 USA / CAN Free Click here lawyer.com 54 USA Free Click here legaldocs.com 53 USA Free Click here leadcounsel.org 52 USA Free Click here lawresearch.com 50 USA Paid Click here canadianlawlist.com 50 CAN Free Click here morelaw.com 49 USA Free Click here attorneypages.com 48 USA Paid Click here uslawyersdb.com 45 USA Paid Click here lawlink.com 44 ALL Free Click here statelawyers.com 44 USA Paid Click here riabiz.com 44 USA Free Click here bestattorneyrankings.com 44 ALL Free Click here lawfirms.com 43 USA Free Click here legalhelpmate.com 42 USA Paid Click here findlaw.com 41 ALL Free Click here lawyercentral.com 41 USA Free Click here lawfirmdirectory.org 41 USA Paid Click here lawqa.com 40 USA Free Click here   Local Search Marketing for Attorneys If your law firm needs assistance with LOCAL SEO, contact us today and we will do a FREE Local SEO analysis on your site.  

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Best Sites for Legal Research

Nolo.com is one of the better legal reseach sites on the net. You can do legal research by topic in one of Nolo’s Law Centers, or research through one of Nolo’s features, which include: Nolo’s Legal Encyclopedia with articles on legal topics in an easy to understand style, Ask Auntie Nolo with questions and answers on a wide variety of legal topics, Nolo’s Law Dictionary, Calculators for number-crunching, and Statutes & Cases ****The Internet Legal Research Group is another good Web site for free legal research, and is divided into several sections, including: Legal Profession, Academia, Legal Research, E-Mail Updates, and Attorney Referral Network. The Legal Research Section is divided into three sections: Law Runner, ILRG Legal Bookstore, and ILRG Web Index. In the Law Runner section under Legal Research, you can go to the Global Index, or the USA Index. The Global Index includes home pages for every nation in the world, including all islands and territories. The USA Index has a listing for each state and then includes some or all of the following links to the following within each state: the state’s home page, judicial branch & case law sources, legislative branch, executive branch, and miscellaneous state government sites. SOURCE: Allbusiness.com

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