Why Most Law Firms Need Only One Domain

Written by

respectthealgorithm

While there are a few tried and true rules when it comes to SEO, a lot of the SEO advice out there comes with an expiration date. Should you follow such advice after it “goes bad”, you could be left with a very serious stomach ache–at least when it comes to your firm’s online presence.

For the longest time SEOs and people in the business of selling domains often recommended businesses buy keyword rich domains-as many of them as possible. If you happen to be a brain injury attorney in Seattle you should buy seattlebraininjurylawyers.com (and .net and .org) for that matter, and continue to buy domains like this so that your competition doesn’t get them, and one-ups you in the the search results. Not only that, but you should use those domains to create “microsites” that can rank for competitive keywords and drive traffic to your business through multiple organic channels.

Google became wise to the game, and in 2012 Google updated its algorithm to ensure that low quality websites with exact match domains ceased to get an unfair advantage over other websites. Despite this fact, businesses continue to pour thousands of dollars into useless keyword rich domains that won’t do them a lick of good.

Recently this got especially out of control as domain sellers started aggressively marketing the new .lawyer and .attorney TLDs to attorneys.  Since that happened, we haven’t seen any instances of these new TLDs dominating the marketing landscape.  It’s simply a case of marketers preying lawyers’ lack of knowledge to sell a useless “asset”.

Why this advice used to make sense:

When it comes to ranking pages and websites, Google wants to display the most relevant and highest quality results for every search. In the early days, Google used to determine relevance by the number of relevant keywords on the page and whether or not the keywords were in the URL itself. So, if your website happened to be seattlebraininjurylawyers.com, chances are you had a leg up in the game when it came to ranking for the term “Seattle brain injury lawyers”.

Not only that, but the text that people used when linking to your site (or anchor text, as us SEOs call it) used to be a big indicator to Google as to whether a site was relevant for a particular search term. Because seattlebraininjurylawyers.com has the keywords “seattle brain injury lawyers” baked right into the domain name, and because most people often link to a website using the domain name, this would be yet another advantage for using this keyword rich domain name.

Why this advice no longer makes sense:

If there’s anything that Google doesn’t like, it’s marketers using tactics to game the system. After all, it’s pretty easy to find keyword rich domains (as of this writing seattlebraininjurylawyers.com is still available). It wasn’t long before SEOs started building “microsites”, or small websites with very little content built specifically to “win” in the search results for certain competitive queries. It’s not uncommon even today to see businesses with five different websites, all of them with boilerplate content, all of them representing the same business, despite the fact that each site brings in what would barely qualify as a trickle of search traffic.

This is a poor user experience for both searchers and prospective customers alike, which is why Google started making keyword rich domains less of a ranking factor in 2012. This doesn’t meant that you can’t get your seattlebraininjurylawyer.com website to start ranking and get organic traffic, it’s just that in order to do so you’ll need to create quality, content relevant to your audience as well as to get links from large, high authority websites. In the end, you’re going to get as much of an advantage from seattlebraininjurylawyers.com as you would from yourlawfirmname.com. Would it not be better then, for branding consistency, to use the latter rather than the former?

To review, let’s go over the DOs and DON’Ts

Domain name DOs and DON’Ts:

DON’T buy a keyword rich domain just to prevent competitors from buying them. Even if they create a site with this domain, it will still take a a lot of hard work for these sites to show up in the search results.

DON’T go on domain shopping spree. Domains seem enticingly cheap at $10.99 or less each, but if you buy 50 domains just for the sake of having them, you’re paying $549 a year for a practical return on investment of zero dollars.

DON’T create a series of keyword rich microsites to drive business. Google won’t give it to you.

DON’T change your current domain to a keyword rich domain that you’ve just purchased. For example, if you have a website at yourfirmname.com and then switch it over to seattlebraininjurylawyers.com. Our experience has shown that you’ll actually see a temporary drop in traffic, rather than a gain. Not only that, but we’ve seen no long term observable benefit for changing from a site with your firm’s name on it, to a site with practice area related keywords in the domain.

DO put all of your eggs in one basket. The great thing about having just one website, is that the website grows stronger over time. One website will attract all of the links for your business and over time will generate much more web traffic that five smaller sites ever will.

DO consolidate your domains. If you already have a whole bunch of websites out there, see what you can do to make all those domains redirect to a single domain. This will often result in a quick observable boost in traffic for the main site. Before doing so, however, make sure that the content on your smaller websites are transferred to your main website.

DO protect your brand. Consider buying the .net and .org version of your domain. If people consistently misspell your business name, it may be useful to buy a domain with the most common misspellings. This is probably not necessary unless you hear about people misspelling your website. You should also buy a domain for former business names of your firm if that name has changed as well.

Brand protection, however, can go too far. DON’T do what Michael Bloomberg did: http://domainnamewire.com/2014/11/11/john-olivers-five-nyc-domain-names-making-fun-of-michael-bloomberg/

Mockingbird Named 2015 Top SEO Agency

Written by

Top 24 of the Silicon SoundSeattle 24×7 just launched their list:  Seattle’s Top 7 SEO and PPC Agencies of 2015.  One of the upsides of being based out of Seattle is the concentration of high end, white hat SEO talent.  Vanessa Fox, Rand Fishkin, Todd Friesen, Ian Lurie and many others make their home in the land of coffee, rain, bike commuter and microbreweries.

Just, two years in, we are frankly very flattered to be grouped with Seattle SEO stalwarts including Portent, Searchwrite, Wheelhouse and Distilled.

 

Company drinks on me tonight.

A Change in AdWords Third-Party Management Policy (for the better)

Written by

Last week, Google announced the launch of a new third-party policy for AdWords, expected to take effect November 2014. At Mockingbird, we’re big proponents of being transparent with our clients and making sure they own and have access to everything we do for them. For us, the improvements are reinforcing what we already do. For others, though, it may be a wake up call.

What’s the current third-party management policy?

Here’s a cliff notes version of Google’s current AdWords policy, as summarized from their Third-Party Policy page. Third-party managers…

  1. Must provide advertisers with monthly data on AdWords cost, clicks, and impressions.
  2. Must provide the Google Disclosure notice to small and medium-sized clients.
  3. May not engage in unclear, deceptive, or harassing sales practices.
  4. May not misrepresent their relationship to Google.
  5. May not make improper guarantees about Google to clients.
  6. May not violate Google’s branding guidelines.
  7. May not improperly use AdWords accounts.

In a nutshell – don’t be sketchy. You are a third party Google AdWords marketer, not Google. You are charging clients money to manage this account. You can’t guarantee that with your help they will win the Internet.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Google’s changes to the policy (as discussed here) include the addition of the following points:

  • Management fees – If you charge management fees, which you probably do, you must disclose them to your client.
  • Customer IDs – a customer ID is how Google identifies your AdWords account. You must provide this to your client so they can speak directly to Google about their account.

In a nutshell – seriously, don’t be sketchy. If you’re charging people money to manage their AdWords account, you have to tell them. You also need to give your clients the ability to talk to Google directly.

3 Questions to Ask About Your Third-Party AdWords Manager

To protect yourself from a potentially less-than-stellar third-party AdWords manager, we recommend you ask yourself the following questions:

  1. How much money are you spending on ads, and how much are you spending on the management of those ads? Keeping in mind that you get what you pay for when it comes to professional management services, if the numbers seem ridiculous, they probably are.
  2. How many clients are you getting from this advertising? 1? 2? 200? How does this compare to your cost per client in your other marketing channels?
  3. Are you allowed to access your own AdWords data? If you can’t, that’s a good indication you should run for the hills.

If you’re having issues with a third party manager and want to tell Google about it, you can fill out a complaint here.
If you’re having issues with a third party manager and want to hire a new one, you can read more about us here.

Its Here – Penguin 3.0 (and Webinar for Law Firms)

Written by

It’s been a busy weekend on the Internet. Friday, internet-dwellers became aware of a long awaited Google algorithm update, Penguin 3.0. Mockingbird Marketing will be hosting a Webinar, Tuesday, October 28th at 1:00 PDT to help you self-diagnose if Penguin 3.0 has impacted your site and what to do about it if it has. Webinar Signup: Penguin 3.0 Diagnosis for Law Firms.

Penguin Refresher Course

Google told us this was coming (we wrote about it last week), and here at Mockingbird we’ve been anxiously awaiting it’s arrival. Penguin is an algorithm update first released in 2012 that aims to put the hurt on sites with spammy backlinks. It’s a particularly interesting update because it appears that if Penguin has penalized a site, no matter how much backlink cleanup you do, the site won’t be able to recover until the next update. Considering the last update was over a year ago, a lot of sites have been sitting in limbo for a long time.

How to Tell if You’ve been Penguin-ed

We ran a quick study this morning on our clients, looking specifically at our top 20 clients with the most traffic. To see how Penguin affected our clients, we compared the natural traffic average of the four weekends prior to the natural traffic this past weekend.  If this pattern holds (and thats a big if – we’re dealing with just two days of data here) – 25% of the sites saw a increase of more than 15% and one got hammered.

Screen Shot 2014-10-21 at 3.43.43 PM

[Note: we are by no means suggesting this is 100% accurate data. Two days worth of traffic is hardly enough to perform a complete study with – but this methodology should serve you well in diagnosing the impact of Penguin 3.0 on your site’s traffic once another week or two passes.  We’ll walk you through this process step by step on the webinar.]

In any case, this is what we found:

For the most part, to our delight, our clients faired well – with a quarter seeing a large boost and only one getting hit. A few clients experienced a huge increase in traffic. Uncoincidentally, we’ve spent a ton of time cleaning up the spammy efforts of previous agencies to sanitize the backlink profiles of these sites.

To see the effect of Penguin 3.0 on your site, we recommend following the same steps:

  1. Filter your Google Analytics data to only show organic traffic.
  2. Get your average traffic for the past four weekends (or if you can wait until Friday, the past four weeks).
  3. Compare this number to your traffic this past weekend. Take it all with a grain of salt, and consider what else is going on. Did you just re-launch your site? Have you been experiencing a steady decline in traffic for a while? And also remember – your best bet is to wait for at least a week to see a clear picture.
  4. Cheer, cry, or shrug, depending on your results.

Still confused?

If you have a website and you or someone on your behalf has ever done less-than-white-hat link building, keep a close eye on your traffic. If it takes a turn for the worse, there’s a good chance you are feeling the force of this Penguin smack down.

If you want to learn if the Penguin update affected your site, tune into our Webinar Tuesday, October 28th at 1:00 PDT.

Pending Penguin Update – Is Your Site Ready?

Written by

A new Penguin update could rollout as early as this week. This is a huge – you need to make sure your site is ready.

What is Penguin?

Let’s start with the basics… Google uses a number of factors to decide where (if at all) to rank websites in the search results. Site authority is one of the most important of these factors. Google determines site authority by counting backlinks (or links from other websites that link back to your website). In order for your site to show up well, it is very important to have quality backlinks rather than hundreds of spammy links. Unfortunately, many attorneys have found this out the hard way.

Penguin is code name for an update Google made to their algorithm. The intention of the update is to punish sites that use dirty techniques to obtain links (ie: buy them or trade links with other sites).

How the System Has Been Gamed

SEO’s in the legal arena are especially notorious for using spammy backlinks to try and game the system and boost their ranking in search results. Unfortunately, working with attorneys, we have seen far too many clients hit by Penguin penalties because of these shady techniques. It can be a painstaking process to clean up and remove the (sometimes hundreds) of dirty backlinks, but this is one of our most important jobs and is not taken lightly.

What Does This Mean for Lawyers?

Although the percentage of sites that will be affected is still unknown, we expect an immense re-shuffling of rankings, and soon. Many businesses are hoping to finally be relinquished from the pain of the last punitive Penguin update.

We have been waiting for a refresh for 364 days now. Every time there is a Penguin refresh, Google chooses to forgive sites that have committed to cleaning up their backlink profile. Disavowing bad links (or telling Google that you want certain links to your website to be completely ignored).

Unfortunately, according to Google’s Gary Illyes, it may be too late to disavow before the new update hits. However don’t fret, assuming this update isn’t delayed during testing, the new algorithm will allow for more periodic refreshes.  It’s never a bad time to run a backlink audit and prepare for the next impending refresh. If you’re currently benefitting from spammy links (which is the case for many attorneys) disavowing backlinks may feel like amputating a leg. However, if you don’t, it is only a matter of time before you suffer a Penguin penalty.

Summary For Those Who Hate Words:

The latest algorithm update for back-links (penguin) is coming soon and should help those who have worked diligently to clean up their backlink profile. For those who haven’t, now is the time to start.

New Panda Rollout Helps Lawyers (we hope)

Written by

Last evening, Pierre Far from Google announced a new rollout of the Panda algo (remember that Google change targeted towards identifying thin, weak and otherwise low quality content).  Don’t go checking your Google Analytics just yet – the rollout will take a week to full deploy and impact 3-5% of search queries.

Most notably Far announced:

This results in a greater diversity of high-quality small- and medium-sized sites ranking higher, which is nice.

So it is interesting that in a very brief statement about Panda, Google is specifically calling out benefits to the little guys.  Reading the tea leaves here, I’m hoping this is in some degree a response to the backlash from Pigeon, which benefited the large directories at the expense of small businesses.

Google Authorship is Dead (or is it . . . .)

Written by

Last week, John Mueller over at Google announced authorship would no longer be shown in search results. In case you forgot, authorship was the nifty gizmo that made your picture appear in the SERPs next to content you wrote. Or at least, it did until this past June when Google removed the photo and just left your name.

Here’s what Google Authorship looked like in its glory days:

authorship 2

And here’s what it looks like with the removal of authorship:

authorship gone

boo boo!  Sad Trombone . . .

Why did Google (say they) got rid of authorship?

In their analysis of authorship, Search Engine Land cites two reasons. First of all, a low adoption rate by authors. Not many authors were implementing authorship code, suggesting that many content providers weren’t interested in it or didn’t understand how to use it. Secondly, a low value to searchers. Although authorship was originally intended to provide users with another indication of the validity of your content, it turns out that seeing your pretty face wasn’t really helping decision making.

Why do (we think) Google got rid of authorship?

Generally at Mockingbird, we take most of what Google says at face value. BUT – – – let me uncharacteristically offer a contrarian view:  Google got rid of authorship because we (the scummy, spammy) SEO industry transformed it from a positive quality signal into a spammy marketing tactic.  Especially within legal – where social media marketing consultants and SEO hacks desperate to demonstrate some tangible benefit to their clients went overboard with authorship.  Remember how FindLaw spammed authorship by attributing blog posts from old clients to their new clients? Hardly a legitimate quality signal and FindLaw wasn’t the only one.  My take is that it is highly possible that Google has removed the tangible benefit of authorship (that ego-boost of your picture right within the results that made lawyers salivate and social media marketing something to do) but has quietly held on to the concept of author rank.  Getting rid of “authorship” is going to remove (some) of the low quality signals that SEOs foisted into the author rank concept.

What does this mean?

Thankfully for website owners, Mueller says, “removing authorship doesn’t seem to reduce traffic to sites,” so you shouldn’t be too concerned on that front. However, folks in the SEO community have been spending time and energy on this since 2011, when authorship was first introduced.

Authorship was always about much more than the silly little picture . . . and for our clients we’re staying the course – building the authority of individuals.

Factual Changes How to List Your Business

Written by

Update (3/29/2016)*: Factual is now accepting manual submissions and revisions here: https://factual.com/contact#update_add_business

By now, we should all know the importance of having a consistent business name, address, phone number and domain listed throughout the web. Inconsistencies within directories send different signals to the search engines and can negatively impact your local listing position. Pigeon, the latest Google local update, seems to solidify this point with their move to more “traditional ranking factors” for local search.

Last week, I had one of our Marketing Managers help create and clean up a list of directories for one of my clients.  Each directory has a different process to adding and updating business information, but Factual was unique enough for me to remember that the process entailed and actual email to the company.

This is the process that was outlined on their contributing/correcting data page last week (you can also find this catalogued in the way back machine on Jun 25, 2014):

Factual Listings Before Change

Here’s what you see now:

Factual Listings After Change

Like many other directories, Factual is relying on “trusted data contributors” to list your business. Not surprisingly, Yext is one of the top recommended data contributors.

Unfortunately, this is taking the control of small business listings out of the hands of small business owners and into the hands of online marketing experts and tool providers. Does anyone else feel like they are being backed into a corner when it comes to managing your business information?

*Thanks to one of our readers Nigel Allen for the tip!

The Pigeon Mess . . .

Written by

Last Thursday, Google quietly released a new algo update targeting improved search results that had a local component (i.e. almost all legal related searches).  Note that Pigeon impacts both local and natural searches – so the reach for law firms is very significant.  The early results are in to Pigeon and they aren’t pretty.

Here’s why:

Pigeon Favors Directories Over Law Firms

Like the most recent Panda algo update, Pigeon seems to have favored directories over the actual businesses in these directories.  There is widespread agreement among local search geeks – Mihm, Blumenthal, Shotland and more that directories have indeed benefited.  Andrew Shotland noted a 5-10% traffic increase for some of the directories he works with following Pigeon. Counterpoint: I pinged the guys at Avvo who didn’t acknowledge anything dramatic.

I should note that this direction continues to surprise me.  Cutt’s has often made comments to the contrary so I see the possibility of a  large reversal in the horizon (although I’ve been envisioning it unsuccessfully it for a while.)  It is highly possible that Google’s focus on “brands” and the rewarding of brands in search results is to explain – i.e. the Avvo’s and FindLaw’s of the world have established brands while branding for law firms, especially small law firms is essentially impossible – especially as a computer would view a “brand.”

There’s also an argument (and I think a good one) that this update is a hastily rolled out response to Yelp’s recent sniveling about anti-trust . . . Pigeon, which rolled out just two weeks after the leaked TechCrunch article  has very directly benefited Yelp.

Shake-up of Local Results in a Bad Way

In many cases, mapped results have changed almost completely.  We’ve also seen the reduction of the frequency and sized of mapped results – i.e. some formerly mapped results don’t deliver at all and some seven packs have been replaced  by three packs.  I had one attorney call me insisting that his claimed Google profiles were no longer appearing and yet some unclaimed satellite offices had suddenly shown up in the mapped results.

Remergence of SPAM Results in Local Pack

Michael Ehline at the Circle of Legal Trust noted that Avvo was now showing up as a local personal injury law firm in Los Angeles.  I dug in and found what looks to be an old spam tactic – piggybacking a local company to the strength of a large, relevant domain to win in local results.  This is more widspread than this example – the travel site, Expedia is now a small hotel on Madison Avenue in New York  . . . . at least according to Google maps.

Circle of Legal Trust

I looked further into the los angeles PI example and found the following result.  Note that both Avvo and Lawyers.com are listed as a mapped business for the “los angeles personal injury attorney” query.  Also note that neither of them have a physical address and both of them have the identical phone number (which incidentally, you may not be shocked to learn, does NOT in fact ring to my old friends in Seattle.)  Also note both of them (and Farar & Lewis) are keyword stacked with “Personal Injury Lawyer” in the name of the business . . . . another rudimentary local search no no.

Avvo and Lawyers Local

You’d think that Google local results, with the focus on things like NAP consistency might be able to algorithmically detect that two different business within the same result have the exact same phone number.  Apparently not. Ehline insists that this result didn’t exist before Pigeon – and I tend to believe him.  The only thing he fears more than the Government removing his AR-15 is the Google removing his rankings.  While clicks go through to the appropriate directory, the phone number doesn’t – a quick search on that number brought me to an instagram (yuk) account that was associated with  . . . . a los angeles motorcycle accident attorney:

CycleLaw

Hope you are proud of yourself, Attorney Robert Brenner – but don’t expect this flood of new business to last, after which it may well dry up forever. This is an old spam technique (and I won’t encourage it by telling you how) that Google’s quality update (read: Pigeon) re-enabled. Good job MountainView. This is why I believe Pigeon to be a hastily launched response to Yelp’s whinings and I would expect more turmoil as they work to (hastily) improve upon it.