There are lots of questions that pop up when lawyers hear the phrase organic digital marketing. For example:

• How is organic web traffic different than paid?
• What are the latest organic strategies in law firm digital marketing?
• What metrics will help me measure the success of organic efforts?

These are some the very questions that we address daily as we help our legal clients find the right mix and balance of search engine marketing tactics.

Q: How is organic web traffic different than paid?

There are two ways—paid and organic—to get your law firm’s website to appear in the first page of the search results, regardless of which search engine you use. Paid and organic marketing have the same goal: getting potential clients to your site. But the strategy behind them couldn’t be more different.

Paid search is exactly what it sounds like. You, or your law firm’s marketing agency, create ads for keywords with high search volume or high conversion rates, paying only for each click or impression the ad earns. Of course, your law firm’s pay per click campaigns may be  more complicated than that. If you have that do-it-yourself attitude, you can check out this guide to SEM & Paid Search Marketing from Search Engine Land.

Organic search (SEO) is a different process entirely. You’re not bidding on clicks and impressions, which can save a lot of money in the marketing budget. But organic isn’t 100 percent free either. You don’t pay for clicks or impressions, but you do have to invest in meaningful, well-produced content, site design and functionality, and site promotion.

You are paying for results one way or the other.

 

Q: What does organic digital marketing entail?

You can ask six different SEO experts how to do their job and you’ll get six different answers. That said, there are clear strategies every law firm should employ in order to have a successful organic campaign. Assuming your marketing agency or in-house SEO specialist isn’t using black-hat tactics, these include:

Engaging content

You need content on your properties that resonates well with your potential clients. Content can be anything from a 500-word blog post to a well-crafted infographic or video.

Each piece of content should have a specific purpose—the key to content marketing for lawyers. That’s how you know if it works or it doesn’t. For example, a service page on your site may convert well but perform poorly on your social media pages. Whereas a video, infographic or a piece of interactive content might earn a ton of social shares or backlinks, but convert poorly. Having both scenarios is ideal. There’s one piece of content that directly affects your law firm’s bottom line and another that improves brand awareness.

Creating content at such a high level requires a lot of research, trial and error, and a bit of luck, to be honest. It’s also unique to each market. What works well for a Boston firm may not earn the same results in Tampa or Seattle.

Likewise, “If you build it, they will come” worked great in A Field of Dreams, but it won’t work for your content. You need a promotional component to get your content in front of the right people.

These time-consuming tactics range from sharing it multiple times on your social channels to sending personalized messages to individuals and webmasters. You could add a paid Facebook campaign as well. It’s a high-risk tactic, but if successful, the results are well worth the investment.

Mobile-friendly & local search

In 2015, Google announced that mobile search volume outpaced desktop for the first time. So what does that mean for your website and digital marketing for law firms in general?

It means you ignore mobile devices at your own risk. Google tweaked their ranking algorithm to ding sites that aren’t friendly to mobile users. That first update in 2015 was called “Mobilegeddon,” promising to do just that. Thankfully, there wasn’t a lot of fall out because agencies and webmasters made the necessary changes to websites to avoid the penalty.

It doesn’t matter if your website has a responsive design (adjusts to a user’s screen size) or a standalone mobile site, as long as it’s user friendly. If you don’t know if your site is mobile friendly, you could ask your marketing agency or use Google’s Mobile Friendly Testing tool.

But you’re not done yet. You need to pay local SEO some attention.

The first organic result isn’t what it used to be. The first organic listing used to get the majority of clicks. These days, depending on the search result, that No. 1 position may actually be the eighth link on the page—behind four paid ads and three local listings.

It’s one reason why folks in the SEO marketing industry have moved away from just reporting on keyword rankings to validate their work. Just remember, rankings are still important, but they aren’t the indicators of success that they used to be.

So how do you overcome this change to the results? There are two ways. First, you could start a PPC campaign. But depending on your market and the legal keyword you’re targeting, that can get expensive in a hurry.

The second option is getting your business in that local pack. Like creating content, that’s easier said than done, but there are a few things you can do to improve your chance of getting in.

You’ll want to create or claim a Google My Business profile. (Tip: Always claim a listing if it already exists.) After claiming the profile, you or your representative should confirm the information is correct and add in anything that’s missing. Repeat that process on Bing, Yelp and other local listing platforms.

 

Q: Can you outline some smart strategies for organic digital marketing?

 

All law firm marketing strategies should answer one question first: Are your attorneys or law office giving prospective clients (users) what they want?

From the content on your website to the videos and photos you share on  Facebook or Twitter, these are all tools to reach an audience. If you don’t know who your audience is and what they want, then you’re essentially just throwing things against the wall and hoping they stick.

Identify your audience,  give them what they want, and share your content where your audience is. Go to them first, then they’ll start coming to you.

We can get into the weeds about content, backlinks, mobile-friendly designs and so on. But if you’re ignoring the user, then why are you wasting time and money advertising at all?

 

Q: What are the best metrics & tools for measuring success?

Measuring success for organic strategies requires teamwork between your law firm and advertising agency. At Network Affiliates, we can tell you how many users filled out a form or clicked on a digital ad to call your office, but that’s where our data ends. And unless you’re using a track-line phone number, we have no way of knowing whether those leads turned into clients.

That’s why intake is such important component of marketing plans for lawyers. If your intake specialist is capturing the right information from online leads, then we can compare the information we gather with theirs. It gives us a better idea of how well (or poorly) your site is performing.

Google Analytics is the most important tool to have installed on your website. While it’s far from perfect, it’s one of the better ways to see how people are engaging with your website. You can track how many leads your site generated, where those people came from and how many pages they visited before converting to a lead. Analytics lets you monitor traffic sources from organic and social channels, time on site or page, and a myriad of other metrics.

It is far from perfect. Spam traffic can inflate bounce rates and page visits and improperly set goals can skew your conversion data. Those issues can be fixed with the right configuration or a little bit of foresight.

For social channels, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+ have their own reporting dashboards. Those dashboards give you the social information that Google Analytics can’t. You can really dive down to see what resonated with your audience for that respective platform.

That level of reporting and teamwork takes all the guesswork out of calculating your ROI, cost per lead and cost per case. Time consuming? Yes. Worth it? Absolutely.

Let Network Affiliates eliminate the guesswork from your law firm’s digital marketing efforts. Give our organic search pros all call today – (888) 461-1016

The goal of all search engine optimization is to get found on the Web easier and more often. That gets you more eyeballs—and ideally more legal clients.

For attorneys, who are typically embedded in their local communities and continue to do much of their business face-to-face, making connections via “local” SEO for law firms is more crucial than ever.

Local SEO is a segment of online search strategy designed to deliver results that are most relevant to a “searcher” based on that person’s current location. Given the rise of mobile phone use, local SEO has become indispensable for brick-and-mortar businesses, but increasingly valuable for professional services as well. It’s obvious why optimizing around geography would be critical for a pizzeria. When someone types in “best pizza restaurants” while driving around town, a pizza joint just around the corner should come up first in Google results. One click and a mobile user could be placing an order for a large pie.

Local SEO can be just as valuable in professional service industries like law. Why? Because people are increasingly doing a majority of researching on all topics, interests and motivations online from small, portable mobile devices that they keep with them at all times. Convenience is key for consumers, but it can also lead to quicker conversions for companies. Let’s say someone was in a car crash. While still in crisis mode that person might start to search for legal representation from the nearest local hospital. You want your law firm of auto accident lawyers to come up first in that victim’s search. It’s instant top-of-mind. That’s what local SEO for attorneys can accomplish.

 

What’s in a local listing?

A local search marketing campaign is built around creating a variety of business listings online. These are mini profiles on popular sites and directories that will include your law firm’s name, along with a physical address, phone number and other details you deem most relevant to searchers and callers. The big players in the local-listings space currently include Yelp, Google+ Local, Bing Places, Internet Yellow Pages and Yahoo! Local, many of which share data with each other.

In local SEO, more is better. The more relevant listings you have the more visible your attorneys will appear online and the more chances your law firm has of ranking well in local searches—and therefore being found by prospective clients.

The first step in solid local SEO is to make sure you have “claimed” any listing of your business online. While each local business index does this a little differently, the process simply verifies that you are the owner of a valid business and are authorized to maintain its presence on the Web.

The baseline local business listing across all indexes include these criteria:

1. Business name or DBA
2. Local phone number that matches your city of location (toll-free, shared and call-tracking numbers won’t work)
3. Physical street address (no shared addresses or PO boxes) where you can make live contact with clients who want to do business

 

Common local SEO snags and solutions

Because local SEO is multifaceted and continues to shift like all things related to Google’s changing algorithms and rules, it can be a devious space to navigate alone. That’s why local SEO specialists for law firms are in high demand. While it’s typically not possible to take on local SEO alone, it is still helpful to understand some of the most common pitfalls that occur with this very specific sector of digital marketing.

We’ll categorize some common mistakes, as well as some tips to avoid them, under some big local SEO buckets, including content, “indexability,” citations, Google My Business (GMB) and links.

Clean content

In order for local SEO to work the way you want it to for Google, the content on your website must be scrubbed of all the little errors and issues that search engines don’t like and will penalize you for.

TIPS

• Stick to one powerful umbrella website rather than breaking up content into microsites.
• Use only original content—don’t scrape it from other sites.
• Make sure content is robust enough and is not duplicated anywhere on the site.
• Consider unique “city landing pages,” where you can leverage local testimonials, if you offer legal services in different locations.
• Integrate a blog, videos and images to add the “freshness” that search engines like.
• Build in location specifications wherever possible: schedules/calendars for different locations; bios of staff in other offices; sponsor/promote events by city region; and create tips-style content specific to your geographic region

 

“Indexable” optimization

Instituting a solid local SEO strategy does not get your firm out of having a great website. The same SEO best practices still apply in that to be “found” quicker your professional website must be well organized, properly optimized, easily “indexable,” free of errors and work on any device. Overlooking any of these fundamentals will only work against local SEO for attorneys.

TIPS

• Make sure you have a complete Contact Us page on your website.
• Your phone number should be clickable and highly visible throughout the site.
• A site-wide footer needs to include all of your locations.
• Your name, address and phone number (NAP) should be perfectly consistent.

 

Citation consistency

These little nuggets of information—complete or partial references to your name, address, phone number or website online—get a lot of attention, and for good reason. Studies are showing that with citations it’s consistency that matters more than their specific “strength” or volume, so, like content, keep citations clean. To start, ask an authority in local SEO for law firms to show you common aggregators for citations.

TIPS

• Build a unique set of citations for every physical office and ensure accuracy of each.
• Learn acceptable citation abbreviations, for example St. for Street, because they vary by platform.
• If you have multiple offices, point the website link on each citation to the corresponding website landing page.
• Once you’ve built citations for biggies like Yelp and Google, move on to local listings like your chamber of commerce, the BBB, or city newspaper.

 

Dueling duplicates

One of the most detrimental downfalls of good local SEO is ignoring duplicate business listings. Often lawyers don’t even know about dups. But if you don’t catch these copies they can quickly weaken the muscle you’ve built in local SEO.

TIPS

• There are plenty of free tools to detect duplicate listings. Just Google it.
• If it’s dups on Google that are tripping you up, look for cleaning options like the search engine’s Map Maker.
• For advanced issues with duplicate listings, you’ll need a combination of paid scraper tools and some slick query strings. (Ask a pro.)

Google My Business

Because it is linked to the most powerful search engine on the planet, law firms must be especially cognizant of Google’s own local indexing machine—Google My Business (GMB). Remember, if you are ranking well in Google’s eyes the more likely it is that people will see your site or call your business.

 

TIPS

• Get linked: Local SEO Guide’s recent study of 30,000 businesses across more than 100 SEO factors showed that links (with optimized anchor text for both keyword and city) are the key competitive differentiator in GMB rankings.
• Having a keyword in your business name will help you rank higher in GMB searches.
• GMB also seems to like business with a strong showing of owner-verified profiles, online reviews and photos.

 

If all this information on local search has made you feel anything but grounded, we understand. It’s tricky digital stuff that only gets more sophisticated by the day.

Network Affiliates has always been here for attorneys and will remain at forefront of digital marketing to ensure that our legal clients have the tools they need to succeed. Give us a call to start localizing your SEO strategy: (888) 461-1016