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Why Google Reviews Matter for Lawyers

April 21, 2019 By lcourt3 Leave a Comment

Google Reviews for Attorneys

Google reviews seem to be the hardest reviews to get for lawyers. Usually every law firm has some reviews from Lawyers.com, AVVO or some other legal related site. Some lawyers have 30-40 reviews at those sites and ZERO at Google. Getting reviews should be part of your overall Internet marketing strategy for lawyers.

Google is often the first point of contact between a customer and a lawyer. We plug keywords into Google to help us with anything we want to know. And if we want to find out how one law firm compares to another, we Google to find out about other people’s experiences.

Recognizing the need, Google has rolled out its own reviews feature, which allow users to write reviews directly on the business’s Google or Google Map listing. Since Google reviews are obviously favored by the search engine and show up upon every relevant result, if your business wants to have a good presence on Google, the best place to start is by getting more Google reviews.

Having a bunch of 5 star reviews will look better when a person does a search for your law firm and they see the stars show up next to your law firm name in the Google local search results.

Get Reviews Organized from ALL Sites

Having your reviews show up from Google is the top priority, yet lawyers will get reviews in a lot of other places including AVVO, Martindale & Lawyers.com, Yelp, Facebook and a few other legal review sites.

You want to have a plugin that will allow you to show ALL of your reviews in one place and show reviews from Avvo, next to Google, next to your Facebook reviews. I have the perfect review plugin for wordpress sites that will allow you to do everything you can imagine with your reviews.

If you a law firm like Stroudsburg PA Newman Williams, you will probably have a lot of reviews from a lot of different websites, along with reviews for both your firm and for your partners. Some lawyers like Asheville, NC Personal Injury Lawyer Lakota R. Denton, have more then 70 Google reviews and mostly have google 5 star reviews.

The first reviews people will see are the Google reviews, because if someone Googles your law firm by name, they will find your Google my business listing and that will show your Google reviews. Yet on your website, you can decide what reviews to show and how to show them. Many lawyers such as Portland real estate lawyers McEwen Gisvold dont have any Google reviews, but plenty of other reviews from Lawyers.com and AVVO.

Contact us if you would like to know more about our review services for lawyers.

Get 5 Star Reviews at Google and other key review sites.

—-> Getting 5 Star Reviews for your Law Firm Process

—-> SPECIAL – Lawyer Google Review Campaign ($199 setup, $69 monthly)

—-> Watch Video on how the Google Review System Works

—-> Why Getting Google Reviews is Important for your Practice

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11 Lawyer SEO Website Tips for 2019

April 4, 2019 By lcourt3 Leave a Comment

SEO For Lawyers in 2019

Is your lawyer website ranked well at Google for both organic and local search terms?

First a lawyer comic strip…..

Now back to the business of getting new clients….

If you want to get more new clients online, you have to make sure your site is set up right and that you are creating an ongoing series of content and getting links from other relevant websites.

Here are a few lawyer SEO tips to help your attorney website rank better in the Google search results.

Top 11 Attorney SEO Website Tips

Search Engine Optimization for lawyers (SEO) consists of a lot more than setting up a few meta tags like in the good old days. In 2019, you must create a lot of content, create a lot of videos, get social signals, get links from other sites and then do a lot more than that. Its an ongoing thing with SEO but there are certain things that must be done if you want to have any chance of ranking #1 at Google for your law firms top keywords related to your location and practice areas.

Below are the top SEO tips for lawyers who want to try and do more with Internet marketing this year. Organic SEO, Local SEO, Video SEO, Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing, and Reputation Management are just a few of the things that you must do in 2019.

Top Tips for SEO Marketing in 2019 for Lawyers

#1- Have unique Longer Pieces of Content Created (2000 words PLUS)

*** This post is over 2500 words and will be 3500 once I add to it, like Im doing here!

This should be the #1 tip on any list these days. Content is the key to success online and it always has been. Lawyers are not very good at creating content for their own websites I’ve discovered and sometimes they won’t create any for years. To be fair, they have enough to do, yet it’s key that someone creates this content!

The more content you create, the better your SEO chances will be, simple as that. Its key in 2019 to create longer blog posts that are over 1000 words long and contain images, videos and infographics whenever possible. 1500-3000 word posts are even better.

If you create content, especially good content that is long and unique, well that alone is going to help. Yet the added benefits are that people will stay on your site longer, people will more likely share this content, getting you links and social signals and also Google should reward you with some kind of traffic love.

** April 2019 Update:

You need to create a LOT of unique content for

* Blog Posts

* Guest Posts

* Social Media Posts

All of the content MUST be 100% unique and be able to pass the Copyscape test. You need to have a paid account to use Copyscape but its worth to know if your content is unique. If you put up a Blog post, you do not want to copy that same blog post to your social accounts or for a guest post you’re doing in order to earn some backlinks.

Also, you want to make your main blog posts longer than your competitors and usually at least 2500 words or more. An example if this lawyers blog post on Personal Injury Timeline for a Car Accident Case.

This post has over 2500 words, has multiple embedded videos from YouTube, has external links to high authority sites and includes multiple images. Usually, you want to also include an infographic, but you could also create a 2nd related post that covers a different angle and a different set of keywords.

#1A – Build Backlinks via Guest Posting at Relevant High Authority Sites

Building or earning backlinks to your site is the #1 most important thing to do in order to build your law firms SEO rankings at Google. This is not an easy process at all and why its so important.

Buying links is against Googles guidelines, but if you create a good piece of content, a lot of websites want to give you a link in exchange for writing such a great piece of content.

So you need to create even more content for guest posts, and then do a link outreach program to find sites that will award you with an editorial link to a page within your site.

#2 – DO KEYWORD Research to find better keywords

Make sure your site is optimized for the best possible keywords. Doing keyword research is a very good idea anytime you want to do a new legal blog post.

You want to do research to see all the possible keywords related to your post and main keywords. Then you want to find keywords that are bringing in traffic with low competition if possible.

Then once you identify the best keywords, you want to use them in your blog posts in strategic ways in the Title, description, headers, body, etc.

Some of the best Keyword tools are SEM Rush and Google Keyword Planner. There are a ton of other keyword tools you can use but the key is using something to do some research and you probably will discover a bunch of keywords you never even considered using, but that could lead to some new quality traffic coming to your legal site.

*** 2019 Update —- Use Neil Patels free keyword research tool at https://neilpatel.com/ubersuggest to find relevant keywords and long tail keywords that you can and should include within your content. This tool will give you an idea of how popular some keywords are and how much they cost on average at Google ads pay per click program for lawyers.

#3- Use Yoast SEO plugin & Optimize your TITLES and Descriptions

Titles and Descriptions are still very important for SEO and you need to make sure EACH and every page in your lawyer site has a unique and optimized Title and description.

The title tag is probably the most important part of your overall SEO strategy and it determines how search engines display each page. Your title should always include a relevant targeted keyword phrase, but keep it short and to the point. There’s no need to stuff the title full of SEO keyword phrases, doing that usually hurts more than it helps.

The Meta Description is what you see beneath each title in the search results. It has no bearing on your search rankings these days, but it can determine if someone will actually click on your listing. You need to grab the users attention and make sure you

Yoast SEO is the top WordPress SEO Plugin and helps you setup a variety of SEO settings and has a ton of built-in features that can help your SEO efforts. You can use this to optimize the Titles and Descriptions on the different pages.

*** 2019 Update…. You do NOT need to upgrade to the Pro version of this software. I use it, but dont find anything that really demands an upgrade. The internal linking feature is good, but it can be done manually pretty easy. The key with this SEO plugin, is to make sure that all of the settings are setup correctly.

#4- Do On Page SEO & Optimize Main Content (H1 and H2 Tags; Variations of Keywords)

The second most SEO relevant part of your page is the headline, or in coding terms, the “H1” tag. This tag is important for a few reasons.

First, Google gives it a lot of weight because of its prominence on your page. After all, it’s the one thing that every user will probably read because its so BIG.

You should tell your readers what the page is about and invoke some curiosity to keep them reading. You want to combine an H1 with a H2 sub-heading and try and get your main keyword that your focusing on, along with your geographic location.

Also you want to make sure that different variations of your keywords are included throughout the page.

If you have a page on “truck accidents,” you shouldn’t repeat “truck accidents” or truck accident lawyer excessively. Instead, use words like “truck crash accidents,” “truck wreck lawyer” “truck crashes,” and as many different variations as you can come up with.

Google is not dumb in any way, in fact you should just presume they are a straight up genius.

So you don’t want to do anything that is spammy or seems easy,. Things like repeating the same keywords over and over, or anything you think might have worked 5 years ago.

The only thing that really works now is making sure you have a lot of high-quality content, and that you interlink that content together and make sure you use a lot of different variations of your keywords. That combined with getting high-quality backlinks and doing something with social media should help improve your organic SEO rankings.

*** 2019 update – You want to focus on LSI related keywords and to make your page follow a theme. The best way to find what LSI related keywords that you should use on your post or page, is to do a Google search and at the bottom of the page, you will find a list of related searches that Google thinks are most related to your search. SO then you want to sprinkle these keywords into your content where they make sense.

You dont want to just put them one after another where there is no logic to them being on the page. You must create new content around them usually and this can be a huge help, because by doing this, you now increase your word count by 500-1000 words or more. You also might improve your pages dwell time, and then you should start ranking for more keywords if you sprinkle in these related keywords in the right way.

#5- Get More Social & Get More Social Signals to your site

Getting social signals tells Google that your site is being shared by others and is popular. So the easiest way to do this, is to make sure you have social media accounts setup such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, AVVO, YouTube, Google, Pinterest and any other social media account you think might help your law firm.

Then do facebook posts, adding videos, images and a link to your law firms site. Do tweets at Twitter and utilize as many social media accounts as you can. Then the key is getting people to share and like your content. The more this happens, the more Google will see that your being active and trusted by other users.

You want to get as many retweets, likes, views and everything else that goes with social media. The more content you can create, the more chances you have at people liking and sharing your content. You want to build all of your social media accounts over time, the key is making sure you keep them updated. You want to have some kind of automation, so that when you do a blog post, it will automatically update your Facebook and Twitter accounts.

#6- Improve Site SPEED & Performance

More and more Google talks about how important a factor that Site Speed is. The faster your site loads, the better for everyone, including your organic SEO rankings. Yet improving your overall sites speed is not always easy, and sometimes you can fix your speed issue, just to have something else create a problem.

So if your using WordPress, you need to use a good Speed and performance plugin such as W3 Cache or WP Super Cache.

Go Test Your Site with Google SPEED Tool
Download the W3 Cache WordPress Plugin
Download the WP Super Cache Plugin

#7- Site Security and making sure your site is locked down and SECURE

This is becoming a big deal and yes Russian Hackers are real! So are all other countries and who knows how they do it, or why they do it, but they do it constantly. SO you must have your site secured in multiple ways. There are some basic things you can do and then many more advanced things that really need to be done in order to lock down your site.

Even then its possible you can run into some kind of issue where you get hacked and malware is on your site. Usually if you have a good web host, that problem will be solved and almost never an issue, IF you take all the needed steps.

Site security for lawyers is part of the overall SEO strategy because if your site gets infected with malware or has any other kind of issue, it can have a negative effect on your overall SEO rankings and it can bring your site down for days.

WordPress is an excellent CMS and very popular, yet it seems to be very vulnerable to hackers. Ive seen more and more lawyer websites that get hacked and have this ugly message from Google…. “This Site is NOT SAFE or This Site May Harm Your Computer”…. Thats the last thing you want a client seeing when they visit your site.

Some WordPress Security Tips for Attorneys:

Download a WordPress Security Plugin like Bulletproof Security
Remove the default ADMIN user name and replace with unique name
Make sure you always update your WordPress Software & Plugins
Read more WordPress Security Tips for Lawyers

#8 – Have a Mobile Friendly Site

This goes without saying but your site must be mobile friendly and easy to read on any mobile device. Google has put a big emphasis on this and will tag a site that is mobile friendly, so you want to make sure you get that tag because otherwise a potential client might just decide not to even visit your site.

Mobile is more important than ever and is accounting for over 50% of traffic in most cases these days. Everyone is on a mobile phone and it’s getting easier to read sites, so people have no problem viewing your site on a mobile device unless of course, it is not mobile friendly, then for sure, they are leaving to your main rival’s site. So make sure you take all the steps needed to make your site mobile friendly and then some.

Most WordPress themes these days will be responsive and mobile friendly without much needing to be done. Yet you can also setup a more custom mobile site using a mobile plugin and creating a custom mobile home page for your legal website.

#9- Create more Videos of Lawyers:

Create Videos of Lawyers in the law firm talking about the different areas of practice. Videos are a form of content and the more videos you can create, the more content you will have to spread around. Sometimes adding a video to a blog post can make it come to life and compliment it well.

Then sometimes you can do a blog post just around the video. If you have a 30 second video of a partner talking about a latest case or practice area, you can embed the video into a blog post and add some content of the transcript of the video.

You can not do Video SEO without videos. You need videos in order to come up in the YouTube search results.

You need to setup a YouTube channel that links to the firms website, and then every time you create a video, you would upload it to YouTube, and then you will be able to easily embed the video into your legal site, blog or social media site.

#10- Create Customized Images & Optimize for SEO:

You should have customized images created for all of your blog posts, and then make sure they are optimized for SEO by adding keywords to the alt image tags. Your images can be found on Google image search if they are properly optimized. You can use a wordpress plugin that will help you optimize your images for SEO.

Creating different images to use is a good idea, and you can have an image for your blog post and other images for different social media sites. Some sites like Pinterest are all about images, so you will want to have a custom image created around your latest blog post, and then have an image that has the title of your post. Then when the user clicks on your image, it will goto that blog post.

Images are a good idea for multiple reasons and you should use one image for every 300-400 words of content. Images can make your blog post easier to read and its a good idea to use as much media as possible, so images, videos and infographics.

#11- Do a Press Release for your Law Firm:

Press Releases are not just for bigger firms and companies. Anyone can create a press release if you have something newsworthy. That’s the key, you have to have a newsworthy story with a catchy headline that will be accepted as a relevant news story. There are a number of different reasons a lawyer would do a press release including:

Launching of a new website
Introduction of a new practice area
New Lawyers joining the firm
Awards for any of the lawyers
Any kind of Charity Work the Firm does

Once you have a good newsworthy story with a catchy headline, then its a matter of putting the press release together and if done right and accepted, you can get your news story in front of a lot of potential media sites, including affiliate sites of bigger news sites like ABC and NBC.

This can be a big boost for both organic SEO and Local SEO For lawyers. The press release would have a link to your website from a lot of potential high ranked and trusted media sites. It would also have your firms NAP (Name, address and Phone #) and those citations could help your firms Local SEO marketing efforts.

LAWYER SEO IN 2019 CONCLUSION

Internet Marketing for Lawyers in 2019 is alive and well and there are a lot of things you can do to help promote your law firm better online. If done right, it can lead to a steady flow of new clients. The real key is creating new content for your website on a constant basis, not just plain text, but also customized videos, images, and infographics.

You want to then also do a link outreach program and find sites where you can do guest posts with a link back to your websites power pages.

With links, in general, you do NOT want to use keyword rich anchor text for your links. You want to use your brand name, which will be your law firm’s name as your anchor text and have these links go to your home page. \

Then you also want to get links to your subpages and blog posts and here you want to use a combination of anchor text including some blended keyword anchor text from some of your better link opportunities.

Lawyer SEO Marketing Services

We can help your legal practice with all forms of SEO Marketing. Contact us today for a free Legal Site Analysis.

—> Free SEO Analysis & Estimate

Phone: 630.393.0460
Email: law@lawyerscourt.com

Lawyer Internet Marketing Services

Getting Backlinks for Lawyers for SEO

October 6, 2018 By ctech2 Leave a Comment

Lawyer SEO Marketing in 2018

Are Links Still Important to get Ranked higher in Google?? Do Links Matter?

Links matter. Big time, maybe not as much as they once did but they are still a vital part of getting your law firm website ranked in the Google organic SEO Rankings.

What are Backlinks?

Backlinks (also known as “inbound links” or “external links”) are links from other websites to your website. Search engines consider backlinks “votes” for your website and content, which can improve a site’s rankings in the search results.

Fun Fact: They’re called “backlinks” because it’s when a website links back to you.

Why You Need Backlinks to Rank

Backlinks are basically votes from other websites. Each of these votes tells search engines: “This content is valuable, credible and useful”.

So the more of these votes you have, the higher your legal web site will rank in Google and other search engines.

Even though Google has made thousands of changes to its algorithm since then, backlinks remain a key ranking signal.

For example, a recent industry study that Brian Dean from backlinko was a part of, found that links remain Google’s #1 ranking signal.

And Google has confirmed that links remain one of their three most important search engine ranking factors.

The question is:

How do you get backlinks for your lawyer site?

And how do you get the types of backlinks that get your site to Google’s first page? Well, that’s what chapter 2 is all about…

Latest Google Updates Have Many Lawyers Losing Rankings

August 17, 2018 By ctech2 Leave a Comment

Legal SEO Marketing Services

Google SEO Rankings for Lawyers – Latest Google Update….

Have your law firms rankings taken a DROP? You are not alone….

On August 1st, 2018, Google released a broad core algorithm update that seems to have had an impact on both local and organic rankings.
One of the functions of the update has been to demote advice pages with questionable expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-A-T) in rankings.
YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) websites and pages seem to have been a particular focus.

You’ll no doubt have noticed, whether from reading the news or experiencing its effects yourself, that on August 1st, Google released what it’s called a ‘broad core algorithm’ update. This is the same way it referred to the updates in March and April, perhaps in an effort to move away from the irregular, major updates like Possum, Pigeon, Panda, etc. which inevitably send shockwaves throughout the SEO and content industry.

What is E-A-T in SEO?

E-A-T stands for ‘expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness’ and plays a big part in Google’s Search Quality Guidelines. I’m going to assume you don’t have the time right now to read the 164-page PDF I just linked to, so I’ll summarise this for you here.

Making expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness big factors in Page Quality is Google’s way of trying to avoid negatively impacting people’s lives. By ranking sites that offer questionable advice from non-authoritative sources lower than more authoritative ones, they reduce the risk of searchers being scammed, or in more extreme cases, suffering worse physical and mental health.

For example, as Google states in its guidelines, with regard to medical sites,

“High E-A-T medical advice should be written or produced by people or organizations with appropriate medical expertise or accreditation. High E-A-T medical advice or information should be written or produced in a professional style and should be edited, reviewed, and updated on a regular basis.”

This approach extends to news articles (something that’s particularly relevant these days), information pages, financial/legal/tax advice, home improvement sites, and even pages on hobbies such as photography or musicianship.

Qualifying a website or content creator’s expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, without performing deep research into authors’ experience or qualifications, is highly subjective, so it’s assumed that Googlers have a way of fairly quickly assessing these factors for millions of websites.

In this update, it would seem that websites with low E-A-T are being hit the hardest, so if you’re working with a local business with a tendency to overreach their expertise with their site content, you’ll want to look carefully at its site rankings and assess whether it’s time to find another way to highlight the worth of the site and business.

What is a YMYL website?

Another term that’s cropping up more since Google’s August core broad algorithm update is YMYL, which stands for ‘Your Money or Your Life’.

What Google calls YMYL websites are closely tied to E-A-T, as they include pages that “could potentially impact the future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety of users.” YMYL isn’t a statement of quality; it’s more a category of page or website that has the potential to significantly affect someone’s life, for better or for worse.

These include the following (per Google):

Shopping or financial transaction pages
Financial information pages
Medical information pages
Legal information pages
Legal information pages
News articles or public/official information pages important for having an informed citizenry
Other (based on evaluator judgment)

I’d encourage you to take a look at page 9 of the Google Search Quality Guidelines for more details on these.

Conclusion

This latest algorithm update, if what we’re seeing from the community is to be believed, may well have been focused on demoting YMYL pages with low E-A-T.

Whilst this will definitely impact websites like forums with low-quality advice, it should be noted that local businesses are just as at risk (as shown by Joy and Marie above) from providing advice that doesn’t come from a place of expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.

citations that make the difference!

Top 11 Lawyer SEO Tips in 2018

#1- Have unique Longer Pieces of Content Created

This should be the #1 tip on any list these days. Content is the key to success online and it always has been. Lawyers are not very good at creating content for their own websites I’ve discovered and sometimes they won’t create any for years. To be fair, they have enough to do, yet it’s key that someone creates this content!

Top 5 Reasons Chatbots Work for Lawyers

Chatbot for lawyers is a new evolving technology that solves the present market deficiencies through an intellectual software solution. The main reason to have a chatbot setup is to not let any potential clients that come to your site just leave without possible leaving their contact info. If they leave, they are gone. If the chatbot gets them to start chatting and leave the phone and email, then you can contact them and follow up and maybe they become client, thanks to your chatbot!

*** You can see an example of the Virtual Assistant CHATBOT setup on this site…. You can have the box come up automatically, or after a set time or when the user is about to leave. The great thing about the BOT is that its a 24/7 assistant that can learn over time and is available right away to help any of your website visitors.

HERE ARE FIVE REASONS CHATBOTS WORK FOR LAW FIRMS

1. Chatbots are 24/7 Assistants that offer ease of access

Your Chatbot does not need a break or a vacation like the human workforce. It works 24/7 to provide the customers with legal help whenever and from wherever they need it. This technology could add a lot to the legal firms’ services making them better, smoother, and more proficient.

You can train your chatbot, like you might train someone who is going to handle the live chats. You can provide answers to a variety of questions your potential clients might have. You could program the chatbot to give info on each lawyer in the firm, answers to questions about specific practice areas and many other things. As time goes on, you can learn from the answers you get from people using the chatbot. The chatbot also learns via Artificial Intelligence and can add new questions people might have. This is a big difference from a chatbot for facebook, here the chatbot will only give answers that you program, their is no AI in that case.

2. Chatbots Are Quick to Repond to People

Chatbots understand natural language questions and are quick to respond with serviceable and supportive legal information in simple English. A user can chat with the chatbot to get whatever information he or she need. They are also very beneficial for people doing introductory research. Its chief benefits are easiness and accessibility, which means that anybody can find appropriate legal information.

The bottom line is that if someone comes to the website after hours or really anytime, it looks good that the firm would have a chatbot setup that can potentially help someone answer a question they might have. They might just need directions, or want to read your reviews, or want to know if you give a free consultation. These questions can easily be answered by the BOT, thus taking some burden off whoever else might have to answer these questions.

3. Chabots help collecting data

Chatbots come equipped with a tool to gather, study, and optimize the data. By using a chatbot, a legal firm can go through the conversation record to trace and evaluate the engagement process of the users. It helps them in identifying users’ behavior and the potential leads. If the firm knows how often the clients make use the chatbots, what their queries are, and what motivates their continual involvement, it proves to be a very valuable asset, which offers new perspective for the firms and encourages them to enhance their commercial practices.

The chatbots can collect a users email address and phone # and email you right away with this valuable info. You can also go back through the chats and gather info that you might otherwise have no record of.

4. Chatbot for Customer Service & Educational Purposes

Chatbots for lawyers can also be used to engage and educate a client. As modern technology, for instance natural language processing helps in developing clients’ online association with legal firms as it converts the one-way communication into a mutual dialogue. It helps the lawyers in demonstrating their expertise and share new and significant content pertaining to the laws and policies of their residing city or country.

You can setup the bot so it has a customer service script vs. a lead generation script if your main goal is to provide customer service to the people that visit your lawyer website or blog. The customer service script is more setup to provide as many answers to potential questions a user might have.

5. Chatbot for possible Lead Generation

Chatbots can be used for lead generation by simply engaging the user on the website and getting them to leave their contact info. Some people might not want to go through hassle of calling a firm or even filling out a contact form, yet some people like the idea of instant satisfaction to a question that is on their mind. So if the chatbox comes up, they very well might start typing a question they have and then wind up leaving their contact details, as well as describing their legal problem.

Looking at it from the outsider’s point of view, chatbots are a win-win situation for both clients and the law firms as they help and improve clients’ engagement while providing a valuable tool for lawyers to generate fresh leads and expand the clients’ base of the firm.

In last few years, the chatbot environment has been flourishing in almost all the sectors. Legal expertise and digital revolution give lawyers vital competitive advantages over their competitors and also helps them in bringing in new clients with new cases. When a legal firm starts using chatbots, it sets free the lawyers or human representatives in customer support team from managing everyday repetitive tasks that are time consuming and allowing them to concentrate on more important tasks that are of higher value and effect for the firm.

HIRE US TO CREATE A CHATBOT FOR YOUR LEGAL WEBSITE

We can help you setup a bot like we have on this website. Your bot can be pretty basic where its just collecting basic info from anyone who engages in a chat. It can also be more advanced where you program it with answers to questions related to your firm and practice.

—> Facebook Messenger Chatbot (Use now)

Lawyer Google Local SEO Special

May 14, 2018 By lcourt3 Leave a Comment

Google Local SEO for Lawyers

Lawyer Google Local SEO Marketing Package

Is your law firm site listed on the Google maps when you do a search at Google for your location and practice area? You want to be found in the Google 3 Pack for local searches.

We have an excellent package designed for lawyers on a budget who are looking to get the most bang for the buck. This package will help your law practice in a number of different ways including getting listed on the Google Maps and a great system that is designed to make getting 5 star Google reviews a simple process.

**** SPECIAL – Lawyer Local SEO Package – ONLY $399 Flat Fee

LAWYER LOCAL SEO & REVIEWS MARKETING PACKAGE

Get Your Law Firm Ranked in the Google 3 Pack Local Listings. Get 5 Star Reviews at Google and other key review sites.

—> Setup of Google My Business Account. Optimization of Google Account

—> Setup of other key Local Business Accounts including Bing, Facebook, Yelp and others.

—> Creation of images to use within Google account

—> Creation of Videos to use within social media accounts

—> Setup of Google Reviews Package for firm

—> Setup of Monitoring for Google Reports

—> CITATIONS Work – We obtain high quality local citations that make the difference!

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Top 11 Lawyer SEO Tips in 2018

#1- Have unique Longer Pieces of Content Created

This should be the #1 tip on any list these days. Content is the key to success online and it always has been. Lawyers are not very good at creating content for their own websites I’ve discovered and sometimes they won’t create any for years. To be fair, they have enough to do, yet it’s key that someone creates this content!

FREE Lawyer Graphics

Everyone needs high quality images these days. Either for your website, Blog, Facebook account, Pinterest or Instagram accounts. In the old days of the Internet, people would just do a google search and just cut and paste whatever image they liked. They also would save an image from another site by right clicking on it, saving the image and hoping it was LEGAL. Yet a lot of times people got calls from Getty images asking for a hefty fine! They also could get a call or email from a lawyer stating they were using an image without permission.

USE PIXABAY OR UNSPLASH

Pixabay and Unslash are two sites that you can get high quality images that are CC0 Creative Commons. They are Free for commercial use and No attribution required.

SETTING UP A FREE ACCOUNT

You need to setup an account to make it an easier process, otherwise you will be faced with endless catcha screens. Much easier to setup a FREE account in order to download totally FREE High Quality images!

After you setup an account and login, you will then do a search to find the images you want. After finding an image, you simply click on it and it will open up a larger version of the image, in the right corner of image you can click on DOWNLOAD in order to download that image.

GIVING CREDIT FOR IMAGE IS NOT REQUIRED

It will also open up a box that says
SAY THANKS.. Crediting isn’t required, but is appreciated and allows photographers to gain exposure. Copy the text below or embed a credit badge.

SO…. you can use these images on your website for Free and dont even need to give credit. You should give credit and I find some photographers have great work and you can use multiple images they have. So its only fair to at least give them a link. Yet unlike some other sites, your not required to give credit in order to use the images.

—-> Visit Pixabay to download free attorney images

—-> Visit Unsplash to download free lawyer images

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LAWYERS COURT
Legal Web Design & Marketing

PHONE: 630-393-0460
EMAIL: law@lawyerscourt.com

—-> Free Site Analysis Form

Facebook Offers Free Music and Sound Effects for Video Makers

December 12, 2017 By lcourt3 Leave a Comment

FACEBOOK MARKETING FOR LAWYERS

Facebook today announced it was offering a selection of free music and sound effects to content creators. If you want to use music in a Facebook or Instagram video, the Sound Collection gives you options that won’t get you dinged for copyright infringement.

Facebook removes any video uploaded that contains copyrighted music — similarly to how YouTube works. So instead of adding an Ariana Grande song to that highlight reel of vacation photos and potentially getting a black mark for it, the company is giving you a selection of music it owns to use instead. Note that these will only be free and clear to use in Facebook and Instagram videos.

The sound collection contains a number of tracks, sorted by genre. A lot of it feels more kind of generic, like elevator music, but some of it is actually not that bad. With 1,000 tracks and 1,500 sound effects, it’s by no means an extensive list — I’m not going to get to score my winter staycation with “Stairway to Heaven,” sadly — but it’s still good to have options.

YouTube also offers a collection of royalty-free songs and sound effects, so it’s obvious who Facebook is taking notes from. This might be part of Facebook’s effort to draw in new creators, away from the more well-established video site. Since the launch of its Watch app earlier this year, Facebook needs new voices and faces if it wants the kind of diverse content with which it can compete with the likes of YouTube.

While a free music library might not be the biggest step towards courting the YouTube audience, it is the kind of tool Facebook has long needed if it doesn’t want content creators to feel hamstrung as soon as they boot up the site.

Facebook’s Sound Collection is rolling out to everyone over the next few days. You can find the library here.

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OPTIMIZING YOUR ATTORNEY GOOGLE LOCAL LISTING

Google My Business (GMB) optimization has quickly become something of a cottage industry within the broader scope of Search Engine Optimization SEO. Its obvious that keeping your listings up to date with accurate store hours, phone numbers and addresses are the no-brainer changes. How do you go beyond the low-hanging fruit to really make your GMB listing stand out?

Some relatively straightforward tweaks to Google My Business can have a profound effect on your listing’s visibility and your local 3 pack ranking. They may seem deceptively simple, but these GMB hacks could make all the difference in the world.

Geocode Precision

Google My Business uses your listing address to generate geocodes, which in turn dictate where your store appears in Google Maps. This is not a foolproof process, however, and it’s not unheard of for businesses to have wildly inaccurate geocodes. Google Maps could put your store at a nearby intersection, or even several blocks away from its actual location.

You don’t want to make it any more difficult for your customers to find you, which is why it’s so important to ensure your listing has precise geocodes. This is doubly important for any business located in a larger metropolitan area. Denser areas could see more inaccurate geocodes, so city dwellers need to be extra mindful of this factor.

Listing categories

Google doesn’t change its algorithm for the fun of it. The company is always trying to improve its search engine so it returns results that closely align with users’ queries. With each new update, relevance becomes an even more important factor in a listing’s visibility.

The more precise you can be with your firm category, the more likely your listing will appear for searches that match it. Don’t settle for overly broad store categories, even if they are technically accurate. Drill a little deeper to provide an accurate characterization of your business, and you’ll likely see better results.

Proximity to search

That same need for precision applies to your store’s listed location as well. It may be tempting for businesses located near a larger city (but still outside of it) to list that metropolis as their location. Why not, right? It could broaden your potential customer base.

Google takes location and proximity into account when calculating local page ranking, however. It won’t be fooled by businesses misrepresenting their location, and if anything, doing so will hurt those stores’ visibility. If your shop is in Skokie, Illinois, say so. Don’t pretend it’s located in Chicago to draw more eyeballs. You’ll be far more likely to rank for searches done in your area.

Cultivate (and respond to) reviews

Unknown quantities tend to scare off consumers. No one wants to be the first diner at a new, non-vetted restaurant or roll the dice on a barber with no track record of leaving customers satisfied with their haircut. More than ever, online reviews are critical to local page success. Encourage your customers to go online and leave a review for GMB to pick up on. The more reviews you have, the more exposure your business can get.

Business owners may be a little wary of online reviews given their mercurial nature. It doesn’t take much to get negative feedback, and those kinds of comments could reflect poorly on your store. However, such instances are opportunities to engage unhappy individuals and show other potential customers that you take their satisfaction seriously.

Google recommends responding to both positive and negative reviews to improve your listing.

Create engaging content

An inactive site could be mistaken for a dead one. One area of optimization that’s easy to overlook is filling your site with engaging content. Creating new material to share with regular or potential customers is a good way to improve your local page ranking. Moreover, content that focuses on local events or area-specific concerns can help your search efforts immensely.

Additionally, consider making use of Google Posts, which allows you to publish events, promotions and other business updates directly to Google Search (in the Knowledge Panel) and Maps.

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LAWYERS COURT
Legal Design & Marketing

PHONE: 630-393-0460
EMAIL: law@lawyerscourt.com

—-> Free Site Analysis Form

Top 11 Attorney SEO Tips in 2017

#1- Have unique Longer Pieces of Content Created

This should be the #1 tip on any list these days. Content is the key to success online and it always has been. Lawyers are not very good at creating content for their own websites I’ve discovered and sometimes they won’t create any for years. To be fair, they have enough to do, yet it’s key that someone creates this content!

—> Read More on Lawyer SEO in 2017

—> Free Lawyer SEO Analysis & Estimate

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Google Reviews for Attorneys

Google is often the first point of contact between a customer and a lawyer. We plug keywords into Google to help us with anything we want to know. And if we want to find out how one law firm compares to another, we Google to find out about other people’s experiences.

Having a bunch of 5 star reviews will look better when a person does a search for your law firm and they see the stars show up next to your law firm name in the Google local search results.

Get Reviews Organized from ALL Sites

Having your reviews show up from Google is the top priority, yet lawyers will get reviews in a lot of other places including AVVO, Martindale & Lawyers.com, Yelp, Facebook and a few other legal review sites.

You want to have a plugin that will allow you to show ALL of your reviews in one place and show reviews from Avvo, next to Google, next to your Facebook reviews. I have the perfect review plugin for wordpress sites that will allow you to do everything you can imagine with your reviews.

Contact us if you would like to know more about our review services for lawyers.

Get 5 Star Reviews at Google and other key review sites.

—-> Getting 5 Star Reviews for your Law Firm Process

—-> SPECIAL – Lawyer Google Review Campaign ($199 setup, $69 monthly)

—-> Watch Video on how the Google Review System Works

—-> Why Getting Google Reviews is Important for your Practice

SEO For Lawyers in 2019

Is your lawyer website ranked well at Google for both organic and local search terms?

First a lawyer comic strip…..

Now back to the business of getting new clients….

If you want to get more new clients online, you have to make sure your site is set up right and that you are creating an ongoing series of content and getting links from other relevant websites.

Here are a few lawyer SEO tips to help your attorney website rank better in the Google search results.

Top 11 Attorney SEO Website Tips

Below are the top SEO tips for lawyers who want to try and do more with Internet marketing this year. Organic SEO, Local SEO, Video SEO, Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing, and Reputation Management are just a few of the things that you must do in 2019.

Top Tips for SEO Marketing in 2019 for Lawyers

#1- Have unique Longer Pieces of Content Created (2000 words PLUS)

*** This post is over 2500 words and will be 3500 once I add to it, like Im doing here!

The more content you create, the better your SEO chances will be, simple as that. Its key in 2019 to create longer blog posts that are over 1000 words long and contain images, videos and infographics whenever possible. 1500-3000 word posts are even better.

** April 2019 Update:

You need to create a LOT of unique content for

* Blog Posts

* Guest Posts

* Social Media Posts

Also, you want to make your main blog posts longer than your competitors and usually at least 2500 words or more. An example if this lawyers blog post on Personal Injury Timeline for a Car Accident Case.

#1A – Build Backlinks via Guest Posting at Relevant High Authority Sites

Building or earning backlinks to your site is the #1 most important thing to do in order to build your law firms SEO rankings at Google. This is not an easy process at all and why its so important.

Buying links is against Googles guidelines, but if you create a good piece of content, a lot of websites want to give you a link in exchange for writing such a great piece of content.

So you need to create even more content for guest posts, and then do a link outreach program to find sites that will award you with an editorial link to a page within your site.

#2 – DO KEYWORD Research to find better keywords

Make sure your site is optimized for the best possible keywords. Doing keyword research is a very good idea anytime you want to do a new legal blog post.

You want to do research to see all the possible keywords related to your post and main keywords. Then you want to find keywords that are bringing in traffic with low competition if possible.

Then once you identify the best keywords, you want to use them in your blog posts in strategic ways in the Title, description, headers, body, etc.

#3- Use Yoast SEO plugin & Optimize your TITLES and Descriptions

Titles and Descriptions are still very important for SEO and you need to make sure EACH and every page in your lawyer site has a unique and optimized Title and description.

The Meta Description is what you see beneath each title in the search results. It has no bearing on your search rankings these days, but it can determine if someone will actually click on your listing. You need to grab the users attention and make sure you

Yoast SEO is the top WordPress SEO Plugin and helps you setup a variety of SEO settings and has a ton of built-in features that can help your SEO efforts. You can use this to optimize the Titles and Descriptions on the different pages.

#4- Do On Page SEO & Optimize Main Content (H1 and H2 Tags; Variations of Keywords)

The second most SEO relevant part of your page is the headline, or in coding terms, the “H1” tag. This tag is important for a few reasons.

First, Google gives it a lot of weight because of its prominence on your page. After all, it’s the one thing that every user will probably read because its so BIG.

You should tell your readers what the page is about and invoke some curiosity to keep them reading. You want to combine an H1 with a H2 sub-heading and try and get your main keyword that your focusing on, along with your geographic location.

Also you want to make sure that different variations of your keywords are included throughout the page.

If you have a page on “truck accidents,” you shouldn’t repeat “truck accidents” or truck accident lawyer excessively. Instead, use words like “truck crash accidents,” “truck wreck lawyer” “truck crashes,” and as many different variations as you can come up with.

Google is not dumb in any way, in fact you should just presume they are a straight up genius.

So you don’t want to do anything that is spammy or seems easy,. Things like repeating the same keywords over and over, or anything you think might have worked 5 years ago.

#5- Get More Social & Get More Social Signals to your site

#6- Improve Site SPEED & Performance

So if your using WordPress, you need to use a good Speed and performance plugin such as W3 Cache or WP Super Cache.

Go Test Your Site with Google SPEED Tool

Download the W3 Cache WordPress Plugin

Download the WP Super Cache Plugin

#7- Site Security and making sure your site is locked down and SECURE

Even then its possible you can run into some kind of issue where you get hacked and malware is on your site. Usually if you have a good web host, that problem will be solved and almost never an issue, IF you take all the needed steps.

Site security for lawyers is part of the overall SEO strategy because if your site gets infected with malware or has any other kind of issue, it can have a negative effect on your overall SEO rankings and it can bring your site down for days.

Some WordPress Security Tips for Attorneys:

Remove the default ADMIN user name and replace with unique name

Make sure you always update your WordPress Software & Plugins

Read more WordPress Security Tips for Lawyers

#8 – Have a Mobile Friendly Site

Most WordPress themes these days will be responsive and mobile friendly without much needing to be done. Yet you can also setup a more custom mobile site using a mobile plugin and creating a custom mobile home page for your legal website.

#9- Create more Videos of Lawyers:

Create Videos of Lawyers in the law firm talking about the different areas of practice. Videos are a form of content and the more videos you can create, the more content you will have to spread around. Sometimes adding a video to a blog post can make it come to life and compliment it well.

Then sometimes you can do a blog post just around the video. If you have a 30 second video of a partner talking about a latest case or practice area, you can embed the video into a blog post and add some content of the transcript of the video.

You can not do Video SEO without videos. You need videos in order to come up in the YouTube search results.

You need to setup a YouTube channel that links to the firms website, and then every time you create a video, you would upload it to YouTube, and then you will be able to easily embed the video into your legal site, blog or social media site.

#10- Create Customized Images & Optimize for SEO:

Images are a good idea for multiple reasons and you should use one image for every 300-400 words of content. Images can make your blog post easier to read and its a good idea to use as much media as possible, so images, videos and infographics.

#11- Do a Press Release for your Law Firm:

Launching of a new website

Introduction of a new practice area

New Lawyers joining the firm

Awards for any of the lawyers

Any kind of Charity Work the Firm does

Once you have a good newsworthy story with a catchy headline, then its a matter of putting the press release together and if done right and accepted, you can get your news story in front of a lot of potential media sites, including affiliate sites of bigger news sites like ABC and NBC.

Phone: 630.393.0460
Email: law@lawyerscourt.com