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Latest Google Updates Have Many Lawyers Losing Rankings

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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!

—> Read More on Lawyer SEO in 2018

—> Free Lawyer SEO Analysis & Estimate

 

 

Improving Your Lawyer Google My Business Listing

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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.

—-> Why getting Google Reviews for your Firm is Key

—-> SPECIAL – Lawyer Google Review Campaign Signup

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

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

Google Releases Penguin Algorithm Update Targeting Webspam

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This past week there has been a lot of talk about Google’s “Penguin Update.” Google’s latest search algorithm update targets people using forms of negative SEO, particularly people who use webspam or go against Google’s quality guidelines.

According to SEO legend Danny Sullivan, webspam or search spam is defined as “Pages that try to gain better rankings through things like: keyword stuffing, link schemes, cloaking, and purposeful duplicate content.” You can read Danny Sullivan’s entire blog post on the Penguin update here.

It’s not news that Google doesn’t condone these types of SEO strategies. In fact, they have warned about using them for years despite constant frustrations from white hat SEOs that have seen their clients rank beneath others that use the unapproved methods. The Penguin update has improved Google spam filters, though true to form, Google will not release details. What they are clear on is the messaging that they are “targeting spam, not over optimization.”

This comment by Matt Cutts of Google has many in the industry confused and scrambling for a clearer understanding, as it tends to blur the line between white hat and webspam, and even gray hat and black hat.

The good news is that SEO best practices are still being encouraged by Google, and it is estimated that only 3.1% of English queries will be impacted by this update.

SEO Continues To Be Encouraged

Indeed, today’s post makes a point of contrasting “white hat SEO” against “black hat webspam” and encourages people to continue with SEO best practices:

Our advice for webmasters is to focus on creating high quality sites that create a good user experience and employ white hat SEO methods instead of engaging in aggressive webspam tactics….Sites affected by this change might not be easily recognizable as spamming without deep analysis or expertise, but the common thread is that these sites are doing much more than white hat SEO; we believe they are engaging in webspam tactics to manipulate search engine rankings….

We want people doing white hat search engine optimization (or even no search engine optimization at all) to be free to focus on creating amazing, compelling web sites.

As with most big Google updates, there are going ot be some sites that lost a lot of rankings, some sites that gained some and some sites that had no effect at all.  It seems like a lot of people are upset with this update and feel they have been targeted by Google.  Yet this is an automatic update and not a human review, so if your site isnt ranking well now, then you must have it analyzed to see what hte problem is and get it fixed.   Moving forward its going ot be even more about CONTENT and good quality content, as well as social media.  Links will still be important but not as much, odds are social media likes and shares will be the new links.

If you have any questions about this recent update or need assistance with your SEO strategy, please call us at 630-393-0460 or fill out the online contact form for a free site analysis.

Google Webmaster Tools Expands Query Data to 90 Days

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Today, Google has expanded the historical search query data to 90 days. The number of queries reported has increased as well: the report will now list the top 2,000 for each day of the selected date range (vs. the previous top 1,000). This is great news, as this is data not available anywhere else and when looking at trends, the more information, the better. Google has made a few other minor adjustments to this data recently. So if you use Google webmaster tools query data, see below for all the details of how these reports work.

What’s In the Top Search Queries Report

First, a refresher on what this data is all about. The top search queries report (available in Google webmaster tools for sites you’ve verified ownership of by selecting Your site on the web > Search queries) lists the top queries that brought traffic to your site from Google organic search (from all countries and properties).

Summary Data

For the selected data range, the report shows the total number of queries that brought traffic to the site, the total impressions and clicks the site received, and the number of impressions and clicks for the reported top queries.

Query-Specific Data

For each query, the report notes:

  • Number of impressions – how many searchers saw the site in search results for that query
  • Number of clicks – how many searchers clicked on the search result for that query
  • Click through rate – The percentage of the time searchers who saw the site in search results for that query clicked on it
  • Average position – the average position the highest ranked URL for that site appeared in search results for the query across all searchers
  • In addition, you can find out the change for each of these data points from the previous period. However, the change percentages aren’t available for time periods longer than 30 days. The change details used to be visible by default, but they’re now off by default. You’ll need to click the With Change button to see them in the report (although they’ll be included automatically with the CSV download). If you have the change percentage displayed, you’ll need to turn that off in order to expand the date range beyond 30 days.

You can click into any query to get more specific data, including the pages that ranked for the query, and the impressions, clicks, and click-through rate at each position the site ranked.

Country and Property-Specific Data

Use the filters to drill into what queries brought traffic from Google properties (web, video, images, mobile web, and smartphones) and from specific countries.

Read more here