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Is Your Firm Prepared for Google’s Newest Algorithm?

‘Mobilegeddon’ has been taking over the internet this week. On Tuesday, Google announced a big change to its search algorithm. What does that mean for your law firm website?

Google’s newest update will essentially give a boost in organic (non-paid) search results to websites that are mobile friendly. The idea is to encourage website developers to create websites that are more user friendly on smart phones. The more mobile friendly and content rich the website is, the higher it will rank in Google’s organic search results.

Google spokeswoman Krisztina Radosavljevic-Szilagyi explained, “As people increasingly search on their mobile devices, we want to make sure they can find content that’s not only relevant and timely, but also easy to read and interact with on smaller mobile screens.”

According to NPR, Google stated that as soon as a website is made mobile friendly, its position within the search results will begin to improve. This is excellent news for law firms that have not yet made the move to a responsive, mobile friendly, website. Google’s latest news is saturating the internet.

ARTICLE BY

Brian Lynch

RW Lynch Company, Inc.

“Google It”: The Search Engine’s Trademark May Be a Verb, But It’s Not Generic

Google defeated a claim that its GOOGLE trademark was generic, in Elliot v. Google Inc., a recent case from the United States District Court for the District of Arizona.

In 2012, Google filed a Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) Complaint against the owner of several hundred domain names that included the word “google.” The UDRP’s Administrative Panel ruled in favor of Google and ordered that the domain names be transferred to Google.

The domain name owner responded by suing Google in the Arizona district court, seeking cancellation of two of Google’s US Trademark Registrations covering search engines.

The domain name owner argued that “google” has become a generic term and is therefore not a protectable trademark. Google filed a motion for summary judgment to dismiss the domain name owner’s claims.

A generic term is one that identifies a general category of goods or services, while a trademark identifies the specific source of those goods or services. A trademark may become generic if the public ceases to associate the mark with a particular source of a good or service, but instead believes the term to refer to a general category of goods or services. Examples of trademarks that have become generic terms include “aspirin,” “escalator” and “videotape.”

In Elliot v. Google, the domain name owner tried to establish that the GOOGLE trademark had become a generic term for search engines. However, the domain name owner did not argue that the majority of the public understands the term “google” to refer to search engines in general. Instead, it based its genericness argument on the public’s use of the term “google” as a verb, contending that “verbs, as a matter of law, are incapable of distinguishing one service from another, and can only refer to a category of services.” The domain name owner offered media and survey evidence to support its genericness claim, but focused mostly on the public’s use of the term “google” as a verb. As a result, the court found that the evidence failed to create a genuine dispute about whether “the primary significance of the word ‘google’ to a majority of the public who utilize Internet search engines is a designation of the Google search engine.”

The court rejected the domain name owner’s genericness argument, holding that the use of a trademark as a verb does not, alone, prevent it from identifying a product or its source.

The court found the domain name owner’s reliance on verb usage as a basis for genericness “misplaced”; even if a majority of the public uses “google” as a verb to refer to the act of searching on the Internet, such usage does not make the term generic because the public still uses “GOOGLE” as a trademark to refer to Google’s search engine. Accordingly, the court granted Google’s motion for summary judgment and ruled that the GOOGLE mark is not generic. In reaching its decision, the court also noted specific steps taken by Google to prevent its GOOGLE mark from becoming generic, including using the mark to identify the Google search engine in national advertising campaigns, establishing standards for third-party use of the mark, and engaging in a pattern of enforcement measures.

The court’s decision highlights the risk that a trademark may become generic and reminds brand owners of steps they can take to prevent generic use of their marks. Brand owners can monitor both authorized and unauthorized uses of their trademarks to ensure their marks continue to function as source identifiers.

ARTICLE BY

Karen Artz Ash

Bret J. Danow

Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP

Authority Marketing and Thought Leadership for Law Firms with John McDougall of McDougall Interactive [PODCAST]

Listen as we speak with John McDougall, McDougall Interactive, on authority marketing and thought leadership for law firms.

Nicole Minnis: Hi everyone. I’m Nicole Minnis with the National Law Review. I’m here today with John McDougall, the President of McDougall Interactive and author of legalmarketingreview.com. Today, we’re going to be talking about authority marketing and thought leadership for law firms.

Welcome, John.

John McDougall: Welcome. Thanks for having me.

Nicole: Thank you. Do you want to go ahead and get started with a little bit of background about McDougall Interactive and what your team is doing?

John: McDougall Interactive is in Danvers, Massachusetts. I started in ’95 at my father’s ad agency doing Internet Marketing. I was actually a media planner before that in ’94 at the agency.

Ever since ’95, I’ve been doing all digital marketing, and now we work with a lot of law firms in different areas, both business to consumer and B2B.

Nicole: It sounds like you have a lot of wonderful expertise that you can draw from while we’re talking today, so I’m looking forward to getting a little bit of insight myself.

John, tell me, what is authority marketing and why is it important to law firms?

John: Authority marketing isn’t a really popular term yet and we’re trying to change that, because thought leadership is quite well known and people, in particular law firms, like to build up their reputation as leaders in certain practice areas by blogging on certain topics.

Authority marketing is taking that idea of building up your thought leadership in a systematic way, so that you can eventually turn your blog and your content into ebooks that become a printed book. Then as an author you get more media engagements, more speaking engagements. It all ties together in a way that also Google will appreciate.

That’s one of the real reasons, as an SEO company, again back from ’95, when we were saying “content is king.” Even in ’95, we used to say that.

We’ve been trying for all these years to get our customers really on board with building up content. It’s often quite hard to do that. What we realized is sometimes people are thought leaders and experts but they don’t have time to write.

Sometimes we do interviews to get their content out there, but the idea is that Google is going to pick up on that. The more you blog and have good content, your SEO rankings will go significantly up.

Authority marketing has good things about just your offline marketing and thought leadership, but it’s really good for Google Organic SEO.

Nicole: Do you recommend that lawyers use more news story content type things, or would they write on evergreen topics, like the estate planning of a $20 million estate? Do you think it’s more of a mix, or that they should focus on one or the other?

John: It’s probably a mix, but what we have seen when people do just news content is that it’s a little maybe boring or flat. Because if you’re just regurgitating news that other people are all talking about, there is only so much thought leadership in that.

Certainly, if there is a breaking issue, like for myself when Google Penguin happens, and different Google updates, I need to be leading the charge and blogging about those topics as they’re happening, to be a thought leader.

It’s not that news is a bad thing, but we have seen some people so overly focused on just news content that it falls short of answering the customer’s questions. So that evergreen content that you talk about and the struggles that people have with various issues — we can find those struggles by looking at the Google keyword tool, and looking at the monthly search volume of the way people are searching.

We can use social media listening tools to figure in your topically related communities what are people concerned with, what are they sharing on LinkedIn groups and Google+ communities. If you can take that content, and as you said, make more evergreen content that’s going to be heavily searched on, then it’s going to prove the test of time and keep ranking.

Google is going to rank that a little better in a long term trajectory, because the news isn’t just over with, this is content that Google will keep bringing back into the search engines, so that keeps a steady stream of visitors to your site year round, as opposed to just news content.

So a bit of a mix is good, but we’re a bit more fans of the evergreen and thought leader content.

Nicole: That makes sense, and just to try to get in front of the readers, with the news worthy things, but also searching for the useful content is what people are normally doing.

Is there a magic number for how often you compile blog posts to create an ebook? Is there a magic number, or a magic date or time? Do you do it four times a year? Or, is there not really a formula for what works for compiling everything?

John: In terms of content volume, once a week is sort of industry standard, that if you’re not blogging once a week, it’s a little bit weak. It really goes up from there to — it really depends on the organization. Mashable is doing maybe hundreds a day of blog posts, or certainly a hundred ish. [laughs] I don’t know the exact number, but I was just talking with one of my guys here who was quoting their editorial calendar and how much they’re producing.

The sites that have the most traffic on the Internet tend to be the sites that have the most content. There is not an exact correlation, because of content quality. If you pumped out 10,000 articles a year, and your quality was crap, then a site with 300 articles might outrank you, because Google is aware of the quality.

Again, I think a blog post a week is a good healthy start. Two, three a week is a little more serious. A blog a day, you’re going to start to get more significant SEO traffic.

Then you can turn that content — maybe at least a couple of times a year, if you have an ebook — that’s great. Hub Spot says that if you have 30 ebooks or more, you’ll have — I forget, I think it’s a 7x increase in leads.

It does depend on your industry, et cetera, but a couple of ebooks a year at least to have a top of the funnel call-to-action. A blog post a week at minimum. Maybe a video a month.

Then, certain times of day — that’s all going to be dependent on your audience. If you’re targeting kids that get home from school at two or three in the afternoon, then you might want to publish just before that, that type of thing, versus a different industry that’s targeting night owls. The time of day is probably depending on your actual audience.

Nicole: We’re doing this right now, but tell me, John, how can lawyers use podcasting to generate more leads and improve their SEO?

John: One of the keys to SEO as we’ve discussed is having more content, but a lot of people aren’t naturally writers. Maybe it’s somewhere between 10 percent of the population.

I was actually at the HubSpot Inbound conference this fall. They had the stats on that. I don’t remember exactly what they were, but basically not everyone is a writer. That’s why blogs often fail, because people hear someone like myself say, “Hey, you’ve got to blog every week.”

The people on the staff say, “Geez, we don’t really have any writers here.” But you think they would be able to publish content because they’re thought leaders. What we realized is there are a lot of experts at law firms that might not be comfortable writing, but they love to talk. Or certainly a fair amount of attorneys like to chat, and they’re really engaging and full of ideas and energy.

We like to bottle that up by interviewing them. Because you ask them to write, they’re busy, and they’re concerned potentially with the billable hour, of course. We all have to make money.

It’s so easy to get a great piece of content in even 15 minutes by asking three questions. Every three questions become about 1,500 to 1,800 words. So every question may be around 500 words if you answer fairly lengthily. So you’re able to, in a 15 minute conversation, get a very long blog post. The average blog post is maybe 500 to 700 words or so.

When people are thinking to write one, that’s what they shoot for. But you can get, again, 1,500 to 1,800 words in 15 minutes. That’s a lot of content. Now what you’re going to do is you’re going to transcribe the text. After this podcast is over, we use CastingWords in New York and some other places. You pay $1 to $1.50 a minute.

You put that text up on the blog post under — we use sound cloud, but that’s just one player. You put the audio file that you can click and listen to the podcast in the blog post itself, then under it, you put the transcribed text. Because you’re picking keywords as the topics before you write the titles of the post and pick the interview questions, it’s a very search-engine-friendly strategy.

You just title the name of the post in WordPress, or whatever you’re using, and that becomes the URL, then you can put that search-engine-keyword-friendly title in the heading, in the title tag. Google is going to read all that nice rich text of Q&A content, and it’s going to pop up in the search engines.

Now, you wouldn’t want to only use podcasting for your blog necessarily. We do that with a lot of our customers. We also like them to either pay us to write or for them to write a little bit of regular prose as well, but it’s an awesome way to get regular, consistent content.

Again, say once a week, if you do an hour of podcasting a month in four 15 minute interviews with three questions each, you’re going to have an easily-generated one blog post a week.

Nicole: How about making the leap to video? How important is a video strategy for SEO?

John: YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. There was a guy from — it was Distilled, recently that said, “If you don’t have a video and YouTube strategy in 2014, you’re just simply not doing SEO.” [laughs] It’s that important.

Google, they own YouTube. Again, it’s the second largest search engine in the world above Bing, Yahoo, et cetera. Yet, you still have to pick keywords for your YouTube videos.

We do a similar routine with the podcasting where we ask our attorneys to answer basically one question. “What to do if you get pulled over for drunk driving”, for a DUI lawyer, or something along those lines.

When they answer that one question, and that question is something people actually search for, because we’re looking again at the keyword research and the forum social listening to see how people — what are the common questions.

Because we know that that’s an actively looked-for topic, then you’re going to pop up both in YouTube if you upload the video with the right keywords in the title, in the description, et cetera. You can also put in the transcript into the close caption area.

We do the same routine with the podcasting as with the video. We put the YouTube video up in the blog post using the embed code from YouTube. The video shows up, and you can play it right in the blog post, but under that, you put in the transcription of the conversation. Usually those are like one or two minutes long. Maybe three minutes.

You don’t want to kill people with “too long”. Those are going to be maybe 300 words or so. But again, you’re popping up now both in YouTube and your blog because you have the YouTube video in a blog post. You’re getting that extended benefit beyond YouTube of your blog’s ability to rank for the conversation that’s in the video.

Nicole: Those are all really great thoughts. I’m actually personally excited about implementing a podcasting and video strategy for our company.

Thank you so much, John, for joining us today, and talking to us about authority marketing and thought leadership for law firms.

John: Absolutely. Great talking to you.

Nicole: It’s great talking to you, too. I will see you on our next post when we talk about content marketing for law firms another time. Thank you so much.

John: Sounds good.

ARTICLE BY

Nicole Cudiamat Minnis

The National Law Review / The National Law Forum LLC

3 Things You Need To Know About Penguin 3.0

Penguin is an algorithm from Google that judges the quality of links that you have pointing to your site. Inbound links, sometimes called “backlinks,” to your website are one of the factors that Google’s algorithms use to rank websites in its search results. Google uses the Penguin algorithm (or filter) to punish link profiles that it sees as low-quality (coming from untrustworthy sites) or unnatural. This is a response to linking practices used in the early days of search marketing, and still employed by some vendors, to show clients’ quick success.

3 Things You Need to Know about Penguin 3.0

In the early days of the Web and SEO, the sheer volume of links (and linking domains) to a website helped its rankings in Google Search results. Many early SEO companies prospered by buying and selling links, creating directories and setting up other sites for the sheer purpose of creating content and supplying links. This was an exploit used for years by almost every search marketing vendor to gain rankings for their clients. Since April of 2012, Google has used Penguin to dissuade webmasters from this practice for fear of losing all rankings for their websites.

As Google crawls the Web and finds a link to your site, it places them in a particular database of known links. If you are bored, you can read through the original paper by Sergei Brin and Larry Page. Penguin is a separate algorithm that is run periodically to parse through this database of links pointing to your site to check against known spam sites and known manipulative techniques.

In an explanation of Penguin 3.0 for Forbes magazine, Jayson DeMyers says Penguin “rewards sites that have natural, valuable, authoritative, relevant links.” It penalizes sites that have built manipulative links solely for the purpose of increasing rankings, or links that do not appear natural.

Penguin was introduced in April 2012 and updated twice that year with versions 1.1 and 1.2. Penguin 2.0 came out in May 2013 and an October update (2.1) had a fairly wide affect, causing Google ranking changes in about 1 percent of sites.

Penguin 3.0 was released in mid-October in what Google said could be a slow rollout. For some websites, Google said, it could be a few weeks until Penguin 3.0 had an effect, which would be about the time of publishing this article.

Here are the top 3 takeaways from the first days of Penguin 3.0:

1. Penguin 3.0 may have little impact on quality websites.

Upon its introduction of Penguin 3.0, Google said: “(W)e started rolling out a Penguin refresh affecting fewer than 1 percent of queries in U.S. English search results. This refresh helps sites that have already cleaned up the Web spam signals discovered in the previous Penguin iteration, and demotes sites with newly discovered spam.”

This indicates that Penguin 3.0 will adjust rankings for sites that were adversely affected by earlier versions of the Penguin algorithm, but have since cleaned up offensive links.

But, if your site is still plagued by low-quality links, Penguin 3.0 will have an effect on you, and the impact – “demotes sites with newly discovered spam” – should be in line with earlier iterations of Penguin. The word to note here (bolded) is that Google’s Pierre Far, called this a refresh, intimating that no new signals were added to this release.

2. Penguin 3.0 means you need to evaluate your links.

To avoid a penalty via Penguin 3.0 or to recover from it if Google has already penalized your site, you need to make sure you are not adding bad links that will hurt your site. You also need to rid your site of bad links pointing to it.

To avoid Penguin penalties, you want to review the type of links pointing to your site. This can easily be done in Web Master Tools by using their tool to download a list of Sample and Latest links to your site. Some of the items to look for are:

Links from foreign domains (ie. walre.co.pl)
Links sites that contain many hyphens (ie. best-personal-injury-lawyers-us.com)
Sites that are obviously off-topic (ie. a site about fishing would not normally link to an attorney’s site)
Large quantities of links from a particular domain.
Large percentages of commercial anchor text in the links pointing to your site. (If you see anchor text that you would love to rank for in Google, then it is commercial. Commercial should not make up more than about 10% of your anchor text.)

Removing bad links can be tedious and tricky. First you have to identify them and then you have to figure out how to get them taken down. You can simply contact the site that hosts them (if you can find a contact) and ask for it to be removed. Google also provides a “disavow tool,” by which you can ask Google not to take into account certain links when assessing your site.

But Google’s disavow tool come with two warnings: 1) “You should still make every effort to clean up unnatural links pointing to your site. Simply disavowing them isn’t enough.” And deeper on Google’s Webmaster tools site, 2) “This is an advanced feature and should only be used with caution. If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site’s performance in Google’s search results.”

3. If you’ve invested in a search marketing campaign, you need to know how your provider is obtaining links to your site.

Building links to your site cannot just be something you expect your marketing provider to do. How it is done can ultimately affect your business, and could adversely impact your overall revenue if your website is penalized by the latest Penguin update or by future Penguin updates.

The biggest takeaway from all Penguin updates is that you need to know how your vendor, your provider, is getting links for you. If they are not working directly with you, then it is likely a scaled process, meaning that their tactics are low quality and potentially harmful.

Instead, your vendor should be working to obtain links from sites that represent highly regarded authorities in your field. In addition to direct outreach to request backlinks, which may have limited cost effectiveness, firms may build links by community outreach, such as sponsoring organizations or public events in the community, which would publicize the firm. Or establishing a scholarship for local students and promoting it to area schools and school systems, which would link to scholarship information on your site. If a member of a law firm teaches at a local college or sits on a corporate or non-profit organization’s board, those organization’s sites may link back to that individual’s profile on your site.

Obtaining high quality backlinks is not always the easiest road, but it is the road well worth traveling, especially in the post-Penguin era.

What’s the Deal? Why Do Accounting Firms Use Initials Instead of Names? – Part 2

We know that for many professional-services firms (e.g. law, accounting, consulting, etc.), using initials is simply a necessary compromise — a less-controversial way to abbreviate the firm’s name. You get to shorten a cumbersome name without seeming to favor the first one or two people over the others whose names come later on the door. It seems like a reasonable solution, but it’s actually a big step backwards, as we discussed in our previous “Don’t Use Initials” blog post.

Some of our valued blog readers wanted more supporting evidence, another way to explain it to their firm’s own professionals. This post shows how I explain this issue to the marketing committees, to help them make a good decision:

1. Look at this random collection of accounting firm logos I found on Google. (Disclosure: We don’t work with any of these firms.)

Look carefully:

2. OK? Got it? Now I’ll shuffle them around and changed just one of the logos.

See the group below? Can you tell which of the following logos is different?

You couldn’t tell, could you? Of course not.

3. OK, now I’m going to shuffle them around again and insert a new logo we designed recently.

Can you tell which of these logos, below, was added to the mix?

It’s pretty obvious, right?

Here’s the true test of marketing:

If you needed to find one of those companies on Google tomorrow, which one of them would you remember?

So, before changing a perfectly good name to a random collection of forgettable initials, think whether you’re advancing the firm’s strategic goals, or actually making your existing marketing challenges even harder to achieve. Most of the time, a name, even a challenging one, is a better option than the firm’s initials.

ARTICLE BY
Ross Fishman

OF
Fishman Marketing, Inc.

Google, the House of Lords and the timing of the EU Data Protection Regulation

(LONDON) Could the European Court of Justice’s May 13, 2014 Google Spain decision delay the adoption of the EU Data Protection Regulation?

In the Google Spain “Right to be Forgotten” case, the ECJ held that Google must remove links to a newspaper article containing properly published information about a Spanish individual on the basis that the information is no longer relevant. The Google Spain decision has given a much sharper focus to the discussion about the Right to be Forgotten that may soon be adopted as part of the new Data Protection Regulation that is expected to be passed sometime in 2015. With the advent of the Google Spain decision, an issue that was on the sideline for most businesses – and which was expected by some to be quietly dropped from the draft Data Protection Regulation – has become a hot political issue. The Right to be Forgotten as interpreted by the ECJ has garnered international attention, deepened the UK/continental EU divide, and ultimately could delay the adoption of a final form of the Data Protection Regulation.

The Google Spain case has been controversial for various reasons. The decision takes an expansive approach to the long-arm reach of EU data protection law. It holds search engine providers liable to comply with removal requests even when the information in the search results is true, was originally published legally and can continue to be made available by the original website. The decision makes the search engine provider the initial arbiter of whether the individual’s right to have his or her information removed from publically available search results is outweighed by the public’s interest in access to that information. (For a pithy analysis of the “public record” aspects of the case, see John Gapper’s “Google should not erase the web’s memory” published in the Financial Times.)

Google started implementing the ruling almost immediately, but only with respect to search results obtained through the use of its country-specific versions of its search engine, such aswww.google.es or www.google.co.uk. The EU-specific search engine results notify users when some results have been omitted due to EU’s Right to be Forgotten. (See the Telegraph’s ongoing list of the stories it has published that have been deleted from Google.co.uk’s search results to get a flavor of the sort of search results that have been deleted.) However, the “generic” version of Google (www.google.com), which is also the default version for users in the US, does not omit the banned results.

Google has been engaged in an ongoing dialogue with EU data protection authorities regarding Google’s implementation of the Google Spain ruling. According to some media reports, EU officials have complained that Google is implementing the ruling too broadly, allegedly to make a political point, while other commentators have noted that the ruling give Google very few reference points for performing the balancing-of-rights that is required by the ruling. Perhaps more interestingly, some EU officials want Google to apply the Right to be Forgotten globally (including for google.com results) and without noting that any search results have been omitted (to prevent any negative inferences being drawn by the public based on notice that something has been deleted). If the EU prevails with regard to removing personal data globally and without notice that the search results contain omissions, critics who are concerned about distortions of the public record and censorship at the regional level will have an even stronger case. Of course, if truly global censorship becomes legally required by the EU, it seems likely that non-EU governments and organizations will enter the dialogue with a bit more energy – but even more vigorous international debate does not guarantee that the EU would be persuaded to change its views.

The ongoing public debate about the potentially global reach of the Right to be Forgotten is significant enough that it could potentially delay agreement on the final wording of the Data Protection Regulation. Recently, an important committee of the UK’s House of Lords issued a report deeply critical of the Google Spain decision and the Right to be Forgotten as enshrined in the draft Data Protection Directive. Additionally, the UK’s Minister of Justice, Simon Hughes, has stated publically that the UK will seek to have the Right to be Forgotten removed from the draft Data Protection Regulation. The impact of the UK’s stance (and the efforts of other Right to be Forgotten critics) on the timing of the adoption of the Regulation remains to be seen. In the meantime, search companies will continue to grapple with compliance with the Google Spain decision. Other companies that deal with EU personal data should tune in as the EU Parliament’s next session gets underway and we move inevitably closer to a final Data Protection Regulation.

ARTICLE BY

Hope S. Foster

Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo, P.C.

HTTPS – Should I Implement It on My Site?

Google announced last Wednesday, August 6, that the search engine will use https as a ranking signal. HTTPS stands forHypertext Transport Protocol Secure, which protects the data integrity and confidentiality of users visiting a site. For example, when a user enters data into a form on a site in order to subscribe to updates or purchase a product, a secure site protects that user’s personal information and ensures that the user communicates with the authorized owner of the site. For the HTTPS connection to work properly, websites require an SSL certificate, which is what enables the site to make a secure connection.

HTTPS Hypertext Transport Protocol Secure

Even though Google is making this change, it is not something that webmasters should jump into lightly. Webmasters should implement https only when they really need it and have sections in their site where they need to protect their visitors’ information.

Before making any drastic changes to the site, it is important to take into consideration that Google stated that this change will affect less than one percent of queries, carrying less weight than other signals such as high-quality content.

Cons of using https

Up until this recent announcement, it was recommended only using https on the sections of the site that needed to protect the confidentiality of user data, such as payment forms that collected credit card information, the site’s login section or any page that would sends/receive other private information (such as street address, phone number or health records), because using https in the whole site can overload webservers and make sites slower, which affects negatively on a site’s ranking.
Changing to https also means that all of the URLs in your site will change and it will be necessary to redirect all of the URLs on the site, so that they can be indexed by Google and avoid having duplicate content between https and http URLs. Redirects usually increase the load time of the site, which can be negative ranking factor and reduce the link juice coming from external sites pointing to http URLs.
SSL certificates cost money, and certificates signed by well-known authorities can be expensive.

I advise against making an immediate decision to change to https because it is a recent change and apparently the effort to switch exceeds the benefit obtained in rankings. Right now it is better to stand back and observe how the change affects those sites that alter their URLs to https.

ARTICLE BY

Robert Padgett

Consultwebs.com, Inc.

To Satisfy New Search Algorithms, Legal Websites Need Quality Content

The success of a law-firm website is determined by how many clients and potential clients visit the site, spend time there and take action based on what they discover.

Over the years, law-firm marketers focused on keyword and link strategies to enhance search engine results and increase traffic to their websites. While these are still valuable tools, recent developments in the search universe have shifted the emphasis to content strategy.

Quality content includes well-written articles, blog posts, videos, webcasts, presentation slide decks, infographics, eBooks and white papers. Quality content addresses client needs.

Sixty-seven percent of the time, online searchers use Google to find what they are looking for. To provide the best results, Google is constantly tweaking its search algorithm. (An algorithm is a process or set of rules to be used by a computer in calculations or other problem-solving operations.) These algorithms are designed to maintain search engine integrity and punish violators.

Sara Downey Robinson and Chris Davis discussed the changing landscape of digital marketing and search engine optimization at the monthly meeting of the Rocky Mountain Chapter of the Legal Marketing Association, held May 13 at Guard and Grace in LoDo Denver.

Davis is business development director at Burns Marketing, a full-service B2B marketing agency that combines traditional and digital marketing to help clients drive demand. Robinson is marketing coordinator at Inflow, a top inbound-marketing firm specializing in search.

Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird

Panda and Penguin are two major changes to the existing Google algorithm made in 2011 and 2012, respectively. In 2013, Google released a totally new algorithm called Hummingbird (which incorporates and enhances the updates made by Panda and Penguin). These three developments have completely changed the way law firms must look at search.

“Law-firm sites that regularly showed up on page one now find themselves on page 20,” said Robinson. “Since searchers rarely go beyond the second page of results in an online search, this is a real problem.”

Google Panda focuses on keywords. Sites with keyword “stuffing” are demoted or flagged as spam. Panda also penalizes low-quality content, thin content, duplicate content and the amount of advertising compared with the amount of useful content on a site.

Google Penguin focuses on links. It focuses on “black hat” tactics like links that come from poor-quality sites, from sites that aren’t topically relevant to a target market, paid links, and links where the anchor text is overly optimized (exact-match anchor text). Use natural language in your links, and vary it.

“Quality inbound links are not found at garage sales, “said Robinson. “Steer clear of link farms. A few high-quality, carefully developed links perform much better than a large number of weak, irrelevant links. It takes time and perhaps a dedicated staff person to develop and nurture quality links.”

The new Google Hummingbird algorithm looks for a steady stream of high-quality, relevant content and natural language on webpages – and rewards those who provide it. Hummingbird attempts to decipher a search engine query by using the context of a question rather than the specific keywords within the question. Thin content, keyword stuffing and lack of relevant content will cause significant demotions.

“Content marketing is a technique that creates and distributes valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience,” said Davis, “with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”

Identify client personas and clarify their needs

Before a law firm can create relevant content, it needs to know with whom it is communicating. In marketing talk, this is called the “user persona” – or target market.

“In user-centered design and marketing, personas are user types that might use a legal service in a similar way,” said Davis. “A small law firm might target one user persona. A large law firm will target numerous user personas.”

One law-firm user persona might be high-income individuals going through divorce. Another might be small businesses in need of venture capital. Another might be large medical equipment manufacturers facing product liability lawsuits. The more specific the persona, the more specific a law firm’s content can be. Relevant content will answer the questions these users are asking, using natural language.

A user personal is a representation of the goals and behavior of a hypothesized group of users. In most cases, personas are synthesized from data collected from user interviews.

“An effective law firm website will focus not on the firm’s capabilities, but on the identified needs of a persona or personas,” said Davis. “It will use industry- or interest-specific terminology within a context familiar to the targeted persona.”

Create relevant content

Law firms that want to prevent or correct loss of search engine result page rankings and traffic should publish meaningful, original content on a regular basis. The goal is content that will establish a firm, practice group or lawyer as a though leader in an area relevant to a user persona.

“Take the time to discover the common questions your clients have, and provide the answers to these questions,” said Davis. “Relevant content can be written, but it also can and should be visual. Video content posted on YouTube (which is owned by Google) is particularly powerful as ‘Google juice.’”

Instead of using keywords like “car accident,” use more specific terms like “car accident lawsuit” or “car accident insurance”, or better yet natural language terms like “What should I do if I am sued for a DUI car accident?” or “What should I look for when buying car insurance for an older vehicle?” Think in terms of full-fledged questions that a person might ask Siri on a smartphone.

Once search brings users to a law firm’s site, there must be a way to create and nurture a relationship and convert the potential client into a real client over time. Each item of posted content should contain a call to action – some way for the user to interact with the site so that the firm can capture data. This could be a way to comment on a white paper or download information about an upcoming event.

Use analytics to measure success

“Take advantage of Google Analytics to collect data that can be used to improve the quality of your webpages – adding more of what works and eliminating what does not,” said Robinson. “In Google Analytics, which is currently free, law firms can set up specific goals to study how users are entering and interacting with your website.”

Google Analytics lets a law firm know which content is most-viewed and acted upon, so that similar content can be added. It lets the firm know which content is ignored, so that it can be eliminated or improves. It lets a firm know the exact path users take through its site, so that adjustments can be made to create a better user experience.

If observation and analytics show that a law firm website is not getting the results it wants, an audit can help determine the source of the problem, take steps to fix the problem, measure the results of these steps, and look for any others areas that could be improved.

“Increasing inbound traffic to your website is not magic – it is a combination of art and science,” said Robinson. “You should select any agency that makes you feel comfortable and uses language that is easy to understand. You should never feel intimidated.

“At the same time, do not expect miracles,” said Robinson. “Go into the process with reasonable expectations. It takes time to make changes, add quality content and wait for the search engines to find and reward this content. Each day, more than one million pieces of new content are posted to the Internet. It takes time to rise above the fray.”

A law firm that has experienced worsening search engine results in the wake of Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird can take positive steps to restore performance. Google will continue to reward webpages with strong content marketing efforts, including answer-driven content. It also rewards sites that generate social media buzz – especially an active presence on its proprietary YouTube and Google+ platforms.

Article By:

Janet Ellen Raasch

Of:

Strategic Writing And Ghostwriting

Google+ Is (Walking) Dead? Or Simply Changing?

In response to the grievous reports of Google+’s death last week, a famous misquote from Mark Twain comes to mind: “It appears the reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

In late April, a bold headline was turning heads: Google+ Is Walking Dead. The article made some pretty strong claims regarding Google’s struggling social network in response to Vic Gundotra’s announcement that he would be leaving the company. Mr. Gundotra was Google’s Vice President of Social and head of Google+.

This left online marketers with several questions: What will become of authorship? How will this affect Google search? Will this change Google+’s YouTube integration? What about the time and money we have put in to growing our Circles, engaging in Community discussions and posting content?

Once you delve a little deeper and look past the pessimistic headlines, things are not as grim as they appear. Apparently, Google+ is not dead (not even “walking dead”). However, there may be changes on the horizon—which should be nothing new for veteran Google+ users and online marketers.

How Does Google+ Fit In to the Google Brand?

Google+ has never truly competed with Facebook or Twitter. But look at it from a different angle. Google’s social network provided a way to tie together Google’s disparate services while establishing a clear identity of each user. This helps Google provide better search results and sell better targeted ads by better tracking and consolidating user data.

“Google+ is really two things: an identity layer that tracks and connects all of Google’s products and a social sharing app,” says JR Oakes, the Director of Search Marketing at Consultwebs. “I think we will see a movement towards individual teams (Android, Maps, Gmail) just leveraging the identity layer to add value to the products from the standpoint of what makes the product better instead of what makes G+ better.”

The Facts

Many Google employees have taken to Google+ to address these rumors and provide facts.

Yonatan Zunger, Google+ Chief Architect, denied the death of Google+, saying that “this entire TechCrunch article is bollocks.” He also confirmed that Dave Desbris will be the new head of Google+, which suggests the company currently has no plans for dismantling the social network.

In response to a Google+ post, Chris Lang asked Moritz Tolxdorff, Google’s Consumer Operations and Community Manager, to confirm if anyone on the Google+ team had been moved to Android. Tolxdorff responded, “No one is moving anywhere. Everything will stay as it is.”

In light of these public responses, marketers can breathe a sigh of relief—at least for the moment.

Responding to Possible Changes

Even though powerful voices of Google have spoken on this issue, online marketers know that anything can change in the blink of an eye. With a new head of Google+ on the way, we can likely expect to see some changes, even if minor.

Let’s take a look at a timeline of major changes and gradual integration that has occurred through the years:

Google+ is heavily integrated into several of Google’s most popular products: Local, YouTube, Gmail and last but definitely not least, search. The slightest change could create a ripple that affects all of these. I think that is what scared marketers the most.

The best way to respond to situations like this is logically and in the best interest of your business and clients. This is not the first time rumors have panicked the online marketing world. Does anyone remember when the buzz was that Facebook would soon be a paid service? This eventually led to the company’s slogan, “It’s free and always will be.”

It is crucial to respond quickly to changes, but only changes that are validated. Responding too quickly to false claims can result in missed opportunities and wasted time and money. It is best to relax, keep your eyes open for confirmed changes and respond accordingly.

Online marketing best practices are going to change. That is something we have to accept. What makes our jobs challenging (and interesting!) is keeping up with these changes, adapting new best practices and staying ahead of the curve. Whether it is a Google algorithm update, changes to Social Media sites or a change in popular tech devices, we must be vigilant and respond accordingly.

Article By:

Kenneth Harris

Of:

Consultwebs.com, Inc.

Bad Precedent: Lawyer Censured for Buying Google Keywords for Other Lawyers and Law Firms

I thoroughly disagree with this anti-competitive, anti-consumer censure. It’s bad precedent.

I was the defense’s law firm marketing/social media expert witness in Habush vs. Cannon & Dunphy on this very issue (although the lawsuit was filed under a Wisconsin state “invasion of privacy” statute).

This is common practice online. When you Google “Avis,” a sponsored link for Hertz shows up in the margin. The user isn’t deceived and everyone gets more information and more choices, which is good for consumers. It’s a strategy that helps smaller firms with smaller marketing budgets compete against big-name, big-budget firms.

This keyword-bidding strategy is certainly aggressive, but it shouldn’t be considered unethical or unprofessional; it’s simply an issue of taste, which is subjective. We shouldn’t legislate taste.

Article by:

Ross Fishman

Of:

Fishman Marketing, Inc.

Tag: Google

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