We’ve been waiting for the day when legal directories finally start to get buried in the rankings for legal-related searches. While we’ve been waiting for years, it seems that the day may finally be on the horizon: Traffic is falling, innovation is stagnant, popular directories are hemorrhaging customers, and there are indications that workers are Read more about Are Legal Directories Finally Dying?[…]
Search engine optimization (SEO) can seem intimidating to lawyers who are making their first venture into online legal content marketing. There’s so much to think about: How many internal links should I include in a legal blog post? How should I link to a state statute? What anchor text should I use? Should I link Read more about How SEO is Like Criminal Procedure and Mexican Food[…]
The coronavirus has upended nearly every aspect of human life, including how search engines work and how people are using them. Most of these changes will have little effect on the field of online legal marketing, but some are creating plenty of volatility. Here’s a smattering of the things that we’re seeing, in the Age Read more about How is the Coronavirus Changing the Way People Use the Internet?[…]
One of the experts at Google, John Mueller, regularly hosts an “office hour” session on YouTube, where he fields questions from search engine optimization (SEO) professionals and other people who run a website. Some of the things that Mueller says during these relatively informal sessions, though, can seem to tip Google’s hand and reveal important Read more about Does Google Think It’s Beaten the Backlink Blitz?[…]
We reiterate, perhaps entirely too often, that search engines change on a near constant basis. Whether the alteration affects how the search engine’s algorithms find results that are relevant and important to the search query, or just alter how the results page looks, the impact can have real implications on your law firm’s online marketing Read more about How Google’s SERP Has Changed in 4 Years[…]
One of the most disturbing trends in the search engine optimization (SEO) world today is the fallout from Google’s attempts to answer as many search queries as possible from the search engine results page (SERP). The intent is honorable enough: Give search engine users the answers they want, as quickly as possible, whenever feasible. The Read more about Zero-Click Searches and Why Law Firms Aren’t Competing Against Google[…]
A few days ago, the Wall Street Journal published an article on how search engines, and particularly Google, work. The piece is titled “How Google Interferes With Its Search Algorithms and Changes Your Results,” and is subtitled “The internet giant uses blacklists, algorithm tweaks and an army of contractors to shape what you see.” At Read more about The Wall Street Journal’s Hit Piece Against Google[…]
The search engine optimization (SEO) world was all in a tizzy this past week as Google announced that it had rolled out a serious update to its core algorithm. That update is technically called Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, but has shortened to BERT because it kind of has to be and doing so does Read more about How BERT Can Impact Online Legal Marketing[…]
In our last blog post, we delved into Google’s decision to apply its Freshness Update to featured snippets. But what, exactly, are featured snippets and how can they help your law firm’s SEO efforts? Featured Snippets are Common Elements at the Top of the Results Page A featured snippet is a sampling of content taken Read more about While Overhyped, Featured Snippets are Still an SEO Goal[…]
A new study has suggested that just about half of all searches on Google do not end with a click through to a website in the results page. While this may startle some lawyers who have been told that it’s critically important to rank well in targeted search engine results pages (SERPs) by, for example, Read more about Half of Google Searches Don’t Lead to a Click[…]
People facing legal problems and in need of an attorney frequently turn to the internet to find the lawyer they need. According to one survey from 2014, more legal clients got online to find an attorney than asked a friend or relative for a referral. In the years since that survey, the gap has likely Read more about The Role of Search Engines in Online Marketing[…]
There have been a couple of old blog posts that we’ve published that deal with the differences between search engines. In some of those posts, we’ve drawn out those differences and nuances for the purpose of showing why some law firms could benefit more from marketing on one search engines, rather than another (and, of Read more about How Do You Target a Specific Search Engine for Legal Marketing?[…]