A lot of times clients will e-mail us with concerns about their under-performing or suddenly dropping Google Pagerank, and wonder if it means that their website’s search engine rankings are suffering as a result.
How important is Google Pagerank to a client or webmaster when it comes to SEO?
Well, it’s actually not as important as you may think.
Your website’s Google Pagerank will not give you much of an accurate indication of how your website ranks on search engines for desirable keywords. A website’s Google Pagerank is based more on the number of inbound links that particular website has, and how many pages of content are on the website. The same can be said for individual pages on a website as well.
And, if you’d like to (try to) understand the technical equation behind how Google Pagerank is calculated, here’s a pretty good explanation. To summarize it: the more quality inbound links and pages of content (which should also have inbound links), the higher the Google Pagerank.
So you’re probably now saying to yourself, “well isn’t that what SEO is? Building links and adding content?”
To an extent, yes, but there is a lot more of a strategy involved than just building links and adding content, and the question at hand is “does a website’s Google Pagerank directly relate to it’s search engine rankings (for particular keywords)?”
No, and here are a few reasons why.
1. Anchor Text Variations
The MOST IMPORTANT aspect of SEO…. more important than a website’s on-page optimization like page titles, meta descriptions, and URL structures, more important that how many links a website has, more important than any other factor related to SEO, is the anchor text of the inbound links a website has.
You could have 5,000 PR5 links coming into a website, but if the anchor text of all of those links are “click here” or “visit our website”, while you may have built up a respectable Google Pagerank, this has nothing to do with how your website ranks on search engines for your preferred keywords because you’re only helping your website rank for “click here” and “visit our website”.
Is it possible that the website still ranks well for keywords like “California personal injury attorney” and “Los Angeles accident lawyer”? Maybe, but it would have a LOT better chance obtaining top rankings if the anchor text of those inbound links were keywords that are within the SEO strategy.
2. Internal Pages
We say this all of the time: don’t focus all of your attention on your website’s home page. You don’t want your home page to rank for every search term that you can think of because it can hurt your conversion efforts.
If you’re a search engine user looking for an auto accident attorney, and you did a Google search for “California auto accident lawyer”, are you more likely to click on and spend on a website in the results if it’s a broad home page with multiple practice areas, or are you more likely to visit a result dedicated to you’re actual search: auto accidents?
Well, the first reason we gave as to why Google Pagerank isn’t directly related to search engine ranking, the anchor text of inbound links for the website’s home page, can be applied to the internal pages on your website as well.
Just because your practice area and other internal website pages have a high or low Google Pagerank, it doesn’t mean that it does or does not perform well on search engines from an SEO standpoint.
We’ve seen practice area pages on other attorneys’ websites with Pageranks of 3/10 (which is pretty good for an internal page), but those pages still struggled to obtain search engine rankings for their desired keywords because the person(s) who performed the link building to those pages had no idea how important anchor text or relevancy (see below) was, and were instead more concerned with obtaining links from websites with high Google Pageranks.
We’ve also seen web pages with lower Google Pageranks, but because the links coming into thos epages were from relevant sources and because the anchor text of those links were directly related with the keywords in ther SEO strategy, those pages ranked better on search engines than those with higher Pageranks.
3. It’s good to have links from websites with high PR, right?
Not so fast.
If you’re a lawyer or you’re involved in legal web marketing in any way, you’ve likely received an e-mail at some point from someone requesting a link exchange. Most of the time, the main selling point of these e-mails is the Google Pagerank of the website that your site will be linked from.
When I first started in SEO a few years back, I realized the importance of link building and thought that the more websites with high Pageranks that I obtained links from, the better my clients would rank.
Then I got to thinking… “hmm, the website’s home page has a Google Pagerank of 5/10, but most of these links are coming from internal pages on the websites, which have low or zero Pagerank. So does it depend on the Pagerank of the home page or internal page?”
Good question, grasshopper. The answer is both, but if the internal page has a high Google Pagerank (which isn’t typical), that is a lot more effective. But, they also need to be relevant links, which means that the pages that your site is linked from shouldn’t also have links to a jet ski rental website in Barbados and a website selling knock-off Nike shoes.
Also, search engines (Google, specifically) take into account what “neighborhood” these links are coming from. This can also be related to something called a “footprint”. This is the most overlooked aspect of SEO.
You probably already know that one-way links are more valuable than two-way or reciprocal links. Well, there are also three-way links, four-way links, five-way links, and so on, and you may not even be aware of them.
Let’s say you hired a website design company to launch your website. This design company specializes in medical malpractice attorneys and, to increase the search engine rankings of their clients, they have a page on every client’s site that links to and from each client.
Also, on the bottom of your website, there is a footer with that particular design company’s info or logo which links back to their website.
When Google’s spiders crawl the design company’s website, your website, and the websites who are clients of the design company (all of which are linking to your website), they are able to establish (because of the “footprint” left between all of the sites) that all of these sites are in the same neighborhood, and the “juice” of these inbound links, regardless of the websites’ Google Pageranks, is lower because this neighborhood has been identified.
This is why, sometimes, you’ll receive link requests (most of the time from SEO consultants or firms) asking you to link to one site, and in return you’ll receive a link from a completely different website. They’re trying to establish one-way links and hide the footprint, but even then it’s hard for the webmasters and SEO companies to cover all of their tracks.
So Google PageRank is Useless To Me?
Not exactly, but your website’s Google Pagerank doesn’t give an accurate indication of how your website performs on search engines.
You should still monitor your website’s Pagerank to make sure it doesn’t experience any dramatic and sudden drops because then you know you have a problem.
You should also still pay attention to the Pagerank of websites you are trying to obtain links from, just make sure you look into the other variables involved which are mentioned above.
You should also monitor the Google Pagerank of your competitors just so you have a general idea of how they are seen, for the most part, in the eyes of Google. But, once again, just because they have a high or low Google Pagerank, it’s not an accurate indication of how well they do on organic search engine results.
The best way for you to know how well your site performs on search engines is to monitor the actual rankings themselves. However, you have probably realized by now that performing searches on your own aren’t always as accurate because the search engines are pulling from your brower’s history and know that you’ve visited certain sites in the past.
Most higher-end SEO software solutions offer rank tracking capabilities, and you can also check out a company called Zoomrank which we’ve used in the past. It’s fairly accurate and inexpensive at only $8.95-$14.95/month.
Google has decided to re-brand the Google Local Business Center as Google Places. With the re-branding, a few new features have been added:
You can now apparently tell Google Local what areas your business services, and can also keep your address private if you operate a home-based business or have an office in an address where you don’t want potential clients visiting. More on this to come in terms of how this will help/affect your Google Local rankings as we monitor clients’ results.
There is a new tag feature where you can pay $25 for your address/directions or website to stand out by being “tagged”. This means that they place a yellow tag next to whichever you choose which will apparently help it stand out. Once you pay the $25 you can track how many clicks/actions are obtained in the Google Places dashboard. We would hope that tagged listings have a better chance of ranking better but, once again, we’ll monitor this over the next few weeks.
If you don’t have a photo of your business, don’t worry, Google Places has your back. They will upload a photo (likely taken by their Google Maps team) to your Google Places listing at no charge. We noticed that they were doing this for a few clients who had not yet claimed their listings a few months ago, so we think this is just the way to formally announce this feature.
Last, but not least, Google is offering custom QR codes through Google Places. These CR codes are square bar codes that can be downloaded and placed on ads and business cards. Users of certain smart phones (likely any smart phone with a camera and downloadable apps) can then scan these codes and your Google Places profile will populate on their pone for directions, contact info, etc. How useful is this? We’ll test it out and let you know.
We JUST released our new (and free) Google Local report but obviously these changes haven’t been reflected yet. Either way, go take a look as the report shows how to optimize your Google Local profile and how to improve your local rankings.
Chances are that, if you’re in a major city or one with a large population of a specific heritage, you would likely benefit from a website that caters to that particular demographic. We have clients in New York, Miami, and Texas with Spanish versions of their websites, in Canada with French versions of their websites, and even one or two maritime clients who handle international cases that cater to multiple cultures and languages.
Google does offers a translate option (called…Google Translate…) which will allow a user to translate a web page’s content from one language to another. This is an effective tool for anyone who is bilingual as they likely came to your website after searching for a specific keyword or keyword phrase in English. But what about the potential clients out there that don’t speak English?
Obviously it goes without saying that your office should be able to effectively communicate in any language that the demographic that you’re marketing your website to speaks.
If you feel as if you have the resources in place to manage a second website (monthly content in another language, managing the contacts and Analytics, monitoring search engine rankings, etc.) in another language then that may be an option worth looking into.
Unfortunately it isn’t as easy as translating some text and pasting it into Wordpress. The site itself also has to be coded based on the new language, you need to be educated with the keywords of that language that you want your new site to be found for, and if Google or other search engines start seeing discrepancies between two different languages your search engine rankings may suffer.
Based on clients with Spanish, French, or other-language-speaking websites’ success, it’s best to keep the English version and other language version separate through either sub domains for the site speaking a second language or through a completely different domain altogether.
The good news about launching a Spanish or French speaking website is that you now have an additional website that you can use as link leverage for link building/SEM purposes. Just be sure that your web design company has produced a website in that language before and aren’t just going to translate the content, throw it up, and send you out on your own.
You would also want to look around to see if there are other search engines that are popular within the culture that you’re trying to market to. Google may be considered that world’s leading search engine but that doesn’t mean that everyone uses it. Take the time to look for search engines used in countries that speak the language you’re optimizing for and see if you can submit to those search engines.
For link building, look around for directories, blogs, articles submission sites, answer sites, and other websites that are popular within that particular demographic. Yes, you probably need to speak the language in order to be able to find these sites, so training a paralegal or assistant in your office who speaks the language fluently on how they can become a “link ninja” may be worth the investment.
If you launch and manage a multilingual website in your area successfully, there’s a very good chance that you could capture the niche market that you’re going after and grow your business as a result.
Matt Cutts recently released a video that recapped his 2009 State of the Union recap speach that he gave at Pubcon in Las Vegas back in November. Here is the video:
And a few things that you can take from this as an attorney/law firm with a website/blog:
Matt Cutts can’t sing. Just kidding (maybe)…
We haven’t had much experience with Google Squared or how it can help anyone in the legal field. It can be good for finding some niche websites that someone has created a Square for, but we don’t see much that Google Squared can do for you. Feel free to create a square though, it probably can’t hurt.
Google Social Search is a great tool that you should be utilizing. A lot of recent searches have displayed Twitter and Facebook posts, and this is a good way for you to capitalize. Simply fill out a Google Profile if you haven’t already done so (and be sure to include some of your keywords in the description and throughout the profile), add your Facebook and Twitter URL, and opt-in for Google Social’s experimental search. This is a great way for your Facebook and Twitter profile (if you update them, which you should) updates to capture some searches in your area.
Most of us are aware of the new abilities of Google Blog Search and Google News Search, and if you aren’t: basically you can see posts within the past day, week, etc, and also break down the results based on a specific date range.
Similar to Google Squared, we haven’t found a way to effectively utilize Google Wonder Wheel, and not sure it’s necessary for you to become familiar with this feature. If any attorneys or law firms are utilizing Google Wonder Wheel please let us know by commenting on this post.
Google doesn’t use page loading speed as an organic ranking factor. I’m not sure that this is accurate/truthful this is, but be sure to be aware of your site loading speed in 2010. (and of course, Foster Web Marketing clients do have access to site loading time in DSS under “site performance”).
Make sure you’re familiar with Google’s February 2009 update, rel=canonical to avoid any possible duplicate content issues. Your webmaster should be handling this for you, but it’s always worth checking up on.
Matt continues to claim to not hate SEO. I don’t think that he hates us, but he definitely doesn’t love us .
Google not using keyword meta tags to display results is “verified”. Do they use the keyword tags? Probably not. Do they see them at all when crawling your web pages? I think so, they just don’t put much weight on them (and rightfully so) when determining rankings.
Google Caffeine, Google’s new search engine algorithm, is recapped. Again, faster indexing and more up-to-date content.
It’s always good to see Google communicating with webmasters and SEO professionals. Cutts promised to keep this promise to communication in 2010 and we all hope that they do so.
A question came up in our last webinar regarding video submission sites and which ones allow you to post links back to your website. This is a great question as most of our clients have a plethora of videos and submitting those videos to sites where they can be viewed by potential clients and also get some links back to the site to help with your search engine rankings is pretty much killing two birds with one stone.
So, below is a list of video sites that will allow you to submit your legal videos and also allow backlinks to be posted to your website. All of these sites are also Dofollow (meaning that Google and other search engine spiders follow the links and count them towards your “link juice”). If you think we’ve missed any, please leave a comment with the video site’s URL and we’ll be sure to review it and add the site to the list.
I was driving through Baltimore City this weekend when I passed by a local dry cleaners with a very interesting sign out front that caught my attention. This particular dry cleaners is still considered to be in the city but it is kind of on the outskirts in a district where there are a lot of residential properties and businesses, but not a lot of “service” businesses, like fast food restaurants, grocery stores (there is a small Whole Foods but that’s about it), or pharmacies.
The sign read “Free Box Storage”, and I thought to myself, why on earth would a dry cleaners offer free storage?
Well, come to find out, there aren’t any self storage businesses in this area either. There are a few two miles into town, but as anyone who lives in a major city knows, 1) driving and parking two miles away in the city can be a lot worse than it sounds, and 2) storage space can be hard to find.
But how is the business capitalizing on offering free box storage? Is he just offering this to help others in the community, or is this a business decision?
I went inside and spoke to the owner about the service for a bit. He told me that it was as simple as bringing in any size box, and they’ll store it for as long as I’d like. After speaking to the gentleman for a few minutes and building some rapport, I finally asked him what his motivation for offering this type of service was. And it was pretty simple.
He told me that he had some extra space on the second floor that he tried to rent out as an office, but he had no interest from anyone because that particular area is primarily retail, there is no parking, and not a lot of businesses that would have a need for such a space.
So he decided to dedicate the space to storage in a hope to get some extra dry cleaning business by referrals (”you can go store some things at the local dry cleaners for free, and they get my dress shirts back to me within two days if you want to start using them while you’re at it”) and also as another way to get more people in the door.
He told me that he has about 15 people who have boxes stored there and, since they came in the first time with their boxes, they have been back multiple times for dry cleaning services and use them on a regular basis. He also told me that he doesn’t really have a way of tracking how many people are now his customers thanks to referrals from satisfied box storers, but he did say that he noticed a little bit of an increase in business since offering the service. And afterall, he has their boxes and he knows that they’ll be back at some point, and the people trust him enough to hold their boxes, why not trust him with pressing their suits and cleaning their coats? He’s building a business relationship with clients, who also refer business, all because of some extra space that he had.
I thought this was a pretty creative marketing technique. The space was just going to sit there anyways and the only expense that he had was the cost of the sign that he had out front (it was just a simple vinyl banner) and whatever amount of manhours it took to take a box up a flight of stairs.
This made me think about what kind of creative marketing techniques attorneys use to obtain leads, cases, or even contact information for a drip campaign follow up.
My guess is that if you’re a personal injury attorney reading this blog post, and you have a website that you use for web marketing (versus a normal 5-page that you have just so you can put the address on your business cards), that you offer a “free case analysis” somewhere on your site.
I’m not saying to stop offering a free case analysis seeing as that is becoming the standard for attorneys these days. I’m saying that offering some more creative and effective services or incentives for someone to
a) think about hiring you, or
b) tell a friend or family member to visit your website, link to your website, or just spread the word for whatever reason
might be a little more effective.
Some examples are free report downloads (”Ten Reasons Why You Might Need A Lawyer For Your Accident Case”), informative and unique content, polls and surveys, videos, or whatever else you can offer that you think may catch on.
In the dry cleaners’ case, it didn’t even have anything to do with his business’ offering. After all, what does self storage have to do with dry cleaning?
ANYTHING that you can think of to capture a potential client’s contact information (at LEAST) that twenty other attorneys in your city aren’t already doing is what you should be thinking about.
SEO, social media marketing, blogging, and adding content to your site are great ways to get more visits to your site. But what are you offering to turn that visit from someone spending thirty seconds on your site and just leaving into a potential business relationship?
Everyone is always eager to buy up as many domains as they can with hopes of one day conquering the world, but then the question always arises: “what am I going to do with all of them?”
Optimistic hopes of having ten different websites with different URL’s to capture more and more traffic (and cases) usually quickly vanish when you take into consideration the time necessary to maintain multiple websites: the initial website design, content, design tweaks after the site is launched, monthly SEO, etc. You can always just forward the domains to one primary URL, but if it’s not setup correctly, it could really hurt you in the long run.
So, here are five tips that you can use when trying to decide what to do with those extra domains that you have laying around:
1. Forwarding/Redirecting
This is usually the most popular way to put those extra domains to good use.
A lot of times, we advise clients of ours to use a primary domain that is keyword-rich since Google and other search engines seem to be putting so much emphasis on the importance of keywords in URLs these days.
However, these website domains tend to be extra long. Take http://www.lawfirmandattorney-internet-marketing.com for example. Obviously, we only had search engine optimization in mind when we chose this domain, and if I had a dollar for every time I had to spend five minutes spelling this out in person or over the phone, I could retire before I’m forty.
So having a domain name that is shorter and easier to put on business cards and commercials, easier to tell potential clients and friends without having to spell out ten words, and just easier to remember usually comes in handy.
Okay, maybe that first domain is a little overboard, but you get the point.
The easiest way to do this is to forward or redirect the shorter domain to your primary domain, so that you can still capitalize on the SEO “juice” of the keyword-rich domain and still not lose your voice after telling people your website address. So, the question is: what’s the best way to do this?
2. 301 Redirects And Why They’re Awesome
There are two different reasons why you may want to utilize a 301 redirect:
1) Your website is just about to launch, and you have one or two domains that you’d like to point to your primary website (similar to the example above), or
2) You have an old website that wasn’t all that great, and a new website that is just about to launch. Even though your old website is “old and busted”, it still gets a few decent search engine rankings and you don’t want to lose them. Whether your new website is using the same domain as the old one or not, using a 301 redirect to make sure you keep your existing search engine rankings is the best way to do so. Even Google says so.
So, what is a 301 redirect?
Without getting too technical, it basically tells search engine spiders and web browsers that a website or web page has been permanently moved to a new domain, and that the search engines should transfer any “link juice” and search engine rankings to the new website or web page, and browsers should visit the new website or web page instead of the old one.
In terms of setting up a 301 redirect, your webmaster should know how to, or you can read this useful guide on how to do it yourself. But, be careful, you need to know what you’re doing.
Which leads us to tip number 3:
3. Are You Sure That Your Redirect/Forward Is Set Up Correctly?
If your redirect or forward isn’t set up correctly, there is a chance that you could be inadvertently running two different websites with different domains with the same content, which would cause Google and other search engines to view both websites as copycats of each other. This results in: You guessed it, a duplicate content penalty.
Google has publicly stated that there is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty, which I find amusing seeing as I’ve seen two websites over the past two months dropped to page six of Google for search terms that they were ranked on page one for simply because the webmaster didn’t know that their forwarding wasn’t set up correctly.
If you have multiple domains forwarding or redirecting to one URL, here is what you should look for to make sure everything is set up properly:
1. When you type in the domain name that should be redirecting to the primary domain, does the primary domain come up in the browser bar or does the redirecting domain?
If all is done correctly, http://www.your-florida-car-bus-and-motorcycle-accident-lawyer.com should come up in your browser’s address bar, and you should never see http://www.murphyandfoster.com.
If you go to http://www.murphyandfoster.com and http://www.your-florida-car-bus-and-motorcycle-accident-lawyer.comand each domain loads in the browser bar, you probably have a problem.
Here’s another example:
Tom Kiley, a client of ours, has a Boston motorcycle blog. The URL is injuredbikerlaw.com.
So, when I type in http://www.loudpipessavelives.com in my browser bar
It is setup so that it redirects to his Loud Pipes Saves Lives page, and the URL that is www.loudpipessavelives.com is referring to shows in my browser bar
Which is exactly what we want.
If Loudpipessaveslives.com and his blog page each loaded with different URLs, Google is likely seeing that as two different web pages with the same content, which is a huge no-no.
So again, if you’re able to launch the same website or web page with two different URL’s, and both URL’s show up in your browser bar, it’s likely that you have a problem.
You can also use a website called CopyScape to see if you have website pages that are being looked at as duplicates by the search engines.
4. I Think My Forwarding Is Wrong, What Should I Do?
If you are able to load the same website or web page with two different URL’s and they don’t seem to be forwarding correctly, it’s very likely that you will see a drop in rankings once Google and other search engines realize what’s happening.
You should always contact your webmaster to make sure they’re 100% certain that your forwarding is set up correctly and they can reassure you of it, otherwise you’ll probably wake up one morning and your traffic and search engine rankings have plummeted.
If you have reason to believe that you have already been penalized for a redirecting issue, make sure you or your webmaster do whatever you can to rectify the situation, and then send Google a request for reconsideration. in Webmaster Tools. This can take some time though, so be patient and provide Google with as much technical information as possible when explaining what went wrong.
5. Okay, I’ve Read Enough About Redirecting. I Just Want To Launch Different Websites and/or Blogs for Each Domain That I Have
Easy there, tiger. This sounds like a great idea and is definitely the best way to go, but like we mentioned in the opening paragraph, are you ready to spend the time and/or money necessary to make each site successful?
Let’s say you have six different domains, and you want a website on two of them and a blog on the other four.
Okay, sounds good. Are you going to come up with unique and informative content for each one on your own, or pay someone else to do it? And I’m not just talking about the initial content, I’m talking about updates on a regular basis.
Design and hosting costs aside, the time and money associated with properly maintaining six different websites can be pretty high. A lot of clients underestimate how much time is necessary to maintain one website let alone six.
So you decide to try it on your own, and a few months later, after you run out of time and ideas trying to post content yourself regularly for six different sites, you think about outsourcing your content efforts.
If the average blog post costs an industry average of $25-$30, and you want two pieces of content posted to each site per week (which is still low seeing how newer search engine algorithms are putting more emphasis on content), that’s up to $360 per week, or $1400 per month, not even counting the time you spend reading the content to make sure it’s accurate, the time you spend monitoring your websites’ traffic through analytics programs, and the time necessary to maintain effective search engine marketing and link building efforts (which is pretty much mandatory these days, especially if you’re in a competitive market).
Oh yeah I forgot, you’re supposed to be practicing law on top of all of this.
Just be sure to realize that having multiple websites isn’t as easy as paying a design company a one-time fee and expect it to be off and running in the first three months and the cases to be rolling in. Properly marketing and maintaining a website can be a full-time job, and doing the same for six websites? I hope you have some help.
So, there are five tips that you should think about when you’re trying to decide what to do with all of your unused domains.
All of this, of course, is related to your overall web marketing strategy, which is extremely important to online lead generation. If you’re still unsure of what you should do, or even whether or not your forwarding or redirecting is set up properly, shoot shoot us an email and we’ll be more than happy to take a look.
Okay, so you already know how important it is to have an effective search engine marketing strategy in place in order to obtain and keep page one search engine rankings. You’re an attorney, which likely means that you don’t really have the time to go out and build links yourself because you’re spending most of your time in the court room and with clients.
So who do you hire to do so?
Here are a few options and our opinions on each:
1) Have a Paralegal or Junior Attorney in your office do it
You’re already paying them so why not give them another task?
This is the most popular decision when it comes to finding someone to perform routine link building tasks like directory submissions and article distribution, but what about training and research time? It takes a good amount of time and effort to get paralegals and assistants with no experience to know enough about the art of SEO and SEM, and even then are they qualified as experts who can do an effective enough job to increase your search engine rankings?
We’ve also noticed that this route leads to a high turnover rate, as most of the time assistants and paralegals either move on from their link building duties because they’d rather be more involved in the legal aspects of the firm (which is what they went to school for) or because the firm finally realizes that they aren’t Internet Marketing professionals after a few months.
2) Can your Traditional Marketing consultant(s) do this?
Most firms and small law offices have traditional marketing consultants that they go to for their “traditional” marketing needs, whether it be in-house or not. These people surely know enough about SEO and SEM to either do most of it themselves, right?
Well, that depends. From our experience, the marketing consultants are great for certain aspects of web marketing, like serving as contact people for online press releases, helping out with necessary social media tasks, and basically serving as the go-to person for the attorney(s) since they don’t really have the time, but from our experience the traditional marketers don’t know enough about SEO and SEM to create and maintain an effective link building campaign. There are some exceptions, of course, but from our experience the traditional marketers make better project managers who can measure the level of effectiveness of an SEO/SEM campaign than actual “do’ers”.
3) Hire A Freelance SEO/SEM consultant
This is another very popular decision when it comes to finding someone to build links to your website. You can find hundreds of people on Craigslist and freelance websites like Elance, but be very careful of this. Be sure to ask for other websites that they have performed SEO/SEM duties on, and see what types of rankings and back links these sites have.
Also try to make sure that they are actually competitive keywords that the freelancers are using, and aren’t showing you keywords that pretty much anybody could obtain with a few pages of content.
Hiring a freelancer is a good option if they can prove that they know what they’re doing and are effective, but turnaround usually plays a part (the freelancer takes on too many projects or takes a full-time job and suddenly doesn’t have time to dedicate to your project) as does measuring success.
It usually takes some time to obtain number on rankings on search engines because of indexing (usually up to six months), and it’s not easy for you to pay someone every month without seeing some type of return on investment. Be sure to monitor your Google analytics for increases in traffic and keyword visits, and also ask for a detailed breakdown of what links were obtained by the freelancer. If you really want to be sure, check the PageRanks of the sites that the freelancer is obtaining links from and also make sure that they are legal-related or relevant to your location.
4) Hiring an Offshore Web Marketing Company
You likely get contacted by companies from India and other countries overseas that promise you page one rankings for a low monthly fee all the time. This is because the labor in these countries is very cheap and, just like with any other business, outsourcing your project to an overseas vendor can be tempting, especially if they can show results for past clients and are hundreds or thousands cheaper than a company here in the States.
There are a few problems with this. One is the language barrier, not only between you and the company but also the grammar errors that come up while the offshore company provides their link building services on article and press release sites, blogs, forums, etc. You may say to yourself at first “well, I’ll just proofread everything” but that turns into more time than completing the actual work.
Another issue is that most offshore companies use black hat techniques, like obtaining crappy back links that have nothing to do with law or your location. You may not care about this at first when you’re on page one of Google, but if the search engines find out about these sites linking back to yours it’s very likely that your site will be penalized and you’ll be stuck after paying for services that ended up hurting you more than they helped.
Have you ever tried to convince Google to re-index a website with hundreds or thousands of bad inbound links? We have after we tried to help out a few clients who made bad choices when hiring link building “companies”, and it’s near impossible. Long story short: you get what you pay for.
5) Hiring a Web Marketing Company
While it’s true that this is probably the most expensive option, it is usually also the most effective. Hiring trained and proven professionals to handle your SEM and link building campaigns provides a return on investment that most of the previous options do not.
You understand how important your search engine rankings are, and building quality and relevant links is absolutely key to obtaining and keeping these rankings. Are you really thinking about pinching pennies when you know this?
Be sure to check out some of the web marketing’s companies and their search engine rankings before hiring them. Also be sure to follow similar rules that pertain to “hiring a freelancer”, like asking for a detailed work completed report and monitoring the quality of the back links that the company obtains.
Having a web marketing company on your side also pays off when you need web marketing advice, like whether or not certain paid advertising opportunities that are available online are worth the investment, what kind of strategies they can implement to increase traffic conversion, networking and referral opportunities, and more.
There is power in numbers and most web marketing companies already have the necessary resources in place to make your link building and search engine marketing campaign a success, and help you generate more leads, cases, and most of all, money.
Those of us who have been in the SEO/web marketing industry have seen these types of sentences in Craigslist “Job posts” plenty of times:
“We need you to help get us to page one of Google, but our budget is limited.”
“We are willing to become partners with you if you can get us to page one of Google in two months.”
“We are looking for an SEO intern who can get us to page one of Google and get some real-life experience in the process.”
“I’m looking for someone to help us get more links back to our website. We will pay you per link if you obtain 100 or more PR4 links within 30 days.”
Here’s my favorite:
If you can find someone willing to work for $9/hour who has some sort of experience and is worth anything, more power to you. But, a lot of times, website owners and web design/web marketing companies looking for SEO help don’t have realistic expectations of what an SEO consultant is worth or what QUALITY SEO work actually costs.
SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization) published a report last January based on a survey that asked a number of in-house SEM professionals what they make per year. Here are the results:
A few things are true when it comes to hiring someone to perform SEO on your or your clients’ site(s);
Yes, the economy is currently struggling. People are looking for work and you could probably find someone for cheap.
Yes, you could hire someone to do freelance work at a lower hourly rate.
Yes, you could always outsource your project to someone overseas for a lot cheaper.
However, while all of these statements are true, is SEO REALLY something that you want to pinch pennies over? Because most of the time, you get what you pay for.
Do you really think that paying someone $9/hour is going to keep them motivated and dedicated to making your project a success?
I always like to think of this statement when looking at SEO as a whole: “If it was easy, everyone would be doing it.”
If it was as easy as paying someone $200 bucks a month to get your website to number one for “personal injury attorney” or “Los Angeles accident lawyer”, don’t you think someone would have thought of that by now??
Legal SEO is a very competitive market. Lawyers are never scared to spend money on marketing, especially after they have realized the ROI that is involved. If you think that you’re the only lawyer in your city that has thought about having someone help with your online marketing, think again. The reality is that you’re probably already a few years behind your competition, and trying to find some college kid or inexperienced SEO’er on Craigslist who doesn’t have a job for a reason is not going to make up for that.
Finding someone to perform SEO on your website is very similar to finding a lawyer. If you can’t afford it, can you go with a public defender or represent yourself?
Sure!
But what are the realistic chances that you’re going to succeed?
Many have said that submitting your website or blog to directories is no longer an effective way to build links and improve your website’s search engine rankings, but this isn’t entirely the case. Yes, not only are (some) directories still good for SEO and link juice, but listing your website and local business information on directory sites can also increase your Google Local/Google maps rankings as well as Google Local pulls from many trusted directory sites when verifying that your information is correct.
So now you need to know what directories to submit to and what rules to follow. Here are 5 tips that you should follow when listing your site or blog on a directory.
1. Is it a niche/legal directory?
You don’t want to submit your website to a directory that is too general or has nothing to do with law because this can actually negatively affect your rankings. The quality of you inbound links is very important, and the last thing that you want is a bunch of links coming in from non-legal-related sites.
One directory that we can show as an example (there are plenty out there but this is just one that we prefer for a number of reasons which we’ll explain below) is Local-Attorneys.com. This is a directory site that specializes in ONLY lawyer listings.
You can also look for niche directories that are location-based, meaning they only list businesses in your city or state. These can be good for improving your location-based search engine rankings and some of them are also good for traffic as a lot of quality directories that are location-specific get a pretty good amount of visits.
2. How does the directory rank?
How the directory is structured is also very important to look at. You want to make sure that any directories that you submit to have SEO-friendly URL’s for your listing (meaning that some of your keywords are actually included in the URL of your listing), some sort of content on the directory site and not just a bunch of links, and a decent Google Pagerank.
Again, we like to use local-attorneys.com as an example because they have all of these things and also rank on page 1 for terms like “local attorneys”, “find local attorneys”, etc. Try to see if the directory you’re listing on ranks for any of your local searches (also, conduct these searches to see what directories DO come up and submit your website or blog to those as well).
This is important for rankings because a) the higher the quality and rank of the directory, the more “link juice” that you’ll receive by being listed, and b) a quality directory is a lot more likely to get more visits which should direct some traffic to your website.
Remember, a directory can help you in two ways: it can help improve your inbound “link juice” which will dramatically improve your Google and other search engine rankings, and some directories can also get your website more traffic.
3. It’s a paid directory, is it worth it?
Clients e-mail us all of the time asking if they should be listed on a paid directory and if it’s worth the submission fees.
Yes, there are plenty of free directories out there that are effective, but a quality paid directory can help you earn a return on investment as long as you know what you’re looking for.
(And, by the way, if you’re using any types of software or web-based programs to submit your website or blog to multiple free directories at once, you’re shooting yourself in the foot).
We’ve seen listing fees range anywhere from $50 all the way to $1000. So, our tip: find some quality directories with lower listing fees ($50-100 is usually pretty reasonable) and submit to a few of them to start off with.
You can monitor Google Analytics to see if any of these paid directories have referred traffic to your website, but just remember that there is return on investment that you won’t be able to see and that is the link juice that this directory is providing your website and helping it rank better on the search engines.
4. Be sure to use effective effective submission methods
What do we mean by “effective submission methods”?
Don’t use the same description for every directory. Be sure to change the wording and included keywords around and, if possible, try to link to interior pages of your website for appropriate keywords/practice areas.
In other words, if you’re submitting your site or blog to directories trying to build your “link juice” up for an auto accident keyword, don’t always link back to the home page itself. Your website should have a page dedicated to each of your areas of practice, and the more inbound links that you have going to these types of interior pages, the better.
Also, to save time, instead of typing or copying and pasting all of the generic information like address, phone number, e-mail, etc., download and use a Firefox plug-in called Informenter. This will save you a LOT of time, trust me.
5. Always try to be as detailed as possible
Listing a website or blog on multiple directories in one sitting can become very tiring and repetitive, but you’d be surprised how much adding little details like a company logo or hours of operation can actually make a difference. Try to take the time to fill out AS MUCH INFORMATION ABOUT YOUR BUSINESS AS POSSIBLE. Add as much content to every directory submission as you can and make sure that you’re maximizing the listing on that directory. Sure, it may take a few extra minutes, but it’s better to do it then and to do it right than to have to go back and do it again.
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