Why You Need to Pay Attention to Your GMB Account
Google My Business (GMB) is a free service that is often overlooked by law firms, despite how useful it is. Through a GMB account, your firm can claim the physical locations of all of your offices on Google Maps and optimize these listings for local search results. Offering you the opportunity to upload office photos and respond to client reviews, GMB is extremely important to your Internet marketing efforts, but only when used correctly. To help guide you through the process, the team at SLS Consulting has broken down the key elements of GMB so that you have the best chance at ranking locally.
Pitfalls of Bad Marketing: What to Avoid When Picking a Legal Marketing Agency
Lawyers face many unique challenges in online marketing. Fierce competition and catastrophic Google updates have left many firms without a viable source of new leads. Worse, many marketing companies exploit law firms with hollow promises of success. The result? Many law firms spend thousands of dollars per year and see no progress in their online marketing.
The Truth About Links and How They Can Help Your Business Today
Links are always a hot topic of conversation in the marketing world. Links are used by many marketing agencies as a scare tactic to get you to sign on with them. They will base most of their SEO on expanding your number of external links and do very little other work on your website. The truth about links is that no one really knows what the magic number is for links. So, if an agency offers to get you thousands upon thousands of links, there is no real truth that it will help your business. But we do know that links are about quality, not quantity. You could have 50,000 spammy and irrelevant links and your website still won’t rank well, but if you have 20 solid, relevant links, you can rank very high.
Do Meta Tags Still Matter for SEO?
If you have ever talked with an SEO expert at length, you very likely heard about the meta descriptions on your website. While these may seem complicated, mysterious, or even magical, they are actually pretty simple. Meta data boils down to a set of tags in the header of page HTML that is used to tell Google a little more about your website. We are going to talk about three types of meta tags in this article, in order of their relevance to SEO: keywords, descriptions, and titles.
How to Use Color as a Tool
It is no secret that all colors have their own unique psychological effect. There are entire fields of study just devoted to understanding how colors in advertisements can impact the marketability of a product, service, or business. Bright and vivid colors are often utilized for children’s toys, yellow is used as a warning sign (yellow traffic lights, yellow wet floor signs, yellow caution tape, etc.), and blue can inspire trust in users (just take a look at how many banks use blue in their logos.) This is especially true on the internet, and even law firms can be impacted by the types of colors they utilize in logos, photos, and website designs.
Why You Should Post About Current and Local Events
The longer you use social media for your law firm, the more you discover the importance of engaging with your followers. Sometimes this can be answering general legal questions or highlighting clients you’ve helped in the past. Other times it is showcasing your professional talents through new awards and case results. But one of the most important ways to connect with your followers is by humanizing your firm and your legal team, which you can often do by discussing the latest big event.
Having a Clear Voice and Tone for Your Posts
Whether you are writing a blog, sending out a newsletter, or tweeting out a new award, how you craft your voice and words can determine how your reader views you and your firm. While each platform and medium can have its own style and goals, your social media posts will rely heavily on consistency. Having widely different tones across several posts can make it seem like each post is by a different writer, thus giving your account an identity crisis. But if you decide on a tone beforehand and are selective about how you post – from the words you use to the topics – you can improve engagement across each platform.
The SEO Opportunity Hiding in Plain “Site”
Most legal websites have some type of relevant content, whether it be legal articles, newsletters, or blogs. Any website that has a reasonable amount of good content (read: written for users, informative, and not copied from other websites) is off to a good start in terms of SEO. But many websites, even in competitive markets, are not using this content as well as they could. If you are looking for an easy fix to take your content to the next level, consider internal linking.
Don’t Just Solicit, Offer
For a lot of attorneys, bringing in new clients can feel like selling vacuums door to door. As charming and persuasive as you may be, getting a client to “open the door” can be tricky on the internet. Users are bombarded with ads, pop-ups, and chat boxes on a daily basis and have learned to tune out most sales pitches. However, that only means you have to get more creative with your messaging.
Good SEO Is Focused on Leads
SEO is a complicated industry, with as many tools to measure performance as there are experts on the subject. Every SEO company will differ on which tools are best. Some of the most prominent ways of measuring the success of your SEO are link strength (domain authority), rankings, and keyword density. While these and many other metrics can play a role in measuring SEO, we have found that the most important metric is leads.
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