Local SEO for Lawyers – Is Your Local Search Campaign In The Right Direction

Local SEO is crucial for any lawyer business looking to attract customers in a specific location. Here are 3 local SEO best practices to help you get started.

Although changes to Google’s search engine algorithms are behind the constant changes in search engine optimization, it hasn’t diminished the importance of local SEO.

In fact, you could say that local SEO has never been more important, what with local results occupying the topmost section of the search engine results pages (SERPs).

But it’s also true that local SEO has never been harder.

As per Mike Miller of Search Engine Land, “…it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. Google has recently reduced the size of the local pack, so now only three businesses are shown in the SERPs (unless users click through to see expanded results).”

“And the bad news does not stop there. Ads are starting to creep into the local results, and we have the ever-looming threat of home service ads eating up standard AdWords text ads and local listings,” he adds.

Still, that doesn’t mean you should just give up on local search, especially if your business has never given it a whirl.

The good news is that Google offers a wealth of tools and resources to get started, so whether you’re a law firm serving local clients, a restaurant looking for more patrons, or some other kind of service provider that wants to reach out to your local community, getting started has never been easier.

In this guide, we go over 3 local SEO best practices to ensure you hit the ground running.

1. Add Your Business to Google My Business

Google My Business is perhaps the most basic tool you can start with to ensure your business shows up on local search queries. As Google points out in their official Google My Business guide (2), “Providing and updating business information in Google My Business can help your business’s local ranking on Google and enhance your presence in Search and Maps.”

Google My Business is so easy to use it’d be a marketing crime to ignore it.

Start by searching for your business on Google, claiming your business on google.com/business. Follow the instructions to have your business verified by Google. If you’re in charge of marketing, make sure your business owner signs off on this, as only he/she can claim a Google My Business page.

You can then optimize your GMB listing by typing in your:

• Business name (make sure it’s the same name on your website, social media channels, and official storefront)
• Logo
• Address
• Email
• Phone number
• Hours of operation
• High-res photos of your products and services
• Payment methods accepted

Make sure every entry is complete.

It’s also worth mentioning that Bing has its own version of this business feature with Bing Places for Business, which is always worth checking if you want maximum local search exposure.

2. Take Advantage of as Many Business Listings as You Can

Google might be the local business directory on the Internet, but it’s by no means the only one you should pay attention to. You also have the following platforms to work on:

• Yelp
• Trip Advisor
• Foursquare/Swarm
• Merchant Circle
• Citysearch

You should also aim to be listed on business associations like the Better Business Bureau, as well as associations relevant to your industry.

• For law firms and attorneys, it could be the American Bar Association
• For accountants and accounting firms, The American Institute of CPAs
• For dentists and dental clinics, the American Dental Association

You might think that claiming these business directories is common sense, but you’d be surprised how many businesses, especially small businesses, fail to give them any attention.

3. Utilize Reviews

Between a business with reviews and one without any, whom would you trust?

It’s a no-brainer really. And fortunately, many businesses are finally catching up with the importance of online customer reviews.

According to the BrightLocal Local Consumer Review Survey 2016 (3), “84% of people trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation,” “74% of consumers say that positive reviews make them trust a local business more,” and, “58% of consumers say that the star rating of a business is most important.”

In terms of SEO, Google notes that (4), “High-quality, positive reviews from your customers will improve your business’s visibility and increase the likelihood that a potential customer will visit your location.”

So, clearly, reviews are important. But it also comes at a price: review management.

The moment you open your business up to reviews is also when the process of proactively responding to and containing negative reviews begins. As such, you want your customer support and customer experience to be topnotch to ensure your potential customers have as little to complain about as possible.

Conclusion

With how Google is running its search business, local SEO is not going away anytime soon. As such, you’ll want to take advantage of as many methods to improve your business’ visibility to customers within a particularly area or location. There are no shortcuts or any tricks here—just making use of features just waiting to be tapped.

Does your law firm need assistance with your search engine optimization campaign? Make sure you work with local SEO specialists with marketing experience in the legal services industry.

Sources:

1. http://selnd.com/2qPLr7Y
2. http://bit.ly/2rpeqMX
3. http://bit.ly/2qPv5fz
4. http://bit.ly/2rpeqMX

Contributor Qamar Zaman
CEO of KISSPR.com a Dallas based digital marketing and local SEO expert specializing in SEO For Google My Business & Local SEO For Law Firms

Source: http://bit.ly/2roOCAw

Qamar Zaman
Chief Visionary at One SEO Company. An Internet Entrepreneur SEO & lawyer Internet marketing professional & Starbucks Lover.

from Dallas Internet Marketing Blog

How to Avoid Biggest Digital Marketing Mistakes

Mistakes are part of digital marketing. What’s important, however, is making sure you’re avoiding preventable mistakes that could kill your campaign.

When it comes to digital marketing, mistakes are all but guaranteed to happen. After all, marketing your company is very much a process of trial and error.

The key, however, is minimizing the impact of these mistakes and avoiding those you shouldn’t be making in the first place. Of course, this is much easier said than done, especially for businesses, many of whom still practice and believe in many traditional marketing techniques.

Not that there’s anything wrong with keeping things classic, but there’s no denying that traditional marketing—even “traditional guerrilla marketing”—is sometimes completely different from Internet marketing.

And this is where mistakes often happen. Writing for Inc., Neil Patel notes (1), “These mistakes cost money, traffic opportunity, and growth. Unfortunately, marketers make these mistakes because they fail to truly understand how to leverage their skills and improve their approach.”

Digital marketing requires a significant investment in terms of time and resources. The last thing you want to do is to waste your efforts doing things that are taking your online presence  farther away from your goals.

In this guide, we look at some of the most common digital marketing mistakes your company might be guilty of making.

1. Marketing Without any Goals

If you’re writing on your blog or posting on social media without any real goals, you might as well as be wandering around aimlessly on the Internet. One of the most common mistakes many digital marketers make is not setting any goals before launching their campaign.

Goals are critical for evaluating the success of your digital marketing efforts, whether it’s in the context of sales, sign ups (for newsletters), messages, or phone calls.

“Goal setting is the backbone of marketing. Goals help us prove how effective we are, keep us focused and push us to succeed,” says Amber Klein of Hive Digital Strategy (2). “And while we know how important goals are to measure our success, more than 80% of small business owners do not keep track of their business goals.”

With no goals, you have no direction. With no direction, you have no way of knowing your campaign is successful. And if you don’t have benchmarks for success/failure, what’s the point of marketing your business?

Read this if you are a law firm.

Lawyer Marketing Mistakes – 4 Mistakes that Will Kill Your Law Firm’s Digital Marketing Campaign

2. You Don’t Know Who Your Audience Is

Marketing your small business on the Internet is one thing, but all you are doing is wasting time and resources if you do not know whom you’re reaching out to.

It’s not enough to just say “potential clients,” because that could mean anyone needing the services of an attorney.

Even if you’re creating insightful killer content, you’re only setting yourself up to fail if you’re not promoting your content to the right audience at the right time. Chances are your niche is already saturated with content, making it difficult to stand out.

The trick is figuring out just whom you want to market to.

“Identifying your target audience is the first step in any type of marketing endeavor,” says Neil Patel in a Forbes write-up (3). “Tragically, it’s also easy to overlook. Don’t make this mistake. Study your audience, and much of your marketing will take care of itself.”

The most basic way to understand your audience is by creating buyer personas—semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer/client, complete with personal descriptions as well as behaviors.

Related: What does it take to create a website that captivates the audience and keeps them on the page?

3. You’re Not Putting Your Customers First

Many marketing teams make the mistake of boxing themselves inside echo chambers, where all they do is strategize and plan about things they like, but not so much the things their customers actually do.

This rookie mistake is something you can easily avoid if you focus your entire campaign on putting your customers first.

At its core, digital marketing is about doing the following:

• Attracting
• Engaging
• Educating
• Nurturing
• Converting
• Retaining

And naturally, all these things involve your customers. The experience you provide must be tailored to their needs and preferences, which fortunately you can know through data analytics and engagement evaluation. To put it simply, the customer must always come first.

4. You’re Not Being Social on Social Media

While there are certainly many businesses building a presence on social media, many of them use platforms like Facebook and Twitter not so much to engage their audience, but as a way to simply promote their firms with ad-like content.

This is not what social media is about. Yes, you can broadcast information about yourself, but this should not be your priority. Social media is a way to be social—to interact and engage your audience with genuine dialogue.

In other words, you need to respond to your audience and not just post something and leave them alone in the comments section. Your community will come to respect you more if you genuinely want to build a relationship with them, which can only be a good thing for your firm in the long run.

PR Budget Tips: How to Make People Talk about Your Brand in Social Media

Conclusion

In summary, the 4 most common mistakes digital marketers make are ignoring the importance of setting goals, failing to understand your audience, not putting your customers first, and misusing social media, says Qamar Zaman a Dallas based website conversion expert.

Although it would seem these are ‘no brainer’ mistakes, you would be surprised just how many marketers, even those with quite a bit of experience under their belt, are guilty of making them.

 

Sources

1. http://on.inc.com/2r4KgxC
2. http://bit.ly/2pp0tRM
3. http://bit.ly/2r4Nst4

Qamar Zaman
Chief Visionary at One SEO Company. An Internet Entrepreneur SEO & lawyer Internet marketing professional & Starbucks Lover.

from Dallas Internet Marketing Blog