Get Ready for SEO in 2018 – SEO Guide 2018 by Qamar Zaman

SEO to top law firms in the Nation, Qamar Zaman (QZ) explains the future of SEO.  Read this FREE 2018 Non-Complicated SEO Driven Growth Guide.

By 2019, it is expected that the spending in search engine marketing (SEO and PPC) will increase 1 to $45.49 billion. According to the website State of Inbound 2, 66% of marketers claim that improving SEO and increasing their organic presence in search results are their top inbound marketing priority. However, 63% of them also reveals that their top challenge is generating traffic and leads.

These figures show that the demand for SEO is still increasing despite the backlash caused by those who abuse and game search engine algorithms. And, along with this demand, comes the need for small business owners to get more acquainted (if not hands-on) in implementing their SEO campaigns.

SEO and Small Businesses

If you are part of the nearly 30 million 3 small businesses in the United States, then you might have already been implementing SEO in your website. Maybe you are contemplating hiring a professional who can help you increase your business’s visibility in search results.  

Running a small business with limited capital and profits can really drain you especially if you have a limited budget for marketing. However, if you are willing to go hands-on and learn the latest SEO strategies to optimize your website for search engines, you may be able to save that money.

The thing is, you might be hesitating to do the latter and if you are doing the former, you might consider checking that your strategy and tactics are currently relevant.

When beginning, it’s important that you understand how search engine optimization works. You can create momentum by calibrating your digital marketing arsenal with this easy-to-use guide that will help you develop and implement your SEO strategy more effectively.

The Non-Complicated SEO Checklist for Small Business Owners

Search Engine Optimization for small businesses should not be complicated. You only need to remember these 3 main components:

1. SILO selection
2. Onsite optimization
3. Offsite optimization  

Of course, each component is composed of optimization processes that you can practice and learn on your own.

Read: Why Small Business Owners Should Know Basic SEO?

For 2018, this simple checklist should help you improve how to optimize your website and content for search engines.

1. Keyword Selection

• Check Your Competitors SILO terms

2. Onsite SEO

•         Improve Website Structure
•         Improve User Experience
•         Make Your Website Mobile Friendly
•         Try Implementing AMP
•         Create Good Content
•         Avoid Panda Penalties

3. Offsite Optimization

•         Avoid Penguin Penalties
•         Improve Local SEO
•         Earn Social Signals
•         Earn Organic Backlinks

1. Intent Selection

A successful SEO starts with the right market targeting user intent. If you are currently struggling with web ranking, then you might consider adapting to SILO architecture.

Read: How Can You Improve It to Increase Successful Conversions?

a. Check Your Competitors

Read: The Things your Competitor teaches you about Internet Marketing

Despite the continuous modern advances in search technology, keywords remain a constant factor in SEO. Without keywords, there’s no point in optimizing content for search engines.

2. Onsite SEO

Everything you do on your website that helps it to rank on the SERPs is part of Onsite SEO. It starts with the correct website structure, content, and important Metadata that can help you tell search engine bots that your web pages can be indexed.

In order for search engines to fully index and rank your website content, full onsite optimization should be done. This can only happen if you know the basics.

If you are looking for ways to boost your onsite SEO, this up-to-date checklist may help improve your search ranking.

1.       Start by Improving Your Website Structure
2.      Look for Ways to Improve User Experience
3.       Make Your Website Mobile Friendly
4.      Try Implementing AMP
5.      Improve Your Content Quality
6.        Avoid Panda Penalties

a. Improving Your Website Structure

Keeping your website structure simple and dynamic makes it easier for search engine bots to find, crawl, and index your web pages. Avoid using long URLs and make sure each of your pages are reachable from the homepage. See examples below.

Bad URL Structure

http://bit.ly/2DLoR47

Good URL Structure

http://bit.ly/2DeknBZ

Read: Bad Choice in URL Structure – One of the Most Common Mistakes by Web Designers

Your page URL names must be consistent with you website structure, and your internal links should point to correct and relevant pages.  Also, don’t forget to use breadcrumbs 5 to facilitate navigation. You can also use rel=next and rel=prev to make your very long pages into paginated series. This saves your readers the tedious infinite scrolling that oftentimes discourages them from staying longer on your website.

Lastly, don’t forget to use XML sitemap 6, RSS Feeds, and integrate Schema markup 7 to enable rich snippets every time your website or content appears in the SERPs.

b. Improve User Experience

Boosting user experience should be one of the things you want to improve for your onsite SEO.  Aside from making your website load faster, you can also help your visitors navigate it easily by placing a search box at its upper or lower part. Unfortunately, there are still business websites without a search box to the dissatisfaction of their users.

A search box not only helps you improve user experience but also helps your readers find useful content hidden deep within your website.

c. Make Your Website Mobile Friendly

When you make your website mobile-friendly you are also improving user experience. The easier it is to navigate from mobile devices, the higher the chance they will convert into paying customers.

Read: 4 Easiest Ways to Create a Mobile-Friendly Website

When doing onsite SEO, understand that mobile use has out ranked desktop use. It is important to optimize your website for mobile platforms to increase your search rankings. Not doing so, will in fact, decrease your chances of getting more leads.

Read: Everyone Goes Mobile – When 5 billion people are already on mobile, how could you pass up such gigantic opportunity?

d. Try Implementing AMP

AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages is an open-source project initiated by Google to help online publishers optimize their websites for mobile platforms. It was launched in 2015 and has since flourished. According to Google8, since May of 2017, 900,000 web domains were already publishing AMP pages and there were already 2 billion AMP pages published globally.

If you think AMP is a good option for your SEO, then give it a try. Follow the tutorial set at AmpProject.org. If you feel implementing it is harder than you thought, you can always ask the help of professionals. Make sure you choose those with a solid track record in helping entrepreneurs grow their businesses through SEO.

e. Improve Your Content Quality

Do you already have regular blogging activity for your website? Does it help increase your visibility in search? If not, you might be missing a few important aspects on how to create a content that appeals to your prospects.

First, identify who you are writing for and what is the impact of your article on them. Determine the type of content platform they prefer. If they love reading text, then create long form articles. If they love visuals, create infographics and videos. If they have a very fast-paced lifestyle and have no time to read or watch, create a podcast blog.

Read: Daily blogging for More Website Lead Generation

Next, confirm how you can help them. Find out your prospects’ needs and create solutions that they can easily follow.

Don’t forget that if you do onsite optimization for the main pages of your website, you also need to do the same every time you publish a new blog. Make sure that you use the right keywords and that you don’t overstuff them. Use proper headings/subheadings and make sure your title and description follows the recommended text length so that it won’t look awkward when displayed in the SERPs.

Read: Top Benefits of Blogging for Search Engine Optimization

f. Avoid Panda Penalties

When you abide by Google’s rules, you are zeroing any chances of obtaining penalties and deindexation which is good for your SEO. Making sure that you avoid Panda penalties can help you increase your search ranking and maintain it.

Read: Why Is Google’s Panda Update Driving SEO & Internet Marketers Mad?

Google launched the Panda algorithm in the first quarter of 2011. This is Google’s way of filtering thin pages and low-quality content that was propagating online by those who are trying to game their system.

Creating high quality content is the only way to avoid getting a Panda penalty. Make sure you allocate time and budget to improve the overall quality of your content.

Read: Is your Website Vulnerable to Google Panda?

3. Offsite SEO

Onsite optimization for search engines is not enough. You also need forces from the outside to help your website become more visible in search. These forces are what we collectively refer to as Offsite SEO.

Off Site search engine optimization is all the things you do off your website that still help you increase its visibility in the SERPs. It is as important as Onsite Optimization. Without this crucial part of SEO, you will have a hard time boosting your search rankings.

a. Avoid Penguin Penalties

One way to make your offsite SEO effective is to avoid Penguin penalties. Penguin is another part of Google’s search algorithm that detects suspicious backlink patterns. It penalizes websites that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines 9 especially those who are trying to game their system using link schemes 10.

You can avoid getting a Penguin penalty by simply doing ethical link building practices while  making sure to avoid interaction with practitioners who are practicing Black Hat SEO.

Read: Link Building Should Be Natural and Earned – 4 Ways Old SEO and New SEO are Different

Ethical Offsite SEO practices include building editorial backlinks, accumulating diverse anchor texts for backlinks, natural link building, and disavowing bad or spammy links.

Read: Steps on How to Remove Bad Links – How to Prune Links after Google Penguin?

b. Improve Local SEO

Improving your Local SEO can help you increase your leads and conversion when done the right and ethical way. Targeting your prospects by location is far more effective than by targeting them without any filters.

For example, if you run a social media company in Texas, it is more effective to target cities in Texas rather than Texas as a whole.

Assuming that you are already doing local SEO, here are some tips that can help you improve.

•         Consistent NAP (Name, Address, and Phone) in your local listings – This primary information should be listed consistently across all your web properties and online directory pages. For search engine crawlers to correctly index your business information, consistency is very important. This doesn’t only apply to search engines but to those people who are checking your business information online as well. An incomplete business address will lead your prospect to the wrong location creating a loss for you and your business.

 

•         Make sure your Google My Business Listing has no missing information – Your Google My Business Listing can help you rank higher than your competitors in Google Search.  Optimize it properly and get an edge when it comes to obtaining more space and visibility

in the SERPs.  Read: The Importance of Google My Business for Local SEO

 

•         Encourage your customers to leave a review of your product or services in popular review sites – If you ask for it, they will give it. This is what most customers do when it comes to giving reviews about the product or service they avail.  For small business owners, it is very important to be proactive. You should always make sure to remind your customers to leave reviews more importantly if they are returning ones. Google includes review scores when they display your site snippet in their search results.

 

•         Getting in touch with local bloggers and build online and offline relationship with them – To boost your online presence in your locality, building a good online and offline relationship with local bloggers is a must if you want to gain an edge on your competitors. Each time you launch a new product, you can get the help of these bloggers in amplifying the news.  You can also help them with their blogging initiatives and advocacy as their sponsor and partner.

Read: Important Local Search Ranking Factors

c. Earn Social Signals

Although there’s no official confirmation from Google that social signals are among the factors they include in ranking a website. However, there is a lot of evidence 11 that shows how those with a high social engagement have higher search rankings compared to those who have less or none.

You can earn social signals by boosting your social media presence and by engaging with your followers. Make sure that every time someone comments on your social media post, you reply and give them the information they need.  

Creating good content, especially those that are time-relevant, can help you get more shares, likes, and comments.

Maintaining connections with social media influencers such as bloggers and YouTubers can also help you boost your social media presence thus allowing you to earn more social signals.

Read: 5 Reasons Why Social Media Helps Improve SEO Performance

d. Earn Organic Backlinks

One of biggest factors that affects your offsite SEO is your backlinks. Backlinks are still one of the major factors Google uses in ranking websites. Despite the fact that many experts predict that its importance is currently diminishing, the reality is that search engines are still using it to gauge a site’s relevance, credibility, and importance.

Building links naturally requires more effort and takes more time than what most people normally expect. This is because you need not only online but offline as well to accumulate those kind of links. Here are a few instances where you can earn a backlink naturally.

•         Your business is featured in an online newspaper with a backlink to your website. This usually happens after you hold a press conference or after a reporter interviewed you about a topic in your field of expertise.
•         A customer loves your product and they blog about it and links back to your site.
•         A forum user recommends your services and includes a backlink to your website.
•         A website owner creates a resource page and they include your business and link back to your website.
•         You submit an article to a high domain site and they approve it with a backlink to your website.

Earning organic backlinks requires you to deliver the best product/service, high quality content, good marketing strategy, and an effective PR strategy.

Of course, as a small business owner, you need only ensure to have an excellent product for your customers and that your website is properly optimized for search engines. If you do not have the capital or ability to do them all, you can start by improving your SEO, connecting with local bloggers and making sure your social media followers are fully engaged.

If you are lacking in time while trying to run your business, you can always employ the help of well-seasoned SEO and Social Media professionals. Search for the ones who have no less than a decade long track record in helping small business owners grow and and their company flourish through SEO and Social Media Marketing.

Good luck and happy hunting!

 

Qamar Zaman is a Dallas SEO and Lawyer Marketing Expert who has been featured in Huffington Post, Forbes, The Entrepreneur and many authority trade journals in the United States and The Cayman Islands’ local newspapers as an expert in search.

 

Sources and References:

1. Digital marketing spending in the United States from 2014 to 2019, by segment (in billion U.S. dollars) – http://bit.ly/2DcytUn
2. State of Inbound 2017 – http://bit.ly/2DIE0mD
3. United States Small Business Profile – http://bit.ly/2DfJ69b
4. Open Site Explorer: Link Research & Backlink Checker – http://bit.ly/2drr22M
5. Breadcrumbs: Everything About Breadcrumbs & SEO – http://bit.ly/2DdGRTz
6. Create Your Own Google Sitemap Online – http://bit.ly/2DK9BEQ
7. Schema.org – http://schema.org/
8. Turbocharging AMP – http://bit.ly/2DfJ6WJ
9. Webmaster Guidelines – http://bit.ly/2DJxGLD
10. Link schemes – http://bit.ly/2Dixr9G
11. Do Social Signals Influence SEO? A 2016 Study on 23 Million Shares – http://bit.ly/2DK9CZq

 

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

from Dallas Internet Marketing Blog

Website Design Tips – How to Build a Predictable and Profitable Website

In this article, Qamar Zaman of KISS PR, a Dallas, TX  based website design, SEO, Google Advertising & Social Media Marketing expert, reveals tips for building a profitable website design.

We are well aware of the need to have a website developed for our business. Website design, aesthetics, usability, and user and search engine friendliness have been discussed time and time again by various experts. These things are important in discussions about website design. Today, we will delve into the heaviest part of website design, the elements that have to do with usability for web visitors and giving them a reason to stay on your website.

 

Web Design Tips for SEO

The first thing that we think of when we start building our website is what will be the chosen design? When we configure our designs, we think of things that could attract web visitors, and entice them to stay on for a longer period of time. Images, graphics, color, typos, white spaces, navigation settings, calls to action, buttons, and content placement are included in the list of website design elements that impact why visitors may stay on the site, subscribe to an offer, leave a trail or possibly become your next customer.

We want our web visitors to concentrate on our web pages. If your web space is crowded and people experience a difficult time navigating it, or encounter difficulty in finding information, they will walk away quickly. Therefore, in selecting our design preferences, the following should be considered:

Simple Design

Keep your design simple and to the point. Choose the right set of colors, but make use of white spaces efficiently and remove unnecessary elements that are not serving any real purpose except that of occupying usable spaced on the web page.

Is User Behavior a Proven Factor in Search Ranking?

See The World Through Customer Eyes

Take a look at your web page like a web visitor would. What are elements that your website visitor would like to learn about? What are the elements that could confuse them? Which content is most enticing? If you put yourself in the shoes of the web visitors, you could possibly make effective web pages that could help you sell your products and disseminate information.

Use of Images in Website Design

Images – Choose images wisely. High resolution, purposeful images. If you are trying to sell candy, but display pictures of puppies, this won’t help you sell your product. You likely won’t be able to retain web visitors for more than 2 seconds. Pick images that relate to your business, products and services. Do not create false alerts. Such efforts simply go to waste.

Use of Fonts in Website Design

Typography – This is another highly important element to focus on when you design your web page. The font type, font size, and font colors must be chosen with care. Readable text makes a difference. Faded text or small fonts can make reading difficult for some audiences.

Larger fonts and bold text work well with H1 (heading or headlines). The text that you want to emphasize must be written in these types of fonts. Over crowding the content area with bold text in other areas could force visitors to lose focus and wander off to other places on the net.

 

Most Common SEO Mistakes Committed by Web Designers

Call to Actions

The web page that you create must carry a clear call to action. Don’t hide behind words; tell your web visitors what they need to do, whether they are eager to learn more, or wanting to take you up on a discount offer. Put your call to action in catchy words to make users want to quickly grab the offer that you are presenting to them in exchange for the information they leave for you to catch up with them later.

The development of web pages isn’t as simple as it appears. However, a customer focused approach and attractive design can help you garner the interest your products deserve.

How to Leverage – Zero Moment of Truth in Marketing

 

By: Qamar Zaman – KISS PR – Dallas Web Site Design & SEO Company

If you are looking for a profitable website design visit KISSPR.com.

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

from Dallas Internet Marketing Blog

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

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

While there are no guarantees for success in digital marketing, ensuring the absence of these mistakes will give you the advantage over the competition.

Has your law firm’s online marketing campaign suddenly hit a dead end? It may be that you’re making a number of website marketing  mistakes that are hurting your efforts.

What is Digital Marketing When it Comes to Law Firm Marketing

“Digital marketing (also known as data-driven marketing) is an umbrella term for the marketing of products or services using digital technologies, mainly on the Internet, but also including mobile phones, display advertising, and any other digital medium.” Wikipedia.

With digital marketing practices always evolving, making sure your legal marketing campaign is in top shape is a constant process.  According to Group8A founder Eric Samson, “Changes in trends and tactics shift quickly with the wind and, as digital marketers, the only way we can keep up is through innovation and information.”

Of course, keeping your ear to the ground and adapting to trends and industry shifts at any moment’s notice is a lot easier said than done, especially for law firms that don’t have a dedicated marketing staff, much less a major marketing department.

Given how volatile digital marketing can be, sometimes the best solution is not to figure out what to do, but rather to identify what digital marketing mistakes you might be making. In this guide, we look at a few of these common issues.

1.     You Have No Overarching Strategy

A 2012 Smart Insights study found that as much as 47 percent of businesses are investing in digital marketing without a clear strategy. In an updated survey (2017), Smarts Insights says, “that number has shrunk to 44%…although that is still quite high, and means many are doing digital with no strategy in place.”

So what’s the big deal? Operating without a strategic approach to your law firm’s digital marketing efforts means that you could be missing several opportunities for efficient targeting and optimization.

If you’re a small law firm (or a lone attorney), you could certainly get great results from your SEO, content, and social media marketing.

However, playing things by ear can only take you so far. If your campaign’s performance has plateaued, a real strategy may be what you need.

Read my previous blog post “How Content Marketing Can Help Law Firms”

2.   You Don’t Have Defined Marketing Goals

With no goals, how could you accurately measure your campaign’s performance and success? For many organizations, the problem is not the absence of goals but rather the use of abstract goals, such as:

1. Increasing likes
2. Getting more followers
3. Trending on social media

The beauty of digital marketing lies in the ability to measure pretty much everything you do (on Google Analytics), which is obviously great for determining your ROI.

Smart Insights CEO Dave Chaffey has a developed a system of setting digital marketing goals called the 5Ss of digital marketing, which comprises:

• Sell – Growing your sales
• Speak – Communicating with your audience
• Serve – Adding value to your customers’ experience
• Save – Cutting costs
• Sizzle – Generating online excitement for your brand

Of course, there are many other goal-setting systems out there, but Smart Insights’ approach is a good place to start.

Read SEO Forecast for 2017 by SEO Expert Qamar Zaman a Dallas SEO & Lawyer Marketing Expert

3.    You’re Not Paying Attention to SEO

With many of your target clients using the Internet as the first point of contact to your brand, you need to invest time and effort in improving your online visibility through search engine optimization.

Rachel Ayre of Hit Search Limited refers to a whitepaper titled Sink or swim: How to adapt to the New Legal Consumer, which showed that “31% of all legal consumers research lawyers online, and 95% of them stated that online reviews matter to them when deciding which law firm to hire.”

However, there are a few things to consider when investing in SEO. For starters, gone are the days of old school SEO, which was a free-for-all game of keyword stuffing, article farms, and low-value articles.

Google Panda, a major search algorithm update, pretty much killed off the strategy of gaming search engines with spammy content, while Google Penguin, another update, now penalizes shady link building practices.

So what else is there to do? We go back to what Google has been saying for years: deliver a great user experience to your website’s visitors. That means making your site easy to navigate and improving your content, all while making it easy for Google to find you with strategically placed keywords and high-quality inlinks and backlinks.

Key Takeaway: Read Top 5 Important Trends That Bring Impact on How You Do SEO in 2017

4.     Ignoring Paid Media

While SEO is certainly an important aspect of digital marketing, it’s organic approach to improving your search rankings takes time to generate results. It’s why so many law firms give up on SEO—they fail to realize it’s a long-term effort.

It’s also for this reason that paid ad platforms like Facebook Ads, Google AdWords, and Bing Ads can be a powerful way to complement your SEO efforts. Each platform offers a powerful suite of targeting options that allow you to run precise campaigns aimed at your most relevant online users based on their demographics, location, and interests among several other things.

In turn, this ensures your PPC ads are only visible to people who are most likely going to be interested in your law firm’s services.

Key Takeaways:

As competition among law firms get tighter, the need to stand out and create more visibility especially in the SERPs is of utmost importance if you want higher possibility of getting more leads. Pay per Click (PPC) is quite useful if you don’t want your spot in the SERPs getting occupied by your competitors through paid search. Here is a clear scenario. Read Lawyer Marketing Using Google Adwords

SUMMING UP

1.     Missing or Lack of Strategy
2.     Lack of Defined Market Goals and Measurement of These Goals
3.     SEO Audit  
4.     Paid Media

These are just a few of the most common mistakes that usually have a visible effect on any digital marketing campaign. To set up your digital marketing efforts for success, make sure you have an overarching strategy, set the right kind of goals, invest in modern SEO, and don’t underestimate paid ad campaigns.

If your law firm needs help in launching and managing a hype free digital marketing campaign for your law firm, make sure you turn to a specialist or agency that caters to organizations in the legal services industry.

If you answered Yes to any one of the these. You really need to take the pulse of your law firm’s digital marketing. Give us a call to learn more.

We are in the business of growing law firms. https://kisspr.com/

Contributor:

Qamar Zaman – Lawyer Marketing with Proven Results in local, national, regional and International SEO!

Hype FREE Attorney Marketing Expert

Check my work on Huffington Post

Follow me on LinkedIn

 Image Credits:

Many images have been used from my Lawyer Marketing Blog, where I have curated content and given credit to each contributor respectfully.

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

from Dallas Internet Marketing Blog

Qamar Zaman Reports 4 Rules of Law Firm Marketing in 2017

Qamar Zaman Reports Trends Attorneys & Law Firms Need to Follow in 2017.

Author

Qamar Zaman KISSPR.com – Lawyer Marketing Expert

For law firms that have taken an interest in building an web  presence using online Law Firm Marketing, it’s important to be familiar with the core rules of digital marketing.

While being ready to adapt to shifts in technology is certainly crucial, at its heart, digital marketing is about reaching out to real people. As Molly Reynolds notes in a write-up for the Huffington Post, “Digital marketers need an analytical approach and a commitment to staying current with technology to ensure results. Yet it’s also important not to lose sight of the human side.”

Still, digital marketing is as much a data-driven science as it is an art of knowing what makes people tick. And these days, it’s not enough for your law firm to know the surface and different components of digital marketing science, as it takes a deeper understanding to successfully create a comprehensive marketing strategy.

There’s a series of logical steps and rules that go into creating a winning campaign—your job is to know what these factors are. In this guide, we go over s of the most important digital marketing rules and practices to follow in 2017, which should help your law firm build a solid marketing strategy.

1. Identify Your Goals

Goal setting lays the foundation of any digital campaign, guiding your decision-making processes, especially when it comes to allocating resources to produce desired results. To put it simply, if you don’t have goals, you won’t know what metrics to track, much less how to gauge the success of your campaign.

HubSpot has a useful goal-setting framework called the SMART goal system, helping just about anyone create strategic campaign targets. SMART stands for

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant 
• Timely

As HubSpot notes, “Goals are totally useless if they’re not grounded in reality. That’s why it’s critical to set SMART goals.”

2. Identify Your Target Client

Many companies make the mistake of believing they’re marketing to a “dream” client, only to realize their efforts don’t seem to be generating any conversions.

The reason? There’s a disconnect between their dream client and who their target should be in the real world. Conversely, marketing to a large group makes your messages disjointed and less focused.

As Jessica Mehring of CrazyEgg notes, “When you write for a large group of people, the message gets watered down because it’s trying to address too many different needs. Or it misses the mark completely because it’s unfocused. It’s the equivalent of trying to hit 10 dartboards with a single dart.”

This issue is precisely why it’s imperative that your campaign is based on well-researched buyer personas. These are semi-fictional representations of your law firm’s ideal customer based on real data, market research, demographics, buyer preferences, goals, and challenges.

Buyer personas help ensure that your marketing efforts are tight and targeted, allowing you to focus your time, product development, and content assets to the right audience.

3. Create Content Assets Aligned with Goals and Personas

With your SMART goals and buyer personas, you now have a reliable framework for conceptualizing and building targeted and relevant content assets. Your content, website, and landing pages need to be optimized according to your digital campaign’s goals. Below are a few places to start:

• Personalize your content for your audience
• Optimize your website and landing pages with a “mobile first” approach
• Offer value on your landing pages (i.e. incentivize conversions through promotions and smart copy)
• Create smart calls to action (CTAs)
• Blog early and blog as often as you can without compromising content quality and relevance

4. Invest in Building Your Online Visibility

Social media marketing is easily one of the most effective ways to improve your online visibility. Although there are other options like PPC, SEO, display advertising, social media marketing is unparalleled in both speed of results and cost-to-benefit ratio.

Social media doesn’t just improve your visibility, it also shapes the kind of purchase decisions your audience makes, making it just as effective as television, sans the obscenely high cost of traditional TV ads.

According to an Ad Age report based on research by CivicScience, there is an “increasing percentage of consumers saying social media chatter influences them the most. The proliferation of portable second screens is no doubt a big factor here.”

When leveraging social media to market your law firm, remember the following points:

• Be sure to have clear objectives. Do you want your posts to generate leads, shares, or likes? Integrate this goal into each post’s CTA.
• Share content that offers value and resonates with your target audience.
• Mix it up. Post blogs, infographics, videos, live streams, curated content—any content format your audience will gravitate to.
• Social media is about interaction. Engage your audience instead of just pushing out content.

 

Lawyer Marketing Conclusion

Whether your law firm is new to digital attorney marketing or you feel that your existing campaign needs a clearer structure to be effective, these rules should help you create a defined framework for your marketing strategy, one that helps maximize the ROI of your marketing efforts.

Honing these tactics and applying them consistently will also position your law firm to enjoy accelerated growth, allowing you to hit your conversion and ROI goals.

If you need the help of a digital marketing consultant or agency to integrate these rules into your campaign, make sure you approach someone that understands the needs of law firms and legal professionals.

About the Author

Qamar Zaman is a Dallas based Lawyer Marketing Expert. He has worked with over 100 Top Law Firms & Achieved 60% Case Growth every year.  He can be reached at 972-961-7319

 

Sources

http://huff.to/2m06q4U

http://bit.ly/2my2XZl

http://bit.ly/2m034yZ

http://bit.ly/2my0SfY

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

from Dallas Internet Marketing Blog

Top 5 Important Trends That Bring Impact on How You Do SEO in 2017

Search Engine Optimization is unquestionably one of the top digital marketing strategies that has changed the way businesses compete with each other and has revolutionized the process on how they reach out to their target customers.

Nowadays, modern businesses don’t go around without SEO as part of their digital marketing arsenal.  According to a research conducted by Ascend2, 82% of the surveyed marketers considered SEO as a more effective digital marketing strategy with 42% stating that its effectiveness has increased significantly.  Eighty-one percent of the survey’s respondents revealed that their SEO efforts are at least above average.

SEO last year, as predicted by many industry experts, has been really more about innovations with the Google, still the leading search engine.

This year, search engine optimization is expected to gain more popularity as it has already become a staple in digital marketing.  If you are one of those businesses who have already jumped into the SEO bandwagon, you should keep yourself updated with the latest trends that can impact on how you optimize your websites for search.

In 2017, these are the top trends that you should watch out.

•         The mobile domination
•         The steady rise of videos
•         The rise of AMP’s popularity
•         Content quality is king
•         Backlinks getting sidetracked

Okay.  You not only need to watch out, but must also focus on those ones that can bring impact on how you optimize your content for search engines.  These trends are picked by experts based on their significance, relevance, and popularity among SEO practitioners in the industry.

1. Everyone Goes Mobile

The numbers on the screenshot above are enough evidence why mobile is on top of the trends.  When 5 billion people are already on mobile, how could you pass up such gigantic opportunity?

John Lincoln, in his article in Business2Community.com, predicted that mobile will become more important.  He foresees that more and more companies will adopt a “mobile first” strategy when it comes to SEO.

Let’s also not forget that Google is now moving to a mobile-only world.  According to Gianluca Fiorelli in his article in Moz.com, mobile-first indexing has become an inevitable result of almost a year of changing the people’s mindset from desktop to mobile.

Fiorelli added that in a mobile-only world, the importance of local search is even more crucial.

“In a mobile-only world, the relevance of local search is even higher. This seems to be the strategic reason both for an update like Possum and all the tests we see in local, and also of the acquisition of a company like Urban Engines, whose purpose is to analyze the “Internet of Moving Things.””

2. Video marketing still reigns

In 2016, video has been predicted to rise more in relevance compared to text content.  This year (2017), it is predicted that online video will account for 74% of all web traffic.  This figure alone shows the potential impact video marketing can bring into your SEO campaign.

When 81% of people feature their video on their brand website, the need to optimize these pages to rank on top of the SERPs become more of a necessity.  This is one of the major reasons why 93% of marketers will use video for online marketing, sales, and communication.

According to MerchantMarketingGroup.com (in 2015), 96% of B2B companies are planning to use video in their content marketing on 2016. So, from this alone, those who are using video this year might have already surpassed that figure.

Lastly, based from our observation, the rise of video marketing has been greatly affected by the steady rise of mobile.  Video consumption nowadays shows people’s fast-paced lifestyle.  This should be put into perspective if you are strategizing how you can make your SEO more effective.         

3. AMP is becoming more and more popular

AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages Project is another technology launched by Google to create better mobile experience for online users.  It was launched in 2015 but was integrated in the SERPs on the first quarter of 2016 (February).

According to SearchEngineWatch.com, one of the most successful AMP integrated websites in 2016 is Gizmodo. They got 50% increase in impressions and 80% from their AMP pages are new traffic.

You will know if a website has an AMP integration when it shows up on mobile with the lightning icon on the upper right side (see screenshot above).  This signals readers that they can instantly click that link and read the news article inside Facebook (for example).  The biggest websites that used the AMP format include WordPress, Reddit, Bing, Ebay, and Pinterest.

AMP integration brings so much impact into your SEO these days because Google has already been prioritizing AMP pages to show up on top of the SERPs.  Again, this technology is created to cater the rising demand of better mobile user experience.  You should keep this in mind in doing SEO this year.

4. Content quality is king

You might be familiar with the popular tag line “Content is King”, but that is not the real deal these days.  It’s now “Content Quality is King”. The quality of your content can predict the outcome of your digital marketing campaign, more specifically in SEO.  There’s no point in producing content that would only be thrown into the gigantic trash bin of the World Wide Web.

One of the factors that can add quality to a content is the incorporation of ideas from industry leaders.  According to Demand Gen Report, 96% of B2B buyers demand content with more input from industry-thought leaders.

Ever since the inception of the internet, it’s always been about content.  But, if you want to compete and get an edge from your competitors, then you should prioritize quality all the time.  No matter how good your SEO strategy is, if your content is subpar, it will never help you accomplish your goals.

5. Backlinks are not the top ranking signal anymore

This is not news to anyone who has been keeping a tab in the latest happenings in the industry.  But, for those who are still not aware, backlinks have already continuously spiraled down in relevance through the years.  Why is this happening and how can this bring impact on how you do SEO this year?

Of course, there are still many who don’t agree on this.  See here Backlinko’s study last year wherein they said that backlinks are still the most important search ranking factor.  But, this is negated by Search Metrics.  Their study revealed that backlinks have continuously lose their relevance and no longer the ultimate factor in search ranking.  Here’s Search Metrics statement in detail.

“Whereas the importance of a well-established internal link structure of a domain can rarely be overestimated, backlinks no longer primarily determine search engine rankings. Depending on the topic, it is now sometimes possible for a website to achieve a high Google ranking even with far fewer links than its competitors.”

Search Metrics further explained why this is happening.

“This is partly driven by the increase in mobile search queries, as URLs on mobile devices are often liked or shared, but rarely actively linked. The increasing prominence of apps and app rankings in organic search is also contributing to the decline of backlinks’ importance.”

This finding has also been seconded by Search Engine Journals and other experts in the industry.

Of course, despite all these, backlinks are still part of the major search ranking factors.  It’s just that, compared to before, it is not the “supreme overlord” anymore.

Other trends that are also expected to affect how you do SEO this year include personal branding, prioritization of better user experience, the arrival of Progressive Web Apps (PWA),  content optimization for Facebook search, and long form content.

Final Thoughts

If you put all these trends in perspective, there’s one common denominator that always surfaces and that is mobile. Every trend that can affect how you do this year is a necessity because they make mobile user experience better.  

The “Mobilegeddon” that Google launched almost two years ago has now taken a full-swing effect not only in SEO but in all aspects of digital marketing.  Almost everything now is created in major consideration on how they appear on mobile.  Thus, if you are serious in optimizing your content for search, you should now put mobile optimization first before anything else.  Good luck!

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

from Dallas Internet Marketing Blog