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

Attorney Virtual Reality – Lawyer Online Marketing Expert Says Seeing is Believing

Why Using Virtual Reality Technology Is Important for Your Law Firm says Dallas based attorney marketing expert Qamar Zaman

Reaching new clients should be one of the main concerns your law firm has. Without a bit of marketing savvy, connecting with potential clients can be very difficult. Finding a way to embrace trending technology is a must for any law firm looking to compete in the 21st century. Staying on the cutting edge of marketing technology will allow you a chance to attract new customers with ease. Among the most popular pieces of technology on the market right now is virtual reality software.

Who hasn’t seen the videos of people riding a virtual roller coaster or skydiving with virtual reality apps? It is predicted that the revenue from virtual reality apps and equipment will reach 5.2 billion by the year 2018. Just like any other piece of new technology, marketers are finding ways to implement virtual reality technology into their advertising campaigns. Embracing and utilizing this new technology will allow you a unique opportunity to be the first to market in your area with a virtual reality app. Below are some of the reasons why using virtual reality technology is a great option for marketing your law firm to a wide array of potential clients.

Enhancing Your Law Firm’s Brand

The main concerns you should have when trying to market the services offered by your law firm is building your brand. While building a brand may sound like a fairly easy process, it is anything but. Are you curious about how virtual reality can help you enhance the recognition of your brand? Here are some of the things you can gain when using this technology to push your law firm’s brand.

• The Power of Apps- One of the most used virtual reality app markets out there is the Oculus App Store. Users scour this app market in search of cool new virtual reality programs to download. Putting your virtual reality app on this marketplace is a great way to expose your firm and your brand to thousands of people from around the world. Many have speculated that virtual reality markets like this will hold as much marketing power as social media networks in the next couple of years. Getting in on the ground floor of the virtual reality movement will benefit you greatly in the future.
• Appealing to a Wide Demographic- Having a virtual reality app on the various marketplaces will also allow your firm to appeal to a wider demographic. Many studies show the virtual reality app market appeals to a number of age and ethnic groups. This means you will be able to get more bang for your advertising dollar by embracing this new technology.
• Available on Many Different Devices- Another reason a virtual reality app can help you build your firm’s brand is by allowing you to spread your message on a variety of device platforms. Many of the largest electronic manufacturers, like Apple, are currently working on virtual reality headsets and apps. Being able to expose your firm to people regardless of the mobile devices  can help you grow your brand greatly.

The last thing you want to do is wait to get in on the virtual reality tech boom. Taking the plunge into virtual reality is a smart move for your law firm.

The Social Element of Virtual Reality Apps

Just like with any other piece of technology, virtual reality apps have a huge following. Most people who are passionate about this technology are anxious to share new developments and apps coming out of the virtual reality world. The virtual reality user base can offer benefits like:

• Sharing Their Experiences- Making a virtual reality app that is shareable should be one of your main concerns. Virtual reality enthusiasts are constantly sharing videos and posting about new apps on the market. With the right professional help, you will be able to get your app built and in the hands of virtual reality enthusiasts.
• Exert Your Influence- As the virtual reality market grows, influencers will rise to the top. Having a proven track record in the world of virtual reality will allow you to become an influencer. This influencer status will allow you to take your firm to the top.
• Get Information in the Right Hands- Your main goal as a lawyer should be getting information about the services you offer in the right hands. The virtual reality community is composed of a number of groups. Making the message conveyed through your app universal is a great way to spread the word about your firm and the help you can provide.

The story of virtual reality is being told through various social channels. Don’t miss out on your chance to be a part of the virtual reality conversation going on in all corners of the internet.

 

About the Author – Qamar Zaman – Attorney Marketing Specialist

Dallas, Texas based Qamar Zaman has over 20 years of online marketing experience. For over a decade Qamar and his team have helped many top law firms optimize and convert quality cases using digital marketing.

If your law firm needs helps with cutting edge marketing tools and you want to get quality cases from online marketing / lawyer marketing expert Qamar Zaman can help you.

When marketing expertise is needed to market a law firm, Qamar Zaman will be there to guide you in your pursuit of online dominance.

 

Media Contact:

Monica Richmond

Submit Press Release 123

Business Growth Consultant

972-646-2789

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

from Dallas Internet Marketing Blog

Common SEO Mistakes – Audit Your SEO Work Says Qamar Zaman SEO Audit Expert

Dallas based SEO & conversion rate optimization / SEO Audit Expert Says Look out!

Optimizing your website and blog for maximum search engine visibility continues to be important, even with the rise of other inbound marketing methods. In fact, content marketing, by far the most popular inbound marketing strategy, relies so much on solid SEO to be truly effective. It helps to think of content marketing as handling the content creation process, while SEO takes care of distribution and acceleration.

But because SEO practices rely on Google’s search engine updates, it also means that marketers must constantly adapt to the changing landscape of search, not to mention the changes in users’ search habits. Still, this doesn’t change the fact that SEO is still on top of many marketers’ priority list of strategies.

Obviously, it’s not easy trying to keep up with the most effective SEO techniques, so much so that many marketers end up making costly SEO mistakes. One way of ‘keeping up’ the smart way is knowing what not to do instead. In this guide, we go over a few of the most common SEO mistakes you should avoid to prevent your website’s search rankings from being hurt.

 

1. You’re Using Irrelevant Keywords

 

The point of using keywords is to make your website, your ads, and all your other content assets relevant.

So the question is: How relevant are your keywords?
One of the most common mistakes that can cripple an SEO campaign is focusing on short generic keywords (with high competition, mind you), and neglecting the value of long-tail keywords.

Source

While your business’ products and services might fall under one set of keywords that you think might be relevant, it’s also important to consider how your actual potential customers search for your brand and offerings on Google. And more often than not, people do so by using long-tail search terms, which usually fall outside of the typical marketer’s radar.

The key is to be more careful and thorough with your keyword research. Use as many tools as you can, whether it’s Google’s Keyword Planner, SEMrush, Moz, or Google Trends. Better yet, just ask your customers how they found you on Google and what search terms they used.

 

2. You’re Still Spamming Keywords

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Sure, in the old days, you could get away with stuffing your landing pages and blog posts with keywords to game search engines into boosting your rankings. But that was before Penguin and Panda, Google’s search algorithms that effectively ended blackhat SEO techniques and prioritized the creation of original high-quality content to create authority and better rankings.

And even back in the day, such practices were already deemed unethical because they provided little or no value at all to a brand’s customers. Unfortunately, the practice of stuffing content with target keywords continues today, even if Google has made it clear that spammy content will only result in a penalty to rankings.

But don’t get tricked into thinking keywords are the be all and end all of SEO. In fact, keyword placement might soon become irrelevant, with Google employing Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), an indexing method that allows the search engine bots to understand the content topic without the need for signaling them with target keywords.

In other words, a time may come that search engines will be so smart they’ll immediately understand what you’re trying to say in your website content or blog without having to rely on keywords.

 

3. Your Content is Misleading

While keywords should not be your only focus in your SEO efforts, it’s still important to make sure that whatever content you produce is actually related to your target keywords.

Say you want to rank for a certain keyword: restaurants in New York City. That’s fine, but any content you create should also focus on a topic related to that keyword—you can’t write about cookware or shopping tips.

This might seem like common sense, but many marketers actually make the mistake of trying to fit as many topics into a single content asset, which ends up not being relevant to the keywords it’s trying to aim for. A slightly different version of this mistake is to use too many keywords in one piece of content, giving it no direction.

Google wants you to use content that’s actually relevant to the search terms people are using. So if you’re going to use specific keywords, make sure your content answers the needs of people that use those terms when looking for you.

 

4. Your Content Isn’t Original

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If Google’s Panda update made anything clear, it’s that quality will always trump quantity, at least as far as content is concerned.

In the old days, it was common to duplicate or spin text-based content for as many private blog networks (PBNs) and other link farms. It worked for a while before Penguin and Panda too.

Fortunately, that practice has since been banned, resulting in a search engine penalty.

But if you’re smart, you don’t have to worry about best content practices. You’ll have made sure your content is:

• Original
• Well written
• Relevant

Copying and plagiarizing content from other sites is not only unethical, it might also result in your site being banned from the search engine results pages (SERPs). Remember that there are no shortcuts to content marketing.

 

5. You Have Low-Quality Links

Source

One of Google’s key ranking signals is a healthy link profile that clearly shows your site’s authority. To achieve this, you need high-quality links coming from relevant, high-quality content across a diverse array of sites.

Some key notes on effective link building include the following:

• More than anything, Google cares about how important the sites linking to you are.
• The higher the authority and the older the indexed age of the site, the more weight and influence it has over your rankings.
• Google also cares about the quality of the content your links are coming from—think news articles from media outlets.
• In addition, Google is also looking for diversity in IP links, as an added guarantee that they’re not manufactured from one source.
• Avoid ineffective anchor text. The anchor text should signal both the reader and the search engine about the context and value of the link. So, stay away from the practice of adding a link to the text ‘Click here.’

 

6. You’re Ignoring Your Meta Titles and Descriptions

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The process of optimizing your site and its content for a search engine like Google doesn’t end once you’ve inserted your target keywords into your landing pages and blog posts. Don’t ignore the value of optimizing your meta titles and descriptions, both of which are critical SEO elements that too many marketers ignore.

It’s not exactly a deal breaker for your rankings, but ignoring them means that you’re also ignoring the potential gains your content can get in search visibility. Just know that search engine bots will always crawl a site’s meta data. If it’s done properly, these factors can improve the performance of your landing pages and onsite content.

Likewise, don’t ignore the power of optimizing images. All images on your site and content should have relevant alt tags, which search bots will use to identify the content you have on your page, adding it the information affecting how your pages are indexed.

In Summary

SEO continues to be a crucial component of any inbound marketing strategy, especially on the content marketing side of things. While this guide should help you avoid some common SEO mistakes, be sure that you understand what challenges other marketers have faced in their efforts to improve their rankings. This will help you understand why these mistakes are so common in the first place.

Qamar Zaman offers SEO Audit Services. He can be reached at 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

SEO Expert Qamar Zaman Explains – 4 Ways Old SEO and New SEO Are Different

Lawyer SEO Expert Qamar Zaman Says, lawyers needs to make sure that they are keeping up with search engines and observing best practices when creating and executing a strategy.

After Panda and Penguin—Google’s sweeping search engine algorithm updates—the landscape of search engine optimization has never been the same since.

To cut the long story short, what used to work wonders back in the old days just doesn’t anymore.

But the good news is that, at its core, the goals and basic tenets of SEO haven’t changed. Sure, some tactics and best practices may be different, but SEO is still about connecting your brand with your target audience by increasing your search rankings.

Perhaps the best way to describe new school SEO is that it’s about optimizing for real people instead of search engines. But then again, this school of thought has already existed even in the old days of SEO.

For law firms, knowing the best practices for modern SEO is now more important than ever, as more and more providers of legal services jockey for online visibility.

So, how do you know which practices to avoid, and which ones you should be spending more time and resources on? Here are a few key differences between old and new SEO, which should tell you everything about the kind approach to take when marketing your law firm.

     1. Today’s SEO is About Engaging Customers, Not Just Rankings

Source

In the past, the thrust behind SEO was to focus on a few keywords and trying to rank for them on the search engine results pages (SERPs). Some search marketers believed that it didn’t matter how you did it, as long as you managed to grab and keep top rankings on Google.

However, Google’s Penguin and Panda updates saw to it that marketers could no longer game the system with link farming and keyword spamming.

Today, SEO is about managing your brand’s reputation, and making people want to interact with your brand by spreading quality content about your products and services.

For law firms, this means creating content that attracts your target audience and nurturing them until they become your actual clients. If you have this down pat, your rankings should improve through organic sharing/mentions, and natural linking across the Internet.

To put it simply, SEO is now rooted in traditional marketing and public relations, in that you’re trying to build your law firm’s authority through reputation management and savvy PR.

     2. Keywords are Still Important, But They’re Not the Only Thing Going On

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Anyone who’s been engaged in SEO before 2011 knows that for many years, the industry was always focused on one thing: keywords.

In the past, search marketers would focus on just one major keyword, hinging all their efforts on getting ranked for that specific search term, and only that term.

But as search engines continue to get smarter, the goal is now to think of what search engine users think and want when typing into the search engine. This has given rise to semantic SEO, which focuses on keyword intent and long tail keywords.

For law firms, this means the days of gaming Google with keywords are over, with the context behind searches now being taken into account when showing search results. In turn, this means your content has to be topnotch and relevant in order to generate traffic and improve your site’s rankings.

Relevance will be the primary factor affecting how effective your website content is. This will be both a challenge and opportunity for providers of legal services, possibly requiring them to change their website content and marketing campaigns.  But it can also place you in a prime position to beat your competitors in the SERPs.

Read more on semantic search here http://bit.ly/2ho8iQ6+

     3. Content for People, Not Search Engines

Although the concept behind using content to increase search engine rankings was to create content for readers, search marketers nevertheless deviated from its intended purpose.

In the old days, SEO was focused on creating content that would rank on the search engine results pages. This meant that keywords and keyword density took precedence before the actual quality of the content. And so, you had marketers flooding private blog networks with poor-quality and sometimes even plagiarized content stuffed with target keywords.

But Google’s Panda update pretty much put that practice to an end, forcing marketers to realize that content needs to be written for people, as it was always intended.

Law firms thus need to focus on creating content assets that are not only relevant, but also educate and solve their target audience’s problems.

Read my blog post content for people not for bots

     4. Link Building Should Be Natural and Earned

Source

To be fair, everyone knew what the best practices for link building were, even in the old days of SEO. Search marketers were already aware of black hat link building and that it was pretty much a way to trick search engines into increasing their rankings.

That didn’t stop many people from building links the shady way though. It was all about jamming as many links into content assets whenever possible, and posting them on as many websites as they could. It was pretty much open season for search marketers, which made postings on discussion forms and social bookmarking sites so popular.

But such questionable practices never had a chance of lasting, and so after Panda and Penguin, the only way to build links without suffering penalties is to do it the right way, as everyone should. In other words, links have to be natural and earned.

A link should be the result of forming a relationship between your law firm’s site and a relevant and authoritative party. Of course, there’s no rule prohibiting you from posting on forums and social bookmarking sites like Pinterest or Tumblr, but you should still be very selective on the sites you choose to avoid any penalties.

What Does All This Mean for Law Firms?

As with any other company, your law firm needs to make sure you are keeping up with search engines and observing best practices when creating and executing a strategy. Most of these changes aren’t actual changes in best practices per se, because they’ve actually been recommended since the early days of SEO—so it shouldn’t be too much of an adjustment if you’ve always put your audience first in your SEO efforts.

Still, it’s important to be fluid with your SEO methods and be ready to adapt to trends and changes when they benefit your marketing efforts.

Qamar Zaman is a renowned national SEO expert for lawyers. With his office based in Dallas, Qamar Zaman specializes in conversion rate optimization for law firms. He works with all types of law firms and helps them get improve ROI without increasing more on marketing cost.  

Follow Qamar on Huffington Post

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

from Dallas Internet Marketing Blog

Dallas Social Media Expert Explains – Impactful Social Media Trends in 2016

You should be able to draw some ideas and direction on how to improve your social media campaigns for 2017, says Qamar Zaman a Digital Marketing Expert from Dallas.

One only needs to look back at the state of social media marketing in 2016 to know that it was definitely a watershed year for the industry. It’s common for trends to come and go in the world of inbound marketing, but this year, we had a number of megatrends that made a huge impact on how brands market themselves on social media.

And as 2016 comes to an end, it helps to look back at your strategies and methods applied in 2016, evaluating if they generated positive ROI for your overall campaign.

Try to ask yourself these questions:

• How many social media platforms did you include in your SMM campaign?
• What kind of content assets received the most activity?
• Did you have a distribution strategy?

Remember these questions and your answers and see how they stack up next to the biggest social media marketing hits and trends of 2016.

1. Live Streaming

Sources

Live streaming has been called “the future of social media,” a claim that marketers seem to hear time and time again whenever a new trend comes into town. But this time around, it seems to be the real thing.

Live streaming pretty much blows the notion of video having to be heavily produced and edited to be effective out of the water. With live streaming, just about anyone can leverage the power of video and share whatever they record in real time.

For marketers, it means being able to use video in real time without having to spend on graphics, editing, and other production expenditures. It’s also a great tool for interacting with audiences, especially if you were to hold a question and answer session, a contest, or an interview.

Interest in live streaming apps first started in 2015 with Persicope, which was later acquired by Twitter. And things haven’t slowed down since, with Facebook Live taking the social media world by storm and used by brands to stream events and interact with their audiences in novel ways.

If you’re still skeptical of live streaming, just look at how Buzzfeed held a live stream event where they counted how many rubber band could be wrapped around watermelon until it burst.

Silly? Sure. But it drew it 807,000 viewers in real time. That kind of engagement is the stuff of marketing dreams.

       2. Social Media ‘Stories’

Snapchat’s Stories is the feature that launched the once-fledgling social media platform into the spotlight, where it would become the go-to app for young millennials. YouTube star and filmmaker Casey Neistat chalks up Snapchat’s popularity to its ephemeral nature—he points that it allows users to share a slice of their life in the moment, right then and there.

Snapchat took a while to develop the same kind of audience as Twitter or Facebook (but it does boast of a staggering 10 billion video views daily), so its Stories feature wasn’t really understood by non millennials for a while.

Source

It did, however, receive a new surge of attention after Instagram unveiled their own Stories feature, which some would say was lifted directly from Snapchat’s.

In any case, Stories offer a new way to tell, well, stories in ways that are very different from traditional videos uploaded on YouTube or Facebook. It’s more raw, more in the now, and more real—qualities that consumers are looking for in an increasingly ad-heavy world.

     3. Mobile, Mobile, Mobile

 

 

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Research from comScore shows that digital media time spent on smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices is now at a staggering 68 percent. Simply put, we’re spending more time consuming digital media on our phones than on any other platform. In contrast, people spend just a third of their total digital time on desktop computers.

We’ve arrived at a point where your next customer is probably going to visit you through a smartphone, so if you still don’t have a mobile-optimized site, you’re placing yourself at a serious disadvantage against your competition.

Mobile usage has always been on a steady rise from as early as 2008, but 2016 was a remarkable year, with several events happening on the mobile front. For example, consider the Pokémon Go craze, which caused people to spend so much time on their phones, some of them even got into car accidents.

For social media marketers, the challenge is to take advantage of this unprecedented immersion in mobile. One way to do that is by ensuring all your content is optimized for mobile devices.

Fortunately, both Google and Facebook have taken steps to make this easier for marketers, releasing Accelerated Mobile Pages and Instant Articles respectively, both of which essentially streamline website pages into faster and simpler versions for mobile screens.

     4. Gamification

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Fun and games were also big factors in the success of many social media apps in 2016. Perhaps the best example can be found in Snapchat’s filters, which transformed your face into animal heads, added a variety of effects (complete with music), and basically made taking selfies much more fun.

In hindsight, it might not have been very interesting to the non-Snapchat crowd, but it was certainly new and never before seen, at least as far as mainstream social media platforms go.

We also saw Facebook with their take on gamification, unveiling a series of new emoji reactions in addition to their like buttons. Even Apple got in on the fun with a new emoji system that allowed you to supersize, predict, and replace emojis.

     5. Influence and Confirmation Bias

In 2016, we also realized just how frighteningly powerful social media is as a platform. You only need to look at how social media played a role in shaping public opinion over the U.S. presidential election. It’s no secret that social media gives users more control over who and what they listen to, which in turn has led people to boxing themselves inside echo chambers where the only information they’re exposed is what they agree with.

The problem is that social media platforms are also rife with fake news—an issue that Facebook vehemently denies had anything to do with the stunning victory of Donald Trump.

In any case, we might expect to see the major social media platforms to take a more proactive approach against fake news. Most recently, we saw Facebook and Google moving to take fake news sites off their ad network. For marketers, this means more attention must be placed on content quality and accuracy if they don’t want to be kicked off or penalized.

In Summary

Ultimately, by reviewing these trends and events, you should be able to draw some ideas and direction on how to improve your social media campaigns for 2017. The way things are going, social media will only continue to grow next year and beyond. Your job is to anticipate what happens next by understanding the course of social media in the past.

Did you read my SEO Forecast for 2017

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

from Dallas Internet Marketing Blog

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

Dallas SEO and Lawyer Internet Marketing Expert Qamar Zaman Goes Over 2017 SEO Trends

As the new year approaches we remain skeptical about things that will good on the internet marketing front and help us achieve our digital marketing targets. Does internet of things have any surprise for us in 2017.

2016 was more than eventful.

Mobile internet marketing grew and SEO trends shifted due to constant Google updates.

This has been a feature of the world wide web that has transformed with lightning speed over the years. With the completion of 2016, one may be uneasy of 2017 and how web marketing, particularly SEO trends, will proceed.

SEO is the first marker of internet marketing as it helps to improve the online visibility of your web presence on search engines. It will be beneficial monitor how SEO will progress in 2017.

Forbes contributes its thoughts on what might be the SEO trends in the coming year.

7 Online Marketing Trends That Will Dominate 2017

2016 was an amazing year for online marketing, but the industry never slows down. We haven’t quite hit the end of the year, but it’s time to start thinking about how the industry’s going to change in 2017—and how you can prepare accordingly.

Marketing is a field dominated by those with the foresight to plan ahead, anticipate changes, and jump on trends before your competitors do, so take note of these trends to come and prepare for them. You don’t have to use all of them, but you should be aware of their existence if you want to continue being competitive in your industry.

http://bit.ly/2hh89hC

Mobile has grown over the years and will continue to grow in 2017

Mobile’s growth in the past led way to the prediction of 2016 being the year of the mobile, and it certainly was. The upcoming 2017 will see continual growth as more people adapt to the use of smartphone and mobile tablets.   

• Its Mobile social internet world
• Its Mobile search
• Its about Mobile online purchases
• Its about Mobile online payments

Everyone who searches on the go, does so with a purpose. The intent is to reach a destination, locating a coffee shop, or buying online. The world has adopted a somewhat changed intent as compared to when we used to surf the net through desktops and laptops. We search differently when we are in stage 1 of the buying cycle, education begins  however, we are using mobile handheld devices as compared to desktops.

MORE AND MORE MOBILE

1 purchase on a mobile every 15 seconds in Europe, over 50% of local searches on a smartphone in the world, 50% of internet connections made on mobile in France.  The use of mobile is already preponderant and will intensify in 2017.

The brands and businesses that  improve the appearance responsive to their site will draw all the better their game Also, a complementary pattern emerges. Think of a mixed-use PC / laptop / tablet. As many carriers, that continue to be predominantly used. |Business2Cummunity

Top Mobile Marketing Trends for 2017

The more individuals become contingent to phones, precisely smartphones, the trend of mobile marketing becomes increasingly important and critical for the modern brand. The sooner you understand mobile marketing, the better for your business. With time, few trends have become obvious and approaching towards development of business. Ignoring the trend could damage your business greatly. Here is the list of trends that you might see in 2017.

http://bit.ly/2hh8alT

Video marketing will remain an IMPORTANT internet marketing medium in 2017

Among the types of content that will be used and those that will dominate the internet marketing horizon, VIDEO is and will remain an important online marketing medium.

• YouTube has over a billion users, which is almost a third of the internet population.
• It’s estimated that content delivery network traffic will deliver over half of all internet video traffic by 2019.
• On mobile devices, users spend more than 40 minutes watching videos.

Source |Envato.com

So what are they predicting?

Videos everywhere: Videos in emails, Videos in blogs, even videos in email subject lines? People are consuming videos more than ever, Facebook videos, videos ads, videos in websites etc.

The likelihood for consumers to have multiple devices is growing. Because of this expect in 2017 that cross-device video consumption will increase. Consumers are more likely to seek out videos from multiple different social media channels and websites. On top of that you can expect consumers to be watching video content from a traditional format, while also watching content from a modern format like a phone or tablet at the same time. | Boast.io

7 Video Marketing Trends for 2017 (and What They Mean for You)

Social media is always in flux, and one of the biggest shifts right now is video.

The development of improved mobile technology has enabled widespread video consumption – available always and at anytime. And although video content isn’t new, it’s certainly growing, and will to continue to expand in 2017 and beyond.

Check out the following video statistics reported by Insivia:

• One-third of all online activity is spent watching video
• The average user is exposed to 32.3 videos in a month
• 75% of online video viewers have interacted with an online video ad this month
• 75% of executives watch work related videos on business websites at least once a week
• 36% of online consumers trust video ads

http://bit.ly/2gnq4q1

Closing

Experts keep watch on how things will progress in the world of web marketing. The online marketers who have been, from year to year, working hard can offer expert online marketing advice and can help in carrying over your web marketing to the next year without letting your business disappear online.

About the Author:

Qamar Zaman can help in this transition. Qamar’s web marketing expertise spans over 20 years. He’s helped over 25,000 clients worldwide to achieve online marketing success. Qamar is a Dallas, U.S. based online marketing expert who can be reached at 972-437-8942.  

Follow Qamar Zaman Blog on Huffington Post.

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

from Dallas Internet Marketing Blog