In today’s world of high tech gadgets and unimaginable information at our fingertips, there are tons of attorneys out there that rely on high search engine rankings to continue the growth of their client base. With more than 80% of consumers performing an online search before hiring a legal professional, it’s hard to discount the impact high rankings could have on a particular attorney’s ability to gain more clients. With that said, Google has recently performed an update to their hummingbird algorithm that many experts are calling the biggest Google update we’ve seen since the year 2,000. So, one of the biggest questions for search-minded attorneys is, will this update affect my practice?
So Will This Have Any Affect On Attorneys?
To be honest, the update may or may not have an affect on your overall ability to build your client base through search. However, it will most likely have an affect on how that happens.
Throughout the past 15+ years, Google has been the biggest provider in search; and has gathered quite a bit of data with regard to how consumers search for information. With all of this data, Google now has the ability to not only display results relevant to words in a search, but understand the true reason for the search. Based on the context of the search, Google is now going to make an attempt to show you the results that will answer your particular questions; instead of simply providing tons of information about a broad topic.
This Is Great News For Some, Bad News For Others
What Attorneys This Is Great News For
The attorneys that have taken part in quality, white hat marketing techniques will benefit the most from this. That’s because these attorneys aren’t optimizing for particular keywords. Instead, they’re doing the following…
- Maintaining A Blog - Instead of focusing on a small group of keywords, attorneys who have been taking part in quality online marketing have been maintaining a blog; essentially focusing on answering the common questions that consumers may have. As a result, these attorneys already have quite a bit of incredibly valuable and detailed information hosted on their blogs. As a result, when consumers search for these answers, attorneys who have maintained a quality blog that provides valuable answers to pressing questions will most likely show up for searches associated with what they do. What those searches may be, who knows! Nonetheless, if you provide quality answers through a blog, you’re going to show up.
- Focusing On Their Audience - Great attorneys with great marketing strategies not only make an effort, but focus quite a bit of their efforts on understanding their audience. As a result, these attorneys have pages on their websites that their target audience will find invaluable; leading to more social shares and interaction. These signals will show Google that the attorney associated with them provides great content that people find useful!
- Engaging With Their Communities - To get a better understanding of what your local community expects from you, it’s important to be an active member of that community. By engaging with their communities, attorneys get more of an understanding of exactly what their audience wants to see; and can provide that on their websites; ultimately leading to more traffic and more clients.
What Attorneys This News Is Bad For
If you’re doing things in a positive way online, chances are that this updated is great news for you. On the other hand, if you’re trying to fool the search engines into showing you on the first page, this is definitely bad news. If you take part in the following, this update is bad news for you…
- Keyword Optimization - For a long time, many internet savvy attorneys have been focusing on high rankings for specific keywords. For instance, they want to rank for keywords like “Personal injury attorney in (insert city here)”. However, Google has found that consumers search all kinds of terms for this particular keyword and each search has an intended purpose. So, if you’re simply optimizing for a specific group of keywords, you’re going to miss out on the vast majority of searches associated with what you do.
- Displaying Thin Content - The biggest part of this update is to understand what searchers what to see, and show them detailed content that will answer their questions. Many attorneys have tons of pages of thin content where the only thing different in each page is the city name…that doesn’t fly any more! Thin content just won’t work!
Final Thoughts
If you’re an attorney looking to increase your online presence, it’s become more important than ever to use white hat strategies. If you’d like professional help making your firm shine, contact us today!
The post Attorneys | Will Google’s Change Affect You appeared first on ControlYourCity.com, LLC..