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How law firms and solicitors can use search marketing to increase traffic and conversions to their websites.
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@annstanley
How law firms should really use search?
byAnn Stanley
September 2012
@annstanley
Understanding Google search results
Ads - PPC
Display options
Organic or natural results
Universal results – maps, news, shopping etc....
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Google – local businesses
Ads - PPC
Display options
Organic or natural results
Universal results – maps, news, shopping etc....
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Listings dynamicallyordered bybid price & relevancy
2
User submitssearch
1Pay Per Click in Action
User clicks on paid link, triggering payment to Google
3
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Managing PPC – what’s important• Granular set-up of the account to increase relevancy – 100-1000’s of
keyphrases in discrete ad groups (with a matching ad and landing page) • Quality Score is Google’s measure of relevancy – it affects your position
and how much you pay (e.g. QS of 8/10 you pays half as compared with 4/10 to achieve the same position)
• Click through rate – pause phrases and ads with a CTR below <1%, otherwise this drags down your QS
• Position and bidding – you may have to bid lower (cost per click) and settle for position 3-6 to avoid the bidding war of position 1-3, where the CPC will be too high!
• Cost per acquisition (CPA) – most sites have a typical conversion rate of 1%. Your cost per sale or lead will be 100 x your cost per click – can you afford this?
• Conversion and revenue optimisation – invest in what works (keyphrases and ads) and pause what does!
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A search engine is made of three basic components:
A Spider or RobotAn automated browser, it searches the web for new websites and changes to websites then views the web pages and strips out the text content
A Storage System or DatabaseA record of all the pages viewed by the Spider
A Matching Process or Relevancy AlgorithmThe rules that tell the search engine how to determine what would be relevant to your search
How Search Engines Work
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Check that your site is indexed?
Do you have keyphrases in your url, title and description?
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Example of SEO Page plan with monthly searches vs. competition
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• Title Tag• Meta Tags (description, keyword etc)• Content• Heading content• Frequency of phrases (how many times they are
mentioned)• Density of phrases (proportion of the text)• Internal Link structure with anchor text)• Image optimisation (file names, Alt tags)• Avoid Spam techniques and over-optimising• Create new ongoing content on your site e.g. a
blog
On-page factors
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Steps to optimise your website1. Carryout keyphrase research (where possible use PPC data)2. Prioritise your keyphrase by high search volume and low competition
(does the keyphrase convert?)3. Produce a topic and a page plan (ie which pages are to be optimised with
which phrases)4. Write new optimised content or existing and new pages, (URL, title,
description, headers, keyphrase density, anchor text, image optimisation)5. Upload your content through your CMS and add new links from the
homepage for new pages e.g. in the footer (you may need to get your developer to do this)
6. Add new optimised content every week via a blog 7. Share your content through social networking8. Review results using Webmaster Tools and Analytics
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• Domain age• Domain name• Filename/full URL• Directory listings• External Link Structure• Anchor text of inbound links• Page quality of inbound links• Social bookmarks• Reviews and testimonials• Social indicators especially Google +1 and Facebook
“Shares”
Off-page factors
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• Content that people will want to link to• Free stuff• Blog posts• Useful documents/articles/whitepapers• Online tools• Video and audio
• Your content on other sites• Article syndication site• Guest blogging• Online PR• Directories
Getting Links
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Importance of social• Direct traffic - e.g. Brand pages (Facebook,
Google Plus, Twitter, LinkedIn) • Community, loyalty and word of mouth -
(Facebook Likes, Twitter, Reddit, Digg, Delicious)
• SEO benefit - Referrals, links and social indicators (Google Plus, Facebook Shares, social bookmarking)
@annstanleySocial networking for businesses (personal vs. company profiles)
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Call tracking technology - dynamic phone number creation with each visit
• New phone tracking software is now available to determine the keywords that triggered a phone call from your website
• Ideal for B2B and brochure sites where conversions are mainly over the phone, rather than by online forms
• Dynamic code is added to your website, which generates unique phone numbers every visit
• If the number is called it is redirected to your normal phone number, with the option to record the call
• The users’ referral data is sent to the tracking software and a virtual page is fired and tracked in Analytics
• A Goal can be set-up in Analytics and imported back into AdWords to allow “Call Optimisation”
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Panda?
LSI – Latent semantic indexinghttp://searchenginewatch.com/article/2104571/Google-Panda-6-Months-Out-Still-Has-People-Baffled
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Optimise for the user – not search engines
• Making sure a site is optimised to provide a rich, relevant and rewarding experience for visitors is the best way to avoid Panda penalties, which means:– No duplicate content– All pages to have unique, relevant and useful content
(even the 1000s of product pages on ecommerce sites!)
– Good levels of interaction on site (low bounce rates, inbound links to ‘deep’ pages, social mentions etc…)
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Penguin• Google Algorithm change to “penalise” sites with:
– Unnatural and poor quality links (very high numbers, high proportion of “exact match anchor text”, links on every page of a website, poor quality source of links)
– Search spam – keyword stuffing• P-Day = 24th April – if you had a significant drop in
traffic then you were affected by Penguin update• You may have received an “unnatural links” warning
in your Webmaster tools• Clean your site up, remove bad links (on other sites)
and put in a “reconsideration request”• Bing has introduced a “disavow” feature in Bing
webmaster tools. Google expected to follow.
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What next?• Device responsive design, so you have one Universal website
that works on all devices• Only 7 organic results on Page 1 of Google!• Google Plus will become the “New Google” (i.e. integration of
many features in one platform/interface)• More emphasis on content and quality, so an excellent
opportunity for marketers to exploit copy writing skills and the knowledge base within the company
• Social will become more important to search and will also become the “new spam”
• More change, more innovation and more surprises!
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Thank You
Ann Stanley@annstanley
www.anicca-solutions.com
