Attorney web marketing: 3 tips for staying in Google’s good graces

If you write content or pay for content on your attorney website you may have heard about the infamous Google Panda / Farmer update. In short, Google is trying to weed out low-quality, spam-like content from the top of their search results page.

In an unusual move, Google has tried to explain their update, to give website owners more guidance about how to provide a better user experience. Here are a few things we want to highlight for attorneys trying to dominate the search marketplace:

1. Trust: do you provide real, trustworthy information? It is easy to focus too much on optimizing content for websites and forget that you're creating content for people who have suffered a traumatic life event, like a serious accident or death of a family member. Make sure that you or your content provider is keeping your potential client and their needs in mind.
2. Go deep: you may have heard us nag our clients to post at least 30 pieces of quality content a month. It can be tempting to post "shallow" content just to get something out there, but this can backfire on you. Google has made it clear that you need to provide original, thoughtful content from an expert's perspective if you want to rank highly. No shallow, fluffy articles written to appease the search engines.
3. Quality control: as an attorney, you probably make sure to dot your i's and cross your t's when preparing a case. Are you doing the same thing with your ENTIRE website? Google has made clear that they don't like spelling errors or broken links. We take care of this for our "big dog" clients, but if you aren't in that group then you need to invest some time and effort in making sure that every piece of content on your site is properly edited, well-written and correctly linked.

If you suspect you've been cutting corners, there is hope. Google has indicated that if you clean up your act, that is if you delete poor content or merge "shallow" pages together to make them more substantive, or if you clean up your site's editing and linking standards, you can start ranking higher.

Tired of trying to keep up with all this online marketing business? We can help. Contact our awesome sales team at 1.888.886.0939 or fill out an online contact form to share our frustrations with us.

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