You’ve Got Questions About SEO, and We’ve Got Answers!

I've got a bit of bad news. As you feared, it's not as simple as it should be to find mistakes in your local listings and clean them up. Is it possible to do so? Absolutely, and we will show you how in this article. But is it an easy, ten-minute task? No. However, with a little perseverance and patience, we have faith that you can do it. Here's how.

To clean up your local citations, we suggest that you use the following websites:

• Yext. Yext is a fantastic service that finds everywhere your business is listed. This can be a long, long list. In addition to just finding your local citations, Yext will scan all of these listings, showing you everywhere there is incorrect information, missing citations, or missing information. This includes mistakes in your phone number, address, and business name—all of which are crucial to the success of your local listing.
• Whitespark. If your local listings are correct, but you don't feel you're doing enough to take advantage of local search, try using Whitespark. This service will find new, niche-specific local citation sources that you aren't taking advantage of. It will also give you links to your current listings, allowing you to ensure the information found there is correct.  

Once you find any mistakes in your local listings, it's time to fix them. Some of the fixes can be as simple as logging into your account and changing a "5" to a "7" in your phone number, but others will be much harder to correct. It can mean contacting each host of the listing sites where your information is wrong and getting them to fix it. And while doing so is possible—we do it all the time—the process can be lengthy and daunting.

There Is Good News, Too

The first bit of good news is that you know what local listings are, and you recognize how important they are and want to ensure that you're getting them right. Huzzah! Also, you have come to us for the answers. At Foster, we are experts at creating and fixing local listings. We love digging into your listings, cleaning them up, and then watching as your local traffic goes through the roof. Seriously, what could be better than that?!

The other good news is that you now have the answer to your question, and you have a choice: go it alone and fix your local citations by yourself or enlist our local-citation cleaning team to help.

Is Your Law Firm Or Medical Practice Website Getting Enough Exposure? Foster Web Marketing Can Help With Our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Services  

Are you concerned that your website isn't pulling in enough traffic to keep you swimming in leads? Do you need help with SEO for your legal or medical website? If so, Foster Web Marketing can help! Please contact us online or call our office directly at 866.497.6199 to schedule your free consultation with our experienced marketing team. We have been helping clients throughout the United States and internationally since 1998 and are confident we can help you not only reach, but exceed your goals.

Local citations are other websites on the internet where your business name, address, and phone number are listed. Back in the day, the only place you had to get your local listing right was the Yellow Pages. Now, your listing is scattered all over the internet and, when incorrect, has the potential to snowball into an avalanche of misinformation and missed opportunities.

How the Local Citation Snowball Gets Rolling

The three big names in local search are Yahoo, Bing, and Google. However, there are many other sites that pull your information from the big guys and one another. So if your information is incorrect on any of your local listings, it's likely listed incorrectly on multiple sites. 

When this happens, your listing and your local SEO efforts could be buried under tons of incorrect listings, suffocating your local search power and threatening the life of your practice.   

I'm Listed Where?!

Local search is a big deal, so there is a good chance that your information is listed in more places than you know. To find out where your practice is listed, we suggest using the free website Yext. Yext will scan local listing sites and let you know where—and how—you're listed on each of the 50 most popular sites, apps, and maps.

This handy tool can help you find any mistakes in your listings. However, it will be up to you to correct mistakes everywhere your local citations are incorrect. If there are many mistakes across many sites, this can be an extremely time-consuming process.

Another way to check your local citations is to request our free website audit. We will check to see if your local citations are correct and, if they're not, can take over the process of repairing all your listings. 

Is Your Law Firm Or Medical Practice Website Getting Enough Exposure? Foster Web Marketing Can Help With Our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Services  

Are you concerned that your website isn't pulling in enough traffic to keep you swimming in leads? Do you need help with SEO for your legal or medical website? If so, Foster Web Marketing can help! Please contact us online or call our office directly at 866.497.6199 to schedule your free consultation with our experienced marketing team. We have been helping clients throughout the United States and internationally since 1998 and are confident we can help you not only reach, but exceed your goals.

In late 2011, Google started to encrypt its searches for users who were signed into their Gmail accounts while completing searches in Google. This resulted in an increase in “not provided” keyword data being recorded in Google Analytics. In layman’s terms, this basically meant that, as a website owner, you couldn’t see the search phrase used by someone who found your website while signed into his Gmail account.

Although this was a road bump for search marketers to analyze keyword data, we rarely saw the percentage of “not provided” above 30 percent for lawyers.

In recent weeks online marketers have noticed a steady rise in the percentage of “not provided” data being passed into Google Analytics. This all came to a head on Sunday night when Google redirected all searches completed in its search engine to encrypted search. This has increased the percentage of “not provided” for organic Google searches to 95 percent or more.

What Does This Increase in “Not Provided” Keyword Data Mean for My Website?

First off, this new change will in no way change the performance of your website. What it does mean is that there is going to be a shift in the way online marketers can analyze organic traffic to your site. Some things to keep in mind:

• Don’t freak out. Google is not the only search engine out there and others still provide this keyword data.
• This should only reinforce the fact that you should not be focusing on high-level vanity keywords, but instead long-tailed search phrases that convert.
• As always, write content to inform and engage human visitors to your site and not to help improve your rankings in search engines.
• Choose another yardstick. There is a variety of other measurements to help you understand the success of your law firm’s SEO program.

If you are worried about how this news will affect your law firm’s search engine optimization, please do not fret. Foster Web Marketing’s team of attorney SEO specialists can help make sure your website is performing well even after this big piece of news from the king of search engines. Schedule a free website audit to make sure your online marketing efforts are working the way they should be.

Is Your Law Firm Or Medical Practice Website Getting Enough Exposure? Foster Web Marketing Can Help With Our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Services  

Are you concerned that your website isn't pulling in enough traffic to keep you swimming in leads? Do you need help with SEO for your legal or medical website? If so, Foster Web Marketing can help! Please contact us online or call our office directly at 866.497.6199 to schedule your free consultation with our experienced marketing team. We have been helping clients throughout the United States and internationally since 1998 and are confident we can help you not only reach, but exceed your goals.

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Before we discuss the difference between a referring domain and a backlink, it's best that we get on the same page by going over a few basic terms.

Just the Facts, Ma'am  

• Domain: A domain is an organization's unique descriptor listed within a URL. For example, in the URL “http://www.honkeytonk.edu,” honkeytonk is the domain name.
• Referring Domain: Also known as a ref domain, a referring domain is a domain that backlinks are coming from.
• Backlink: A backlink is a link on another website that points to your site.

So a referring domain is where your backlinks are coming from, and backlinks are the links on the websites that link back to your site. Think of the referring domain as a phone number and backlinks as the number of times you've gotten a call from that particular number.

Why You Need to Know the Difference

If you've dug into your backlink profile or had us do so with a free website analysis, then you have seen how many referring domains and backlinks are associated with your website. But what do they mean?

What you're looking for is the ratio of referring domains to backlinks. If you have a ton of backlinks and not very many referring domains, your backlink profile is very weak. For example, if you have 10 referring domains and 110 backlinks, Google is likely dinging your site for shady backlinks, which negatively impacts your page rank.

They punish high backlinks and low referring domains because, when a high number of backlinks come from a few sites, it's almost always a paid linking scheme, such as a private blog network. Increasingly, search engines are de-indexing blog networks. If your website is connected to the de-indexed network, your ranking will be affected. Because of this, it's best to stay far away from paid blog networks.

Getting Better Backlinks

If you find that your backlinks are all coming from a few referring domains, you have some work to do. Begin by reading our advice on the best way to get backlinks for SEO. Using these tips, begin to slowly increase the number of backlinks pointing to your site. This will take time, but it's worth the effort. Google is always on the lookout for quality, natural backlinks and will reward you handsomely if you are able to obtain them.  

Is Your Law Firm Or Medical Practice Website Getting Enough Exposure? Foster Web Marketing Can Help With Our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Services  

Are you concerned that your website isn't pulling in enough traffic to keep you swimming in leads? Do you need help with SEO for your legal or medical website? If so, Foster Web Marketing can help! Please contact us online or call our office directly at 866.497.6199 to schedule your free consultation with our experienced marketing team. We have been helping clients throughout the United States and internationally since 1998 and are confident we can help you not only reach, but exceed your goals.

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When done right, local SEO has the potential to not only help your law firm, but explode your practice.

This is because Google and other search engines, like Yahoo!, recognize that their users are increasingly demanding high-quality, local results. To give their users—your potential clients—what they want, search engines have improved their algorithms to ensure that searchers get exactly what they want.  

Getting in on the Local SEO Game

To get you started, I'm going to cover the basics of local SEO—what you need to know now about local search SEO:

• Grow where you're planted, or move. It's important that you know that local search results on Google work best when your business is located within the city you want to be found in. For example, if your personal injury law office is in Grapevine, but you want to be found in Dallas—and the Dallas personal injury market in Dallas is flooded—you may be out of luck. While you can and should put some effort into getting found organically in Dallas (e.g. including Dallas-centric keyword phrases in your content), there isn't much you can do in Google Local or Google Maps to get found. Some attorneys choose to move their offices or open a satellite office in order to get in on a more desirable city. Alternately, you can increase your efforts in Grapevine in order to be the top local attorney in your home city.
• The devil is in the details. If critical information—business name, address, or phone number—is incorrect on any listing site, your local search SEO power will take a hit. So, if you are Foreman & Gary on one site and Gary and Foreman on another, or if your address is off by just one number, your firm won't be easily found during local searches.
• Realize the power of reviews. Reviews are an important piece of the local SEO puzzle. Reviews give consumers confidence in your services, and they send signals to Google that you are a business worthy of page one. If you don't have any online reviews, or if you only have a few, it's time to get an online review strategy.

Is Your Law Firm Or Medical Practice Website Getting Enough Exposure? Foster Web Marketing Can Help With Our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Services  

Are you concerned that your website isn't pulling in enough traffic to keep you swimming in leads? Do you need help with SEO for your legal or medical website? If so, Foster Web Marketing can help! Please contact us online or call our office directly at 866.497.6199 to schedule your free consultation with our experienced marketing team. We have been helping clients throughout the United States and internationally since 1998 and are confident we can help you not only reach, but exceed your goals.

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Trying to figure out Google’s and other websites’ analytics can be extremely confusing. What do all of the ratios and rankings actually mean? Since bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits compared to visitors who view more than one page of a website, the best way to improve it is to keep visitors on your site.

So let us answer this question instead: “What can I do to keep people from leaving my website?” Here are five simple things you can do:

1. Add well-written content. Studies have shown that one of the main reasons visitors will click away from a site and proceed to block it from search results is because of misspellings and poor grammar. (Along with poor grammar, here are some more stats on why people bounce.)
2. Add relevant content. Nothing will make a visitor leave in a click of frustration faster than discovering that your article had nothing to do with what you claimed it was about. Fluffing meta descriptions to draw people to the page will backfire if the page isn’t actually about what is described.
3. Add call-to-actions to your content. Give people a reason to keep browsing through your site. Phrases like “check out this article on how to prevent car accidents” or “request a free copy of our book” will encourage readers to check out other pages.
4. Add credibility to your content. Offering a wealth of common-sense information on your website at no charge shows that you are willing to take the time to educate the community. This shows that you are most likely an expert in your field.
5. Add lots of content. Give people something to look at. It makes sense that a visitor would leave your site if there are only five total pages to view. Providing readers with pages and pages of options increases the chances that they will stick around for a while.

Is Your Law Firm Getting Enough Exposure? Foster Web Marketing Can Help With Our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Services  

Are you concerned that your website isn't pulling in enough traffic to keep you swimming in leads? Do you need help with SEO for your legal or medical website? If so, Foster Web Marketing can help! Please contact us online or call our office directly at 866.497.6199 to schedule your free consultation with our experienced marketing team. We have been helping clients throughout the United States and internationally since 1998 and are confident we can help you not only reach, but exceed your goals.

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Determining the best keywords for a website used to be easy when search engines like Google put most of their ranking emphasis on whatever one- or two-word phrases you chose to hyperlink. Since then, virtually all businesses have jumped on the website bandwagon and become aware (if not savvy) about SEO. 

Now things are much, much different. While content is still King, the phrases and words you use are now only helpful if they have actual substance and meaning. 

This means that you now have to do a little leg work. You must research what keywords will best suit your practice and utilize them across the all of your marketing practices, including in your videos, your social media, and on your website. 

But how exactly are you supposed to find the keywords you need when you don't even know where to start? We know that the process of maintaining SEO can be confusing and a huge challenge, which is why our FWM SEO gurus put together a list of the top ways to determine keywords:

1. Searcher intent. Take an afternoon to sit down and really think about what went through your clients' heads immediately before they made the decision to contact you. If you're a personal injury attorney, perhaps it was figuring out who would pay for the medical bills after the car accident. If you are a podiatrist, perhaps it was their foot pain when running.  Ask yourself "Why would they choose you over your competitor?" Once you put yourself in your potential client's shoes, you will soon realize that "Gotham City attorney" or "Metropolis plastic surgeon" no longer cuts it as a keyword phrase. 
2. Avoid highly competitive keywords. We've already established that vague keywords like "Gotham City attorney" are becoming useless, but another reason to avoid them is because they are overused. You wouldn't keep spending money on a raffle if the odds of winning were very slim, so why would you keep pumping time and effort (a.k.a. money) into keywords in which you might never be found due to stiff local or national competition?
3. Use layman's terms and avoid legal, medical or business-specific jargon. After decades of working in your chosen field, you are more than familiar with terms you use everyday. But you must remember that many of the people you are trying to reach have never even needed your services before, so you must use common terminology in your content and keywords.
4. Use tools like Google's Keyword Tool or Google Analytics to get a jump-start on what people are currently searching to find your site.

Is Your Law Firm Or Medical Practice Website Getting Enough Exposure? Foster Web Marketing Can Help With Our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Services  

Are you concerned that your website isn't pulling in enough traffic to keep you swimming in leads? Do you need help with SEO for your legal or medical website? If so, Foster Web Marketing can help! Please contact us online or call our office directly at 866.497.6199 to schedule your free consultation with our experienced marketing team. We have been helping clients throughout the United States and internationally since 1998 and are confident we can help you not only reach, but exceed your goals.

Although it seems like you should be aiming for a broad audience with your attorney search engine marketing, the most effective online marketing efforts focus on a narrow audience with unique concerns. When you first get started with online marketing, you should be thinking about your “unique selling proposition,” which is really just a fancy way of describing what makes your law firm special and what you have to offer to your clients. 

So why does it matter? Here are just a few reasons why your unique selling proposition is so important to online marketing:

• It should be at the core of your overall online marketing strategy. It can be a challenge to stand out from the crowd of online competitors. Getting a clear idea of what makes your services unique helps you build up a strong attorney marketing strategy that really showcases what you have to offer.
• It’s easier to target the clients who need your services. Effective attorney search engine marketing focuses on attracting your ideal clients—and your ideal client is largely attracted by the things that make you special. Figuring out what sets you apart from your competitors helps you focus your marketing attention on your unique areas of interest and expertise, which brings in more relevant contacts.  
• It helps you establish an online “personality.” What is the personality of your law firm? How do you work with the clients who visit your office? A big part of what makes your law firm special is what you bring to the table in experience and personality. Letting your personality show online helps potential clients get to know you and makes you stand out from the cold, dry content on other legal sites. 

Is Your Law Firm Or Medical Practice Website Getting Enough Exposure? Foster Web Marketing Can Help With Our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Services  

Are you concerned that your website isn't pulling in enough traffic to keep you swimming in leads? Do you need help with SEO for your legal or medical website? If so, Foster Web Marketing can help! Please contact us online or call our office directly at 866.497.6199 to schedule your free consultation with our experienced marketing team. We have been helping clients throughout the United States and internationally since 1998 and are confident we can help you not only reach, but exceed your goals.

It really depends. Some attorneys start seeing results immediately, and other attorneys need a few months—or even a year—to tweak their online marketing campaigns and start building traffic. It’s important to understand that SEO isn’t a one-time thing or an overnight solution. Great SEO takes a little time and attention. 

Here are just a few of the factors that can affect how soon you start seeing results from your online marketing efforts—and how effective those results are:

• How relevant your content is to potential clients. If potential clients start finding your site and fail to find anything useful, your page rankings are going to struggle. Make sure you’re offering something that is meaningful and relevant to your clients—something that encourages them to reach out to you. 
• How targeted your keywords are. The keywords you use to attract traffic should be relevant to the types of clients you’re really looking for. Think about your ideal client and the types of words or phrases he or she might use to find you online. 
• How much competition you face. If you are in a highly competitive market with an active online presence, you may struggle more in the beginning than other businesses in less competitive markets. It may be difficult to compete for the most desirable keywords, and it can help to apply your creativity and be vigilant in updating content regularly. 

Is Your Law Firm Or Medical Practice Website Getting Enough Exposure? Foster Web Marketing Can Help With Our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Services  

Are you concerned that your website isn't pulling in enough traffic to keep you swimming in leads? Do you need help with SEO for your legal or medical website? If so, Foster Web Marketing can help! Please contact us online or call our office directly at 866.497.6199 to schedule your free consultation with our experienced marketing team. We have been helping clients throughout the United States and internationally since 1998 and are confident we can help you not only reach, but exceed your goals.

When it comes to search engine bots ranking your web page, meta descriptions don’t count for very much. However, having a pithy, interesting, and well-written meta description can greatly help your click-through rate and help attract readers to your website.

Here are a few SEO meta description tips to keep in mind when writing content for your attorney website:

• The best meta descriptions are ones that very accurately describe the content on your page.
• Never cut and paste the same generic meta description onto multiple pages.
• Keep your meta description under 160 characters so that it is not likely to be cut off when it appears in the search results.
• Don’t stuff your meta description with keywords—it does not help your SEO.
• Never leave your meta-description field blank.
• Take an extra minute to make your meta description interesting and effective.

Is Your Law Firm Or Medical Practice Website Getting Enough Exposure? Foster Web Marketing Can Help With Our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Services  

Are you concerned that your website isn't pulling in enough traffic to keep you swimming in leads? Do you need help with SEO for your legal or medical website? If so, Foster Web Marketing can help! Please contact us online or call our office directly at 866.497.6199 to schedule your free consultation with our experienced marketing team. We have been helping clients throughout the United States and internationally since 1998 and are confident we can help you not only reach, but exceed your goals.

Your web page titles are one of the most important aspects of your attorney website, and search engines weigh them heavily when ranking your page. It is vital to take the time to write a search engine optimized title that also grabs the attention of readers.

Here are some quick tips:

• Don’t make your page titles too long or too short. Google accepts 70 characters – stick with that limit.
• Put a good keyword or two in your title, but never stuff your title with more. Search engines and readers will notice, and it won’t make them happy.  
• Make sure your title is relevant to the content. The closer they match, the happier both the search engine bots and your readers will be.
• Never cut and paste generic titles onto multiple pages of your website.
• Be certain that your title makes sense and is not just a string of important keywords.
• Make sure that your title speaks to the needs and emotions of the reader.
• Take an extra moment to make your title really interesting and well written.

Is Your Law Firm Or Medical Practice Website Getting Enough Exposure? Foster Web Marketing Can Help With Our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Services  

Are you concerned that your website isn't pulling in enough traffic to keep you swimming in leads? Do you need help with SEO for your legal or medical website? If so, Foster Web Marketing can help! Please contact us online or call our office directly at 866.497.6199 to schedule your free consultation with our experienced marketing team. We have been helping clients throughout the United States and internationally since 1998 and are confident we can help you not only reach, but exceed your goals.

Analytics is a crucial part of attorney SEO – the data you receive through analytics can tell you how effective your online attorney marketing is, what keywords are working, and where your law firm website could use some work. Used correctly, analytics can be a guiding force in building the kind of online presence that brings in more contacts, more clients, and is truly a benefit for your law firm.

Here are the questions that analytics software can help you answer:

• What keywords are bringing people to my site?
• Where is most of my traffic coming from?
• Are the people who find me finding what they need when they get here?
• What are my most popular pages?

Using analytics, you can fine-tune your online marketing plan, know what’s working (and what isn’t), give your potential clients what they’re looking for, and stay on top of the frequent changes to Google’s search algorithm.

Sound pretty good? It is! If you need help making better use of your analytics data, the online attorney marketing team with Foster Web Marketing can help! Speak with us today at 1-888-886-0939, or simply fill out our convenient online contact form for more information.

And, for more great information about beefing up your online marketing, request your FREE copy of our must-read book 7 Biggest Mistakes Lawyers Make With Their Web Marketing That Cost Them Millions in Cases, Clients, and Profits. This important guide explains more about the most common attorney website pitfalls and how effective use of “white hat” SEO can help you get seen. 

Is Your Law Firm Or Medical Practice Website Getting Enough Exposure? Foster Web Marketing Can Help With Our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Services  

Are you concerned that your website isn't pulling in enough traffic to keep you swimming in leads? Do you need help with SEO for your legal or medical website? If so, Foster Web Marketing can help! Please contact us online or call our office directly at 866.497.6199 to schedule your free consultation with our experienced marketing team. We have been helping clients throughout the United States and internationally since 1998 and are confident we can help you not only reach, but exceed your goals.