Beware of Google’s Manual Actions

When you hear the phrase “manual actions” in the context of search engine optimization (SEO), you might think that it is something good. After all, user engagement helps your site’s SEO rankings. If a user manually clicks on your site, that means more to Google than if a user simply is aware that your website exists; it should also count at least as much as time on page, where the user could simply be staring into space while your site is visible on their screen. Outside of the Internet, manual actions by customers, such as signing a check or taking cash or a credit card out of their wallet, are among the best things you can hope for. When an employee at Google clicks to make a decision about your site that overrides the judgment of its algorithms, though, it means trouble for your site. Therefore, if the content on our site has been there a long time, you should review it to make sure that it is manual action-proof, and you should add new legal blog content that complies with Google’s current standards.

Google’s Manual Actions Are Penalties, Not Ranking Factors

Google ranks websites in the order of their relevance to users’ search queries, in other words, how useful it thinks they will be to the user. It judges their relevance by a variety of factors, including keyword matches, high quality writing (grammatically correct and idiomatic language that stays on topic), the number of clicks the site has received in the past, the length of time previous users have spent on the page, links to other web pages, and how recently the website has been updated, among other factors. Google changes its algorithm (the mathematical formula it uses to give weight to each ranking factor) periodically. Therefore, a comprehensive SEO strategy requires you to monitor the rankings of your law firm website and update your site as necessary.

Website designers and content creators often find ways to game the system and make their sites rank higher without enhancing the quality of the site. A classic “black hat” SEO tactic is to write keywords dozens of times in a font color that matches the background, so that users will not see the phrase “Hattiesburg personal injury lawyer” repeated ad nauseam in the margins, but Google’s bots will, and they will think that the site is more relevant than the sites of other law firms in Hattiesburg. Google’s algorithm updates are a way of staying ahead of the black hat SEOs. If Google catches your site trying to bend the rules while its next algorithm is still in the works, it will take a manual action. This means that a Google employee in a cubicle somewhere will physically click on the search result of your site and move it off of the first page results or remove it from the results list entirely. If Google takes a manual action against your site, it will notify you. The good news is that manual actions are not forever, and you can always repair the violations on your site so that Google will reinstate it.

Excellent Content With No Risk of Violations

You can count on the professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers that play by the rules and provide value for readers.

How to Optimize Your Law Firm Website for Local Searches

Most people who hire lawyers find these lawyers through Google searches. Likewise, most people who search on Google for law firms are looking for a law firm in their own geographic area. There may be a few people searching for your law firm from out of state, but these are the exception rather than the rule. For example, someone in North Carolina might search for “Is Florida an equitable distribution state” when she sees on Facebook that her frenemy from high school, who has since moved to Florida, is getting a divorce. Likewise, someone who got injured in a car accident while visiting Florida from out of state might look for a personal injury lawyer in Florida, since the courts of the state where the accident occurred have jurisdiction in personal injury cases. Most searches will be from people in your area looking to hire you. Therefore, your legal blog content and everything else on your website should have your local community as a target audience.

Get Your NAP in Order

In the context of search engine optimization, NAP stands for Name, Address, and Phone Number. NAP is one of the things that search engine bots pay the most attention to when finding results related to businesses. Your NAP should display on every page of your website, to make it clear to Google that all of the pages belong to the same business. The best way to get your NAP on every page and to ensure that it is identical on each page is to display it in a footer. Consistency is important; you should either format your business name as “Bloggins and Associates” or “Bloggins & Associates.” Likewise, you should format your street address as “Pines Boulevard” or “Pines Blvd.,” but not both. If you change the name of your business, you should reach out to all the sites that list your business and ask them to update the name, so that your business is not competing with its former self for SEO rankings.

Write What You Know

Outsourcing blog content is fine; perhaps it is even ideal. When it comes to practice area pages on your website, though, the best person to write the content is someone at your law firm, or at least someone in your city. Someone who lives in South Florida knows which of the roads that lead to Pembroke Pines are the most annoying to drive on; they can write content that reflects this more quickly and effectively than the most skilled Internet researcher. They remember which multi-vehicle pileups and society page divorces remain in the local public consciousness, even though these never made national news.

NAP on Your Own Turf, but Leave the Blogging to the Professionals

No matter how accurate your NAP and how local your practice area pages, you will still need to update the blog on your law firm website regularly with new content. You can count on the professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers to deliver custom-written blog posts that add value to your site and enhance your SEO rankings.

Searched-Focused Outlines: An Effective Method for Writing Informative Web Page Content Quickly

Your teachers in middle school and high school probably tried to teach you to create outlines of writing assignments before drafting the text, but most students don’t put much thought into their outlines or reread them very carefully when writing out the full text of the assignment. By the time you are a practicing lawyer, though, you understand the value of outlining and organizing your thoughts before composing a text that other people will read. Many lawyers write outlines before drafting any document more formal than an email to a client. Like many lawyers, even though you are accustomed to composing a variety of legal documents, you might feel stuck when it comes to writing content for your law firm’s website. You might feel especially intimidated when you find out that writing content for your law firm’s site is not a one-time project; for best results, you should update it frequently, such as by adding new posts to your site’s blog. The good news is that a simple outlining technique can help you quickly compose legal blog content that succinctly addresses readers’ questions.

Creating an Outline Based on Keyword Research

In the old days, people used to write blogs to enthuse about their favorite bands or rant about the multilevel marketing companies that scammed them out of their life’s savings, but today, the main purpose of blogs is to drive web traffic to business websites, including law firm websites. Whether you are writing a blog post or a content page about one of your law firm’s practice areas, your goal should be content that addresses issues that users have in mind when they type common search queries.

Keyword research tools can show you the websites that rank highest in your geographic area for the search queries for which you want to rank. Choose several keywords and write a subheading for each one; if possible, phrase your subheading as a question. Assume that you will write one or two paragraphs under each subheading. Don’t obsess over word count too much, but for a 500-word blog post, you should write approximately three subheadings, and for a 2,000-word content page, you will need about 12. For example, for a blog post called “What to Do After a Car Accident,” your subheadings might be, “Should I Take Pictures After a Car Accident?” “What Do I Tell the Insurance Company?” and “Do I Need a Car Accident Lawyer?”

When you start with a keyword-focused outline, you do not have to worry about working keywords into the body text, because they are already in the subheadings. You will probably include them naturally in the text, but even if you don’t, that is fine. A keyword-focused outline can help you avoid writing text that is awkward, wordy, or repetitive just so you can include keywords.

Keyword-Focused Outlines Are Just One Approach to Law Firm Blogging

Whether your law firm’s brand identity includes blog posts based on common questions, current news stories, or the intricacies of case law, you can always trust the professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers to deliver informative, readable content quickly.