How can Podnah improve my law firm’s SEO?

That’s a great question! And one I’ve been working on for the last 15 years…

The Truth About Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization is more art than science. It’s actually more alchemy than anything. After 15 years of struggling with it as a self-employed lawyer, I can finally say that it’s an ever-changing game with ever-changing rules.

You have several things working against you at once. First, you have new competitors entering your space all the time. Second, Google changes its algorithm 500 times or more each year. Third, and perhaps most importantly, new content is added to the internet each day. This dilution makes your content stand out less as your competitor’s content continues propagating. So how do you solve this problem?

What worked five years ago may no longer work today. Google changes its algorithm 500 to 600 times per year. And they don’t share those details with the public. Your site might be riding high with great organic rankings one day, and then “Bam!” you’re now on Page 3 after an overnight algo update.

What strategy seems to have a lasting impact, after you’ve done all the core basic stuff with the website itself, is to have periodic high quality content that has backlinks from high quality domains. This course therefore focuses on that approach to Search Engine Optimization. Let’s start!

Your Website – An outline for your success:

Here we will go over your website basics. It took me years to learn this stuff and I will share that with you in our SEO for Personal. Injury Lawyers course. In this course we will show you:

How to get a WordPress site built cheaply on Fiverr / How to hire Freelancers on Fiverr.
How to look for examples of their work and good reviews from multiple people (not the same person who gave many reviews!)
How to avoid getting bogged down in graphics and fancy design that wastes time and money.
How to choose someone who has a lot of good reviews and pick a theme you like and go with it. You can always modify it later.

Starting with a WordPress website, your WordPress website needs to be:

Mobile responsive (easy to check in WordPress / Elementor)
Fast loading
Reduce on-site errors & redirects

We will show you how to check your websites for free with:

www.SEOptimer.com

https://aioseo.com/seo-analyzer/

https://pagespeed.web.dev/?utm_source=psi&utm_medium=redirect

These are some of the free websites I use to check my own website for issues. They give you basic information and let you know if you have any glaring errors on your page. The last link is Google’s speed checker and will tell you how fast your page loads. The faster the better for SEO.

Again don’t get too bogged down on these details as they help some but are not the most critical for SEO. These sites can only tell you if there are any glaring basic issues with your website. They will not, however, tell you anything at all about your SEO ranking for various keywords or what your competitors are doing.

High quality content and high quality backlinks (and good customer reviews) are by far the most important factors to ranking in our experience!

Make sure you’ve Installed Google site console on your website. It will automatically connect to your Google Analytics account. If you don’t have this, create a free analytics account or have a freelancer do it for you.

Google My Business

Set up your GMB basic listing to help you show up on local maps. You don’t need to spend any money on this and can do this yourself. Include a few actual photos of you and your business. Respond to each and every Google review you get.

You can also hire a Freelancer to build it for you. You do NOT need to pay a monthly service to “maintain” a GMB listing. That’s a total waste of money and time.

You should respond to each and every Google review! Include keywords in your reply if possible. Google will spot and remove spammy reviews so just make sure they’re all from real customers, clients or people who actually know you and your business.

The real issues with getting found online.

You have multiple moving parts you have to contend with in order to get found online.

Issue 1: Your local market — how many others are doing what you’re doing and

selling online?

Issue 2: How good are your competitor’s websites, backlinks and content?

Issue 3: Local versus national versus worldwide. Google local search acts

differently than national search. Let’s check out some examples.

If you’re providing local services, your local search is critical. Look at who shows up locally for what? What’s different about their websites and GMB page? More reviews? More content? More backlinks? Better looking website?

The bottom line is you’re literally competing locally with your highest ranked competitors. If your competitors are few and have low content websites, surpassing them won’t be nearly as hard.

If you have many competitors who also have tons of content, it will correspondingly be much more difficult and expensive to get to their level on Google. That’s the hard truth SEO companies don’t tell you. It takes time and money to get there. There are no shortcuts.

So we start tackling this problem with that in mind.

Keywords essentials — what you need to know

What are keywords and how they work
How to do keyword research / competitor analysis – nobody showed me this!
What are the different types of keywords?
What is Keyword Difficulty?
How to do Keyword volume research
How to do Keyword difficulty research
How to do Competitor research
Discover keywords that are in demand
Discover corresponding keyword difficulty

How to write excellent content that actually helps SEO

They used to say that any article less than 500 words was “thin.” They say you need a minimum 1,000 word article to “rank.” Blindly following these rules, however, will get you absolutely nowhere because you can write all the long but low quality articles you want and Google won’t respect it.

Your competitors are writing better and longer form content and are rising because they are getting backlinks to this content. Remember, it’s like comparative scale grading, your content is judged against your competitors’ content. You therefore want your content to outshine your competitors’s content.

You really want longer content of at least 2,500 words with inbound and outbound links. It needs to be very well written and reliable information. You can go in depth into any subject in your service. I will show you how to get creative but it is actual hard work and there are no shortcuts. Sorry.

Our problem is that Google’ search algorithm is basically a black box. Many people claim they know it but the honest ones will tell you that they are basically guessing what Google is looking for in their search algorithm.

Moz and other big companies have pretty good ideas of how to weight the various factors of SEO (reviews, local search, backlinks, etc) but they’re still guessing and Google changes their algo up to twice a day!

So what do you do? We therefore suggest you focus on two main things: 1) Write High Quality Content and get 2) High Quality Backlinks.

Writing great content and getting great backlinks avoids the black box debate because you are literally working to make your website actually better than your competitors. In other words, no gimmicks, you start focusing on quality.

SEO is very hard work. It’s the hardest part of getting found online because ultimately it means creating quality content that answers people’s questions and that people want to actually read

How to discover keyword search volume (for free) and how to find out their ranking difficulty (for free)

Does ranking for keywords mean more business? Not necessarily… You still have to capture the interest of a potential buyer.

How to write great content

You need to know the Google E-E-A-T method which will guide you in creating great website content.

E-E-A-T means:

Experience: Your firsthand experience with the subject matter

Expertise: Your topical expertise on the subject matter. Do you have personal

knowledge, qualifications, and/or credentials to provide information that is reliable?

Authoritativeness: Your reputation in your industry.

Trustworthiness: They say this is the most important factor. Do you cite trustworthy

Sources? No spam links in or out. SSL website. GMB page, address and telephone that are verified by Google.

How do you employ these techniques in your writing?

We have created a methodology for helping you create great new content for your business.

This methodology will help you avoid writer’s block such as “what do I write about.” It will also help you write content that helps the user, which will in turn improve your SEO results. Google, after all, has the user in mind when deciding which content to serve to the searcher.

Step 1: Identify each and every service you provide

Step 2: Create a Topical Map of those services

Step 3: Create article titles based on the topical map and keywords

Step 4: Add your personal story, experiences and expertise to each article you

write.

Step 5: Combine thoughtful commentary and links to resources that help the user

into a long form article that a person would actually want to read.

Result: Trustworthy content personalized to your business that Google has to

notice.

Your personal experiences are unique to you and therefore your content should reflect that. Google is smart – it will detect boilerplate content and we do not believe low quality content like that will be rewarded in the future. Google is pioneering AI into search and content creation so you will want to have your authentic voice in any content you create.

If you’re writing about a specific subject, what is YOUR personal experience in that area? Including a personal anecdote can help your article stand out from your competitors.

People crave authenticity. In the age of overstimulation, automation and AI, people are literally craving authentic experiences. Leverage that!

What are people searching for?

Begin by looking at your keyword search volume and then think about targeting certain niches within those broader topics.

Write articles based on topical maps

What is a topical map? How do you create a topical map?

Try a “Question based” search content strategy.

I am using this strategy for my law firm. Let’s look at the difference between searching for the service versus asking a question about the service.

Posts and Pages ranked the same. Therefore it does not matter if your new amazing article is posted as a blog article or as a new website page.

Ideal Article Length – 2500 words or more!

“To improve your SEO, you need backlinks. Semrush found that content of 3,000 words or more is more 3.5x more likely to receive backlinks.”

More is more, as Yngwie Malmsteen says.

Backlinks – You Need Very High Quality Backlinks

High quality backlinks are essential to ranking organically. How do you get them? You either pay for them or you write content that’s so good other people voluntarily link to them (the best kind of backlink).

Ideally you want contextual backlinks. What is that? Is your page about a specific legal matter? Then you want the page with that link to discuss that legal matter on that page.

Non-contextual would simply mean a link from a watch store to a HVAC website. Not as helpful and potentially harmful.

What about Youtube backlinks

I have tried them and I don’t really find them to work in my experience. If you have a lot of traffic to your Youtube channel, then you can get customers that way. But creating a Youtube page for your business, adding videos and hoping backlinks in the videos will improve SEO is simply not the case. Example, here is my youtube channel.

Do follow / no follow – You need a healthy mix of both since people have abused this system over the years.

Domain Authority and all the components (backlinks, do follow / no follow, internal links)

Not all links are equal. Having a lot of backlinks from low DA sites can harm your site and make it look spammy while having a few backlinks from high DA sites can be more helpful. But they are expensive.

How do you check your backlinks?

Ahrefs.com

Semrush.com

Moz.com

You will see your Page Authority / Domain Authority scores. The higher the better.

Now look at your backlink domains. Again, the higher the better. You want steadily increasing contextual backlinks, from steadily increasing new and relevant domains.

How do you get backlinks?

There is no easy or cheap answer. You can buy them or you can earn them. This is the honest truth.

But beware of cheap backlink offers you will find online and on Fiverr. Those low quality backlinks may cost you by lowering your rank if Google considers them spam.

This is why I do not recommend hiring a freelancer to do a cheap “citation building” service as they tend to add your site to spammy and low authority websites that may have nothing to do with your profession.

If you’re going to purchase backlinks, they will cost you because high quality ones are expensive. But they work.

Tips for getting backlinks:

Get them from a reputable freelancer (check reviews) who offers High DA backlinks. Read their reviews, especially reviews from USA customers!
Hire an SEO company that specializes in this (fatjoe.com, seotuners.com)

Write content that is so helpful, funny or meaningful, that other good websites find it and link to the content. This could be articles that include:

Research and statistics
Funny essay or article in your field
A true and compelling story in your field
An in depth explanation on a topic in your business or an in-depth how-to

Think about what kind of article you would link to. If you have information that provides a lot of insight on something, then it is likely you will get contextual links to that website article.

The biggest issues are content and backlinks. Everything else is secondary to this. Focus on quality content and quality backlinks and stick with it regularly.

Personal Stories

Your content should include personal stories about your journey as a lawyer.

Why not PPC?

PPC is not SEO. PPC are ads you can buy right now. They can help get paying customers and clients but they are also very expensive. PPC is where Google makes most of its advertising revenue.

How expensive? Depends on industry, but as much as $300 to $1,200 or more per click!

How to Hire an SEO Company

There is a lot more to hiring out SEO services than just cost. I’ve made this mistake multiple times. I’ve worked with cheap and expensive companies and the results are all over the place.

I found that each company will tell you something different – backlinks are more important than content, content is more important than backlinks, and so on.

You should always keep in mind that nobody really knows how Google’s algorithm works. You can only infer from it what you will. If you see some pages doing better than others, you can infer something from that. But that’s about the extent of it.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of questions I would ask any company offering me SEO services?