SEO | ApricotLaw

How Local Search Works for Law Firms

Posted on July 29, 2015December 21, 2023 by apricotlaw

Local search is the best way for search engines to help their users at this point – and if you’re a lawyer, that’s great news. Few people in NYC want to search for an attorney in Los Angeles, and if they do, they’ll include it in their search queries.

Google, Bing and Yahoo all have local search capabilities built into their algorithms, so the right clients will naturally find you… as long as you’re delivering the right kinds of results.

What is Local Search?

Local search responds to users based on where they’re located. An explicit local search, such as “personal injury lawyer Newark” or “criminal defense lawyer San Diego” would deliver results that matched the user’s query.

An implicit local search is a bit more complex. Your IP address and, if you’re logged into the site you use for search (including their mail service, such as Gmail or Ymail), tell the search engine where you are. If you’re looking for a service that’s typically provided locally, the search engine will deliver local results.

Here’s what happens on Google when you’re logged in and you do a simple search for the term “restaurant.”

How Local Search Works for Law Firms

How Does Local Search Benefit Law Firms?

When someone searches for an attorney who performs your services and they’re logged in, it’s possible that you can come out on top. However, there’s a catch: your site has to be indexed and put together properly so that the search engines recognize its usefulness.

Your site has to have:

Great content that gives readers real value
A responsive, easy to navigate design
Powerful incoming links that propel your site to a position of authority in the SERPs
Lightning-fast load times

Local search can be incredibly beneficial to law firms – as long as you’re doing the things you need to do to please Google. Ultimately, what pleases Google are the same things that please their users. Making sure that you’re on top of the latest algorithm updates and that your site is taken care of by the leading law firm SEO experts in the country can make a huge difference for your firm when it comes to local search.

[SEO Dictionary] Definition of Black Hat

Posted on July 25, 2015December 20, 2023 by apricotlaw

In search engine optimization, the term black hat refers to sneaky, underhanded techniques that some people employ in order to cheat the search engine ranking algorithms.

Black hat SEO generally makes use of aggressive techniques that focus on attracting search engines rather than pleasing readers.

Some examples of black hat SEO include:

Keyword stuffing
Adding invisible text
Using unrelated keywords
Changing website content after it has been ranked
Cloaking, or delivering pages other than what the searcher expects
Using hidden links

Anything that is designed to trick search engine crawlers or cheat the carefully planned algorithms that search engines use to determine a page’s value, or anything that is designed to mislead searchers, can be considered black hat techniques.

Black hat techniques usually result in a penalty from Google, which can cause your site to disappear from the search engine results altogether.

Natural vs. Unnatural Links – What Does Google Say

Posted on July 22, 2015December 21, 2023 by apricotlaw

Google wants people to link to quality websites – after all, part of the algorithm they use to judge whether a site is valuable to searchers uses inbound links to determine its popularity within the Internet community.

So when Google talks about avoiding unnatural links, what do they mean? More specifically, what do they have to do with law firm search engine optimization?

What is a Natural Link in SEO?

When you find a webpage that’s useful to your readers and adds authority or believability to what you’re writing, you might choose to link to it. Law firms often link to statutes and other helpful pages, and when that happens, Google considers it a natural link.

A natural link is something that will help your readers delve deeper into a topic or clarify what you mean. (The links in the first two paragraphs of this post are natural links because they’re there to help you.)

When a reputable website naturally links to your site, Google sees that as a point in your favor.

What is an Unnatural Link in SEO?

An unnatural link is one that doesn’t belong there and doesn’t make sense – and it certainly doesn’t add value for searchers.

We’ve all been to websites that have odd-looking links that don’t belong there. Some examples of this are blog comment spam, which looks like this:

Natural vs. Unnatural Links – What Does Google Say

This comment was posted to create a backlink to this essay service, but the comment has nothing to do with the blog post, which was about creating invoices for freelance services. It’s clearly spam, and when Google sees unnatural links such as this one splattered all over numerous websites, they can tell – and that will most likely spell disaster for that essay service’s rankings.

The same type of unnatural linking is used as a black hat SEO technique on webpages, in blog posts, and in user-powered forums.

Should You Buy Links?

For the most part, Google has identified ways to zero in on websites that have the sole purpose of selling links. Many of these sites have been penalized, but there are still businesses out there that offer to sell links to webmasters who don’t know any better.

What happens when a webmaster pays for links?

It’s not pretty. Google’s algorithm will notice the sudden influx of links and determine the quality of sites they’re coming from – and if they’re not coming from sites that Google already trusts, your website could be penalized and be knocked out of the search engine results pages altogether.

In most of these cases, purchased links are placed on sites that Google already considers “spam,” so you’ll get hit twice: first, you wasted money on the links, and second, you damaged your site’s ranking in the process. This has happened to law firms all over the country because at one time, Google didn’t punish sites for purchasing links… but now they do.

What is a Link Scheme?

When links are designed to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google search results, they’re considered to violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Any linking scheme that doesn’t have searchers’ best interests in mind is a “no-go” as far as Google is concerned.

Link schemes include:

Buying or selling links
Using automated programs that create links
Linking to other websites only so they’ll link to you
Putting keyword-rich anchor text in mass-distributed press releases

The key is that you’re not adding links to your site to build in value; you’re doing it for the sole purpose of creating a link.

What Does Google Do About Unnatural Links?

When links to your website show up on disreputable pages, or when they’re splattered all over the Internet without any clear purpose, Google can tell that they’re spam. When they find that artificial, manipulative or deceptive links point to your site, they can apply what’s called a “manual spam action.”

A manual spam action will penalize your website in the search engine results pages by lowering its ranking. It makes sense if you look at it from Google’s standpoint; if your site was high quality, links would be natural rather than paid for.

Authority and SEO

Posted on July 16, 2015December 26, 2023 by apricotlaw

When you hear search engine optimization experts talk about authority, we’re referring to how much weight a particular website has behind it in the search engines.

A high-authority site is one that has plenty of links to it because people trust it to provide valuable information. Examples include sites such as Harvard.edu and WhiteHouse.gov.

The two types of authority that most SEO experts discuss arepage authority and domain authority.

Page Authority and SEO

Page authority predicts where a page will rank within search engines. We look at your page authority to find out how competitive your website is; it gives us a picture of what your competitors are doing, too, so we can make sure your site is doing it even better.

Domain Authority and SEO

Domain authority is a signal of how strong your entire domain is when compared to other, similar websites. A powerful website has a high domain authority, and at the same time, any of its pages are more likely to rank in the search engines than pages with low domain authority. A high domain authority is a sign that others trust your website to provide high quality, reliable information.

What is Anchor Text?

Posted on July 10, 2015December 22, 2023 by apricotlaw

Anchor text is the visible text that leads to a link. Search engines use it to figure out how relevant the link beneath it is to the content on the other side of a link.

You may see anchor text like this:

ApricotLaw specializes in law firm marketing.

In this case, the anchor text is “ApricotLaw.” The link leads to our homepage, and it’s very relevant because you naturally assume that you’ll be taken there when you click on our firm’s name.

You may also see anchor text like this:

ApricotLaw specializes in lawyer SEO.

In this case, the anchor text is “lawyer SEO.” The link leads to a page about SEO for lawyers, which is also relevant because you have a pretty good idea about the page you’ll be visiting if you click the link.

Your anchor text should always be relevant to the page it’s on and to the page it’s linking to – otherwise you risk being penalized by Google and other search engines.

Black Hat SEO

Posted on July 9, 2015July 27, 2020 by apricotlaw

There are two ways to do search engine optimization: the right way and the wrong way.

What Is Black Hat SEO?

Black hat SEO is the wrong way. Black hat refers to the use of techniques and strategies that usually run against search engines’ guidelines. In most cases, people use black hat SEO techniques to “game” the search engine results and come out on top of the results pages – even when their site does not deserve a top spot. These tactics are designed to manipulate the results that search engines deliver.

On the other end of the spectrum, people use white hat SEO to earn a position among the top results of the search engines.

What Happens when People Use Black Hat SEO?

Black hat SEO is not a sustainable practice. That means companies that use these underhanded, aggressive techniques will be found out (usually sooner than later) and Google will penalize their sites. It is difficult to recover from a Google penalty, which can remove a website from the search engines entirely, so it’s always best to stick with white hat SEO and avoid penalties from the start.

Examples of Black Hat SEO

Keyword stuffing
“Invisible” text (text that includes keywords butblends in with the page so readers cannot see it)
Page swapping (making massive changes to a page once it has ranked in the search engines)
Doorway pages