Law Firm Websites, SEO and Social Media Blog

Google announced yesterday that it has updated its search algorithm, with the results impacting around 35% of Google searches. This news comes only months after their Panda update which had a major impact on search results, particularly in respect of duplicated content. This time, it's about making their search results as up-to-date as possible for news-worthy stories, while preserving the prominence of older posts where these are still relevant.

Head of Google’s Web spam team, Matt Cutts has recently clarified that Google does not consider SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to be spam.

While Google still holds the largest share of the global search engine market (with 64.8% according to comScore), Microsoft’s Bing is still trying to catch up. With a current 14.7% share of global searches being made through Bing each day, law firms and professional services firms looking to be found on search engines for targeted keywords should not rely solely on Google. And, indeed, we’re always pleased to tell a client we’ve helped get their website to the number one spot in Google AND Bing and other search engines for targeted keywords.

Its an accepted generalisation that lawyers are seen as being good with words, not numbers. At school this manifested itself in good results for subjects like English, History and French whereas Physics, Chemistry and Maths were given a body swerve. Weren't they? Is this just me?

Unless you can no longer afford the petrol….

Recently we have been reviewing a lot of professional services firm websites and in spite of the fact that we shouldn’t be, we remain surprised at how many of them are being let down by proprietary content management systems.

Larger organisations often have vast amounts of content and good domain histories, and as such they should routinely rank well for the short tail and longer tail keyphrases related to their services. It would appear that often poor on page optimisation arising from inadequate CMS functionality is holding them back.

Traditionally larger professional service companies would have taken the view that ‘we do not wish to be instructed by members of the public and as such search engine rankings are not important to us’  but as internet usage continues to grow, particularly mobile internet searches, they run the risk of only being found by those who already know them thereby losing out on countless opportunities to grow their brand, extend their influence and reinforce their authority.

Recent research by Forrester (as brought to our attention by Ben at Barker Brooks) titled The Rise of the Digital C-Suite, where ‘C-Suite’ is a term used to describe the chief executives, heads of finance and heads of information at the 10000 most successful companies in the world highlighted that not only is the internet the C-Suite’s top information resource but also that members of the C-Suite search for information themselves.

So, back to the title of this post; if you have a strong professional online presence which is not being presented properly to search engines as a result of a content management system which is not fit for purpose then, effectively, you’re keeping the Ferrari in the garage.

If you’re putting time and effort into creating regular content for your website then you want to be getting the most out of it. There are a range of options for getting your content out there but the first thing you should do is check that your Content Management System (CMS) is doing all it can from an on page optimisation point of view.

The first thing I always do when reviewing a customer site, or potential customer’s site, is have a look at their page titles. If their page titles, as opposed to their article titles, are poorly structured then they are falling at on page ooptimisation hurdle number one (I never thought I would say that).

What is a page title?

When an internet marketeer or search engine optimisation refers to your page title he, or she, is referring to the text which is displayed at the top of the browser bar.

Where this become increasingly important is in the creation of articles, bulletins and news items relating to a service or a company but not specifically designed to attract traffic from a single search engine query. Such items will pick up the longer tail traffic, i.e. traffic arriving from phrases you are unlikely to guess at. Over time such traffic will dwarve that arriving from your very specific keyword targets, particularly where your site contains a depth of content.

In such circumstances, if your page title does not reflect the nature of your content, perhaps by dynamically picking up article titles, then your CMS is letting you down and you are not maximising your efforts.

What should you do?

Check out your articles to see if the page titles vary from article to article and display a title relevant to the content. If they don’t get on to your developers and give them the hairdryer treatment.