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Seven Law Firm SEO Myths to Leave Behind in 2022

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smith smore
Seven Law Firm SEO Myths to Leave Behind in 2022

The inescapable truth of search engine optimization (SEO) is that it is neither a clear, straightforward process, nor one that can be done quickly. Online search engines, Google in particular, are notoriously tight-lipped about how their search algorithms function. They operate inside a kind of black box, where the ranking factors they use are somewhat hidden from the public. Google does provide extensive guidance on how to best optimize your site to rank well, but the specifics of the algorithm remain a mystery.  buy facebook accounts

Because of the opaque nature of the guidance from search engines like Google, many common SEO myths still persist, despite people’s best efforts to dispel them. Part of this is thanks to deliberate obfuscation to protect search providers’ intellectual property, but also because many site owners just don’t understand how SEO works, and what doesn’t work, to get their pages appearing at the top of search rankings. That includes law firms, whose expertise is in their area of legal practice, not necessarily in running an optimized website.

Benefits of a Digital Membership  buy linkedin accounts

Free access to 1 article* every 30 days

Access to the entire ALM network of websites

Unlimited access to the ALM suite of newsletters

Build custom alerts on any search topic of your choosing

Search by a wide range of topics  buy Facebook Ads accounts

The introduction on ChatGPT has caused considerable debate and explosive amounts of content on the web. With ChatGPT, content marketers can achieve an extra edge over their competition by efficiently creating and editing high-quality content. It offers assistance with generating titles for blog posts, summaries of topics or articles, as well as comprehensive campaigns when targeting a specific audience.

However, it is important to remember that this technology should be used to enhance human creativity rather than completely replacing it.

For many years now AI-powered technology has been helping content marketers and SEOs automate repetitive tasks such as data analysis, scanning for technical issues, and reporting, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. AI also enables real-time analysis of a greater volume of consumer touchpoints and behavioral data points for smarter, more precise predictive analysis, opportunity forecasting, real-time content recommendations, and more.

With so much data in play and recession concerns already impacting 2023 budgets in many organizations, content marketers will have to do more with less this coming year. You’ll need to carefully balance human creative resources with AI assists where they make sense to stay flexible, agile, and ready to respond to the market.

It’s time to look at your body of content as a whole

Google’s Helpful Content update, which rolled out in August, is a sitewide signal targeting a high proportion of thin, unhelpful, low-quality content. That means the exceptional content on your site won’t rank to their greatest potential if they’re lost in a sea of mediocre, outdated assets.

It might be time for a content reboot – but don’t get carried away. Before you start unpublishing and redirecting blog posts, lean on technology for automated site auditing and see what you can fix up first. AI-assisted technology can help sniff out on-page elements, including page titles and H1 tags, and off-page factors like page speed, redirects, and 404 errors that can support your content refreshing strategy.

Focus on your highest trafficked and most visible pages first, i.e.: those linked from the homepage or main menu. Google’s John Mueller confirmed recently that if the important pages on your website are low quality, it’s bad news for the entire site. There’s no percentage by which this is measured, he said, urging content marketers and SEOs to instead think of what the average user would think when they visit your website.

Take advantage of location-based content optimization opportunities

Consumers crave personalized experiences, and location is your low-hanging fruit. Seasonal weather trends, local events, and holidays all impact your search traffic in various ways and present opportunities for location-based optimization.

AI-assisted technology can help you discover these opportunities and evaluate topical keywords at scale so you can plan content campaigns and promotions that tap into this increased demand when it’s happening.

Make the best possible use of content created for locally relevant campaigns by repurposing and promoting it across your website, local landing pages, social media profiles, and Google Business Profiles for each location. Google Posts, for example, are a fantastic and underutilized tool for enhancing your content’s visibility and interactivity right on the search results page.

Optimize content with conversational & high-volume keywords

Look for conversational and trending terms in your keyword research, too. Top-of-funnel keywords that help generate awareness of the topic and spur conversations in social channels offer great opportunities for promotion. Use hashtags organically and target them in paid content promotion campaigns to dramatically expand your audience.

Conversational keywords are a good opportunity for enhancing that content’s visibility in search, too. Check out the ‘People Also Ask’ results and other featured snippets available on the search results page (SERP) for your keyword terms. Incorporate questions and answers in your content to naturally optimize for these and voice search queries. It’s important that you utilize SEO insights and real-time data correctly; you don’t want to be targeting what was trending last month and is already over. AI is a great assist here, as well, as an intelligent tool can be scanning and analyzing constantly, sending recommendations for new content opportunities as they arise.

Consider how you optimize content based on intent and experience

The best content comes from a deep, meaningful understanding of the searcher’s intent. What problem were they experiencing or what need did they have that caused them to seek out your content in the first place? And how does your blog post, ebook, or landing page copy enhance their experience?

Look at the search results page as a doorway to your “home”. How’s your curb appeal? What do potential customers see when they encounter one of your pages in search results? What kind of experience do you offer when they step over the threshold and click through to your website?

The best content meets visitors where they are at with relevant, high-quality information presented in a way that is accessible, fast loading, and easy to digest. This is the case for both short and long form SEO content. Ensure your content contains calls to action designed to give people options and help them discover the next step in their journey versus attempting to sell them on something they may not be ready for yet.

2023, the year of SEO: why brands are leaning in and how to prepare


Conclusion

The audience is king, queen, and the entire court as we head into 2023. SEO and content marketing give you countless opportunities to connect with these people but remember they are a means to an end. Keep searcher intent and audience needs at the heart of every piece of content you create and campaign you plan for the coming year.

03

9 tips to get the full SEO benefits of long-tail keywords

Creating content to satisfy long-tail search queries is an often-overlooked strategy. It’s easy to go after bigger wins, but focusing on the smaller gains can lead to powerful long-term results. Many times in SEO, slow and steady wins the race. 

Search has been evolving and talking about keywords might seem old-fashioned. But long-tail queries have never been more important.

As search is second nature for many people these days and voice search gains popularity, searches are becoming more conversational. Creating content to satisfy this type of query can be really beneficial. 

To get the best results from this strategy you need to approach it thoughtfully. In this article, I’ll cover some tips to get more SEO benefits from long-tail queries. 

Long-tail keywords: What are they and why use them for SEO?

Long-tail keywords are specific words or phrases that tend to have a better conversion value. They are usually longer (three to five words) and have a lower search volume. 

If long-tail keywords are not part of your strategy, you miss out on many opportunities. Nearly 95% of U.S. search queries get less than 10 searches per month, a large-scale study by Ahrefs revealed. 

It’s also widely accepted that 15% of search queries on Google are new. This statistic has been confirmed by Google many times, most recently in 2022 as reported by Barry Schwartz on Search Engine Roundtable. 

Long-tail queries can be easier to rank for and have the potential to eliminate ambiguity to drive qualified traffic and conversions. 


What is a long-tail strategy?

A long-tail SEO strategy is a technique that places a focus on lower-volume search terms. This SEO tactic capitalizes on a lower competition rate to drive qualified website traffic.

It can be a really effective approach because the searcher’s intent is usually much clearer with long-tail terms. This gives you an opportunity to make sure you capture really relevant, valuable traffic.  

9 tips to maximize the SEO benefits of long-tail keywords

While leveraging long-tail keywords can be powerful and effective, it’s important to go about this in a planned and considered way.

Here are my top tips for getting the best results from your long-tail opportunities. 


1. Start small, gain traction

A long-tail keyword strategy is ideal for gaining traction in a new market.

If you’re starting a new site or covering a new topic, putting your focus on long-tail keyword phrases within your content can help to give you visibility with the right target audience.

By their nature, long-tail keywords are less frequently searched for and very specific. This means the people searching for them tend to have a very clear intent.

Creating great content to satisfy these queries is ideal for building your reputation with the right people. It’s also a great SEO strategy to get things off the ground and build rankings around topics relevant to your niche. 

For example, here’s Amore Coffee, a small coffee machine rental company in the UK, making the most of the long-tail.

That’s just one example, but across their website, they have managed to rank for a variety of detailed, long-tail queries around their main topic of coffee in the UK:

This forms a good basis for their target audience to discover them via search engines.

They’re unlikely to be driving huge amounts of traffic but they will be reaching people who are really interested in what they have to offer. 

2. Stay relevant and build your presence

When working with long-tail queries, it’s important to be thoughtful with your choices. Don’t just create content for the sake of it. 

Select topics that are very closely related to your area of expertise, or product offering. Don’t stray too far from your core business goals. 

Make sure you can create highly relevant content that’s helpful and adds value. This will help you avoid the trap of taking a “search-engine-first” approach, which Google actively discourages in its helpful content guidelines.

The “don’ts” include:

• Did you decide to enter some niche topic area without any real expertise, but instead mainly because you thought you’d get search traffic?• Are you producing lots of content on different topics in hopes that some of it might perform well in search results?

What creators should know about Google’s August 2022 Helpful Content update, Google Search Central Blog

In most topic areas, there are many relevant long-tail queries to work on.

The road to success starts by choosing the right ones and keeping them unwaveringly fitting to your audience and goals. 


3. Define your goals

Before you start working on your content, think about what you aim to do.

Are you writing an in-depth article that you’d like to achieve an organic ranking position?

Is there a featured snippet or People Also Ask (PAA) box you’d like to capture for that specific long-tail phrase?

Would showing up in voice search be more valuable to your business?

Your primary goal will influence the content you write.

To target a featured snippet or PAA your content will need to be objective, short and snappy.

For an overall organic ranking article, you’ll need to explore the topic in-depth and add your own unique perspective or expertise.

For voice search, you’ll want to target the featured snippet if there is one for your long-tail query. But with a focus on long-tail, you’ve already taken a step towards optimizing for voice search.  

For the long-tail query “how much value will an extension add to my house” in the UK, Yopa clinched the featured snippet with their simple and objective answer:

Overall, Yopa now gets more organic traffic from their article: Google’s Helpful Content update, which rolled out in August, is a sitewide signal targeting a high proportion of thin, unhelpful, low-quality content. That means the exceptional content on your site won’t rank to their greatest potential if they’re lost in a sea of mediocre, outdated assets.

It might be time for a content reboot – but don’t get carried away. Before you start unpublishing and redirecting blog posts, lean on technology for automated site auditing and see what you can fix up first. AI-assisted technology can help sniff out on-page elements, including page titles and H1 tags, and off-page factors like page speed, redirects, and 404 errors that can support your content refreshing strategy.

Focus on your highest trafficked and most visible pages first, i.e.: those linked from the homepage or main menu. Google’s John Mueller confirmed recently that if the important pages on your website are low quality, it’s bad news for the entire site. There’s no percentage by which this is measured, he said, urging content marketers and SEOs to instead think of what the average user would think when they visit your website.

Take advantage of location-based content optimization opportunities

Consumers crave personalized experiences, and location is your low-hanging fruit. Seasonal weather trends, local events, and holidays all impact your search traffic in various ways and present opportunities for location-based optimization.

AI-assisted technology can help you discover these opportunities and evaluate topical keywords at scale so you can plan content campaigns and promotions that tap into this increased demand when it’s happening.

Make the best possible use of content created for locally relevant campaigns by repurposing and promoting it across your website, local landing pages, social media profiles, and Google Business Profiles for each location. Google Posts, for example, are a fantastic and underutilized tool for enhancing your content’s visibility and interactivity right on the search results page.

Optimize content with conversational & high-volume keywords

Look for conversational and trending terms in your keyword research, too. Top-of-funnel keywords that help generate awareness of the topic and spur conversations in social channels offer great opportunities for promotion. Use hashtags organically and target them in paid content promotion campaigns to dramatically expand your audience.

Conversational keywords are a good opportunity for enhancing that content’s visibility in search, too. Check out the ‘People Also Ask’ results and other featured snippets available on the search results page (SERP) for your keyword terms. Incorporate questions and answers in your content to naturally optimize for these and voice search queries. It’s important that you utilize SEO insights and real-time data correctly; you don’t want to be targeting what was trending last month and is already over. AI is a great assist here, as well, as an intelligent tool can be scanning and analyzing constantly, sending recommendations for new content opportunities as they arise.

Consider how you optimize content based on intent and experience

The best content comes from a deep, meaningful understanding of the searcher’s intent. What problem were they experiencing or what need did they have that caused them to seek out your content in the first place? And how does your blog post, ebook, or landing page copy enhance their experience?

Look at the search results page as a doorway to your “home”. How’s your curb appeal? What do potential customers see when they encounter one of your pages in search results? What kind of experience do you offer when they step over the threshold and click through to your website?

The best content meets visitors where they are at with relevant, high-quality information presented in a way that is accessible, fast loading, and easy to digest. This is the case for both short and long form SEO content. Ensure your content contains calls to action designed to give people options and help them discover the next step in their journey versus attempting to sell them on something they may not be ready for yet.

2023, the year of SEO: why brands are leaning in and how to prepare


Conclusion

The audience is king, queen, and the entire court as we head into 2023. SEO and content marketing give you countless opportunities to connect with these people but remember they are a means to an end. Keep searcher intent and audience needs at the heart of every piece of content you create and campaign you plan for the coming year.

03

9 tips to get the full SEO benefits of long-tail keywords

Creating content to satisfy long-tail search queries is an often-overlooked strategy. It’s easy to go after bigger wins, but focusing on the smaller gains can lead to powerful long-term results. Many times in SEO, slow and steady wins the race. 

Search has been evolving and talking about keywords might seem old-fashioned. But long-tail queries have never been more important.

As search is second nature for many people these days and voice search gains popularity, searches are becoming more conversational. Creating content to satisfy this type of query can be really beneficial. 

To get the best results from this strategy you need to approach it thoughtfully. In this article, I’ll cover some tips to get more SEO benefits from long-tail queries. 

Long-tail keywords: What are they and why use them for SEO?

Long-tail keywords are specific words or phrases that tend to have a better conversion value. They are usually longer (three to five words) and have a lower search volume. 

If long-tail keywords are not part of your strategy, you miss out on many opportunities. Nearly 95% of U.S. search queries get less than 10 searches per month, a large-scale study by Ahrefs revealed. 

It’s also widely accepted that 15% of search queries on Google are new. This statistic has been confirmed by Google many times, most recently in 2022 as reported by Barry Schwartz on Search Engine Roundtable. 

Long-tail queries can be easier to rank for and have the potential to eliminate ambiguity to drive qualified traffic and conversions. 


What is a long-tail strategy?

A long-tail SEO strategy is a technique that places a focus on lower-volume search terms. This SEO tactic capitalizes on a lower competition rate to drive qualified website traffic.

It can be a really effective approach because the searcher’s intent is usually much clearer with long-tail terms. This gives you an opportunity to make sure you capture really relevant, valuable traffic.  

9 tips to maximize the SEO benefits of long-tail keywords

While leveraging long-tail keywords can be powerful and effective, it’s important to go about this in a planned and considered way.

Here are my top tips for getting the best results from your long-tail opportunities. 


1. Start small, gain traction

A long-tail keyword strategy is ideal for gaining traction in a new market.

If you’re starting a new site or covering a new topic, putting your focus on long-tail keyword phrases within your content can help to give you visibility with the right target audience.

By their nature, long-tail keywords are less frequently searched for and very specific. This means the people searching for them tend to have a very clear intent.

Creating great content to satisfy these queries is ideal for building your reputation with the right people. It’s also a great SEO strategy to get things off the ground and build rankings around topics relevant to your niche. 

For example, here’s Amore Coffee, a small coffee machine rental company in the UK, making the most of the long-tail.

That’s just one example, but across their website, they have managed to rank for a variety of detailed, long-tail queries around their main topic of coffee in the UK:

This forms a good basis for their target audience to discover them via search engines.

They’re unlikely to be driving huge amounts of traffic but they will be reaching people who are really interested in what they have to offer. 

2. Stay relevant and build your presence

When working with long-tail queries, it’s important to be thoughtful with your choices. Don’t just create content for the sake of it. 

Select topics that are very closely related to your area of expertise, or product offering. Don’t stray too far from your core business goals. 

Make sure you can create highly relevant content that’s helpful and adds value. This will help you avoid the trap of taking a “search-engine-first” approach, which Google actively discourages in its helpful content guidelines.

The “don’ts” include:

• Did you decide to enter some niche topic area without any real expertise, but instead mainly because you thought you’d get search traffic?• Are you producing lots of content on different topics in hopes that some of it might perform well in search results?

What creators should know about Google’s August 2022 Helpful Content update, Google Search Central Blog

In most topic areas, there are many relevant long-tail queries to work on.

The road to success starts by choosing the right ones and keeping them unwaveringly fitting to your audience and goals. 


3. Define your goals

Before you start working on your content, think about what you aim to do.

Are you writing an in-depth article that you’d like to achieve an organic ranking position?

Is there a featured snippet or People Also Ask (PAA) box you’d like to capture for that specific long-tail phrase?

Would showing up in voice search be more valuable to your business?

Your primary goal will influence the content you write.

To target a featured snippet or PAA your content will need to be objective, short and snappy.

For an overall organic ranking article, you’ll need to explore the topic in-depth and add your own unique perspective or expertise.

For voice search, you’ll want to target the featured snippet if there is one for your long-tail query. But with a focus on long-tail, you’ve already taken a step towards optimizing for voice search.  

For the long-tail query “how much value will an extension add to my house” in the UK, Yopa clinched the featured snippet with their simple and objective answer:

Overall, Yopa now gets more organic traffic from their article: The inescapable truth of search engine optimization (SEO) is that it is neither a clear, straightforward process, nor one that can be done quickly. Online search engines, Google in particular, are notoriously tight-lipped about how their search algorithms function. They operate inside a kind of black box, where the ranking factors they use are somewhat hidden from the public. Google does provide extensive guidance on how to best optimize your site to rank well, but the specifics of the algorithm remain a mystery.

Because of the opaque nature of the guidance from search engines like Google, many common SEO myths still persist, despite people’s best efforts to dispel them. Part of this is thanks to deliberate obfuscation to protect search providers’ intellectual property, but also because many site owners just don’t understand how SEO works, and what doesn’t work, to get their pages appearing at the top of search rankings. That includes law firms, whose expertise is in their area of legal practice, not necessarily in running an optimized website.

Benefits of a Digital Membership

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Access to the entire ALM network of websites

Unlimited access to the ALM suite of newsletters

Build custom alerts on any search topic of your choosing

Search by a wide range of topics

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02

Five things you need to know about content optimization in 2023

Google is constantly testing and updating its algorithms in pursuit of the best possible searcher experience. As the search giant explains in its ‘How Search Works’ documentation, that means understanding the intent behind the query and bringing back results that are relevant, high-quality, and accessible for consumers.

As if the constantly shifting search landscape weren’t difficult enough to navigate, content marketers are also contending with an increasingly technology-charged environment. Competitors are upping the stakes with tools and platforms that generate smarter, real-time insights and even make content optimization and personalization on the fly based on audience behavior, location, and data points.

Set-it-and-forget-it content optimization is a thing of the past. Here’s what you need to know to help your content get found, engage your target audience, and convert searchers to customers in 2023.

AI automation going to be integral for content optimization

Technologies-B2B-organizations-use-to-optimize-content

As the content battleground heats up, SEO insights will continue to grow in importance as a key source of intelligence. We’re optimizing content for humans, not search engines, after all – we had better have a solid understanding of what those people need and want.

While I do not advocate automation for full content creation, I believe next year – as resources become stretched automation will have a bigger impact on helping with content optimization of existing content.

CHATGPT

ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is a powerful language generation model that leverages the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) architecture to produce realistic human-like text. With Chat GPT’s wide range of capabilities – from completing sentences and answering questions to generating content ideas or powering research initiatives – it can be an invaluable asset for any Natural Language Processing project.

ChatGPT-for-content

The introduction on ChatGPT has caused considerable debate and explosive amounts of content on the web. With ChatGPT, content marketers can achieve an extra edge over their competition by efficiently creating and editing high-quality content. It offers assistance with generating titles for blog posts, summaries of topics or articles, as well as comprehensive campaigns when targeting a specific audience.

However, it is important to remember that this technology should be used to enhance human creativity rather than completely replacing it.

For many years now AI-powered technology has been helping content marketers and SEOs automate repetitive tasks such as data analysis, scanning for technical issues, and reporting, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. AI also enables real-time analysis of a greater volume of consumer touchpoints and behavioral data points for smarter, more precise predictive analysis, opportunity forecasting, real-time content recommendations, and more.

With so much data in play and recession concerns already impacting 2023 budgets in many organizations, content marketers will have to do more with less this coming year. You’ll need to carefully balance human creative resources with AI assists where they make sense to stay flexible, agile, and ready to respond to the market.

It’s time to look at your body of content as a whole

Google’s Helpful Content update, which rolled out in August, is a sitewide signal targeting a high proportion of thin, unhelpful, low-quality content. That means the exceptional content on your site won’t rank to their greatest potential if they’re lost in a sea of mediocre, outdated assets.

It might be time for a content reboot – but don’t get carried away. Before you start unpublishing and redirecting blog posts, lean on technology for automated site auditing and see what you can fix up first. AI-assisted technology can help sniff out on-page elements, including page titles and H1 tags, and off-page factors like page speed, redirects, and 404 errors that can support your content refreshing strategy.

Focus on your highest trafficked and most visible pages first, i.e.: those linked from the homepage or main menu. Google’s John Mueller confirmed recently that if the important pages on your website are low quality, it’s bad news for the entire site. There’s no percentage by which this is measured, he said, urging content marketers and SEOs to instead think of what the average user would think when they visit your website.

Take advantage of location-based content optimization opportunities

Consumers crave personalized experiences, and location is your low-hanging fruit. Seasonal weather trends, local events, and holidays all impact your search traffic in various ways and present opportunities for location-based optimization.

AI-assisted technology can help you discover these opportunities and evaluate topical keywords at scale so you can plan content campaigns and promotions that tap into this increased demand when it’s happening.

Make the best possible use of content created for locally relevant campaigns by repurposing and promoting it across your website, local landing pages, social media profiles, and Google Business Profiles for each location. Google Posts, for example, are a fantastic and underutilized tool for enhancing your content’s visibility and interactivity right on the search results page.

Optimize content with conversational & high-volume keywords

Look for conversational and trending terms in your keyword research, too. Top-of-funnel keywords that help generate awareness of the topic and spur conversations in social channels offer great opportunities for promotion. Use hashtags organically and target them in paid content promotion campaigns to dramatically expand your audience.

Conversational keywords are a good opportunity for enhancing that content’s visibility in search, too. Check out the ‘People Also Ask’ results and other featured snippets available on the search results page (SERP) for your keyword terms. Incorporate questions and answers in your content to naturally optimize for these and voice search queries.

SEO-and-creating-content-in-2023

It’s important that you utilize SEO insights and real-time data correctly; you don’t want to be targeting what was trending last month and is already over. AI is a great assist here, as well, as an intelligent tool can be scanning and analyzing constantly, sending recommendations for new content opportunities as they arise.

Consider how you optimize content based on intent and experience

The best content comes from a deep, meaningful understanding of the searcher’s intent. What problem were they experiencing or what need did they have that caused them to seek out your content in the first place? And how does your blog post, ebook, or landing page copy enhance their experience?

Look at the search results page as a doorway to your “home”. How’s your curb appeal? What do potential customers see when they encounter one of your pages in search results? What kind of experience do you offer when they step over the threshold and click through to your website?

The best content meets visitors where they are at with relevant, high-quality information presented in a way that is accessible, fast loading, and easy to digest. This is the case for both short and long form SEO content. Ensure your content contains calls to action designed to give people options and help them discover the next step in their journey versus attempting to sell them on something they may not be ready for yet.

2023, the year of SEO: why brands are leaning in and how to prepare


Conclusion

The audience is king, queen, and the entire court as we head into 2023. SEO and content marketing give you countless opportunities to connect with these people but remember they are a means to an end. Keep searcher intent and audience needs at the heart of every piece of content you create and campaign you plan for the coming year.





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