SEO for Lawyers: An In-Depth Guide with SEO Guru Lane Houk

Ever wondered how you could navigate Google's mysterious core updates or conquer the world of AI-driven content for legal SEO strategies? Promise us your ears, and we'll present you with the insightful revelations of SEO guru, Lane Houk. Explore the labyrinth of SEO for lawyers, particularly the areas of estate planning and elder law. Together, we dissect Google's approach to validating content and its authors, and the crucial role Googlebot plays in this process.

We don't just stop there. We venture into the technicalities of assigning authorship, utilizing platforms like WordPress and LinkedIn, and uncover how linking authorship profiles across different platforms using 'same as schema' can propel your visibility. We even dive into the frequency of digital press releases and harnessing trending news stories for building robust authorship profiles. Engage with us in this illuminating conversation that aims to augment your law firm's reach and visibility. 

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

SEO for lawyers is more crucial today than ever before, especially in estate planning and elder law. No matter how stellar your law firm website is, if it's lost in the depths of Google search results, it's not serving its purpose. In today's episode of the Marketing Lawcast, I'm joined by my good friend and recognized SEO expert, lane Hauke. Stay tuned for insider secrets to getting your legal content ranked on Google's page one and one strategy we use here at IMS that's moving the needle for our top clients, even in competitive markets, even if you have multiple locations.

Speaker 2: 0:39

Before we dive into today's episode, a special shout out to our sponsor, QuidproQuo. Are you a law firm looking to scale or sell your practice? Qpq's expert team can help you unlock your firm's full potential. Stay tuned for valuable insights brought to you by QPQ.

Speaker 1: 0:55

Hi, welcome back to the Marketing Lawcast. I'm your host, jennifer Goddard, and I'm here with our guest today, lane Hauke. Lane is a recognized expert in search engine optimization. He's a co -founder, in fact, of a search engine optimization platform online. I've known Lane for about a year or so, and he's really been a big help to us in our SEO efforts, and so I asked him to come on to the podcast today to talk about the changes that are going on with Google and some of the things that our clients or lawyers in this field may want to focus on in terms of their search engine optimization. Hi, lane, it's great to have you on the podcast.

Speaker 3: 1:41

Thanks, jennifer. Awesome to be here with you. Appreciate you having me on. Looking forward to just a quick talk about some of the latest and greatest and things that are happening digitally and online, especially for your audience, estate planning attorneys and the like.

Speaker 1: 1:58

So recently we've had just a lot of volatility in SEO and Google rank and a lot of things going on. I just kind of want to toss it over to you, lane, if you could talk a little bit about what's going on with Google and why things are so volatile right now.

Speaker 3: 2:13

Sure, sure. Let's dive in real quick on some of the latest and greatest changes at Google. So the last year has been volatile. Like you said, they have released several major core updates and then several smaller updates. In between those core updates, we've been seeing core updates almost monthly, which is very atypical, if you will, but the last 12 months we've been seeing every 30 to 60 days of core update being released.

Speaker 3: 2:41

The biggest changes that have been happening have revolved around content and how Google validates who's generating the content and who's the author of that content, and a big catalyst for a lot of the changes this year in 2023 have been the releases and the huge advancements in artificial intelligence, or AI. Because of AI, now more than ever, there are just literally millions of pages of content being published all the time on Google, and so Google is not even crawling the entire web anymore. There was many, many years where Google would crawl the entire web almost every 30 days and, as of late, because of the proliferation of just digitally, the amount of websites and now AI and AI-driven content, google's had to combat that by just simply not crawling all the web. So, number one, we have to really try to figure out how do we actually get Googlebot to actually come crawl our pages? Because if Googlebot doesn't ever crawl the page, then it doesn't exist in Google's world period.

Speaker 3: 3:49

And so if the bot doesn't crawl the page, then it doesn't exist and therefore has no benefit at all. It just exists on the website, but from a digital standpoint, in search, it has no value. So AI-driven content has made the problem, or the challenge, even bigger for Google in that respect, and so now, because there's so much content out there, they have to filter through all that. Whatever pages they do crawl, and figure out, okay, what's actually worthwhile putting on page one for our users, because if they get it wrong over time, users will figure that out and start to use Google Search, lessons, some other options that are out there more. So it's about market share. They're a business and so they've got to produce a good user experience.

Speaker 3: 4:42

So the way that they're really really refining their algorithm is by validating content and us in figuring out is this content assigned to an individual or an entity in their words, an entity and is that entity an individual or a business, or is this anonymous content? Is it just kind of unnamed, anonymous content that just exists out there? So it's really really important, then, for that content to not only be authored or assigned to an individual, at the best practice, having a real individual assigned to that content as the author. Google wants to find out who is responsible for the content. So their algorithm is doing and checking literally also hundreds of data points around the company, around the people that are working at or own that company, and then who's assigned to that content or who's the author of that content, and then if it can't find an author, then it's going to go into kind of that anonymous content category where it's just going to be disregarded, go ahead.

Speaker 1: 5:56

Why does Google care? Why is it so important for them to validate that content? The author.

Speaker 3: 6:03

Well, so that gives us in to eat. Okay, because it's not just about identifying an author, but it's identifying how much experience does that person, that author, actually have around the topic of content that's in play or the subject of the evaluation? And so the biggest changes that have been happening last year around this helpful content update okay, the helpful content is actually a system, so it's called the helpful content system. It's an entire system that Google has behind the algorithm and there are many systems driving the algorithm. It's not just one system, but the helpful content system is now a huge component of the overall algorithm, and so there have been several updates we call them helpful content updates to that system since it was first released in August of 2022. So, ultimately, the bot is reading every single word on a page on a web page. So all the words on a web page the bot is reading and it can read it better than a human and it can read it way faster than a human, and it makes evaluations and decisions instantaneously after reading or crawling and rendering that page of content, and it's looking for helpful content signals, basically, if you will.

Speaker 3: 7:27

And so underlying the helpful content system is this concept that Google has put out called Eat, and it used to be EAT, and then Google added an extra E in December of last year 2022. And so now it's EEAT. And so EEAT is an acronym that stands for Experience, expertise, authority and Trust. Okay, and so we'd like to make a little play on that acronym and say Google loves to eat, loves to crawl and eat helpful content and it's looking for these signals around EAT Experience, expertise, authority and Trust. Now, really, it's hard to really develop. The trust is kind of what I would say is, trust is the outcome of generating the or demonstrating the other three, e, e and A. And so in our content now this is really good for attorneys, right? Because attorneys, number one, they've gone to law school and so they've got. Now they have to pass the law, the bar exam, they have to be licensed, they have to maintain CLEs on a regular basis to maintain their licensure. That gives them experience and expertise that they can actually document and put into their content.

Speaker 3: 8:50

And so, practically speaking, what we want to start doing now because of the helpful content update, is we want to do a couple of things. We want to, number one, have this goal of it not being for SEO. We want our content to actually be helpful to a user, and so what are? The easiest way to make helpful content, especially around the legal space, is there are all sorts of questions that your typical prospect or client of an attorney or a state planning attorney is going to have. What are those questions? Document them and now let's start answering those questions. Now, obviously there's a finite number of questions. I don't think there's probably infinite number of questions, so you might work through answering those questions after a certain number of months or years, and so there's got to be more that goes into just helpful content besides answering questions.

Speaker 3: 9:42

But we can also use case studies, all of the different. You can obviously keep it bar compliant, anonymize who the case study is about, but use some of the cases that they've used and some of the wins or successes that they've been able to generate for their clients in those types of scenarios or cases, and those are great, great articles. Those are also great press releases, and so one of the things that you and I have talked about, and the platform that we've developed, is to leverage digital PR. So the old way of doing PR was you'd pick up the phone if you were a PR specialist and if you were an attorney and you needed some coverage or you wanted some special coverage about your company or your case, a case that you had or your practice, you'd find a traditional PR specialist and they may make some phone calls and some faxes. Remember back in the day they send some faxes out to some of their journalist friends and see if they could get their client picked up and published in a publication.

Speaker 1: 10:46

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Speaker 3: 11:56

About eight to ten years ago, digital. With the world transforming into digital, a lot of the traditional PR publications also went digital. Digital PR became a spin-off of traditional PR. What we do is we developed a software platform and a technology that we built specifically for agencies to utilize for their clientele. We're able to get them picked up and published on news publications In a digital sense and we then are using that to send off authoritative signals that ultimately build trust. The challenge for the agency and the estate planning attorney client is to demonstrate experience or document experience and expertise within their content, while also making it helpful, answering questions and giving consumers or prospects what they want in that content. If you can demonstrate experience and expertise in your content, leverage digital PR to get that content published on authoritative news sites. There's the A and E right Then in certain ways, we are helping with building out the trust of that, because there's certain ways that we execute that digital PR process that's very unique in the space. That just really helps fire off signals.

Speaker 3: 13:23

For EAT, one of the most important components is leading back to authorship. Your attorney clients need to become authors. Some people are like that. They like to be out front, they like to have their name out there on the billboards. They like to. Then some attorneys are not like that. They like to just be behind the scenes, do their work quietly and they don't want their name out there much at all. It doesn't matter, they don't have a pen name if you don't want your real name out there. Some of them are really good at doing that too. They understand the legalities there. It's pretty simple and easy to create a pen name, but there needs to be somebody attached to the content. Preferably it's the licensee. It's the person who has that law license that's practicing, because now you can document their experience and their expertise in the space.

Speaker 1: 14:14

So is it better laying to have the content connected to a specific attorney in the firm or to the firm, or does it matter?

Speaker 3: 14:23

It does matter.

Speaker 3: 14:24

The best practice is to an individual.

Speaker 3: 14:26

For sure, google will revert to the entity, assigning the content to the company or the entity in this case the law practice if it must, because it's on their website, and this is that a component of authorship that's important and part of how we execute in our software technology, as you know, is that the content needs to be published on the law practices website first Before it appears anywhere else out there on the web, right?

Speaker 3: 14:56

Because Googlebot is going to be crawling the web and if that content is found somewhere else first, not on the law practices website, then that other website could be assigned the author of that content and then they're going to get the credit. Okay To your question. It will assign it to the entity or the law practice if it must, but it would prefer to be assigned to an individual, and we know this because Google's quality rate or guidelines, the QRGs. These are the guidelines given to the human raters who are work for Google and who are assigned to go literally read pages of content as their job and then evaluate and rate that content, and the main job of the quality raters is to identify who is responsible for the content.

Speaker 1: 15:43

So in our, in our best practice, in our practice we always go to the blog article first, we publish that blog article first, then we go and do the press release, the digital press release, and we reference that blog article.

Speaker 3: 15:59

Perfect, and then make sure that you're implicitly or explicitly identifying who the author of and if you're using WordPress, wordpress automatically assigns authorship to the user that publishes that blog post, and so there's some specific things that can be implemented to make sure that authorship is explicit, so that when Googlebot crawls that page, it goes ah, here's the author, here's the individual for this content, and that also makes it very easy for a quality rate or a human writer to also identify that who because that is that that's the operative word in the QRGs is who it says it several times, the guidelines repeat it multiple times identify who is responsible for the content and their reputation.

Speaker 1: 16:48

So it's really important for us to have that bio page built out for the primary attorney, the person that's going to be the author of the identified author of that content, correct?

Speaker 3: 16:58

And then directly link it to a very well thought through LinkedIn profile, because Google is absolutely Googlebot, the algorithm is absolutely crawling the LinkedIn profiles and then identifying all okay, we've got attorney Jane Doe here's attorney Jane Doe's LinkedIn profile.

Speaker 3: 17:21

And then, to your point, here's attorney Jane Doe's bio and authorship profile on the website, and then you can have attorney Jane Doe's Quora profile, attorney Jane Doe's slide share profile, attorney Jane Doe's obviously Facebook profile, if she has one, a Twitter profile. Again, they're very authoritative, for authors use Twitter and so if you have these other profiles and then you connect them all together and link them all together with same as schema. That same as schema tells Google bot ah, here's the authorship profile, but it's the same. Here's their Quora profile, the LinkedIn profile, the Facebook profile, the Twitter profile, and then it has this complete authorship profile footprint that is very much identified by the bot and then it goes out here's the author of the content, and now that author of that content can, month over month over month, publish more and more articles and start to really build authority as an author. You see that root word coming back.

Speaker 3: 18:23

Right right right.

Speaker 1: 18:25

So how often should you be sending out this digital press release?

Speaker 3: 18:32

Well, so you know, there are companies, the bigger the company, the more frequent. And there are companies who do daily press releases, sometimes even multiple because they're so big and they have multiple divisions. For you know, the average small business law practice, you know in a local, you know market, or even a multi-location law practice, I would say at least once a week would be ideal. If you can't do once a week, either because of budget or just because of you know whatever other constraints you might be dealing with, then add a minimum once a month, but ideally once a week.

Speaker 3: 19:10

There's always news, especially in law, like there's new cases coming down from the appellate courts, from the district courts. There's sometimes federal law that you know, especially when you're dealing with state planning. You've got, you know, federal tax laws that might be in place. There's always news and you know here's a little tip is I would capitalize on these news, these trending news stories. So anything that's trending, anything that's new news, any attorney can just jump right on that bandwagon and write a blog article about this new case that just came down, even though it may not, they may not think there's a lot of benefit from that particular exercise. Doing it over and over and over again, we'll start to build your authorship profile and your authority in the space. Give your very strategic about the content that you're writing, which is where, obviously, you and your expertise come in as an agency.

Speaker 1: 20:03

A lot of our clients have multiple offices and I. There are always big questions that they bring to us about how do we make sure that we're showing up in the local market in each of these offices and I know that's one of your fields of expertise. Is that multi-location, which is kind of a tricky thing to do?

Speaker 3: 20:24

So the first understanding is that every location that has its own Google listing, which is obviously, if you have a multi-location law practice, you're going to have multiple Google listings. I've never seen a multi-location law practice leased in the last three to five years. It didn't have multiple listings for each of those locations. So each location has its own Google listing. Well, in Google's eyes, in the algorithm, each of those GBP listings, google listings, is its own entity. It's unique, it's separate from the other Google listings that are all being shared, maybe sharing one website, which is common. One website, five locations, one website, 10 locations. Whatever the case might be, each of those Google listings has a separate entity in Google's eyes or in the algorithm, number one. So you have to understand that. Number two obviously each of those Google listings is in a separate and different location. So ranking that particular entity, that particular Google listing, in a unique location of cities and zip codes around that location, takes a repeated set of signals or generating signals around that Google listing on a regular basis, which means weekly to monthly, like monthly again. We go back to the same thing Basically, if you can, monthly in terms of frequency, at a very bare minimum. So each Google listing needs to have its own set of signals generated around that Google listing on a weekly to monthly basis in order to create lift in the rankings, in order to overtake any competitors who are currently on the first page.

Speaker 3: 22:04

So the only way that we can train the algorithm and generate signals is with content. We need some form of content in order to generate a signal other than some of the signals that are generated off of our website, like our load time, our dwell time. There's some signals that we can't control, but the signals that we and or the law practices can control are going to be high. The majority of them are going to be generated by using content. So content comes in the form of four mediums. Right, we have written content, we have audio content, we have image content and we have video content. So we have to use one of the four forms of those contents preferably all four together if we can to generate signals.

Speaker 3: 22:49

And then so each of those Google listings in a multi-location application needs to be generating content weekly to monthly, and using one or more of those forms of content and then getting that content out strategically, using it to generate signals, because if it just gets published to the website. There's almost no other signals that are generated with that publication. So much like the technology that we develop using leveraging digital PR. We're able to take a piece of content in the form of a press release and then, through relationships and publications and contacting all these different, get some of that content published on different news sites, right? And so now that content is generating signals because other sites are picking up the content, publishing it, and we've got signals that are generating around that Google listing and around that website with that content. So that's the exercise that must happen weekly to monthly. If you're a multi-location law practice firm owner, you must be generating content and generating ranking signals around that each individual Google listing on a weekly to monthly basis in order to create, lift in the rankings and overtake competitors.

Speaker 1: 24:03

You know, lane I think that you probably have answered a big question right there that a lot of lawyers have, especially smaller firms why am I not ranking on Google? And that answer is because you're not doing a lot of these things that you just talked about and your competitors are, and that's you know. You just can't overcome that if you just have, you know, a static website and you're not generating content, like Lane said, on a weekly or monthly basis and generating those authoritative signals.

Speaker 3: 24:40

And I think I've even seen, you know, there's a fair amount of attorneys that love the blog, like they love to write. You know, that's just kind of in their nature. My wife happens to be an attorney, you know so, and she loves, she's still. I mean, I had to go get her notepads, you know, last week because she still writes on notepads. Like I haven't touched a notepad, you know, in years. But many of them are writers and so I've seen many, many lawyers blog pretty proficiently and not get rankings the way that they thought they were going to get, because they were producing blog articles on a monthly basis. They'd sit down on a Saturday, sunday, on an off weekend, and crank out three or four blog articles for the month and they don't get rankings. And they're wondering why? Why am I not? You know, because you're publishing content simply to your blog and nobody's seeing it.

Speaker 2: 25:28

And if nobody's seeing it?

Speaker 3: 25:28

you're not getting any signals around that content, and so that's where an expert like Jennifer can come in and not and help you get your content actually published on other sites and syndicated so that you actually utilize and leverage that content to actually create ranking signals with it, because content sitting on a blog site creates no signals.

Speaker 3: 25:49

We must get it published elsewhere and elsewhere, preferably on authoritative sites, so we can check that A and E for creating authority right.

Speaker 3: 25:59

And if news sites are picking up in a lawyer's content and publishing it on their news site, there's something authoritative about it, right.

Speaker 3: 26:08

And so now and then, if we position ourselves or as an agency when you write it the way that you do, positioning the lawyer as the expert in their industry, now we're starting to check some of the boxes of expertise and experience.

Speaker 3: 26:24

And then, if we have a really well documented LinkedIn profile that we link to and we maybe document some of the things that we've recently done or we put a case study in that content, now we're actually documenting experience and that's a really, because the bot is reading that content and looking is there any experience being documented here around the topic at hand? Is there anything? Is the author have any unique expertise at the topic at hand. So this has to become a very purposeful strategy to become a documented author of content, be positioning ourselves as the expert in our industry, utilizing case studies and glossary of terms. I mean these all demonstrate hey, I've got a good handle on the topics and then getting it published elsewhere. Because if you just blog, blog, blog, blog, you're probably not going to see the rankings that you thought you're going to see.

Speaker 1: 27:22

Right, exactly. Well, lane, you know you're not going to sit here and talk about this all day long. This has just been fascinating, but we're running out of time. I hope you will come back again and we can talk about SEO, because I'm sure it's going to change a lot the next three months. Maybe we can schedule another.

Speaker 3: 27:40

That's one thing I'm curious it will change yeah.

Speaker 1: 27:43

Absolutely. Thank you so very much. I appreciate it and we'll definitely be continuing this conversation in future episodes.

Speaker 3: 27:52

My pleasure. Thanks again for having me, jennifer. It was awesome spending that time with you. Thanks, yeah, you're welcome.

Speaker 2: 28:00

That's a wrap for today's episode and a big thank you to our sponsor, quid Pro Quo. Qpq is your partner in law firm success, offering expert guidance on scaling, selling and optimizing your practice. With a team of experienced professionals, they bring real world insights to the table. Are you ready to take your law practice to new heights? Visit their website at wwwquidproquolawcom to learn more and start your journey toward a thriving and sellable law firm.