Mobile Friendly Website Design: Optimizing for Google Rankings

Host: Alex Valencia, WDW

Guest Speaker: Conrad Saam, Founder of Mockingbird Marketing

 

In this webinar, Alex Valencia of We Do Web picks the brain of one of the masters of mobile marketing—Conrad Saam from Mockingbird Marketing. Conrad delves into responsive design and spills the benefits of using platforms like WordPress to make your site responsive and how hosts like WP Engine can help you manage WordPress in your sleep. 

 

With the Google algorithm update rolling out on April 21, you can’t run the risk of your website not being mobile friendly. Listen in to get the skinny on a more hush-hush change coming down the Google pipeline: penalizing sites that use doorway pages. 

 

Transcript:

 

Alex Valencia:

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so much for attending. I’d like to introduce Conrad Saam, and we’re waiting on a few more people, so I apologize for the technical difficulties in the beginning. But I want to let you know this, we want this to be as interactive as possible. This is some really important stuff that Conrad’s going to go over. To begin with, Conrad Saam’s a really good friend of mine. He’s the go-to SEO for We Do Web Content, and a lot of the other legal marketers that I know of. We’ve been working with Conrad for probably going on two years now. Super smart guy. He used to work for Avvo, I’m sure you know Avvo if you’re all legal attorneys or legal marketers here online with us. So again, feel free to ask any questions during the webinar, either raise your hand or use the questions.

We’re going to be sharing some stuff on the chat side. You’re also going to get an email with the video presentation and the links that we used during the webinar, as well. So I’m going to go ahead and hand it over. Now to Conrad. Conrad, thanks so much again for doing this. We look forward to doing more webinars with you. Go ahead, shoot, man. Tell us what this big deal about Google is and why we should be afraid and what we need to do to go ahead and get things fixed and be in the right eyes of Google.

Conrad Saam:

What we’re going to discuss here today are two really, really big things coming out of the search world that are going to have, in my opinion, a bigger impact on legal SEO than probably we’ve ever seen. The only thing that’s had a bigger impact is when all the lawyers got into the SEO game. But there’s two things coming out that we’re going to talk about in detail. One is this upcoming change, January, April 21st. This is Google’s mobile penalty that is rolling out starting April 21. There’s a week long rollout, and essentially if you don’t have a mobile friendly site, things are going to change. If you do have a mobile friendly site, things are going to change for the better because all of your competitors who don’t are going to be losing business, and it is going to be rolling into your inbound phone calls.

Secondly, and much less talked about is the upcoming doorway change. So, Google has very quietly talked about a penalty on sites that utilize doorway pages. And so we’re going to talk about what’s the doorway page, why does Conrad think this is so relevant in legal, and what do I need to do about it? So that’s coming up, and we’ve got Alex Valencia here andConrad Saam here from Mockingbird. Alex and I have known each other for a very long time, and we do a lot of work together on mutual clients. And so what you’ll get is probably a bit of a Conrad/Alex show with back and forth conversation.

So really, I’m going to walk through four different components of this. What do we know right now? What does this mobile update mean? What is their information that we currently have? Two: how do I assess whether or not I have a problem or if maybe I’m sitting on an asset and on April 22nd the phone starts ringing off the hook. Three: how do I estimate the overall impact to my business? And four, “Okay, Conrad, what do we do now?” So I get all this stuff, but what pragmatically should I be thinking about doing? So let me hit this, what do we know? The graph here is an example of what happened to a website after one of the penalty rollouts, and this is organic traffic, and you can see that it just craters to almost nothing on a specific date. In general, Google has not broadcast what that date is. And so in my industry, what we do is we look at a pattern like this, we go back and find out, hey, in this case at the beginning of November, there was an algorithm update and there-

Alex Valencia:

I lost sound.

Conrad Saam:

… what impacted this site? This one we looked in… You still got me, Alex?

Alex Valencia:

I got you, but you cut out. Sorry guys.

Conrad Saam:

Oh, I’m sorry. So this is an example of Pigeon, and Pigeon came out on this specific date, traffic cratered, and now we know specifically what needs to happen for this site.

Alex Valencia:

What was Pigeon? Can you tell everyone a little bit about Pigeon real quick without going into a whole…?

Conrad Saam:

Pigeon was a Google algorithm update that looked for unnatural link patterns. And I believe this last one, I can’t remember what number it was, but they continuously look and roll these updates out. So it’s essentially a penalty for an unnatural link profile. And they have become increasingly vocal about these unnatural links. And now with the April 21st announcement, they’re really foreshadowing what’s happening. And the issue here is does your site deliver a good experience on a mobile device? And what that means, what is a good experience on a mobile device: that it’s fast, that it’s readable, and that it looks good on a mobile device. So when people are searching for your business on mobile, they don’t have to pinch and zoom and squeeze their phone to actually access the content, but that it looks good on those much smaller screens. So as early as the beginning of the year, we started seeing these mobile friendly badges on mobile searches.

So here’s an example. I’ve got these highlighted in yellow where these mobile friendly badges start showing up in search results to indicate to the end user that, “Hey, you what? This website here, this looks pretty good on your mobile phone.” And presumably that drove quicker to some impact. Now, to assess this, there’s some very, very simplistic ways to go about looking at your site. When you load your site on your phone, do you have to pinch and squeeze it? Do you get a different experience, a better experience on your phone than you get on your desktop? And so that’s a really quick way of evaluating whether or not you are doing a good job from a mobile perspective. Another one that we do all the time is just take your desktop and resize it, resize the screen that you’re looking on. Just literally drag Internet Explorer around and see if the content reorganizes itself, or does it slip off the page and you would have to start scrolling in order to actually access that content.

So those are kind of the really simple old school ways of doing a self-evaluation. Again, in the spirit of Google forecasting this as much as possible, there is now a Google mobile friendly check. So there’s absolutely no excuse for not knowing whether or not your site may have an issue. And Alex, if you can ping out through the chat, you can ping out that URL. Perhaps we can have people, I mean literally jump on this URL, listen while I’m yammering on, jump on the URL, put your domain in there and see what you find. And this is really the best way to ask Google whether or not they think you have a mobile friendly site. This is an example of a Martindale site, Orlandolaw.net, that looks terrible on a mobile device, and I would fully expect their traffic to take a really big hit come April 22nd.

Okay, so how does mobile work, and what is Google looking for when they do this Google mobile friendly check? And there’s really three different approaches from a technology perspective. There’s three different approaches to a mobile friendly site, and this is very much in order of-

Alex Valencia:

I think I’m losing you.

Conrad Saam:

… priority. Okay?

Alex Valencia:

Go ahead.

Conrad Saam:

You’re losing me on audio?

Alex Valencia:

Yeah, you’re back.

Conrad Saam:

Okay, sorry, I must have a… You know what I’m going to do, Alex, I’m just going to pull this headset off. So I’m going to assume that the Bluetooth is the problem, I’m going to pull this and let me know via chat if I completely drop off the air. Okay?

Alex Valencia:

Okay, go ahead.

Conrad Saam:

You still have me now?

Alex Valencia:

Yep, we’re good.

Conrad Saam:

Okay, good. Sorry about that, everyone. The worst thing in the world is when technology is not awesome when you’re a technology company. So let me go back, there are three approaches to getting that kind of badge of health from Google when you run that assessment. And in order of priority, I would look at it these three ways. The first is responsive, and responsive design essentially means that the website itself relays itself out, redoes the layout dynamically based on the screen size available to you. So if I go back two or three or five years, you used to have to design websites for a specific screen size. And when people got bigger screens, we had to have these new processes where we redesigned our website, recognized the screen size, and had a different experience. In the responsive world, there are so many different screen dimensions, and what responsive does is it redos the layout, font sizes, et cetera of your website to look good on any different screen size.

And so that’s the premise behind responsive. And this is really the gold standard. This is what really we would recommend doing. Alternatively, you can use what has been called an m-Dot. And an m-Dot really looks like M.Mywebsite.com, and it’s serving a different experience to the user by recognizing the screen size. Now, the difficulty on this, it opens up a Pandora’s box of potential problems. And I’m not suggesting that if you aren’t on m-Dot that you have these problems, but there is the potential for more problems with an m-Dot approach. And that essentially means that I’ve got duplicate content. I need to make sure that we’re hitting the screen size correctly. And so my backend needs to identify the screen size and have a solution for that individual screen size. So the m-Dot is, it’s okay, but it kind of opens up a problem. And as more screen sizes come out, how m-Dots actually work becomes something you can really call that into question.

The third thing is dynamic content. And this is where the content on the website actually changes based on the screen dimensions of the device that you’re looking at. Let me back up, I’m not seeing dynamic content from any law firms. So this is really, if you’re a major retailer, is a very, very complex technology and it really kind of falls out of the purview of this discussion just ’cause we’re not seeing it. So to summarize this, what we’re really looking for is responsive, and what I’m going to go into and recommend aggressively is how to get your website if it’s not responsive onto that type of technology.

Alex Valencia:

Sorry to interrupt, I just pinged everyone through the chat. So if you want to go ahead and take a minute now and try to link up the URL into the link I sent you and test your mobile friendliness now, you can go ahead and do that and then let us know if you have any questions.

Conrad Saam:

And that might be a good way to circle back and actually pull out some questions from some of the people on the webinar. Okay, so now what I want to do is talk about the impact. And Conrad’s been sitting here saying, “Hey, it’s the end of the world, the sky’s falling.” But you can and should mathematically look at the impact on your site. And I really think about this as a zero-sum game. So there is a potential positive impact if you’re doing things right and there’s a potential negative impact if you’re doing things wrong, if my traffic, this traffic is not going to me, it’s going to someone else. Conversely, if someone else has done it all wrong and they get hit, it’s going to start coming to me. So this is why I say that there is going to be such a massive shakeup in the legal marketing world. And Alex, you did a study, can you go into the study that you did in terms of the percentage of sites that were not mobile friendly in legal?

Alex Valencia:

So one of my staff members, and purely out of curiosity since I got this block from Conrad, Jeff went out and not only did he do it through the mobile friendly on Google for I think up to 75 websites, he did it on his cell phone and then he ran them also through the mobile friendly link that I just sent everyone, out of 75 sites, 92% of those websites were not responsive. And it’s funny, I’m not going to mention any names, but I had sent my email out to a group of attorneys and one of them sent me an email back saying, “Check mine out, I’m fine.” And I was at a conference last week and out of curiosity, I ran it and it totally failed. So I just had to let him know, “Sorry dude, I ran your site, it totally failed. Let me know if you need any help with it.”

I use my phone for everything. I mean, I get in trouble from my wife because I’m always on it. I search absolutely everything on it, even though the screen’s broken. I can only imagine for PI attorneys, you get in an accident and the first thing you’re going to do is you’re going to search on your phone. If I get to a site where I can barely read everything and I’m going to have to pinch and squeeze, I’m moving, I’m leaving. We’re in the environment where we want everything instant and almost done for us. And if that’s not done, you’re going to fail. You’re going to fail to the 8% that are actually being responsive, right?

Conrad Saam:

Yeah, I think this is a really big deal, and it used to be you get to the site and you go somewhere else, but now it’s like you’re not going to even get there. You will not exist. So how dire is this? How big of an impact are we looking at? What are we really talking about here? So, A, I want to show you the diagnostic, and then B, I want to talk about mobile traffic in general for law firms. So this is a screenshot of our Google Analytics. So this is for Mockingbird Marketing, and in Google Analytics, I hope you can see my cursor here. Under “audience,” it is a really easy thing to find under “audience.” You can go to mobile and click overview and find out exactly the percentage of traffic that’s coming from desktop versus press mobile. And then for some reason they have mobile and tablet both broken out. But I would consider both of those mobile.

Alex Valencia:

So about 24%. Wow.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah. So we’re looking at roughly one in four. Now in law firm traffic, as we’ve looked across hundreds of law firms, and these are law firms that are doing things right already because they’re clients of ours, and I just realized how arrogant that sounded, so I apologize. But these are firms that are on cutting edge technology. We’re seeing roughly 50%, so roughly 50% of the traffic comes to your site through a mobile device. Now, there’s other ways to cut this data in Google Analytics, and I would very strongly encourage you to do this. So you can create a custom segment, and let me… I’m going to break out of this, let’s just pull, let me see if I’ve got this up really easily. I don’t.

Alex Valencia:

I got a quick question from Charlotte who works at a law firm. She is asking something about the dates. If the change is on the 21st or 22nd, she’d heard both dates.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah.

Alex Valencia:

Is there any specifics on that or are they rolling it out slowly? I think you were going to get into that anyways.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah, the change is rolling out on the 21st. And this is actually, let me segue this into another conversation. Is this going to happen right away? Is this going to be the guillotine where the traffic disappears really quickly or is it going to be a much more gradual approach? There we go. I got this back. Very frequently, Google will roll stuff out over time. And so even some of the Pigeon and Pandas and Penguins updates, they’ll roll that out over a period of time. My guess is that (and this is me guessing, and this is just me looking into the psyche there,) my guess is that they’re going to roll this out very aggressively on one day, and it will be a signal to all the people who haven’t taken this seriously that this is very, very serious. So that’s my guess. But we really are looking at April 21. So if we have problems, we need to jump on this really quickly. And I hate to say this, but we’re kind of a little bit behind the eight-ball. We’ll talk about what we should do, and the answer is dependent on the platform, but I would be looking at April 21, trying to get things squared away by April 20th.

Alex Valencia:

I remember the last algorithm update, I remember there was a quick impact early on, and then they slowly started giving more information, week two, week three, it started eventually dying down, but I remember there was an upfront impact and a lot of law firms were hit up front. I forget if it was the… Was it the last Pigeon? It might have been the one about links. But I remember the impact being fairly quick. I don’t imagine it’s going to be the same for attorneys, unresponsive, but you never know. I mean, with Google, you really just want to stay ahead of the game and listen to what they’re telling you because they’ve been talking about responsive for a while. They just finally rolled it out and said, “We’re going to make this part of the update.” Correct?

Conrad Saam:

Yeah. Yeah. And let me hit one thing just because you used the word “update,” and I’ve been using the word “penalty,” right? What is this? Is this an algo update or is it a penalty? And Google’s really going out of their way to talk about this as an update, but the reality is this is a penalty. If you are not conforming to what they’re determining to be best practice is, you are going to get hit. The impact is very much the same as if you were buying links and get whacked by Pigeon or if you get hit by the Panda updates. These are penalties and it has a very big and negative impact on traffic. And I use the word “penalty” because I like to call it out for what it is. People who don’t, and this is the ugly flip side of this, if you don’t spend the money to stay up to date with the technology, you’re going to get hit. And I hate this, but for small firms, it gets unfair. It starts to get really unfair where it’s like, “Okay, you need to continue to invest in technology in order to keep the Google happy.” And I think that is a shame, but it is the way it is, and I can’t change it. I can make some recommendations on what you can do to future proof yourself, but I can’t necessarily change that.

Alex Valencia:

We have a raised hand from Kevin, Kurt. Kevin, I’m not sure if I could unmute the audio, but if you want to write the question in or we can try to open it up later, I’d love to hear what your question is. Or if you could just type it in the questions box, then we could have it answered. That’d be awesome. Go ahead. Sorry, Conrad.

Conrad Saam:

No, no, it’s fine. So let me go back to Google Analytics, because this is important. In Google Analytics, you can create a segment very easily, at the first screen that you see, there is a box that says “new segment.” And if you click on that box and then select “mobile,” you can look at your entire website traffic just through mobile. And you can go back to whenever you started collecting data on your website and see what the mobile trend is. So at the very least, at the bare minimum, unless of course you’re working with a vendor who hasn’t bothered to install GA, but at the bare minimum, you should watch the trajectory of your mobile traffic over the past 12 months. And then I would be looking at this through the next two months because it’s going to get very interesting. And for all we know, Conrad’s blowing a lot of smoke, and this doesn’t turn into a big deal.

But you will know and you can look at this, and instead of philosophically listening to people like me talk about the theory of mobile and responsive, blah, blah, blah, let’s see what you actually have, and let’s see whether or not this is a big deal. And the final thing within Google Analytics that I recommend doing is looking at your landing pages. So I would look at mobile traffic that’s going to your landing pages, and you can get that under “behavior content landing pages.” And a landing page is essentially a page where someone starts. Okay, what is the first page on which they landed on your website? And let me paint the worst case scenario, in your worst case scenario, you find a lot of your mobile traffic starts out on one of those pages that I would call a hike.

It would be something like “Seattle divorce lawyer,” right? Because generally if I’m landing on “Seattle divorce lawyer,” I’m high up in the funnel, I don’t really know who I want to hire, I’m just looking for information on “Seattle divorce lawyer.” As opposed to a branded search where I’m looking to hire Smith, Smith, Smith, Smith, Smith and Smith. And I land on Smith, Smith, Smith and Smith homepage. If I am way up higher and I’m just looking for “Seattle divorce lawyer,” I don’t have a starting point. And so those pages are the pages that are the money pages, they’re the high converting pages, they’re the pages where people not haven’t necessarily been referred to you. You see a lot of mobile traffic going to those pages from natural search. Again, I would start to worry about whether or not your phone is going to stop ringing or at least see a significant reduction. So again, 50% benchmark of your traffic coming from mobile. What does that look like? Where is that traffic going? Are you going to lose all 50%? Probably not because if someone’s doing a branded search for your law firm name or doing a name search for you, they may end up where you are. But those high converting users, that’s what I start to worry about.

Alex Valencia:

So we have some questions.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah, yeah, go.

Alex Valencia:

Okay. So are we saying this update is going to impact mobile search or mobile and desktop searches?

Conrad Saam:

It will affect mobile search. This is a mobile specific update.

Alex Valencia:

Okay, that’s not a question. Will having a mobile app give our firm a boost for our Google rank after this change?

Conrad Saam:

So let me answer the question that you asked, and then let me answer the question that I think you’re asking. The question you asked is, will having a mobile app have any impact on this? And having an app that I download through the app store is a completely different experience from mobile search. And there are a bunch, maybe you have a blood alcohol content calculator, maybe you have… A bunch of law firms have built apps and they’re downloaded. I personally think it’s probably not something I would invest in, getting a consumer to download an app that they’re going to pretty much never use in their life seems like you’re pouring money into the ocean. What I think you’re asking is, “I think my website’s responsive ’cause it looks kind of like an app, is that going to have an impact?” And the answer to that is, yes, you’re doing the right thing. So if you want to follow up with a clarifying question, I’m happy to answer that. But those are the two, I hear the word mobile app and I’m not necessarily sure exactly what you mean.

Let me move into the, “Okay, Conrad, what do we do now?” Part of the conversation. So I would put yourself and define where you fall into one of these three buckets, and I’m going to talk almost ad nauseum about WordPress and almost as if I have a whole bunch of stock in WordPress, which I don’t. But the answer here is if I have a non WordPress-based site, if I’m on Joomla or Drupal or something that my kid made when he was a CS major at MIT and it’s hand coded, we get a lot of these.

Alex Valencia:

My kid said he was going to MIT; he’s only seven, sorry. Go ahead.

Conrad Saam:

That’ll work. So if you are off of the WordPress platform and you don’t have a responsive site, I think now is the time to start thinking, coming up with a “yes, we’re going to do this today kind of thing” answer about moving to a responsive site. The reason, and again, I’m going to sound like a WordPress acolyte here, but the reason we push WordPress is because it does an amazing job of future proofing yourself against these problems. So five years ago, were we talking about mobile like this? No, people were still trying to be convinced that people would look for lawyers on a mobile device. Now at this point that’s saying seems ludicrous, but because WordPress is so ubiquitous and because there are so many developers, this platform grows with changes in technology. And this move to mobile is a perfect example of how the platform future proofs itself against these problems.

So I would be thinking about moving to a WordPress site and I would be thinking about doing that right now. The second thing, and here’s the other thing, the upside, there are WordPress developers all over the place. They’re probably within 20 miles of your office there’s probably a hundred people who can work on WordPress. So WordPress skillset is very widespread. The complicating factors with a non WordPress site is your volume of content. If you are on a non WordPress site, you need to migrate that content into WordPress. And if you have ten pages, that’s fine. I can manually grab your pictures and copy and paste stuff and we can move it into WordPress. And it’s not a big deal if you have 50 pages or a hundred pages or in some cases we’ve dealt with a site (so the largest site I’ve dealt with for a single law firm, we were dealing with over 10,000 pages of content), that requires an automated process to move it over.

It’s messy, it’s pain in the neck, it’s very technical, you shouldn’t try it on your own. This is the deep end of the pool and it adds expense. Having said that, let’s do it. Let’s get on this. Let’s fix this problem. Now, on the happier side, let’s say you’re on a WordPress site and it is not mobile friendly, and there are lots of these sites. So going back even two or three years ago, many of the themes that existed for WordPress were not responsive. And two or three years ago, lawyers who were selecting themes didn’t know what responsive meant, nor did they understand it, so they didn’t select themes that were responsive. So if you’re on a WordPress site that does not pass the Google sniff test on mobile friendliness, it’s actually pretty easy to change. And really all you need to do is find a theme that works within your existing look and feel and upgrade your WordPress install to that new theme.

Now it’s not perfectly simple, this can get a little bit tricky, but you may need to do some design changes, et cetera, but you really can maybe without even talking to someone like myself or even a WordPress person, go buy a book and see if you can upgrade to a responsive team. So this is your best case scenario. And then I’m going to hit the third bucket. And the third bucket is this is much more complicated, and it’s a little bit of Conrad on a soapbox. So with that being said, if you are on a vendor’s proprietary platform and it is not responsive and you are paying this vendor hundreds or thousands of dollars a month, you need to ask yourself, “What am I doing? What am I paying for?” And so I’m seeing this, and I’ve seen this a little too frequently to be happy about it, but there are vendors out there who I’m paying a bunch of money on a regular basis, and now in order to upgrade, upgrade to kind of a minimum standard, there is a fee to move my site to a responsive site.

And in all fairness, it costs these vendors money to generate a responsive site because they’re not using WordPress. But I go back to the question and say, okay, if I’m dropping, some people are spending $750 a month on their website or a thousand or $2,000, and if the vendor has not seen this very long ago forecasted best practices changed from the search engine and you’re still paying for a website in the hundreds or thousands of dollars level, what are you paying for? So we just looked at the traffic, we could be looking at a loss of 30, 40, or 50% of our traffic. What on earth am I paying for? So I would be screaming bloody murder at my vendor to get my platform on a responsive site at this point.

Alex Valencia:

We have a couple questions. So here’s one, we had trouble with WordPress for years, and we switched to DotNetNuke. That is what our SEO recommended. Is that still okay?

Conrad Saam:

I have no idea. Let me give you two answers on that. One, if you’re running WordPress, you should run it on a managed WordPress host. One of the downsides of WordPress is that it is very, very vulnerable to being hacked. And so having this on an expensive host, and by expensive I mean 29 bucks a month kind of thing, there’s only two digits in this number, not talking about hundreds, but having it on a place that is, and we use WP Engine, I’m happy to send that out to you guys, but WP Engine does a great job of protecting your WordPress site. So that’s one answer. The second answer is my guess is the reason that your SEO recommend moving your site to DotNetNuke is because that’s what they like to develop in. I can’t for the life of me come up with any rationale to have my site built on anything other than something that’s very easy to use for me and very ubiquitous from a developer perspective. Your downside of course is that if you do have a problem, you need to find DotNetNuke developer, right? Good luck. At this point it’s like, good luck. I don’t even know where to start looking for a DotNetNuke developer.

Alex Valencia:

Yeah, I’m curious what your access and are you adding content on your own and how that’s working for you? Because again, I love WordPress for that reason. I mean, we post and do so much for clients on WordPress, even if they’re being managed by another SEO or another marketing firm, we still do a lot of work in there. So it makes it easy, but both for us and the client to get access to it. So I’d be curious to see what your access to that is. And it seems they were on WordPress for a while, so they recently just switched Conrad, and I don’t know much about it. And so hopefully, it’s working out for you and you are getting the benefits. Let’s see what if you answered any other… Go on, sorry, Conrad, go ahead.

Conrad Saam:

That’s all right. But this is a great example of why I believe in WordPress. Run it your site through that test that we found, and maybe you’re fine and you have nothing to worry about, but if you’re not, you are really up the creek and we’re looking at three weeks out, finding someone to fix your site is going to be very difficult and you’re going to be spending money to make that happen. Whereas if you are on WordPress and if you’ve chosen a responsive theme, you don’t need to do anything. It just happens for you. And if you are on a managed WordPress host that updates the WordPress version, as the WordPress versions come out of beta, you literally are on a best of read technical platform that you don’t even have to think about instead of going back to some developer to get something done.

Alex Valencia:

We’re getting questioned again on how the apps, will it help ranking. If you want to touch on that real quick, in case they didn’t hear you, but they’re fine, they have a mobile friendly site, they’ve had it for years, it’s working well. However, will having an app be rewarded by Google and ultimately help us raise our Google ranking?

Conrad Saam:

No. I mean this isn’t even apples and oranges. This is apples and shingles or pancakes or something. Having something in the app store is not going to do it. So let me give you two answers, one, to your question two, me being snide, having an app in the app store is going to do nothing to help you ranking for mobile traffic. Two, having an app store and app in the app store may not do much for you even overall. I just haven’t seen them work out really well, and I hope I’m wrong in this case, but we all got very excited about apps, and I used to work at Urbanspoon, so I’m very app-happy, but I just haven’t seen these really crush it for law firms. And again, I’m happy to be wrong, and in your case, I hope I am wrong, but that that’s kind of the answer on apps.

Alex Valencia:

I think that’s cool for questions if you want to move on. I know I’m totally interested in the next subject, given that we pump out so much content for our clients for SEO firms. So this is a good one. This is a good topic. If you’re writing your own content, if you’re getting advice from some blogs out there, what works for other companies doesn’t always work for legal, which might be the same situation with the apps. I love apps, they’re cool, I have tons of them on my phone. I’ve probably seen one or two attorneys that are really pumped about it. The Avvo app for Lawyernomics last year was actually really cool, but again, I haven’t seen it do too much for attorneys. So I want to find out more about these doorway pages. Conrad let us know, he is also going to show us some examples of what one might look like, but this is really good advice if you’re creating your own content and what you should and should not be doing with these pages.

Conrad Saam:

So the doorway page issue came out very quietly and it was picked up by a couple of the local search geeks, Andrew Shotland wrote some stuff on this. The doorway pages is a very, very different situation than this mobile change because it is much more quiet. So two weeks ago, Google came out with a quiet statement about doorway pages and how they were going to be updating the algo to essentially penalize doorway pages. So what on earth is a doorway page? And they laid out five bullet points that defined what a doorway page was. These are the two that I think are very relevant to legal. And so just the bottom parts of these, are pages an integral part of your site’s user experience or are they just there for search engines?

Okay, secondly and more specific, very specific to legal, do the pages duplicate useful aggregations of items (locations) specifically calling out locations that already exist on the site for the purpose of capturing more search traffic. Okay, what does this mean? And I think this is a big deal because there are three potential impacts to the legal industry. And the first is the big directories. So for a long time Google’s been talking about how we need to move traffic towards smaller firms. And yet, and I’ve been wrong for three years running that each algorithm change is going to have this impact, but when Pigeon came out, which was the local algo change, one of the major benefactors of that was Avvo, FindLaw, Thumbtack, et cetera, these big direct… Yelp, Yelp was a big beneficiary of that. So these big directories benefited from that. It is very possible that this doorway change is a reversal of that, okay?

Because be this again, duplicate, useful aggregations of items including locations that already exist. Okay? Looking at what some of the directories have worked on, and the first thing that I did when I saw this FindLaw stuff was, “Hey, I hope the Avvo guys are on top of this.” So full disclosure, I used to work at Avvo, so I have a bunch of stock at Avvo, I wish them nothing but the best selfishly, but they’ve also a great company. So I pinged them to make sure that they were aware of what was going on. The directories have done a very good job over time of what really looks like, as a descriptor, these doorway pages. So here’s “find a lawyer in Bellevue, Washington,” look at the content on here. Now let’s look at right across the lake at Seattle, Washington. Look at the content looks very, very, very similar.

Oh, in fact, it looks like the exact same thing, with the exception that the page is really optimized for Bellevue instead of Seattle. Now let’s look at King County, the county in which Seattle and Bellevue are. And again, this content is very, very similar. And if you go deeper into some of these pages, this is “Seattle personal injury page” and the “Bellevue personal injury page.” And lo and behold, these things, even look at the companies listed here, there’s four companies at the top, the exact same four companies. So when you go back to the definition of what Google talked about as being a doorway page, I would be hard-pressed not to be really nervous if I’m a big director. So this may have a really positive impact at the firm level and I hope it ducks. Secondly, a lot of law firms rely heavily for their backing profile on what I will call low end directories.

And there is no paucity of low end directories for small businesses or even legal or even practice areas within legal. And a lot of the pages on those directories are nothing but lists of the same stuff that’s duplicated out over and over and over again. So it’s possible, and this is my conjecture, but as I look at what might happen, it’s very possible that Google might look at a lot of these low-end directories and devalue them. And when they get devalued, the links from those directories in turn may be devalued. And a lot of law, I look at backlink profiles for law firm websites almost every day. And a lot of law firms rely very heavily on these low end directories for their backlink profile. So they may in turn, get hit. I don’t think that’s an outrageous estimate. And finally, at the law firm level, at the individual site level, or even across multiple sites, and this is actually, that’s an interesting point.

These doorway pages may exist at a domain level or they may exist on multiple different domains across a portfolio of domains for an individual law firm. And you guys go bananas more than any industry, of buying up domains and trying to gain a system like that. So it’s possible that takes a hit. This is an example here, this is one of the downsides of WordPress, it’s very easy to build out lots of pages that are optimized for very similar things. So here’s an example, and this is done with tags or categories. Here’s an example of a site we are working with right now where they have individual pages for “car accident,” “car accident facts,” “car accident lawsuit process,” you get the whole… Everything down from “car accident” to “car accidents.” And this stuff looks very similar because in fact it is exactly the same thing.

The other thing that I see with law firms doing this with is geo spam. So it’s not that we are a Seattle DUI lawyer, but we are a Seattle DUI lawyer and we’re an Everett DUI lawyer and we’re a Bellevue DUI lawyer and we’re a King County DUI lawyer, and we’re a North Seattle DUI lawyer, et cetera. So the geo spam that was very prevalent and successful, four, six years ago is may also be a target of this at the individual law firm level. So that’s where we are with the doorway pages and it’s much less specific. We don’t know when this is coming out, even my description here is very much, “These are the things that might happen.” But I would be looking at my backlink profile. I would be looking at my own site or network of sites. So if you have Seattledui.com and Everettdui.com and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, you may be running into some of these problems. But hopefully doorway pages actually help the small firms, Shotland, the local guy who started writing about this has said so much to suggest that Yelp is going to get whacked with this. And that wouldn’t make me very sad if that was the case.

Alex Valencia:

We had a question, and I’m sure the answer is no, from Greg. Is there a site to see if your homepage is considered a doorway page? And I could probably frankly say there probably is not, but Conrad’s kind of giving you an idea on how to look at that.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah, I would say, what I would do is I would run what what’s called a site colon search. So if you do site colon and then type in your URL, so site:conradsaam.com, that will give you a list of all the pages that are indexed on your site. And I would look through those pages and see if a lot of them look like the same content optimized for different cities, for example. That would be a red flag to me.

Alex Valencia:

One of the questions that I’d ask Conrad, because we write local pages, we’re fond of them and it helps our clients. I’ve seen it work. I think I read an article not too long ago about the importance of local, ’cause when you’re searching, especially in mobile, you’re definitely coming up with the localization, but it’s about writing relevant information and good, different information on those pages. And you might ask yourself, “Well, how do I differentiate from cities to cities?” Well, that’s what makes it difficult, but adding some technical information, specific information about that county that might be relevant to the area of practice that you’re writing them about will help. But again, just be careful. I mean, you don’t want to post too much of it, but we know that it’s been beneficial in the past. And again, I go back to, make sure that content is different, that it’s relevant, that there’s a good amount of information.

The sample pages that Conrad showed obviously didn’t have much content on there. There was links, there was some keyword optimization and they were drawing the client. And again, in my opinion, there was absolutely no user experience there. When I do a search and all I get is links and a tag or some kind of title, that’s not a page that I’m going to be happy with. I mean, this isn’t really giving me more information, but rather sending me to additional areas on the page. So it’s obviously just optimized for that specific keyword, I would expand on that as much as I could.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah, this is the case where it looks like this is just programmatically generated pages that really should be nothing but a site map instead of… And I found these pages by searching for them, literally searching on Google. I didn’t go through a site map of FindLaw, but I found these through searching. So it’s hard to suggest that these wouldn’t fall in the doorway page category. And I’m really hoping that this is a move towards the small businesses. This may be a really huge benefit to the actual businesses. So right now, I love Avvo, but someone does a search Avvo ranks really well, you go to Avvo and now the lawyers are paying to advertise. And wouldn’t it be nice for the small businesses, if that traffic went directly to your phone, to your doorstep, to your website, instead of essentially paying the Avvo, FindLaw, whomever it might be, to be there.

Alex Valencia:

Great. Do we have any questions? Oh, it looks like we have a couple other questions. What are some of the low end directories that we should stay away from? That’s a good question. There’s probably so many.

Conrad Saam:

I could talk about this forever. And what I would do, instead of me trying to list them, what I would do is look at your backlink profile, and you can do that for free. There are three different sites you can use. I’ll cite one of them, it’s called opensiteexplorer.com. It’s a product from Moz. You can look at your backlink profile, and I would look through that backlink profile and it’s ordered by quality, and so your high quality sites, New York Times, Avvo, FindLaw are up at the top. And your low quality sites, I-want-to-buy-cheap-pharmaceuticals-in-canada.com are down at the bottom. And I would walk through the bottom of your list, see how many different domains are linking to your site. If you’re looking at 50, and I’m pulling these numbers right out of the air, so just take my level of certainty on this with a grain of salt, but if you’re looking at 50, 60, 70% of the domains linking to you being things like Arizona-DUI-personal-injury-lawyer-directory.com, then you may have… It would raise a level of concern for me.

Alex Valencia:

Great. Yep. Any other questions? If not, I thank you all for joining. I’m going to be sending an email out shortly, probably in the next six minutes you’ll get some of those links if you didn’t get them through the chat. There will also be a link for you guys to please give your feedback, let us know what other content you’re interested in. Conrad and I are going to start doing more of these together, so we’d love to help out and see what you’d like to learn about. We’re here to help. I might be doing one with Ken Hardison from PILMMA next week, so I’ll send out an email on that, so please join.

Again, please fill out the form and let us know how we did, what you’d like to learn more about. Again, if you need help with your website or if you’re interested in learning more about the doorway pages or you’re afraid, please feel free to reach out to Conrad or myself. Again, our contact information will be in the email, we’re here to help. The presentation will be recorded, so once it’s edited, we’re going to send it out to everyone, and it’ll be available on our websites, as well. Thank you again for staying the whole time. I think we only had a few drops. So Conrad, you weren’t as boring as most people say you are. And next time, bring your shot glasses, maybe we’ll do this during happy hour. So Conrad’s having coffee instead of the Glenlivet because I forgot mine today.

Conrad Saam:

I’m having coffee because I’m in Seattle. It’s noon.

Alex Valencia:

All right guys, thank you again. Oh, what about keywords going away? From Lona Goode. What about keywords going away? Are you asking about semantic search, Lona? Do you want to take that Conrad? Yes. Semantic search. Go ahead.

Conrad Saam:

So the concept of keywords going away, there are lots of ways to answer this question. One is: what you shouldn’t do is load up your content with a bunch of keywords, and especially, there’s meta keywords, that went out of style long, long, long time ago. So that’s something to not do, and it hasn’t been a best practice for a very, very long time. The other thing that I get concerned about when people talk about keywords is what was often called anchor text spam. So all of the links pointing to my site had the anchor text that said, “white coffee cups” because I was selling a whole bunch of white coffee cups, and that used to help me rank for phrases, “white coffee cups.” That’s disappeared. But the notion of doing research on what people are looking for and writing about what people are looking for, have at it, do that all day long. I think you would agree with that, Alex, right?

Alex Valencia:

Yeah, I agree. Definitely. And I think if you wanted us to expand a little further on semantic search, I had a webinar with Dave Amerland.