Host: Alex Valencia, WDW
Guest: Jason Hennessey, Hennessey Digital
In this episode of SEO Happy Hour, Alex Valencia of We Do Web and Jason Hennessey of Hennessey Digital use a real-life case study to dive deep into developing a solid and proven content strategy for your law firm. They go over:
- Blogging
- Article writing
- FAQ’s
- Featured snippets
- Foundational content, such as practice area pages, sub-practice area pages
- AMP, accelerated mobile page project for mobile formatting
They’ll tell you how to see if your content plan is working, so start watching now and learn how to take market share from your competitors.
Transcript:
Narrator:
Welcome to the SEO Happy Hour podcast with We Do Web Content.
Alex Valencia:
Good afternoon. Thank you all for joining us on this Friday for SEO Happy Hour. We’re super stoked about today’s content. Happy Veterans Day. Thank you all to our servicemen. So again, I’m super stoked about today’s webinar, we’re going to be talking about foundational content. Not only that, Jason’s going to dive in on a actual case study on how the content strategy built this website from scratch to gaining over 200 calls a month and over 36,000 unique new visitors per month to this website.
This is a strategy we use in all of our clients, Jason and I are recently back from Las Vegas where we were at Pubcon, where we had the opportunity to talk to some of the leading search masters in the industry, including people from Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other major enterprise corporations that are fortunately using the same, exact strategies that we’re using for our lawyer clients.
So, with that said, I’m going to pass presenter to Jason. Jason, thanks again for having us. It was great being with you all week. And again, so how to develop a kick page ranking and link-loving content strategy for your law firm. You guys are going to learn tons of information. Hopefully you can implement it or if we can help in any way.
Jason Hennessey:
Perfect. By the way, as you can see we both have the same background here, try to-
Alex Valencia:
[inaudible 00:02:11] background.
Jason:
Alrighty, so let’s get started. First off, Alex, can you just let me know if you can see my screen?
Alex Valencia:
I can. Can everyone else see Jason’s screen?
Jason Hennessey:
Maybe just put something in chat if you can. Don’t want to start talking and get 15 minutes into the presentation and nobody’s actually seeing my screen, so hopefully that is working.
Alex Valencia:
Yep, I can see it [inaudible 00:02:40].
Jason Hennessey:
Okay, cool. Perfect. Okay, great. So again, SEO, there’s two different philosophies with SEO. So, there’s theory and then there’s practical. And so, I can get on a webinar and we can talk about all of the different theories that we have based on our experience with SEO, or we can talk about all of the practical strategies that we’ve used to get the results that we’ve gotten. And so, this is more of a practical webinar today.
And so, I’m going to use a case study. This site is called “Los Angeles DUI Attorney.” And the funny thing about this is, all’s it is a site and all they do is DUIs and expungement in one area, Southern California, specifically the LA area. And so, when you start to think about it, you’re like, “Well, how can I really develop a content strategy for a site that does two things, DUIs and expungements? How much content do I really need for that?” And so, this right here will show you that we’ve now got probably over a thousand pages of content on this website.
And again, it’s only focused on trying to get DUIs and expungements from LA in the surrounding areas. So, having said that, let’s talk, I want to start with the end in mind. So, I want to start with the end in mind. This site was launched in … I’m showing the analytics here. It was launched in September of 2015. And so, upon starting this campaign, we built out the strategy first. So, the way in which we build out a strategy, it’s all done in Excel spreadsheet. So, this is a strategy that I’m working on right now. This is a criminal defense site in LA and you can see that we map out the URL structure, we map out the city, the practice area, the category, the anchor text, the title tag, the meta description. So, everything is all here.
This is the strategy, before we ever even think about how the site will look. And this is based on keyword research, which I can do a whole webinar on, but based on the keyword research, this is how we mapped out the strategy. We knew on this website we were going to start to publish about 25 pages per month.
And so, back to now, this case study here. So, since we did the same thing with the “LA DUI,” as we start to look at the content publishing about this one, I think we were doing 35 pages of content per month. In the first month, we got 76 visits. The second month, 82, and we jumped to about 101 in December. And then the content started to get indexed and the links that we were building started to kick in. And so, then you can see, fast forward to about a year after we started that campaign, we were getting about 18,595 visitors to this website.
Fast forward to October last month, we’re now getting 36,000 people to this website every month. And you can see how it’s growing. So, here it is, a site that we built that we didn’t know how we can build so much content for because all’s it does is two things in one geographical area, but yet, now we’re getting 36,000 people coming to the head of the site.
Alex Valencia:
I wanted to interrupt real quick. Sorry about that, Jason, when you were talking about now these pages start to index, can you talk a little further about Google “supplemental index” and why that’s important to know?
Jason Hennessey:
Yeah, yeah, no. So, the “supplemental index,” so yeah, for the first six months when you’re starting to build out a content strategy, you sit in a “supplemental index.” And so, bear with me for a second, [inaudible 00:06:35] because I’m working from home today. And so, for the first six months what happens is Google doesn’t really trust your website yet. And so, you sit in what is referred to as a “supplemental index.” And so the content that you’re writing isn’t really being shown yet because Google doesn’t know whether or not they should actually trust you. And so, that’s typically what happens when you start to build a website. And that’s why you see here, for the first couple months, we weren’t really getting any traction at all.
And so, the things that get you out of a supplemental index is all of the trust signals, like some of the links that come in. It’s like, “All right, wow, this website’s linking to you, and this website’s linking to you.” And you start to actually get all of these credible links and you continue to publish content. And so, over time, you end up adding the supplemental index and you start to get a lot of traffic. And so, that’s basically how that works.
And so, I wanted to get over to my next point though, is so more content, well, does that equal more phone calls? And so, the answer is yes. And again, it’s not theory again, here it is, it’s practical. And so if I look at the amount of phone calls now that the site is getting, so when we first started this out in September, we got no phone calls. In October, we got a total of three phone calls. In November, we got four phone calls, then we got six phone calls, five phone calls, and then it started to grow.
So, you can see the same correlation here as the traffic grows, so does the phone calls. And so, we use a service called CallTrackingMetrics to track phone calls. And now we’re at the point where we’re getting over 200 phone calls a month from this website. So, it’s pretty drastic results. And if I were to fast forward another year from now, we will get 400 phone calls per month if we keep staying at this pace.
And so, that’s basically … I wanted to start with the end game in mind so that people that are actually tuning in, will understand what the objective here. And so, that was the goal from the start. And now in hindsight, we can actually see that we’ve accomplished the goals. And Alex jump in anytime. You know what I mean? [inaudible 00:08:53]-
Alex Valencia:
Yeah, go ahead.
Jason Hennessey:
… interactive kind of presentation.
So, a couple things that I also wanted to share here is, so when I do a search here for the word … I’m just going to do a search for DUI attorney. So, when I do that search for “DUI attorney” here, I can see specifically that at the bottom here, the precise location of my search is “Santa Clarita, California.” So, Santa Clarita, California is where I’m conducting a search. And so, other people will be conducting searches from areas throughout Southern California and their precise location will change. And this also goes the same for mobile. But you can see here that when I do a search for DUI attorney, nowhere in my search did I include any type of geo modifier. I didn’t include “Santa Clarita,” I just searched for “DUI attorney.”
And as I scroll down, there’s three local attorneys that are in the area, that are probably within two mile radius of my home here. But here you go, you’ve got a Justia page that’s optimized for Santa Clarita, you’ve got an Avvo page that’s optimized for Santa Clarita, a Yelp page, and then here’s us. So, we have two results in the first page for that word, just the word DUI attorney. And so when I do that search there, I can see specifically that the page that’s ranking here is the Santa Clarita page. Again, nowhere in my search period did I mention “Santa Clarita.”
And then we also have our homepage that’s ranking just because of the power of that search, of the site. And so, that’s one of the reasons why I wanted to … and oh, one other thing too is if I do a search of “DUI attorney near me,” which again is a very popular search query, again, we’ll see the same thing, the Santa Clarita page right here, that’s ranking again, nowhere in the search query did they I the term “Santa Clarita.” It just recognizes it down here.
And so, the part of our strategy here was to build out an areas we serve. We don’t have offices in every single city in Los Angeles, but we do serve all of these different cities. And so, this was part of the content strategy, is we built out content for every surrounding area. And so, the content has to be unique. So, if I click on “Calabasas,” you can see here that it has “Calabasas DUI lawyer” in the URL, it has “Calabasas DUI lawyer” in the H1 tag, “get a DUI attorney near me.” So, that’s an H2 tag, so we can get the word near me in there. We’re linking out to places. So if I click there, it takes you to the Calabasas Wikipedia page. So we’re adding some of the local factors surrounding Calabasas. And so, the content is written in a unique format.
Nowhere is this page the same on anywhere else on the website. It’s not like we just took this page that was Los Angeles and just modified it for Calabasas and expected it to work. That just doesn’t work. So, every page has to be unique. And so, when I start to do searches here, so “DUI lawyer in Toluca Lake,” another area in California, there’s the page that’s ranking number two. So, it ranks number two for that term. But the catchier is, like I showed you earlier, if somebody just did a search for “DUI lawyer” and their precise location read to Toluca Lake, they would still see the same result even though they didn’t put “in Toluca Lake.” So, a lot of people aren’t necessarily going to type in, “in Toluca Lake,” I get that, but I’m showing you this just because I’m not in Toluca Lake and I want to basically pull the same result that somebody would get if they’re doing that search. So, that’s just one example.
“DUI lawyer in Santa Monica,” same thing. There we are right there. “DUI lawyer in Calabasas,” home of the famous Kardashians who probably will eventually get maybe a DUI here in the near future, maybe become our client, but again, “DUI lawyer in Calabasas.” So there’s our page that’s ranking for “DUI lawyer in Calabasas.” You can also see that we got the five star reviews. That’s a trick that we’re using here with this website, none of the other law firms are using that. It’s called schema markup. Even if I do the search for “best DUI lawyer in Beverly Hills,” an affluent area. And so, as I do that, here it is, there’s our Beverly Hills page [inaudible 00:13:44].
So, that’s one part of the strategy that’s driving a lot of visits because people are doing the searches from their local homes or their offices. And we’ve got pages that are optimized throughout all of Southern California.
Alex Valencia:
I’m going to just jump in real quick, with this content that we’re looking at. For instance, the page that Jason was mentioning. So, those are the foundational pages that we’re developing for site. It all starts out with all the practice areas, subpractice areas, and then we really start getting granular and start creating specific location pages for the markets that those attorneys are in.
And then now we’re redoing the sub practice in the practice area pages. Again, all original content with detailed internal links and content specific to the market that they’re in. So, we’re differentiating those pages and creating the design of the page, so it has the usability, it has the information that somebody needs because we’re incorporating information that’s directing them to some authority site like Wikipedia. And then we’re also creating internal links to feed the user more resources for them to be able to go through and scan through the site.
There’s strategy to absolutely every little thing that’s done. All of this is done by design, which is why we want to show this webinar, that it’s a true content strategy. So for years, law firms and lawyers have been told, “Blogs, start putting out content,” but it has to be content with purpose. You want to make sure you’re making an investment in getting a return on it. And Jason always puts it best, “The more fishing poles you have in the water, the more opportunities you have the cash fish.” And that’s how we look at it with the content. If you’re developing content for everything that you’re in and all the markets that you’re in specific to the users and the cases that you want, you’re eventually going to start getting the phone calls and the leads from it.
Jason Hennessey:
Yep, all good points. So, most people don’t realize that a long time ago, Google took away the transparency to the keywords that you were receiving traffic from. Back in the day, probably like seven years ago, maybe even longer. You can go into your Google Analytics and see which specific keywords were deriving traffic from. And then they pulled that away and they started to make everything not provided, is how it shows up in Google Analytics. There’s some keywords in there, but they really don’t show all of the keywords. But you know, do have your Google Search Console.
This used to be called Google Webmaster Tools. They redeemed it to Google Search Console, and there’s so much good information here. So, I can see here within the last 90 days, all of the different queries that generated clicks. So, in the past three months, they had over 100,000 visitors that came to their website from these keywords.
So, one of the things that we were trying to target here was, for example, “How long does a DUI stay on your record?” So, when I do that search, because the page is so powerful and because we have a lot of good links, we are in position zero. So, Google is using our site as the official Google answer for “How long does a DUI stay on your record?” And so that’s pretty cool. But then we also rank number one organically, and then we also rank looks like number two organically because they pulled in one of our insurance pages, as well. So, here we are for one search query, “How long does the DUI stay on your record?” And we rank in position zero, position one, and then position two. So that’s pretty cool.
And then, so I can even look a little bit closer. And so I can see here, “How long does the DUI stay on your record?” Right? Well, since that page has gone up, we’ve received 23,600 people that visited that page. 23,600 people that visited that page since we built that page. And so, you think, “Wow, does 23,000 people really search for how long does a DUI stay in your record?” And the answer is no. However, that page doesn’t just rank for that one keyword. So, using this tool right here called Agraphs, I can see that page ranks for that keyword, but it also ranks your 715 other keywords. And so here, “California DUI record,” “DUI on your record,” “How long does this DUI stay on your record?” So there’s 750 iterations of keywords that are semantically related to that keyword. And then we rank in position one for a lot of it. So, DUI stays on your record for how long? I mean, it’s so many different ways that somebody might type that question in. And the cool thing about this tool is it actually shows you all of them.
So, that’s one page that now has 715 opportunities to bring in traffic. So, that’s pretty cool. And then when I go back to the search console, there’s so many other pages that are like that. So, one of the things that we thought of was there’s a lot of people that are trying to drive for Uber, especially in big cities. And so, when you apply for a job with Uber, they do a background check. And so, if you ever had a DUI that’s on your record, there’s a good chance that you probably won’t be able to drive for Uber.
So, people here in California could get that DUI expunged. So, it’s not like that in every single state. But because of that, we thought that we would leverage that opportunity because there’s a lot of people saying, “Can you drive for Uber with a DUI?” And so, when I look at that search result, there we are, we rank number one for that term, not in position zero, but we rank number one for that term. And so, it just goes on and on and on. So there’s all these, here goes a vehicle code, I’m going to talk a little bit about that strategy as well. But here’s a vehicle code that we rank number one, I’m sorry, number two for, so there’s a lot of good data back here and I highly encourage you to go into your Google Search Console.
First of all, make sure that you have it set up, but then go into it and then all you’re going to do is click on search traffic search analytics. You’re going to change this to the last 90 days and look at all the queries and you can see where you’re getting all that traffic. But this would not be possible if we didn’t have a content strategy and if we were not publishing content, you cannot … if you have an SEO company that you’re paying, I don’t know, $1,000, $2,000, $10,000 per month and there’s no content strategy, well, you cannot expect to get more phone calls from your campaign. You cannot expect to get more traffic from your campaign if there’s no content strategy. I mean, it’s just plain and simple. You really just need three things with SEO.
You got to make sure that your site is clean of any technical errors so that Google can crawl it. You’ve got to publish content, an abundance of content. If I were to open up a law firm, I’d probably would be investing anywhere between 25 to 50 pages a month because I know firsthand what that traffic is going to do, what that site is going to do with regards to the traffic I’m going to get and the phone calls that I’m going to get. And this compounds, this becomes a virtual asset as compared to pay-per-click, right?
Alex Valencia:
Exactly.
Jason Hennessey:
I can do pay-per-click where I spend $10,000 a month. Let’s just do the math here. So, if I spend $10,000 per month, and let’s say the average cost per click is about 150, right? I’m going to get 66 visits to my website for $10,000. 66 people to my website for $10,000. If you take into the fact that maybe 7% of those will actually turn into phone calls and maybe 20% of those people that actually call you turn into leads. My point here is that this is an asset that you’re investing in. It’s not a sum cost like pay-per-click.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I highly encourage you to do paper per click as well, but you should be building your digital asset and this is the bones behind your law firm. So again, just some of those case studies, I can go here and I can click on a lot of these, “DUI under 21.” There we are, somebody gets a DUI under 21, there we’re ranking position two … actually, this is position zero. So, we rank in position one and position two for that. So, that’s the other cool thing about having a lot of content is you start to get two, three listings within the first page of Google for some of these type of terms too. So, I’m going to close out of this. I’m going to close out of this. How long [inaudible 00:23:29], close out of this here.
Alex Valencia:
While Jason’s doing that, does anybody have any questions on what they’ve seen so far?
Jason Hennessey:
Please jump in, this is an interactive presentation. As we’re waiting on maybe a couple questions, again, this is cool too. So, we can see here within your analytics the traffic showing up, and this is just for organic search. If I were to do it for total traffic, this number would be much higher. I’m only looking at the traffic that we’re getting in from organic search. And so, then you can actually select the different landing pages that driving more traffic. You can curate this and mix and mingle the data anyway you want.
All right, so let’s talk a little bit about AMP. And the reason why I want to do that is because I can see here that you see how it says “AMP” at the back of it? 13,000 people came to this page because it’s an AMP page. So, first of all, what is AMP and why should you care about it?
Well, first of all, one reason why you should care about it is because it is driving traffic to the website. Again, here’s 13,000 visits from this AMP page, and as I start to go down, we’ve got a lot more, here’s another one, 5,000 visits from this AMP page. So, let me define what it is and then talk about why you should care about it. So basically, AMP is a language … it’s HTML code that you write and it creates a specific version of your page. So, every single page on your website will get an AMP version of the page, which will look a little bit like this. So, you really can’t control a whole lot of call to action. We’ve got a little phone icon there that will actually … you’ll be able to press it and actually call the firm. But the difference here that Google takes this and they store it on their servers, as compared to the data being stored on your servers.
And so, how it looks when somebody does a search on their mobile device, because this is really a mobile strategy, here it is, “What are the laws against carrying alcohol in a vehicle?” And so, when I do this search right here, on mobile, Google is using our sites as again, the position zero, using the schema, but if you see here, you see that little lightning bolt? The reason why they use a lighting bolt is because they call it AMP, accelerated mobile page project. And so, they want sites to load quickly.
And so, because this site is loading quickly, and because I’m one of the only law firms that does DUI that even knows what AMP is, we’re starting to get a lot of traffic from this. Google wants to show more of these because they want it to become more prevalent so that other webmasters will start to build AMP technology, so that the site just continues to get faster and the overall web continues to get faster. So, that’s why you should care about AMP, is because Google in some cases, is prioritizing those pages in the search results, so that more people get used to seeing these lightning bolts and so that the site loads faster to the-
Alex Valencia:
And it’s definitely important. I mean, like I mentioned earlier, we were at Pubcon in Vegas, which is a digital marketing and SEO conference, and AMP is one of the major subjects of conversation and why you should be doing it, so it’s not anything that … AMP is directly coming from the servers that Google’s using, right, Jason? I mean, you would probably explain that technically, but we’re a mobile responsive website, which what most of you should be having is coming from your hosting server, and AMP is delivering the content directly from the Google servers. Is that right?
Jason Hennessey:
That’s correct, yep. Yep, that is correct. They take it and they cash it in a different way. And so, they don’t have to go pin your server to, they don’t have to call upon the data from your server to pull the actual extract the data to display. They just show it in real time because they have a cache version of the actual page because you built it to the specs that they acquired. So, this is the difference. So, this is what it looks like on desktop.
And so, this is going to look different on mobile. So, I don’t want to confuse things because this looks a little bit different on mobile. Hold on, let me just see here. All right, so this is what it looks like on mobile. So, you see what it looks like on desktop, this is what it looks like on mobile, and then this is what it looks like on AMP. So, there’s really three different versions of every single page on your website if you’re doing it correctly.
So, let me close out of this. I just want to talk a little bit about AMP because again, it is driving traffics. Oh, but by the way, are those AMP pages converting? Well, AMP is red, right? So, 53 calls from amp. Do you see that this month? 47 calls from AMP. So, Google wouldn’t even have that page to show. So, because I created an AMP version, now I’m getting again, 53 calls just because we developed that page in a month. And as we know, 66 calls will get you the equivalent of about $10,000 in ad word spend on pay-per-click. So, with the value of just building that AMP page, well 150 times 53, so that’s about $8,000 in savings because I developed the AMP page. I mean, you really have to look at it like that because that’s what you’re comparing to. If you don’t have a good strategy for your organic SEO, you have to compensate that with pay-per-click and that stuff gets expensive.
Alex Valencia:
We had a couple questions come in, Jason, the latest one from Vicki was on AMP. Do you have to load a widget and WordPress to do AMP, or do you have the programmer to do the pages?
Jason Hennessey:
So, there are certain plug-ins that you can use, but they’re not that great when it comes to the way it looks and the way it functions. You definitely should have a web developer customize it. They can certainly use the plugins as a foundation, but you definitely want to customize the look and feel of AMP so that you can build it so that it’ll actually convert.
Alex Valencia:
Awesome, thank you. Yeah, we have our developers do it, Vicki. Another question from Sam, and this one goes back to the content. So, before we move on, do you think it’s advantageous to use blog posts or actual content updates? I’ll answer it and then Jason, you can add your two cents, as well.
I believe the website needs foundational content first. You adding any sort of content is showing that you’re updating the website. So, why not put out money pages first and build out that foundation first, and then you can start blinding? Once you have your content set up, everything’s there, it’s like furnishing your home. Then you can start adding all the accessories, which is how I believe blogs are. If you could do both at the same time, you’re an attorney and you’re blogging and you’re working on a case, or you’re giving your opinion on another one and you can do both, then I would recommend doing both if you can, because they do drive traffic too.
But our goal is when we’re building out a site and working with the client, that foundational content is what eventually will be a lot of the money pages, long tail keywords do get leads. But as far as search and our data shows, a lot of the phone calls and everything’s coming from the money pages and the foundational content.
Jason Hennessey:
Yeah, no, and I’m just going to add on. So, having a blog is important, but really what Google wants to see is that you’re adding content on a regular basis, because one thing you have to realize is that Google is financially incentivized to reward you with better rankings if you publish more content because it’s more pages that they can serve ads around, as people are doing searches. So, the more content that you publish … and one way to determine how much content that you have on your website, it’s pretty simple.
You just do a site and then you put a colon and then you take your URL without the “www.” And then you can see here, so we got 1,030 pages that are indexed on this page. And this, you have to be careful because sometimes you might have your page, your website set up so that pagers are getting indexed that shouldn’t be getting indexed. You do start to see things that say “category” and “tag” and “archives.” If you have those being indexed, that’s a bad thing because it starts to kill some of your … the necessary, they call it a crawl budget, a Google crawl budget.
So, having a blog is important, but I prefer to invest the money on the actual content that I know is going to drive cases first. And so, I’m going to get into the strategies for developing content because I only showed one strategy so far, which is the areas we serve. I’m going to get into some of the other content strategies here in a second, but if you’re looking for good … “What should I be blogging about?” If you’re looking for topics, one strategy would be to use Buzzfeed as a seed to see what they’re doing, because Buzzfeed is … they’re very creative in getting writing titles and creating content that will actually generate clicks and traffic.
And so, what I’m doing here is I’m just doing “sites:buzzfeed.com,” and then I just put in the word “DUI” and it’s basically going to pull all the pages that have the word “DUI” in it. And so here, “Ten reasons why you really, really, really don’t want a DUI,” that’s a pretty cool page. I would probably click on that and read that, and that’s something that will become shared and it could go viral. “32 celebrities who have been arrested for DUI,” another great link page. So, if I was going to build a content strategy, these aren’t really FAQs, these are more blog content topics.
And so, this is the stuff that I would be using for ideas on what I should be blogging about. So hopefully, that makes sense. And you could put any different keyword in here. “Personal injury,” if you guys are injury attorneys, this toddler’s obsessed with this local personal injury lawyer, that’s the guy out of New Orleans.
Alex Valencia:
Yeah, that was a funny guy.
Jason Hennessey:
“Mr. Bart,” “Where’s Bart?” “How to choose a lawyer for personal injury case.” “Four reasons you should hire…” So, there’s all these different Buzzfeeds, “Seven of the strangest personal injury compensation claims.” Again, these are all great. The how-tos and stuff, I would group those into FAQ sections on your website and not so much make them blog posts, but anything where it says a number or something else, those can be used as blogs.
Alex Valencia:
We have three more questions and we’ll move because I know we have a lot of content to cover. So Michael asked, “There’s three versions of every page on your website if you’re doing it correctly. What is the third?”
Jason Hennessey:
Well, it’s a loaded question because really, if you’re building out your website correctly, so when I say three different versions, the old school approach would be you have a desktop version, then you have an m-Dot version of your website, which means it’s built specifically for mobile. That’s outdated. Instead, what you really want to do is you want to combine those two pages. So, you have a desktop version that’s responsive and that creates the mobile version of your page. So, it blends it together as compared to showing up as an m-Dot then your website, which is the old strategy. So, if your site is responsive, I would say that the desktop page and the mobile page are the same. It’s being shown differently, displayed differently on how people are searching.
So, the second page is the AMP version of your website. So, if you’re doing it right, you really have two different versions of your webpage, every single page on your website, if you’re still doing it the old school way and your website isn’t really set up to be a responsive website, as you start to take this … and when I say responsive, so if I take this down here and I start to stretch it, you see how it starts to get smaller and smaller and smaller, but it still maintains the clarity of it? If I start to get too small, then it turns into the mobile version of it. So, that’s a responsive website. And so, if your website’s doing this, then you don’t have to worry about the m-Dot version. So, I hope that answers your question?
Alex Valencia:
From Teresa, “Do you know of any lead builder company that creates AMP pages?” I use those Leadpage companies sometimes and I haven’t seen it. It might be something that Leadpages is working on, but I’m assuming you’re asking because you were redirecting those pages through your WordPress website, is that correct, Teresa? Yeah, okay, that’s what I thought.
I’m not sure, I’d check what Leadpages, but I think they might do it if you’re not using Infusionsoft or one of the other ones. What I’m going to be doing in the future with the new design of this site is we’re going to be incorporated incorporating those dynamic lead pages within our own WordPress to avoid that external cost. So, I hope that answers some of your question. And then from Vicky, when you do a major update on an old page, should you edit the published on date?
Jason Hennessey:
Say that question again, Alex?
Alex Valencia:
When you do a major update on an old page, should you edit the published on date? So, I’ll jump in because I remember asking this question in … that was something I asked-
Jason Hennessey:
You shouldn’t have an on date. I mean, unless it’s a blog, I mean, I’ll let you answer it in a second, Alex, but here’s my thoughts on that. You shouldn’t have a date on the date in which it was published. Google will recognize, so Google will recognize the data was published based on the cache of that. And so you can see a cache by just clicking here on any page result. And then you click cache and then it’ll show you the date that they last saw it right here. So, it says November 10th. So I mean, I don’t really see a reason to add a date unless it’s things like blogs and you want it to be relevant. So, “Oh yeah, that was a really old blog post.” So, I’d say most of the content on your website shouldn’t contain a date, but if it’s a blog, then yeah, you could. And then I don’t even see a reason why you should be going back and messing with those blog posts anyway. I would be focusing more of your time and energy on creating new content. So, that would be my advice. However, there are strategies that we use by creating micro blogs on certain sites, which we can probably talk about in a whole nother webinar, but that would be a different strategy altogether.
Alex Valencia:
So, I’m with Jason. If it’s a blog post and here’s something that I learned before, a blog post that’s generating a good amount of traffic, and it’s a popular post, and you want to make sure and update with new information, you can go in and add the new update to the blog, “Done on this date.” It’s not necessary, but I’ve seen people like Eric Enge and Mark Traphagen do it, but it’s not necessary. If you’re going to update a popular blog with new information, you can just say the updated version based on the date if you want to go ahead and add it.
Jason Hennessey:
Any other questions?
Alex Valencia:
Nope.
Jason Hennessey:
All right, we’ll move forward. And jump in again, if you’re listening and you have questions jump in. Don’t be shy. We’ll address them as you have them. All right, so I want to talk a little bit about, again, part of the content strategy. And so, if you do a search for just about anything on the web, and I’m just pulling in “Las Vegas” because it’s a good example. Alex and I were just in Las Vegas for Pubcon. Alex was there when OJ Simpson got kicked out of the cosmetology…Serious story, I guess we can do a whole webinar on that too if we want. But yeah, he was there. It looks like he got banned, all thanks to you, Alex.
And so, the reason why I bring this up is because any search that I do, whether it’s “Las Vegas,” or what have you, you’re always going to see this website, this little website. It’s like a startup Wikipedia. So, you got this “Las Vegas,” and we click on it. What can we learn from looking at the content on this website? Well, one thing that we know is that this website ranks for pretty much everything. And case in point, here’s a hyperlink to Mojave Desert. So, if I click on “Mojave Desert,” here’s a page about Mojave Desert. Well, let me just check to see if Wikipedia might just happen to rank for “Mojave Desert.”
What do you know? They rank number one, and it’s not by chance. I mean, people at Wikipedia are very smart. They know the algorithm, they know what it takes, and that’s why they have all of these internal links, these blue underlying links, because what they’re doing is they’re taking page rank and they are passing page rank and relevant signals to some of their own internal pages.
Here’s one for “Utah.” Same thing, if I were to take Utah and do a search for the word “Utah,” there Wikipedia is. And so, what they’re doing is, again, they’re passing page rank and they’re passing relevant signals. They’re telling Google that the proceeding page is relevant to Utah. And by the way, take some of my page rank from this page and pass it over to this page. And so, if we can learn how the biggest site in the world does their on-page optimization and their internal linking strategies, well, why can’t we do the same thing for our law firm in LA?
And so what we did was we built out a whole glossary section on our site, where we clearly defined everything and anything that somebody might do a search for, or might need to know, what is a jury, what is license suspension? And then we use schema so that Google knows that this is a definition. So, there’s certain markup language that we can use in the code to tell Google that this is actually a definition.
But the thing is, as we start to write this content, we start to internally link to these pages. And so, it creates almost like a Wikipedia experience. So, here it is. So enter “your plea,” then you may continue to “your trial.” And so, if I click on “plea,” it goes to the definition of what a guilty plea is. I click on “trial,” if I click on “jury.” So we’re creating a real educational experience for the user, again. And I can go back in here and I could probably spend a full year just fixing internal links so that there’s more of those links, and that would be a very good project to do. I might actually do that. Here you go, “jury pool.” But it’s a tedious type of a process.
And so, how does that look though? So, “Arraignment in a DUI case,” so this is just one example. Well, here you go. “Arraignment in a DUI case,” there it is. There’s the page that’s actually ranging for arraignment in a DUI case. So, that’s another strategy, is to start to think about how you can incorporate the Wikipedia approach to your content. So, the more that you can become more of an educational resource as compared to just call to actions, call now and a sales site, the better Google is going to treat you, because you’re adding a lot of value to your site. Moving on here, other strategies that we used.
So, this is all of the different vehicle codes. So, if somebody gets pulled over and they get cited for a DUI, but maybe they also got cited with the suspended license or whatever else that they were doing, there’s not a lot of room on those different citations. And so instead, they put the vehicle codes and they say, you were charged with 200002A or whatever. And so, a lot of times people don’t even know what that means. What am I being charged with? What is this? So, what would they do?
So, they take that vehicle code, we’ll use this one as an example. This is called wet, reckless driving. And so, they’ll just take that number on the citation and they’ll enter it into Google. And because we are smart enough to approach that, now when they start to do searches for any vehicle code, we have pages that are actually indexed. So, now they don’t know what that vehicle code is, they’re just curious to know, “What am I even being charged with?” And the site that they click on is a site that can represent them because they were charged with this vehicle code. And so, now because we’re helping define what they were charged with, now they’re going to feel comfortable with calling us, and maybe we can help them defend their case.
So again, that’s just another strategy that we used. I’ll talk about another strategy. These are the DUI strategies that you can use for any type of case, whether it be “felony DUI,” “Plea bargains,” “DUI defense,” “attacking the breath test,” “Mouth alcohol,” all of these, “The sobriety tests.” So if somebody got arrested for their fourth DUI, well, we have pages. We know that that’s a felony in the state of California. So here it is, “Fourth DUI.” So, here’s the page, “Fourth DUI offense in California,” “What are the consequences of a fourth DUI?” We can write a page, it’s about a thousand words, but if somebody doesn’t do Google search for “Fourth DUI offense,” there we are, “Fourth DUI offense.” We rank here and then we also rank here because we have two pages that are optimized for that.
So, there’s so many different ways to drive traffic to a website. And here’s just one example. This is a site that does two things, DUI and expungement in Southern California, specifically Los Angeles. And we’ve got a thousand pages that are indexed and we’re getting 36,000 people just from organic search that come into the site, generating over 200 phone calls a month. So, when you start to think about it, well, if you’re a personal injury lawyer, well there’s all these different practice areas, there’s all these different geo areas that you could serve and you write content for. There’s nothing stopping you from building out a content strategy where you’re publishing 50 pages a month. It just has to be smart. You just can’t hire a writer and say, “Hey, I heard on this webinar that we should be writing a lot of content. Do me a favor, go write 50 pages a month and publish it.” I mean, you’re setting yourself up for failure.
Again, all of this is by design from the very start. We map all this out in a content strategy like this, and then we write the content because we know which keywords we’re targeting, the amount of search volume there is for these keywords and what we expect to get with phone calls from these keywords. So, that’s that. And then again, just for tracking purposes, then you can go in and you can see all the different pages and how many keywords that they all rank for, and you can start to see where all the traffic is coming in at a keyword level. A lot of people, again, focus so much in on how well is my site performing and how many keywords are we ranked for?
It’s not really that, you know what I mean? At the end of the day, you should really more be concerned about the traffic going up? Okay, great. How many phone calls are we getting? Okay, great, everything’s going up. And so, that’s really the barometers. And so again, if you’re sitting there and you have an SEO company that’s doing SEO and you’re paying them thousands of dollars per month, first of all, you want to make sure that you have these barometers. There’s probably a lot of people that are on the webinar that don’t even have call tracking in place. So, you’re just flying blind and you don’t know what you’re doing. So that’s a problem. But more importantly, you really can’t point the finger at them and say, “How come my traffic is not going up. And how come my phone calls are not going up? I’m paying you $5,000 a month. I’m paying you $10,000 a month,” when they’re not writing any content because there’s an impossibility. It’s impossible for you to get more phone calls and more traffic without publishing more content month over month. And so, that concludes the stuff that I wanted to talk about, and I think we’re just a little bit over in time, but let’s take some more questions if you got them.
And while Alex is looking at the questions, I’m just going to pull this up here. All right, so this right here is our contact information. I’m jason@wedowebcontent, that’s alex@wedowebcontent. There’s the office phone number. I’d be happy to hop on a private one-on-one call with any of you that’s on this call or listening to this call, this webinar, and we can talk about what we see as it relates to your site now, what are some of the technical problems? What traffic are you getting, we can do a preliminary audit on your website. So either, give me or Alex an email and we can set that up for you. We’d be happy to do that. And again, there’s no obligation. We’re just going to hop on a call, do a screen sharing and just go over what we discovered.
Alex Valencia:
Yep, thanks Jason. And with that said, we can also … We’re a boutique firm, so we don’t take on a lot of clients across the country. We do have some exclusivity with some very large law firms, so we can help with the content strategies and we might not be able to do work with you on a full basis, but we can always do consulting with you. So, if you need help with designing and building out your content strategy, that’s definitely something we could do. But we highly recommend registering for a preliminary audit and see what other things we find. Because even with an amazing content strategy, if your website’s technically broken, you’re not going to see the results that you want to see. So, with that said, Sam had a quick question. Jason, can you show what specific tabs we have on the spreadsheet on the content strategy?
Jason Hennessey:
Sure. So, this is for our own internal purposes, which month that we’re going to actually write the content for. So, this is a client that’s getting 25 pages per month. And so let’s see here. So, the tabs are the URL, so this is the URL that we’re going to build. And again, this is by design. In this case, you don’t necessarily need city, practice area, category. We’re just doing this because this is the way the navigation is going to work on this particular site. But you should have the title tag, you should have the H1 tag, and then you should have a field for the meta-description as well. Meta-description is what you see in the search results.
So, this right here is the title tag, this is the URL and then this is the meta-description. And then the H1 on the page is this. This is an H1 tag. So, those are the big things that you really should be paying extra close attention to when you’re mapping out a content strategy.
Alex Valencia:
Yep. Hope that answers your question, Sam. Again, thank you all. Do we have any other questions before we shut it down? Feel free to ask now, forever hold your peace, or feel free to email us again. I suggest, you know, give us a call and at least sign up and register for the preliminary audit. Yes, I will be sending a link to the recording. It will be on our podcast. So, if you’re not following our podcast, it’s SEO Happy Hour. You can download it on Google Play and iTunes. So, it’ll be on a podcast and it will also be on a link on our webinars, on our website under “About Us.” And once I get it edited, I will send it out by email, but you can always catch it on our YouTube channel, the podcast, or directly on the website. Again-
Jason Hennessey:
One thing I forgot to mention too, next, you’re talking so much about phone calls. I didn’t even include all the leads that we get from chat and all the leads that we get from the contact submissions as well. I mean, so we got 200 phone calls, but we probably get anywhere from between 150 to 200 chats and leads as well. I mean, on any given month, this site could generate anywhere from 350 to 500, I guess we can call them leads. So, it’s pretty impressive. I mean, it really starts to grow and not all leads obviously turn into profit, but the more leads that you can get, the more revenue that your firm makes.
Alex Valencia:
Yeah. And again, just like attorneys or businesses, we appreciate any feedback. Google review would be awesome. Facebook review, email me, let me know what you think, what other content you’d like to see on the webinars or in our blog. And again, thank you so much for taking the time today. I know it’s probably a day off for a lot of you, so we had a good crowd today and I appreciate your time.
Again, I will be sending it out eventually, probably in the next couple weeks, but you should be able to find it on YouTube or on our podcast. Make sure you check it out, that way you can listen to it at any time.
Jason Hennessey:
All right.
Alex Valencia:
Appreciate you guys. Have a great weekend, and we’ll see you on the next one.
Jason Hennessey:
Thank you.
Alex Valencia is an influential entrepreneur, marketer, speaker, podcaster, and CEO of We Do Web Content, one of Inc. 5000’s fastest-growing businesses in America. His agency implements game-changing content marketing strategies and produces top-ranking web content for law firms, medical professionals, and small businesses nationwide.
