Main takeaways:
- Google’s Personalized SEO Recommendations: The new feature in Google Search Console provides personalized, data-driven recommendations, acting as a free SEO consultant to help law firms improve their website performance.
- Strategic Use of Recommendations: Not all recommendations are equally important. Understanding which to prioritize can maximize SEO efforts without wasting time on less impactful tasks.
- Technical Improvements for Law Firms: Following Google’s advice on optimizing technical aspects like website speed, mobile responsiveness, and indexation can significantly boost a law firm’s search engine rankings.
In today’s competitive market, leveraging Google Search Console’s new Recommendations can be a game-changer for your law firm’s online presence. By understanding and implementing the right recommendations, you can improve your visibility, attract more clients, and ultimately grow your business. Don’t hesitate to start exploring these recommendations and prioritize them as part of your broader SEO strategy. Thanks for tuning in, and remember, your next big client could be just a click away.
Timestamps:
Introduction to Google’s New SEO Recommendations
Timestamp: 00:00:06 – 00:07:03How to Leverage Google Search Console
Timestamp: 00:07:03 – 00:16:25Which Recommendations to Focus On
Timestamp: 00:16:25 – 00:24:33
Short on time? Watch these digestible videos instead:
Transcription:
00:00:06:11 – 00:00:26:23
Patrick Carver
What if Google told you exactly what you needed to do to improve your website, get more clicks and ultimately get more cases? Well, the cool thing is that this is happening right now with a new feature that just launched with Google Search Console. I’m going to break it all down for you. How you can get the most value out of it.
00:00:26:23 – 00:00:51:10
Patrick Carver
Some things you maybe don’t want to do when you see those recommendations and ultimately how you can use it to your advantage, Get more traffic, more cases for your law firm. Welcome to another episode of the Optimize Law Firm Podcast. I’m your host, Patrick Carvel, CEO of Constellation Marketing and this is the podcast for helping you run a more profitable and enjoyable law firm.
00:00:51:10 – 00:01:29:21
Patrick Carver
And today’s episode, we are going to talk about Google’s launch of their new personalized SEO recommendations for law firm owners through the Google Search console product. Imagine having your own personal SEO consultant, just one you didn’t have to pay for. That’s pretty much what you get with Google’s new Google Search Console Recommendations feature. So now I may have oversold that just a bit, but let’s talk about what this recommendations feature is what Google search console is and how you can take advantage of this to your benefit and improve the performance of your law firm’s website.
00:01:29:23 – 00:02:02:00
Patrick Carver
So if you’re not familiar with Google Search console, this is a tool that is typically used by webmasters, people who own websites and also very commonly used in the SEO community. The best way you can think about this is that it’s your private connection to Google. Basically the closest you can get to hearing what Google actually thinks about your website, because the search algorithm is basically a closed key secret, right?
00:02:02:00 – 00:02:25:06
Patrick Carver
It’s under lock and key and you do not have really any idea what goes on in the in the algorithm. Of course we have we have, you know, what we believe is good working knowledge of it. And we get that from testing and learning about it throughout the industry. But the reality is there’s no document online that talks about all the different factors that go into Google search ranking.
00:02:25:06 – 00:02:48:09
Patrick Carver
So ultimately, ourselves and everybody else out there is working off of complete gut sense that right there they do not know any of these things for a fact. It’s just based on the good ones are doing it based on testing and the bad ones are just out there repeating the last article they read from a from an influencer or somebody who thinks they know about SEO.
00:02:48:11 – 00:03:19:20
Patrick Carver
So Google Search console is a tool that you effectively are putting your website in and you’re telling Google, Hey, my website exists, this is the sitemap of my website. And please add me to the search engine. So when you’re getting a new website going, you want to add yourself to Google Search console. From there, it’s going to give you data back based on what their crawlers see and more or less rate your Web site.
00:03:19:20 – 00:03:50:26
Patrick Carver
It’s going to tell you how accessible it is, how quickly it loads. Is it loading fast enough? Are there problems with specific pages? And so a lot of what we’re talking about today is is really not that new. We’ve been utilizing Google Search Console for at least ten years since we started the business. And it’s been a powerful tool because it’s the first place you want to go add your site maps so that it gets indexed and so it gets crawled first and then indexed into the search engine.
00:03:50:27 – 00:04:08:28
Patrick Carver
So the first place we go when we’re updating a page, we’re creating a new website or any of that is we want to go plug it into Google search console, because the faster you get it in there, the faster Google has a chance to see it and ultimately start to crawl it and then determine where it should be in their index.
00:04:08:28 – 00:04:50:20
Patrick Carver
And that’s effectively your starting point for you appearing in search results. So the big announcement now is related to this new recommendations area that’s actually inside Google search console. So prior to this, you would get a bunch of pretty technical data about your website. It’s going to tell you like crawl rate, it’s going to tell you different things like problems that may be happening with your with your website and how often it’s crawled different different measurements like that that go into, you know, whether or not it is optimized properly when it comes to speed, when it comes to responsiveness, things like that.
00:04:50:22 – 00:05:20:21
Patrick Carver
A problem for the casual Web site here, the casual Web site owner, law firm owner who’s managing their own website or is in charge of that component is like, you know, it’s just it’s just very challenging. It’s technical data. You really have to understand what what that means. And then actually implementing a lot of those changes is a whole separate can of worms and very difficult because a lot of it has to do with changing things at the host level or on the back end of a website.
00:05:20:21 – 00:05:48:09
Patrick Carver
It’s not just going in to a website page and adding a few words or or something like that. These are pretty sophisticated changes that you often need to develop before to go in and do that. Now, the problem is that Google is very not for forthcoming with a lot of this information. Right. And so they’re not really going to tell you a lot of these things.
00:05:48:11 – 00:06:13:12
Patrick Carver
So they’ll give you some of these indications, but you can go often and try to fix a problem that that they highlight, but they won’t really tell you if you actually fixed it. And so the kind of yin and yang here is that you do get insight into the way Google looks at your website, but you don’t always get that confirmation that like what you’ve done to address their concerns is the actual thing they wanted you to do.
00:06:13:17 – 00:06:40:23
Patrick Carver
Or if it if it passes. Right. And so there’s some other issues that that we we have with it are challenges that it creates for us. But what we’re talking about today are is this new recommendations feature. And so this is like a new part of search console. It’s just an additive that people are starting to see inside their dashboards that’s now going to give you personalized recommendations.
00:06:40:23 – 00:07:03:05
Patrick Carver
And the the kind of the cool value of this is that it’s going to go from just showing you test results to actually giving you some specific advice on how you can improve your website to meet their standards. And so when I said it’s kind of like having a personal SEO consultant that updates you daily in a in a sense, it’s true.
00:07:03:05 – 00:07:37:05
Patrick Carver
Right now there’s a lot more that goes into it in terms of ranking in really competitive markets. But nonetheless, any insight into this is is definitely a positive. It’s a benefit, especially if you are doing any of the website management yourself. Right. It’s going to take a lot of the, you know, kind of a theoretical part out of it and give you more actionable types of information that you can use to improve the performance of your website.
00:07:37:07 – 00:07:58:18
Patrick Carver
So now, instead of needing to go into all of these reports and really understand the nuances between types of reports and things like that, it’s just going to give you a pretty straight forward recommendation on what to do. And another example of this is it may call your attention to a specific group of URLs that’s not getting indexed.
00:07:58:21 – 00:08:22:13
Patrick Carver
So when you put in your site map, ideally all of the web pages on your website are going to get crawled an index, but they might not for a variety of reasons. When they’re going over with that crawl, it doesn’t necessarily mean every single page is going to get crawled and accepted by Google and then ultimately indexed. And so there may be a technical issue with that.
00:08:22:13 – 00:08:55:06
Patrick Carver
You might have some sort of directive on the page that says don’t show in in Google search results. And this is actually something that I’ve seen a number of times from incoming clients who have been working with a different SEO team and someone on that SEO team, either intentionally or unintentionally, has set one or many pages to no index, which effectively tells Google, Hey, we do not want you to index these pages right?
00:08:55:06 – 00:09:15:10
Patrick Carver
And so you might have done this while you were like developing a web page or changing things and you didn’t want it to get indexed yet and just it just forgot to do that. I’ve also seen it done in a malicious way where the previous provider is actually trying to inflict damage by effectively telling Google, Hey, we do not want you to index this entire site.
00:09:15:10 – 00:09:46:14
Patrick Carver
And so recommendations like this can be absolutely vital with seeing that. And it really starts to help you understand low performance on a website or if you’re getting a certain level of performance, something that can actually improve it. There’s also recommendations here as well that are going to talk about, you know, certain keywords or certain topics that your your pages cover that are getting more impressions than usual or you’re starting to gain traction with particular pages.
00:09:46:14 – 00:10:13:03
Patrick Carver
So these can be really valuable because it’s going to give you a little bit of insight as to which pages are performing well. And maybe you’re getting you’re taking advantage of a trend. From there you might see that you’re getting a little bit more traffic on some of these pages that you wrote a year ago. But changes have happened in the judicial system or new laws in your state where those pages actually need to be updated.
00:10:13:06 – 00:10:40:06
Patrick Carver
So this can kind of remind you to go in and look at these pages and then just, you know, revisit them, optimize them, because if you’re getting some good impressions now, typically by optimizing it, adding some additional updated information, you’re you’re going to get even better performance because Google’s looking for the best, most up to date, accurate and authoritative sources for information on the Internet.
00:10:40:13 – 00:10:58:20
Patrick Carver
And so by going in, optimizing it, improving it, it’s a it’s a great way to show Google that you are, in fact, on top of these updates, you have the best content out there compared to other people in your profession. So a lot of good actionable stuff that you can do with these recommendations. And again, it’s all free.
00:10:58:20 – 00:11:24:04
Patrick Carver
It’s all easy to access inside the Google search console. So if you’ve ever wish that you had a direct line to Google, these recommendations are getting you closer than ever. And this is why we feel confidently that law firms should care about these new recommendations. And I would say in a bigger sense about Google Search console and all of the information that is is available in there.
00:11:24:09 – 00:11:48:13
Patrick Carver
Ultimately, Google holds the keys to the search engine, Right. They have 100% control over what goes in at what positions the content is featured. And if you can get some of their personalized recommendations, even though it’s, you know, created by air or a box, what have you, still is very, very valuable because it’s going to give you a better idea of what they’re looking for.
00:11:48:13 – 00:12:10:04
Patrick Carver
Right. I think a big problem with SEO in general when it comes to law firm owners is that it’s it’s out of their control. Right. And there’s a lot that goes into it. And so not being able to understand the mechanics of how it works is is super frustrating, especially if you’re spending lots of money and you’re not getting any results.
00:12:10:04 – 00:12:30:06
Patrick Carver
Right. And your trust in someone to navigate this for you and they’re just not getting those results, it’s super frustrating. You’re going to feel very vulnerable being out there, paint thousands of dollars and then just not really knowing like, is this the right thing to be doing? Are there other things that I should be doing, all that type of stuff.
00:12:30:06 – 00:12:58:29
Patrick Carver
And so when Google provides you with some of these opportunities and they kind of show their their hand a little bit, you absolutely want to seize on them. And so a big part of our SEO optimization program is we want to maximize every opportunity that Google has given us and has put out there publicly about their recommendations. And so you can kind of track this over the past ten, 20 years.
00:12:59:02 – 00:13:31:21
Patrick Carver
Google will give you these new recommendations. And the expectation I have for our team is that we are going to follow them to the letter of the law because even though there’s some debate about, you know, are the things that Google talks about, always the things that they’re actually rewarding for in the in the search algorithm. But everything in Google search console, I would argue, has a pretty direct impact or is is directly aligned with their search engine philosophy.
00:13:31:21 – 00:14:01:16
Patrick Carver
And so if you go into the main components of Google search console, it’s talking about technical aspects of the website of web pages. Can can Google’s software crawl them easily and without a lot of power or, you know, memory energy because ultimately they’re crawling millions and billions of web pages. And so they need to be able to do it efficiently because it’s costing them an enormous amount of money to be out there constantly looking for new content.
00:14:01:24 – 00:14:27:16
Patrick Carver
And so are you as the owner, following their guidelines so that they can do that efficiently and at the lowest cost possible for them? Same thing when it comes to just all the other visible aspects of your website pages on on their platform. Right? When visitors go and click on a search result, Google is looking for that visitor to have a good experience.
00:14:27:16 – 00:14:54:17
Patrick Carver
And that’s kind of the the handoff or the trust between the content producer, the website owner and Google. Right. Google will give you the placement, but on your end you have to ensure that you’re giving them a good experience. And so the fluctuations, the ups and the downs of the rankings for Google are going to be largely based on who they feel is giving the best experience.
00:14:54:19 – 00:15:35:15
Patrick Carver
One of the big elements that they have discussed and put in their guidelines over the past five or so years, 5 to 10 years has been website speed and also responsiveness, because not everybody is looking at your website from a desktop desktop computer with with a great Internet connection. And so if they’re on their phone, if they’re out in the country and don’t have access to high speed Internet or something, Google wants them to have a good experience too, because ultimately that makes them a happy customer who’s going to come back and keep using Google to find the answers to their questions moving forward.
00:15:35:15 – 00:15:59:29
Patrick Carver
And so you as the website owner, need to meet or exceed all of these guidelines. Right? And so these recommendations and the other components of search console are going to help you solve one of the really three big components or for when it comes to SEO, you have off page, you have on page, you have technical of local.
00:16:00:01 – 00:16:25:11
Patrick Carver
This is the technical component of your website and whether it meets all of those requirements put forth by Google. So your SEO campaign is entirely contingent on this because if you don’t come through correctly with all three of those components, you’re not going to be in a position to rank capture traffic and ultimately more business for your law firm.
00:16:25:15 – 00:16:51:04
Patrick Carver
Not all CEOs strategies are created equal and knowing which ones to act on can make or break your SEO strategy. So in the final section of this podcast, let’s talk about getting the most out of these GSC recommendations, which ones you should really pay attention to, which ones you maybe can can look the other way. Or you want to get some advanced counsel from an expert on the matter.
00:16:51:04 – 00:17:23:21
Patrick Carver
So with every new feature or tool like this, it’s important to kind of understand where it’s coming from. So these are not hand-selected recommendations by an actual person. These are going to be developed by their software. And you know, whether it’s AI or data driven rules around this, these recommendations are ultimately not human approved. Right. And and so there’s benefits and drawbacks with that.
00:17:23:21 – 00:17:58:16
Patrick Carver
I would say the benefits is that this can be done at scale. You’re going to get these maybe more more commonly or more quickly. Frequently is the word I’m looking for than if a human were were to do it. And they can really get into a lot of the granularity of the data and find items that that are of value where the human eye just wouldn’t be able to do it when they’re trying to consume such vast amounts of data and go through like, you know, ten different reports and and find that that one piece that, you know, can be very valuable.
00:17:58:18 – 00:18:27:03
Patrick Carver
Some of the downsides, though, are that these are not, you know, going to be always super beneficial to you. Right. And they may not be super beneficial to you because you there’s always going to be some of this that if you followed the letter of the law, you’re going to be spending too much time on it. And it’s not really going to have a large impact on their they’re not going to probably tell you anything that is actually wrong.
00:18:27:10 – 00:18:55:01
Patrick Carver
If you were to say, you know, is this, you know, technically right when it comes to the best optimizations practices for SEO, but they will tell you that, you know, you have this problem and, you know, maybe it’s a big problem and there’s one URLs that, you know, have this thing that you need to go go fix. You’re going to have to determine how important that item is.
00:18:55:01 – 00:19:25:24
Patrick Carver
And that’s where it’s really challenging. If you are an amateur and you don’t spin it a lot of time on this, you’re going to have a really difficult time understanding which of these recommendations are going to be valuable or not. And that’s where bringing somebody in who is, you know, has an advanced understanding of SEO. And I think most importantly, real hands on training in competitive environments with law firm websites where they can actually see by doing these things.
00:19:25:24 – 00:19:49:09
Patrick Carver
Did it have a negligible impact on performance because my belief in this area is that a lot of these recommendations are a good portion. I would say a lot. You know, it’s it’s kind of like busywork a little bit, right, Because they’re they’ve got this new feature and this. Okay, we’re going to do you know, we’re going to give everybody recommendations.
00:19:49:11 – 00:20:16:06
Patrick Carver
Well, what happens when, you know, there’s really not that many recommendations or the recommendations are not weighted properly. It ends up being kind of a bad product. And so I think they’re going to air on the side of throwing a lot of of recommendations. And I’m basing this on our experience with like Google ads, for instance, where they use AI to deliver all these these recommendations.
00:20:16:08 – 00:20:56:28
Patrick Carver
And some of them are good, but a lot of them are going to be giving advice based on their idea of what a good campaign is. And in in reality, what we have learned is that what’s good for Google in the ad world is not always good for the consumer. They want you to spend as much money as possible, get as many clicks as possible, whereas with us we want a much more restrictive, filtered group of clicks that are going to be only tied with our our, you know, highest level consumer to the most high value target of a client.
00:20:56:28 – 00:21:20:19
Patrick Carver
And so it ends up creating this kind of spam that that’s happening that, oh, you should be doing this, you should be adjusting this bid by by 10% or, you know, the time of day. And again, sometimes that’s super valuable and really helpful. There’s a bunch of these that can be really small, easy kind of layup type opportunities like going and, you know, making sure a page is indexed properly.
00:21:20:19 – 00:21:44:22
Patrick Carver
Right, or making sure that certain tags are not there, they’re going to that are going to prevent it from being indexed. Maybe there’s a piece of data, like a description is missing or the title is missing. Different things like that, which are just real basic SEO elements and having the benefit of the search console to come in and, you know, pick up on those things and and give you that basis is super valuable.
00:21:44:24 – 00:22:10:09
Patrick Carver
So I know I’m giving you kind of a back and forth commentary on this. So but let me kind of try to summarize it is that, you know, utilizing the recommendations and just Google search console information and data, you know, in some ways is like a roadmap to achieve success. But with all things, you have to use it wisely.
00:22:10:09 – 00:22:34:18
Patrick Carver
Right? Understand that all of these recommendations are not should not be weighted equally right. There is a a time and energy cost to them or a financial cost to them. And so as you’re watching this, the takeaway is not to, you know, go and send a fiery email over to your your SEO person and say, are you are you looking at recommendations on GSC?
00:22:34:24 – 00:22:56:16
Patrick Carver
I want a checklist of all you know, of all of those that have been implemented. But instead, I would you know, I would just ask some probing questions like, what do you think of the recommendations? Are you do you use GSC commonly? What parts of GSC do you use? What do you use it for? What are what are some of the benefits you’re going for or some of the, you know, the end results that you’re you’re looking for with this?
00:22:56:16 – 00:23:17:05
Patrick Carver
And so when discussing SEO with lawyers is that, you know, you don’t want to be the person in the factory making the sausage, right? You just need to come every now and then and make sure it’s quality, you know, what’s going into it. You know what the the results should be at the end of the month. And you have a just a better idea of what’s going on in the factory.
00:23:17:05 – 00:23:38:06
Patrick Carver
Right? That’s what this is. This was this is all about right. And so have these type of discussions with your SEO person, your marketing company, and let them tell you what what how they’re utilizing this stuff. Right. So it’s it’s most important that you just have an idea of what they’re doing and that they’re doing it every month.
00:23:38:09 – 00:24:08:04
Patrick Carver
And you can you can sleep a lot better, right? In conclusion, by implementing the right recommendations, you’re going to be able to improve your visibility, get on Google’s good side, which will allow you to attract more traffic, gain more clients, and ultimately grow your business, making it more profitable. So that’s it for today’s podcast. Don’t hesitate to reach out if you’re exploring this topic, If you’re going in and learning about Google Search console, I’d love to chat about it.
00:24:08:04 – 00:24:33:18
Patrick Carver
We have a ton of informational material about this on our website. We cover all aspects of SEO from off page on page link building, local competitor research, and anything you can you can imagine. We have it on the website. So that’s it for today. And again, thank you so much for tuning in. I know you have a lot of options out there for marketing content, for improving your law firm’s performance and a lot of choices out there.
00:24:33:18 – 00:24:38:03
Patrick Carver
So really appreciate your time. Thank you. And please reach out.
