Here at Crafted, we want to give clients a design-first experience with creative storytelling and custom development solutions. Through this, we can take your business to the next level and take advantage of the sweeping new technologies entering the market. We’re proud to be recognized as one of 30 Clutch Industry Leaders in automotive and real estate marketing.

Clutch is a research firm based in Washington, DC that evaluates and ranks companies based on industry data and client reviews. Their unique ranking methodology connects potential buyers to the service providers they need. Our clients graciously took the time to give us great feedback on Clutch’s verified B2B reviews platform, earning us recognition as a leading digital marketing and design firm.

Our stellar work is also recognized at Clutch’s sister site The Manifest, another top companies resource for buyers. On The Manifest, we are listed as one of the top 25 PHP developers in New York City. At Visual Objects, a Clutch-powered visual design focused catalogue, companies can display their digital design portfolios.

If you are interested in getting cutting-edge visual design and a strong digital marketing presence for your automotive or real estate business, be sure to contact us today!

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SEO is especially instrumental for small businesses that are trying to build a brand name within a budget. SEO that is strategically implemented can drive more traffic to your website, aid in profitable conversions, and best of all, it helps you in creating user-friendly websites.
Despite the fact that SEO is popular, a number of businesses are still not quite aware of how to implement SEO. Many small businesses tend to make mistakes that can jeopardize their business.

Here are some of the most common mistakes made by small businesses in SEO and how they can be fixed.

Not defining your audience

The base for executing an effective SEO strategy is to understand your target audience. A number of small businesses fail to properly define their customers. They take a broader, more general approach that includes people who have no use for your products.
Fix: Focus on the desirable characters in an ideal audience and appeal to these characters. You may need to define certain aspects like gender, location, wants/ needs, marital status, age, and so on. The more you define your customer, the easier it becomes to narrow down a highly receptive audience.

Snowballing with keywords

Time and again our favorite, trusted blogs have tried to define the difference between keyword stuffing and using just the right ratio of keywords to content. However, many small businesses still do not understand this concept. Most people think that higher the number of keywords in a piece of content, more the traffic. This is a wrong approach. Your keywords should fit naturally within the context of the content and should not appear as though it has been forced into it for the sole purpose of gaining traffic.
Fix: Remember that in every case, your customer is the top priority. Traffic comes later. Your content should be made for users first and search engines second. Practices such as keyword stuffing, especially when forced can be unappealing to users and search engines do not prefer these practices in SEO as well.

The ideal ratio is a 1-3 percent ratio of keywords to text but it can be higher or lower as long as the keywords fit naturally into the context.

Inconsistency with your contact details

You might have observed that a number of small businesses have no proper form or structure when it comes to their contact details. In some cases, the given contact numbers and location are even invalid. This is a big mistake, especially when it comes to local SEO. Search engines like Google are very meticulous when it comes to checking the consistency of your contact details because this is a proof of your reliability and credibility.

Fix: Go through all your online profiles. Make sure that the contact details are consistent across all these profiles. Also, always update your location and contact numbers if any of them happen to change. Failing to update your contact details means losing a number of potential leads.

Pay attention to your title tags and meta descriptions

After all, it is the first thing that a user sees on the search engine results page. Many small businesses fail to optimize these tags and as a result, does not stand out enough to catch a user’s attention.
Fix: The title tag and the meta descriptions are descriptive text. You need to summarize what’s coming in your website in just 160 characters, so it calls for some creativity. The title tags and meta description tags should contain the most relevant keywords and should not exceed 160 characters. You should be able to give a peek into your website in the most interesting way possible.

Not paying enough attention to internal linking

Most people are aware of the importance of external linking and go above and beyond to get as many external links as possible. What most small businesses ignore is the importance of internal linking. Internal linking is an essential aspect of SEO that helps people find information that is helpful on your website.

Fix: Do not ignore the importance of internal linking. These links can help search engines find more of your pages resulting in better search engine rankings. One of the best ways to add more internal links is to ask your in-house content writers to write blogs that contain links that direct back to one or more of your past posts and services. While giving internal links, make sure that the links are updated and that the information is not outdated.

If there are any broken internal links, make sure to fix these links as well.

Ignoring the importance of a mobile optimized website

Mobiles are handy devices that are an integral part of our everyday life. Gone are the days when we would sit behind a desktop to browse for information. Today, the world is at the tip of our hands. Anything and everything is available through your mobile. However, business owners ignore the simple task of seeing that your website is mobile optimized. It is not enough to take comfort in the fact that your website is optimized for desktop. Most of your traffic comes through mobiles and that’s where you should focus.
Fix: Use tools like the Google Mobile-Friendly Testing Tool to check whether your website is mobile friendly. You should look at aspects like responsiveness, page load time, and check for any site errors.

Your website needs to have a responsive design because it enhances user experience. If your website gives a user a smooth and effortless experience, there is no turning back. You can be sure that the same user will return to your website another time.

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Not too long ago, the discussion on SEO mainly revolved around the use of keywords. Optimization strategies literally depended on keyword research and usage. To put it simply, everything was about keywords.

But, those days are gone. Keywords no longer form a core part of the SEO strategy. Google is working actively towards eliminating keyword stuffing while prioritizing content quality.

So, if you’re one of those businesses that still depends heavily on keywords, you’re going to have some trouble meeting your goals. Either you’re going to end up being penalized for keyword stuffing, or your obsession with keywords is going to force you to miss out on all the other important aspects of search engine optimization.

You see, various other strategic elements make up a comprehensive SEO strategy.

Here are a few examples:

Content positioning

Now, we aren’t saying keywords aren’t important. They still very much are. However, keyword usage isn’t about how many keywords you use in your content. Rather, it’s about where those keywords are positioned within the content.

For instance, the inclusion of keywords in the title or heading of a page is far more useful than incorporating it into the body or the footer. So, you need to bother about how keywords are incorporated into your site’s overall structure. Search visibility is highly dependent on the quality, value, and shareability of your content; not on the number of keywords it contains.

Use synonyms

Google receives around 6 billion searches a day. Needless to say, that’s a ton of information; information that needs to be assessed in order to understand what searchers are trying to look for. So far, Google’s assessment has determined that synonyms play a key role in about 70% of searches.

In order to meet the challenge, search engines make use of an inventory of synonyms and variants for the various search phrases that they receive on a daily basis. This allows them to match the queries with the right content.

For example, searching for ‘sports cars’ can be very different from searching for ‘cars with sporty engines.’ Search engines need to be aware of these subtle differences in order to provide the proper results.

Using variations can also provide semantic meaning and help search engines overcome the problem of disambiguation. Disambiguation is a standard issue with certain search terms. For example, ‘vehicle’ can refer to actual automobiles or even a medium. The meaning varies based on context.

Currently, Google’s Hummingbird algorithm leverages co-occurrence to look for synonyms that match the query.

Go social/mobile

These are some of the key areas that businesses today tend to forget – social media and mobile. Websites today need to be responsive, i.e., optimized for mobile use. Most of the web traffic today comes from mobile devices. So, a responsive design is necessary for a better search engine ranking.

The same goes for social media. Social media is a highly effective traffic-generating platform because it encourages link sharing. So, make sure you have a presence on major platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Also, make sure those platforms are linked to your website.

Navigation and structure

Search traffic is also impacted by your site’s design, especially with regard to navigation and structure. You see, users don’t want to use sites that make it hard for them to find things they want to find. This is why Google plays the role of “enforcer” and ensures that only the most navigable sites make it to the top of the search results.

So, if your site possesses clean navigation, with clear menus and sub-menus, you are much more likely to find yourself being ranked high in the search results. Also, make sure you add a sitemap along with standard pages such as About Us, Services, and Contact.

It is necessary for your website to have a proper structure in place. Just good content won’t cut it.

Entity salience

Search engines are now looking to understand the relationship between multiple entities to determine topic relevance. One such technique is entity salience.

Entity salience goes way beyond the traditional use of keywords for identifying relevant keywords in a document by looking at the relationship between entities. Here, the term ‘entity’ refers merely to any well-defined or distinct item in a document.

If the relationship between entities is strong, they will acquire more significance.

To give you an example, think of terms such as Mercedes, BMW, Toyota, etc. used in an article. These are nouns that have a strong relationship with phrases like ‘automotive industry’ or ‘car manufacturer.’ So, even if these latter phrases appear once in the article, they still have a strong entity relationship to the brand names which we mentioned. So, the overall significance goes up.

However, if another term such as ‘Johnson’s Car Dealership’ appears in the article more than once, it will have a weaker association. This is because ‘dealership’ doesn’t necessarily mean car dealership. So, the significance is lower.

Security and site speed

Site speed is another major factor that impacts searchability. There is way more competition on the web now, and the web itself has become more accessible. So, in order to stand out, you need to make sure your site speed meets the current expectations of users.

This can be done by establishing a clean caching system, eliminating clutter, and optimizing content, especially media content such as images, animation, or videos.

Another major component is site security. Your site ranking also relies heavily on security. For instance, sites with SSL encryption are likelier to receive preference in search rankings over sites that don’t have SSL encryption.

Site security will only grow in significance in the near future.

So, as you can see, there is a whole lot more to search engine optimization than just keyword research and usage. In fact, we’re moving towards an era where advances in search algorithms may even begin to ignore keywords in favor of some of the elements that we just discussed. So, it’s best that you start playing catch up.

For more on SEO, do visit Crafted.

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But, how can all that be achieved in a cost-efficient and ethical manner while overcoming the various challenges that come with operating in a digital business landscape? Well, one way would be to leverage SEO or Search Engine Optimization.

However, SEO for law firms has always been a complex topic. Often, such firms find their efforts going to waste. Well, in this blog, we’re going to look at how law firms should ideally utilize SEO. After all, SEO is more than just keyword research and implementation.

Let’s take a look at some of the “less known” strategies that law firms should make use of to boost their leads.

Video marketing

Video marketing is one of the best ways to boost your website’s rankings on Google search. However, many law firms still fail at it. Well, this is primarily because these firms are unaware of how to link video portals like YouTube to their website.

It is never enough just to put up a video and hope that things will work out.

One of the most basic things that law firms need to do is include the link to the site on their uploaded videos. Any link from a popular video sharing portal like YouTube is highly valuable. Now, you may argue that users don’t follow YouTube links. However, the key goal of SEO is traffic; not purely rankings.

So, connect your website to your video channel. Make sure you link pages that are relevant to the content of the video. These links will drive traffic to your site, which will eventually boost your rankings.

Use long-form content as the primary content

Statistics tell us that long-form content (1000 words or more) tend to do better with regard to search rankings. Of course, creating long-form content can be quite difficult. However, the results it can deliver is worth the effort.

Long form content plays a very significant role in the area of SEO. Content that offers in-depth coverage of certain topics, especially legal topics, tend to enjoy higher engagement. More importantly, they position your agency or firm as an expert on the topic being discussed.

Discuss primary practice areas

Search engines, such as Google, do factor in aspects such as ‘focus’ in order to rank sites. What that means is you need to be clear about what your law firm is all about, if you want to see a good ranking. So, make sure you offer brief or detailed information about your core practice areas.

When you do this, you make it possible for Google’s search algorithms to determine the focus of your site and rank it appropriately.

On the other hand, if you fail to discuss your core areas of practice, Google will ignore that content and rank it much lower.

Now, one way to make sure your core content remains noticeable is by positioning it strategically. Make sure core practice information goes to the front and center of your homepage. When visitors see this, they’ll immediately know what you specialize in.

Also, when listing your services, make sure you list each practice separately, instead of clubbing it all under a single category. However, it’s okay to club your secondary or tertiary practice areas.

Leverage the power of social media

Social media has a huge impact on your search rankings. For instance, using hashtags that are relevant to your strategy can help clients find you in a much easier manner. You can also use photos to present yourself as an approachable practice. Photos on social media are a sure-shot way to boost your engagement and generate traffic.

Limit your use of keywords

There’s such a thing as overusing your keywords. It’s more popularly referred to as “keyword stuffing.” As we stated earlier, SEO is much more than just using keywords. So, don’t make the assumption that keywords are everything. There is a strategic way to leverage keywords.

To begin with, the keyword must fit into your content naturally. Stuffing it out of context isn’t going to help you. You’ll end up with low-quality content, and that’s a bad thing in terms of search rankings. There must be a certain amount of relevance to your chosen keywords.

Secondly, make sure your keywords are placed where they’re most effective. Generally, apart from the body of the content, keywords need to go into your title tags and your meta-descriptions. Other than that, you can use what’s known as an “alt tag.”

Alt tags are basically text alternatives to the images you use on the site. These alt tags are read by screen readers to determine what kind of pictures will show up along with the content. Alt tags are a great way to incorporate keywords into your content while avoiding “keyword stuffing.” But, alt tags also need to be used in moderation.

Conduct an SEO audit

Finally, make sure you conduct an SEO audit. An SEO audit a core part of your overall SEO strategy because it’s basically aimed at fine-tuning your strategy. It helps you identify problem areas and correct them. Statistically, it is possible to bring up your website traffic rate by almost 200% with just a simple audit.

You can use tools such as a web ranking software to measure your progress as well. The advantage with these tools is that they can offer insights on what’s effective and what’s not. A good example of such a solution is Google Webmaster Tools or Google Analytics. You can also use the Google AdWords Preview Tool for manual tracking and observe listing according to regions.

So, there you have it – basic strategies to help you boost your law firm’s search rankings. If you’re looking for more guidance on search engine optimization, get in touch with Crafted. We might be the right fit for your needs.

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