Freedom from Google
-
I was looking at a blog site and the owner is claiming a very high number of hits per day, I forget maybe it was 200,000 a month or something like that. His site is about "self improvement" so it is a general interest site, so I understand traffic is high for this type of site.
The interesting thing is that he claims that he gets only 1.5% of his traffic from Google. The rest is mostly referred traffic that he gets from other blogs and sites where they have posted his link and people actually click on it. NOw while a lawyer site is unlikely to ever be popular like that, ithe idea of having an internet marketing strategy that is not subject to the vagaries of Google , the Panda and other algorithm changes, etc is quite interesting. This guy said that he has totally emphasized having great content and not SEO tactics or marketing tactics.
Would this concept make sense on a lawyer site? Does anyone have any thoughts?
thx
Paul
-
Hi Paul,
Great answers from Ryan and EGOL.
The other thing to keep in mind is that traffic doesn't automatically equal business.
While it may seem attractive to be "free from Google" and other search engines, there is an important consideration that must not be forgotten.
If the Lion's share of your traffic is perhaps from RSS subscribers or referrals from more general sites, how many of those visits are actually delivering you people who need a lawyer?
When I need a lawyer for myself or a family member (when my need is immediate and I am ready to contact the one that seems best able to help me), what am I going to do?
Will I:
- Look for a blog to subscribe to?
- Surf around and read other websites looking for links to lawyers that might help me?
- Go to my favorite search engine and search on a term that will take me straight to a list of local law firms in that practice area?
While diversity of traffic sources is important, the reality is that if they were not the most useful means of finding what you want on the web, search engines would not still hold the place they do.
I have a number of clients who are lawyers and would agree that the approach Ryan has described for you is the best way to go. In addition to that I would say that the key in developing content for them has always been remembering the mindset of the client. A person who needs a lawyer is a person who needs help. The practice area and seriousness of the situation will dictate what type of help.
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
Lots of people who have kickass traffic from sources outside of Google are getting that traffic from subscriptions. If you have a blog that has, say 20,000 email and RSS subscribers and you post every day, then you could easily get x00,000 visitors per month from your subscribers.
You could also get a lot of traffic by having your blog feed posted out to your facebook and twitter accounts. If you have a lot of friends and followers it will get passed along.
The key to getting big traffic outside of search is developing an Audience.
-
This guy said that he has totally emphasized having great content and not SEO tactics or marketing tactics.
For the most part, great content is the cornerstone of solid white hat SEO and marketing.
Work such as optimizing meta tags, robots.txt files and similar search engine specific activities are an extremely small percentage of a SEO's time. A much better use of time is spent on content related activities. A few examples:
-
determine which topics are most popular. You can write a fantastic legal article on the insanity defense, but how many people are interested in that topic? You may find a "how to beat a speeding ticket" article will be a LOT more popular.
-
ensure the topics are relevant to your services. Perhaps you are a one attorney office and you specialize in the insanity defense. In that case, even if your main topic is unpopular, you can only handle one client at a time so the insanity article would be the best topic.
-
the basic English and marketing strategies you have learned in school are all relevant to great content. Grabbing the reader's attention with a title such as "How I beat my last 7 speeding tickets" is often very successful. Writing articles in a wikipedia like fashion is not done for search engines, but for readers. See how they do it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speeding_ticket
-
proper "link building" shouldn't be about grabbing links for search engine purposes, but instead earning links for direct traffic.
Try this approach. Pretend Google and search engines did not exist. Now write your articles and try to popularize them. What would you do differently? For my part, nothing would change with respect to the content itself.
Some suggestions: write the best article you can, let everyone know about it via social networking (twitter, facebook, etc), publicize the article anywhere you can think of where readers can find it. These tactics will be great for direct traffic, but they will also be great for search engines as well. Realistically speaking, if you provide great content and present it properly, you can promote your web pages "normally" without adjusting for search engines and the pages should do very well in search results.
PS. Please forgive my judgment, and I humbly admit I could be wrong, but I call bullsh*t on the guy who claims 200k visitors a day with 1.5% being from Google. It is entirely possible, but would be a very poor business strategy. The site is likely either in Russia or another country where Google is not a factor, or it is highly probable the statements are severely inaccurate or misleading.
-
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Disavow Google Links
Hi Guys, one question from my side: When I disavow domains in the Google link disavow tool, do I have to disavow every subdomain of a main domain.....for example; I want to disavow the following (sub)domains safsad.mydomain.com hapdasd.mydomain.com skdkada.mydomain.com Do I have to disavow every subdomain solely or does it suffice if I disavow "mydomain.com" and when done also every subdomain of this main domain is disavowed too? Thank you in advance. BG
Link Building | | MihaSI0 -
In order for Google to recognize a hyper-link on your website, does it have to be written in a specific java script?
Does it have to read as the following script? KBB 2018 Best Buy Overall Winner
Link Building | | Greg_Barnhardt0 -
Google.com showing as backlink provider in Webmaster Tools?
Hi Everyone 🙂 Looking in the 'Links to your site' section of webmaster tools today and my top backlinking domain is google.com which is apparently giving me 113 links. The second top referring site is googleapis.com which apparently isn't even a site when I type it into my browser? Does anyone else get Google.com as a site linking to them? and why would Google be linking to us, where would these links be coming from? Any info appreciated 🙂 Regards
Link Building | | O2C0 -
Diagnose My Google Crash!
On July 20, my site peaked in terms of google impressions. On July 21 it crashed and then got worse. Here is my chart from Google Webmasters. http://tinypic.com/r/abruv7/5 I have been working really hard to get qualify backlinks from my niche (mom deals/coupons) and I know people like my site due to the growth in newsletter subscriptions etc. So what happened with Google? Is it Google Panda? Nothing on my site changed except maybe I had been getting less backlinks for a few days. I am having duplicate content issues which I posted about in another question. For some reason Google is indexing past page 1 of my category pages even though Yoast Wordpress SEO is set NOT to. So I am getting duplicate title tag errors from the subpages. I also have some crawl errors/404s due to deleting and renaming categories to improve my site. Any SEO issues my site might have (shorter posts than 300 words, affiliate links etc) are the same issues my competitor's have who are on page 1 of Google. Any input would be appreciated.
Link Building | | 2bloggers0 -
How to make google index the page title has changed ?
Google has indexed all my websites, but I have to change some title in the website but when checking google does not update the change.
Link Building | | tuananh0688
Please help me .
My site : http://blog.addme.vn0 -
Google Cache Date
The Google Cache date for my website: This is Google's cache of http://www.petmedicalcenter.com/. It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on Aug 28, 2011 03:19:05 GMT. Does this date coorelate to the last time Google reevaluated their rankings for my site? So if I had done 15 or so backlinks after the August 28 date, will those start to affect rankings (once they are discovered) after the next time the site is updated?
Link Building | | PMC-3120870 -
There are penalties by Google for the purchase of links? If yes which are the penalties ?
There are penalties by Google for the purchase of links? If yes which are the penalties ? When we buy links how to see if the site is considered as salesman of link by Google? Thanks you
Link Building | | elitepronostic0 -
Adding to intl versions of Google?
I ran the SEOmoz Competitive Link Finder tool for my URL and 5 of my competitors. The #1 result (where 3 of my competitors are listed but I'm not) is google.com.sg. Here's the URL where they are listed: http://www.google.com.sg/alpha/Top/Business/Investing/Derivatives/Options/Research_and_Analysis/ All 5 of us are US-based companies. Why would 3 of them be listed in the Singapore version of Google but not me? Is it common practice to add your URL to all local versions of Google, or should submission to the main google.com be enough?
Link Building | | scanlin0