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.
-
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
-
How long does it take my links to get indexed by Google?
How long does it take my links to get indexed by Google? Also Is it possible to get my links indexed faster?
Link Building | | EugeneMot0 -
Can a company group have reciprocal links on their company websites without being penalised by Google?
A client which is part of a group of businesses all within one industry but have different purposes has come to us aith a "brilliant idea" that they all have a blog on their website that links to every business within their group. We are pretty sure that this will be seen as "black hat" by Google, but just wanted to see what you all thought? Thanks!
Link Building | | RedAntSolutions0 -
Google Link-building Update....
Hey, Guys How long does it take for Google to recognize your link-building efforts with authority websites and affect the SERPS?
Link Building | | AubbiefromAubenRealty0 -
301 Redirect and Google...
Hi all Recently, Google has indexed the landing page url for our product differently. This has just happened. So now, when you used search for "DocRead" you would find the top result being : "http://www.collaboris.com/products/policy-and-procedure-management-software" which is what i want. However, now it's indexing it as "http://www.collaboris.com/products" this page is simply a redirect to our product page as it's part of the menu. If I look in fiddler when requesting http://www.collaboris.com/products I can see its doing a 301 redirect, which is fine. Why is Google storing the wrong url ? I also noticed we dropped in our rankings quite significantly last week.
Link Building | | MarkQJones0 -
Why articles submitted to squidoo not indexed by google
Hi, I have written a few articles and uploaded to squidoo/hubpage last month and they have been accepted and I can see the links in the articles. But they dont appear in the latest link report from Google Webmaster Tools. Is it because it's delay or Google simply wont treat them as valid links? Thanks
Link Building | | LauraHT0 -
Why are none of my incoming links showing up in SEOmoz or Google? How do I get good legit incoming links?
There are hundreds of sites that are linking to my website, but nobody is showing it. Google wont display any when using link:eugenecomputergeeks.com, and in webmaster tools it only shows 46 incoming links. SEOmoz shows only 3 links. This just isn't so. Why is this? I DESPERATELY need valid incoming links from well ranked websites , and having lots of trouble getting them. Nobody in town with a well ranked site seems to want to do a link exchange, and I've already made the mistake of buying my way into directories, which didn't do anything good for my rankings. Thanks!
Link Building | | eugenecomputergeeks0 -
Do http:// links to a http://www. site count the same to Google?
In terms of links to one's site helping your position on Google, if your site defaults to http://www.example.com (automatically adds "www." even if it isn't typed), does Google count links that appear as http://example.com (without the www.) with the same "weight"? Thanks.
Link Building | | celife0 -
Why is Google not following a 301 redirect on the robots.txt file?
Hi Guys, I recently posted a question on the Google Webmasters Forum http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=683e71557db7fd54&hl=en&fid=683e71557db7fd540004a4b4add8cbb6 and didn't get a satisfactory feedback so I thought I will put this to the SEO gurus on here. Perhaps one of you guys might good buddies with Matt and might be able to ask him directly. I actually posted on Matt's blog but he hasn't got back to me. Basically we did a URL restructure for client and set up 301 redirects and saw a huge drop in rankings over time. The 301 redirects seem to work fine and have been tested by many many people. We suspected that google might be ignoring the 301 redirects or devaluing them and so I reviewed the server log to see what is happening when the googlebot crawls the site and it showed that on many occasions the googlebot did not reload the page after hitting a 301 redirect. Sure.. you might say it probably queues it or Google might just be checking that the 301 redirect is still in place but why check so often (with a few hours to a day on the same URL) it even skips a 301 redirect on the robots.txt file i.e. from http://clientsite.com/robots.txt to http://www.clientsite.com/robots.txt. from non-www to www version. I don't think it is easy to dismiss the skipping of the robots.txt file - this 301 redirect should be loaded immediately to use the instructions the gooblebot requires to crawl the page. Any help will be appreciated. I can sent the server log to anyone personally but I am reluctant to post it on here. Regards, Zan
Link Building | | FRL0