The Local Iceberg: Your Website + Google Business Profile

TO: Attorneys & Managing Partners
FROM: Benji Albrecht, Founder and CEO of BPAgency
DATE: March 15, 2024
RE: The Local Iceberg and Direct Search in LSA's

Take a look at these average monthly search volumes:

Replace “divorce”, “personal injury”, or “tax” with any keyword related to your practice areas and you’ve identified the highest-intent searches relative to your law firm. In other words, these “near me” searches are the most valuable traffic and the most important for your law firm to acquire.

Capturing these searches requires alignment between your Google Business Profile(s) (GBP) and your website content. I refer to this alignment as…

The Local Iceberg.

Much like how the visible portion of an iceberg is propped up by the ice below it, your website content provides signals to Google that “prop up” your GBP profile in the search results. For example, if your GBP primary category is set to “Estate Planning Attorney” then the majority of your website content should speak to estate planning and include keywords relative to the same.

If you serve multiple practice areas, you still have options…

Option A) Create a separate brand, GBP, website & blog for each practice area.

Option B) Focus on one practice area for SEO and generate leads for the others using paid advertising.

Option C) Use the website/URL structure to clearly delineate each practice area for both service pages and blog content.

Option A would likely be the most costly as you incur marketing costs for separate websites. Option B may cost even more as you pay every single time someone clicks on your advertising for Google Search or Google Local Services Ads. Option C is the cheapest, but is also the least effective.

Reach out to me for assistance if you need help navigating these decisions. Like most things in marketing, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. The right choice depends on your practice, your budget, and your goals.

The Marketing Pulse

Running LSA’s? Turn off Direct Business Search to Avoid Paying for Brand Terms This has been an issue since before I began writing the Marketing Memo, but I feel obligated to mention it here. Follow the link above to read about direct business search in LSA’s and decide for yourself if you want to pay for those leads. Instructions to turn it off are included in the help article.

Google Continues to Deindex Websites with Low Quality Content SEO Strategist Ian Nuttall used a script to analyze 49,345 sites and found that 1.7% of them were impacted by Google’s anti-spam update as of March 8th. This means Google pulled content from these sites out of the search results. According to Nuttall, the pages removed account for approximately 20+ million monthly organic visits.

This email is brought to you by Benji and the team at BPAgency.

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