If you don’t currently own one of the 33 million voice-driven devices like an Amazon Echo or Google Home, you probably an Android or iPhone which has voice search built in out of the box. All of these devices are pushing consumers to get more comfortable with voice search. In fact, back in 2016, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that 20% of queries Google gets in the US are spoken into a device.
We have been saying for a few years now that mobile searches are on the rise and that they recently outpaced desktop searches. Well, ComScore says that in 2 more years, by 2020, that 50% of all searches will be voice searches.
Since we manage many Google AdWords campaigns for law firms, we can see the actual search keywords entered by users. Over the past year, we have seen more and more searches that are long and slightly confusing. Our assumption (until Google classifies voice search differently for analytics) is that many of these strange queries are voice searches.
Here are some examples of these longer searches that may likely have been voice searches:
How Your Law Firm Can Optimize For Voice Search
There are a few strategies that you should consider implementing to capture the quickly growing number of voice search users, most of which we recommend to law firms marketing online for traditional search:
- Claim and optimize your Google My Business page and other key directories
- Implement Schema markup fully on your website
- Answer your prospective clients’ questions
- Use longer tail search terms if using Google AdWords
Claim and Optimize your Law Firm’s Google My Business page
This is not a new requirement for law firms. We listed Google My Business (back then it was called Google Places) as a critical piece to your web presence in the first edition of our book Online Law Practice Strategies back in 2011. Yet, even as it continues to grow in importance, I see many law firms either not claiming or incorrectly claiming their firm’s listing.
Why are we recommending that you optimize Google My Business and other key directories as the most important piece when it comes to voice search?
The Internet Trends Report 2016 found that 22% of people are using voice search to find local information. I think this makes sense as people are on their mobile phone when sitting in their car or walking down the street and that’s when you are often thinking about the next errand you need to run or business to visit. Plus, for years we have reported that half of all mobile searches for local search visited a store within the same day of their search.
When users search for local businesses, they often look for operational hours, contact information, address, and directions. Obviously, you should have this information on your website, more on marking this information up with schema below.
But, when using a voice search, most prospective clients won’t need or want to go to your website when they search. With directory listings on Google, Bing, and Apple Maps and review sites like Yelp, voice search users can get your address, business description, hours, and reviews just by speaking.
Well, they can get if your law firm is listed correctly in the right directories.
Business directory sites to optimize for voice search:
- Google Assistant (Hey Google) = Google My Business
- Siri = Apple Maps and Yelp
- Alexa = returns Yelp reviews
- Cortana (Microsoft) = Bing business listings and reviews from Yelp
When it comes to desktop and mobile “text” searches, we have been telling you that Google, Facebook, and Avvo are where you want to have your reviews. But to prepare for voice search, you definitely want get reviews on Yelp. Unfortunately, we have found that Yelp is often the hardest platform for law firms to get good, credible reviews.
As we’ve written before about claiming your directory listings, make sure that your name, address, and phone number (NAP) are the exact same for each listing. Fill out the profile with as much detail as the profile will allow.
This includes:
- URL
- Business Hours (yes, your firm can put 24×7 if you truly have someone answering chats or phone calls at all hours)
- Business Description
- Logo
- Photos
- Posts (if allowed)
- Categories (your practice areas)
Implement schema markup fully on your website
Did you know that there is a piece of code for your website that allows you to tell Google’s searchbot and the other search engines that you are a local business, and in fact a law firm, plus your address, phone number, office hours, and more?
This is called schema markup and you can find all kinds of information about this at http://schema.org. When it comes to voice search, schema markup can help the search engines parse out information that they use in their answers.
For law firms you should definitely be using the following schema markup on your website to describe the following information about your firm:
- Legal Service – use this on a contact page for each office
- Attorney – use this on each attorney profile page
- Notary – is one of your team members a notary? Create a bio page for them and mark it up with this schema
- Review – do you have a list of reviews people provided you directly on your website? They should not be copied from review sites around the web? Use this markup for those unique reviews and you can see stars on some of your actual pages in the search rankings.
- Question – You have a frequently asked question area on your website, right? If not, we will be covering that in the next section. Use this markup to tell the search engines the exact question you are answering and then your accepted answer.
This markup requires some technical knowledge to implement, so you may want to ask your webmaster do this for you. You can use a few different formats, we commonly use the JSON format for our law firm clients but any of the three standard formats will work.
Answer your prospective clients’ questions
People use voice search to ask a question. It is the natural use of any voice assistant. “Hey Siri, what is the weather today?”, “Alexa, what time is The Avengers playing nearby?”, Hey Google how do I get out of a traffic ticket?”
It makes sense that consumers will begin to use longer, more natural questions with voice search than when typing.
In fact, Bing’s Purna Virji described it this way: “You can speak 110-150 words per minute, as opposed to the average person’s typing 38-40 words per minute”. Data backs this up as Jennifer Slegg, founder and editor of TheSEMPost.com, described at an SMX presentation in 2016, “Average query length for voice: 4.2 words vs. Average query length for text: 3.2 words”
In our audits of law firm websites, we’ve notice that many of them have one page devoted to frequently asked questions. All the questions and answers are bunched up on one page. Instead, what we recommend is creating an individual page with one question and answer per page, then linking all of the questions on one reference page.
What questions should you try to answer on your website?
Our short answer is any question you have ever received that can be answered generically without indicating that you are providing actual advice. You should definitely have a disclaimer on each of these pages.
Starting today, put a legal pad next to your phone that will be dedicated to questions. Every time someone asks you a general legal question or any other relevant question about your firm write it on the legal pad. That will be the start of your list of questions.
To add to that list we recommend some free internet tools such as AnswerThePublic.com, and not just because of the cool video of this man with an awesome beard.
Answer The Public uses Google’s Autocomplete information and pulls it into a central list sorted by question keyword modifiers such as “what, when, how, where, etc.
You want to use more generic terms in the search box for it to work well, for example, typing in DUI in the box gives me this result:
This is a great brainstorm of potential frequently asked questions. You should have potential content writing work for months now with just these two tactics.
When writing your questions, you may also want to include some questions with the term ‘near me’. For example: “Where is the juvenile court near me?”.
When answering your questions, it is fine to take 600 words or more to go into a lot of different scenarios, detail and to provide extra background, however, the first sentence should provide the summary of your answer.
With mobile devices, we are learning that consumers seem to skim more, so use short succinct sentences separated with white space. Bulleted lists, images, and frequent headlines also work well to help your prospective clients skim the information on their mobile device.
The closer a succinct answer is to the question header the more likely it will have a chance to become an “answer card”, also known as the Zero Position in the search results.
For a search similar to one I recently saw in our analytics (changed to my state): “What is the divorce alimony in OHIO” here is Google’s result when searching from the GNGF offices:
Notice that not only is there an answer right at the top, Google also is telling me that “People also ask” similar questions. I clicked on the “Is state of Ohio fifty fifty in divorce”, and Google does not perform a new search as it used to. Instead it just shows me what it thinks is the right answer based on some website’s answer, in this case LegalZoom.
What we call the “Zero Positon” took up a lot of the browser window and we didn’t even get down to the traditional search results. Also, notice that there are no AdWords ads in that search result—we’ll get to that in the next section.
Currently, we do not have any guaranteed tactic for making your page a featured snippet. But, you should definitely keep trying by and raising your chances by answering questions on your site.
One extra benefit for Google Home and Android is that when using voice search, Google reads an answer card snippet always leading with “From website ….”. This can be great extra branding for you.
Don’t forget the basic onsite SEO pieces too. Use the full question in your title tag and maybe some of the answer in your meta description. Also, refer back to the previous section on schema markup and help the search engines out by making sure that each of your questions has the appropriate question markup.
Searchers ask questions outside of voice search too, so this recommendation works for SEO on text search, but with the growing use of these voice based digital assistants, we will see more consumers begin to be conditioned to ask them anything.
Use longer tail search terms when using Google Adwords
I mentioned earlier that the average words in a search query are longer on average than text queries. Also, in the above example on “What is divorce alimony in Ohio”, we saw that this longer ‘question type’ search query did not have any ads.
As an agency that runs a lot of Google AdWords campaigns, we know that keywords driving Divorce Attorney ads are not cheap and are very competitive.
Yet, people running ad campaigns get so focused in the short keyword phrases like “Divorce Attorney Cincinnati” that they forget to work on longer tail phrases.
With the growth in longer search queries due to voice search, we recommend looking at some of your ad groups and carving out some that focus on long tail ‘questions’. In addition to the different questions that people could ask, you could also bid on phrases like “what is a good divorce attorney near me”.
The reason you should carve these phrases into their own ad groups is because these longer tail terms are likely to be cheaper per click than the more competitive shorter terms. If you can send the ads to your frequently asked question page for that topic, you could gain a lot of relevancy to the terms and increase your quality score, driving your cost per click down even more.
Of course, as with any paid click, be sure to have strong conversion elements on the page you take them to.
Like any AdWords recommendation, do this in addition to what you know is working and run solid tests with keyword phrases, ads, and bids, over three months, to make sure the clicks you are paying for are leading to conversions over time.
Summary
The rise of mobile phones forced change in law firm marketing strategies and tactics over the past couple years, that if ignored, resulted in less online leads for law firms.
We believe the predictions that voice search will grow incredibly fast over the next two years—to 50% of searches according to a number of analysts.
Therefore, you should aim to be like the law firm that took advantage of things like responsive web design, site speed improvements, adjusting their content (with more shite space, headers, pictures, and bullets) to not lose any traffic as mobile devices overtook desktop in search queries.
You want your website to show up when consumers near you ask the queries below to their devices:
The strategies in order we recommend them to law firms marketing online:
- Claim and optimize your Google My Business page and other key directories
- Implement Schema markup fully on your website
- Answer your prospective clients’ questions
- Use longer tail search terms if using Google Adwords
If you have any questions, about this or other law firm marketing strategies you can contact us using the live chat option on our website, at 513-444-2016, or using this form here.
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