After a career as a professional musician and band leader in the Miami South Florida Area I decided to see if I could make some money with this new internet thing. After years of trial and error I started to get the hang of it and now I am completely financially independent because of my various online businesses. The goal of this blog is to chronicle my continued marketing experiences. I focus on real examples of what works and what does not work.
Google does not give us a recipe for getting our sites ranked. We have to use our own experiences to see what actually works rather than theory.
I hope you enjoy the blog. Please let us know what you think in the comments area. We appreciate your feedback.
You would think that Lawyer SEO would be very difficult since it is such a competitive niche. However, if you are willing to be a bit creative and diligent it is possible to rank for very competitive attorney related niches.
I have a client who is a debt defense attorney. So I am now delving in seo lawyer tactics. Every month I create a new video for this client and optimize the video around keywords for the debt attorney niche. For example I already have 2 videos ranked of the first page of Google for the terms “Best Houston Debt Defense Lawyer.”
This is a search result on the first page of Google for “Best Houston Debt Defense Lawyer.”
The videos are both my videos and the website below is the customer’s website. The videos are obviously helping rank the customer’s main website as well.
Lawyer SEO is Not As Difficult As You Might Think As Long As You Are Willing to Be Diligent And Creative
I am now working on ranking a video for the keywords: “Best Houston Bankruptcy Lawyer.” You can see the video below. You are invited to listen to it all the way through, like it, comment on it, share it, and to embed it on your website or blog. More on this later.
Here are the actions I am taking to rank this video:
Keywords Into The Title: I have put the keywords directly at the beginning of the title. This is the first place Google looks to find out what the video is about. I am not trying to rank for lots of keywords. I want to specifically rank for the keywords “Best Houston Bankruptcy Lawyer.”
It is very important to focus on exactly on the keywords you want to rank for. If you try to rank for too many keywords this can dilute your efforts.
2. Phone Number in Title: My client wants potential clients to call him. My job is to make this as easy as possible. I put the phone number right in the title of the video. This is important because the video and phone number will be shown directly in search results. Many potential clients will see the phone number and call without even looking at the video. See the following screenshot of the Google listing of this video:
We just put up this video the other day and it is already ranking above the paid ad below from a competitor. Do you know how much the competitor is paying for the listing below my client’s video? Probably around $50. every time somebody clicks the paid ad! How much does my client pay per click to rank above him with an attractive video and his phone in bold in the title?
My client pays nothing per click. He just pays my fee to optimize his video and he has free traffic forever.
When Doing Video Lawyer SEO Put The Phone Number of The Lawyer In The Title of The Video. Clients May Call Directly Without Even Viewing The Video
3. Keywords In The Channel Title: Notice the name of the channel is “Best Houston Debt Defense Lawyer” channel. I have created a channel around the niche of my client. By the way I chose to use the term “lawyer” rather than “attorney.” Why? Because when I did my keyword research I found that more people search for the keyword “lawyer” than “attorney.”
Of course I will do further optimization for the keyword “attorney” because people search for this term as well.
4. Full Description and Website and NAP in the Channel Description: I have also put in full description on the YouTube channel with my keywords and a picture of the attorney as well as the name address and phone number of the attorney in the exact format that is on his Google My Business page.
5. Client’s Website in Description: I put the website of the customer at the top of the description with the full http://www. in the url. This will make the website both visible and clickable if somebody wants to visit my client’s website. If I forgot the http://www. and I did not put the website at the top of the description the website would not be visible or clickable.
6. Detailed Full Article with Keywords in Description: In addition I put in a full article on Bankruptcy in the description. Google reads the description and will look for keywords and terms in the article. If I have a full informative description with my target keywords Google and YouTube have even more reasons to rank my video for my chosen keywords. I make full use of the description.
7. Name Address and Phone Number in Description (NAP)– I have included the full name address and phone number in the description of the video. The reason I am doing this is that I want to help the client rank his Google My Business page in Google. It also helps associate this video to the client and he will be found on phone number and address searches.
Lawyer SEO Tactic- Put The NAP in The Description of The Video
To rank your Google My Business page you need lots of reviews and citations. Citations are usually associated with listings in major local directories like Yelp but also YouTube videos can be considered citations.
The important point to remember is that you need to include the Name Address and Phone number of the client in the EXACT format that he has used on Google My Business. If he uses “Street” do not use “St.” If the NAP is consistent throughout his listings this helps build the rank of his Google My Business page which usually shows first in Google listings for local searches.
8. Keywords in Tags:The first keywords I put in the tags section are the exact keywords I want to rank for “Best Houston Bankruptcy Lawyer.”
Names of Top Ranked Competitors in Keywords: Then I decided to do something a bit clever. I googled my keywords and I found out the exact names of the top 3 lawyers in this niche who are currently ranking for my desired keywords. These are the direct competitors to my client.
Ninja Lawyer SEO Tactic- I Put The Names of The Top 3 Competitors to My Client In The Tags Section. This Way His Video Will Show Up When People Search For His Competition
I put the exact names of my client’s top ranked competitors for the desired search term into the tags area of my YouTube video. This way when people both Google and YouTube my client’s competitors my client will start to appear in the search listings as well. This works particularly well in YouTube where google suggests related videos.
When my client’s competitors videos appear my client’s video will appear in related videos listings.
9. Custom Made Thumbnail– I made a custom thumbnail for the video. You need to verify your account with YouTube to have this capability. I use a free service called canva.com to make this youtube custom thumbnail. I put my keywords directly in the thumbnail, along with a picture of the client.
This way when people see the video on related videos on YouTube they will see immediately what the video is about and who it is about. I also included the phone number again in the thumbnail.
Lawyer SEO Tactic- Put The Keywords In The YouTube Thumbnail Image and The Client’s Phone Number
You want to make the text as big as possible and as short as possible. There is limited space in a thumbnail. It has been proven that people click more on videos with faces in them so I included a picture of the attorney.
I also named the thumbnail with my keywords.
10. Name the File The Same As Keywords: I named the video file “Best_Houston_Bankruptcy_Lawyer.mp4. Yes even the name of the file is based on my client’s keywords.
Uploading A Transcript– Google and YouTube cannot read the contents of the actual video. However, I have uploaded a transcript of the YouTube video into YouTube and Google will be able to read this transcript which will give me even more of an edge in ranking for my keywords.
Video Promotion
Now it is time to promote the video. I need real traffic not fake views to the video.I do not need 10’s of thousands of views to rank for this video. I need real traffic. The more positive traffic signals I send to this video the more favorably it will be regarded in search as a valuable video.
11. Share on Social Media. I am sharing this video on social media. Now my audience is mainly interested in marketing and seo so I will share this video in that context as a case study.
12. Embed the Video on Websites and Blogs. I have embedded this video on this blog on purpose. Not just for your information but the more you have a video embedded on blogs and websites the more favorably your video is regarded by YouTube. Plus it gets more traffic.
13. Asking Other People to Share Your Video. I asked you to share like and comment on the video. You would be surprised how many subscribers likes and shares you can get just by asking. The more the better for the video ranking.
14. Sending an Email to My List: I have a huge opt in mailing list of people interested in seo and marketing. I am going to send an email to my list with this blog post.
Another idea for those who do not have a list is to put a link to the video in your email signature. You can also just send the video to everybody you know as ask them nicely to comment and like.
15. Getting People to Watch the Full Video– You want people to watch the video to the end.The longer people watch the video the more highly regarded it is by YouTube. This is considered a positive signal. I did not do this on this video but one strategy would have been to put an annotation at the beginning of the video encouraging viewers to view the whole video to check out reviews of the attorney. Use your imagination on this one.
16. Getting Subscribers to Your YouTube Channel: The more subscribers you have on YouTube the more people will see your video and the higher you will rank. One of the reasons I created a separate channel for this client is that I can build a channel around a focused them and attract those who are interested. They are the ones who most likely will view the videos.
17. Create Keyword Based Playlists: You can create a keyword based playlist and you can put related videos into this play list. I created a play list called “Best Houston Bankruptcy Lawyer” and put this and another bankruptcy video in the play lists. Play lists help get your video ranked in YouTube as well.
Did I forget anything? Have you had any experience doing Lawyer SEO? I am sure there is more that I could do to optimize this video. When it comes down to it Lawyer SEO is not rocket science it is just a lot of detailed work. If you have any suggestions please let me know in the comments below. If you found this article helpful please like and share on social media. Thank you!
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