- March 2, 2021
- Posted by: JPM 4 Marketing
- Categories: Content Strategy, Digital Marketing, Legal Marketing, SEO Strategies
If you have noticed that your SEO results quickly went up when you hired your marketing team/ agency and now your SEO ranking is declining, your marketing team/ agency may be to blame. Many marketing agencies promote themselves as SEO “experts” and promise quick results to law firms. Who doesn’t want quick results? Seems like a no-brainer for firms that are looking for a marketing agency to boost their SEO rankings.
When SEO rankings jump up quickly it’s usually because your marketing team/ agency is taking shortcuts. In digital marketing these shortcuts are referred to as Black Hat strategies. Black Hat takes advantage of loopholes in search engine guidelines to boost rankings. This technique not only backfires over time, it is considered unethical.
As search engines close loopholes your website is penalized. Black hat techniques do not consider searcher intent and attempt to “game” the system and go against search engine guidelines. Sadly these techniques only provide short term results. Search engines, especially Google, figure out that these techniques were used and penalize your website by moving it low in the rankings. Sometimes Google will even completely remove your website from search results.
Prior to loopholes being closed, search engines will figure out that searchers are not spending time on your site and are not getting the information they seek. As that data is gathered, your website begins losing traction in the rankings.
Common examples of Black Hat techniques include; buying backlinks, publishing low-quality, irrelevant content, using duplicate content, keyword stuffing and using misleading redirects. In short, if something sounds too good to be true then it usually is.
The truth is that gaining high quality, long term SEO rankings requires time, quality content, consistency and a marketing team that stays current with search engine guidelines. In other words, only use a marketing team/ agency that follows White hat techniques. For some examples of White Hat techniques read my past articles: The SEO Holy Grail: Predicting User Intent and How Duplicate Content Hurts Your SEO
If you want help improving your SEO ranking through our proven ethical strategies please feel free to schedule a call with me!