As a PILMMA member, you’ve repeatedly heard our webinar or live event speakers stress the necessity of a robust Google My Business profile for successfully marketing your firm.
You know the content within your profile influences your firm’s performance in several types of search results. And you understand the important role it plays in customer engagement.
In preparation for this article, I reviewed the GMB profiles of every PILMMA member firm.
Hooray For Our Members
I’m happy to share with you that as of mid-April 2020 nearly every PILMMA member firm had claimed and, to some degree, built out their GMB profile.
As a group, PILMMA members’ 98.8% participation in GMB profiles outpaces the nation’s legal community as a whole. A recent study demonstrated that only 7 in 10 U.S. law firms had claimed their GMB listing.
Further proof of something we at PILMMA already knew: we have extraordinary members.
I examined the number of Google reviews within each profile, however, what I found was that while many of our members have done impressive work, many have an opportunity for significant improvements that, in turn, could lead to better search results for their firm.
Why You Should Care
Of course, you know that when it comes to Google’s evaluation of your reviews, quantity is only one factor. The diversity, velocity, and increasingly, the quality of re-views are combined with quantity in the algorithmic evaluation of your reviews. Quantity, however, is primary.
Why should you care about this very narrow discipline within the much wider and unruly pursuit that is search engine optimization?
First, as a law firm marketer, it’s useful to keep in mind that your Google reviews score (and to a lesser extent re-views on Yelp! And Facebook) is believed to contribute more than 15% to your “map pack” ranking and more than 9% to the entire Google organic ranking.
The quantity and quality of your Google reviews as part of a robust GMB profile is believed to be the third most important ranking factor for appearing in the “map pack” and the seventh most important contributor to your organic ranking. This from marketing analytics leader and search engine diviner, Moz.
Secondly, it’s useful to keep in mind that unlike so many arcane disciplines within the SEO world best left to professionals, growing the number and quality of client reviews is something you and your staff can contribute to daily.
What the Research Shows
The average number of Google reviews for a law firm in the U.S. is eleven. PILMMA members average 138 reviews. Seemingly excellent news, however, that average isn’t particularly useful as one in five our members have more than 200 reviews on their profile. One in twenty has more than 500 reviews.
National research has shown that top-ranking firms, on average, have no less than 48 reviews within their GMB profile. Obviously, results vary by the size and competitiveness of your market.
17.5 percent of our members have fewer than 50 reviews. Three in ten have fewer than 25 reviews. Again, this represents a wonderful opportunity for our members to improve their visibility on search results.
In fact, I would suggest that other than obtaining scads of high-quality inbound links to your site (an onerous task best hired out), the single biggest contribution you and your staff can make to overtake a rival firm that appears ahead of you in search results, is to amass client reviews.
Next month I’ll review some of the best methods law firms can employ for collecting reviews, what you should know about your star ranking and tips and tricks from PILMMA members who shine when it comes to collecting client reviews. ◆
