Lawyer Marketing Solutions: Google Hummingbird – How Can It Change Your Caseload?

What Does Google Hummingbird Have to Do with Cases?

You may already know Inbound Marketing techniques can revolutionize the way that you find clients and increase both your caseload and the quality of cases that you take. Or you may be asking, “What is Inbound Marketing?”

Using a combination of:

• Paid search advertising (PPC)
• Strategic search engine optimization (SEO)
• Social media and multimedia Content

can help you to attract, nurture, convert and re-engage prospective clients. However, one of the cornerstones of inbound lawyer marketing — SEO — has just undergone a radical change.

If you don’t understand Google Hummingbird and how it can change your caseload for the better or for the worse, it’s time to get up to speed.

About Hummingbird

On September 26, 2013, Google announced to the world that it had already changed over to a new way of searching the Internet, called Google Hummingbird. Unlike other changes to the way that Google works like the Penguin and Panda updates, Hummingbird isn’t a tweak.

Google Hummingbird is a total overhaul of Google’s underlying system. According to the head of Google Search, Amit Singhal, it’s the most significant change to Google since 2001.

The fact that Hummingbird was live for almost one month without anyone noticing bodes well for your current online lawyer marketing system. If what you had was working well under the previous version of Google’s system, it should work just as well under Hummingbird.

However, while you might think that you can ignore Hummingbird, it presents real opportunities for you to improve your search rankings even more.

Hummingbird and Lawyer Marketing

One of the key changes in Hummingbird is a new focus on “conversational search.” As more and more people get used to searching the Internet for the information they need, they are typing or dictating longer questions into the search field.

Google is adjusting its search system to interpret those questions using the entire search string, instead of just pulling out keywords. At the same time, it also uses Google’s extensive databases of information to also better interpret questions. One way to think about Hummingbird is that it’s a tool to help Google answer questions instead of just provide search results

The initial findings from Hummingbird is that it isn’t hurting what you’re already doing. However, the change in the way that Google parses questions appears to mean that if your site is designed with some question-based content, you can get more traffic when your site’s questions match the questions that people enter into Google. You may also be able to get more traffic from people that are in your immediate geographical area — giving you better focused leads.

Hummingbird appears to have another change related to mobile search results. Google has been treating video preferentially for years. However, Google Hummingbird search results seem to be even more generous to video content with mobile search. Given that more and more of your prospects are coming from mobile leads, video is becoming an even more important lawyer marketing tool.

Google Hummingbird and Your Practice

Ultimately, Google Hummingbird gives your practice the opportunity to add on to what it is already doing well on the Internet. When a prospect walks away from a car accident or steps out of a particularly painful discussion with a soon-to-be-ex-spouse, goes to a coffee shop, and asks Google for help, Hummingbird makes it more likely that he will find an actionable result.

By adding strategic content — like questions and answers and videos — to your arsenal of online lawyer marketing tools, you can increase the chance that the prospect finds you and becomes another part of your firm’s caseload.

For more information on creating content that converts, download our free ebook:

Marketing Matters Inbound?is an inbound marketing firm specializing in online conversions, content?strategy, call-to-action mapping and traditional media placement. Our experience in?B2B digital?marketing?and traditional media allows us to deliver results through a strategic media mix. We believe in?aligning and merging marketing and sales/operations for optimal return on your marketing investment.