Law firm marketing for estate planning practices is all about building trust. People come to estate planning attorneys to solve problems, alleviate worries, and map out the most personal parts of their lives: their family, financial assets and possessions. How law firms are presented online must generate trust and confidence, with no incongruities or conflicts. One place where firms frequently fail to hit the mark: Name, Address and Phone number, known as “NAP.”
Trust, Confidence and Credibility. Humans require trust before they put their lives into your hands. Search engines require trust also, only their robot-minded trust comes from precision. That means consistency everywhere—and that means everywhere. If you set up an ad with a local directory five years ago when your firm had a different address, the bots that search the internet will find that directory and the disparity will be mathematically noted against you.
More Mistakes = Less Trust. The more disparate information is out there, the bigger the impact on your quality score and rankings. Do online searches for yourself, your firm and estate planning law firms in your market on a regular basis. Know what is out there, so you know what the bots are finding.
What If the Firm Moved or Changed Its Name? Assign the task or do it yourself, but this is important. Visit the sites where the incorrect or out-of-date information shows up and do what you can to fix it.
What if the Firm Doesn’t Have any Local Citations? Join the local Better Business Bureau, Chamber of Commerce or any local organization that offers a directory of local businesses. Check your Martindale listings, using the customer service platform to update data on your firm, yourself and associates.
PC or P.C. –Yes, This Matters too. Consistency in the use of the firm’s name matters, and that includes the initials that follow the firm’s name. If you are a PC and don’t use periods, but the firm name appears both with and without periods after the letters, the algorithms will take this into account. Don’t let something so simple get in the way of your otherwise robust SEO.
Use more than Google to check NAP. Try Bing, Yelp, Facebook, Yellow Pages and Yahoo when conducting NAP research. They may not be as widely used as Google, but they are still being used. We see it all the time: sites show up on Bing and Yahoo that may never make the front page of Google—but they are still searchable and found by Google bots on the web.