Google just finished rolling out what has been reported as their biggest search algorithm update ever. Normally, Google updates shouldn’t matter to personal injury lawyers. However, the early results indicate that personal injury lawyers should pay attention to this one. In this post, I’ll outline some of the concerns for personal injury lawyers about the helpful content update and a few strategy changes you should make as a result.
What are Google Core Updates, and what is the September Helpful Content Update?
Google makes four official changes to their search algorithm each year. These are called core updates and they are designed to make Google’s main product, search, better for end users. Google core updates feature hundreds of small changes, which you likely never notice. Sometimes, the changes are as a result of search engine optimization experts realizing something works to get their pages ranking higher, and Google whacks them back down the rankings. Sometimes they are just a result in changing user behaviour and needing for Google search to remain relevant with its users.
The September Helpful Content update is a unique update; it wasn’t explicitly called a core update, which Google said happened in August. Instead, it was released like a product feature, to promote content that Google deemed was written to be helpful. Specifically, from their developer blog: Google Search’s helpful content system generates a signal used by our automated ranking systems to better ensure people see original, helpful content created for people in search results.
What Should I Pay Attention To as a Personal Injury Lawyer?
If you are actively paying for somebody to handle your SEO, you should really pay attention to how your rankings are impacted. Personal injury law content, by nature, should be helpful to potential clients. It should be designed to help potential customers understand the ins and outs of injury law and help them decide to contact an injury lawyer. Thus, if you have been writing or paying for content related to injury law, you should see increased rankings from this update. There are a lot of bad actors in the personal injury law space, and this update should help neutralize those sites.
If your rankings decreased from the update, and it is still early to tell, but by the end of October, your rankings should have settled out enough to know if you benefited or not. If your rankings decreased, you may need to do an SEO audit to determine what happened. If you have an SEO agency hired, I would expect the September Helpful Content Update to feature prominently whenever your next report is issued or takes place. If it doesn’t, that’s a massive red flag that your SEO experts are not experts or aren’t conveying the full picture of what is happening to you.
You should take a deeper look at your content. Based on your experience as a personal injury lawyer, and the countless initial consultation meetings you’ve been in, does your website content positively contribute to your potential client’s understanding of your business and injury law as a whole? If it doesn’t, why is that? It might be time to change tactics and write better content.
My Rankings Have Been Lagging For a While. Will This Update Help Me?
This is almost impossible to answer. However, I expect the September Helpful Content Update to punish bad actors in the SEO space. Those websites that exist to sell leads, or those big question repository sites, and potentially those lists of best injury lawyers I expect to be moved down the search rankings. What replaces them? I would expect that to be injury law firms with sound content strategies that write content that injured victims find valuable. If your site has that content, you will likely have cause to celebrate with your rankings. If your content is uninspiring, and your competitors have better content, your rankings will likely continue to slide.
What Else Has The Update Shown?
It is relatively early in the post-update phase. However, it appears that sites like LinkedIn Articles, Quora, and other message boards like Reddit are now more prominent in search. What personal injury lawyers can do is start sharing content on these platforms and helping answer questions there with links back to their website with more explanation of the issue. This will diversify your placement on the search engine results page, and also seems to be an early aftermath of the Helpful Content Update because those platforms have more helpful content than many web pages on the internet.
While this isn’t directly a result of the update, but featured snippets are going to be less prominent in the future. So, the practice of having a FAQ section of your site and hoping to rank in a featured snippet appears dead for now. So I would encourage you to stop putting resources into your FAQ for now.
Rock Bound Marketing: Designed for Personal Injury Lawyers
In conclusion, Google’s September Helpful Content Update holds significant importance for personal injury lawyers. This update emphasizes the need for high-quality, informative content that addresses users’ search intent. As a marketing consultancy specialized in the personal injury law industry, Rock Bound Marketing possesses the expertise to navigate this update successfully. With our in-depth knowledge of marketing strategies and SEO, we are well-equipped to help personal injury lawyers enhance their online presence and attract more clients. Take a proactive step towards optimizing your law firm’s marketing efforts by booking a free consultation with us today.
