Google spent most of last year “doing the dance” – the Google Ballet dance. Almost monthly, the algorithm for search results was turned upside down for a restart, or so it seemed. The kids in Palo Alto throw a new set of rules into the search algorithm and sites that were at the top can’t be found while sites that were 10 pages down are suddenly showing up on the first page.
How does this Google Ballet affect you and your law firm?
Your online reputation is at stake and Google holds the power. Google is the largest and most widely used search engine. If you are relying solely on them to garner traffic to your site through Google Adwords so that potential clients can find you and other lawyers can refer business to you, then these periodic updates probably caused a great deal of havoc for you and your firm. Even if your firm website eventually landed back on the first page, the days or weeks of the “Google Ballet” (sites dancing back and forth between search result pages) means the loss of a lot of clicks and the possibility of less business while the search results settle back down meaning that the Google Ballet is real. 
You never know what is going to trigger the ballet but watching what has worked in the past is a helpful illustration as to what may work in the future. Google isn’t changing their goals, only the means to get to those goals.
Many a Webmaster and SEO Expert has been thrown into a panic, fixing and changing elements of a site only to find out that the site was caught up in a readjustment of search results that ended up featuring the same sites in basically the same order. The ballet happens when a new site shows up, when there are Google updates, when new content gets attention, when new backlinks show up.
Google is actively dancing this ballet. Around the 7-10th of each month since January last year, Google has adjusted its algorithm. It’s important for you to look back and see how this has affected you and your law firm since the first of the year and devise strategies to defend your online reputation from the ballet.
For a complimentary consultation to understand more about how you can take back control of your online reputation from Google and other search engines, contact us.
