Timothy Carter

Backlinks are a big deal in the world of SEO. Most backlinks pass authority, causing Google to evaluate your site as being more trustworthy. And of course, more trustworthy sites are more likely to rank higher in search results. But what about nofollow links? What are nofollow links, exactly, and are they important for your SEO strategy? Nofollow Links: The Basics By default, Google bots crawl the web on a constant basis, following links and using them to determine how PageRank is passed. This is also an opportunity to evaluate “bad” backlinks and penalize the sites they point to. As you might suspect, a nofollow link prevents Google from following the link as usual. Nofollow links are established with a rel=”nofollow” HTML tag, which instructs Google to ignore the link. In the backend code of your site, this is the only distinguishing feature of a nofollow link. When live, a nofollow link is indistinguishable from a standard dofollow link. It looks the same, it can be clicked the same way, and there’s no immediate clue to a user that the link is nofollow. Why is this important? For starters, most search optimizers are heavily focused on improving their authority with PageRank. They employ link building strategies to establish more links to earn more authority and eventually rank higher. Because nofollow links don’t pass PageRank, they can’t help your rankings directly. Note the importance of the word “directly” here. Google has verified this directly: “Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web.” Why Do Nofollow Links Exist? You may be wondering why nofollow links exist, and why they’re used by various websites, if they’re not so different from standard links. Originally, nofollow links were conceived as an idea to fight back against link spam. In the early days of SEO, practitioners would take any opportunity they could to build a dofollow link back to their website. They would spam blog comments, issue meaningless press releases, and post actively on forums to get more links to their site. The nofollow tag allowed blog owners and other webmasters to fight back against this tendency by making certain types of links nofollow by default. They could also issue the nofollow tag to reduce the impact of a dofollow link they deemed questionable in the body of a guest post. This is useful for nearly everyone involved. The blog gets to preserve its reputation by ensuring it isn’t used for spammy backlinks. Google gets to fight link spam and calculate better search engine results. Web users encounter less spam. And webmasters are incentivized to find better linking tactics. Nofollow links are also recommended for use with paid links. Generally speaking, Google frowns upon paid links. But this is mostly because paid links are considered to be a form of ranking manipulation. If you use a nofollow link, there can be no direct ranking manipulation, since nofollow links don’t pass authority. Problem solved! You can even find a reference to this in Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. It states, “Make a reasonable effort to ensure that advertisement links on your pages do not affect search engine rankings.” It then recommends using a nofollow tag for this purpose. How to Tell If a Link Is Nofollow     You can apply nofollow tags to links on your own site, but how can you tell if a link on an external site is nofollow? Sometimes, publishers and external sites will inform you directly about their nofollow policies. But it’s much more reliable to simply check your backlinks yourself. Right click anywhere on the page you’re inspecting and click “View Page Source” or simply click CTRL + U. The code might look somewhat incomprehensible to you if you’re not used to it. But don’t worry. Use CTRL + F to find the link you’re looking for, and see if it has a rel=”nofollow” tag. The Non-SEO Value of a Nofollow Link When people hear that a nofollow link doesn’t pass PageRank, they immediately get turned off. After all, isn’t the whole point of link building to earn PageRank and rank up? Yes, for the most part. But it’s important to understand that nofollow links have a lot of value that has nothing to do with SEO. For example: Referral traffic. This is the big one, so it deserves to be mentioned first. Nofollow links have the power to generate referral traffic to your site. When someone clicks on a link in a blog post they’re reading, they don’t care whether Google is using it to pass PageRank or not. All they care about is reading the content on the other side. Depending on the publisher, the context of the link, and other variables, you may be able to generate thousands of new visitors this way. Brand visibility. Simply including dofollow links, with a named reference to your brand, is enough to increase your brand visibility and raise brand awareness. This is especially powerful as you build your reputation as an author and reach bigger audiences through bigger publishers. Increased attention for your content. Referral links also serve to promote your content. In some cases, just mentioning your content (such as calling out statistics in original research you conducted) can serve your brand well. Otherwise, the traffic you generate for the content will make it more popular. In some cases, a single nofollow link can help make a piece of powerful content go viral. The Value of Nofollow Links for SEO No PageRank, no SEO benefit, right? Wrong. In fact, in addition to all their non-SEO related benefits, nofollow links can have significant value for your SEO strategy. Importantly, Google says this about nofollow links: “In general, we don’t follow them.” If this is the case, it implies that Google occasionally does follow nofollow links. That may sound like a conspiracy theory, but there’s some real evidence to support this. For

Search engine optimization (SEO) and content go hand-in-hand. It’s almost impossible to make progress in SEO without a solid content strategy serving as your foundation, and any reasonable pillar content strategy should at least give you some SEO benefit. However, several factors are making it increasingly difficult for amateur content developers to see the SEO results they want. For starters, Google search is introducing updates that refine its algorithm and allow it to evaluate the quality of content more stringently. Hummingbird, from 2013, introduced semantic search, which practically eliminated exact match keyword consideration in favor of considering context and meaning. Since then, synonyms and contextually relevant phrases greatly increased in importance when optimizing for strategic keywords. Additionally, the SEO industry has become incredibly competitive, with millions of websites often fighting over the same groups of keywords and phrases. This makes it increasingly hard to stand out, and nearly impossible to rank for the most hotly contested phrases in an industry. How can you combat these effects and improve your SEO results? One solution is using topic clusters, a content-focused strategy that can help you rank for highly competitive head keywords and accessible long-tail keyword phrases simultaneously. If you want to remain competitive and maximize your SEO results, you need to include some variation of the topic clustering strategy. What Are Topic Clusters? We’ll start with a high-level overview. What are topic clusters, and how can you use them for SEO? A topic cluster is an assortment of individual pieces of content that are all relevant to the same overarching key themes or topics. Working together with an anchoring piece of content, usually called “pillar content,” your topic cluster will yield much better search engine ranking results than a conventional content strategy. Your pillar content for a given cluster will work as a functional overview of a broad topic. You can think of it as the center of a wheel, with each piece of topic cluster content serving as a spoke in that wheel. The pillar content is meant to provide a comprehensive overview of your chosen topic, with each of the “spokes” covering some aspect of that topic in much greater detail. For example, let’s say you’re a digital marketing firm. You might create content pillars covering the topic of “onsite SEO.” This article covers all the important aspects of onsite optimization, from a somewhat high level. It also links to a variety of other pieces, which cover more specific aspects of onsite SEO in greater detail. For example, you might link to pieces on topics like “how to audit your current onsite SEO,” “how to increase your site speed,” “technical onsite SEO for beginners,” and “how to write better onsite content.” Each piece of cluster content should attempt to target a long-tail keyword phrase, while your content pillars target a more competitive head keyword. Each of these keyword terms should be at least somewhat relevant to the others. By the end of your strategy, each of your cluster content pillars should rank highly for their low-competition, “low hanging fruit” keywords, all while lending support to lift your content pillars beyond where it could rank on its own. Google will come to see you as an authority on this central topic because of your work throughout the cluster, and you’ll likely earn more backlinks as a result as well. The Benefits of Topic Clusters and Content Pillars for SEO So what are the benefits of using topic clusters for SEO? These are some of the best advantages: Head and long-tail keyword optimization. This strategy allows you to take advantage of both head keywords and long-tail keyword phrases simultaneously. Head keywords tend to be short and broad; they have the benefit of offering very high search volume, but they’re also incredibly competitive. By contrast, long-tail keywords tend to be longer and more specific; they’re not competitive, so they’re easy to rank for, but they also have a lower search volume. Head keywords require a lot of time, effort, and patience, as well as a huge volume of relevant content. Long-tail keyword phrases are easy and convenient, but individually, they can never be as powerful as a head keyword. With pillar pieces and your entire topic cluster, you can get the best of both worlds. Feeding high search volume results. The most lucrative positions in SEO are the top-ranking positions for highly searched keywords and phrases. The downside is that it’s incredibly difficult to attain these positions. With topic clusters, you can optimize your entire pillar page content strategy to “feed into” the pieces most likely to achieve these feats. In other words, you’ll be pumping up your best content and greatly increasing your chances of getting to those sought-after high-ranking positions. Internal linking and user retention. Creating content pillars and clusters allows you to foster better internal link building and optimize for user retention. Readers who peruse your pillar content will naturally want to follow links to your complementary, more detailed subtopics. Conversely, readers who stumble upon your niche content will naturally want to read more about the “big picture” of the topic. Ultimately, this strategy helps you keep users on your website, which is valuable for increasing conversions; it’s also useful for lowering your bounce rate and positively affecting other important onsite behavior metrics. Authority and reputation. Writing pillar page content in the form of a topic cluster will increase your authority—both in the subjective sense, and in terms of domain authority as considered by Google. In the former case, readers who follow your pillar page will quickly learn that you’re an expert in this field; they’ll have high-level and low-level content to review, and given enough time, will think of you as the thought leader in this area. In the latter case, your pillar page will be much more likely to attract links and social media posts and shares, ultimately increasing your domain- and page-level authority. Development flexibility. While there are some best practices that everyone should follow,

Working directly with your competitors, and at times giving them mention, is actually a worthwhile strategy for local SEO. With the right approach, you’ll greatly increase your domain authority and local relevance, and any traffic you lose to your competitor will be more than made up for by the increases you see from local searches. The Local SEO Relevance Factor First, consider the local relevance factor. Google is constantly updating its index to determine which local businesses are where, and what those local businesses do. It searches for contextual clues throughout your content, your local links, and the prominent titles on your website. One obvious strategy to increase the local relevance of your brand is to include your city and/or state in much of your web copy. But another, even more valuable strategy is to mention your competitors. When Google crawls the web and sees you and your competitor’s name frequently mentioned together, it will learn to form a connection between them. Because your competitors operates in the same region and the same industry, you’ll gain extra authority from both a local SEO and industry-based SEO perspective. That means your domain authority will increase, your rankings for local keywords will rise, and you’ll enjoy the benefits of far more organic search traffic. The Competitor Search Factor There’s another major search benefit to using your competitors’ names. Imagine a prospective customer who is searching for a solution both you and your competitor offer. They’ve only heard of your competitor before, but they want to do some research before buying. They perform a local search in Google for your competitor’s name. If your brand frequently mentions your competitor’s name, it’s highly likely that you’ll be the second result to pop up. That means you have a shot at stealing your competitor’s otherwise untouchable branded search traffic. Strategies to Use Your Competitors Now that you know the benefits of mentioning and using your competitors in a local SEO strategy, we can focus on the day-to-day tactics that make these benefits possible. There are several strategies you can use, both onsite and offsite, but using them in conjunction with each other will give you the greatest benefit. Mutually Attending Events Your first option is to find out what local events your competitors are attending, and attend them. Local event attendance is a great local SEO strategy in itself, since you have the perfect opportunity to submit a press release and write new content featuring local keywords, but if you can capitalize on your competitors being there too, you can sweeten the deal. Consider interviewing a representative from one of your competitors at the event if you really feel like going all-out. We have done this at our West Palm Beach location, with great success: Exchanging Links First, understand that “exchanging links” regularly can get you into trouble—if you constantly swap links with one partner, Google will suspect you of link manipulation and you’ll likely be penalized accordingly. However, occasionally swapping guest posts can only serve to strengthen both of your sites. You’ll trade authority and diversify your content blend, all while increasing your local relevance. It really is a win-win situation. Writing Industry-Covering Review Articles This is one of the greatest strategies you can use since it capitalizes on a very specific type of query. Write an article that covers all the options consumers have for businesses like yours in the area. For example, you could use an article to ask and answer the question, “who is the best plumber in Albany?” In the article, detail yourself along with all your competitors, but do try to remain unbiased. Anyone looking to comparison shop will find your article easily, and you’ll have the home field advantage since the article is featured on your site. You might lose a few visitors to your external links, but the information you provide will allow you to win out in the long run. Mimicking Your Competitors’ Backlink Profiles and Followings Finally, take advantage of the work your competitors have already done. You can use a backlink profile local SEO tool like Moz’s Open Site Explorer to review and see what types of links your competitors are building. While you don’t want to copy this exactly, you can draw inspiration from it and discover new local sources you haven’t previously considered. You can also engage with your competitors’ social followings; you can usually determine whether each follower is a local resident, and you can definitely tell they’re interested in your industry. Sometimes, all it takes is a simple mention to earn a new loyal follower. We cover more of this in detail in our comprehensive online marketing guide. Google Maps optimization  Piggyback off your local competitors by using similar phraseology and strategies for both Google Maps and your Google Business Profile. Optimize using keywords in your company description as well as looking for how other local competitors are using Google Reviews to maximize their local GMB listings. Use the Best Local SEO Tools The most successful local businesses are more likely to use local SEO tools like Yext, Brightlocal and Moz Local. In doing so, you are. more likely to find opportunities to mimick competitor local SEO strategies to drive traffic to your ow business website. Embrace Local Competitors Don’t hesitate to use your competitors when trying to build your local SEO presence. While it might seem strange or counterintuitive at first, soon you’ll find that the strategy has immense net value to your brand. Build yourself into a recognizable local presence, keep user experience at the heart of what you do, and you’ll see multiplied incoming traffic as a result. Are you looking for a boost in your local search engine traffic? We can help boost your local rankings with our expert focus on local search results and deep local SEO competitor analysis. Contact us today to learn more!

Keyword research has always been the foundation of SEO, and while that hasn’t changed, search engines are constantly altering the impact of each ranking factor, including keywords. This is why proper keyword research is imperative.  When search engines first launched, all you needed were clusters of keywords relevant to local businesses and visitors would find you easily. Over the years, online competition has grown and there are now millions of websites, forcing search engine algorithms to evolve and serve results based on more than just keywords. Today, getting seen in the search engines requires various elements like helpful, relevant content, quality backlinks, and earned authority in your niche. Still, local keywords remain a fundamental basis of search engine optimization (SEO), especially since some 40%+ of searches are local. If you haven’t dialed in your local SEO keyword research, now is a great time to start. Local keyword research drives the following benefits Generate more sales and qualified leads Get more fast purchases when people see your positive business reviews in the search results Rank higher in search results served to local users Generate more targeted traffic to your website Capture mobile leads easier If you want sales, you need clicks. To get clicks, you need visibility, which comes from good SEO. Ideally, you want your website to show up on page one or two of the search results for a given query. According to the data, the first result on page one gets an average click-through rate (CTR) of 27.6%, while the first result on page two generates a 15.8% CTR. If you want a chunk of that traffic, solid local keyword research will help you get there. Why you need local keyword research Most people new to SEO perform the process backwards – they come up with a list of local keywords they think they want to rank for and then spend all their time, money, and effort trying to rank for those phrases. This method is hit or miss because it doesn’t help to rank for competitive keywords unless people are searching for them. You can get first-page results for a lot of phrases, but if nobody’s searching for them, you will remain invisible. Local keyword research will tell you what keywords and phrases your local target market is using to find the products and services they need related to your business. Sometimes people in a geographic area use specific, local keywords that you won’t realize are important until you start researching. Proper research ensures you won’t waste your time trying to rank for local keywords that won’t increase your revenue. Why local SEO is different Before going too much further into keyword research, it’s important to understand why local SEO isn’t just an extension of standard/national SEO so local keyword research makes more sense. Local SEO works the same at a basic level, but it’s much more powerful. In fact, businesses with a local presence have an easier time getting traffic from search engines than businesses that only sell services and products online without any identifiable locale. If you run a local business, keyword research will help you generate traffic despite any national competitors you may have. While it’s true that it’s impossible to rank for certain highly competitive local keywords without a million-dollar budget, local SEO changes the game by drastically narrowing down your market and competition, which increases your ability to reach your local market. For example, you may not be able to rank generally for the search term “get a cheap website,” but with local SEO you can rank for this term when people from your area search for similar phrases. There might be four million cheap web developers competing nationally, but in your specific city, there may only be a handful and that’s who you’ll be competing against. You might still compete with national competitors who have locations in your general area, like chains, but when you optimize your website specifically for local SEO, you’ll reach locals who are specifically looking for your services. Your total reach will be smaller, and that’s a good thing because local leads are highly targeted and more likely to buy your products or services. They already want what you have to offer. Local SEO targets people specifically in your geographic area and considers the following as ranking factors: A user’s location Your star rating on Google Maps The content/sentiment of your Google reviews Local keywords from your Google reviews Your optimized Google Business profile The presence of your business’ name, address, and phone number across all listings that matches the information on your website If you struggle to rank for phrases in general or you aren’t reaching your desired market, local SEO is a better way to reach your local market. Local SEO reduces your competition With local SEO, you aren’t competing against everyone in the same industry. For instance, say you run a restaurant in San Francisco, CA and there’s a similar local restaurant in Houston, TX. You aren’t going to compete against that business when people are searching for phrases like “best steak and seafood near me.” Outside of local searches, you may never rank for a phrase like “best steak and seafood,” but you don’t have to – in fact, that shouldn’t even be your goal. Ranking nationally for having the best steak and seafood won’t fill your dining room with hungry guests – ranking locally will. There are numerous factors that will help you rank, but it all begins with your keyword selections. You have to get these right to get results. How to perform effective local keyword research Now that we’ve established the importance of local SEO, it’s time to dive into some research strategies and tips. There are two main ways to conduct local keyword research: free and paid. Paid research requires a monthly or yearly subscription keyword research tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, Keyword Magic, or SECockpit. Some come with free trials and it’s worth checking them out. You can

Optimizing your site for local SEO based on your business’s location can help your business appear in local directories, Google Maps, and climb the ranks in traditional searches. Most of these strategies are based around your business’s specific location. For example, one step of the process is ensuring that your name and address are appearing accurately and consistently across the web, and one ongoing strategy is to use your city and state in the context of your written content. This presents a major problem for businesses with multiple locations: how do you locally optimize your site and your Google Business Profile (GBP)? Fortunately, locally optimizing your online presence for multi-location businesses is simpler than you might think. I’ve outlined the process of optimizing local search in multiple locations with these easy steps: 1. Consolidate Everything in One Domain It may be tempting to split your locations up into multiple domains, and some businesses have tried this as an ongoing strategy. On one hand, it makes logical sense—if each location is different, why not try to rank on each site individually? However, in practice, this segmented strategy is ineffective. Google’s search bots and individual users may be confused when they see multiple domains for what appears to be one master brand. Even if you need separate information, like different menus, using a single root domain to consolidate all that information still gives you the chance to present those in a segmented format. Using one domain gathers all the authority you would have built in your individual presences and places it into one master hub. Otherwise, you’ll be forced to split your domain authority; for example, if you have five locations, each location would only get 20 percent of its potential visibility if you split them into separate domains. 2. Create Specific Pages for Each Location Even though you’ve consolidated all your locations under one domain, it’s important to differentiate between your locations. Otherwise, Google won’t know that you have multiple locations and your users might have a hard time figuring out the nearest one to them. The best way to do this is to create a separate city pages for each of your locations, usually listed in the navigation under “Locations” or something similar. Create a page title that includes each city or neighborhood (as relevant), and write a full body of content that elaborates on the unique features of each location. Be sure to also include the address and phone number of each location on these individual pages. This will clearly demonstrate to Google how your locations are set up, and how they all relate to your master brand. It’s also important to list all of your locations on your “Contact” page, with the address and phone number for each reiterated. 3. Check Your External Listings and Correct Any Errors In the post-Pigeon era, having your contact information clearly segmented for your locations on your site—even when it’s on multiple pages—simply isn’t enough. Google looks to external sources to organize and verify its indexed information, and any inconsistencies on offsite listings of your locations could result in a decrease in your domain authority and rank. To remedy this, you’ll have to check every local SEO listing or directory site you can find to ensure your information is accurate—and update it if necessary. Common places include Yelp, UrbanSpoon, and TripAdvisor, but you’ll want to look for others, just to be sure. Some directories function differently than others, but as a general rule, you should have a separate entry for each of your locations. If you’re having trouble finding these directories, or want to double check to make sure you’ve hit them all, there are a number of local citation tools (e.g. Moz, Google Search Console, Ahrefs and others) that can help you automate the work. 4. Localize Your Content by Writing Locally for Each Location Ensure your content is relevant to each location by including references to local landmarks, events, and community information. This will help you connect with local audiences and improve your rankings. This can be tricky, especially if you’re consolidating everything into one master blog, but it’s important to include content based around each of your individual locations. That means featuring the city or neighborhood of the location in the title and body of each relevant piece. If you’re having trouble generating topic ideas, look to each location’s recent events. Have they celebrated an anniversary? Have they made new hires? Have they hit a new landmark achievement? Obviously, your content marketing campaign can’t solely focus on your office, but posting these kinds of topics occasionally can seriously help your local ranks when you have multiple locations. 5. Have Each Location Cultivate and Manage Online Reviews Reviews are critically important for local businesses—the more you have and the more positive they are, the higher you’re going to rank. And, since each of your locations is going to be listed separately on review sites, it’s up to your individual locations to actively cultivate and manage those online reviews. Make sure each of your employees know to encourage your customers to post reviews about their experience. Then, designate a contact at each of your locations to take point on actively monitoring and responding to those reviews. Commenting on positive reviews is a show of customer appreciation, while proactively responding to negative reviews (which will come up from time to time) can help mitigate the situation and show you’re willing to step in and make things right. Like with any optimization strategy, the setup phase is important but it’s the ongoing work that will make or break your campaign. Make sure you implement a plan that allows for each of your locations to actively encourage and respond to online reviews, and keep your content strategy as present and relevant as possible. Over time, each of your individual locations will rise through local-specific local searches, and the authority of your master domain will skyrocket as your individual locations all feed into it. 6. Localize Your Link Building Earn backlinks from

You have a mass tort case. You have the expertise. You have the knowledge. You even have the target demographics. But if you’re going to be successful, you need to find a way to make your law firm visible and attract more leads with the potential to become clients. Obviously, there are many marketing and advertising strategies that can help you do this. If you have enough money to spend, you can easily reach millions of people and build a steady flow of inbound leads. The problem is, not all mass tort marketing strategies are equally effective. And if you’re not careful, you could end up spending more money than you make from your efforts. One of the best solutions is practicing SEO for mass tort lawyers. But what exactly is SEO for mass tort lawyers? And how do you practice it? What Is SEO for Mass Tort Lawyers? Mass tort SEO (search engine optimization) is a series of strategies and tactics designed to increase the rankings of your website pages in search engines like Google. Put in enough effort, and your website will become the top-ranked site for keyword searches that are highly relevant to your audience and your law firm. Already, you can begin to see why this is valuable. If your website outranks the websites of your competitors, people searching for information related to your mass tort will come to you first. Given the modern reality in which most people search for a topic before they take action on it, this is even more valuable. The Benefits of Mass Tort SEO Mass tort SEO holds several benefits for the lawyers and law firms who practice it:       Search visibility (and brand visibility). The first and potentially most obvious benefit is greater search visibility, and along with it, greater brand visibility. People conducting searches related to the mass tort are likely looking for information or are curious about the subject. Either way, if they see your brand name first, they’ll be much more likely to remember it. Conversely, if people literally can’t find you in search engines, they may not associate you with the tort at all.       Organic inbound traffic. Most SEO practitioners treat organic traffic as their highest objective priority. Organic traffic is the amount of traffic generated from organic searches; ranking higher in search engines means more people will see your website and click through to visit your web pages. At a high enough scale, this can generate thousands – or even tens of thousands of new visitors every month. Even better, these visitors should be highly relevant to your law firm SEO, since you already know they were searching for terms relevant to the mass tort.       Peripheral sources of traffic. Organic traffic is the main priority of most mass tort SEO campaigns, but many of the tactics you practice for SEO will have the incidental benefit of generating peripheral forms of traffic. For example, link building is a critical aspect of SEO; it passes authority, allowing your website to rank higher, but it also introduces a path to more referral traffic generation.       Specialized destination pages. Practicing SEO gives you an opportunity to create specialized destination pages, including blog posts, white papers, case studies, and general landing pages, tailored to your target demographics. This allows you to funnel people in highly specialized streams to highly relevant pages, so you can better market to them once you capture their traffic.       Persuasive onsite content and CTAs. People who visit your website after discovering it in search engines will likely want to read your content. This presents an excellent opportunity to persuade your audience and get them to act the way you want. Accordingly, your onsite content should be fitted with calls to action (CTAs) designed to motivate readers to take a specific action (like filling out a form with their contact information or scheduling a time for a consultation). Technically, conversion optimization is a concept distinct from SEO, but because they’re mutually beneficial and reciprocally supportive, it’s wise to speak of them as if they’re part of the same overall strategy. SEO is also incredibly beneficial for mass tort lawyers because it’s cost effective. These are just some of the reasons why it’s so cost effective, especially when compared to other marketing and advertising strategies:       Low barriers to entry. There’s practically no barrier to entry for SEO. If you have a website and you know what you’re doing, you can get started right away – with no partnerships, connections, or existing assets strictly necessary. Learning SEO isn’t especially difficult, especially with the abundance of educational materials now available online, and if you do need support, a qualified SEO agency can easily help you. Hiring professionals is more expensive than doing it yourself, but paying for professional SEO services is still cheaper than most traditional advertising campaigns.       Competitive opportunities. SEO is also highly cost effective because it gives you the opportunity to mitigate or eliminate competitive pressure. Because you’ll be targeting highly specialized keywords and phrases, you can immediately cut your competition to the absolute minimum. If you do have competitors in this narrow space, you can usually supersede them with better content and a more thoughtful strategy.       Permanent resource development. The resources you create for mass tort SEO are going to be permanent, or nearly so. The blog posts you write for SEO are going to continue providing information to people and converting people for years to come. The links you build can keep generating traffic indefinitely. Whatever landing pages and persuasive materials you create will continue providing value to your brand as long as you keep using them.       Hands-off intake. SEO is an inbound marketing strategy, and one of the brightest appeals of inbound marketing is that intake is mostly hands-off. Instead of spending time, effort, and energy on every