1. Proprietary & Confidential | © 2014 - UpCounsel
Crash Course in SEO
Mason Blake
Co-founder & CTO

2. Proprietary & Confidential | © 2014 - UpCounsel
▪ Who the hell am I?
▪ About UpCounsel
▪ What is SEO?
▪ The Easy Stuff
▪ The Hard Stuff
▪ What I would do differently
▪ Q & A
Agenda

3. Proprietary & Confidential | © 2014 - UpCounsel
▪ Born & raised in South Dakota
▪ Studied Computer Science
▪ Lead Engineer - 15 yrs; 4 startups
▪ Co-founded UpCounsel in Nov 2011
▪ I’m not a Marketer
▪ I do not know everything about SEO
About Me

4. Proprietary & Confidential | © 2014 - UpCounsel
About UpCounsel
▪ Marketplace for Business Legal Services
▪ RFP-based process, ala Odesk / Elance
▪ End-to-end legal solution
▪ Practice management suite for attorneys
▪ Fixed fee services, subscriptions & more…
www.upcounsel.com

5. Proprietary & Confidential | © 2014 - UpCounsel
About UpCounsel
▪ Marketplace for Business Legal Services
▪ RFP-based process, ala Odesk / Elance
▪ Fixed fees, hourly rates, no “retainers”
▪ Ad-hoc jobs or ongoing Outside GC
▪ Attorneys are solos or boutique firms
▪ Attorneys average 14 yrs experience
▪ Get proposals for free
▪ Save 40% - 60% on legal bills
▪ Build your own virtual legal team
▪ Practice management tools for attorneys
▪ End-to-end legal solution for businesses
▪ Centralized communications
▪ Real-time Chat
▪ Documents
▪ E-signatures
▪ Invoices
▪ Payments
▪ and more!

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▪ A long term play
▪ Never-ending
▪ On-site factors (the easy stuff)
▪ Off-site factors (the hard stuff)
▪ White-hat
▪ All about the customer
▪ Always evolving ...
What is SEO?
flickr.com - © "Startrails over the Autumn foliage" by Darron Birgenheier

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What SEO is not
▪ Easily gamed
▪ A Quick Fix
▪ Short-term Growth
▪ Black-Hat
▪ Link building

8. Proprietary & Confidential | © 2014 - UpCounsel
Matt Cutts
Head of Web Spam @ Google
currently on extended leave

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Rand Fishkin
moz.com

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Quick Poll

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LOCAL search terms
▪ “business lawyer”
▪ “best restaurants”
▪ “lawn mower”
▪ “painters”
▪ “dog walking”
▪ “guitar stores”
Localized SEO opportunities
GLOBAL search terms
▪ “legal practice software”
▪ “restaurant pos software”
▪ “john deere lawn mower”
▪ “paint removal”
▪ “beagle dogs”
▪ “martin guitars”

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Tools to Get Started
Most important tools
1. Google Analytics
2. Webmaster Tools (GWMT)
3. Page Speed analysis
4. Moz.com
▪ schema.org - structured data
▪ Moz.com
▪ Open Site Explorer
▪ moz.com/google-algorithm-change
▪ Screaming Frog
▪ App to index, query, analyze
▪ LOTS more … don’t get lost
▪ Don’t trust everything you read
▪ Publish date matters when
learning SEO

13. Proprietary & Confidential | © 2014 - UpCounsel
Google Webmaster Tools

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Google Page Speed analysis tool

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SEO - On-site factors…. The Easy Stuff
▪ Page titles
▪ < ~60 chars
▪ Keyword positioning matters
▪ Uniqueness required!
▪ Your brand at the end
▪ Meta keywords (not used)
▪ Meta descriptions
▪ < ~155 chars
▪ Unique
▪ Alphanumeric chars only
▪ Make it dynamic
▪ Technically not a ranking factor

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▪ HTTP status codes & redirects
▪ 301 - moved permanently
▪ 302/307 - moved temporarily
▪ 404 - not found
▪ 410 - gone
▪ Keyword matching
▪ Anchor link text
SEO - On-site factors…. The Easy Stuff
▪ Robots.txt
▪ Block spiders / bots
▪ Block folders / URLs
▪ Include your Sitemap URL

17. Proprietary & Confidential | © 2014 - UpCounsel
Meta Tags
▪ charset
▪ viewport (for responsive sites)
▪ X-UA-Compatible (for IE)
▪ apple-mobile-web-app-title
▪ Open Graph
▪ og:site_name
▪ og:url
▪ og:image
▪ og:description
▪ og:title
▪ apple-touch-icon
▪ stylesheets
▪ rel=canonical
▪ Pagination
▪ rel=next
▪ rel=prev
Link Tags

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Structured Data
schema.org
▪ People
▪ Places
▪ Restaurants, venues
▪ Events
▪ Reviews
▪ Organization
▪ Product
▪ Creative Work
▪ blog, book, article, answer, question...
▪ Media
▪ audio, video, photos...
▪ dozens more...
▪ Helps Google understand your site
▪ GWMT Structured Data highlighter
▪ Some data types shown on SERPs
▪ Can get hairy really quick…

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Site Architecture
▪ MAKE A PLAN!!
▪ All pages within 3 clicks from HP
▪ URLs do not need to match this
▪ Don’t go too deep (4 nodes max)
▪ No orphaned pages
▪ ie, pages in your sitemap that cannot
be found by your users

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URL Structure
▪ Use hyphens to separate words
▪ upcounsel.com/trademark-attorneys-san-francisco-ca
would also be ok to do this:
▪ upcounsel.com/trademark-attorneys/san-francisco-ca
probably not this:
▪ upcounsel.com/attorneys/trademark/california/san-francisco
▪ Avoid query strings when possible
▪ 3 or more parameters is considered bad
▪ Avoid using too many folders
▪ OLD: upcounsel.com/free-legal/documents/21/release-of-liability
became
▪ NEW: upcounsel.com/release-of-liability-agreement
▪ Semantic URLs help - include the keywords you’re targeting
▪ upcounsel.com/profile/jennifer.wang
probably should be
▪ upcounsel.com/attorneys/jennifer.wang

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Query Strings
▪ Avoid if possible
▪ .com/red-shoes
instead of:
▪ .com?cat=shoes&color=red
▪ Minimize if you can’t remove them
▪ > 2 parameters is bad
▪ Be careful about duplicate content
▪ rel=”canonical”
▪ Use GWMT to configure
▪ proceed with caution
Can be used to your advantage with:
▪ Pagination - article
a. rel=”next”
b. rel=”prev”
c. all in one page
▪ Faceted Search - article

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Canonical URLs
▪ <link href="https://www.shop.com/red-shoes" rel="canonical"/>
▪ https://www.shop.com/red-shoes
▪ https://www.shop.com/shoes?color=red
▪ https://www.shop.com/search?term=shoes&color=red
▪ Important for pages with:
▪ Query strings
▪ Filters
▪ Faceted search
▪ Tell SEs how to untangle pgs w/ multiple URLs for the same content

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Sitemaps
Sitemap.xml
▪ Critical to tell SEs about all your URLs
▪ 10MB or 50,000 URLs for 1 file
▪ If > 50,000 URLs
▪ sitemap.xml = sitemapindex
▪ points to all other sitemap files
▪ UpCounsel has ~600k URLs
▪ Sitemap index points to
▪ 12 sitemaps
▪ upcounsel.com/sitemap1.xml.gz
▪ upcounsel.com/sitemap2.xml.gz
HTML Sitemap
▪ Gone out of style lately
▪ Still important
▪ Doesn’t have to be pretty
▪ Link to all / most of our URLs

24. Proprietary & Confidential | © 2014 - UpCounsel
SEO - the harder stuff
▪ Link building - proceed with
caution!
▪ 80% deep
▪ 20% homepage
▪ Authorship
▪ It’s dead
▪ Content marketing
▪ Guest blogging
▪ PR links
▪ Duplicate content at scale
▪ Controlling flow of rank thru links
Keeping up with the next changes
Always keep it white-hat
Add value to the end user
Don’t build for SEO, build for the user
Build for UX and conversions

25. Proprietary & Confidential | © 2014 - UpCounsel
What I would do differently
▪ Invest in SEO sooner
▪ Make a plan for the long term
▪ Build an SEO roadmap
▪ Don’t deny too many ranking factors
▪ Do tons of keyword research
▪ Pg Speed more important than ever
▪ Put your blog on your main domain
▪ www.upcounsel.com/blog/
not
▪ blog.upcounsel.com
▪ Launch pages sooner even if they
don’t meet your ideal format *
▪ Time is a factor
▪ Iterate - go back and improve
▪ Mobile friendly from the start
▪ Mobile optimized from the start
▪ Mobile first from the start

26. Proprietary & Confidential | © 2014 - UpCounsel
Q & A?
Mason Blake
mason@upcounsel.com
@mase