Google Search Console (GSC) is a web service offered by Google to help you manage your firm’s online presence. With GSC, you can see what queries users are typing to pull up your firm, how often you’re showing up in search, which pages on your site are indexed properly, and more. If you receive a lot of traffic from Google, one of the best things you can do to help boost your digital presence even more is using the Data Highlighter tool in GSC.
What is the Data Highlighter?
The Data Highlighter is a way to quickly tell Google important information about a page you just published, like the date the page was published, the page’s title, the author, your firm’s name, and more. Highlighting your data adds structured markup to your firm’s HTML, which means Google can crawl your site faster and you’ll be more likely to show up for rich snippets on search results.
You can highlight nearly any type of content, from something as simple as an article (like a blog post on a recent court victory of yours) or even reviews, events, products, and more.
Why Add Structured Data To Your Firm?
By using the Data Highlighter in GSC, you can easily add structured data to as many pages as you’d like. You never have to add structured data to a page. Essentially, Google wants to make it easier to understand what your page means. By helping Google out, you can rank significantly better on organic search.
A great example of where structured data helps is in image results. Carousels (series of images across the top of a search result page) only show up if you’ve used structured data to show Google where an image is. Featured snippets, which are long blurbs of text that show up before all other organic text links, are also more likely to appear if you’ve added structured data to your site.
Caveats With the Data Highlighter
There are two main issues with the Data Highlighter. The first is that it’ll only add structured markup to pages showed on Google. While the vast majority of US search is performed on Google, this could be a deterrent for Social Security disability firms in particular. Many Bing users are much older than the general population, so Social Security attorneys may want to use another structured markup tool like Schema.org to ensure that the benefits are seen for all search engines, not just Google.
The other issue with the Data Highlighter is that is doesn’t guarantee you’ll show up for unique search results like featured and rich snippets or image carousels. It’s possible you could toil away on highlighting your firm’s content but not see any additional claimants contact your firm.
To supplement your own digital marketing efforts with lead generation, give eGen a call today at 617.800.0089. Lead generation is a great way to ensure you still have enough pending cases to keep your revenue up while you optimize your own digital marketing strategy.