How to Travel Anywhere Instantly Without Even Getting Out of Your Chair
Many law firms are interested in tracking their Google rankings (at least they should be!). During your busy day you may get a minute or two of free time away from your cases and you want to check where you stand in the Google rankings for a particular keyword phrase (“Car Accident Attorney” for example). What you may not realize, is that search has been becoming more locally relevant and takes into account your geographic area, especially when serving up local results. The Google servers receive your request, and use your IP address to determine where you are. Any server you connect to knows your general location.
This is generally useful because if you go searching for “Chinese Takeout” you don’t want results for Anchorage, Alaska if you live in say, Palm Beach, Florida. But we run into problems when you have a business that operates in multiple locations (like many large law firms do). So if you have a branch of your firm in Florida, but you are working in the Texas office, you would have a hard time seeing how well you rank in that geographic area without adding some specific geographic keywords, and even then you may not be getting a very clear picture. Well those days are behind us.
Google recently announced on their blog that you can now control your location with the click of a button (ok it’s a couple of clicks, you have to expand the left side menu first, but it’s easy!). Now you can be in the Florida office, and still check to see what someone in Austin, Texas would see when they search for “Car Accident Lawyer” or “Neck Injuries From Large Cowboy Hats” thus ensuring that your results are regionally specific and you are seeing what a local will see when they search.
