When we search for “lawyers in my city,” the legal agencies that appear on the first page of Google are usually what users click to know about these agencies’ services. What can you do to qualify your legal entity on the search engine result page? Well, SEO will improve your organic search and will help you with lead generation.
- Consumers now spend a minimum of 8 hours consuming online content in a day when looking for legal services.
- 97% of people head to Google instead of yellow pages.
- 3/4th of users prefer to get their questions answered and know about one’s law firm through online articles, preferably online ads.
Willing to grow your practice? SEO for law firms will make it easy for you!
The legal industry has traditionally been slow when it comes to adopting new technology. However, you can’t afford to fall behind. That’s why we have created this blog highlighting the best lawyer marketing strategy out there.
What is SEO for Attorney? And Why is it Vital?
Attorney SEO includes techniques, strategies, and tactics that help fetch more prospective clients to a law firm’s website by ranking on search engines’ first page.
Now, why is SEO for Attorneys crucial?
In recent years, the way people find, research, and choose a law firm has changed dramatically. According to studies, 87% of smartphone owners surf on Google at least once a day. In Q1 2020, 96% of people searched on their mobiles, and 92% of people combed on their mobiles and desktop.
The above statistics confirm that if you run a law firm and want to obtain more clients, it’s essential to rank well on SERPs.
Elements involved in SEO for Law Firms
Just incorporating strategic keywords is a myth; SEO involves other aspects too.
Website Optimization
Your website should have headers, content, URL, title tag, image, and meta-attributions; this would guide Google to file your site in the appropriate location for users to find it easily.
- Navigable
It is significant for users to find the information they need accessible – this sets the first impression of your brand. The amount of time that potential clients spend on your website, on each page, and how many times a user clicks on your site just to push the “back” button right away—called a bounce all to affect your SEO.
- Content Optimization
Unique, relevant, and informative content draws users to your site. Incorporating suitable keywords on your website and blog is the only type of content worth producing.
- Backlinks
Search engines process information by crawling through websites and skimming them. While crawling through a website, search engines will move from one page of the website to the next through links. Moreover, when another website includes a link to your company’s page, it sends the search engine to you, improving your ranking on SERPs.
SEO focuses on your site’s structure and architecture, your link profile, and your web page’s content.
SEO for Law Firms: 10 SEO Steps to More Clients and Leads
Before you dive in, it’s vital to understand that SEO is also like the stock market in that it can go south really quick if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Step 1: Select the Right Law firm SEO Keywords.
You should pick keywords based on the following parameters.
- Your target audience: Knowing who your target audience is? And what do they search for?
- Search Intent: “Lawyer reviews” indicates much more commercial intent than “do I need a lawyer?” For the highest impact, choose commercially-inclined keywords that show that consumers are ready to start a conversation.
- You can use tools like Google’s Keyword Planner to discover keyword’s monthly search volume.
- Other than Google Keyword Planner, other paid tools like Moz and SEMRush are also up-and-coming. The more people who choose to optimize for a keyword, the harder it is to rank. That’s why you’re going to have a LOT more trouble ranking for “divorce lawyer” than “family law attorney near 20886”.
Step 2: Screen out your Competitors
Once you have got your keywords, analyze your search engine performance compared to your competitors. Below mentioned are some factors that can impact your page rankings:
- Is your website mobile-friendly?
- Is your website secure (HTTPS vs. HTTP)?
- Does your web page have the correct schema markup?
- How fast web pages load?
- What is the length of your web content?
- Is your web page’s content qualitative?
- Is your image optimized on your web pages?
- Does your website generate quality backlinks?
Comparing your’ and competitors’ SEO performance on the above parameters will give you a clear idea of where you stand.
Step 3: Make Technical SEO Improvements to your website.
After SEO analysis, move on to fixing your website’s technical issues.
- Mobile-friendliness: 57.6% of searches for lawyer keywords happen on a mobile device.
- Speed: Half of the consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less and leave if it takes longer.
Schema: Schema removes any kind of guessing games, allowing you to tell Google exactly what the content on your web page is about.
This improves your chances of ranking higher and lessening the chances of Google misunderstanding what your page is all about. Law firms should use schema for local businesses.
- Security: There is a cyber-attack every 39 seconds, and 43% of cyber-attacks target small businesses. Not only that, but 82% of people won’t browse an unsecured site.
Step 4: Optimize your Existing Web Pages for Search Engines
Once you’ve found your keywords, and your website is cleaned up, you need to optimize your current website pages.
- Ensure that a title tag and meta description includes your keywords. Most websites you’ll see have an SEO plugin in the backend where you can enter your page’s title and meta description.
- Ensure to use heading tags, which give search engines more clues as to your page’s structure and topic. Do not use heading tags for emphasis. Each page should have ONE H1 title, multiple H2 tags, and if you need them, a few H3 tags.
- Ensure that each page thoroughly addresses the page subject.
- Ensure to use heading tags that give search engines more clues as to your page’s structure and topic.
Step 5: Optimize your Law Firm’s Local SEO properties.
Local SEO targets your local service areas and gets your law firm at the top of search results in Local SEO. It is targeting the local pack in the box of Google Map results in the SERP. The information in the local pack is fetched from the GMB account; hence, your Google My Business (GMB) account needs to be claimed and optimized for local SEO.
Google uses your GMB page’s data to display the firm’s address, phone number, business hours, average reviews, specials, coupons, and updates.
In addition to listing your firm’s NAP information on GMB, generating local SEO citations on nationally syndicated online business directories as well as niche legal directories will increase off-site SEO factors.
“Marketing is not the art of finding clever ways to dispose of what you make. It is the art of creating genuine customer value” – Philip Kotler.
Step 6: Build up your Strong Website Page Game.
Once you are done taking care of the most important SEO factors, it is time to level up your law firm’s SEO efforts. Analyze your website thoroughly and see if you are missing out on anything. Glance through your competitor’s websites to confirm that you all got all that you need.
Include everything: FAQs, About Us, Services, News and Media, and other authority building pages.
Your FAQ page is your gold. You have spent years understanding the law, but your client is trying to get his head around it in a few hours. Make sure you answer all the questions your client might have because they have nothing but only a bunch of questions when they begin a legal process.
Step 7: SEO-friendly content and blogs are EVERYTHING!
It is all about blogs and SEO friendly content. You need a blog; it may not be a fancy one. It is OKAY, even if you don’t add a new one every day. Just have a blog and update it at regular intervals.
Your blog page can help you increase ranking chances on search engines by 434%. It also builds belief in your law firm. People like to research even before they purchase a new pen. It is imperative to convince modern consumers by having content that can answer your prospective customers’ questions.
In a nutshell, the better your content, the higher your rank will be, and with that, you will have more leads.
You need to have well researched detailed content to get a better ranking. Along with it, you need to have images and videos to make your blog presentable and attention-grabbing. It should also completely cover the topic and optimized SEO for law firms.
Step 8: Build Votes of Confidence with Backlinks.
Linkbacks to your website are often viewed as a vote of confidence of your readers in your content. Backlinks have an enormous weight in search engine optimization. When you have more quality backlinks to your webpage, the more convincing google considers it, and it will rank you higher in the google search results. You need to be very active in your backlink game. You need to monitor the links you have and even build more continuously.
Below is a list of some great sources of backlinks:
- Creating amazing infographic content
- Promoting your content on social media
- Getting interviewed
- Building internal links
- Having guest blogs
- Reaching out to journalists and bloggers to work together
- Writing law journal articles
Step 9: Track, Measure, Analyze and Repeat
All your efforts will go in vain if you do not regularly track, measure, and analyze all the data. Monitoring and analyzing will help you figure out which strategies are working for you and which methods need to be removed/modified.
Just remember, do not make the common mistake of looking at metrics when you are supposed to look at Key Performance Indicators.
Metrics are social shares, website traffic, impressions, rankings, bounce rates, and brand mentions.
Whereas KPIs lead, booking rate from calls, revenue, cost per lead, total new clients, lead-to-sale conversion rate, and ROI.
You need to track and measure both of them and not take decisions solely based on metrics. Metrics give context to your KPIs, which drive the digital marketing strategy of your firm.
Step 10: Rinse and Repeat your SEO campaigns strategies
The last step is to look at the results of your SEO strategies for law firms, and based on those results, you need to modify your SEO strategy. You can compare your KPIs every year, and you can even do a competitive analysis.
Doing so regularly, you will be able to see your graph and decide accordingly. If you see a continuous fall or no improvement in any of the categories, say, ranking, you need to switch your strategy immediately.
For instance, if you saw a decrease in,
Rankings: Optimize your page as much as you can by finding out which rankings fell.
New clients: You need to see if you are targeting the right audience and leads. After finding the root cause, you will be able to fix it.
Website Traffic: First, find out which page has decreased traffic. Answer questions like: Have you made any changes in them in any way? Is there any broken link? Did they get slower? Is there any alert from google?
Lead: Find out if your call leads are decreasing or web leads and find the factors affecting your leads. Also, analyze your previous leads.
Conclusion!
Unfortunately, SEO isn’t a one-time deal. Continuing to hone your SEO strategy over time ensures that you will keep up with the current ways search engines use to sort content activities. Continue to tweak your strategy as you learn more from your results. We have covered most of the things in this SEO guide, and if you feel a bit lost, then don’t fret about it. Reach out to us to know more about our services!
