With more than 86 percent of the market for search engines, Google organic search makes 59% of the internet’s traffic total.
In this regard, legal firms cannot afford to rest on Google since most users use Google every day to look for lawyers and other legal services. Also, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the best way to get your business noticed by these people.
Do you want to make the most of the SEO potential to benefit your firm’s legal practice? Here’s how you can plan your SEO strategy from beginning to close.
SEO for Law Firms Defined
Before you start creating an SEO strategy, it is essential to know the basics of the law firm’s SEO and what it is for your firm.
Law firm SEO is the term used to optimize your site and online platforms to rank well in search results to increase natural traffic to your legal firm. It is about focusing on the keywords (i.e., “keywords”) people search for services similar to yours.
SEO’s benefits for Law Firms
- SEO is crucial for law firms due to various reasons. SEO allows you to:
- Find people looking for the kind of services you provide within your area.
- Improve your website’s experience so that it can be more efficient and user-friendly
- Make sure you address any technical issues with your website that might be affecting your site’s performance.
- Create content that is valuable as well as relevant for your target audience
- Connect with more people by using online directories and local listings
- Enhance engagement, clicks as well as lead generation for your site
- Improve your visibility on YouTube and in video searches.
The advantages of SEO in a law firm do not end with the benefits, but the effectiveness of your SEO relies on a strategy that is based on data. In this article, we’ll discuss how you can get the most benefit from SEO strategies.
Step 1: Open Your Law Firm’s website.
The website of your law firm is among the most valuable assets you have in terms of your digital marketing. It’s the virtual platform to be optimized for Google and generate organic leads.
- The structure, design experiences, and the content on your site all play an essential role in driving traffic to your site and turning visitors into clients. In this regard, you’ll need a site that checks all of the boxes:
- Design – Your website must be professional, appealing, and properly designed. Whether you’re using templates or employing an expert designer, your site must look professional to potential customers.
- Speed – Your site needs to be able to load quickly so that your content can be easily rendered and accessible to users. If your website isn’t fast, it could turn off potential customers.
- Experience – A pleasant experience on a website is required to make an impression on the people who visit. This includes having interactivity, interactive elements in the design, and a plan that works for desktop and mobile devices and captivating images and videos.
- Infrastructure – Your site may look beautiful, but the infrastructure is vital. It’s essential to have a secure, technologically sound, quick, and easily indexable website for search engines.
- Content: The information on your website can make all it takes to attract new visitors and convert them into customers. “Content” here means the text on the page, images, videos, downloads, and any other type of content that sends a message to your customers.
After you’ve created (or revamped) an appealing, speedy, and user-friendly website, you’re now able to begin optimizing your site for organic traffic through SEO.
Step 2 2. Do SEO Keyword Research
“Keywords” are the terms users type to Google Search to discover business, information, products, or others. Legal firms’ term “keywords” refer to the terms prospective clients might use to locate lawyers, legal information, and legal services.
Your keyword strategy is the foundation for your SEO strategies since it determines the exact keywords you hope to achieve. You may be surprised to learn that various law firms have different strategies to rank for keywords since the words are contingent on the location, practice area, and target audience.
Begin by making an inventory of the words you will associate with the law firm you work for. For instance, in the case of an attorney firm that specializes in family law, there could be a “family lawyer,” “family law services,” “file for divorce,” and so on.
Then, consider which of these terms could be modified using a geo-specific time. Most likely, if you are a service provider for a particular geographical area, you’ll need to focus on geo-specific terms. Examples: “Seattle family law,” “Seattle family lawyer,” and so on.
After you’ve compiled a comprehensive list of terms that relate to your company and its services, you can use SEO software to determine the Keyword Volume and Search difficulty of each keyword. We suggest tools such as SEMRush.com or Ahrefs.com for this. They will let you know if the term is being searched for and its difficulty to rank.
Make sure to use your SEO tool to locate other keywords. You can utilize it to access the Related Keywords report or search for domains belonging to your competitors to uncover keyword opportunities that are not being used. Include these keywords in your list to create the basis for the SEO strategy.
Step 3: Optimized Design Content
- Your keyword research will gradually reveal the terms you need to make your website more effective. For instance, Search Volume data may show that “Seattle family lawyer” is an appropriate term to include on your site.
- Keywords can then be linked to existing or new websites. Make sure you “cluster” keywords that are closely connected. For instance, the “Seattle divorce law services” page will likely also focus on “Seattle divorce lawyer” and “divorce lawyer in Seattle.”
- After you’ve mapped these keywords onto existing pages or brand new topics for runners, you can begin to build a framework that will create or optimize the content or create. The following are some essential points to take into consideration:
- Title Tags – Include the most prominent keyword you have chosen to describe your page in the “title tag” of the page. For instance, the title tag for the Divorce Law Services page might be “Divorce Law Services Seattle | PP&G Law Group.”
- Meta Descriptions: The Meta Description is the element coded on a webpage that explains what the page is about. It can be used as an initial or a related keyword in this. An excellent example of a meta description for a Divorce Law Services page might be: “Looking for Divorce Law Services in Seattle? PP&G Law Group helps individuals and their families navigate through the process of divorce, file mediation, filing, and more.”
- H1 Heading H1 Heading is an additional element in the code, usually the web page’s title. It’s usually a different variant of the tag that is used for the title. For instance, “Divorce Law Services” is usually a suitable H1 heading for this page type.
- Body Content-The body of the page on a page constitutes the main content. It’s the content that explains the information or accurately describes the service. The body of your content should naturally incorporate keywords throughout the page. Most importantly, you will be able to provide more value than the competition pages that rank for the exact phrases.
- This is only the beginning of the iceberg in regards to what’s called “on-page SEO.” On-page SEO, in general, is the process of creating content that is beneficial to your readers and optimized to match the search terms you want to rank for.
Step 4: Take ownership of your local organic presence
Law firms heavily rely on Local SEO to get their message to users within a specific geographic area. If you’re only serving particular states, cities, or even counties, you’ll require local SEO.
The Local SEO process mentioned is optimizing for specific geo-specific terms or location-specific platforms. For instance, you’ll be looking to optimize your website for local-specific keywords and fill all of your listings for local businesses, reviews, and directories.
Here are the basic principles in local SEO that law firms should know:
Keywords Target keywords that have geo-specific modifiers about the markets you cater to.
- Content – Create content for your site that is optimized for specific keywords that are geo-specific (this covers web pages as well as specific blog articles topics)
- Google My Business – Google My Business (GMB) is an open platform that companies can use to store their company details in local Searches. Create your profile for free and add your contact details, website URL, office picture reviews, and much more.
- Other directories such as Yelp, Yellow Pages, Avvo, and Lawyer.com permit law firms to post their business details to attract prospective clients. Join credible directories (but beware of spammy directories).
- Reviews – Reviews by satisfied customers affect SEO and affect sales. Request past customers to rate your company online on GMB, Yelp, Bing Places, and many more.
Local SEO is a lot of work that requires regular maintenance, so check your rankings, create more customer reviews, and produce more local-specific content.
Step 5: Establish and Manage Your Backlinks
Backlinks are hyperlinks from other websites to your website. They give credibility to your site and make it more credible to Google. Creating backlinks on high-quality sites is highly beneficial for SEO.
However, building backlinks can be simpler to say than doing. Here are some suggestions on how to make backlinks:
- Partnerships – Use existing relationships with other law businesses, blogs, and companies to request that they hyperlink back to your site. This could involve you creating a guest post or hosting you in their directory of theirs, or linking to you via your existing blog or website.
- PR – conduct PR outreach, or hire an agency that can advocate for the law office to get prominently featured in media and news. Help a Reporter Out is one example of a site frequently looking to feature experts from the legal field in articles.
- Guest Posting – Contact quality blogs and ask them about the possibility of contributing guest posts. It is even better if these sites or blogs permit you to add links to your site for free.
- Blog posts – Post blog entries on your website to draw interest from other sites. If your content is outstanding, it could encourage publishers and bloggers to share your content.
- Furthermore, you can utilize tools such as Ahrefs or SEMrush to track your backlinks. These tools will provide the number of backlinks you have obtained, the quality of your backlinks, their date of acquisition, and more. This will allow you to track your efforts to acquire backlinks.
The Law firm’s SEO strategy is easy.
Many marketers would like you to believe that SEO is complicated. The truth is that the basic concepts are pretty simple to learn. Once you’ve mastered the basics, you can move on to more complex strategies.
Of course, certain areas have more competition than others. If you’re in a competitive market, It could be worth employing an attorney firm SEO professional to provide more specific assistance. However, knowing how to design an SEO plan from the bottom from the beginning will allow you to better implement, understand, and evaluate the results of your SEO strategy.
