Getting a law firm to rank high in Google searches is often a daunting task.
As one of the most competitive industries, it can be difficult for legal professionals to outperform others.
Most lawyers know SEO is the key to ranking High Google.
But how do you know where to start?
How do you know if the first step will make you successful?
Here, I reveal the first essential steps in law firm SEO – and the next steps to creating an effective legal SEO strategy.
Step 1: Familiarize yourself with SEO
A lawyer’s first step in SEO is to become familiar with the subject of SEO.
This may seem backward because you don’t know where to start Search Engine Optimization Strategiesbut that’s exactly the point.
Education is the key to building an effective data-driven strategy.
Additionally, learning the basics will allow you to hold your internal team or external partners accountable for getting the results you expect.
This way, you’re not blind and you can set realistic expectations for your SEO team.
You can become familiar with SEO by watching YouTube videos, joining Facebook groups, attending conferences and planners, or reading articles on the subject online.
There are also books on the subject, (e.g. Law Firm SEO) helps educate and empower attorneys to increase the visibility of their website, leverage SEO and increase Google rankings, web traffic, leads and signed cases.
Some of the best SEO professionals are self-taught
When SEO first emerged as a field of practice, there were no college courses, books, or videos on the subject.
Many early SEO professionals learned by doing; by creating websites, optimizing them, watching their rankings, and measuring results.
This means that many of the best SEO professionals are self-taught, and self-study is still a great way to learn SEO today.
Everyone can use SEO, and there are now more resources than ever to learn SEO—even for free!
Where to start? – The Basics of Law Firm SEO
Every SEO strategy is built on foundations.
Even the best “SEO strategy” won’t be successful unless you understand basic SEO practices.
Later, you’ll build on these basics by testing different approaches and discovering what works best for your website.
Here are the basic SEO basics you should know.
keyword research
keyword research Involves identifying search terms (“keywords”) that users search for in search engines to find businesses, products, services, and information.
Your SEO strategy is based on optimizing your website and platform for the keywords that your target audience related to your service is searching for.
When it comes to law firm keyword research, search terms are largely aligned with two audience personas: legal information seekers and attorney seekers.
Some users are looking for information on legal issues or problems, and some users are specifically looking for lawyers or law firms.
When doing keyword research for your law firm, you need to identify search terms in both categories.
For example, if you are a family lawyer, you might identify terms such as “how to file for divorce” or “how to resolve custody disputes” for information seekers and “family lawyer Kirkland” or “Kirkland divorce lawyer” for information seekers the term. Lawyer job seeker.
website compliance
Law firms face specific regulatory and Accessibility Requirements in website marketing.
In particular, the provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) now apply to commercial websites, brick-and-mortar offices, and businesses with websites.
This means that your website needs to be accessible to people with hearing, visual or physical impairments.
For SEO, this might mean optimizing image alt text for e-readers or adding subtitles to your YouTube videos.
Another consideration is your marketing content.
Lawyers must comply with certain Advertising rules This may not apply to other businesses. E.g:
- Avoid claiming to be an “expert” unless you are certified or accredited.
- Don’t make false or misleading claims, such as saying you are the “best” law firm.California State Bar Association Advertising Rules Law firms are required to avoid any solicitation of users that is “untrue, confusing, deceptive or misleading.”
- Check your state’s laws before operating under a trade name. For example, practicing under a trade name is not permitted except in certain circumstances.
Offsite SEO
“Off-page” SEO is optimization that occurs outside of your website, such as Google Business Profile Optimizationlink building, or directory listing.
Off-site SEO is an important way for law firms to drive backlinks, referral traffic, reviews, and leads through online listings.
Positive reviews can help build trust with potential clients and even help your Google My Business profile rank higher than other attorney profiles.
However, keep in mind that ABA Rule 7.2(b) states that attorneys cannot compensate anyone for their referrals or referrals, so make sure your referrals comply with this.
Local SEO
Local SEO involves optimizing your website and online platform for geo-specific search terms.
It leverages proximity signals to help you rank for the localized terms users are searching for – and target users in specific locations.
You can improve your law firm’s local SEO by using keywords that specify the law firm’s location or service area, such as “LA Personal Injury Attorney” or “Denver Family Law.”
You can also include a map of your address, directions and law firm location on your website.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO involves addressing your site’s site structure, security, indexing, and speed.
To ensure your website is fast, accessible, and crawlerable by search engines, you need to tackle technical SEO.
Technical SEO fundamentals for all types of businesses include:
- Optimize page speed/site load time By reducing image size and improving the presentation of content on your website.
- Fix broken links/404s Pages with redirects.
- avoid repetition Title tags, meta descriptions, page content, and H1 titles.
- Make sure your website has Secure SSL Certificate (HTTPS) Setup.
- make sure your Website design optimized for mobile and desktop.
- Find and fix crawl errors and sitemap issues.
content
“Content” can refer to any visual or textual content on your website, but usually refers to the text on a page – such as your web pages and blog posts.
Your content tells users and search engines what your business is about.
Law firms can organically engage users through web/service pages and blog post content.
For example, you might have multiple service pages (optimized for service- and geography-specific keywords) and blog posts (optimized for informative “long-tail” keywords).
Recall two audience roles—information seekers and lawyer seekers.
Try creating content for both audiences by offering informative blog posts and pages and more descriptive service and sales pages.
link building
link building is an important activity in SEO that involves actively, passively or organically attracting links to your website from other websites.
So-called “backlinks” add authority to your website.
We discuss more about link building for law firms below.
Track and analyze
platforms such as Google Analytics and google search console Tells you how much traffic you’re getting, where it’s coming from, and more important metrics for your business.
Tracking and analysis is important to determine if your SEO strategy is working.
For your law firm’s marketing purposes, there are some key metrics you need to be aware of:
- Impressions – The number of users who saw your page URL in search results (found via Google Search Console).
- hit count – The number of users who clicked the URL of your page or post (can be found through Google Search Console).
- user – The number of users who visited a specific page or during a specific period (can be found via Google Analytics).
- Target – Conversion tracking on your website; how many users completed a given action (which can be found via Google Analytics).
- Bounce Rate – The percentage of times a user visits a single page on your website and then immediately leaves that page or your entire website (can be found through Google Analytics).
Image via Google Analytics, March 2022The metrics above can tell you how many people are visiting your site, from which channels, and how many users are taking action on your site (such as filling out a contact form).
This way, you can measure the effectiveness of your SEO and marketing campaigns.
What’s next? – SEO strategy moving forward
The first step in SEO is to learn the basics in order to build on the basics with more advanced strategies.
Not only will education make you more SEO-savvy, but it will also help you see through any shady tactics other SEO salespeople might come up with.
Whether you choose DIY SEO or hire an agency, here are some additional steps you can use in your law firm’s search strategy.
Develop a content strategy
The content on your site is important in telling Google and users what your site is about.
Also, optimized content can attract new users to your website through keywords.
develop a content strategy is one of the best early steps to setting up your website for success.
This means publishing descriptive and engaging web content, publishing blog posts, and experimenting with media like images and videos.
Building Authority with Article Marketing
The content on your website plays an important role in SEO, but creating content off-site is also valuable.
Marketing project Offers many ways to generate great results from your content.
You can post on your own blog, post on other blogs, write articles on LinkedIn, become a contributor to other publications, and more.
You can generate organic traffic to your website, refer traffic from other websites, and boost your authority with expert content.
Get high-quality backlinks
Once you have great content on your website, you can start driving links to it.
Sometimes this will happen naturally, such as when other sites find you and choose to link to you; other times, you will take on a more active role, such as through outreach or content marketing.
There are several ways to Get backlinks naturally.
These methods can include publishing “Link-worthy” contentshare valuable tools, create resource guides, showcase infographics and other ideas.
Link building is an activity you should always keep in mind to increase the authority of your website.
Take Your First Steps to Law Firm SEO
SEO shouldn’t be intimidating.
In fact, one of the best ways to demystify SEO is to start reading.
Read articles about SEO online.
Read books on SEO.
Read the how-to guide on the expert forum.
Over time, you’ll gain more confidence in your skills and be able to develop smart strategies.
Search Engine Journal is a great source of accurate, free information about SEO.
Start with the basics, try more advanced strategies, and implement SEO on your website.
Who knows, maybe one day you’ll be an SEO expert yourself.
More resources:
Featured image: Job Creation 51/Shutterstock
