Search engine optimization (SEO) is a necessity for any modern business, and your law firm is no exception. The point of SEO is to increase the traffic to your law firm’s website by ranking higher in organic search results. In other words, you’re trying to get the attention of potential clients by providing answers for their search engine inquiries.
Users enter keywords in search engines to find solutions to problems or answers to their questions. They may search for facts, legal advice, or they may be looking for an attorney in their area. The search terms themselves aren’t all that’s important. In fact, determining user intent has been the name of the game for a few years now, and Google’s BERT update is an algorithm meant to help the search engine to better process natural language. Google doesn’t just want to know what users are searching for—it wants to know why.
If you want to bring in new clients and build a larger online presence, you’ll need a great SEO strategy. Here are some basic SEO concepts and ways you can use them to rise in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Keyword Research
As mentioned, keywords are essentially the terms users put into a Google search to get the information they need. Keyword research is the process of determining exactly what keywords users are searching so you can use these terms in your website and in the content you produce. Since you already know your business and generally what you want to rank for, you may think you can skip the research and planning step, but this is still one of the most important things you need to do.
The words you want to rank for and what users actually search for aren’t always the same. Focusing on your target audience and analyzing their needs will help you come up with the best keywords. For example, if you’re a law firm that specializes in personal injury cases, you’d want to use keywords that emphasize your practice area and location like “injury attorney in [location].” If you’re trying to attract prospective clients having legal issues due to the current pandemic, you’d want keywords like “legal services for COVID-19.”
If you decide to seek out experts providing SEO for lawyers, you’ll need to make sure they understand your areas of expertise and the kinds of clients you’re looking for. SEO companies know the best practices and can be a great help for improving your search engine rankings, but they’ll need all the relevant information you can give them.
Title Tags
These are the HTML elements that display the titles of web pages. They’re generally the first thing users will see in search results, and they have a huge impact on whether anyone clicks your links. Title tags are also shared on social media, so you’ll want to make your first impression count. They may seem fairly simple, but there are many different factors that affect your rankings in SERPs, and you need every advantage you can get. After all, only links showing on the first page are likely to get traffic. Here are some of the best ways to improve title tags.
Firstly, you need to keep your tags brief and to the point since Google typically starts cutting them off at around 60 characters. Don’t worry about trying to cram keywords into your title tags since you’re trying to make these look as natural as possible. Instead, it’s best to focus on just one or two crucial words to work in and build on them. Here are a few examples of tags for law firm SEO.
“What to Do Immediately After a Car Accident”
“Do I have a Medical Malpractice Case?”
“Legal Preparations for My Small Business”
Each of these title tags is meant for a specific audience, and they show off a particular practice area. If you’re a well-known law firm, you could even work in your brand name for some added authority. Just remember that title tags are what show up in search results. They differ from your H1 tags, which are the actual titles of your content on web pages.
Meta Descriptions
Also called meta tags, these are HTML elements that display a summary for the contents of the web page. This is an important factor in on-page SEO. Information from meta tags generally appears in search results beneath your headline, and the full information from meta tags can always be found by right-clicking a webpage and selecting “view page source.”
Good meta descriptions help you get more clicks from potential clients since the tags let them preview your page content and see how it can help them. As a general rule, it’s best to ensure meta tags for each page are unique and representative of the content on the individual pages instead of using similar tags across your entire law firm’s website.
Directories
Online directories are websites that collect links to other sites, often businesses, and are a great resource for both users and business owners alike. Good examples are sites like Yelp, Facebook, Yellow Pages, and FourSquare.
For attorneys, there are aggregator sites like Jusita and Super Lawyers that help connect potential clients with the top lawyers in the country. Profiles on these sites are critical for law firm SEO, so if your firm doesn’t already have these, you’ll need to make them. You’ll also undoubtedly have a profile on your state’s Bar Association website, so a bit of the work is already done for you. Directories like these are important since search engine results pages are often filled with results from them, and having your law firm appear in high authority directories adds credibility to your own site.
Link Building
This is one of the most basic tenants of SEO, and it’s arguably still the most important. It’s basically the process of earning backlinks, also called inbound links, which are links on other sites that lead back to your own law firm website. The more high-quality backlinks you have from authoritative sites, the more your own domain authority (DA) rises. This is the best way to rise in search engine results.
DA is a metric developed by Moz that seeks to predict how well a website will perform in SERPs. Since Google uses hundreds of ranking factors, DA is influenced by an aggregate of complex factors as well to ensure as much accuracy as possible. Effective link building is time-consuming, but it’s the most certain way to boost your DA. It’s also worth remembering that DA is only a comparative measure and that you really only need to outscore your direct competitors. You can always measure your progress with free DA checkers online.
Link building is the step that most commonly calls for SEO experts, and even professionals tend to say it’s the most difficult part of their job. If you do want to try and tackle things on your own, here are some great resources to help you build links.
Quora: This is a question-and-answer site edited by users that can be a great platform for building your brand and uncovering leads. It’s considered more professional than most sites of its kind, and users are required to use their real names and credentials, so you can generally expect quality answers.
Attorneys can use the site to search for legal questions and provide some basic answers. While you naturally wouldn’t want to go into details about specific cases here, you can leave a link to your law firm site that users can follow for more information.
HARO: Help a Reporter Out is a service that lets journalists make requests for information from experts. If the information is used in an article, the answering expert will be credited as a source and can request a link to their site somewhere in the article. As with Quora, you may not be able to go into extreme detail, but news sites are high authority, and getting backlinks from them is great for law firm SEO. It’s certainly worth looking for questions any of your law firm’s attorneys can answer.
Broken Links: Broken link building is a technique where you seek out dead links on other websites and contact their webmasters to suggest links to your own as replacements. Naturally, these sites will need to be related to legal information in some way, as it’s always important to provide relevant information, but this is a relatively simple way that anyone can build links.
Content Marketing
The best way to both earn backlinks and get some legal marketing done is by creating original content that showcases your services. Content marketing is a marketing strategy that seeks to connect with your target audience by answering their questions in a way that’s both informative and entertaining. Original content can be anything from blog posts to videos or even infographics. One of the good things about making content is that it’ll stay online for as long as you want it to, unlike paid ads, and content can even be shared by users on social media.
Video content is the most popular to make, and it’s definitely worth getting on board since video accounted for over 60% of web traffic last year, and the number is only rising.Good video ideas for law firms include tutorials on how to find the best attorney for your needs or webinars on specific legal topics. Even vlogs sharing expert opinions on current events could be educational and fun.
Blog content is another great option, and lawyers can certainly write useful articles and information about legal services for a variety of blogs. Look online for sites accepting pitches for guest content, or you could even start your own blog that showcases your law firm’s site. Legal blog content could include things like what to do following a workplace injury, information about settlements vs. trials, or options for finding a lawyer with a limited budget. Just make sure your content is providing useful information to your audience.
Local SEO
Local search results dominate mobile searches, and you definitely need to cater to mobile users to be successful. A local pack is generally a group of three results that appear at the top of a mobile Google search, and they each display a local business. Improving your local SEO is one of your best options for increasing foot traffic to your firm, and it can help your online presence as well.
If you haven’t already, you need to create a free Google My Business profile for your law firm. This gives you a business listing in the search engine, and it also gives you control over how your business appears in search results and even in Google Maps. To create a profile, you just need basic business information like the name of your firm, street address, phone number, and business hours. Naturally, this will give you an additional inbound link for your firm as well.
Local SEO is great for smaller businesses since it gives you a low-cost (or no-cost!) way to advertise to potential clients and to reach out to them with social posts. Eighty percent of local searches lead to conversions, so you can’t afford to neglect your local listings. You can even use the free Google Analytics tool to see how you’re doing in SERPs for both organic and local search results, which means you can always adjust your strategies as necessary.
While good SEO is obviously a big part of your business strategy, you should always bear in mind that your efforts are always meant to improve the user experience. If your site is slow, unresponsive, or difficult to use on mobile devices, having a strong online presence won’t help you with a huge percentage of potential customers. Likewise, having lots of backlinks from questionable sites or producing content that isn’t relevant to your services won’t help you much in the long run. Even if you can’t employ every SEO strategy, ensuring the ones you do use will serve your clients makes them as effective as possible.
