10 SEO Tips for Law Firms

Search engine optimization is critical for any successful business, and it’s no different for law firms. Whether you’re running a smaller, local business or a large firm with multiple locations, you need your law firm website to rank high in search engines so new clients can discover your site and learn about your legal services.

Most people who need an attorney will begin looking with a search engine, and it’s long been known that the first Google search results page attracts the vast majority of clicks. An SEO strategy will not only improve your site’s rankings in search engine results pages but also build your online presence through link building, digital content creation, effective use of keywords, and more. The following are some of the best practices for attorney SEO. 

Maintain ABA Compliance

First, you’ll need to make sure that every part of your digital marketing strategy, including your SEO efforts, is compliant with the American Bar Association’s advertising rules.

Generally speaking, these rules prevent law firms from making false or misleading claims as well as vague claims that can’t easily be backed by evidence (such as being the “best” firm in an area). These rules also prevent legal marketing teams from overstating an attorney’s qualifications or providing misleading information about their practice area.

Individual state bars can impose their own rules as well, so you’ll need to keep up with all updates to regulations.

Ensure Your Website Is Responsive

Having a slow website or one that’s difficult to read and navigate makes for a poor user experience, and there are few better ways to scare off prospective clients. Some SEO companies can help you with your law firm’s website design, and it’s a good idea to take advantage of this.

Since over 50% of web traffic comes from mobile devices, you need to make sure your site runs great on these devices as well as desktop. You can either create a new site with mobile-friendliness in mind or update your current website to run more smoothly. Site speed is one of many ranking factors Google takes into consideration. Your site’s speed is impacted by a wide variety of factors including your web hosting, media file sizes, and how efficient your code is.

Once you think you’ve made enough updates, you can check your site with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to see how you’re doing.

Research Your Keywords

Keyword research is one of the most fundamental parts of SEO, and it’s certainly something you’ll need to do for your law firm. Search engines work by using bots to crawl web pages and index them with information like keywords discovered within the page content, how recently the pages were updated, and how users are interacting with the pages.

Keyword research is the process of identifying keywords and phrases that users enter in search engines and optimizing site content to use those words. When it comes to law firm SEO, some of your biggest keywords will involve your practice area since potential clients are likely to search for a lawyer specializing in their needs.

If you’re a personal injury attorney, for example, you’ll want to cater to user intent with keywords involving your specialty as well as the locations you practice. The better you can optimize your site’s keywords, the more organic search traffic you can attract, which is one of the best ways to increase your search engine rankings.

Optimize Your Web Pages

Of course, you need to focus more on optimizing your overall site. There are many different factors that go into determining your rankings in search results, and your individual page speed and page content are both important for engine optimization.

On-page SEO refers to all the efforts you make to improve your rankings for individual web pages. The most important factors for individual page rank are the page’s content and whether the page is linkable. The best way to make high quality content for your pages is to ensure that they’re solving a problem for users or supplying a demand in some other way. For a law firm, this could include information about personal injury cases, what your rights are, and what legal services are available to you.

Even if your site has great content, it won’t be much of a good thing if people can’t link to it. So much content is shared on social media and in other ways, and you need to make sure you can take advantage of that. Avoid requiring users to log in to view your content and hosting content that’s hard to share.

You can also boost your on-page SEO by placing keywords in your page’s title tags, meta descriptions, and H1 tags. While most SEO professionals will likely tell you that this isn’t as important as it used to be, there’s still some correlation with doing this and achieving higher page rankings, and it’s another good use of keyword research. It’s also a good idea to keep your URLs as simple and straightforward as possible since this allows search engines to easily crawl your pages and determine how important they are.

Optimize Your Aggregate Profiles

Off-site SEO refers to improving your online presence on sites other than your own, and this is an important part of SEO for lawyers. As an attorney, you’ll have a profile with your state’s Bar Association website, and it’s likely that you have profiles on aggregator websites like Justia and Super Lawyers. If you don’t already have these profiles, most SEO experts will recommend you make them. 

This is because many organic search results for lawyers are going to be results from aggregator sites, and it pays to make sure potential clients can find your law firm on them. These profiles are also easy ways to gain a slight ranking boost since having the same information from your site on a high authority aggregator will make your site seem more authoritative by association.

Create Original Content

As with any business, one of the best things you can do for your law firm marketing is to make original content that promotes your business as an authority in your field. Content marketing is the creation and sharing of material, usually online, that provides valuable information for your target audience and encourages them to visit your website. This type of marketing is a basic part of most strategies put in place by SEO specialists.

Original content means basically anything you create and share online. Content marketing can be done with YouTube videos, blog posts, infographics, and through social media. While not the exact same thing as social media marketing, you can certainly use social sites to track how well your content marketing materials are doing and gain insight into what kind of content your target audience wants to see in the future.

An example of content marketing for a law firm could be blog content about car accidents. While you’d naturally wait to see each individual case before giving any real legal advice, you could make a blog post detailing guidelines to follow after the event and establish your firm as an expert on the subject. Your post can include a link to your firm’s site which will then list a number where you receive phone calls regarding consultations.

The most important thing about your content strategy beyond offering valuable information is to always link back to your site. Link building is still the number one way to rise in search engine results pages and reach the first page of Google.

Build Healthy Back Links

Speaking of link building, there are several different ways you can go about it. One of the easier methods is internal linking. This is where you link from one page of your own website to another. One of the reasons to do this is to share a bit of link equity from the first page to the second. Another reason you may want internal links is to signal to search engines which of your web pages are the most important.

If you really want to positively influence your placement in search results, though, you’ll need to focus on building backlinks (also called inbound links). These links are formed when one website links to another. In the previous content marketing example, all links to your site that you put in content hosted on another site form inbound links.

In addition to creating content, there are some other ways to build links. It’s best to stick to healthy “white hat” techniques to avoid potential Google penalties. While “black hat” methods that seek to exploit search engines rules may offer short term gains, they can easily cause problems you’ll have to clean up later. Here are some good, healthy ways to start building a backlink portfolio.

Directories: An online directory is a cataloging system that stores links to relevant sources. Popular examples of directories include Yelp, LinkedIn, and Facebook. The previously mentioned lawyer aggregate sites also count as directories. Submitting your information to sites like this allows you to easily form a reputable backlink to your website.

Quora: This is a question and answer website that can be a great early way to get some exposure for your site. As an attorney, you can search the site for legal questions and provide answers while linking your site for more in-depth information.

Image Link Building: Images that break down complicated information are extremely popular online, and if you can create images that do this for legal issues, you can provide your images to sites that host legal information. Each image you provide can double as a backlink to your site.

Ultimately, how you want to pursue your links will be up to you. Just make sure you’re providing relevant and useful information to your audience.

Clean Up Bad Links

Even if you use best practices for building your links, it’s possible to have some bad ones out there that could be considered negative ranking factors. This can happen when links go dead (the page they’re trying to link to no longer exists), when you have a low authority backlink, when you’ve paid for links, or when search engines are updated. Search engines and SEO practices are constantly evolving, and what made for a good link last year may no longer be the case.

Fortunately, you have many options these days when it comes to free backlink checkers online. You can run your site’s URL through any of these checkers, and they’ll give you a good idea of how many bad backlinks are out there. If you want to clean them up, the easiest way is to ask the webmaster of the site that’s hosting the link to remove it. If you can’t remove the links any other way, Google provides a disavow tool that can prevent those links from being ranked.

Optimize for Local Search

Local search is like the yellow pages of the internet, and local SEO is an important part of your overall strategy. Local search results dominate mobile search results pages, and you want potential clients to see your firm on these.

Fortunately, you can start your local SEO journey for free by creating a Google My Business profile. This lets you enter basic information about your business and also makes it easy to communicate with potential customers. The more information you include, the more likely you are to appear in local searches and draw traffic to your firm.

Analyze Your Competitors

A competitive analysis is important for any business to gain a better understanding of the market. Once you start seeing improvements from your new SEO strategy, you can start thinking about how to push things even further.

To gain insight into how to do this, you can start searching your own keywords and see how many firms come up besides your own. The law firms offering the same services you do are your direct competitors. Look into their websites and social media posts to see if there’s anything you can learn from them or if you can offer anything they’re missing.

An effective SEO campaign can be a great deal of work, but it’s one of the best ways to ensure you can reach your target audience, offer a great user experience, and convert online users into clients.