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In today’s business world, businesses reach their target audience and prospective customers via search engines, and on the other hand, people access information via the same search engines. With this duality, online spaces have become such an effective medium for relaying information and conducting business.
To reach a greater audience and get ahead in business, you will, therefore, need to invest in search engine optimization (SEO). It is not any different for people offering services such as legal services.
This article highlights everything you need to know about SEO for lawyers.
The Basics of Law Firm SEO
When people search for legal services in your locality, which law firms appear on the first page of the search engine results page (SERPs)? Is your law firm among them? If not, what then do you need to do for your law firm’s website to rank among the first results?
The answer to this question is simple and straightforward. SEO. Optimizing your site for search engines helps you rank higher in SERPs and reach a larger audience. When performing SEO for lawyers, you will need to factor in the following:
- Analyze the already existing online presence of your law firm
- Execute a well-structured SEO for legal firms
- Enjoy the benefits of successful law firm search engine optimization, among them being greater online visibility, more customers, leads, and guaranteed business growth.
However, it is important to note that SEO might take time since it’s a long-term strategy for SEO marketing for law firms. But if you are consistent in your approach and patient enough, the benefits or paybacks are worth it.
Whether you will decide to execute your own SEO for legal firms or you intend to hire the best SEO for law firms, this article is meant to offer you information about SEO for lawyers.
Essentials Elements of Attorney SEO marketing
There is a myth going around that search engine optimization is all about incorporating strategic keywords in webpage content. Although the use of keywords is the basis of any effective law firm search engine optimization strategy, it’s not all that needs to be done. SEO encompasses a number of key components.
Website Optimization
The website should be marked up with useful content, headers, images, URLs, Metadata, title tags, all of which are important factors that Google takes into account when indexing your webpages.
Much like how a librarian sorts stacks of books by their numbers, Google algorithms use these site attributes to rank your website and its pages. If your site is not appropriately marked up with these attributions, it might not be indexable, and clients will not find it online.
Navigability
You have probably visited a website and lost your way around it. As a lawyer, you do not want your website visitors to have a hard time when trying to navigate around. Visitors should find the information they need with ease. Just like genuine eye contact or firm handshake is imperative for first-time consultation, first impression matters in online dealing too.
How will you expect a prospective client to trust you with more sensitive matters if you have failed in offering him/her a hospitable first impression with your website? If the time your website visitors spend on your site is unreasonably short, or they click back to the SERPs after clicking on your webpages, then your site has a poor first impression. A high bounce back rate and visitors spending less time on your site are both indicators of a poor user experience, and this will hurt your law firm SEO marketing. Having navigation buttons such as these can make it very simple for a user to find their way around your website:
Content
Your site should offer relevant and informative content to visitors. To make sure that your content is still relevant and useful to the visitors, you must regularly update it.
In 2018, it would have been possible to fool Google algorithms with a bunch of keywords, but in 2020, relevant and useful content is king. So besides incorporating the relevant keywords in your content, make sure the content matches the search intent of your visitors.
Backlinks
Search engines such as Google process information on your website by crawling your webpages. When crawling your website, Google spider moves from one page to the next via links. When another site adds your link to its page, that link sends the search engine crawler to your site. This will help your website rank higher in SERPs.
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The value that Google attaches to links also makes it important to link internally within your webpages. Your law firm SEO campaign should also, therefore, focus on the architecture of your website, the link profile, and the nature of the content.
While keywords and a well-organized website will make it convenient for the user, a great website architecture helps search engines crawl your website with much ease.
Search engine optimization will help web crawlers find and display information from your website for users in need of such information. When you incorporate the appropriate and relevant keywords in your web content, then your webpages stand a better chance of ranking among the top results in the SERPs.
Conducting an SEO Audit for your Website
A site with an easy to crawl and navigate architecture offers a great user experience (UX). You can hire SEO experts to conduct a navigability analysis on your website by looking at the following aspects:
Content Organization
A well-organized website architecture makes it easy for users to navigate through and for search engines to crawl and index your pages. Great user experience increases the time visitors spend on your website, and this will subsequently boost your ranking on the SERP.
Dead Ends
Whenever people cannot find what they are looking for on your webpages, they will bounce back to the SERP to look for a better source. This has the effect of increasing your bounce-back rate, which is an indicator of poor UX. The latter will hurt your SEO efforts.
Backlinks
One of the factors Google looks at when ranking results is the number of websites linking to the particular page in question. Backlinks indicate that the content is authoritative and useful, which is the reason why other sites are linking to it. Make sure to track your backlinks to be sure none of them are broken, for example:
(Image Credit: Search Engine Watch)
Internal Links
Internal linking helps in building the overall website architecture, which is crucial for improved navigation. Visitors can navigate from one page to another with ease, and the search engine can easily create a connection between the webpages, making them easily crawlable.
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Word Count
Most people do not pay much attention to word count. But come to think of it: Between a DUI attorney website with 21K+ words on the topic of DUI and a website with 1000 words on DUI, which one will rank better?
Longer content tends to be more comprehensive on the topic and therefore offers greater value to the reader. Since Google is only concerned with offering its users the most relevant and useful information that match the search intent, longer content will rank higher.
When conducting an analysis on word count, your SEO guru will also look at the quality of the content, the performance of the backlinks, besides assessing the length or quantity of the content.
Broken links, for instance, could hurt your SEO and cause your website visitors to lose interest in your content.
The analysis will focus on the link profile, internal links, and focus keywords. Linking to authoritative websites helps build trust in your website. Although SEO is generally concerned with the online presence of your websites across all platforms, including social media, the foundation of search engine optimization starts with what you post on the website.
On-Page Vs. Off-Page SEO for Lawyers
Everyone is buzzing about On-page and Off-page SEO, but what exactly does each entail? On-page SEO encompasses all the SEO practices done on the website itself, whether backend or front end. Off-page SEO, on the other hand, entails all other SEO practices that do not impact changes on the websites. In other words, off-site SEO is anything done outside your website but contributes to your overall law firm SEO marketing strategy.
On-Page SEO for Attorneys
When you optimize the aspects of your site that matter the most for SEO, you are guaranteed consistent traffic, higher ranking, and more clients. With an effective on-page SEO strategy, users will find your content more useful, and search engines will have an easy time crawling, indexing and ranking your pages.
Optimizing your website on-site means generating custom content, conducting keyword research, incorporating the relevant keywords, and rendering your website easy to navigate. On-page SEO for lawyers entails the following best practices:
Keyword Research
Before creating your content, you should have a list of keywords that people use as search queries when searching for legal services that your law firm offers. This is achieved with thorough keyword research, where you dig out all the keywords your competitors rank for, keyword phrases that your prospective clients use, and trending keywords in the legal profession.
There are a number of tools that you can use for your keyword research. Some of the tools include Keyword Everywhere, AskThePublic, Uber Suggest, Google Keyword Planner, among others. Here is an example of Google Keyword Planner:
(Image Credit: Ahrefs)
Website Architecture
Your website should be well structured such that users can easily find the information they need from among your webpages. The most relevant pages should be linked to the homepage for easy access.
When internal linking, make sure that you are linking to relevant pages with information related to the anchor text used. Linking to irrelevant pages will create confusion, and this will hurt your site’s structure.
Headings
You can organize the content on your web pages with headings. This makes it easier for search engines to understand the content, and your audience can scan through the information with much ease.
Headings break down the content into smaller and easily scannable sections. The type and style of heading s will also make a significant difference.
Title Tags
Title tags are displayed on the SERP snippet and serve to inform the searcher what the page is all about. You can think of title tags as the names you use to save your filing folders. You should always include the focus keyword in the webpage title tags.
Meta Description
Although meta descriptions are not a ranking factor, they will help search engines and searchers understand the content of the pages. The searcher gets a summary of the content from the SERP snippet. For example:
(Image Credit: ReliableSoft)
The best practices with meta descriptions are:
One, it should not exceed 160 characters because a longer meta description will not fit within the snippet. Secondly, include your focus keyword within the meta description to help the search engine comprehend the content of the page.
Customized Content
Customizing your content renders it more useful to your audience. You should try answering legal questions or offering solutions to problems that your audience might have. You can customize your content by using visuals such as infographics and images, as these make the content more engaging and easier to read.
Custom content is a highly effective search engine marketing strategy that will significantly impact your overall SEO.
Google Analytics
This is a very helpful tool that helps you track the various aspects of your website, including click-through rate (CTR), keyword ranking, traffic, and more. With this data, you can effectively track the progress of your SEO marketing for law firms. For instance:
(Image Credit: Crazy Egg)
Google Search Console and Your Website Sitemap
It is imperative to create a Google Search Console account for your website. Adding the sitemap to the account helps Google understand everything about your website.
However, Google is just one of the search engines as there are other popular search engines such as Bing, Microsoft Edge, Yahoo, and the like. It is recommended that you submit your website’s sitemap to all the popular search engines. This helps the web crawlers find your web pages easily and rank them accordingly, and this will subsequently help you reach a larger audience.
On-Site Security
With the appropriate website security measures in place, you can prevent virus attacks, compromised information, and any other cyberattack that would have a negative impact on your law firm.
You do not want your website to be a threat to your potential client’s computers due to undetected viruses. Consider hiring cybersecurity professionals for guaranteed safety.
Load Speed
This is another Google ranking factor. Google algorithms assess the load speed of your website when ranking it on the SERP. If your webpages load slowly, then you will rank below your competitors.
You do not want your website visitors to wait, not even for 20 seconds waiting for a page to complete loading. In business, time is of the essence. The 20 seconds time frame is enough for the visitor to change his mind and bounce back to the SERP for a fast loading page.
You can increase the load speed of your site by compressing large files such as images. You can also track your load speed by using tools such as Google’s PageSpeed Insights, for example:
(Image Credit: SEO Hacker)
Call to Action
The whole point of investing in SEO is to drive more traffic to your website, and ultimately, convert this traffic to clients. For this reason, every webpage should have a call to action inviting the visitor to hire your services.
The call to action should make it easy for your audience to continue their relationship with your website.
We hope that you found this article useful.
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Off-Page SEO
These are SEO enhancements that are done outside the website. Some of the off-page factors that will help improve your SEO include reliability, relevance, and trust. Whenever other sites link to your webpages, Google interprets this as a signal for authority. Backlinks are, therefore, the leading off-page SEO best practice.
A backlink is typically a link from another website directing traffic to your site. The type and number of backlinks directing people to your site will impact your domain authority, resulting in a higher ranking on SERP.
With an effective backlink building strategy, you can increase the number of backlinks pointing to your webpages.
Link Profile
This is a list of all links pointing to your website that come from third-party websites. As a ranking factor, backlinks help search engine algorithms determine whether your webpages are worthwhile and useful to users.
When high-authority websites link to your site, it will go a long way in improving your domain authority. There are various ways to attract more backlinks to your website, among them, being:
- Guest hosting
- Creating user guide content
- Creating content-based on case studies
- and more
The Benefits of Having a Healthy Link Profile
A healthy link profile is a vital aspect of any effective and successful off-page SEO strategy. Some of the paybacks include, but not limited to:
- Higher ranking on SERP
- Search engines will treat your website as trustworthy
- Your law firm will have more authority on search engines compared to your competitors
- Your target audience will view your site as a trustworthy source of information
What Types of Backlinks will be more Beneficial?
The links forming your link profile need to be relevant for them to have an impact on your SEO. Quality links are those that come from authoritative websites such as industry journals, well-regarded blogs, established websites, and news sources.
You can also build your link profile by internal linking your web pages. Internal links steer your website visitors to less-visited pages.
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FAQ’s
Law firm marketing includes drawing in potential customers or clients into wanting legal services. Some ways you might go about this would be: internet marketing and SEO, referral services, and professional marketing.
Strategies and tactics to get your law firm at the top of the search engine results page are called SEO or search engine optimization. This will help you attract potential clients to your website that need legal services provided.
The way clients and customers find legal services or other businesses has changed a lot recently. Since the invention of Google more and more people are searching for the things they need on the internet. Because of this, if your website isn’t ranking high on a search engine your potential clients will go to a different law firm that has ranked higher.
Every law firm wants different things and they have different goals. This means that each law firm SEO strategy will cost a different amount. If you want to try to work on the SEO of your website without using paid advertisements you will spend less money. However, if you want these advertisements to cause more traffic to your website you will need to put more money into your budget.
Results often vary depending on the website however, most law firms are able to see a few results within three months. You must remember that your SEO results will grow the longer you wait and the more work you put into it. If you create helpful content and keep including backlinks your SEO results will keep getting better and better. Time is key with SEO.
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