Your Complete Guide to Law Firm SEO Marketing

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.

What is law firm SEO?

Law firm SEO (search engine optimization) is the work of making your firm’s website show up when people near you search for legal help.

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 that question is 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 and the chance to win more leads and clients.

However, SEO for law firms is a long-term strategy, and results build over months rather than days. Nobody can promise you a top spot either: Google’s own guide states that “no one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.” Firms that stay consistent and patient give themselves the best chance of a payoff.

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.

What are the essential elements of law firm SEO?

The essential elements of law firm SEO are a well-optimized website, easy navigation, useful content and links from other websites.

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.

Stuffing a page with keywords no longer works: Google’s spam policies treat “filling a web page with keywords” to manipulate rankings as spam. Relevant, useful content is what ranks. 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. Links from other sites can help your website rank higher in search results.

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.

How do you run an SEO audit on a law firm website?

An SEO audit checks how your site’s content is organized, where visitors hit dead ends, which sites link to you, how your pages link to each other and how thorough your content is.

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. Those quick exits raise your bounce rate, a sign of poor user experience that can 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.

Word Count

Word count on its own does not decide rankings. Google says plainly that it has no preferred word count: its guide to creating helpful content asks whether you are writing to a set length because you heard Google prefers one, and answers “No, we don’t.”

Longer pages can cover a legal topic more completely, but length only helps when every section answers a real question your clients have. A focused page that fully answers the search beats a padded one.

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.

What is the difference between on-page and off-page SEO for lawyers?

On-page SEO is everything you change on your own website, while off-page SEO is everything done elsewhere, mainly earning links from other websites.

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

Optimizing the parts of your site that matter most for SEO gives your pages a better chance at steady traffic, higher rankings 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. You build that list through 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. Clear headings make 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, keep it short enough that the key point shows. Google says there is no limit on meta description length, but it cuts the snippet off as needed to fit the device width, so put the most important words first. 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 that answers your clients’ real questions is one of the strongest foundations for your overall SEO.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free tool that tracks how many people visit your website, where they come from and what they do once they arrive. For click-through rate (CTR) and the searches your pages show up for, use Google Search Console alongside it. 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 search engine. Others such as Bing also accept sitemaps, so submit yours to each search engine you care about. A submitted sitemap helps 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 to keep your site protected.

Load Speed

Page speed is part of the page experience that Google’s ranking systems look at. Google’s Core Web Vitals guidance says the main content of a page should load within the first 2.5 seconds for a good user experience. Slow pages can lose ground to faster competitors.

You do not want your website visitors waiting for a page to finish loading. In business, time is of the essence, and a slow page gives a visitor every reason to head back to the search results for a faster one.

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.

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO is the work done outside your own website to build its reputation. 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 quality and number of backlinks pointing to your site affect how search engines judge its authority, which can help it rank higher.

With an effective backlink building strategy, you can increase the number of backlinks pointing to your webpages.

Link Profile

A link profile is the full list of links pointing to your website from other websites. As a ranking factor, backlinks help search engine algorithms determine whether your webpages are worthwhile and useful to users.

Links from respected, high-authority websites do the most to build your site’s authority. There are various ways to attract more backlinks to your website, among them, being:

• Guest posting on reputable legal and local sites
• 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.

How can diib help with law firm SEO?

diib connects to your website and shows you, in plain English, what to fix next to improve how your firm shows up in search.

Implementing some of these SEO best practices for lawyers is actually an easy process. However, lawyers are really busy, which means you might lack time to execute and track all these SEO strategies. diib offers a user dashboard that simplifies the work by giving you a complete picture of your website’s performance and clear goals for improvement.

Here are some of the features that you’re sure to value:

• Keyword, backlink, and indexing monitoring and tracking tools
• Core Web Vitals monitoring with recommendations
• Bounce rate monitoring with fixes to try
• Facebook and Instagram Insights and YouTube video performance
• Broken pages where you have backlinks (404 checker)
• Technical SEO monitoring

Click here for your free 60-second site scan.