Law Firm SEO: 6 SEO Tips for Law Firms, Lawyers & Attorneys By James Tredwell on August 19, 2020 SEO, as we know, is a digital marketing effort to improve the website’s position on Google’s SERP (Search Engine Results Page). When your law firm website achieves a higher SERP ranking, it would translate into an increase in the organic search traffic to your website. More traffic to your website would translate into more potential clients, and so you can grow your law firm’s revenue in the process. So, yes, SEO is actually necessary if you want to generate more leads, more clients, and ultimately, more revenue. Yet, how can we implement SEO for a law firm website? Below, we will discuss six actionable tips you can implement right away. 1.Determine Your Law Firm’s Target Keywords Determining your target keyword(s) is the first and most crucial step in implementing SEO strategy. The more targeted your focus keywords are, the higher the chance you can generate qualified leads for your law firm. In defining your target keywords, there are three key principles to consider: Your target keyword must be relevant to your ideal audience. This is signified with a high enough monthly search volume. Your target keyword must be valuable and relevant for your business. Not all keywords that are relevant for your target audience might be valuable for your business. Depending on your budget and timeline, the competition for your target keyword must be manageable. Since your law firm is a brick and mortar business, you will most likely want to target local keywords (keywords related to your geolocation), for example, “divorce lawyers in New York”, “divorce lawyers in NY”, and so on. There are various tools that you can use to help in this aspect, from the free Google Trends and Google Keyword Planners to premium ones like SEMRush and Ahrefs. Use them to your advantage. 2. Optimize Your Site’s Structure Organize and group content, navigation, and URL structure to help your site’s SEO performance. Here are some general tips to follow: If your law firm specializes in only one service (i.e. litigation, divorce, etc.), then you’d probably want to use an exact-match domain name like “litigationnewyork.com”. However, Google is now a bit strict regarding the exact match domain, and we’d have to make sure the content of the site is high-quality and relevant to the domain name. If you run multiple services, then use a branded domain (the name of your firm) and avoid using an exact-match domain (again, you might get penalized). Add additional service pages for each service you offer, each targeting one keyword. The more pages you create, the more niche traffic you can capture. You can add sub-service pages to target long-tail searches. This can be effective in targeting long-tail traffic. If you have multiple locations, create separate pages for each location (don’t list your office locations on a single page). Add the city name into the URL for each office location, and make sure each page has unique content to avoid duplication issues. Ensure easy navigation for locations by adding a navigation menu at the top of your menu. So: For single-service law firm Aim for an exact-match domain name like “newyorkdivorcelaywers.com” For multi-service law firm Use your brand name like “smithandpartners.com” If you have multiple locations Divide by locations, for example, “smithandpartners.com/NY/our-services/” 3. Google Maps SEO Again, since a law firm is technically a local business, you should also aim to rank on Google Maps. Google Maps ranking won’t display your website directly, but rather, it will display your Google My Business listing. If you haven’t already, claim and verify your Google My Business listing. Optimizing your Google My Business listing so you can rank higher might seem complicated at first, but actually there are only three key factors involved: Optimizing your Google My Business listing: Include accurate NAP information (Name, Address, Phone Number) Description for your practice. You can include your focus keywords, but focus on providing comprehensive information for your target audience Include a link to your website at all times Connect to your social media profiles and also online review profiles Include as many photos as you can, make sure they are well-taken and optimized. Build local citations: list your law firm in as many legal citation sources like: Nolo Lawyers.com FindLaw Avvo Lawyers U.S. Legal Business directories on your location Encourage positive reviews: encourage your clients to leave positive reviews especially on Google Maps listing, but also on as many review sites as possible. It’s important to maintain consistency in information in optimizing your Google Maps SEO. That is, make sure you are using the same NAP information in all citations. If you move your office address, for example, then you’d have to update all your listings. Do these consistently, and your Google Maps ranking should climb steadily. 4. Optimize Your Site’s Technical Factors Technical SEO can be a very deep subject, and you can use this technical SEO checklist to optimize your law firm website. Yet, there are several key areas to focus on: Page speed: your website’s load time is very important. If your page is slow to load, a lot of people might leave your site, which will also hurt your SEO performance in the long run. Use Google’s PageSpeed Insight to analyze your site’s current performance, and optimize what you can. Mobile-friendly: make sure your law firm website is mobile responsive (at least, mobile-friendly). Nowadays this is as simple as upgrading your site’s Theme into a mobile-responsive one (if your site is WordPress-based). Indexability: check your site with Google Search Console and fix any crawl errors. Make sure your site is properly indexed by Google. Internal linking structure: interlink your pages to share the traffic across your website. A proper internal linking structure can also help with indexability. Structured data markup: implementing structured data (schema) markup on your site can help Google to understand all the different elements on your website, and allow your site to be eligible for rich snippets. 5. Competitive Analysis Remember that SEO is competitive by nature: you are attempting to beat your competitor’s position on the SERP. So, it would only make sense that we should closely look at our competitors when attempting our SEO. You should: Regularly search your target keywords and see which competitors moved up/down the SERP. Check your competitors’ approaches with their content. Your aim is to be better than this content or cover the topic from a different angle Check for keywords they’ve ranked for but your site hadn’t (keyword gaps), these can be your opportunities Check their websites’ performance Check their Google My Business listing (if any) Check their social media performance There are various tools like Ahrefs or SEMRush or even the free Google Analytics that can help you in performing SEO competitive analysis. Looking at how your competitors approach their strategy can provide more insights into what you can do to further optimize your own strategy. Don’t be ashamed to imitate and improve upon what they’ve done right, and avoid their mistakes. 6. Optimize Your CTAs Your job doesn’t stop when you’ve successfully generated more traffic through your SEO, but your objective is to convert these visitors into actual clients. This is why how and where you put your call to action (CTA) is very important. You should have a dedicated contact us page providing clear information on how to contact you. A common approach is to offer a free consultation that they can schedule directly on your page (and you’ll get their contact information in the process). However, you can also offer other things like in-depth content related to your services (i.e. if you are a divorce lawyer, you can offer an ebook detailing all the preparations they should have during the process). The idea is to offer something valuable (note: perceived as valuable by your prospect) so your website visitors are interested in scheduling an appointment or at the very least, provide their email address so you can follow-up. End Words With over 2 trillion searches being made on Google annually, ensuring your law firm site is positioned well on Google’s SERP is very important if you want to generate more traffic and potential clients to your website. This is done by optimizing your website so you can give Google clear indicators of who you are and what you do, leading to a higher position on the SERP and more traffic. Author Bio:- Mike Khorev is an SEO consultant who helps SaaS, software, IT, technology, B2B and startup companies generate more sales and grow revenue online.
