Ultimate SEO Guide For Law Firms in 2019

  Su sanna    March 25, 2019    784

 

Looking for more clients online to your law firm? Using SEO to reach the top of the search engines is a common way, to get in front of the targeted audience and the best way to drive more traffic to your Law Firm

Still, “Why my website should be at the top of Google”, the question is hanging on your mind?

Assume you need a service or good, likewise a lawyer or dentist, How will you find them? You automatically browse on Google and when you search, you automatically click on the first or second result on the 1st page.

According to stats,the top organic search yield 30 of clicks and whereas the click rate is 14% if the position number is 2 

So, it is incredibly important to stay on the 1st page of Google. So, it is incredibly important to stay on the 1st page of Google, since the SERP will display 4 paid ads, 3 local search results, 10 organic results, and 3 paid result at the bottom of the page.

If you are looking to hire a marketing expert to do legal SEO for your firm, then we would love to give you a free SEO analysis report. If you are looking to do SEO on your own, this ultimate guide will provide you with tips and strategies you need to understand.

 

SEO For Law Firms

To improve the visibility of your law firm, you must enhance search engine optimization on your website.

Concentrate on page indexing

Get the pages of your law firm properly indexed, appearing in the SERP that shows you in front of your prospective clients.

Your law firm website is the key to successful SEO, and your legal SEO campaign should include metrics like

What are you waiting for?

Become the modern law firm your client want and Increase your profits by using our Law Firm SEO Rankings Methodologies

GET A FREE QUOTE

 

Keyword Research

You should do keyword research

For your site and should add the relevant keywords on the same 

To have Good Traffic

To have high level of competition 

Keyword research includes utilising professional tools and tacts to explore the many varied ways people are using to search for the legal services you render. Though there are plenty of free tools providing free research ideas, I recommend you to go for paid tools or lend to experts who propose SEO for Law Firms. Some of the tools recommended for your keyword research are Google Keyword Planner ,Ahref ,SEMrush,KWFinder,SPYfu etc

Execute research and analyze the keywords detected for commercial intent. Of course! the terms with commercial intent may have less traffic comparing to other terms, but they have their own advantages as you can easily rank for the terms, and they possess a high conversion rate as people are seeking services rather than just a piece of information

Here you can have a look at the screenshot which is an example of a keyword with commercial intent. This keyword “Florida legal services” is entered as a search term an average of 390 times per month.

You have to research keywords with research intent. These often arise with interrogations like “why” or”how” people endeavour answers to queries searching on these terms. Incorporating the content with these keywords will make sense in blog posts, case studies, videos and white papers.

you can also seek help from us  to choose the relevant keyword which will help you avoid spam. If you are a beginner in WordPress website, we recommend our  web service for your legal firm

 

Website Restructuring

This phase deals with creating fresh content targeting

Your audience along with the inclusion of your targeted keywords

setting easy navigation

Making a user-friendly website

along with other SEO strategies

The basic requirement is, you should have a website which is responsive. If you have, you can scroll down to explore how to optimize, or you can find us here to help you with your website.

Having a mobile-friendly site structure and the content placed in an organized way within the website’s structure is important. You should organize and structure your website in such a way that it makes an easy way for the user to access the information they need. 

The potential client of yours has to find the service you render. Make the clients access your services easily by placing it left to the main navigation bar. You can find the example here

Source: Raphaelson & Levine Law Firm

Though you might have the curiousness to tell people about you, your practice pages are the first thing your users like to know. Those pages are the ones you have to really rank for, and having them in a more prominent way send trustworthy signals to search engines. The click pattern of various client websites is that the visitors go first to the practice page followed by attorney profiles and about us pages.

You can also render good quality experience for your users through good UX on your site. If your website is easy to use, automatically the spend time of the users on your site will be more which reflects in the effectiveness of your SEO.  Search engines like Google, notice how much time people spend on your every page and also it monitors the engagement metrics.

 

Optimize URLs

You can optimize your URL with the help of your selected keywords. Use the selected keywords in your URL without overuse. Some law firms use the term “Criminal Defense” on their URL which they are targeting for their websites.  For Instance, they might use www.domainname.com/criminal-defense-attorney-about-us.You shouldn’t confuse from keyword usage to keyword stuffing which affects your efforts of SEO. A better URL for the same about us page will be www.domain-name.com/about-law-firm.

For better understanding, I had added two screenshots below which gives you an idea of how to optimize each page of your practice areas. Your personal injury services page would be www.domain-name.com/personal -injury lawyers.

Your motor vehicle accident attorneys services page would be www.domain-name.com/motor -injury lawyers.

 

Blogging

Blog plays an important role in SEO strategy, particularly for the law firms. Google rewards for the sites that update the fresh content regularly. Including a blog on your law firm website will allow you to focus on your targeted keywords and you can rank the same using your blog post.As I mentioned earlier, the search phrase “Florida legal services” currently has 390 searches a month. You can use this term in your blog and even can write a blog on it t target your prospects.

You can also write a blog post on the title and even can include the geographical tags like “California”, “Florida” or “Texas” if you are targeting for the long tail keyword like, “how to choose criminal defense attorney”.  If your blog post is clear about the particular topic, it tells how well versed you are on that topic and also it helps your audience to gain information resulting in engagement metrics.

You will have multiple audiences for your blog posts like potential clients, users who visit your site will read it, you can recommend to people who need this information, and you can share the blog post on social media and also can build the link to your article. Keep on updating the website with fresh content, paves a way to build the social audience and also keeps the google busy in crawling and indexing your page for the search terms you are targeting.

Another thing to consider in blog writing is long-form blog posts. One of the content marketing strategies is writing a quality long blog post. Recently, Search engines like Google are rewarding for long-term content, so you can incorporate some blog posts covering all aspects you are willing to project to your audience. Try to write the article at least 2000 words in length. Some of the benefits of the long-form  post include:

  • You will be positioned as an expert when your posts are long.
  • Long posts often rank highly and are more evident.
  • Engagement metrics by your audience will be more.
  • Social media shares will be more for the long-form posts.
  • Gaining inbound links for long-post will be comparatively more.
  • You can share information with the people who are new to the subject and also to the people who are aware of the subject as well.

In your long-form blog, you can include contents like FAQs, quotes, checklists, testimonials, reviews, videos of how to do and much more. Avoid using copied content on your site. You can check using the tool for the plagiarised content on your page at plagiarism checker. Your blog is where you can be powerful and be visible as a linkable asset. This is the place where other sites will link to yours, and it is important especially for legal SEO.

 

Page Speed

Page speed is one of the most important ranking factors for SEO. Once it was only the desktop searches and now it’s for mobile too. If your page delivers the slowest experience, then it leads to a negative impact. Especially for your law firm, you should keep page speed in mind.

You should optimize your site speed in such a way that it satisfies both the user and the Google. If so your possible client is worried about the legal issue, and at the same time if your website is also taking long, then definitely they will move to your competitor site. The slowest page will be less visible in Google and will definitely hit a double whammy.

Not sure about your page speed?

In addition, if your pages are among the slowest to load, you’ll be hit with a double whammy: less visibility in Google and potential clients fleeing to your competitor’s site. If you’re interested in more information about page speed, we’ve done a deep dive here. You can test your site at Page Speed Insights.

By using the Perecman Firm as an example, you can see the following information.

You can check your’s and also your competitors’ page speeds with the help of Page Insights Tool.

Another tool I recommend you to use to check the speed of the page is GTMetrix.com.

 

Engaging Content

One of the main on page factor is quality content. You must have great content for your law firm to rank well in the search engine. What else you want to have other than the home page?

First, you have to create a landing page that highlights the services you render, and also it should link to various pages of your specialities. Having the landing page alone will not help you to pull the client. You should have the service page that links out to each service page you render. Make sure that all the services you provide are given equal importance.

Here is an example of a service page that includes high-level keywords in the service page and it navigates the user to each service page they are in need. Ensure you have a clear CTA button that helps users to get what they want.

Here is another example of a landing page which much keywords in it.

If you are free offerings, then it’s time to highlight the same for your potential client.

If you are having multiple locations, you can create a landing page for the locations clearly mentioning the locations, and how can you contact each office. Using individual location pages and offering quality content in each page will give you an opportunity to use geo-targeted keywords.

Create a compelling story on your website’s about us section. Have a look at a law firm website and see how they had constructed the about us page for each attorney over there.

Also, try to include the testimonials and reviews in your site. Don’t limit them particularly to specific pages. Try to do with all of your potential clients. 84% of people believe online reviews, Stats reveals that 74% believe the positive replies and 54% of the visits occur after viewing the positive reviews of the company.

Google rewards for long quality content. I recommend you to use quality enriched content for your service page around 1,000 words at least. Incorporate FAQ page in your website, include checklist & bulleted lists in your site.  Adding rich snippets and providing the content in points or bulletins will make Google pull your content and displays it in the higher top- ranking organic position.

After writing the content you have to optimize the title and should do SEO practices for the same. Usage of HI tag for the posts is recommended.

Here is an example of usage of H1 tag

 

Back-End Website Optimization

When you optimize your site on the backend,  they will not be visible on your site, but it reflects and plays a very important role in the SEO strategy. Let me give an example of how it works: Assume a potential client of yours surfs for ” personal injury attorney Houston” in Google. Organic search results will be shown like:

Whenever you do search in Google, you receive search results like these. You have apparently become so accustomed to viewing them that you hardly even think about how they became together.

The green line tells the URL of the page:

https://www.justia.com/lawyers/personal-injury/texas/houston

Note how “personal injury attorney” shows up in URL. In some cases, the URL return results with state and city too. You can also observe how Google is showing up a result where the searcher intent matches with the URL.

The blue line at the top of the search result is referred to the title tag and it also includes the keyword & geographic areas. The text which is shown in black color is referred to as meta description that tells the Google what the page is about. You can write the meta description for each and every page you write. Make sure the text you write corresponds to the title tag.

WordPress allows you to incorporate the titles and meta descriptions in an easy way. You can use 50-60 characters in title and 160 in the meta description. Adding more in number will not be shown in the SERP.

Here is an example of how the title gets truncated.

The Meta description that you write for your law firm may not impact ranking, but a unique one or compelling description definitely will. You know that ten results will be shown up if so your meta description is unique.

 

Local SEO For Lawyers

You should implement SEO strategies

To draw your local prospects through Local SEO

Focus well on Local SEO

so that you will be in front of your targeted prospects.

Implementing Local SEO for your law firm requires optimization of your specific locations. Suppose you work for multiple locations, then you should have a separate page that links to all the locations you serve. If you are successful in this than your competitors, then definitely you will appear in top position than your competitors. Here is an example of those search results. I had searched “criminal defence attorney new york”, a map appeared which pinpoints the specific locations of the three high- ranking attorneys in local search. 

LINK BUILDING

To get the number of traffics, links, and to be ranked well in Google search engine page, you should acquire high-quality, authoritative backlinks from various sorts of relevant websites.

There are many SEO strategies to incorporate in your website, you can read further to know more. If you still stuck with many questions, you can contact us or read our SEO service for lawyers

Here you can observe the analysis of inbound link for the same domain. (avvo.com)

You can also get more quality inbound links by getting listed in quality directories for lawyers.

You can list them freely, whereas some have a fee. You can look at some of the free directories you can consider.

  • FindLaw.com – DA score of 91
  • Justia.com – DA score of 89
  • AVVO.com – DA score of 83
  • Nolo.com – DA score of 81
  • HG.org – DA score of 67
  • Lawyers.USLegal.com – DA score of 65
  • BestLawyers.com – DA score of 61
  • Lawyer.com – DA score of 57

If so you had already listed but incorrect, then it’s time for you to fix.

Link building is the best off-page SEO tactic. When you have a link from healthy sites, Google considers you as one of the trustworthy sites and rewards you accordingly in ranking factors. Other ways in which you can gain inbound links to your law firm is getting visible in online news sources.

Creating innovative and high-quality content is also a key source which can be referred to as a linkable asset. If you provide sharable content then definitely other would link to it.

You can try a guest blog which allow links to your own site.  The successful strategy for guest blogging is you can provide law-related news to other sites which are in need. One of the example site, where you can approach for a guest post is AttorneyAtWork. It is related to the niche you are targeting, Moreover, you can further research whether the link they provide does follow or no-follow. You can even pitch content for the sites where do not target attorneys as their audiences. Targeting your prospects is important but if the site has high DA, then you can consider them for the backlink benefits. consider them for the backlink benefits.

You should be careful in link building since low-quality inbound links may lead to spam and might hurt your SEO works. You can also use Google’s disavow tool to avoid negative impact. We also recommend you to consult an SEO Specialist  before trying all these techniques.

 

Evaluate Your Results

It is significant to evaluate the result you gain through the SEO tactics.

The measure of the result includes an increase in site traffic, analysis of a particular page that receives much traffic, number of inbound links to the sites and their quality.

You can observe and evaluate all these results using Google Analytics and search console as well. Try to implement these strategies as you explore more from your results.

Eager to stay top on Google?

Imprint your footprint in SEO strategies or hire the experts for your legal SEO Campaign.

Marketing has been modernized, and moreover, consumers are surfing online for lawyers or attorneys.

They will hire you, only when you are found in the place they are searching for. Incorporating comprehensive SEO strategies can help you to acquire prospective clients.

Feel free to ring us for any queries or even for a free consultation that gives a way for client acquisition.

 

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 Article keywords:
Attorney Marketing, Attorney SEO, SEO, Law Firm SEO

 


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