Law Firm SEO

Law Firm SEO

Best In Class Digital Marketing Services for Growing Law Firms
SCHEDULE A CALL →

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO SEO FOR LAW FIRMS

Referral's will always be a great source of revenue for any legal practice, but let's face it,  search engine optimization is just a smarter way to reach prospective client. The world has changed and regardless of what that means to you, we all use search engines to find what we need. Just consider the last time you needed information on anything? What did you do? Unless you've been living in a cave for the last decade, you searched for it.

While this simple concept is part of everyone's daily life. Most of the time, you never stop to consider how search engines work to provide that information so quickly and conveniently. If growing your legal practice is a priority, then this straight forward guide should help you understand why local search engine optimization for law firms is so important, and how to effectively market your business.

The Basic Applications of SEO

When  an individual searches for "lawyers near me" or "[insert practice] lawyer [insert city], the search engine will show them a SERP or Search Engine Results Page. SEO is simply the way in which you tell search engines your law firm should be in that first page of results. By improving your ranking, and optimizing the content in the listing you are making it more likely a prospective client will see your result, click on it and consider your firm as the right choice for their needs. A good local seo strategy lawyers will usually consist of a few different things:
  • Understanding your current online presence and your competition in the local market.
  • Making a number of improvements, which well provide, that helps you get noticed over your competitors.
  • A well executed seo plan that includes relevant and valuable content to those in need of your legal services.
Search engine optimization is a powerful part of any profitable internet marketing strategy that will produce long term benefits if your willing to make an in kind commitment. SEO doesn't just magically happen overnight. It takes time and skill. Should you choose to hire an expert SEO agency for law firms or take on the challenge yourself, our guide will help you understand the main things that should be considered in your legal marketing strategy.

The Most Important Focus Of SEO For Law Firms

Every lawyer looking to improve their SEO needs to understand one thing. Search engine optimization isn't just about finding the right keywords. The most important consideration for an SEO strategy is the intent of your customer (the person searching) and how you can help. To develop a winning SEO plan for your law firm you need to understand what that individual needs, and align that with what they find once they click.

To execute a successful SEO campaign, your law firms website will need:

01 Easy To Navigate

To put it simply, if your customer can't navigate your website and find what they need relatively quickly, how easy do you think it will be for Google, an algorithm that doesn't have the ability to make choices on it's own? If your website doesn't have good structure, it will have a hard time establishing trust with people and machines. A good rule of thumb is don't make it hard for people to do business with you.

02 Optimized Content

The name of the game for good SEO is keeping your website updated with relevant and helpful content. Making sure your content is helpful and making technical information easy for search engines to read, like tags, schema, will ensure you stand out over your competitors. Having a well thought out plan for your content will make this task much easier over the long run.

03 Relevant Backlinks

Search engines like Google, index information by crawling links. This enables it to process enormous amounts of information quickly. Whenever a link to your company is present on another website, the "relevance" of that websites content is considered, assigned a value, and then that value is passed to your site. This is called "Juice" in geek speak. Keywords and content sync with the needs of your customers, but links help the internet understand the relevance of your website. 

How To Start Improving Your Law Firm's SEO

You wouldn't go to court without reviewing the case files, so naturally, the first step in search engine optimization for any law firms website is to do an analysis. This can be a difficult task for even the most knowledgeable "Lawketer", which is why we help attorneys by providing a free SEO analysis tool for lawyers. Weather you choose to use our tool, or go a different route, here are the main things you need to check:
  1. Check for errors on your site by looking for any abandoned content. Usually this will be signaled by a 3 digit error code like 404, or 500.
  2. Content depth matters. Your website should focus on quality over quantity, you still need to have a certain amount of content on any page to be considered for ranking. The general minimum is 250 words or more, but we recommend a minimum 500 - 1000 words of content. This should help you stand out over any competitors with similar content. You can copy and paste your content into a word or google doc and perform a word count to check your content depth.
  3. Links, both internal and external need to work. It's that simple. Don't link to a page in your site that goes nowhere, and don't link to other websites that are dead. The latter is something you should keep an eye on over time, as you can only control the links on your firms website.
  4. Backlinks that point to your law firms website should be error free, from quality sites, and contain relevant text if linked in the words rather than the URL directly typed. Backlinks from toxic or unknown sites of low quality should be disavowed immediately.
  5. Speed is now considered a major factor by search engines. Search engines want to send it's users to sites that are fast on mobile devices as this is a good indicator of up to date relevant information. We'll cover optimizing page speed later, but for now, you should perform a check to see where you land.

On-Page SEO Checklist For Law Firms

A good way to understand on page SEO is to think of it like the bar association of digital marketing. It's the essential components of your website that have to pass certain requirements if it's to be considered an authority on any subject matter. Similar to the bar exam, there are tests of knowledge and skill, and others that seem to be nothing more than a measurement of how good you take tests. In any case, this on-site SEO check list for lawyer websites will ensure your well prepared and help you pass any SEO audit with flying colors.

Choosing The Right Keywords - There are a lot of great tools out there that can help you discover the right keywords to use when optimizing your website. You can look at your current top performing queries in Google My Business, and in Google Analytics. You can also use a keyword research tool, such as Ubbersuggest or Keywords Everywhere. You should check trending searches, search volume, what your competitors are using and make a list. The next step is to choose keywords that you think are most relevant to your business. These we'll call your "Target" keywords. Finally, you'll want to put those in a separate list and look at keywords that are related but not direct copies of your target keywords. These are called "secondary" or semantic keywords and when used in creating content for your law firm website, can help you create better information, plus rank for additional keywords.

Title Tags & Meta Descriptions - Title tags are the "titles" you see in search results and the words in your browsers tab when you visit a website. Think about these like the label on a case file. Next, we have meta descriptions, these are the detailed descriptions you see in search results and do not display anywhere except in the code of your website. These two components are MISSION CRITICAL for SEO. Without them, Google can't physically display your website in it's search results. These essentially tell search engines the nature of the content on your website and should include keywords from your keyword plan.

Headings Structure - The headings on a website are styled the same way they are used for creating a document. They help give direction to search engines for SEO and guide it on how your content is organized. Headings are tag's like H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6. Every website should have only one H1 tag per page, that includes the target keyword (or a variation) of the page and not be a direct copy of the title tag.

SEO Friendly Content - This is the written words on your website. Your content should be useful, informative, have strong word count, and follow the structure of your headings. Not every word on your website needs to be a keyword. Just use the target keywords naturally for the best results. This can be a major SEO challenge for lawyers. We have years of experience and practice writting content, and it's a major component of all Siren Digital Marketing SEO plans.

Secure Website - Having a secure website is one of the easiest SEO tasks you can implement. You'll want to make sure you have an SSL certificate on your domain. Free SSL certificates are common practice these days. If you need help setting us an SSL for your law firm website, just give us a call and we'd be happy to assist. On that note, you'll notice consent theme with on-page. Google want's it's users to have a good experience. If your have a secure and fast website, you have a better user experience. Same with organization. So while all this may seem technical or irrelevant, trust us, on-page optimization is necessary if you want your law firm to reap the benefits of SEO.

Sitemap, Analytics and Search Console - Once you've optimized your website for on-page SEO and filled it with helpful content, Google actually provides you with a free tool called Google Search Console. In search console, you can take your websites sitemap and actually submit it directly to Google as if to say, ok "were open for business, please go ahead and index us". Got it? Good. While your at it, please install Google Analytics, which is free and will track all activity on your website for future enhancements. If you'd like free help setting up analytics, search console, or creating a sitemap, contact our office and we'd be happy to help your law firm with it's SEO efforts.

Calls to Action - If you've gotten this far, great. Take a break for a second and look up in the top right of the screen. See that big CONTACT US BUTTON, that's called a call to action. Calls to action should be placed strategically throughout the website. People generally skim information before reading in depth, and some don't read anymore than that. For this reason, and because you just want to make it easy for people to do business with you, don't forget to pace good calls to action in your content. 

Off-Page SEO Strategy for Lawyer Websites

Off page SEO optimization refer's to the work done outside of your law firms website that can help your websites authority and improve rankings as a result. This includes building links from from social media sites, map sites, and other online sources that are considered trustworthy. Great examples of off page seo optimization would be listing your law firm on Google my business and in Google Maps. Off page optimization also helps you build a more diverse link profile over time.

Building Off-Page SEO for Attorneys

Your link profile is the sum of all links that point back to your law firms website. In a perfect world, a diverse variety of healthy links pointing to your website from trustworthy and credible sources will help your law firms SEO strategy move out of obscurity and into abundance. Link building and off page optimization accounts for roughly 50%-60% of all SEO ranking factors. There are many ways your law firm can start building backlinks. Some are easier than others. With that, let's explore the ways in which your can start creating a healthy link profile.

  • Google My Business
  • Directory Listings
  • Google, Apple, and BING Maps
  • Social Media Profiles
  • Lawyer Referral Websites
  • Guest Blogs
  • Online Directories
Finally, let's look at how Social Media impacts SEO. While most links on social media are considered "no-follow" meaning they don't pass juice to your website directly, content shared on social media like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube get's share, likes, clicks, ect. The engagement your content get's on social media makes your content relevant. The more clicks, shares, and views, the more relevant the content is from an SEO perspective. YouTube is especially powerful in this regard, because your can optimize the descriptions of your YouTube videos and actually get them to rank as well.
youtube seo for lawyers

Measuring SEO for Attorney's

By now, you have everything you need to start improving your law firm SEO. But how will you know if what your doing is working or not? There's a few key things you'll want to stay on top of to measure the results of your SEO.

Traffic - With Google Analytics, you can watch your traffic grow over time as you start to improve your SEO and keyword rankings.

Keyword Rankings -There are a lot of free tools out there to help track keywords and great paid ones too. A few suggestions are Ubbersuggest and Keywords Everywhere. You can also use Google's Search Console to see what keywords your shown for.

Leads - This can be a little tough if you don't have any systems in place to track form submissions and phone calls. We partner with CallRail accurate tracking of all leads for our clients and integrate it directly into our reporting system.

SEO Friendly Content - This is the written words on your website. Your content should be useful, informative, have strong word count, and follow the structure of your headings. Not every word on your website needs to be a keyword. Just use the target keywords naturally for the best results. This can be a major SEO challenge for lawyers. We have years of experience and practice writing content, and it's a major component of all Siren Digital Marketing SEO plans.

Google My Business - Google My Business shows stats about your companies branded search, which is a great indicator of how well your SEO is doing.

Being able to track and measure the efforts of your SEO will help you make better business decisions about your overall law firm marketing strategy in the future. Of course, were always here to help for those that want an expert SEO strategy for their legal practice.

Local SEO For Lawyers

A local SEO strategy effectively executed will allow your law firm to appear in more local searches – both in Google Map results and Google’s organic search engine listings. The application of such a strategy can help you gain links, new reviews, and citations on a monthly basis, in addition to new prospects and clients. At Siren Digital Marketing, we implement highly effective local SEO services for lawyers that deliver the ultimate result – new clients for your law firm.

Local SEO Services for Lawyers

We develop custom strategies and utilize proven SEO techniques to drive more on gaining traffic to your law firm website, attracting greater numbers prospective clients. We do this by propelling your law firm website to the top listings in Google and other search engines.

Initially, we gain a solid understanding of your practice and the clients you are seeking. We then perform a competitive analysis of your local market to determine where your website presence is currently positioned against other law firms serving the same area – your competition. From this, we determine where we need to position your site in order to achieve the ranking and traffic you need.

Our SEO services include the following:
  • Competitive Analysis
  • Search Engine Traffic Analysis
  • On-site SEO
  • Link Building
  • Local/offsite SEO
  • Social Media Campaign Integration

Benefits of Local SEO for Lawyers

As a digital marketing firm that understands the local marketing needs of law firms, our local SEO services for attorneys can help you gain visibility to new clients, generate leads, increase revenue and ROI, and beat your competitors.

To learn more about the local SEO services for lawyers we offer for local law firms, give us a call today (651) 760-7888 or send us a message through our contact form.
Share by: