Benefits of SEO for Law Firm

SEO

Whether your law firm business has only started to grow, or you have a renowned law firm known for excellent legal services, you should still dedicate time to digital marketing.

Organic search traffic often goes overlooked as a marketing channel but having a good SEO for your law firm is slowly becoming essential. The 2019 Legal Trends Report shows that as much as 17% of all legal consumers found their lawyer via online search, putting internet research in second place only to referrals.

However, managing SEO in any type of business structure can be tricky and complicated, especially for small law firms without a marketing department to take care of this task. Also, having a marketing department doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll have a good marketing strategy for your law firm.

And if you decide to take matters into your own hands, you’ll find out soon enough that digital marketing and SEO is not as easy as it sounds and can quickly devour the time you can’t afford to lose.

What Is SEO for Lawyers?

SEO or search engine optimization is a way to drive more visitors to your business’s website. This can help you increase your website’s rank in search engine results.

Now let’s translate that into the ”common folks” language. Most people search for things online by entering something on search engines like Google, Bing, or others. Once the results are presented, almost everyone stays on the first page of results since these results are the most relevant for the inquiry, meaning they are exactly what you’re looking for.

If your law firm appears in the first few search engine results, it can increase the number of visitors to your website. The problem with law firms is that there are so many of them. Because there are so many lawyers out there, there is no guarantee you’ll be able to join the ”good crowd” on the first page.

Here’s where SEO for lawyers can make a difference and increase your law firm’s visibility. There are seral SEO ranking factors for law firms that can dramatically improve your chances of being among the top five search results.

SEO Ranking Factor #1: Content

• Your content has to answer the user’s inquiry

If someone enters ”car accident attorney in Los Angeles” in the search engine, your content needs to reflect that inquiry. Therefore, the content on your website should give information like the location of your law firm and your practice area.

These are just some questions your website should provide answers to. By giving preliminary answers to your clients, you can get more visitors to your website since Google likes to send users to the best place to find answers to their questions.

• Your content should be keyword optimized

When search engines evaluate your website, they send automated bots to read the content so that they can place you into a category (in this case, the legal industry).

Keywords are the key to making your website relevant to both your clients and search engines. This is why choosing the correct keywords can improve the performance of your website.

In addition, those keywords should be placed in the correct places on the page: title tag, description tag, headings, and subheadings, throughout the text on the page and in the web page’s URL.

• Your content should use a variety of keywords

One of the most important parts of SEO for law firms is finding the correct primary keyword. Once you do, you can play around with the variation of that word or long-tail forms of the same keyword.

For example, while some clients say ”car accident claim”, others say ”car accident case”. By using both variations, you can reach a more significant number of clients. This way, you can create content that can address greater online inquiries.

SEO Ranking Factor #2: Backlinks and Off-Page Citations

The worldwide web is a pretty big pond with so much content your website content can be hard to find. The trick is to use backlinks as referral links on other websites, leading back to your law firm’s website. But, of course, all roads lead to Rome, so having plenty of backlinks will create many roads leading back to your business’s website.

Optimizing local SEO for law firms is done with backlinks placed on websites where business information is displayed (citations). Those off-page citations can improve your local SEO but finding places where you can get those types of citations is a job for a great SEO marketing team.

They’ll probably research local directories, legal directories, and reviews and endorsements on other websites and social media profiles.

SEO Ranking Factor #3: Technical SEO

An excellent digital marketing strategy powered by unique SEO content means nothing if your Technical SEO is in disarray. Technical SEO is what keeps your law firm afloat in the digital marketing sea. In simple terms, technical SEO is what makes your website ”Google-friendly”, reviewing your security and sitemaps and other Google guidelines that are complicated to do correctly.

Technical SEO can, in fact, be so complex and challenging to execute most law firms are opting to hire an SEO consultant for a law firm Technical SEO.

Hiring an SEO Expert to Manage Your Law Firm’s SEO

Having a good SEO on your website can do wonders for your business, but it is a time-consuming task. Most attorneys simply don’t have enough time to master the basics of this discipline, and that’s where SEO experts come in handy.

Now here’s the irony- the best SEO experts are hard to find since their websites rarely come up on the first page.

Shocking, certainly, but these people are simply too busy managing (and quite successfully at that) other people’s websites to dedicate time to their own. The best way to find a good law firm SEO expert is to ask another lawyer for a referral.