Search engine optimization is important to help businesses succeed. Whatever niche or industry you have, SEO is crucial for lead acquisition, sales conversions, and customer relationships.

Optimizing your law firm website and its off-site properties allows you to inform search engines and your target customers a clear message on what you do and who you are.

Clear messages can lead to improved search ranking, more organic web traffic, improved leads and sales. 

Potential clients are already looking for law firms online. 96% of people who need lawyers will start their search online. About 76% of consumers will visit a law firm’s website to take action.

 Having comprehensive SEP strategies doesn’t just help your site ranking, it also builds your reputation. If you are new to SEO, here are SEO for law firm tips to boost your position:

 

1. Comply with American Bar Association

 

Refer to the American Bar Association before starting any digital marketing strategy on your law firm website. Make sure you comply with their advertising rules.

The ABA advertising rules prevent law firms from making misleading and vague claims that can’t be backed by any evidence.

ABA rules also prevent legal marketing teams from exaggerating a lawyer’s qualifications or claiming misleading information about their practice area. Refer to state bar advertising laws too so you can personalize your advertising.

 

2. Check Your Law Firm’s Target Keywords

 

Determining the highly converting keywords is necessary for optimizing your website. The more specific and targeted your keywords, the more you attract qualified leads and increase your traffic.

When choosing keywords, think about the kind of searches you want your website to rank for.

Think of your main areas of practice and the searches related to the areas of practice. Make sure to refine your topics to align your areas of practice more closely.

There are plenty of keyword tools you can use to generate relevant keywords. These tools will show you the popularity of searches, amount of competition, and additional suggested keywords.

 

3. Optimize for Local Search

 

Local SEO increases search visibility for businesses that serve clients face-to-face. Optimizing your website for local search involves using different tactics and techniques to improve your business rankings on local search.

A local search takes place when a user includes a local keyword in their search or uses a local location in their search.

There are plenty of ways you can optimize your website for local search including claiming business listing or citation management. Claiming a business listing ensures that your law firm location will appeal in a local Google search

Getting local reviews from your customers, managing online ratings, and managing your social media locally is also a great way to optimize your website for local search.

 

4. Check Your Competition

 

Use the keywords you’ve generated and see where you rank compared to your competition. Competitor analysis gives you an idea of what your competition is doing.

Benchmark from your competition and check how they optimize keywords, content, and structure their website to get better ranks.

Checking your competitors’ websites gives you insights into what they do to improve their visibility, rankings, and conversion.

Take advantage of these tactics, refine the techniques and implement them on your law firm websites.

 

5. Make Your Website Mobile-Optimized

 

It is crucial to make your website mobile optimized with Google’s mobile-first indexing. Mobile-first indexing means that Google will use the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking.

Google Search will continue to show the URL that is the most appropriate to users.

If a website is moved to mobile indexing and has issues such as lazy-loading website speed, poor image quality, and different image URLs between desktop and mobile version, your site rankings will be negatively affected. 

 

6. Optimize your on-page elements

 

On-page SEO refers to the optimization of your website from images, metadata to site speed. Your title tags, meta descriptions, and images play a great role in boosting your rankings.

Optimize these on-page elements using your keywords. It is also important to also provide quality content as part of your on-page optimization.

Make sure that the content is easy to share and access otherwise it will deter your potential readers from visiting the page.

It’s also a great idea to simplify your URL to make it easier for the search engine to crawl your pages.

 

7. Build Healthy Back Links

 

Great backlinks are the backbone of SEO. You can start building great links within your website through internal linking. Internal linking refers to linking from one page of your website to another.

Doing so allows low-performing content in your website to get exposure. Interlinking also increases page views and page sessions on your website.

You can also entice a website to link to your website by producing great content. People would love to link to relevant websites that deliver value.

 Besides great content, you can also build links by following white hat SEO techniques. You can submit your websites to online directories such as Yelp, Linked In, and Facebook.

Answering questions on websites such as Quora is also a great way to build your reputation and your expose your website to potential customers. 

As a lawyer, you likely have a profile with your state’s Bar Association website and aggregator websites including Justia and SuperLawyer. Make sure to optimize your profile on these websites.

This will help potential clients find your law firm. Additionally, building your profile on these websites boost your rankings and builds your authority.

 

8. Clean Bad and Broken Links

 

Broken and bad links can harm your ranking factors. Make sure to conduct a regular assessment of your links and make sure to redirect, delete or update them.

You can use free tools online to check your bad links and clean them. Search engines and SEO practices are constantly evolving and it is essential to keep up with the trends if you want your law firm website to rank online.

Following these SEO tips above can help boost your ranking, generate leads, and turn them into clients.

However, SEO can be a tedious task. You can hire the help of SEO professionals to offload these tasks from your hands and focus on your business.