Most of your potential clients are on Google seeking for legal help. You miss out on them if your law firm doesn’t appear on search results. That is how SEO for a law firm works and this is why you need SEO for your practice. When people seek for legal advice online, they mostly hire the services of law firms near them.
The good news is that you can optimize your website to capture your target leads and convert them as customers. In this blog post, we will explore the basic steps of SEO for lawyers along with the specific strategies that you can incorporate into your website to show up in search engine results. Before delving into the step-by-step SEO strategies for lawyers, let us tackle first what is SEO.
SEO for Lawyers: Definition
SEO for lawyers is the practice of optimizing your law firm websites to increase search rankings and ultimately capture leads. If your law firm appears in the top search engine results, you’ll increase your chances of being found by your target audience.
SEO is a natural way of improving your search rankings without involving ads. Once your target audience finds your website link within the organic search results, they’ll reach out to you for your legal services.
While SEO helps increase your website ranking, it can be challenging to get your law firm website to the top search results. There’s no foolproof guarantee to secure your website ranking since the search engine algorithm changes constantly to provide users the ultimate experience.
The good thing is that there are plenty of ways you can increase your website ranking and generate traffic to your website. It becomes easy to get ahead in the competition once you can understand how SEO works.
Why is SEO for Lawyers Important?
Organic search traffic is an important channel that can be overlooked. In research conducted by Legal Trends Report, 17% of legal consumers looked for a lawyer via an online search. A separate study revealed that 74% of consumers visit a law firm’s website to take action. Those who optimize their website for mobile search can generate 31% website traffic.
SEO for a law firm can be strenuous especially if you haven’t invested in this kind of marketing. However, it is an important factor to get your message across to your target audience.
SEO can be broken down into three main components:
On-page SEO – These are the elements that you see on your website including the content, images, and metadata.
Off-page SEO – Any strategies involved outside your website are considered off-page SEO. These strategies could be social media shares, backlinks from other websites, and client reviews.
Technical SEO – These optimizations help Google discover and crawl your web pages more easily.
On-Page SEO for Law Firm
Looking at your on-page element is one of the first steps towards increasing your search ranking. Pay attention to the following:
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- Conduct extensive keywords for your website. Look for informational and transactional keywords to educated, inform, attract and nurture your target audience.
- Integrate these keywords in your content. Ensure that the keywords are incorporated contextually and naturally.
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- Make sure to include your location or target city on your website for local SEO.
- Create a unique landing page if you have multiple locations. This way, you can target your local audience in each location.
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- Produce compelling content that answers your target audience question. You can also write case studies and blogs. Focus on your practice area and topics that resonate with your audience.
- Check your metadata and make sure that you incorporate your keywords and location in your meta title and description.
Off-page SEO for Law firm
Backlinks are the backbone of SEO. The more authoritative websites that link to your law firm, the more trustworthy you become. When you build your link profile, consider these tips:
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- Assess your links. You can use tools to check your link profile. Check for unique active backlinks that affect your Google ranking directly or indirectly. These unique links are from different IP addresses which are indexed by Google in the last 90 days.
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- Check your link influence score and make sure it’s high
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- Evaluate your anchor text. Make sure that the anchor text is relevant keywords. You must diversify your anchor texts.
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- Remove links that can harm your website. These harmful links include websites that have 0 or N/A Page
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- Ranking, links from referring domain names with little traffic.
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- Conduct a manual link removal campaign to delete links that are harmful to your website.
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- Use Google Disavow Links Tool to remove the links if you are unsuccessful in getting rid of unhealthy links.
Technical SEO for Law Firm
The goal is to improve your users’ experience and help search engines like Google find your website. Technical SEO doesn’t directly affect your lawyer SEO but it can help you increase your rankings as you enhance your user experience.
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- Ensure your schema markup is set up and tested.
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- Improve your metadata.
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- Work on your site speed. Optimize your media and content to make sure your law firm website loads fast or else you’ll risk an increased bounce rate. Bounce rate is the number of visitors who navigate away from your website after visiting one page.
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- Encrypt your data using an SSL certificate. Many hosting providers handle your SSL certificate. An SSL certificate secures your data by encrypting it.
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- Fix site errors from a broken link to link redirects. Site errors can negatively impact your user experience.
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- Enhance site structure. Ensure that your users can get to any of your web pages in 4 clicks or less.
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- Consider a flat site structure to help your users navigate to your website much easier.
The Bottom line
Some of these strategies can be implemented by yourself while others require the help of an expert. You must dedicate a good amount of time to see through your SEO campaign. Legally SEO can help improve your search ranking as we tackle all aspects of your law firm website.
