SEO For Lawyers: Best Practices To Get More Clients
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your law firm website’s position on search engine pages, typically by enhancing your site content’s authority and quality.
By creating a professional, high-quality site that’s easy to browse and full of useful content, your target audience is more likely to visit your site. The more people who visit your site, the greater the chances that they’ll avail of your legal services.
A visually polished website is only the beginning of building SEO friendliness. Keep reading to learn how we can help you get more visitors and turn them into paying clients through SEO.
Types Of Services
Need to boost your law office or firm’s site traffic and search results? These are the types of SEO services we offer that can improve your search engine rankings and generate highly qualified leads:
Keyword Research
Keyword research identifies the terms and questions (a.k.a. “queries”) your potential clients are typing into search engines like Google. Proper keyword research helps create an outlet that makes it easier for an audience to reach you.
Examples of useful queries to include as keywords in your site content include those about potential purchases or legal issues, such as:
- “dog bite attorney near me”
- “should you hire a personal injury lawyer”
- “what to do after a truck accident”
Keyword research improves and influences other aspects of search engine optimization, such as creating high-quality content and converting leads.
On-Page Optimization
On-page optimization ensures that your site’s pages have valuable and relevant tags, content, and internal links for higher rankings on search engine pages. Also known as on-site SEO, this process informs Google of your page’s topic.
Through on-page optimization, you create a valuable, information-rich site where visitors can quickly find relevant content. This improves your chances of converting traffic into actual clients.
Link Building
Simply put, link building is the process of getting links from other sites that lead to your own website. These links that you get through this practice are known as “backlinks”. The more of these you get, the more traffic you drive to your site and the more potential clients you can convert.
Quality link building relies on making relevant, high-quality content that compels other site owners to link to it. Simple link building strategies that improve your site’s optimization include getting listed in online legal directories, testimonial link building, blogging, and creating useful infographics that site owners may use as a reference.
Some link building strategies have been overused, causing them to be marked as spam by other sites or devalued as links by major search engines like Google. We can craft the right link building strategy for your law firm’s site so you avoid these pitfalls, get more mentions, build more trust, and rise in search engine result rankings.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO refers to the practices that improve a website’s technical aspects. This allows search engines to effectively find, understand, and index your website correctly. It could also involve speeding up page loading so site visitors don’t get frustrated and leave your site.
Technical SEO isn’t involved in your website’s content but in its infrastructure. By using this service, you can get a much more SEO-friendly site.
Web Design
Web design is the process of creating a user-friendly site that makes a good first impression on site visitors. High-quality web design incorporates compelling copy, mobile-friendliness, easy navigation, and other content-improving practices. This process shapes other people’s perceptions of your firm and helps you gain more clients.
Local SEO
Local SEO is a strategy that helps your legal services and firm become more visible on local search results for engines like Google.
Local SEO revolves around improving a site’s prominence through practices like posting relevant content, accumulating reviews, and inclusion of consistent information and all areas served. This could include creating a professional Google My Business page and getting positive reviews on third-party sites like Yelp, Better Business Bureau (BBB), and Facebook.
Content Writing
Content writing is the process of creating informative, relevant, and highly authoritative content. Good content educates and engages your audience, telling them more about your legal services and its offerings like discounts and benefits.
The main goal of content writing is to reach your potential leads, build trust so they contact your firm, and convert them into paying clients. Good content writing also encourages other sites to organically link to your page, increasing the number of people who read your content.
Reporting And Analysis
Reporting and analysis give you immediate insight into the effectiveness of your SEO strategies as well as allow you to analyze your site data and performance. This means you’ll be able to see which strategies should be retained and which need to be tweaked further. Through reports, you’ll understand your target audience better and be able to provide a greater return on investment (ROI) for your firm.
The Benefits Of SEO For Law Firms
With good SEO practices, law firms can reap the following business and professional reputation benefits:
- Improved firm visibility and reputation: A strong SEO strategy puts you higher in the search page results, making your firm more visible and more top-of-mind for your target audience. It also enhances your reputation by showing that you provide useful information and value your clients.
- Increased site conversion: A good user experience and useful content will create trust with your target audience, increasing the likelihood of successfully convincing them to hire you.
- Outranking your main competition: An SEO-friendly website helps make you rank ahead of your competitors on search engines, so your target audience will be more likely to visit your site first and hire you for legal services.
Best Practices For Lawyer-Focused SEO Campaigns
- Have a practice area page: This page acts as your sales pitch, so it should provide clients with relevant information about your legal services and explanations of relevant state laws. For example, if you’re a personal injury lawyer, your practice area page should have useful information about personal injury law in your state, who may be considered at-fault parties, and the statute of limitations.
- Aim for longer content on your pages: Content that’s 1,500 words or longer consistently outranks shorter articles on search engines like Google.
- Include fresh, relevant statistics: Updated, geographically relevant statistics will pique your target audience’s interest. Because users are more likely to be interested in the latest information, Google typically gives pages with updated statistics a bump up in the rankings. Choose statistics useful to your areas of practice. For example, if you’re a criminal defense attorney, include data on local crime rates and arrest statistics.
Common Mistakes To Avoid When Doing SEO For An Attorney
SEO is only helpful if it’s used correctly. Here are some common SEO practices that can make an attorney’s website worse and drive away potential clients:
- Not optimizing for mobile users: Mobile-friendliness is essential for a good user experience, with more people using mobile devices to browse pages. If your page takes too long to load or has a bad layout on mobile devices, it can turn potential clients off.
- Failing to make a local SEO strategy: People near you are more likely to hire you than someone that’s two or three states away. If your SEO strategy isn’t targeting a local audience, you’ll fail to reach this valuable demographic and convert them into clients.
- Targeting the wrong keywords: Ignoring click-through rates, allocating target keywords to irrelevant content, and choosing irrelevant keywords for your target audience are all practices that will make you lose out on clients instead of gaining them.
Law Firm Marketing Trends
These are the current marketing trends that law firms are employing to reach more consumers:
- Video marketing: People enjoy watching videos – they find them more expressive and compelling than infographics and photos. Plus, videos can help you explain complex legal concepts and engage your audience. You can share your videos on Youtube, social media platforms like TikTok, and your own site to gain more leads and conversions.
- Posting client reviews: Apart from including positive reviews of your services on third-party websites, you should also respond to reviews to show that you appreciate feedback. This improves client loyalty and your online reputation.
- Quality content marketing: Creating compelling content continues to be a dominant legal marketing trend. If search engine crawlers find your site has more useful information to users, it could bump it up in the results pages. Your site’s pages should have high-quality images, engaging copy, or recent, relevant infographics to count as quality content.
Examples Of Law Firms That Have Excellent SEO
Getting an SEO agency’s services has translated into great business results for many law firms. Here are examples of some law firms that have improved their sites’ SEO and how good SEO benefited them:
- The Levin Firm: The firm was able to scrap its blacklisted domain and start with a fresh site, creating highly shareable quality content and authoritative links. In just two years, The Levin Firm increased its organic search traffic to 3,440%. Its site, LevinInjuryFirm.com, is currently ranked #1 on Google Maps for many relevant search terms.
- Stewart J. Guss, Attorney at Law: The firm employed an agency that launched a link-building campaign, crafted research-driven content, and re-optimized its website’s structure. This has resulted in consistently strong search engine rankings, a 47% increase in organic phone calls, and a 300% increase in cases opened monthly.
- Vantage Group Legal: Vantage Group Legal struggled to get enough exposure for its services in its jurisdiction, generating very little traffic for its website. Through an SEO agency’s help, the firm was able to get and maintain high search rankings for terms that generated highly qualified leads. The firm continues to get dozens of new clients every month as a result of successful SEO strategies.
Frequently Asked Questions From Lawyers
Who is the target audience for lawyers?
A lawyer’s target audience is potential clients who are likely to avail of their services. You can identify your audience by considering demographic details such as age range, location, and preferred communication channels.
Does SEO work for lawyers?
Yes, SEO works for lawyers. By improving your site’s ranking and visibility on search engine pages, you can reach more potential clients and increase the chances that they will hire you.
While many potential clients rely on their friends and family to help them find legal services, online searches are their next option. SEO will help you reach an audience that would otherwise be unavailable to you through personal referrals or traditional print advertising.
What are the top SEO factors?
These are the top SEO factors:
- A secure, accessible website
- Fast page loading
- Mobile-friendliness
- High-quality content
- User experience
- Domain age and authority
- On-page optimization
Making changes to all of these factors can improve your SEO and help your website rank higher.
How does Google work?
Google works by taking a search term entered by a user, then surveying all potentially matching web pages in its index. It then shows the user the best possible matches for the search term in descending order. The first page’s results are generally deemed the most-related, most-useful matches that answer the user’s query.
How can law firms attract new clients?
Law firms can attract new clients by employing the following strategies to get the word out about their services:
- Making a professional search-engine-optimized website
- Submitting your firm’s profile to legal directories like Justia, Nolo, and FindLaw
- Setting up an updated Google My Business page with contact details
- Establishing social media marketing on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter
- Networking at social events
- Accepting referrals from former teachers, students, and classmates, as well as other lawyers from networking events
How can you make your law firm grow faster?
You can make your law firm grow faster by implementing these changes:
- Creating a streamlined system for repeated tasks like filing documents and scheduling meetings
- Optimizing your website for search engines to gain more clients
- Investing in content marketing
- Creating financial goalposts before hiring new employees
- Highlighting your firm’s unique strengths in site content and during client consultations
How can SEO help attract more clients?
SEO can help you attract more clients by making your law firm more visible than your competitors in search engine rankings.
On average, the first five organic search results get nearly 70% of all the clicks, generating more traffic and gaining more clients for those sites. Making your site SEO-friendly helps it rise closer to the top five, increasing the chances of your target audience seeing your website and clicking on it if they need legal services.
How can SEO and PPC work together?
SEO and pay-per-click advertising (PPC) work together by doing the following:
- Increasing search engine results page (SERP) coverage: PPC advertising can put your site at the top of the search results. If a client skips over those top ads and looks for the top five organic results, you can still gain attention if your website has great SEO and is in the top five. This maximizes the chances of your target audience clicking through to your page.
- Improving brand awareness: Clicking on a PPC ad will lead a potential client to your website’s landing page, introducing your target audience to your law firm and creating awareness about your services. In the course of scanning through that landing page, your target audience will become familiar with your law firm and, hopefully, engage with your optimized content.
- Speeding keyword evaluation up: SEO and PPC rely on keyword optimization to improve search engine rankings. Targeting the correct keywords can take time to produce results for SEO, but PPC campaigns can give you immediate data that you can analyze. From your PPC campaigns, you can see which keywords your target audience is searching for. Then, you can adjust your SEO campaign to make your website’s ranking rise higher.