Online visibility for any business in all industries can be a challenge nowadays, so it's crucial to customize your SEO efforts to give the most relevant information to your customers. This is the reason why Law Firm SEO is on a rise right now.
96% of people seeking legal advice use search engines and 74% of consumers visit the website of a law firm to take action. Almost every legal firm knows and understands this and thus, has tried to enhance their law firm SEO. This has made the legal space a competitive vertical in SEO.
Here, I will mention a few effective law firm SEO tips that will help you increasing your ranking without having to spend money on SEO consultants.
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One of the most important SEO strategies is developing content. If you want your legal website to attract clients who are ready to convert, you need a targeted content strategy. There is much more to a content strategy than just writing content and you need an efficient content strategy to get higher rankings.
Your content should be based on:
A successful content strategy consists of these four pillars.
For legal marketing, foundational content means investing the visibility of your website and getting higher organic search rankings.
Adding a separate 'FAQ’ page or segment can be very useful for two main reasons, the growing popularity of voice search and featured Google snippets.
Authoritative content is a branding play, meant to increase authority and influence. Its purpose is to help lawyers and law firms become experts in their area of legal expertise. It consists of blog posts written by you on legal topics, it can be anything which is relevant, whether it is an abstract legal concept or a real life case you do a case study on.
Add images or visual content to break up the content and internally link your pages.
An SEO audit uncovers issues that hurt your organic search visibility and website performance. After the audit is completed, make the fixes. This can increase your website traffic from 250 percent to 2,000 percent.
For Law firms, these are the most common errors found during an audit:
Google judges websites by their titles, which is why you title needs to explain what you do in very few characters. Fortunately, website technology makes that simple with the ‘<title>’ tag. Use this tag to give Google an idea of who you are.
For example, if your make is Skylar Caniff and you are a patent attorney in Atlanta, then your title tag should read something like: ‘Skylar Caniff, patent attorney in Atlanta.'
Once you are done with the title, you have to add a description about your law firm or practice. Unlike the title, the description does not have a specific tag of its own, it is an attribute of a ‘<meta>’ tag. It looks something like this, <meta description=”my description goes here”/>. Use this description tag to put in a little more information like, more than ten years of experience.
Reviews are a very important factor that most customers take into consideration. 90% of the consumers read reviews before visiting a business and 31% of the customers are likely to spend more on a business with good reviews. This happens because, naturally, humans trust other humans’ experience and try to learn from it.
Since reviews are so important to customers, Google takes it into consideration as well. According to MOZ's Local Search Ranking Factors Survey, online reviews are thought to make up 10% of how Google and other search engines decide to rank search results. Google relies on reviews to judge the authenticity and worth of a website or webpage.
Incorporate reviews in your website, respond to reviews, both positive and negative, especially on Google since Google puts a lot of weight into reviews. Encourage your customers to leave reviews on Google or on your website.
Another way to not only drive traffic to your website but also to turn prospects into customers is email.
There are three types of email campaigns that work well in the legal industry.
Guide a client or prospect on what to next steps are. You could either show then a journey throw your law firm or practice by sending them a video or you could explain what it takes to hire a lawyer.
Send an e-book or premium piece of content, for example, ‘5 Steps to Win a Personal Injury Case, 'How to Hire an be Estate Planning Lawyer’, et cetera.
As soon as someone's case is settled, they should fall into the third email campaign, asking for a review or taking a short survey about their services. As mentioned in the previous point, adding positive reviews can drive traffic to your website.
SEO in the legal space is competitive and the competition will only increase with time. So it is important for you to start working on your law firm SEO and rankings as soon as possible. These five tips can help you drive traffic to your website and help get customers.
I would highly suggest that you start with the SEO audit. It is important for you to understand what your website needs and where it lacks before you start adding content and links. Once you are done with the audit, fix everything you need to and start working on your content strategy. Then, it won't be very long before your start seeing your rankings grow higher and higher.
