Law Firm SEO

An Expert’s Guide to Law Firm SEO for Better Search Engine Visibility

Do you know that 96% of people seeking legal advice use Google to find nearby law firms? And, among these individuals, nearly 74% make a decision after visiting the law firm’s website. To put these stats in simple words, your law firm’s search engine visibility will decide how many clients you acquire every year. As opposed to the conventional belief, law firm SEO is no longer an option. If you want to grow your law firm’s revenue and get more clients, it’ll be crucial to invest in SEO for lawyers and make your website search engine-friendly. 

But, how can one get started with law firm SEO? How does attorney SEO differ from other business niches? These are some of the queries many lawyers have before devising an SEO plan for their brand. 

So, to make your job easier and answer such common queries, we have compiled a comprehensive law firm SEO guide that’ll help you devise a result-oriented SEO plan for your website. 

So, without any further ado, let’s get started. 

Why Law Firm SEO Is Important?

Like any other industry, clients use Google (or other search engines) to hire lawyers for their legal matters. They don’t have the time and patience to walk into different law firms and interview each lawyer individually. 

Instead, they prefer visiting different law firm websites and choosing the right service provider accordingly. In short, if your law firm’s website isn’t ranking at the top of Google search results, you’ll most likely end up losing potential clients to your competitors.  

A well-optimized website will not only push your search engine rankings, but it’ll also help you convert website visitors more conveniently. With a law firm SEO campaign, the eventual goal is to increase the website traffic and overall conversions. 

Here are some of the additional benefits of implementing a full-fledged law firm SEO plan. 

• Get qualified leads from targeted customers and increase your website conversions
• Outrank your local competitors by securing top search engine rankings
• Improve your online brand reputation by getting positive client reviews
• Attract high-quality organic leads without relying on paid marketing

Getting Started With Attorney SEO for Your Legal Business

So, now that you understand the significance of a well-optimized law firm SEO campaign, let’s dive into the step-by-step procedure to build a successful SEO plan for your law firm. 

1. Keyword Research

Keyword Research is the basic foundation of any SEO campaign. A wrong set of keywords can damage your other marketing efforts as it’ll restrict you from driving targeted traffic to your website. So, the more time you spend on evaluating the right keywords for your website, the easier it’ll become to climb the search engine ladder. 

Now, when it comes to finding the right search phrases for a law firm SEO campaign, your goal should be to look for keywords with commercial intent. Unlike informational keywords, transactional (commercial) search queries will help you bring highly targeted traffic to your website. 

Even though the search volume for these search phrases might be comparatively lower than informational keywords, they are the most suitable option for businesses that want to gain higher conversions. People searching for these key phrases are actually looking to buy the services instead of simply roaming around the Internet for information. 

So, while you’re devising a keyword list for your website’s SEO, make sure to add relevant transactional keywords to avoid unexpected pitfalls in the future. Now, there are different tools (paid and free) you can utilize to perform keyword research. A few of these tools include:

• Google Keyword Planner
• Ahrefs
• SEMRush
• KWFinder 
• Word Tracker
• MOZ

Keep in mind that it’ll be crucial to perform keyword research for each web page so that you can drive equal traffic across your website. 

2. On-Page Optimization

Like keyword research, even on-page optimization is an integral part of attorney SEO. For readers who don’t know, on-page SEO is the process of optimizing on-page elements of a website so that it looks visually appealing to the end-users. 

However, on-page SEO also plays a significant role in pushing a website’s search engine rankings. We strongly believe that Google prefers user-friendly websites and indexes them more effectively. So, after you have performed extensive keyword research, the next step of your attorney SEO campaign would be to address on-page optimization. 

It’s worth pointing out that on-page SEO is a completely different battle itself. It contains different elements that you must optimize to climb the search engine ladder. Here are a few on-page SEO practices that’ll help you enhance your website’s user-friendliness. 

• First and foremost, optimize your web pages with relevant, high-quality, and keyword-focused content. Updating your web pages with relevant content will not only provide users with enough information, but it’ll also make it easier for search engine spiders to crawl these pages. 
• After updating the content, optimize the page titles and meta descriptions for each web page individually. Even in 2022, meta-data is as relevant as it was during the initial days of SEO. 
• Add both XML and HTML sitemaps to your website to help search engine crawlers and users easily navigate through different web pages on your website. Both these sitemap types have their own benefits and it’s imperative to add them to the website. 
• In addition to content, images are a great way to engage your potential clients. That’s why it’s quite important to add high-quality images to your website. Ideally, you would want to add pictures of your law firm and employees as it’ll help you represent the work culture. But, make sure to compress all these images so that they don’t slow down the website’s loading speed. 

3. Set Up Your Google My Business Account

Here’s the deal; lawyers do not want to expand their business boundaries beyond states. Instead, they want to establish a local brand presence and get clientele from their neighborhood. Now, one of the ways to set up this local brand presence is to set up a dedicated GMB account. 

If you don’t know this already, Google My Business is Google’s own listing platform where local businesses can create their profiles and get ranked in Google’s 3-pack or map results. Since the majority of shoppers use this 3-pack to choose a local business, it’ll be extremely beneficial for your law firm to create your own GMB listing. 

Now, before you get your hopes high, we would like to point out that securing a place in the 3-pack search results isn’t easy, considering your local competitors would have done the same too. To achieve the desired results, you’ll have to optimize your GMB profile with accurate information so that Google pushes it to the top. 

Here are a few golden rules that’ll help you optimize your GMB listing for better search engine visibility in 3-pack results.

• Complete each section of your GMB profile and make sure to add accurate business details. 
• After setting up your GMB profile, don’t forget to claim it. In case someone has already created a GMB profile with your brand name, you’d first have to claim it and complete the authentication process. 
• Add accurate NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) information to ensure your clients can get in touch with your lawyers easily.  
• Get your existing clients to leave positive feedback on your profile as your GMB ratings will act as a major ranking factor 
• Update your GMB profile with high-quality pictures of your law firm and team. 

4. Build Authority Links

Law firm SEO is incomplete without link building, just like any other SEO campaign. Backlinks are one of the major ranking signals Google uses to index and rank web pages. The more authority links your website has, the easier it’ll become to feed the search algorithms and rank higher in search results. But, link building has drastically evolved in the past few years. 

Today, the quality of your backlinks matters way more than the quantity. Too many poor backlinks can also backfire and cause a drop in your website’s rankings. So, while acquiring links for your law firm’s website, it would be crucial to follow white-hat practices and reach out to relevant websites. Here’s an insight into some of the law firm link-building practices that’ll cater to your website’s search engine visibility.

• Start by acquiring links from free directories, but make sure to use platforms that primarily revolve around legal services. Justia.com, FindLaw.com, and Avvo.com are a few of the free directories where you could list your law firm and get a quality backlink in return.  
• If you have the required budget, you can also list your law firm on a few paid directories as they have slightly higher domain authority. Lawyers.com is the most popular paid directory for lawyers and law firms and listing your brand on it could result in maximum brand exposure.
• One of the most effective link-building practices for attorney SEO is to create linkable content that other authority brands would want to link to. Of course, this would be a bit time-consuming and you would probably have to outsource the task to third parties. But, a high-quality linkable piece of content would boost your link-building efforts and make it easier to gain multiple high-quality backlinks. 
• Guest Posting is another link-building practice that could help you generate authority backlinks. But, it’s a bit time-consuming as you would have to look for the right guest outreach prospects and reach out to them with your proposal. However, if done right, guest posting can still be one of the most effective link-building practices for law firm SEO. 

5. Use Content Marketing

Content is always an integral part of any SEO campaign. Even when you are designing an SEO plan for your law firm, it’ll be important to harness the potential of content marketing. To do this, optimize all the web pages on your website with informative content. 

Your content should be crafted in such a way that it shouldn’t directly promote your services. Instead, focus on creating content that provides relevant legal information to your visitors. You should also optimize the content of your website by inserting the target search phrases across different pages. 

In addition to this, you can also leverage content marketing to enhance your brand’s search engine visibility by publishing regular blogs on your website. Publishing blogs will help you share valuable insight into different legal matters and present yourself as an authority in the market. 

The Bottom Line

Law firm SEO is slightly different from SEO for other industries, mainly due to fierce competition and the need to drive highly targeted website traffic. At the end of the day, the ultimate goal of any SEO firm is to drive higher conversions and not just get thousands of website visitors. So, it would be important to devise a well-thought SEO plan so that it becomes easier to achieve the desired results. You can also hire a team of law firm SEO experts and let them optimize your website for better search engine visibility.