Marketing your law firm today means understanding how crucial search engine optimization is to growing your practice and maintaining your competitive edge in a crowded field.
If you’re not already looking at your law firm’s SEO data as the brain stem of your legal marketing strategy, you’re likely reading this article because you’ve seen the writing on the wall. In this comprehensive guide to SEO for lawyers, you’ll learn how to dial up your law firm’s digital presence by:
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You might already have a pretty good idea of what SEO is and how it works. If you’re just here to understand the finer details, feel free to skip ahead to the next section — although a little refresher never hurts.
SEO — short for search engine optimization — is the science of finessing law firm website content in accordance to search trends to get more impressions and better leads. Although SEO requires an understanding of algorithms and complex technical strategies, it’s also as much about understanding basic human nature and your particular target audience, and applying that knowledge to your website content to increase website visitors through search engine results pages, known as SERPs.
Today’s SERPs are busier than Austin at brunch, with more advertising and organic results than the days of bright banner ads and boring blue links in a vertical list.
When your future clients search for a keyword like “personal injury lawyer,” they will see various results, not just a list of lawyers stacked together like the yellow pages.
Organic website visitors nearly always have the highest conversion rate of all forms of online traffic. (Check your Google Analytics now; I’ll wait! Does your organic traffic convert into leads and phone calls at a higher percentage than paid, social or referral traffic? I bet it does!) But SEO isn’t just about integrating the right keywords into your web content — although that’s one of the more well-known pieces of the SEO puzzle. Rather, it’s about having a wrap-around content strategy that is informed by well-researched data and a mastery of the technical side.
Advertising is not just good for your law firm, it’s good for the people you have the opportunity to serve. But in the internet age it’s not enough to simply have a website; you also need a strategy to stand apart from the crowd. Whether you lead a brand-new firm or are simply ready to reimagine how you market your legal services, investing as early as possible in attorney SEO sets you up for the most success in the long run.
When crawling and indexing sites, Google typically prioritizes high-quality content that’s accurate, recent and easily available. Because the best law firms naturally provide this kind of content on their sites, anyway, optimizing SEO — especially on the technical side — to bring in high-quality clients just makes sense.
Getting your name on a billboard isn’t enough to build the trust and connection many people want to feel before even contacting you for the first time.
A competitive 21st-century law firm website needs to provide an immersive, educational experience. What you say — and how you say it — is your identity. The more people know who you are and how you can help, the more you can establish your firm as a trusted name.
Cultivating your SEO ranking to appear higher in SERPs means you need to provide quality content that puts your law practice in front of people at the precise moment they are actively looking for your legal services.
SEO for lawyers is particularly important because first-page rankings often translate into credibility and trust. And how many people take the time to click past the first page of search results? The first position in Google search results has a 33% click-through rate on both desktop and mobile, while second-page click-through rates drop to an astounding 2 to 3% and decrease from there.
HubSpot’s 2019 Global Survey indicated that 70% of marketers are already actively investing in content marketing, and about 64% of marketers report spending time on SEO. Think about how much your firm is currently spending in time and money on your SEO campaign and how you measure its success. In views? Rankings? New clients? Social media success?
Organic search traffic is an investment in your law firm’s visibility and relationship with the public that will pay off long into the future. Working with a law firm SEO company means you’re acquiring an asset rather than renting space that disappears as soon as you stop paying for it like with pay-per-click ads, which may get you attractive SERP positions but also high CTRs that leave your marketing budget high and dry.
If you know you could get more from your firm’s SEO strategy, read on to learn why you just might decide partnering with an agency experienced in SEO for attorneys is a good move for your firm.
When taking steps toward even better SEO optimization, you can start right at home. For some industries, Google assumes that the searcher will want a company near them even if they don’t put a geographic qualifier (such as Austin) in their search. A quick search for “Pizza” on Google likely shows you the nearby pizza shops, rather than the highest-ranking pizza places in the country.
The legal space is another industry that produces localized search results on Google. This is where the local map pack plays such an important part in getting found:
Using your Google My Business page to improve local SEO rankings is a matter of ensuring your business profile is thoroughly updated in three areas:
Complete and detailed business information allows your law firm’s profile to match what your target audience is searching for. If “attorney” is one option, but people come to you when they’re looking for an “estate planning attorney,” always choose the more specific option to narrow the competitive field. You can also use this section to note specific service areas if you want to connect to your target clients from surrounding areas.
Improving your firm’s overall prominence is challenging but crucial, especially in highly competitive locations like Austin and other major cities. Images are a powerful way to maintain a leg up on the competition when it comes to ranking high in prominence, as are reviews, links and articles. In fact, Google often only shows companies with an average star rating of 4.0 or higher when people include the word “Best” in their search, such as “Best Law Firm SEO Company.”
Google considers all of the same important SEO factors when determining which companies to show in the map pack, but also takes into consideration the proximity from the searcher to your business. This is why the same search done on the south side of town might show different results than if you make that search from the north side.
Remember that being in a current three-pack situation is a great organic traffic opportunity to engage with a searcher on the SERP, so even if you are not looking to bring in foot traffic, local SEO should be part of your overall SEO strategy. Being in a local SEO three-pack means that users will see, as of this writing, the name and address of your law firm, along with your Google client rating. While the information immediately available is minimal, you are more likely to be in the three-pack when your GMB page is complete and your site is well optimized.
You can ensure your law firm is making headway on the website users driven from SERPs by consistently creating and sharing quality content informed by data about what people want to know. One way to do this is by designating an online content marketing writer who works with your SEO expert to publish content on your site — and not just on social media. On the other hand, many firms choose to partner directly with an SEO agency to ensure the content represents both their values and law firm SEO service best practices.
If the attorneys in your law firm are licensed to practice in multiple states, you may also want to consider playing in the bigger pond, in which case you’ll also need to compete with more firms. With expanded visibility, your firm can become a contender for high-profile cases like class-action lawsuits, which can result in significant payouts for clients and attorneys alike.
An experienced SEO marketing team can provide a custom law firm website with a dedicated SEO strategy that works to secure top expanded rankings and legitimate, quality leads without upending the personalized, local presence your firm has worked hard to build.
Using SEO to rank in organic searches is tantamount to staying competitive. Organic searches are the dominant channel of website users, and consumers themselves trust Google’s algorithm user experience and rely on it for service and content at a rate that is growing faster than even organic social media, according to BrightEdge Research.
Companies that are already intentionally using SEO demonstrate that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to increasing organic traffic. But there are a variety of research-supported methods law firms can use to increase their search engine rankings to get clicks that turn into conversions.
By meeting you where you are, we can ensure that your SEO strategy is targeted to your specific needs, as we did with FVF Law in Austin. FVF Law’s involvement in the Austin community, compassion for people, and commitment to providing transparent and honest legal representation set them apart in the highly competitive personal injury law field. The firm already had a great site with great information and lots of positive reviews. What was missing were crucial SEO technical updates, new page content — including Spanish-language pages to remain accessible to the community’s sizable Latino/a population — and high-quality link building.
Our legal copywriting team got to work writing more than 40 new pages of content and rewriting existing content to optimize it for SEO. We then integrated this copy into a new site structure and navigation while maintaining a focus on a positive user experience.
In just under two years, FVF Law’s monthly organic traffic has increased 993% percent, with first-page rankings for more than 370 high-value search terms and 108 in the top three. They also increased their number of leads six-fold.
Google’s significance in your SEO practices cannot be overstated. More than 200 factors go into Google’s algorithm. Google says they actually have a “whole series of algorithms to help them sort through the billions of webpages to find the most relevant, useful results in a fraction of a second.” So, it’s no wonder that it can feel like an unwinnable race to the top of the rankings, especially when Google’s algorithm is constantly changing.
Whether you’re thinking of taking on the task of legal SEO yourself or looking to partner with a law firm SEO company, there are a few critical factors to understand to get a top ranking and drive high-quality traffic.
As you would imagine, with every update to Google’s search engine algorithm, the technical aspect of SEO changes as well. A common SEO myth is that SEO is something that is done once to a site and then you’re finished. While taking care of technical SEO is one of the first things we do, it’s also something that needs to be revisited from time to time as your site and Google’s algorithm change. The first step in your SEO strategy should almost always be establishing what your existing technical assets and gaps are and then formulating a plan for your team to implement the recommendations and track the results.
Before 2011, short blog posts of around 350 words dominated the content market. Now, the ideal content length varies by specific field but is overwhelmingly skewed toward long-form content — between 1,800 and 3,000 words — with original information specific to your audience’s needs. Especially in the legal field, your on-site content needs to demonstrate the trustworthiness of your law firm, the value of your expertise and the authoritativeness of your content itself.
“Ranking without link building is really hard.” This is a quote from Google’s own Gary Illyes, a webmaster trends analyst. However, while the goal used to be creating mass quantities of links to increase visibility, now it’s more about the quality of the links. In fact, Google can penalize your search ranking for having too many low-quality or irrelevant backlinks.
Don’t just take our word for it. Google themselves says:
“If you’re thinking about hiring an SEO, the earlier the better. A great time to hire is when you’re considering a site redesign, or planning to launch a new site. That way, you and your SEO can ensure that your site is designed to be search engine-friendly from the bottom up. However, a good SEO can also help improve an existing site.”
If a number one position is your goal (as it should be), technical SEO elements are the breadcrumbs that can lead you to your number one ranking.
Before making any major adjustments or investments in rebuilding or improving your website, your SEO team should conduct a technical audit to assess the health of your website’s technical SEO. Our audits look at more than 80 technical items.
Here are a few of the ways we optimize your technical SEO:
The easier a time Google has crawling your page, the better its chance of ranking high with the right audience. Sometimes, Google has a tough time even crawling pages in the first place because of errors, which potential clients discover when they click a link and get an error message. (You can use Google’s coverage report to proactively seek them out.)
Sometimes, the user view is just fine, but Google’s is not. When Google can’t read a page, it can’t rank it. Google’s URL Inspection Tool feature allows you to assess whether or not your pages are search engine friendly.
More than half of all website traffic worldwide is mobile, so it’s no surprise that Google has adopted a mobile-first policy for its ranking. If your site is not optimized for mobile viewing, even if you don’t think your target audience is searching for you on mobile devices, you’re not going to rank as highly.
The longer you’ve been online, the greater the chance you have broken links, which hurt your SEO in two ways. First, they waste crawler time that could have been spent on indexing high-value working links. Second, they make your law firm look bad. Potential clients often leave a site within seconds of encountering a broken link, which directly impacts your future relationship with them and hurts your ranking by lowering the amount of time visitors spend on your site.
In the American Bar Association’s 2019 Legal Technology Survey Report, 26% of respondents said their law firm had experienced some sort of cyber security breach. Not only is it better for your practice to have a more secure site, but HTTPS is a confirmed ranking signal.
Some people assume more content must mean a lag in loading speed, but proper web development means that you can provide quality, engaging content without sacrificing load time and risking your ranking. Google’s PageSpeed Insights is a quick and easy way to check your — and competitors’ — desktop and mobile load speeds.
Rich snippets can boost your click-through rate by getting users’ attention even if you don’t rank first. And while rich snippets aren’t as beneficial as organic search, the addition of this collaborative vocabulary can still boost your SEO.
Connecting with potential clients is about warmth and competence — you don’t have to be afraid to show you know your stuff! However, what you post is also important on a technical SEO level. While you may already have great content on your website that can be optimized to drive website traffic and increase leads for new clients, you likely need more.
Before finalizing a content creation strategy, you — and perhaps your lawyer SEO provider — should conduct a content audit to assess your existing assets to determine how you might reorganize, repurpose, improve, add to or even prune your existing content.
What kind of keywords do you want to rank for? You’ll need pages dedicated to these terms, as Google ranks web pages, not websites. How do you want your potential clients to perceive your law firm after engaging with your content? Defining your objectives can help you establish or maintain your firm’s identity during the next phases.
Make sure your content is reasonably accessible to those who will engage with it; visual readability and avoidance of legal jargon are two important considerations. This is a key mistake we see lawyers making when writing their own content. They fail to remember that the average reading level in America is at a seventh- to eighth-grade level.
Yes, we said it. Find a similar law firm whose online content inspires you, and aim for doing even better. The skyscraper technique is one popular content creation strategy for boosting your law firm’s SEO, as is evergreen content.
From using shady backlinking to posting unoriginal content, failing to follow honorable business practices runs the risk of not only getting your webpage knocked down in rank, but also damaging your reputation.
The content on the main pages of your website describes who you are and what you do. These are the pages most people see when clicking on and through your website.
Blogs, whitepapers, case studies, infographics, videos and guest posts are all types of rich strategic content that should be developed and posted regularly to help your target clients understand more about your law firm and why they should work with you.
As long-form content increasingly becomes a source of SEO success (notice how long this page is?), it’s important to think about the role you want an ongoing blog to play in SEO for your law firm.
Blogs get fresh content and keywords into Google, but they also help your firm develop its voice, keep a conversation your community, and even avoid fruitless leads by giving potential clients an opportunity to see whether or not your law firm is a good fit for them.
When your core content is engaging and informative, it gives people a reason to keep coming back — not to mention
