Google is one of the true powerhouses of the internet.
Owning over 86% of the search engine market, Google organic search generates 59% of the world’s total web traffic.
With this in mind, law firms can’t sleep on Google. After all, people use Google every day to actively search for lawyers and legal services. And Search Engine Optimization (SEO) holds the key to getting your business discovered by these users.
Want to harness the power of SEO for your law firm? Here’s how to plan an SEO strategy from start to finish.
Law Firm SEO Defined
Before you can start planning your SEO strategy, you need to understand what an SEO law firm is and why it is important to your law firm.
Law firm SEO refers to the practice of optimizing your website and online platforms to rank highly in search engines to drive organic traffic to your law firm. This involves targeting the search terms (i.e. “keywords”) that people use to find services like yours.
Benefits of SEO for Law Firms
SEO is important for law firms for many reasons. SEO allows you to:
Target people who are looking for the types of services you offer, in your local area
Optimize your website experience to be faster and more user-friendly
Troubleshoot technical issues on your site that might be hampering performance
Publish valuable and relevant content to your audience
Reach more users through online directories and local listings
Increase engagement, clicks and lead generation on your website
Increase your visibility in video and YouTube searches
The benefits of SEO for law firms don’t end there, but the success of your SEO depends on a data-driven strategy. Below, we’ll cover how to get the most out of your SEO efforts.
Step 1: Launch Your Law Firm’s Website
Your law firm website is one of the most important assets you have when it comes to your digital marketing. It is the primary platform needed to optimize Google and drive organic leads.
The infrastructure, design, experience and content on your website all play a role in driving traffic and converting visitors into potential clients. With this in mind, you’ll want a website that ticks all the boxes:
Design – Your website should be attractive, professional and well-designed. Whether you use a template or hire a designer, it’s important that your website looks good in the eyes of your potential clients.
Speed - Your website should have a fast load time so that your content is easily rendered and visible to website visitors. If it’s slow, it might turn new clients away.
Experience – A positive website experience is necessary to make a good impression on visitors. This means having interactive design elements, great designs for mobile and desktop, and engaging images and media.
Infrastructure – Your website may look good but the technical infrastructure is very important. You will want a website that is technically sound, safe, fast, and indexable by search engines.
Content – The content on your website makes all the difference in attracting new users and turning them into clients. “Content” here means words on web pages, downloadable images, videos, and other content assets that convey messages to your users.
Once you’ve launched (or redesigned) an attractive, fast, and user-friendly website, you can start optimizing your website to generate organic traffic using SEO.
Step 2: Conduct SEO Keyword Research
“Keywords” are terms that people enter into Google Search to find information, products, businesses, etc. For law firms, keywords mean the words prospective clients use to find lawyers, legal information, and legal services.
Your keyword strategy lays the foundation of your SEO efforts because it determines what keywords you expect to rank for. Believe it or not, different law firms require different keyword strategies as the terms vary depending on the practice area, location and audience.
First, make a list of the words you associate with your law firm. For example, for a family law firm, some of the words could be “family attorney”, “family law services”, “file for divorce”, etc.
Next, consider which terms should be modified by geo-specific terms. In most cases, if you’re serving a specific geographic area, you’ll want to target geo-specific terms. For example: “Seattle Family Law”, “Seattle Family Lawyer”, etc.
Once you have created a relatively complete glossary of terms related to your business and services, use the SEO tools to look up the Search Volume and Keyword Difficulty of each keyword. We recommend a tool like SEMrush.com or Ahrefs.com to do this. This will tell you whether a term is being searched for and how difficult it is to rank for it.
Finally, use the SEO tool of your choice to find additional keywords. You can use the Related Keywords report or search your competitors’ domains to uncover untapped keyword opportunities. Add these keywords to your list to build the foundation of your SEO strategy.
Step 3: Develop Optimized Content
Your keyword research will gradually reveal what terms you should optimize for your website. For example, Search Volume data might show that “seattle family attorney” is a decent term to target on your website.
The keywords can then be mapped to new or existing web pages. Be sure to “group” keywords that are closely related to each other. For example, your “seattle divorce legal services” page should also likely target “seattle divorce attorneys” and “seattle divorce attorneys.”
Once you map these keywords to existing pages or new page topics, you can start a framework for optimizing or creating content, respectively. Here are the basics to consider:
Title Tag – Use the primary keyword of choice for your page in what is called the “page title tag”. For example, the title tag for a Divorce Legal Services page might read: “Seattle Divorce Law Services | PP&G Legal Group”
Meta Description – A meta description is a code element on a web page that describes what the page is about. You can use primary or related keywords here. For example, a good meta description for a Divorce Legal Services page might be: “Looking for Divorce Legal Services in Seattle? PP&G Law Group helps individuals and families navigate divorce proceedings, filing, mediation, and more.”
H1 Headings – H1 headings are another code element that is often a visual title on web pages. This is often a slightly different version of the title tag. For example, “Divorce Legal Services” is usually an appropriate H1 heading for the page.
Contents Contents – The body of the page is mostly the content. This is content that describes information or effectively describes a service. Your body content should use your keywords naturally across the page and, ideally, provide more value than your competitors’ page rankings for the same term.
This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what is referred to as “on-page SEO”. On-page SEO, in general, involves writing content that benefits your users and is optimized for the keywords you want to target.
Step 4: Own Your Local Organic Presence
Law firms rely heavily on Local SEO to reach users in specific geographic markets. If you only serve certain cities, states, or counties, then you need local SEO.
Local SEO, as previously mentioned, involves optimizing for geo-specific terms and/or location-specific platforms. For example, say you want to optimize your website for city-related keywords and create your local listings, reviews and directories.
Here are the local SEO basics for law firms:
Keywords – Target keywords that contain geo-specific modifiers as they relate to the market you serve.
Content – Create content on your website that is optimized for geo-specific keywords (including web pages and some blog article topics)
Google My Business – Google My Business (GMB) is a free platform that any business can use to host their business information on local Search. Create your free profile and include your contact information, website links, work photos, reviews, and more.
Directories – Other directories such as Yelp, Yellow Pages, Avvo, and Lawyer.com allow law firms to publish their business information to attract potential clients. Add your business to reputable directories (but avoid spammy ones).
Reviews – Positive client reviews impact SEO and impact sales. Ask past clients to review your business on GMB, Yelp, Bing Places, and more.
Most local SEO requires ongoing maintenance, so be sure to monitor your listings, generate more client reviews, and create more localized content.
Step 5: Build and Manage Your Backlinks
Backlinks are links from other websites that return to your own website. These backlinks lend a so-called authority to your website, making it more trustworthy in the eyes of Google. Generating backlinks from high authority sites is great for SEO.
Building backlinks is often easier said than done. Here are some ideas on how to get backlinks:
Partnerships – Take advantage of existing partnerships with law firms, blogs, and other businesses to get them to link back to your website. This could be through you writing a guest article, them hosting you in their directory, or they linking to you from an existing page or post.
PR – Conduct PR outreach or hire a PR agency to advocate for your law firm to be featured in news and industry publications. Help a Reporter Out is an example of a website that often wants to feature legal experts in articles.
Guest Posts – Reach high quality blogs and offer to contribute guest articles. Even better if this website or blog allows you to include a link back to your website, free of charge.
Blogging – Publish blog posts on your own website to attract attention from other websites. If your content is great, it can encourage other bloggers and publishers to link to your content.
Furthermore, you can use tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush to monitor your backlinks. These tools will reveal the number of backlinks you have acquired, the quality of the backlinks, when they were obtained, and more. This will help you track your backlink acquisition efforts.
Planning a Law Firm SEO Strategy is Simple
Many marketers will lead you to believe that SEO is very complex. In reality, the basics are relatively easy to master. Once you have the basics in place, you can move on to more involved strategies.
Of course, some markets are more competitive than others. If you are in a competitive market, it may be worth hiring a professional SEO law firm for more customized support. Even so, knowing how to plan your own SEO strategy from scratch will help you better understand, implement, and measure your SEO efforts.
Any law firm can benefit from SEO. Start with the basics, learn from your experience, and invest your learning to develop a winning marketing plan for your legal business.
What qualities make a good commercial lawyer?
10 Key skills & qualities you need to excel in Commercial Law
- The right knowledge and motivation. …
- High ethical standards and understanding of the role of law. …
- Confidence and good interpersonal skills. …
- A variety of ongoing interests that express a high level of achievement. …
- Initiative and responsibility.
What skills do you need to become a corporate attorney? Corporate lawyers must have excellent writing, communication, and negotiation skills as these skills are highly relied upon in day-to-day corporate legal work.
Are billboards effective for lawyers?
Leading market research firm Arbitron insists that while billboards are effective at getting people to “think” about messages, they don’t necessarily lead to action — including making a phone call or visiting a website.
Why are there so many attorney billboards? So, you ask, why do lawyers advertise personal injury cases? Very simply, money. Here’s how it works. Lawyers spend a lot of money advertising on TV and on billboards with their over-the-top ads and they are very successful at getting you to take the bait by calling them.
Are billboards 2020 effective?
According to the Arbitron study, billboard advertising is effective. According to the study, which reports that 71 percent of Americans “often see a message on a roadside billboard,” the majority of Americans have at some time learned about an event that piqued their interest or a restaurant they later visited.
Are billboards effective 2021?
Are billboards really still effective in the digital age? Billboards, a key out-of-home (OOH) advertising method, evolve along with their target audience. The current data shows that billboards don’t just work–they work really well.
Is billboard advertising still effective?
According to research, billboard advertising remains one of the many effective advertising tools available to modern businesses. At least 70 percent of Americans frequently see roadside billboards. Most Americans report learning of an interesting event, business, product, or service from a billboard.
How effective is billboard advertising?
Billboard’s Marketing Power About 71 percent of drivers say they see a billboard while behind the wheel, and 50 percent say they are highly engaged. This type of outdoor advertising has evolved beyond billboards which are simply large posters. Moving pictures on digital billboards increase their attention-grabbing.
Do billboards even work?
The answer, according to research, is, â€Yes.†Every business wants customers to take action and make a purchase after seeing their ad. This makes billboards a great opportunity. More than 70 percent of customers who see billboards shop on their way home (often from work).
Are billboards effective 2022?
According to a recent study, every dollar spent on out-of-home advertising generates an average of $5.97 in product sales. That is a 497% return on investment.
What is the best form of advertisement for a lawyer?
Billboard. Billboard advertising allows lawyers to display information about their business that can give consumers a glimpse of when they are stuck in traffic.
Is Facebook advertising effective for lawyers?
Facebook Ads for lawyers is affordable and efficient as it allows efficient targeting of audiences. The platform’s built-in analytics generate real-time data, so strategies can be kept up-to-date without wasting budget.
What method of advertising is used by most lawyers?
One of the main aspects of advertising for lawyers is digital marketing. Thus, you as a lawyer should use it in your strategy if you want to get more clients. In this way, you can get tremendous benefits.
Is Google Drive secure for lawyers?
Is Google Drive Safe? Short answer, yes – Google Drive is a great and secure way for lawyers to store and share documents. Google Drive has many of the most advanced security features, which is why even Fortune 500 organizations have integrated it into their technology infrastructure.
Is Gmail safe for lawyers? Can Lawyers Use Gmail? For some of the lawyers out there, and some communications, no email client is going to cut it. For the most part, though, Gmail is secure, encrypts your messages, and looks more professional than a yahoo.com or aol.com or hotmail.com address (though that doesn’t say much).
Can attorneys use Google Docs?
Five lawyers said they used Microsoft Word and Google Docs. This comment is typical of the contingent of both platforms: “Google Docs 95% of the time (G Suite is what we use to run our office). We use Word for documents such as appeal summaries that require more sophisticated formatting.”
Is Google Drive secure for legal documents?
Google Drive doesn’t provide client-side encryption, making it a poor choice for law firms that handle a lot of sensitive information. The best cloud storage for lawyers is Sync.com, followed immediately by Egnyte and pCloud.
Can you use Google Docs for legal documents?
Review documents on the go Whether you’re in court, at a deposition, or just working with a remote team, you can update or create documents on your phone or tablet using the Docs app.
Are documents in Google Drive private?
Files on your individual drives are private, until you decide to share them. You can share your content and can transfer control of your content to other users.
Can lawyers use OneDrive?
There are many cloud storage options out there, for lawyers and laypeople alike. But Microsoft’s OneDrive stands out, in large part because of its ubiquity. An online file hosting service is included with Windows 8 and 10 and integrates directly with Microsoft Office applications, such as Word and Excel.
Do lawyers use Microsoft Office?
For lawyers, Microsoft Office is a close technology must-have. Some of the applications it contains, namely MS Word, inevitably need to be familiar with modern lawyers. While others, like Planner, are useful additions to the cost-conscious office.
Is Google Drive safe for lawyers?
Is Google Drive Safe? Short answer, yes – Google Drive is a great and secure way for lawyers to store and share documents. Google Drive has many of the most advanced security features, which is why even Fortune 500 organizations have integrated it into their technology infrastructure.
What is the best form of advertisement for a lawyer?
Billboard. Billboard advertising allows lawyers to display information about their business that can give consumers a glimpse of when they are stuck in traffic.
What advertising methods do most lawyers use? One of the main aspects of advertising for lawyers is digital marketing. Thus, you as a lawyer should use it in your strategy if you want to get more clients. In this way, you can get tremendous benefits.
Is Facebook advertising effective for lawyers?
Facebook Ads for lawyers is affordable and efficient as it allows efficient targeting of audiences. The platform’s built-in analytics generate real-time data, so strategies can be kept up-to-date without wasting budget.
Can a lawyer advertise on Facebook?
With an audience size of 2.5 billion people, running ads on Facebook allows law firms to get their name in front of nearly 70% of the US population. If you haven’t started running ads on Facebook for your law firm yet, that’s something you need to consider if you want to generate more leads in 2022 and beyond.
Does advertising on Facebook really work?
But the truth is that Facebook ads actually work. With updates like exception controls, a new Conversion API that lets you pull data directly from your server into Ads Manager, and transparency about the data Facebook collects, the social network shows no signs of slowing down.
How much do law firms spend on SEO?
Several marketing agencies report that the average SEO budget for law firms is close to $7,500 each month. The top end of SEO investment for a highly competitive company is close to $25,000 per month.
How does SEO help law firms? SEO helps law firms do more than just traffic and lead generation; it provides an overarching marketing strategy that enhances your business’s overall digital presence. And a better digital presence means more opportunities to attract new legal clients!
Why does my law firm need a website and SEO?
SEO allows law firms to drive targeted traffic over the long term, whether to their websites, directory listings or blogs.
What is the purpose of SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art and science of making pages rank higher on search engines like Google. Since search is one of the main ways people find content online, ranking higher in search engines can lead to increased traffic to a website.
Why does a law firm need a website?
Most of your potential clients use the internet to find information. Therefore, your law firm’s website is your firm’s best way of letting potential clients and referral sources know who you are, what you do, how you can help, and how to contact you.