Lawyer SEO: How To Propel Your Practice Forward

On average, lawyers, get a third of their clients from keyword searches. So how’s your law firm website fairing in search results? This article is for you if you’re not ranking first in Google.

There are no shortcuts to search engine optimization. Even if you engaged an SEO specialist, your SEO work is far from complete, so here are some tips so your law practice and up its game online and grab the lion’s share of keyword search referrals.

Create Quality Content

Content is everything, and it needs to be dynamic – i.e. fresh, up to date and most of all, relevant for your target audience. Why? Most people searching online for legal services look for general information first regarding a particular legal issue. For instance, when an employee has been fired, they want to know if they may have legal standing for compensation or job reinstatement. So their first action is to search in Google or Bing using keywords, e.g. employee fired, wrongful dismissal.

When your website has a pillar, aka evergreen article with quality content, search engines will rank it over and above other legal services websites.

What the percentage of clicks go to the top search result?

25% of all clicks for a keyword search go to the top result. Your goal is to get to the top for all things relating to your law firm and its services.

What should be included in your content?

• Source links – that support your content
• Statistics
• Examples
• Recommendations

Content includes social media posts, guest posts on other websites, and blogging. When you take your time and create high-value content, your website becomes a trusted authority in its area of expertise in time. So stay focused on what you do and how you do it well. Let the search engines find your content, and in time you will see a spike in visitor traffic.

Perform Competitive Research

If your competition gets all the traffic you need, do some research. First, using some online tools, you check what keywords your competitors use and what they don’t.

If possible, analyze at least five competitors. You may also find and sort what keywords rank best and go after the least competitive keywords at the start. This way, it’ll give you an advantage once you go for broader terms with which you’re competing.

Do Keyword Targeting

Once your potential clients search for information using different search engines, they use keywords to find what they’re searching for. Therefore, knowing such keywords is one of the first steps you should take to optimize your website and drive more traffic.

You’ll increase the odds of driving qualified traffic that’s more likely to lead to your website using targeted and particular keywords. Then, create a list of phrases and keywords that people typically use when searching for your services. Such keywords must cover all service areas.

You can use the suggestions of Google to find out what people search for by typing all your listed keywords and looking at the search engines’ recommendations.

Another way to identify keywords for your law firm is by using free keyword research tools like Wordstream.

Optimize Your Homepage with the Right Keywords

On your website homepage, your headline must include relevant keywords. For instance, if you specialize in employment law, include ‘employment and law’ in your headline. Your sub-headers must also be optimized with additional keywords your prospective clients use to find legal services.

Optimize Your Online Profiles

Off-page SEO or off-site SEO is the practice of optimizing your presence online on other websites. For example, as a lawyer, you often have profiles on local state bar association websites. If you still don’t have profiles on such websites, it’s best to start creating one today.

Your profiles on other websites should be optimized for your specialization and the locality. Also, consistency matters in search engines because all contact details in the public domain should be the same.

Do Technical SEO

Technical SEO is the measure of your website’s search engine friendliness. While it’s quite the same with user-friendliness, it actually extends to some things like sitemaps and security.

However, it could get complicated to execute, so most law firms and lawyers hire SEO  experts to set up the website fundamentals so search engines can spider it effortlessly.

Regarding technical SEO, you must ensure that your website follows search engines’ guidelines, notably Google. The reason is that Google is transparent with what you can do to maximize your technical SEO.

Another factor to consider in technical SEO is ensuring that your website is mobile-friendly and loads fast. With this, your website can offer convenience to your users no matter what device they use. Your website must also be easy to navigate, which you can achieve by incorporating easy-to-use and simple menus.

Boost Your Website Speed

Mobile friendliness and keyword usage are essential for how fast your website pages load. Check your website’s speed. And it’s slow. There are some ways to improve it:

• Lessen HTTP requests that are necessary to download aspects of pages, including scripts, images, and graphics
• If possible, save images as JPGs because they load faster compared to PNGs
• Minimize your image’s size

Ensure that your plugins are updated and remove the ones you don’t use.

Conclusion

All professional services sites need to work on their SEO in much the same way as eCommerce sites.  Lawyer SEO should target keywords relating to specialization and, these strategies, when done well and continuously, help get the website ranking well and ideally on top for niche keywords.