Law Firm SEO: How To Create & Execute A Winning Plan In 2021

Topics We Have Covered In The Blog –

• What is Law Firm SEO?
• Why SEO is Important for Law Firm Websites?
• Strategies to Create & Execute a Winning Plan for Law Firm SEO Website?
  • Start with extensive keyword research and keyword mapping
  • Optimize your website to rank it higher on Google
  • Create eye-catching content
  • Improve your web page speed
  • Optimize your site for local search
  • Generate links to build authority in Google

• The Bottom Line

Let’s get started!

Law firms are getting wiser day by day. Instead of projecting offline, they are now using online mediums to serve the target audiences and attain strong brand visibility online. This is when they look for successful digital marketing tools & techniques to accelerate their business growth.

The need for online marketing and its implementation has witnessed significant growth in the previous year. Due to the pandemic breakdown, when a majority of marketers have moved online, law firms marketing has also leveraged this medium so as to drive in a huge number of clients online. The year 2020 has shown how important it is to have a strong online presence and make the brand visible to the local audience. Hence, the demand for embracing SEO for law firm websites. 

What is Law Firm SEO?

Law Firm SEO or Attorney SEO is a method that includes proper strategies, tools, and techniques to obtain high rankings on search engines. This maximizes the law firm visibility online thus drawing the attention of the prospective clients to the law firm website.

Why SEO is Important for Law Firm Websites?

Remember, most of your potential clients begin with an online search for legal firms. Hence, securing the position among the first 5 search engine results is definitely needed.

Some statistics you must consider before making any assumptions!

According to the research, 96% of prospective clients use a search engine to get legal advice.

72% of clients seeking legal advice prefer relying on only one attorney.

74% of clients visiting a law firm website perform a relevant action to stay connected with the brand.

65% of the total number of clicks is obtained by the top organic results.

In short, if you are wondering how to drive in more prospective clients to your law firm website, you must invest in attorney SEO marketing.

Don’t you feel the need for law firm search engine optimization in your business? Probably, yes!

2021 is expected to be a year for law firm online marketing. Are you ready to plan out a successful strategy and beat your competitors for the long run?

Here is a complete guide to create and execute a winning plan in 2021

Strategies to Create & Execute a Winning Plan for Law Firm SEO Website?

1. Start with extensive keyword research and keyword mapping

Keyword research is the most initial step of every law firm SEO. By undergoing extensive keyword research, you can discover the high performing keywords, the phrases highly used by the people while searching for legal services.

While conducting research, you can analyze different sets of keywords along with their commercial intent. Learning more about the nature of the keywords, it becomes easier to rank them on search engines and make the site appear at the top SERPs.

To perform the research process in a perfect way, you can make use of tools like Ahrefs, Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, SpyFu, and Wordtracker. These tools are designed to generate the best possible results for a business. Remember, the better are the keywords, the higher the volume of organic traffic to the website, thus increasing the level of competition. 

Once you are done with your keyword research, it’s time to pay attention to keyword mapping – another most significant step in lawyer SEO.

Keyword mapping is the process of optimizing each web page with a target keyword. Since Google ranks a site based on the specific URLs, optimizing each URL with relevant target keywords is definitely a need. This helps to rank the keywords on the search engine whenever a relevant search is made.

Let us get a clear picture of this using the “funnel” model. The funnel model of SEO keyword mapping is divided into three categories – Awareness, Interest, and Action.

 – Awareness keywords on searches indicate the potential clients are looking for your services. For example, real estate attorneys near me, hire a business lawyer, etc.

 – Interest keywords on searches indicate the website visitors are interested in your services. For example, (law firm name) reviews, (law firm name) service cost, (law firm name) successful cases, etc.

 – Action keywords on searches indicate the potential client is interested to hire your service or seek your advice. For example, how to make an appointment, what is the step-by-step process, etc.

Understanding the funnel and mapping out the keywords will help you to analyze the behavior of your potential clients. Accordingly, you can optimize your website and create content to drive more results.

2. Optimize your website to rank it higher on Google

The very next step in the law firm search engine optimization process is updating the website structure to optimize for search. Through this process, you must ensure that the website is responsive, SEO-friendly, mobile-friendly, and provides a proper user experience.

Optimizing your website takes care of your site structure. It makes sure the site is properly organized and structured so that the visitors find it easier to grab any information or get a solution to their query. It also helps to provide a good quality user experience to the visitors, making it easier to navigate the website and access the information without wasting any time.

Certain things that you must pay attention to are –

• Organizing the website content, URL structure, and navigation to rank the site higher on SERPs.
• Focus on creating multiple pages for the same niche to draw the attention of prospective clients.
• For a single service law firm, use an exact match domain name.
• For multiple service law firms, make use of a branded domain name.
• Multiple pages with multiple offerings help to rank the site well.
• Use long-tail keywords to target the right audience.

Good UX has a positive impact on website SEO, especially on website ranking. Still, finding difficulty to organize your website based on your law firm? Let us make this easy for you by portraying different types of law firm websites. 

A law firm can be categorized in three ways –

a). Single Service Law Firm

b). Multiple Service Law Firm

c). Multiple Locations Law Firm

a). Single Service Law Firm Website

When your law firm is specialized in handling only one service, the website structure should be designed as follows.

• You must make use of an exact match domain (EMD) name for the website URL.
• You must add service-related content that is easy to rank for relevant searches. The more content you create, the more traffic you can generate.

b). Multiple Service Law Firm Websites

When your law firm is specialized in offering multiple services as a criminal case, business law, real estate law, etc. the website structure should be optimized with the following.

• You should use a branded domain instead of an EMD domain.
• You should have separate pages for each of your services.
• You can have sub-service pages to gather more traffic.

c). Multiple Locations Law Firm Websites

When you have multiple locations for your law firm, you should organize your site structure as follows;

• You should add your office location to the URL to make it rank for local searches.
• You should use a navigation menu to switch between your office locations. This helps Google and other search engines to understand your site and rank it according to its different locations. 
• Don’t you want your potential clients to visit your landing pages and retain there for a long time? To attain this, you should support website optimization for lawyers. It is the only way to capture relevant traffic and make the website rank well.    

3. Create eye-catching content

Having a creative and informative blog is a part of a law firm SEO. It does not just help readers to educate but even count on the number of leads generated and improved brand visibility.

A small blog section on your law firm website won’t hurt your budget. Right? Instead, if you don’t have one, it will definitely create a huge gap between your business and its growth. So, start blogging today!

Blogging drives more relevant traffic to the website. It builds high engagement and helps the page to rank higher on the search engine. Yes, a perfect blog with well-maintained keywords does this. When you are paying attention to lawyer SEO, make sure you invest a little in blogging as well.

Here are a few tips that you must consider while creating content.

• Target on purchase intent keywords while creating content for each service page.
• Maintain proper keyword density that implies 2-3 times in the body, once in the URL, title tag, H1 tag, image title, and image alt tag.
• Create unique, fresh, and effective content around the keywords.
• The blog content should have the potential to generate social signals, backlinks, and traffic.
• Research on the keywords and attorney topics that are in trend and are mostly used for queries. Put your own thoughts, a few statistics, and information, and create an engaging blog. Finally, share the link of your website blog on social media to extend your business reach. A fresh, authentic, informative, unique, and appealing content never fails to seek the attention of the viewers.  

4. Improve your web page speed

Have you measured your website speed? If not, check it now using a free tool from Google. Web page speed is considered the primary ranking factor of a website.

When a site takes a lot of time to load, it disrupts the brand impression and compels the potential clients to look for other alternating sites. In other words, nothing can be more painful than the slow website speed damaging your user experience.

For example, a potential client is looking for a criminal attorney in an emergency condition. If the site takes more time to load than normal, it is quite obvious that the user will leave the site. Such sites cause high bounce rates and less customer retention rates. Conversions are less likely to happen on these websites.

If you look from the SEO perspective, Google states that such pages cause less user experience, hence are always negatively impacted. So, when you are talking about the best SEO services for law firms, you must pay attention to this factor. After all, it is considered as one of the 200+ ranking factors as per Backlinko.

Here’s how you can boost your website speed and make it run faster;

• Go for a premium hosting platform instead of looking for something budget-friendly.
• Make less use of heavy codes and huge animation.
• Compress images while uploading them to the site.
• Install a cache plugin to work on the high page loading time.
• Check out your page loading speed, learn the factors responsible for it, and optimize it for better results.

5. Optimize your site for local search

The next important step is to perform local SEO for your law firm’s website. Optimizing the law firm website for local searches make the site appear more on Google searches and Google Maps. To ensure local search visibility of your brand, you need to follow a few steps.

• First of all, create and claim Google My Business Listing.
• Optimize your business listing titles on local search results.
• Don’t forget to use keywords followed by your brand name on the title, making the title more clickable.
• Use a keyword-rich description of your services and link it to the service page of your website.
• Manage your client reviews, recommendations, local citations, and list your business in the relevant business directories.

Further on, in local SEO, Google My Business has a distinct role to play. It makes the site appear at the top of organic search results whenever a local search is made.

Verification: To ensure this, you need to get your site verified by Google. A verification code is sent via email or SMS. You have to use the code to verify your business on Google My Business.

Optimization: Once the verification is completed, you can optimize your business page by clicking the editing option. Google allows you to update your business name, location, contact details, hours of operation, and other necessary details that are required to build authority online. Here you can even add a brief introduction about your law firm and your services to make the brand much more reliable.

Review management: Client reviews of a law firm website matters a lot. The reviews help the site to rank higher on local searches and simultaneously, help the potential clients to make a wise decision. Every attorney should focus on the following things – 

• Manage reviews generated on top platforms like Google My Business, Yelp, and Facebook.
• Make a quick response to all the reviews.
• Use reviews on secondary platforms related to your legal industry like Avvo, FindLaw, Justia, etc.

Local directories: Finding a local citation or directory based on your business niche and listing your business profile on such websites are essential. To get an authorized business online and to have a strong exposure, creating these listings are very important.

6. Generate links to build authority in Google

An effective lawyer website SEO campaign is never completed without performing link building method. By the term link building, we mean building quality backlinks or internal links or social links to the blog content, making the content much more effective for ranking.

Building brand authority and trust on Google using a handful of links is not an easy task. After all, these links are responsible for ranking the site higher and driving huge traffic related to the business.

Following are some tips and tricks you must reckon while performing this step – 

• Don’t just rely on a single variety of links. Use different types of links to establish brand authority in Google.
• Use social media and forum links to build a brand presence online.
• Use Quora links to find potential clients who are searching for relevant answers to different questions.
• Pay attention to internal linking bypassing the link juice from blog content to money pages.
• Perform guest posting to acquire more links from more resources.
• Find websites linking to your competitors and get links from them.

Moreover, the inbound links must be relevant and should be obtained from a diverse set of domains. It is considered as the best off-page SEO practice that allows Google to recognize your site as one of the most trustworthy sites. Therefore use different categories for the same, like;

• Social Media, Forum, and Quora Links

Social media, forums, and Quora links are used to build high visibility to the site.

On social media, you can find niche bloggers and influencers, build relationships, increase brand exposure, and channelize your social media content to trigger brand engagement and ranking.

On forums, you can target anchor text, use search footprints, and Ahrefs to find forum backlink sources for the site.

On Quora, you can find multiple threads related to the blog content.

• Internal Linking

Another most important factor highly responsible for generating relevant links to the site is internal linking. It is a method of linking internal pages of the site bypassing link equity and ranking signals from blog content to the money pages.

• Borrowing links  

Suppose you have similar links like your competitors. In that case, you can have a neutral advantage, though you need to have some additional links to push them. Just follow the few steps properly.

• Google your primary keyword.
• Click the very first result that appears on the page.
• Use Majestic SEO browser plugin to get an insight into competitors’ links.

When you move in by clicking the Backlinks tab, you will find a list of links connected to your competitor’s website. They are usually in the form of blog comments, guest posting, resource pages, link roundups.

• Guest Post

Guest posting is a method of building links that offer users to find multiple opportunities using advanced Google search operators. Some popular Google Search Operators are –  

• legal + “write for us”
• legal + “guest blog”
• legal + “submit a guest post”
• legal + “accepting guest posts”
• legal + “contribute to our site”
• legal + “become a guest writer”

Before posting on these legal platforms, make sure you read their submitted articles and go through the guidelines.

The Bottom Line

SEO for law firms is required to index the site properly on Google and to increase its visibility to the right audience online. To acquire the desired results, you must perform the steps including technical optimization of website, Google listings, researching relevant content, building links, and finally monitoring the overall performance.

Guys, it’s not the job of an amateur. Hence, seeking the help of the SEO experts and asking them about the attorney SEO performance audit is always a better approach.

Come with us we are the most trusted law firm SEO company that has good experience in handling lawyer website SEO and customize a high-level SEO strategy for your business.