How Does SEO Help Law Firms?

In this article, we review the basic fundamentals of SEO for lawyers, as well as give specific tips and examples that you can easily apply to your website. This will ultimately help your law firm start showing up first in search engine results. You’ll also get an understanding of what SEO is, develop tactical strategies for implementing SEO for your firm, and what to look for if you’re interested in hiring an external source that is specialized in law firm SEO, like ours.

In today’s world, technology is a very present part, so many people are now going online to find information and compare their options when it comes to attorneys. This also means if it’s difficult for potential clients to find you online, you’re most likely losing out on a significant amount of business.

But for the lawyers who are reading and asking “What even is SEO?” we will be explaining what SEO is and how to implement it into your law firm to get more leads… and better leads.

The formal definition of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is:

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines.

SEO for attorneys differs in that the SEO processes are tailored and applied to businesses in the legal industry.

Since SEO is a marketing tactic, SEO for lawyers requires lots of research for in-depth keywords, onsite optimization, link building, citation building, content development, analytics configuration, and Google My Business optimization.

Now that we’ve discussed what SEO is, let’s talk about how to start implementing it for your firm.

How to start your law firm SEO strategy:

Define your target audience

This is one of the most important and first steps you should take when thinking about SEO. You can’t write relevant, engaging content without knowing who your audience is. That is why it is key to make sure you define your target audience and speak clearly to their needs. If you find that you are targeting more than one group, be sure to define each one clearly in the corresponding content. Our team of experts can help you begin.

Do your keyword research

As we mentioned above, researching keywords is also a very important factor in SEO. It is important to research the keywords your specific target audience is using when searching for your legal services, that will ensure that your content attracts new and relevant leads, and makes your firm easier to find online. Even though keywords are very important, that doesn’t mean that you should only target popular keywords, but rather also consider why a user is conducting their online search. This task can be tricky, but we are here to help.

Create educational SEO content

Once you have done your keyword research, the next step you should take is to focus on creating highly informative content that is relevant to the keywords for your potential clients to read. We also recommend keeping in mind that while some keywords might be key for your business, such as “Boston criminal lawyer”, to draw in relevant traffic and build yourself as a trusted attorney in your area, you should also consider educational content that targets other keywords like “DUI trial question”,  “what is an attorney-client privilege”, etc.

Keyword research takes a lot of time, and our team is specialized in this.

Start with a full SEO audit

Before you can start optimizing your website, you need to know what to fix. A full SEO audit will uncover any problem areas to help you prioritize what pages or web elements to tackle first. We will be able to do a rank-checking analysis for you right away.

Focus on the critical technical SEO issues

There is something known as search engine crawlers, that “read” the content of your website. This means your potential clients are not the only ones reading the content on your site. To be sure that not only your potential clients have no issues, but crawlers can scan the full extent of your website, make sure the technical framework is structured and clear. Any technical issues that slow the page loading time, for example, should be uncovered and fixed as soon as possible, as slow loading time is a major obstacle for your website visitors and search engine crawlers alike. We will check all of these for you as well.

Conduct an SEO competitor analysis

An SEO competitor analysis consists of a comparison of you and your direct competitors, as well as search competitors you might not even know you really had for each individual key search term since your competitors might vary depending on the keyword. The factors that should be looked into to benchmark against include website structure, page structure, content quality, the keywords targeted, loading speed, UX, and backlinks.

Now that we’ve discussed key steps and tips for starting SEO, let’s give you a few more little tips to keep in mind throughout the process or other areas you can work to improve the SEO you’ve just started.

Reviews/Google My Business

If your law firm hasn’t claimed or activated a Google Business Profile account, do so as soon as possible because you’re missing out on a very useful tool that helps boost your SEO exponentially. Google Business Profile (Google My Business) (previously referred to as “GMB”)  is one of the best ways to manage how your business will appear in search results. One of the biggest and most important steps when creating a Google Business Profile is to make sure your profile is up-to-date with the basics: address, hours, pictures, etc. You can even use this tool to post updates or link to the new informative content on your website.

There are many different factors and variables to how your Google Business account will appear in search results. Once you know your basics are up to date, one of the other most important ways to show up in search results is the reviews. When a potential client is searching and your firm pops up, they’re not only going to be drawn to how relevant your firm is but also, the number of positive reviews you have. Law firms often struggle with acquiring quality reviews because they usually lack a process to do so.

Improve your loading speed

Another way to boost your SEO is by improving your page’s loading speed. We discussed this above vaguely when discussing crawlers, but it is a big factor that could really optimize your SEO. Most attorneys fail to consider or think that the audience could be experiencing the website from a mobile device or from just generally a location with a poor internet connection. But if you make sure there are no barriers to information that would cause your audience to have a bad experience, you can save yourself from losing not just one, but many potential leads. As we also mentioned above, it is also great on a technical level, because better loading speed also improves your ranking by making it faster and easier for the search engine crawlers to scan your website.

Mastering SEO for law firms definitely isn’t easy, it will take lots of practice, trial and error, and consistency. But we hope with these tips you’ll feel more at ease with SEO and the best practices to make your firm’s website stand out. If you would like to feel even more at ease by talking to qualified experts on attorney SEO, contact us for a free rank checker today!