All online businesses quickly learn the importance of SEO when they realize that social media marketing and pumping out blog posts simply doesn’t get the job done. If you want to be the first law firm website that a search engine sees, you are going to have to put together a comprehensive SEO strategy that puts you at the top of relevant search results for potential clients who are seeking out legal services.
That said, building a search engine optimization strategy on your own can be a great way to prevent your law firm’s website from getting the organic search results it needs. If you are working on SEO for your website, here are some common SEO mistakes to avoid and keep in mind as you move forward.
1. Attempting to Rank for Competitive Keywords
Chances are that you quickly realized how important keywords were in your SEO strategy, especially if you weren’t taking much time to make sure it was in your title tag, meta description, URL, headers, and throughout the type of content that you are writing. However, you can’t simply add keywords and hope that your content ranks. You need to be targeting relevant keywords that you can rank for.
Let’s imagine, for example, that you are a personal injury attorney based in Ohio looking for new clients. Using “personal injury attorney” will pit you against already established law firms nationwide who have a stronger domain authority and are already on the first page for that keyword.
The solution? Look for long-tail keywords that will be easy to rank for. For example, “personal injury attorney Toledo Ohio” is far more specific and will yield better results on search engines. This will be helpful in your local SEO efforts (such as managing Google My Business Listings and collecting positive reviews) as you try to attract potential customers in your area.
2. Failing to Optimize Your Website
While keywords and content are an important factor in your SEO strategy, the user experience is something you need to focus on as well. If your website design is too slow, too difficult, or too glitchy to use, you are going to drive away prospective clients and fail to grow your online presence overall. Take some time to make sure that your website looks great, works quickly on both desktop and mobile, and is easy to navigate for potential customers. This is the best way to ensure that all of your hard SEO work isn’t done in vain.
3. Forgetting to Implement Off-Site Strategies
Your law firm’s website will need to focus on keyword optimization and other on-site SEO strategies to improve your organic search results and show up on the first page of a Google search, but this isn’t the only strategy you should be focusing on.
As you are building your digital marketing plan, you will need to make sure that you are targeting off-site SEO tactics as well. This begins with becoming an authoritative enough resource of information that other websites will link back to your website when writing their own blog posts or positive reviews.
You should also focus on building your social media presence as well if you expect to receive a fair amount of potential clients from these platforms.
4. Writing Poor Content or Only Focusing on Keywords
When someone first launches a website or a blog, they may simply look up SEO basics, keyword stuff their content, and post it on their website. Unfortunately, this strategy is not effective. Why? There are so many more aspects to SEO than placing keywords in your content and sending it out into the world. When you are writing each blog post for your website, you are going to want to focus on multiple aspects like:
- Writing high-quality content that will serve to establish you as an expert in your industry (and hopefully encourage others to link back to your content when they conduct their own research and write similar pieces).
- Making sure that your title is short, catchy, and uses your main keyword.
- Creating an informative meta description that includes your main keyword and lets readers know what they will learn before they click on your link.
- Injecting visuals into your content that help break up the content (and making sure that you insert your main keyword into your alt text, which is text that shows up on your page if the image doesn’t load for a visitor).
- Linking out to pieces that you used in any research needed to write blog content and linking to inbound content where applicable.
- Producing blog posts that are relevant to your industry and provide more information to your audience, enhancing the user experience and encouraging them to hire your law firm for their needs.
As it is with all marketing in business, using SEO for your law firm is only effective if the traffic you are drawing to your law firm converts clicks to clients. If you are simply writing for the sake of showing up on search engines for certain keywords related to your law firm and fail to produce great content that proves your authority and professionalism, it will yield little results.
Remember, you must adhere to SEO best practices while still making sure that people know you are the best law firm to go to for the services that they need.
5. Not Checking Your Site Performance or Performing an SEO analysis Regularly
SEO, like all things in business, needs to be updated and checked regularly. It is not something that you can set and forget. Should you fail to regularly conduct SEO audits for your website, you can miss out on major mistakes like duplicate content, broken links that no longer link to pages on your own website or pages on other websites, updates made on your website that impacted your design or causes issues you haven’t noticed yet (such as a change in site speed or problems loading on mobile, for example), and other problems that can impact your traffic.
While there is no set amount of time for when you should be going through your website for potential issues, most professionals will conduct an SEO audit at least every six months to keep track of any changes and make the necessary adjustments.
If you are in the process of developing a new web design or making changes that could have a potential impact site-wide, you may want to conduct an SEO audit sooner right before you publish the changes. The more you stay on top of your progress, the better the likelihood that you will avoid any major problems.
SEO doesn’t come easy to everyone, but it is vital if you expect your law firm to reach potential clients online. If you are having trouble with your local SEO strategy and making sure that your digital marketing efforts are providing the results that you need, reach out to an SEO company like Best Law Firm SEO to help you deal with everything from your website design to making sure that you are ranking on common search results. With support from a digital marketing agency and SEO provider like Best Law Firm SEO, you are sure to compete with other attorneys and receive the rankings that you deserve!
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