Most people won’t just walk into a lawyer’s office without doing a little research first, and the days of clients looking for lawyers in the phone book are long gone. Aside from referrals, search engines are the top way lawyers find new clients.
If you want to be the lawyer to land those new clients, you need to make sure your website appears when people search for terms relevant to your area of practice. Not only do you want your website to be found on Google when people search, you want it to show up on the first page.
Your search ranking for the relevant terms is not something you can leave to chance. There is work that goes into making sure a site appears for the right search terms and that it ranks on the first page. With various law firm SEO services, you can move your site up in the rankings, and this will guarantee more new leads from potential clients.
Find the Right Keywords
Keywords are a good place to start building your SEO strategy. The keywords represent the search terms you want your website to rank for. Start by thinking of your area of practice and then build a list of terms that potential clients might use when searching for services like yours. Some examples of those keyword phrases might be DUI Attorney, Personal Injury Lawyer, or Family Law Firm depending on your practice area.
The initial list of search terms will be good to start keyword research. With that said, the first terms you think of will probably be some of the most competitive keywords. You will definitely want to optimize for them, but you will see success quicker for less competitive, long-tail keyword phrases, that actually may convert better. As an example Best Dui Attorney in Phoenix, or Scottsdale Business Lawyer.
Get Local
Most law firms are local businesses. Even if you have a few regions where you practice, focusing on a broad national audience is not going to do much for you. Along with building keywords with your practice areas in mind, you should do the same as it concerns the different cities and towns from which you hope to attract new clients.
As another tip for local SEO, set up your Google Business Profile (Formerly Google My Business / GMB) account. Having the correct information on your GBP profile can tell Google the correct region for your business. This will help your local search ranking and it can be a way to attract more organic search traffic.
Publish New Content
You will obviously want to optimize the core pages of your site. This includes your home page, services pages, location pages, etc. However, that will only provide you with so many SEO opportunities. That is why a law firm should post regular blog updates to their website. Additionally, frequent updates with new content indicate to Google that your site is more active, and that can also help your search rankings.
Instead of creating content just based on your keywords, think about the types of things potential clients might want to know. It could be something like explaining the legal process or outlining the stages of a case. You could also cover news that affects your area of practice. Once you have some topics, you can then go back to determine which keywords will work best in different pieces.
Add Internal Links
A big part of SEO is helping search engines understand what your pages mean and why you made them. One of the ways you can do this is by adding internal links to your website. By linking to your own pages, you can help Google and other search engines understand the meaning of the content, its importance on the site, and its role as a part of your website.
A good way to do this is to consider which terms you want a specific page to rank for. As an example, if you are a personal injury lawyer, you might have a page for car accident cases. One part of your SEO strategy for that page could be to look for opportunities on your site to link back to that page using terms like “car accident lawsuit” or “car accident attorney”.
Attract Backlinks
Getting other websites to link back to your site can be one of the best ways to improve your search ranking. Search engines view backlinks as a signal that indicates quality and usefulness. With that said, you won’t get many backlinks unless you develop a strategy to acquire them.
You might get some backlinks organically if you write good content, but you will probably need to make an effort to get other websites to link back to your site. One way to do this is to find sites that will let you guest post. You could also look for a business that has a related interest and offer to guest post on their blog.
Handling SEO for your website is possible, but you have to be willing to spend the time to do it. If you don’t have the time to consistently work on your SEO strategy, you might be better off hiring a digital marketing agency to do the work for you. SEO companies can do things like keyword research, content strategy, run backlink campaigns and more. These professionals will be able to help you get results faster, and you will be able to focus more time on running your law firm.
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