Search engine optimization is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies for attorneys. Besides improving your firm’s awareness, it can generate high call conversions. However, most attorneys find law firm SEO time consuming. Here’s a step-by-step guide to SEO for lawyers.
Step #1: Claim your Google Business Profile (GBP)
Your potential clients in your primary service area will use local search to find legal representation. So attorney SEO should start with creating a Google Business Profile (earlier called Google My Business) for your law practice. It’s a low-hanging fruit to get leads for your legal services.
You want to choose a relevant business category, upload high-quality photos to represent your brand accurately, and add relevant business information such as your name, phone number, address, and website (referred to as NAP + W). Ultimately the goal is to appear for keywords related to your practice area.
Local SEO goes a step further to incorporate building citations to your site and creating your firm’s listing on other legal directories, such as Avvo, with a consistent NAP + W as your GBP. Ultimately you want to get more positive reviews from your customers about your services to improve your local rankings.
You can monitor the presence of your local listing for relevant keywords related to your practice using a tool such as TrackRight.
Step #2: Build a professional law firm website
Now it’s time to build your online home. Your website needs to accurately reflect your legal practice and your expertise. However, if you’re short of time and money, don’t overcomplicate it. Simply, use a CMS such as WordPress. It has thousands of professional theme templates and lets you install plugins to extend the functionality of your site.
What’s more, most of its themes are responsive, high-performance, and high-security. If you have the budget, then consider hiring a professional law firm design agency.
Step #3: Conduct keyword research
Your prospects are searching for legal advice on Google right now. What if you can interject their journey and offer some helpful advice? Well, not only will it result in driving relevant website traffic, but it can even get you new clients.
Find relevant keywords
To start finding the keywords, write down the top questions of your prospects and clients. Try to research the topics using a keyword research tool such as Ahrefs.
Or you can plug a competitor’s domain to find the keywords they rank for. There you’ll find data like keyword difficulty, volume, cost per click, and for each keyword. The most important metric that you should look for is keyword difficulty (KD). The higher its value, the more difficult it will be for you to rank for that keyword.
Here’s a keyword research tutorial using Ahrefs that you can follow. Overall narrow down your keyword lists, and prioritize keywords based on your customer’s pain points and KD score.
Step #4: Create optimized content for a specific keyword and publish
Content quality is another ranking factor Google considers when ranking a blog post.
The quality is ultimately measured by two aspects:
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Relevancy: It means how well you have answered the search query in your article. To tell Google your content is relevant, you must include the keyword in the heading, title tags, subheads, and body text. Also make your website’s content comprehensive while being efficient.
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Reliability: When the authority websites, targeting a similar audience and ranking for similar keywords as yours, link to your content, then Google considers it reliable. The reliability of your website is related to your domain rating (DR) — something which SEO tools like Ahrefs provide. But we’ll cover this more in the fifth step.
Satisfy the search intent
So before you create content on the selected keyword, it’s essential to understand the search intent. You can do it by searching the keyword on Google and checking the type of content others have published on this topic.
According to Google, there are four types of search intent that one should consider while creating content: Know simple queries, do and device action queries, website queries, and visit-in-person queries.
These are popularly known as Informational, Commercial, Navigational, and Transactional search intent, respectively.
The search intents relevant for law firms—for the most part—are:
Informational Queries: When someone is looking for simple information. It helps to increase your brand awareness—for example, how to take legal action against a company.
Commercial Queries: When someone is researching to make a future purchase—for instance, how to hire an immigration attorney.
Optimize your content for Google bots
After creating high-quality content that satisfies search intent, you must also optimize it for the keyword you’re trying to rank for. This is where on-site signals come into play. Your heading tags, title tags, meta descriptions, etc., should use relevant keywords.
You can use a tool like Surfer SEO to get data-backed suggestions on optimizing your content for specific keywords you target.
While writing, format your content properly. Make the content scannable by including subheads, bold and italics fonts, and bullet points (as required). Furthermore, include external links and internal links in your content as it helps Google establish the topic you cover on a page.
Step #5: Promote your content and build links
Optimized content may not be sufficient to rank on the first page — especially if you’re in a competitive practice area such as personal injury.
Why so? This is where the reliability of your website comes into play. Google wants to serve authoritative brands to its users. So if you have a low domain authority (because trustworthy websites don’t link to you), then you’ll have a hard time competing in SERPs.
Build your authority through content marketing
Content marketing is all about promoting your content to reach your prospects. Here are a few ways to do it:
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Share your blog with your email subscribers. Just send a teaser email (an email that builds curiosity to motivate your subscribers to click on the CTA) to your audience based on the content of your blog post.
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Promote on your social media channels multiple times: Share specific findings of your blog post on your social channel with a link back to the For more inspiration, take a look at how other attorneys are operating their social media channels to get more leads.
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Link building: For starters, you can repurpose your blog post into an infographic and then reach out to publishers for publishing it, earning backlinks.
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Guest post on other blogs: While doing it, make sure you target high domain authority publications that publish quality content, which is relevant to your niche and offer a bio section to guest bloggers with one to two links.
To get started, you can search for the (Practice area) + “write for us.” Chrome extensions like Ubersuggest and Moz Explorer can help you filter the results based on domain authority and estimated visits that the blog receives.
Earn backlinks through media outreach
Provide actionable quotes or legal advice from your experience to writers on platforms such as Help a B2B Writer and HARO.
Link building is one of the messiest and most hated parts of law firm marketing. So I sat down with Adrian Gas, an SEO director, to understand some of his favorite ones to build authority (that you can additionally consider):
Step #6: Improve your user experience (UX)
Often the technical backend of a website is ignored by businesses. But your prospective clients instantly form an impression of your firm’s brand on the basis of your website design and their overall experience on your site. They will better engage with your content and spend more time if you have a great UX.
But how does this impact your legal SEO efforts?
Well, Google has incorporated page experience signals into its algorithm, so they directly impact your search engine rankings.
These signals consist of a metric called Core Web Vitals (CWV), the mobile-friendliness and security of your website, and your usage of interstitials. Optimizing these aspects is a part of improving the technical SEO of your website.
You can access a page experience report through Google Webmaster tools to check how your website fares on mobile devices and desktops. It can help you identify the web pages on your site that offer subpar performance.
While the UX is important, your SEO campaign should incorporate it only when you’ve executed other steps we discussed earlier in the article.
Hire an SEO expert if you’re short of time
Lawyer SEO is straightforward once you have a law firm website. You need to find lucrative and untapped Google search terms (called keywords) that your target audience is searching for. You’ll also need to satisfy the intent of the visitor by writing relevant content for each of the above keywords and ensure stellar on page SEO. Finally, work on off-site SEO factors such as building backlinks and citations.
Legal marketing, in general, is no rocket science. However, it requires time and you get better at it slowly. If your SEO strategy isn’t working, or if you’re short of time, you can consider hiring a professional legal SEO agency.
Just look out for an SEO agency that has worked in your practice area and has a proof of efficacy. By hiring SEO services, you can free time to work on what you know best — dealing with clients.