As every lawyer knows, the legal industry is one of the most competitive online. Wherever you operate, odds are you know another law firm or two, maybe even 10 in your county. If you’re operating in a bigger city then you can probably name dozens if not hundreds of firms with a similar practice to yours. With this last case in point, it also means there are that many law firms with SEO strategies targeting the same clients as you.
This means you need to stand out. If you have ever heard me say it once, you have heard me say it many times. We were not born to fit in. We were born to stand out!!
Having great SEO across your website is important, but when you have a lot of competition, you can’t stop there. To separate yourself from other law firms in town, you must think differently. That’s where ENX2 legal marketers come in handy. We know the formulas. We have tried and tested! And I know more than a few strategies you can use to boost your law firm’s chances of being seen. So keep reading to find out more. You are in the perfect place to build a strong foundation to take you through the tests of time.
1. Focus Your SEO on Specialized Keywords
Think about your practice. Do you focus on personal injury, employment law, dispute resolution, criminal defense, real estate, title searches, corporate law, etc.? That’s where you start, and from there, you can decide on how you want to specialize your keywords. We should write it out. It will be quicker to relate back to and you won’t forget.
I must admit that I can go on and on so just jump and skim if I get too intense.
Now, let’s get started with Nicole’s SEO Strategies for this week’s Legal Juice.
Keywords are the topic of a web page, the term you’re raising your SEO to rank for. When someone types in Google, “Personal injury lawyer PA,” your firm shows up because your web page made a keyword out of “personal injury lawyer” or a synonym. The SEO for your law firm should always be focused on your area of expertise.
For each web page, you should have some specific practice or aspect of that practice to be your page’s keyword. Don’t be afraid to make it specific or longer too. If you can write good content around the keyword, “automobile accident personal injury attorney” rather than “personal injury,” do it. You hit not only people who need a lawyer for automobile accidents but also people vaguely searching for personal injury. Decide on keywords with high intent.
Longer, specialized keywords may sound more difficult to write content for, and they are, but after years of working with SEO, there is a loophole. It counts as a keyword mention as long as all the words (or synonyms) for your keyword appear in the same sentence.
For example, if your keyword is “automobile accident personal injury attorney,” the sentence, “If you’ve been in an automobile accident, you need a personal injury attorney,” counts as a mention of your specialized keyword. It’s easier than you may think.
2. Improve the Quality of Your Page Content
In all aspects of business, quality is of the utmost importance. If you don’t offer quality legal representation, your law firm isn’t going to survive long enough to utilize any SEO strategies. The same works for SEO.
If the quality of your page content isn’t good, your SEO will drop, so you need to make an effort to have important information on your page. Don’t just stuff it full of your keywords. Integrate your keywords naturally into your content–that’s what will make it quality information that people need to read.
But it’s not enough to be as important to read; your content has to be as readable as possible. You want to go through your content and make sure your diction and wording are easy for anyone to understand.
Not only does having accurate and readable content establish quality, but it also establishes credibility. This works together to improve your site’s search performance. Create content that naturally includes primary and secondary keyword phrases. Also, ensure that your content satisfies searchers’ intents. For example, posts that directly answer a question can provide you with a significant SEO advantage.
3. Optimizing On-Site Pages
While it’s good to create new pages and update the readability of your content, it’s never too late to update the SEO for them too. There are some key features of every web page that can be optimized to improve SEO for your law firm, but it’s easy to miss them too.
Check over your pages to see if it has:
- The page keyword in the URL / link slug.
- External links to sites that support what you say.
- Internal links to pages on your site that elaborate on something you say.
- Your keyword in the title.
- Your keyword in the meta description.
- Your keyword in proper heading and subheadings, i.e., H1 and H2 tags.
- A definitive and actionable CTA at the end of your page.
- Alternative text that includes your keyword for every image.
The same rule for keywords that applied for content also applies for headings, subheadings, titles, and meta descriptions. Make sure you have your whole keyword in there, but then you can shift or add to it to ensure it makes grammatical sense to a reader.
4. Linking to Professional Profiles
Thorough clients aren’t just going to take your word that you’re of quality. If they didn’t contact you after a recommendation or out of time-crunching desperation, they’re going to do a background check on your law firm. Make this easier by linking to your professional profiles across social media. Think LinkedIn, Avvo, Twitter, or any other platform you’re active on.
I’ve talked about outbound links before and how social media sites can serve as good ones. These don’t take potential clients away from you, just to another place of your own outside of your website. You can both boost SEO for your law firm’s site and gain trust from a new potential client.
Doing this can help establish your brand authority and encourage more people to pick you rather than your competitors.
5. Get Those Reviews!
Reviews hold a lot of weight in search rankings, especially on Google, which has its own review system built into its search engine. You want to try and convince as many clients/customers, past and present, to leave positive reviews for you, particularly on Google Reviews.
They help shape a client’s initial opinion of you. A ton of positive reviews from real people help new leads find more faith in your firm, leading to a flux of potential clients to your site. The other thing about SEO is that it grows as more people come to your site.
6. Monitor Your Site’s Performance Regularly
No one will suffer a broken site. If your site has broken 404 pages, takes forever to load, or has several images that don’t load on your page, you have a problem. You have to upkeep it and forward backlinks to new pages if you take a page down.
If you have a lot of pages to keep track of, it can seem overwhelming. All you have to do is examine your Google Analytics, check for pages with low engagement and high bounce rates. This is usually a dead giveaway that a page has a problem that you should rectify as soon as possible.
Ace Your Law Firm’s SEO Strategy
SEO is important to stand out from the pack, and that’s true for all platforms. It doesn’t matter what your practice is, you want to make sure potential clients are always seeing your law firm first when they’re looking for legal representation. If you follow these SEO strategies and the previous ones we’ve gone through before, you’ll be well on your way.
But these may seem like a lot of work, and cost a lot of time that you don’t have. If that’s the case, then you need to contact ENX2 Marketing. We’re an agency that specializes in legal marketing, and we can handle SEO for your law firm if you can’t. Contact us today.