SEO is one of the main channels in modern marketing and attorneys who want to grow their business should start using SEO to gain more awareness and online visibility. Below are 8 tips for effective SEO for lawyers that I have incorporated into my SEO processes to achieve results for my clients.
For the purposes of this article, I’ll be referring to lawyers in general but these strategies work well for any type of law practitioner – from criminal lawyer to corporate lawyers, to family lawyers or migration lawyers.
SEO for Lawyers Tip #1
Choose the Right Objectives, Targets and Focus
When you meet with a new client, you invest time in asking the right questions to gather information about the client’s legal situation. This critical step helps you assess the situation and apply the best legal strategy.
This applies for your legal SEO strategy as well. Defining SMART goals will help you get direction and measure your SEO campaign and marketing efforts. It’s also important to set your priorities. It makes sense to identify the legal services that account for the highest revenue and focus your SEO efforts on these.
Here, at SEOlancer, we make sure we get clarity on the legal services you offer, your areas of specialisation, your core clientele, pricing and other details from the beginning. It’s vital for your SEO agency to take steps to determine these core principles at the beginning of an SEO campaign.
SEO for Lawyers Tip #2
Identify Your Competitors and "Steal" their SEO Strategy
Well… when I say “steal” I don’t exactly mean stealing it. This step is more of making sense and analysing other well-performing legal websites and apply what is already working for them. If their websites are doing well, then it’s safe to say what they are doing in terms of SEO is working! We don’t need to reinvent the wheel. If you are interested to learn more about reverse engineering.
When we work on a client’s website and SEO strategy this step is very important to us. Reverse engineering websites that compete with you will help us to:
- Fast track the SEO process and get results for your legal firm sooner
- Gather competitive data and use it to your advantage.
- Take the guesswork out of the process because we know what works already
- Replicate an SEO strategy with proven outcomes
- Create a campaign with purpose and a clear direction
In terms of what we reverse engineer, this is what we look at.
Site structure. We analyse how the legal website is set up. This means we look at how the individual subpages are linked to one another. Search engines can find subpages quickly and efficiently when a website has a neat and well-organised structure. Get in touch if you want to know more about how we do this.
Keywords. Keywords are words and phrases that suggest what the topic is about. We use software to show which keywords are performing well. Identifying target keywords helps us to understand the search behaviour of potential clients.
Content. We audit the information, blogs and other content on the website to see what visitors are clicking on. When we understand which content is yielding results, we can work towards replicating it.
Links. We identify other sites that have created links to their website. Again, we use this information to replicate the links.
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SEO for Lawyers Tip #3
How Your Website is Organised Matters
One of the reasons your legal firm may not currently be getting good SEO results is because you have a poor site structure. You may have multiple pages and categories that are poorly organised, do not link to one another, or your URLs are stuffed with keywords. In short, it’s a confusing mess.
Without a site structure that is logical and well planned, implementing an ongoing effective SEO strategy in the long term will be difficult. It will affect the engagement and the number of enquiries and therefore the conversion rate.
Before we embark on an SEO campaign for our clients, our starting point is to audit their website and determine the need for a new structure. This is critical to do before you start adding pages and building content.
When we restructure a site for clients, we keep the following objectives in mind:
- Flexibility to add or remove pages and services in future without needing to change the website structure.
- Ability to make changes to the site as your attorney's practice grows or evolves.
- Retain your current site traffic, revenue and rankings so we can build on them instead of starting from scratch.
SEO for Lawyers Tip #4
Be Clear What You Want Your Visitors to Do
The prime objective of a website as a marketing tool is to drive traffic that converts visitors into customers. If a site isn’t conversion-optimised, the marketing investment is going to waste. Google also tracks conversions as one of the factors it uses to determine if a website is relevant to the user’s query.
For instance, if a user types “family lawyer in Sydney” and clicks on the first result, but bounce back immediately, that could be a sign that the page is not relevant to the users’ query. Then Google may decide to take that website off the first positions. The opposite is also true – if a law firm website attracts a lot of clicks from search, has low bounce rates and higher engagement rates, that would boost its rankings. Of course, this is only one factor out of hundreds when it comes to Google algorithm.
Getting potential customers to a lawyer website is the first step. Online users usually have short attention spans, so you want to make it easy for them to take the next step and perform an action. They will likely want to email you, call you, or book an appointment.
What do you want them to do? We will help you determine your desired outcome when a user ‘converts’ on your website. This will help us choose the best type of call to action (‘CTA’) we implement and the most appropriate design.
A conversion-focused website has a CTA that is prominent. When a potential client visits your legal firm website, it must be evident to them how to take the next step. They shouldn’t need to visit multiple pages to request more information.
Also, keep CTAs on your legal website simple. If a user is unsure what to do because the form is long or complicated, they will likely abandon the page, and you’ve lost them.
Of course, it’s essential to track these conversions. This, along with our reporting, will indicate if the SEO strategy is delivering a positive ROI.
SEO for Lawyers Tip #5
Make Sure the Content of Your Website is Informative and Engaging
Pay attention to the core pages of your website. They contain critical information about your legal practice and are very important step if you want to embark on a succesful SEO journey.
Start by making sure that the main pages of your website contain useful information for your potential clients. These pages include the home page, about page, service pages, and location pages, for example. Here, at SEOlancer, we will work with you to make sure your legal service offerings are clear, and the content we generate for you is accurate.
SEO for Lawyers Tip #6
Build More Pages to Create More Entry Points
Content marketing will help you build your business and attract new clients. It’s vital for all SEO campaigns.
Low-quality content with 300 words are counterproductive. If your current SEO agency is not producing valuable, content consistently, you are wasting money.
Here are some of the ways of producing new content for your legal practice will pay off –
- You show you’re an expert in your field
- By providing useful and relevant information , you establish your legal practice as an authority. It's a simple but powerful way to communicate to potential customers that you are a cut above your competitors
- You expand your site footprint. More content means more entry points for potential clients to find you. More traffic leads to more conversions and more revenue
- It builds trust. The content you provide on your site for free to visitors essentially presells your service offerings. Potential customers will have confidence in your offering
- You will attract high-quality links. Other websites will direct visitors to yours, which can help your site performance
Generating ideas for content is not as hard as it sounds. Content marketing opportunities come your way every time you have a discussion with a potential client. And we are here to help you with this task.
SEO for Lawyers Tip #7
Build your website's popularity on the web (off-page SEO)
Off-page optimisation includes actions SEO specialist take outside of your legal website to improve its search ranking position. Building links to your website can be a time-consuming and not so pleasant task for you, but it still holds a great value for search engines.
One thing you should remember when it comes to link building is to prioritise quality over quantity.
If your current SEO agency is using low-quality writers or cheap links, it could be one of the reasons you are not getting results from SEO. It could even be harmful to your website.
To create quality off-page optimisation, we do the following –
- Reverse engineer competing legal websites to identify high-quality links
- Perform strategic outreach and prospecting to acquire high-quality links from websites relevant to legal services or those associated with your area of speciality
- Leverage sites such as HARO that can lead to editorial blog posts and other publishing opportunities that will help promote your legal practice.
SEO for Lawyers Tip #8
Focus on Revenue not Rankings
We track and measure the information and provide it to you in a monthly report by implementing call tracking and monitoring enquiries. The focus should be always revenue, not rankings. We aim to demonstrate a return on your investment through the number of enquiries through phone calls and email and earnings estimates. While search engine rankings are essential, getting new clients on board for you is our priority.
We actively engage with all our clients to ensure the measurement is meaningful. You can assist us by tracking and measuring total enquiries, close rates and earnings on your side. At the end of the month, we can compare results, and ensure accuracy of reporting.
OK, You made it to the end of this article! If you enjoyed the above and you are interested in working with me, you can book a call with me to talk more about your legal firm and SEO goals. But before that – just to ensure we are going to be a good fit, I would like to add a few key points here. I would love to work with you if
You are serious about marketing and SEO. You are enthusiastic, motivated and dedicated to playing the long game and have a marketing budget in place.
You have realistic expectations. You understand that SEO takes time and marketing can be challenging
and
You are focused on revenue. You are looking to increase your clients base, get more sales/ customers, enquires and to increase your bottom line.
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