As the competition for visibility becomes intense, a number of firms have found a way to unbundle the concept of SEO for law firms to boost their online presence, drive traffic and improved growth for free.
A few of these law firms have evolved search engine optimization practices that has enabled them to dominate the internet for their branded keywords, leaving the majority of the firms hustling for whatever is left of the search traffic.
As a law firm seeking to get on top of the web search in your niche, there are specific search engine optimization strategies you could use to deliver consistent and long term success for your firm.
Having worked with a number of firms, I’ll be sharing with you some of the key SEO strategies for law firms and how you can use these strategies to boost your online visibility right from the scratch.
Is SEO Important for Law Firms?
As a law firm, most of your clients are using the search engine to look for lawyers, legal representation and corporate legal services. Using SEO to optimize your website is one of the most important steps you can take to position your firm to attract as much of this online audience as possible. This is why SEO is very crucial for your success as a law firm.
That said, I’ll be discussing in the following paragraphs, the steps you can use to set up search engine optimization for lawyers and law firms, including how you can go about this from scratch.
Identify your Goals
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Before setting up SEO for a law firm, you want to identify clearly what you want to achieve with your search engine optimization effort.
For example, you may have specific services you want to optimize for visibility, a specific branding you want to position for your law firm or a set of keywords you want to be recognized for.
The idea is to identify these things clearly so you can take steps to set up your optimization strategies to meet up with these goals.
Also, identifying your goals gives you ideas on how to measure your expected outcomes. When you’re not able to pinpoint exactly what you want to achieve with your search engine optimization, it gets difficult to align your strategies especially if you’re working with an external SEO agency.
You want to get this out of the way as much as possible. For clients who are not sure about their goals, I always advice, work with your SEO experts to identify your key focal areas before heading into implementation.
Ask them to explain this to you based on their analysis of your website.
Initiate a Keyword Research
One of the first step to set up SEO for a law firm is to identify your keywords. This is a crucial step because you need the right keywords that align with the legal services you’re offering, your target clients and of course, what your audience is searching for in particular.
As soon as this is sorted you can then head over to create a keyword strategy that involves the steps you’ll take to use these specific keywords in a way that reflects your legal offerings, client interests and popular search demand.
To sort out keywords effectively, you can consider using keywords research tools like SEMRush, Google Keywords Planner, Ubersuggest etc. these tools will get you started on the right keywords you can use.
From here you can plan the keyword strategy by identifying specific search phrases you will use for the overall website, specific web pages and content generally.
Optimize On-Page SEO
After identifying your key words, it is now time to optimize your on-page SEO, using the search phrases you identified.
Now, on-page SEO refers to all search engine optimization strategies you implement on your website. This includes things like optimizing your title tags, SEO title, internal links, URL, Meta Description etc.
- Title Tags: A title tag defines the title of a web page. For a better performance, optimize your title tags by using the right keywords instead of random phrases.
- Meta Description: This is where you describe the content of a web page in a few words. Use both catchy and SEO description here to attract readers to click through to your website when they see your meta description.
- Internal Links: To get improved results while setting up SEO for a law firm, consider linking to relevant pages on your website to create a better user experience, improved navigation, indexing and rank improvement for your web pages.
Outside this, if you have already existing content on your website, take steps to re-gig and optimize them for better visibility by updating them with relevant keywords and more updated information.
Set your Technical SEO
Technical SEO optimizations are the key steps you take to ensure your law firm website delivers the best performance and overall experience for your users.
As part of your Law firm SEO strategies, you want to take some key steps to ensure that your website is not only performing but it is also delivering your web pages as fast as it should.
Considering that one of the most important indicators Google considers for website rankings is the website loading speed, as part of your technical search engine optimization for law firm, you want to fix your speed.
Take steps to fix your JavaScript, HTML and CSS scripts, to ensure a faster loading speed experience for your users. Remove bloated plugins, applications and widgets if you have them on your website.
Institute web page caching for overall speed, reduce your web page size and finally, optimize your images for improved performance.
Create Valuable Content
Generally, content is very crucial for search optimization but when it comes to implementing SEO for a Law firm, you must keep in mind that creating valuable pieces of content is one of the key strategies to build sustainable visibility for your brand.
This is because, a large percentage of your target audience are not going to search for law firms in Lagos for example. Some of them are going to be looking for specific solutions to their problems.
For example, a potential client who’s in need of a lawyer can ask questions like “How to register a Land Title in Nigeria” instead of looking directly for a law firm.
To get the most out of these kinds of searches, the idea is for you to create content about how to solve these kinds of problems easily and then position your firm as the expert that can help them to navigate the issue.
Doing this gets you three results immediately viz: adds value to those potential clients after they get over to read the content on your website, positions you as an expert that can solve the problems and gets your law firm and its services before them.
You can create different kind of content for your brand based on your own goals as a lawyer and expected outcomes but for your law firm clients, I always recommend this three prong strategy: go with content that specifically covers your niche, adds visible value to your clients and aligns with the services you cover either directly or indirectly.
Optimize for Local Visibility
As a law firm, local search engine optimization is one of the important steps you want to take to improve your brand visibility in your geographical area.
Remember, a large part of your services as a law firm is targeted towards a specific jurisdiction or geographical area.
What this means is that a majority of your target audience are going to be located in a specific region. So, if you want to implement SEO for law firms successfully, you need a plan that takes care of your local region and you can only get this by taking specific steps to acquire it.
For example, outside optimizing for local SEO with your content, consider listing in specific local directories targeted at your geographical area.
Find questions, search queries and legal problem dominant in your geographical area and create solutions for this, using your content. The goal is to make your website as visible as possible to people in your locality. And you must leave no stone unturned.
Build Backlinks to your Website
Backlinks are important indicators that showcase a website’s quality and relevance to search engine. The more backlinks you have from reputable and relevant websites, the better your chances of getting a higher visibility in search engine rankings.
Even where you take all the other steps in this guide, I want you to keep in mind that setting up a successful SEO for a law firm is not possible without a well-coordinated backlink plan. So you need a back link strategy in place.
To get started, using the keywords you identified earlier in step two alongside your goals, identify the websites the websites that are relevant to your law firms. This will most likely be websites that create content around law firms, law practice and legal content generally.
Also, identify the other major websites that are still relevant to your niche. This could be based on your area of practice specifically.
When this is done, create a plan on how you can get to attract backlinks from these websites, this can be either by way of guest posting on those websites, requesting for a link to your resources from their website or directly networking with the authors to evolve a mutually beneficial link building strategy.
As much as possible, avoid links from spammy and irrelevant clients. This is very important.
Monitor, Evaluate and Implement
One of the key strategies that is oftentimes missed when lawyers try to navigate SEO for law firms is the fact that monitoring and evaluation can improve your overall results.
Using tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, you want to monitor and analyze the performance of your websites, based on these strategies you’ve implemented.
Find out the keywords delivering the largest number of impression and visits. Identify the number of minutes people are spending on your website, the page they spend the most times on and their predominant visiting hours.
Looking at this metrics can give you ideas on where your search engine optimization efforts should be headed. Analyzing your metrics will open your eyes to key areas you need to improve on, the kind of content you have to create and the steps you can take to further improve on your overall performance.
Final Words
Setting up the right SEO strategies for your law firm’s website can improve your visibility, traffic and overall website performance but to get this done, you have to take the steps as listed in this guide, to the letter.
Where you can’t get this done by yourself, hire our team of SEO Experts with widespread experience working with law firms to get you started on getting improved search visibility.
Now, it’s your turn. What are the key challenges you’ve faced when it comes to setting up SEO for law firms? Drop your comments below.
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