How to Improve Your Law Firm’s SEO Rankings

As a lawyer, you are already spending a lot of your time on your clients’ cases and finding ways to win. You might think that ranking your law firm’s website should be the least of your worries. While there’s a little amount of truth in that, you should also keep in mind that in order for you to keep helping people, they need to be able to find you first.

You can leave most of the dirty work on off-page SEO to the experts at https://theseomarketingcompany.com/seo/law-firms/ but there are some on-page strategies that you or your team can handle by yourselves.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for “search engine optimization”. It is the process of optimization, and driving traffic to a website, which results to the website landing on the first page of search engines. Google, Yahoo, and Bing are the three major search engines today. They rank pages depending on the relevance of its content to users.

SEO best practices for law firms

Attorneys may have a hectic schedule, but these basic SEO strategies are easy and simple enough to follow.

Write killer content

You should know that in the world of SEO, content is king. Effective and accurate SEO content is essential for your site. Your website ranking will depend on how relevant your pages are to the users. This is the reason why most websites have blogs, and so should you.

Here’s what you should do:

Find out what the common questions are in your specialization and write a blog post that answers those questions. People will start trusting you when they see that you actually know what you are doing.

When writing your blog, you need to get right to the point. Beating around the bush, using long examples, and boring metaphors will only make your readers leave the site. Answer the question, give a proper example, and move on to the next point.

Use short paragraphs. When website visitors see your blog, they want to scan the whole post and get information fast. Studies have shown that shorter paragraphs with three to four sentences have higher conversion rate.

Use relevant images. Internet users love good graphics. They tend to stay longer on a page when there are relevant images or short video about the topic being discussed.

Write more about the benefits of your services and how you can solve their problems. Your readers already know what their problem is so you do not have to focus on that. Find a solution for them and let them know how beneficial it is to have a lawyer for cases such as theirs.

Geo-Target

Whether you are writing a blog post or web copy, always remember to geo-target. This means you add the city name or state in the keywords that you are trying to rank for. “New York City Attorney” is an example of a geo-targeted key phrase.

Geo-targeting allows you to target specific readers. If you are practicing law in New York, it is better for your law firm to attract readers who could be potential clients that are also from this area or who have cases there as well. If you do not practice in the west coast, it is pointless to get clicks from that area.

Ask for Reviews

Almost everybody looks for reviews before they buy products or hire services. Be sure to ask for it when your client is particularly happy with you.

Talk to your client and ask if they were satisfied with the way you represented them. If the client sings with praises, give your calling card with your website address and ask if a review is possible. It is the best time to ask for a review.

You could also ask for a review through email which includes a link that will take the client directly to the reviews page. Make sure that the client does not have to log in or that it does not require a long process just to make a review.

Good Website Layout/Design

People tend to leave a website when it is too complicated or if they do not immediately find what they are looking for. You may not be the one who will build your website, but it is crucial that you take part in the decision-making of the design. User experience is important.

What makes a good website layout?

It should be simple enough. A heavily designed website makes you lose clients. It speaks of chaos and being unorganized. A simple website, on the other hand, looks professional.It should be free of typos. A website with spelling errors comes off as being immature and reckless. Potential clients will not take you seriously. Your website needs to be mobile compatible. Keep in mind that almost everybody relies on their smartphones every day and transacts business through it as well.

Write engaging Meta titles and descriptions

What are Meta titles and description?

These are texts that people read about your website or landing page when they get the search results from search engines. These could attract or dissuade potential clients.

Meta titles and descriptions need to include key phrases so users know they are visiting a website that is relevant to their search. It helps not only potential clients but also the website owner because more clicks are made, and then SEO rankings become higher.

Why does your law firm need SEO?

Every website on the web needs SEO, and law firms are no exception. When people need lawyers, they do a search on one of the search engines, such as Google, for lawyers or law firms they can trust and work with. They would search for a word or phrase and then the search engine will give back search results. This word or phrase is called a keyword or key phrase.

If your law firm specializes in inheritance law, for example, and someone searches for “inheritance lawyer” and your website has been optimized for this particular key phrase, it will appear on the first page of the search results. If your website has not been optimized, people will not find it.

If you try to search the world wide web right now for inheritance lawyers, you will get more than three hundred million search results. People will most likely just look at the first two pages. So, how do you offer your expertise if no one hires you?

Why do you need an SEO specialist?

There is so much more to be done to your website other than the best practices above. There are other SEO strategies such increasing site speed, fixing internal linking, keyword research, and analyze competitors, to name a few. SEO specialists are trained to create better strategies and are up-to-date with changes that search engines implement.

Conclusion

People look for answers on the internet. By providing them with a website that answers some of their questions in layman’s terms, it will make them a regular visitor and will increase your website ranking. Also, many of these visitors do not realize that they need a lawyer immediately. By having an online presence, you can help them and represent them in court if need be.