What Is SEO And What Does It Mean For Your Law Firm?
When it comes to marketing your law firm, search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the best strategies to implement. So many of your future clients will find you through Google search, so it should be your goal to find them there as well. If you have never looked into SEO before, it might be helpful to break it into bite-size pieces. When you start this process, SEO advice will probably come to you from all angles and perspectives. The truth is that there are so many ways to succeed in SEO strategy, and each type of business should take a different approach.
As a lawyer, your website is the focal point of your SEO success. If your website contains strong keywords, quality content, and optimized pages, it will increase your chances of ranking highly on search engines and encourage visitors to contact your firm. For this reason, much of your SEO strategy for your law firm should concentrate on improving your online presence through your digital content. In addition to improving your online presence, your SEO efforts should accomplish the following:
- Increase organic traffic
- Elevate user experience
- Improve website usability
- Improve overall content marketing experience
- Earn authority to improve website’s appearance in search results
- Increase referral traffic from other sites
- Increase number of phone calls and appointments made
- Earn reviews and ratings for your firm
- Earn more local traffic from your community
4 Simple Steps To Create a Winning SEO Strategy For Your Law Firm
You might think that SEO strategy seems too complicated to tackle, but the most important factors can be boiled down to four simple steps. Creating a strong website and informative digital content will be the best way to get your firm in front of the right people. Follow these four steps to create an SEO strategy that takes your firm to the next level:
Step 1: Know The Top Ranking Factors For Your Firm
In order for your firm to reach these goals, it is important to be aware of what elements Google uses to prioritize and rank content. Google has around 200 ranking factors in its algorithm to rank websites. One of the best ways to tell if a specific keyword will rank well for your website is to check the competitive or difficult score of each keyword.
To check your keyword difficulty (KD score), you can use tools like Moz, which will rank a value for your keyword from 1 to 100, with 100 being the most difficult to rank for. For most law firms, a strong KDS is between 30 to 70%. Words in this score range tend to have strong search volumes but are not so popular that they will be too competitive to rank for.
A marketing team like Scorpion can also provide you with the software and team you need in order to find the best keywords for your firm and utilize them appropriately.
In addition to general keywords that pertain to your law firm, you also want to consider ranking factors for local search. When your future clients are looking for their next lawyer, they are most likely searching for a firm in their area. For example, if someone has recently been injured due to a slippery staircase at work and is seeking representation, they might search something along the lines of, “lawyer for slip and trip fall near me.” Google will then find the users’ location and tailor their results to show firms in their local community. If you want to appear to these users, it is essential that you include local citations such as your address and phone number on the website.
Step 2: Create Your Content
Once you discover your ranking factors and best keywords for your firm, it is time to make sure your content is optimized. This will take you one step closer to ensuring that your website performs well in SERPs (search engine results page). First, you will need to decide what types of content would be best for your firm. Below, you will find a list of some of the most popular forms of content for law firms and when they would be a good choice for you:
- Blogs
Blogging is one of the simplest and best ways to jumpstart your SEO strategy for your business. By answering common legal questions your clients have had in your blog content, you will be able to attract new clients who are wondering the same things. For example, if you are a family lawyer and you often have clients who need specifics about divorce, you might create a series of blogs titled “Simplify Your Divorce: 5 Steps To Make Your Divorce As Smooth As Possible.” Weaving the keywords you’ve found into blogs like this will help demonstrate your firm’s knowledge in this area, help your potential clients remember you, improve your ranking on search engines, and support lead generation.
- Service pages
Your blogs might be the shiny object that attracts your audience, but service pages are the glue that holds your website together. A service page is just what it sounds like: a page on your website that describes a specific service that your law firm offers. For example, if you are a family law firm, your service pages might include titles such as divorce, child support, child custody, separation, and alimony. Your service page will offer up a brief summary of how you can help your clients and the level of expertise your firm has in this area.
- Landing pages
When your potential clients click on an ad, a link in an email campaign, or a link in a social media profile, the “landing page” will be the page of your site they see. The landing page is different from other pages on your website because it is not part of the main navigation bar, and there are no external links on the page. The primary goal of a landing page should be to encourage your visitors to take a specific action. These actions can include signing up for an appointment, signing up for your email newsletter, and converting it into a lead. When it comes to high conversions and click-through rates for landing pages, your success will largely depend on the quality of the content on your page. In addition to being compelling enough to persuade your clients to take these actions, these pages need to be optimized for search engines. Your landing page should include targeted keywords that you would like to rank for and a call to action.
- Videos and podcasts
You might not think of a podcast as the first content form you would use to help your SEO. You might not even associate them with law firms at all, but podcasts are becoming more recognized for their SEO potential and for their potential to showcase important knowledge. A podcast will also allow you to give your clients a glimpse into your personality. It is common for clients to spend a lot of time with their lawyers, so they want to spend that time with someone they can relate to and get along with. Not only will your podcast help clients to see you as a position of authority, but it will also humanize you to your audience. The same can be accomplished with videos. For either a podcast or a video to rank, you need to have a strong description that includes keywords.
Step 3: Optimize Your Content – Don’t Forget The Details!
In the world of SEO, a few simple changes can make or break your website. That is why, when it comes to SEO, it is okay to sweat the small stuff (and encouraged). When you are creating your website, social media pages, and your formula for posting content regularly, it is important to make sure that content is as effective as possible. These small steps can go a long way in taking your content from acceptable to highly ranking:
- Use relevant and compelling title tags, meta descriptions, and add alt tags to your image descriptions.
- Use high-quality images throughout your website and social media pages.
- Optimize your website for mobile.
- Install Google Search and Google Analytics to help you track your success (see next step for more information).
- Ensure that you have a secure website and URL with an SSL certificate.
Step 4: Update, Track, and Audit Your Content Periodically
After your website has been set up, the work is not yet complete! When it comes to your blog content, the general recommendation for most lawyers is to post at least twice a month. When Google determines the ranking of your website, it likes to see that content is being posted regularly. If you are able to, posting a new blog every week will help even more. You might not have the time or energy to do this after a long day at the firm, and that is completely fine. That is where professional content writers like the ones on the team at Scorpion come in handy. Scorpion has spent the better part of our existence fine-tuning our legal skills. This means that you can tell us your SEO goals and we will help you accomplish them through frequent content that is tailored to your firm’s services.
In addition to keeping your website current, it is important to perform “SEO check-ins” to make sure your content is still hitting the mark. It is also wise to track the success of your content on a frequent basis so you can have an understanding of what your audience is most interested in. As a good rule of thumb, a law firm should aim to do a content audit at least once per quarter, or two to four times per year. During your SEO audit, make sure to perform the following steps:
- Find areas for potential link-building
When we talk about link-building, we are referring to the process of getting other websites to link to pages on your website. This will increase the “authority” of your pages on Google. You might think it is difficult to get your website linked on pages that you don’t own, and while this might be true, it is certainly not impossible. As a law firm, one of the ways you can go about this would be to collaborate with another firm that offers different services than yours. You could come to a mutual agreement that if a client needs help with an area of law that you do not specialize in, you will refer to each other. This agreement can include incorporating links to each others’ sites on your own. If your firm undergoes some newsworthy changes, you might also consider sending out press releases in hopes of gaining coverage on their news site and links to your own website. One more way to build links would be to guest blog on others’ websites. This will put you in a position of authority to an audience you might not normally reach, and it will improve your SEO ranking!
- Check for usability issues and places to improve site structure
Have you ever visited a website to find that it looks completely dated? Maybe you can’t even put your finger on what the problem is, but you know this website is more difficult to navigate than it should be. That is likely because its owners have not conducted a usability test in a while, if ever. Your SEO and site usability go hand-in-hand because a website that is usable and optimized for search engines will see more traffic, which will bring your ranking higher over time. To improve your usability, you can optimize your pages to scale in order to reduce loading times, maintain consistency across your site, make sure your site is responsive, use a simple navigation layout, and be sure to use headings and subheadings within your content. Your website menu will be the main place to look when you want to improve your structure. Create a simple menu that makes sense for your firm and leads your clients to the pages they need to see.
Once you have a solid SEO strategy in place for your law firm, it is time to prepare to be found by your future clients! Let Scorpion do the SEO work for you so you can focus on giving them the best legal guidance possible. Reach out to our team to learn more about our SEO services and cutting-edge software.
