Just having a website for your law firm isn’t enough to earn you the first position on the search engine results page (SERPs). While it’s a great start, you have to make sure that your website, and every other aspect of your online presence, is working to bring qualified clients to your site. How do you do that? With search engine optimization (SEO) for lawyers.
Legal SEO is the process of getting traffic to your website through free, organic searches in major search engines such as Google or Bing. The goal of SEO is to get your website ranking in the top 3 positions of a search result. Bonus points if you can rank in the Google map pack (aka, the list of nearby businesses that appears next to the map when you search for a term such as “DWI lawyer in Houston”) for local legal keywords.
SEO requires a multi-layer approach that extends across multiple areas of your digital marketing strategy from your content to your social media presence and even to the backend of your website. If this sounds complex, it’s because it is. That’s why the team here at Baal & Spots is here to make it a bit simpler. Here is our top-level guide to SEO for law firm websites.
Why is SEO important for lawyers?
Before we dive in, let’s answer the big questions that linger on all attorney’s minds: “Why is SEO so important?” “Does SEO work for lawyers?” “Why can’t I just launch my website and let it be?”
You always have the option to launch your website and not touch it again until something needs to be updated. BUT your website likely won’t get seen by potential clients looking for your services. And isn’t that the reason you have a website to begin with?
This is where SEO for lawyers comes into play.
The goal of SEO is to bring free, organic traffic to your website by getting your site to rank in the top positions on the search engine results page. Studies have shown that over 25% of people click on the first search result and only 2.5% navigate to the tenth result (the last result on the first page). This shows us exactly why SEO is so important for lawyers — and also why it works.
Even if you’re on the first search results page, your position on that page determines how many qualified, potential clients are exposed to your law firm’s services. By implementing great SEO strategies to your website, you’re more likely to secure those top ranking spots thus bringing all of those new users, and potential clients, to your website.
The basics of legal SEO
So, how does SEO work? After implementing the strategies listed below, your website will be crawled and indexed by the search engines, determining search queries to which it will bring relevant and useful information. In other words, it’s trying to decide whether or not your site is worth ranking.
To make sure that it is, there are a handful of different SEO optimizations that your law firm should consider implementing as part of its SEO strategy.
On-page SEO
1. Keyword research
There are various professional tools out there that help you find the best SEO keywords for lawyers, you’re going to want words that are highly searched but with manageable levels of competition. Choose keywords that a potential client would search for rather than a keyword geared towards learning about the law, like “family law attorney Houston,” “can I sue my lawyer,” or “how to beat a DWI.”
Once you select your primary keywords for each page, it is important to consider how you use the keywords on the page. When in doubt, refer to Google’s keyword best practices to confirm that you are using your keywords in the right places.
2. Blogging and optimized content
Service page copy, blogs, and even the content on your homepage aren’t there just to inform potential clients. It’s also there for the search engines. While providing informative, helpful content is always the first priority, your content needs to move your site up in the rankings too. Things like incorporating a strong keyword strategy, internal links, the proper use of headers, and writing optimized title tags and meta descriptions are steps you can take to optimize attorney website content.
3. Optimize URLs, meta descriptions, and title tags
Optimizing your site’s URLs, meta descriptions, and title tags is one small way to improve your total law firm SEO strategy. This includes proper usage of your keywords, location, and business name as well as minding how often you use specific keywords to avoid keyword stuffing, a major no-no for legal SEO.
The above is an example of a title tag and meta description. This content is not only an important place to have keywords and information, but it’s also your first opportunity to convince a potential client to click on your link over the others.
4. Site structure
Even the structure of your site plays into how well your site performs on SERPs. The main priority of your site’s architecture is to enable your clients to easily find the information they’re looking for. Here’s an example:
Although your site’s structure doesn’t directly correlate to how well it ranks, search engines like Google do pay attention to how a user interacts and navigates around your site. The order of your secondary pages in the menu matter for the user experience, but also affect how well they rank in search results. The earlier they are in your menu, the more authority they have on your site.
5. Website design
Factors of SEO web design that are essential for success include having a responsive web design, optimizing images and videos to increase site speed, making sure that font sizes and colors are easy to read, ensuring that headers are used properly throughout the page, and seamlessly incorporating optimized content.
Again, your website design doesn’t directly affect your ranking, but providing a high-quality user experience is absolutely essential not just to converting users, but to let Google know that your site offers a positive experience. And that’s something Google cares about.
This is why working with a web design company that is aware of best practices is so essential to the success of your site. Just about anyone can throw up what may look like a pretty website, but if you want your law firm’s site to offer a great user experience, convert the most users into clients, and rank well on SERPs, you’ll want to work with a company that knows what to do and why to do it.
Off-page SEO
1. Linking structure
Building your backlinking structure (links to another website page) is crucial to establishing authority in the digital world. Whether this means getting big sites to link to your site, or building your internal linking structure from page to page on your own site, these links provide an indicator to search engines that your content is of high quality leading to higher rankings.
Factors that contribute most to your SEO efforts include the popularity of the other site, the anchor text (hyperlinked text), and the post date of the link.
2. Social media
Off-page SEO for lawyers is built around your online presence as a whole, and this includes your social media platforms. It’s about building a consistent brand across the web regardless of where potential clients are looking. Social media also provides a great opportunity to post links back to your website. Which, as we just learned, is an important part of off-page SEO.
Technical SEO
1. Responsive design
In other words, your site needs to be usable across all screen sizes, especially on mobile. We’ve all navigated to a site that isn’t mobile-friendly and turned right back around. Google has been vocal about adopting a mobile-first approach in how they rank sites on their results page, making it absolutely vital that your site has a responsive design.
If you’re working with a good website development company, this won’t be an issue. They’ll make sure that Google can get around your site just as easily as your users can no matter what device they’re searching for you on.
2. Use SSL
An SSL certificate keeps your website secure and safeguards any sensitive data on your site. This is what gives a site the “s” at the end of HTTPS. Google has made it abundantly clear that they will prioritize ranking HTTPS secure sites over ones that are not secure. If your website does not have this certificate, it needs it.
3. Check site speed
Your page speed is an important ranking signal. If your site takes a while to load, you’ll want to address these issues by optimizing or changing content to increase your chances of ranking higher on SERPs.
4. Avoid duplicate content
Not only is duplicate content confusing for anyone trying to gain information from your site, it’s a major red flag for search engines. Both pages on your site will fight each other for rank, diluting the visibility of both sets of content.
Local SEO for lawyers
1. Google my business
If you have one or more physical locations you should have a Google My Business (GMB) page set up for each of them. Google prefers boosting content it can verify and there is no better way to let Google know your law firm is legit than by creating and verifying a Google My Business account.
Not to mention, GMB offers you an additional opportunity to get your business information out there, collect positive, helpful reviews, and it could land you a spot in the Google local search space on both the search page results map as well as in searches on Google maps.
2. Keep your business name, address, and phone numbers consistent (and clickable)
The goal of SEO for lawyers is to make it as easy as possible for people to find your business. This means ensuring that your business name, address, and phone numbers are consistent across your website, in your Google My Business listing, or on social media.
Side note: Google will not crawl embedded information on your website. Your name and phone number need to be in clickable, HTML format.
3. Optimize site pages with your location
Location-specific keywords are (almost) always better. If you’re looking to incorporate SEO for personal injury lawyers, rather than using the keyword “personal injury lawyer” which could be searched by anyone, anywhere (making it extremely hard to rank for), you’d want to optimize your site content with the location-specific keyword “Houston personal injury lawyer.”
This keyword would bring in search queries from potential clients who are likely looking for legal services in your area.
4. Add location pages (if applicable)
If your firm has multiple locations, create a unique location page for each physical address, optimized by selecting location-specific SEO keywords for lawyers in that area. You’ll want to create a unique Google My Business for these locations as well.
Do lawyers need SEO?
All lawyers who have an online presence should be implementing some sort of SEO strategy.
According to the National Law Review, 96% of people who are searching for legal advice do so through a search engine, 74% of those who navigate to a law firm’s website end up contacting the firm, and 87% of those who contact an attorney will go on to hire them.
This provides ample opportunity for your firm to secure clients with free, organic traffic.
Can you do SEO yourself?
SEO may seem somewhat straightforward, but it isn’t. The study of SEO strategy is vast and rapidly expanding, and your SEO strategy is an ongoing process that should be defined and redefined often.
Working with a team that has expertise in the digital marketing world, keeps up to date with industry changes, and is responsible for keeping your website up to date with them can be the difference between having a successful, functioning website and a digital brochure.
Looking to step up your site’s legal SEO? Let’s work together!
If you’re a law firm looking to step up your online presence, incorporating SEO for lawyers should be your next move. SEO increases your site’s organic traffic for free, boosts your credibility in the industry, and effectively reaches your target audience.
If you’re a law firm that is interested in bringing more qualified clients to your site, it’s time to partner with the exceptional team at Baal & Spots. We are a Houston-based strategic creative design agency that works at the intersection of art and strategy to offer you simple solutions to your complex digital challenges.
Our suite of digital marketing services includes law firm SEO, website design and development, content marketing, and more — all aimed at helping your site, and your business, attract and nurture the right type of clients.
If this sounds like what you need, let’s connect!