The right law firm SEO strategy can dramatically improve your visibility, resulting in more leads and increased earnings potential for your firm. However, finding the right SEO agency to partner with isn’t an easy task.
SEO “experts” are running rampant, but it doesn’t take long to figure out which ones are full of s… (false confidence!?).
Whether you are planning to run your own SEO campaign or looking for an SEO company to partner with, this guide will help you. While we cover a lot of information within, you will need at least a basic understanding of SEO to put this information to work for your law firm.
C-Level Executives and Managing Partners:
This guide will help you understand how a comprehensive law firm SEO strategy can enable considerable growth through increased visibility on Google.
Marketing Directors and Management:
This guide will help you understand the essential elements of an effective SEO campaign for your law firm. This information can help you set up guidelines for running your own campaign or help you know what to consider when looking for an agency to partner with.
Those Vetting Law Firm SEO Companies to Partner With:
There are a lot of people that claim to be experts throughout the SEO space. This guide will give you an in-depth look at our thought process, expertise, and style of SEO. By the time you finish, you should have a pretty good idea of why “Stellar” is in our name. Enjoy the guide, then get in touch.
As you will learn in more detail below, and throughout this guide, traffic from search engines is extremely valuable. With the right combination of tactics, backed by a sound strategy, your firm can generate quality cases on autopilot, which is why lawyer SEO is in such high demand.
Learn more about the ranking factors that impact the visibility of your law firm’s website on Google. We focus on the three areas of SEO – organic, local, and Google My Business (GMB -now GBP) – and discuss the most important factors for each.
This chapter emphasizes the importance of quality in all areas of SEO, from technical optimization to content relevance and user experience. By implementing specific tactics for each area, a law firm can improve its rankings and become a dominant force in its market.
Delve into the crucial topic of keyword research for law firms. Keyword research is the process of finding out what people are searching for, how often words are searched, and the intent behind those searches, which is a critical component of a good SEO strategy.
To properly do keyword research, you need to understand the types and intent of keywords. We describe each type in detail, along with examples to help you understand the differences between them.
Explore the technical and on-page aspects of search engine optimization for your law firm. A technically sound website ensures that Google can view and understand your site’s content while visitors to your site have a good user experience. We cover several key areas of technical SEO, such as crawlability and indexability, creating and submitting sitemaps, managing robots.txt files, and monitoring 404 errors.
The chapter also discusses redirect management, which is essential when your law firm’s website changes due to growth or other reasons. Additionally, the chapter covers Core Web Vitals, which are key factors that affect the overall customer user experience. Core Web Vitals are grouped into three segments: Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift, and First Input Delay.
Overall, this chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the technical and on-page SEO elements that can help your law firm’s website rank higher in search engine results pages.
Content marketing is a powerful way to attract, educate, and ultimately convert potential clients into actual clients. When potential clients are in the research phase, long-form informational content on your site can educate them and demonstrate your unique expertise.
When potential clients are ready to compare a few law firms, the content from your testimonials, reviews, and verdict pages will allow them to determine if you have experience with problems like theirs. And when potential clients are ready to buy, the content of your service pages can guide them to your desired action as it confirms that your law firm is worth considering. We walk you through each phase and how to build content that performs.
If your law firm has a physical office, optimizing your Google My Business (GMB) listing can help increase visibility and capture leads. You should also create well-optimized location pages if your firm does not have a physical location. GMB and localized organic traffic can be engaged and valuable, and there is some overlap between their ranking factors, so improving one can help build a solid foundation for the other.
To improve your GMB rankings, you can optimize your office address, add attributes, select the correct category, post regularly, answer questions, and collect positive reviews. On-page optimization is also important for GMB rankings, so ensure your landing page is optimized for your desired terms. Learn how to put this all into action in this chapter.
Law firm link building is essential for improving both local and organic SEO rankings. In this chapter, the importance of high-quality links and understanding the differences between local and organic link building are explained
We also look at the importance of building campaigns with a specific end goal in mind, and how that allows you to determine the most time and cost-effective tactics to implement. Who doesn’t love a better ROI from a more efficient plan?
Chapter 7 of the guide covers the importance of tracking and analytics in measuring the success of your law firm’s SEO efforts. The chapter emphasizes the need for proper key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure successes and failures.
We also identify three key areas that should be monitored: site technical tracking, site content tracking, and overall performance tracking. The chapter also provides tips on using various tools to track and analyze SEO performance and suggests specific metrics to track to determine the effectiveness of your SEO efforts.
Deciding whether to handle your law firm’s SEO in-house or hire an expert is a crucial decision that will impact your online visibility, website traffic, and potential leads. There are several factors to consider when making this decision.
Hiring an expert can be a smart investment if you lack the time, skills, or resources to effectively optimize your website and improve your search engine rankings.
By working with an expert, you can ensure that your online presence is optimized for maximum visibility and potential leads -without the painful learning curve most in-house teams face.
Whether you’re new to the world of SEO or have some experience, understanding the basics is essential for building a strong online presence and staying ahead of your competitors. So let’s get started!
Law firm SEO services help your firm show up more prominently for important search terms related to your business.
75.1% of clicks go to the top 3 results. If you are not one of them, you are missing out on a lot of great leads.
As a matter of fact, one study found that 96% of people looking for law firms go to Google and conduct a search before hiring an attorney. 87% of people searching go on to hire an attorney and 72% of them only contact one attorney. (source)
If you are doing the math, that means that if 100 people went to Google to search for an attorney, 75 of them would click one of the top 3 results. 65 would end up hiring an attorney, of which 46 would hire the first (and only) attorney they contacted. If you aren’t in a position to benefit from those searches, you are losing a lot of potential cases.
In total, there are over 200 factors that Google considers when determining how to rank your website. Some of these are believed to have minor impact, while other factors are heavily weighted.
Speaking more technically, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your law firm’s site to improve its visibility for relevant keywords, thereby increasing your organic traffic.
If you have an office and a verified GBP (Google Business Profile) ranking well in the local search results is extremely important, as this is a valuable source of new clients.
While local seo and organic SEO success require a different combination of tactics, some core pillars overlap.
The process of optimizing your website infrastructure to ensure Google can crawl and index your site. This includes site speed, coding refinements, and site hierarchy planning.
The process of improving existing content or developing new content to attract and convert website visitors. This includes page level on-page optimization as well. Content is the reason your website exists, so this is a vital piece of the puzzle. You can get an in-depth look at content marketing in our beginners guide to content marketing.
The process of getting linked mentions from third party websites. These are seen by Google as a “vote of confidence” and help to improve the authority and credibility of your website. For an in-depth look at link acquisition strategies, check out our link building guide.
As part of your overall marketing strategy, search engine optimization is a powerful channel to leverage because it connects you with people actively searching for what you offer.
Since this traffic is so valuable, capturing it comes with fierce competition in many markets, especially in practice areas like personal injury law.
However, if you know what matters to Google, you can spring ahead of competing law firms and capture those coveted inbound leads, so let’s take a look at Google’s ranking factors.
Achieving an exceptional digital presence requires experience, careful planning, and creativity.
