Lawyer SEO: 9 Tips for Lawyers and Law Firms to Rank Higher on Search Engines

These Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tips for Law Firms are a must-read for Law Firms looking to increase their Website traffic.

Zero traffic means zero visitors. Zero visitors mean zero sales. Learn how to create the perfect strategy to rank your Website at the top of Google and other Search Engines.

By using the best SEO practices and by consistent hard work on your site, you can rank on the top of Google.

Learning to make small tweaks and to optimize your Law Firm Website will assist you to get your web pages ranking on Page One of the Search Engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo

If you feel that this is too much for you and that you want to outsource your SEO, consider allowing us to assist you. We help Attorneys and Lawyers with SEO by consistently generating more leads for them.

You have a fantastic website. It proudly lists the services you provide and the services you offer. But none of this matters if you don't have any traffic.

If people don't know about you and your services, how can they do business with you?

Getting traffic isn't easy. If it was, there wouldn't be millions of failed websites every day - abandoned - all because no one was visiting.

Lawyers use to advertise in The Yellow Pages. However, the Yellow Pages stopped printing from January 2019 after more than five decades. It is now an online directory.

The Internet is now by far the Most Popular Way to Find and Research a Lawyer.

97% of People go to Google instead of the Yellow Pages.

74% of consumers visit a Law Firm's Website to act.

Even referrals have moved online to platforms such as Google, Facebook and The Attorney Guide.

How do you solve your problem of not getting enough visitors?

How do you get visitors to your Website so they can see what services you're selling and they can buy legal services from you?

If your Website is listed on Page One of Google, you have a +70% chance of someone visiting your Website. This means, if your Website is listed on page two, you have less than a 30% chance of getting that traffic.

The average internet user doesn't go past the first page of the search results. This is where SEO can benefit your Law Firm tremendously.

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the practice of improving the content to be discovered through a Search Engine's organic search results. In other words, if you rank well organically, you have the benefits of free, passive traffic to your Website, month after month.

Your SEO leads have a much higher close rate than traditional marketing as they are so highly targeted. Pay-less for higher returns!

The Benefits of Law Firm SEO include:

Appear in Front of Interested Searchers: By optimizing your Law Firm Website to SEO best practices, you will appear on Page One for many different types of searches.

Most of these searches will be from motivated users that have high intent to use your services.

For example, if your Law Firm Website appears first in Google for the term 'Bail Attorney New York', you have a very high chance of converting this user as they are ready to convert immediately.

Cost-Effectiveness: when you rank well for your keywords, and your Website is positioned well, each click that you get from organic search engine results is free. With Lawyer SEO, you can receive an unlimited number of clicks at zero cost to your business.

Compare this with Google AdWords where the costs for a search term such as 'Medical Malpractice Lawyers in PA' can be anything up to $250 - and this is per click!

No Need to Solely Rely on Referrals: Lawyers traditionally rely heavily on referrals and word of mouth marketing. This, on its own, simply does not work anymore in this competitive world we live in.

Provide value to your Clients through content marketing. Use SEO to get your content before your Clients. Your Law Firm will benefit from this.

Long-term Strategy: Lawyers SEO is a long-term strategy that will benefit your Law Firm for years to come.

Start now, build up and reap the rewards for years to come.

How to Get your Law Firm or Business Listed on the First Page of Google.

Let us look at the 8 Top Tips for Lawyers and Law Firms to Rank Higher on Search Engines.

Lawyer SEO Tip 1: SEO takes time. There are lots of ways... SEO, keyword research, link building and more... to get on the First Page of Google. But here's the catch - doing all this takes time. Not 1-2 hours a month, but 20-30 or more hours a month, depending on the size of your Law Practice and how many Branches you have. Setting aside that much time, especially if you're running a Law Firm, is very hard to do if not impossible. You need traffic. We understand this. If you do not have the time to perform SEO services yourself, or you have no interest in this field, consider outsourcing this function to us, so that you can concentrate on what you do best - running your Law Practise and being a Lawyer. The Attorney Guide SEO Service is designed to help Lawyers, and Law Firms get more Clients to their Website through high-quality traffic. Our service puts you in the front-seat of running your Law Firm. We help you get more customers by ranking your Website on Search Engines like Google, where being on the top spot means you get more and more visitors to your site. This frees you from the ultimate headache: Acquiring Customers!

Lawyer SEO Tip 2: Leverage Attorney Directories You can list your Law Firm for free on many Attorney Directories or upgrade to a premium listing which will help your Law Firm's website rank better organically. Putting up a listing in multiple Attorney Directories will get multiple links back to your Website which search engines will pick up, contributing to its SERP ranking. You can even go one step further and ensure that your profile on these directories are fully optimized, as prospective Clients will most likely look at the Attorney profiles before deciding which Attorney to use. Make sure that you claim your Law Firm in the top legal directory sources such as: The Attorney Guide (TAG)

Nolo

Lawyers.com

Superlawyers

Law Guru

Avvo

Justia

Hg.org Get a Free Basic Listing or a Premium Listing on The Attorney Guide

Lawyer SEO Tip 3: Get your Keywords Right Keywords are the backbone of SEO, and you must select the best keywords for your Law Practice. The more competition for the keywords chosen by you, the harder it will be to rank well organically. You can do a few things to ensure that you select the best keywords for your practice. Start by identifying your target market. If you have been in practice for a while, you will likely know your target market. If you are starting your Law Firm, start by identifying the type of Law that you intend to practice and your practice area, i.e. Divorce Attorneys, Tampa. Keywords are what makes it possible for people to find your services on Google and other search engines. You need to think and act like your potential clients. It will be worth your while and effort to spend time identifying keywords and phrases. Also, review your keywords regularly and carry on doing keyword research. Another thing that will help is to consider the "searches related to" section at the bottom of the page for additional relevant keywords. Try and identify keywords that are not way too competitive. You can use some free tools for your keyword research to assist you in identifying keywords. These free resources include: Google Trends

Google Analytics

Keywords.io

Lawyer SEO Tip 4: Search Engine Optimization needs to be built into the Web Design Process Your Law Firm Website is the start and end destination for your Digital Marketing World. You need to ensure that your Website is SEO friendly - not all websites are created equally in this regard. Your Law Firm Website should preferably be built with SEO in mind as it becomes much harder to integrate proper SEO functionality when a Law Firm Website gets redesigned. You can optimize your Law Firm Website by doing the basics such as making sure that each page has a Title Tag and Description that includes your keywords or phrases. Each page should only have one H1 tag, while it can have multiple H2 tags and a few H3 tags. Do not upload inferior quality content. Only upload relevant, quality content. Some things to look at with SEO friendly websites: Choose a great domain - your domain must make sense.

Your site should be text-based on the backend, no flash and videos.

Images and videos used must be discoverable by the Search Engines.

The site architecture must be simple - do not lose traffic because of a complicated structural design.

Navigation must be uncomplicated with ease of use by the user - within three clicks.

Make sure your URL is SEO friendly

Your content must be easily found and identified by Search Engines.

Fast loading speeds. Your page should load within 3 - 4 seconds. Why do you need an SEO friendly website? Increase in organic traffic (that is traffic from search engines)

It will make your Website user-friendly

It gives you brand credibility

It is cost-effective

Improves Speed of Your Website

Keeps Bounce Rate Low

Avoid Duplicate Content

Multiple Device Friendly One of the most significant benefits of your Law Firm having an SEO friendly website is that you will get more targeted organic traffic from search engines. In other words, FREE traffic.

Lawyer SEO Tip 5: Optimize your Law Firm's Website for Local Search Local Search is the use of specialized Internet Search Engines that allow users to submit geographically confined searches against a structured database of local business listings. When people are looking for an Attorney, they generally take into consideration their proximity to the Law Firm's location. A local search will likely improve the trust shown for the business. If Google shows your business on the map, your business benefits whenever they appear in a local search, as prospects, your brand is more likely to be automatically trusted. You must make sure that you set up and verify your Google+ Business Page. Google will send you a postcard in the mail with a verification code. Optimize your Google My Business Account as this is one of the fastest ways to get your Law Firm featured on Google Maps. Make sure that your Law Firm's phone number, address, business hours, and other information is listed. Add photos to make it more interesting for your Clients. A properly optimized Google My Business Page will further extend your visibility on Google, leading to more Clients for you.

Lawyer SEO Tip 6: Content is King Yes, we agree that this is an overused cliche. However, the importance of quality content cannot be underestimated. As important as content is for your Website, you must also be aware that irrelevant or poor-quality content can hurt your Law Firm's SEO success. Content can come in any format - written articles, videos, podcasts and its purpose is to inform and entertain the consumer thereof. Google's corporate mission is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Ever since its beginnings, the company has focused on developing its proprietary algorithms to maximize effectiveness in organizing online information. This is what Search Engines in general do - they index and arrange the information. Google recommends that as you create content, you make sure your content is: Useful and relevant - if you are a DUI Lawyer, you can have content about the procedure followed when your Client is arrested. A Divorce Attorney can explain the Divorce Procedure. This will be useful and relevant to Google, and you will have improved SEO success with your efforts. More valuable and useful than other sites. If you as an Emigration Lawyer, write about Visas, make sure that your content provides more value or a different perspective than that of another Lawyer. Credible. Improve your Website's credibility as much as possible by adding testimonials, reviews and biographies can help to boost your site's trustworthiness and reliability. If you authored an article, add your details to the article. High quality. Create unique content dealing with the area of law that you practice. You can get your Attorneys to assist you by writing one article per week or get Law Students or Paralegals that understand the Law practised by your Firm to write high-quality articles that are edited by you. Engaging. Your content must be engaging. Add images of your services, your staff or pictures that relate to the article or content created. Optimize your Content. When you create content, start by conducting keyword research. Your articles must be created to be used by real people - it must be audience-centric. Remember, optimized content can drastically improve your online visibility. You can optimize your content in the following way: Your content must create trust between your Law Firm Website and your end-user. You can do this by using words that convert; such as "accordingly", "as a result", "because", "therefore", etcetera.

Know what your Users want; what is important to them?

Use proper grammar, correct spelling and format your articles properly.

Establish your Authority. If you are a Personal Injury Lawyer, you can write articles that help establish you as an authority in your field.

Make sure you have Calls to Action (CTA).

Engage with visuals - keep your user involved.

Lawyer SEO Tip 7: Link Building Link building is probably the most critical skill in SEO. If you want more organic traffic, link building is a must. Google ranks sites with authority and trust. This is where link building comes in. Google uses backlinks as one of its top-ranking signals. If you build high-quality links, your Law Firm Website will take off like a rocket. If you build bad-quality links, Google will penalize you and your Law Firm Website will sink like a stone. The authority of the page that you link to, matters a lot - probably more than any other factor. As an example, if your Law Firm Website links to the Washington Post, you will get a lot more 'juice' out of this link than a link of an unknown blogger. Again, it is an issue of trust. Moz.com supplied the following definition of link building "Link building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own. A hyperlink (usually just called a link) is a way for users to navigate between pages on the internet. Search engines use links to crawl the web; they will crawl the links between the individual pages on your Website, and they will crawl the links between entire websites. There are many techniques for building links, and while they vary in difficulty, SEOs tend to agree that link building is one of the hardest parts of their jobs. Many SEOs spend the majority of their time trying to do it well. For that reason, if you can master the art of building high-quality links, it can truly put you ahead of both other SEOs and your competition" You rarely find content, specifically articles, without hyperlinks that link to authoritative websites or other websites. These are referred to as external links or backlinks, both of which fall under the concept of inbound links. Inbound links when used in third-party blogs or websites have two purposes, to direct traffic to your Website and to build authority. Each Website that links to your site serves as a vote of confidence in it for search engines. Link building helps Law Firms by increasing their SEO ranking, but it also: Help build relationships

Creates Referral business

Brand building Reach out to other sites to create links back to your site. One way of doing this is to do Guest Posting. Besides the link building benefit, you also have the benefit of becoming an authority in your field - this is invaluable and will assist you to get more leads. You can also use Social Media and Forum Links to your blog content. Join relevant groups like Business Chambers if you are a Business Attorney or join Emigration Groups if you are an Emigration Lawyer.

Lawyer SEO Tip 8: Do Technical SEO The term Technical SEO refers to website and server optimizations. This helps Search Engine Spiders or Robots to crawl and index your site more effectively. A Technical Lawyer SEO is an essential part of your Law Firm Optimization. Some of the more important aspects are mentioned herein, but the full details of a technical SEO are outside the scope of this article. SSL is an acronym for Secure Sockets Layer. This is a type of digital security that allows encrypted communication between a website and a web browser. Google announced that secure HTTPS websites were going to be given preference over non-secure ones in search results. Your site must be responsive, mobile-friendly and fast. A responsive site is a site that automatically adjusts to the screen size, no matter if you look at the Website on a smartphone, a TV screen or on your PC. A responsive, fast website is not just a 'nice to have'; it's an absolute must! Amazon calculated that a page load slowdown of just one second could cost it $1.6 billion in sales each year. Google has estimated that by slowing its search results by only four-tenths of a second, they could lose 8 million searches per day - meaning they'd serve up many millions of fewer online adverts. Therefore, your Law Firm Website must load fast. Your page should load within 3 -4 seconds. You can go to https://gtmetrix.com/ to test your site speed for free. Duplicate content: remove duplicate content as this is bad for your user's experience and SEO purposes. Create a Sitemap for your Law Firm Website and submit it to the Search Engines. A Sitemap is an XML file that lists the URLs for a site. It allows webmasters to include additional information about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it concerns other URLs in the site. This allows search engines to crawl the site more efficiently and to find URLs that may be isolated from the rest of the site's content. The sitemaps protocol is a URL inclusion protocol and complements H1, H2 and H3 Tags. You must ensure that you utilize your header tags for SEO. Your H1 tag must contain your targeted keywords. These keywords must relate to your page title and must be relevant to your content. Your H2 tag is a subheading and should contain similar keywords to your H1 header. H3 is then a subheading for your H2 - use your tags in the form of a hierarchy, based on importance. These tags will help the Search Engines find your content and index them. An example: H1: When you need a Divorce Attorney H2: Your First Consult H3: Call us Today!