Law Firm SEO Concepts
Like most people, when legal
services consumers want information, they turn to the internet. At some
point, most of them will use a search engine. Attorneys who want to earn
meaningful attention from these legal services consumers benefit from
search engine optimization (SEO).
Whether you’re an attorney SEO
do-it-yourself’er, or you’re considering hiring someone to help, you’ll
benefit from understanding a few basics about how search engines work.
Generally speaking, search engines work in the following three-stage process:
- Crawl
- Index
- Sort & Deliver Results
Admittedly,
this is a major over-simplification. In fact, as search engines evolve,
the third stage may be more accurately stated as:
Deliver answers.
But before we can run, we have to crawl.
How to Approach SEO for a Law Firm
Let’s
assume you’re a lawyer, legal marketer or law firm SEO consultant.
You’re tasked with earning organic search engine traffic that leads to
clients.
In order to get the best law firm search engine
optimization results, you need to begin with research. Too many people
ignore this part. This starts with understanding your audience.
- What are the goals and objectives of your law firm SEO efforts?
- Who are the people you want to attract to your pages?
- What types of queries are they entering into search engines?
- What actions do you want them to take once they arrive at your pages?
Furthermore,
research the firm itself and the competitive landscape. What does the
firm do better than its competitors? Why should potential clients choose
the lawyers at this firm?
You might be wondering what the answers to these questions have to do with search engine optimization.
The answer: everything.
You have to determine what it is about you that’s worth talking about, sharing and linking to.
Crawling & Indexing
Next,
you need to make sure that your pages of your firm’s website can be
properly crawled and indexed by search engines. Essentially, this means
fixing technical problems with your pages. These technical SEO fixes
involve improving on-page search engine ranking factors. This process
includes fixing things like:
- Site architecture and internal linking structure.
- HTML meta tags including page titles, descriptions and headings.
- Structured data markup (i.e. schema).
- Page content.
- XML sitemap and robots.txt file
- User experience (mobile-friendly, page load speed)
Unfortunately,
too many supposed lawyer search engine optimization experts fail to
understand the importance of technical SEO. In fact, some are completely
dismissive of it. Technical SEO really works.
In
fact, there are some technical law firm website SEO issues that can
prevent your pages from being crawled and indexed at all. Whether you’re
fixing your own pages, or hiring someone to do it on your behalf, make
sure you understand and resolve these technical issues first.
Sorting & Serving Results
Now
that we have a solid technical SEO foundation in place, we can begin
marketing your law firm’s pages. While this process begins with creating
pages that people want to talk about, share and link to, it also
includes a variety of marketing activities to promote these pages to the
right people online.
Search engines use these “popularity
signals” (off-page signals) to determine how to deliver your pages in
their results. But these signals aren’t weighted equally. For example,
quantities of high-quality links from highly relevant and authoritative
sites can have an exponential (really logarithmic) impact on your pages’
visibility in search engine results.
Some of the best off-page search engine optimization for attorneys includes:
- Developing content assets that people want to link to.
- Getting those assets in front of people who are able to link to them.
- Competitor backlink analysis and link building.
- Social profile development and outreach.
- Relevant legal directory profile optimizations.
- Broken link building.
- PR-focused link building.
Hiring a Law Firm SEO Expert
If
you’re considering hiring an attorney search engine marketing services
provider, make sure you ask a lot of questions about how they plan to
improve these off-page signals. If they start talking about proprietary
SEO secrets, you should probably look elsewhere. The best attorney SEO
agencies will tell you exactly what they’re doing and why they’re doing
it.
They
should be setting goals for success in advance. They should also
discuss with you the role that social media plays in the search engine
optimization process. Finally, they should understand the unique
obligations of lawyers in marketing and advertising, including relevant
legal ethics rules.
Local SEO for Attorneys
Many
lawyers target potential clients at a local level. Search engines are
trending toward serving localized results. In our experience, the most
important local law firm SEO involves:
- Hyper-local link building.
- Developing hyper-local content.
- Local business listing management.
Local
search engine optimization is incredibly powerful for attorneys. In
recent updates, Google has given local pack results prominent positions
in search engine results pages. Other search engines are also evolving
to give higher visibility to local results. The best law firm SEO
experts recognize the value of delivering hyper local SEO services that
lead to clients.
Deciding
to hire a search engine optimization (SEO) professional for your law
firm is an important decision that can have a significant impact on your
visibility online. While a skilled SEO can improve your site and save
you a lot of time, an unskilled or irresponsible SEO can damage your
site and, and even worse, your professional reputation. We recommend
that you thoroughly research any potential SEO consultant.
Transparency & Accountability
We
provide a variety of SEO services for lawyers. We specialize in working
with law firms and are aware of the unique challenges and
considerations involved with marketing a legal practice.
Our approach takes into consideration the specific marketing needs, budget, and goals of our clients.
It’s
a fact, people use the internet to research their legal questions, get
answers, and even to search for attorneys. However, how people use the
internet to look for legal information and legal services is much
different from how they use it shop for tennis shoes. Likewise, SEO for
lawyers is much different than SEO for selling tennis shoes, and even
different from SEO for other professional services.
This is
probably the most common use for the internet as it relates to legal
services. Someone gets arrested, gets hurt, has debt problems, decides
they need a will, or a vast array of other legal issues and goes online
to learn more about the subject.
Researchers may not even yet know
that they have a legal issue. They may certainly be interested in
learning about the subject. This will have a significant impact on the
keywords they use to search and the websites they go to for answers.
Doing
SEO for lawyers who are targeting researchers should be geared around
providing answers to this demand. Content development should be focused
on question and answer pages. Contributions should be made on relevant
legal Q&A sites. From a media perspective, doing SEO for lawyers
targeting researchers should identify opportunities for interviews and
publications on trusted legal, as well as, news sites. Link attracting
and social sharing should focus on providing topical information for
those who are seeking it.
Similar to the researcher, the
questioner is someone who has a question about a specific legal issue.
On the other hand, the questioner is usually a little further along in
the legal services search cycle than the researcher. Questioners are
usually facing a pending legal issue. They may also include
do-it-yourself types that are wondering whether they can or should
handle their legal issue on their own.
Executing an attorney SEO
campaign that targets questioners should likewise include content
development strategies that answer their questions. It may sound
redundant, but it’s important to keep in mind how questioners differ
from researchers and supply content that meets their specific demand for
answers.
Shoppers are people who are actively searching for a
lawyer. These are the potential client prospects that lawyers want to
get found by online. Shoppers use the internet in much different ways
that researchers and questioners. The keywords they search on and the
places they go to find lawyers are vastly different than those who are
merely looking for answers. Their intent is also much different. For one
reason, or another, they believe that they need a lawyer. Therefore,
it’s likely that they use search terms that include terms like “lawyer,”
“attorney,” or “law firm.”
Shoppers will often use websites and
search engines more like traditional business directories. An SEO
campaign that is targeting shoppers should focus on local SEO
strategies, as well as, increasing trust signals such as those created
by testimonials and reviews.
Whatever the purpose or goal, it’s
important to keep in mind how different SEO for lawyers is from search
marketing for products and other professional services. There are very
important stakes on the line including the lawyer’s professional
reputation, and in some instances, their license. No amount of web
traffic or search great search engine rankings are worth damaging one’s
professional reputation or sacrificing a hard-earned license to
practice.
Of course, we also provide SEO reporting. That means
developing tangible goals for our clients’ campaigns and reporting on
our progress.
While there are a variety of SEO metrics that we can
measure and report, we know that to be successful, we must increase our
clients’ organic search engine traffic, potential client inquiries from
organic search and paying clients.
If you’re looking for more
general SEO information outside of the context of legal marketing, we
recommend checking out the following:
- Do you need an SEO? (Google)
- Search engine optimization (Wikipedia)
- What Is SEO / Search Engine Optimization? (Search Engine Land)
- Beginner’s Guide to SEO (Moz)