Lawyers and attorneys have a very specific niche that everyone should know and learn to market. A thorough list of law firm SEO tips can drive you great traffic, online, and offline. In this article, we’ll guide you on how to get maximum traffic if you are a lawyer using some best SEO tips for law firms.
Though having a website or digital presence would be beneficial, you will be playing with a lot of other lawyers on a much higher level. You’ll be competing with big and fresh competitors in your particular and peripheral niches. It gives you immense opportunities as an entrepreneur and opens up scope for your business expansion.
Like every other business, there are certain specific SEO techniques for law firms. A majority of the public is searching for law firms online, and hence, if you are not there on the web, it would be very tough for you to gain new clients in the current era. Let’s discuss how you can enhance your visibility in the SERPs with the best SEO tips for law firms.
KEYWORDS
Keyword optimization is one of the basic and most important steps in optimizing any online business space. It brings visibility to your business in Google and other SERPs. When you start a law firm SEO, certain keywords can bring great traffic on your website if used and optimized correctly.
The best way to get your keywords is to enter business-related keywords in Google Suggest (They could be your target keywords as well). It will automatically start giving you many LSI keywords, which may have less search volume, but will also have lesser keyword difficulty. Highly competitive keywords, which are mostly single or two-word keywords, are highly unlikely to be in approach. In short, target keywords that have a higher probability of bringing traffic to you.
1. Competitive Keywords
Competitive keywords are very closely related to the primary product. They can also be abbreviated as industry-specific keywords. “Property lawyer,” “divorce lawyer,” “criminal advocate,” etc. are few of the keywords which are more specific to the type of case. Ranking for such keywords is a bit challenging through the organic route. Though, if you can manage to grab your rank on such keywords, you’ll surely be getting huge traffic.
2. Company/brand-specific Keywords
One of the best SEO services for attorneys, if someone can serve, is to get them visible on SERPs with the company or brand-specific keywords. Advocates, lawyers, or attorneys usually have a good physical note in a particular geographical region. They receive most of the visits due to local referrals because everyone in that region knows about that.
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In the case of web traffic, the size of the region gets bigger and covers more such business owners in that locality. Hence, in such a scenario, if you get your brand name as your identity on the web, you’ll be able to generate a huge number of footfalls at your place. All the big brands are known by their name and don’t require any introduction.
To get this working for you and help you in getting you up in local SEO for the law firm of yours, you must register with your firm’s name, address, and contact details on Google. You would need to verify the same through various, though easy, means. Once done, keep a tab of the same regularly and refresh the same with your target keywords.
3. LSI Keywords
LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) Keywords are conceptually related terms that search engines use to understand the content on a webpage deeply. As described before, Google suggests certain keyword suggestions in a drop-down format when you enter your target keyword. These are also called long-tail keywords and have lesser keyword difficulty. Apart from this, you’ll also get suggestions for some LSI keywords at the bottom of the page.
Long-tail keywords can get you a lot of free traffic as they don’t have much competition and adequate search volume. A good law firm SEO guide should always carry certain keywords that fall into this category. For, eg. if you search for “criminal lawyer,” LSI keywords suggested by Google Suggest will be “criminal lawyer facts,” “types of criminal lawyers,” “criminal lawyer salary,” etc.
ON-PAGE OPTIMIZATION
On-page optimization is the activity that you do on your website to enhance its SEO credibility. It is the practice of optimizing individual web pages to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. It is a genuine SEO process for law firms to performing this to increase SERP visibility chances. Now, On-page SEO is a big term; let’s discuss this in brief.
4. URLs and Titles
If you are a beginner and planning to get your website, try to have an as short as possible domain name while sticking to the main objective of your business. A short and easy to read domain name is easy to remember and hence, chances of better footfalls increases.
The title of a page denotes the prime objective of any webpage. It should be clear and to the point. If your page carries an article about best SEO techniques for law firms, keep it as it is instead of creating some plot over it.
With this comes the URL structure. As said, the domain should be a smaller one; your URL should also remain short and contain the exact theme of the page no matter you are doing local SEO for lawyers or anything else. If we take the above example again, the URL of this particular webpage should be like https://www.abcadvocate.com/law-firm-seo-techniques.html
5. Keyword Specific H1 and H2
The H1 and H2 denote headings within your webpage. They should remain as close to the primary keyword as possible. You can always visit Google Suggest to get some good ideas about the same. You can also check for Google answers to have an interrogative heading. Such headings increase engagement and traffic volume. Competitor’s research can also get you some highly potential H1 and H2 tags to enhance your law firm SEO.
6. Keyword Density
Keyword density is the number of keywords used in your articles. For any webpage, deciding keyword density depends on the entire content available on that page. Generally, it is kept between 2-3%, but depending upon the total number of keyword usage, you may change that as well.
If your website has multiple pages and your page have enough number of navigations, videos, links, etc. apart from the main content, then you should try for a lesser keyword density as you already have the same on your page.
7. Image Optimization
As your content carries a lot of keywords to get into the SERPs, similarly, your images should also have a name to act as its identity. In technical language, we call it alt text/tag. An alt text should be very keyword specific; however, you can put a longer version of the keyword. If you are putting in more than one image, name them by the keywords only. An image with the name “best-criminal-law-firm.jpg” is always better than “DSC2134.jpg”.
8. Hashtags and Social Media Keywords
Social media is a must for all media and blog websites. Your law firm SEO can have great results if you are sharing your content on social media. Optimizing the same with most relevant hashtags, handles, groups, and individuals can get the best traffic to your website. Social media allows you to broadcast different types of content to get the best response from your audience.
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As a law firm, you don’t need to hold back your practice to only a few of the social media channels; rather, you can present your content as per the channel. A law firm is a professional and authoritative business; hence, you can put a serious copy along with an article on LinkedIn and get some of the big clients. On twitter, you can talk about the latest happenings in the law industry that people should know. It will create your positive impression among the public, searching for any help. Facebook can get you a good number of leads by sharing your ads in groups and on the marketplace.
WEBSITE STATS
Apart from content and keywords, certain factors play an important part in bringing traffic to your website. Once you have created a good website, you need to check if the same is working properly or not. Similarly, off-page SEO activities are also important to get traffic on your website. As a law entrepreneur, you won’t like to see your traffic returning due to technical issues on your website. Below are a few points to discuss over the same.
9. Page Load Time
The time is taken by your website to get loaded properly and visualize everything available on your website. Make sure your website is loading fast, and the delay is as low as 1 sec. Though there is no set benchmark for this and it should be reasonable and as low as possible. Search for a good hosting and database provider to have a good load time and try to keep your website as light as possible.
10. Internal and External Links
While writing an article on your blog section, interlink certain other pages here to share the traffic across the website. If your user finds it good to navigate through one page to another, that means your content has good potential, and it can keep the user busy. Hence, your bounce rate will reduce, and ranking will improve.
So once you have created a good SEO friendly web page, share it on other platforms, your friends, colleagues, business owners, clients, and to as many sources as possible. Optimizing your page with keywords is good, but boosting that with the help of link sharing is amazing in terms of results. Link building helps a lot in maximizing the traffic; hence, you can consult a few agencies that provide one of the best SEO services for attorneys and lawyers.
So, the law firm SEO helps attorneys and advocates to gain a lot of online presence and business. Implement these practices to your website, and you’ll notice a good surge in the number of footfalls.
