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This article will cover the importance of SEO for lawyers and the must-have tactics to boost your web page’s rankings and organic traffic and get qualified leads. 

What Is Law Firm SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization, and it constitutes all the best practices for bettering your website’s performance in search engines such as Google and Bing. The better optimized a site is, the better it ranks for appropriate search terms. This, in turn, generates more organic traffic, increasing the leads to your website. 

Legal SEO consists of all the efforts to help position a law firm’s website on the top organic search results and expand its digital presence in Google. Law firm SEO often encompasses on-site SEO, link-building, technical SEO, and high-quality content creation. 

Does SEO Work for Lawyers?

Source: Statista

Google is the most visited website worldwide, followed by YouTube and Facebook. What’s more, in September 2022, Google received up to 18.02 billion visits. Additionally, according to the Google Consumer Survey, up to 96% of people use search engines seeking legal advice.

Missing out on your presence on Google is a tremendous gap for your digital marketing strategy, as most of your potential clients can be found there, no matter the site’s industry.

Hence, legal SEO helps ensure your website appears well on Google to attract quality leads. Good organic search engine rankings help potential clients get the right information about your business, services, and essential legal advice that’s valuable to them.

However, for lawyers to see the results of their SEO efforts, they must always be consistent. SEO is an ever-changing industry, and with constant changes such as algorithm updates and ongoing increases in competition, law firms must stay on top of their SEO game if they wish to remain competitive. 

How SEO Differs from PPC and Social Media

Multiple marketing professionals credit SEO as one of a business’s most effective and rewarding marketing channels. It drives more revenue than other marketing channels, such as PPC and social media.

Nevertheless, relying on only SEO limits your online growth and full potential to acquire leads. 

Since SEO requires constant effort and patience to see changes in your site’s organic rankings, you’ll start getting qualified leads in around three to six months. 

On the other hand, law firms can get leads with Google Ads, but it can be costly as the legal industry is highly competitive. 

That’s why pairing SEO and SEM strategies for legal marketing can help you achieve the best of both worlds.

A combined SEO and PPC strategy can aid you:

• Get short and long-term results.
• Increase your online presence.
• Obtain valuable data from both platforms.
• Increase your conversions.

To learn more about these strategies’ key differences and benefits, check out our video below:

What Is the Difference Between SEO and SEM? Which One Do You Need?

Law Firm SEO Tactics to Generate Leads

A good legal SEO strategy must address three core areas: on-site SEO, off-site SEO, and quality content creation. These could be divided into five major efforts.

Follow these law firm SEO strategies to boost your leads:

• Perform effective keyword research.
• Focus on on-site SEO.
• Have an optimized Google Business Profile.
• Make high-quality content tailored to your customers.
• Engage in authority-building tactics.

Let’s go over each of these strategies.

Perform Effective Keyword Research

Keyword research is the foundation of your SEO campaign. 

This process helps you identify the most relevant terms potential leads actively use to look for your services. It also helps define the difficulty of certain keywords and the efforts your competitors are making to rank for said keywords.

Effective SEO keyword research should include the following:

• Examine search volumes
• Analyze keyword difficulty scores.
• Identify search intent.
• Study the competition.

Regarding legal SEO, be sure to go for keywords specific to the type of practices you specialize in. Some variations include divorce lawyers, bankruptcy attorneys, and personal injury lawyers.

Focus on On-Site SEO

On-site SEO is all of the optimization efforts done to your site’s elements to help boost its rankings on Google. 

Proper on-page optimization helps ensure users and search engines properly understand your website. As a result, search engines can help your site rank higher for relevant terms. 

Not only that, but it also helps improve user experience. 

Some effective on-site SEO elements to focus on include:

• Enhancing title tags and meta descriptions.
• Using a useful heading hierarchy.
• Implementing proper keyword placement.
• Applying relevant structured data.
• Satisfying user search intent.
• Having readable content.
• Using browser-appropriate image formats.
• Adding useful internal and external links.

Have an Optimized Google Business Profile

Have you ever noticed the map section for a search term such as “personal injury lawyer”?

This map section is the Local Pack, appearing whenever Google recognizes someone performing a local search. This map shows multiple Google Business Profiles and information about each business, such as websites, directions, and reviews.

Appearing on local packs is a must for law firms, as they’re often the first organic result potential leads see when looking for a lawyer. To do so, you must have an optimized Google Business Profile.

Here are some must-haves to optimize your Business Profile:

• Use relevant primary and secondary categories.
• Fill out your profile.
• Perform constant health checks
• Get detailed positive reviews regularly.
• Embed your profile to your website.

Make High-Quality Content Tailored to Your Customers

Did you know that only 37% of law firms have a blog, according to the 2021 Survey by the American Bar Association?

In the 2021 Survey, 37% of respondents said their firm had a blog, leaving 57% not having one and 6% wondering if they had one. 

Blog posts are key as they help provide potential clients with useful legal advice using long-tail keywords. Furthermore, constant content submissions around your law firm’s core specialties help boost your site’s topical authority. 

Lastly, blogs are a great avenue to increase your internal and external linking structure.

When creating blog content, you’ll want to have a client-first approach. While it’s vital to have information about your firm, potential clients will find more value in possible cases they might be involved in. Doing so will also help establish that authentic connection between your client and you.

Quality blog posts should be personalized, include keywords around your practice areas, and have quality imagery.

Engage in Authority-Building Tactics

Lastly, to complete your SEO strategy, you must include authority-building efforts, also known as off-site SEO.

Authority building consists of all actions done outside of your website. The most prevalent tactics to incorporate in your off-page SEO are citation and link building.

Online citations are mentions of a business’s name, address, and phone number (aka NAP data) on other sites. They are an important local SEO ranking factor as they give Google authority signals that your business is legitimate and credible.

Link building, on the other hand, consists of acquiring links (also known as backlinks) from websites other than your own. Getting relevant backlinks to your business will also help boost organic rankings as these links pass authority to your site. 

Having these two tactics will not only boost your organic rankings but will also be an avenue of referral traffic as well.

Now that you have all the elements for a successful SEO campaign, it’s time to get your website on Google’s first page!

Need help boosting organic rankings for your site? Rely on us as your go-to SEO agency! Our legal SEO services encompass all the items mentioned above and much more to get your business ranking well on Google.