Law Firm Content Pros

Food for thought for law firms, SEOs, or anyone involved in digital marketing in the legal niche: https://lnkd.in/eCUxtbsm Thanks to Matthew Russell for the contribution and excellent perspective! #InformationGain #SEO #LawFirmSEO

Google and the SEO community have identified several best practices for law firm title tags. We’ll cover the most important ones below, but I decided to take it a step further: I conducted some research on the law firm title tags. I captured the titles Google was displaying at No. 1 in the rankings for “[CITY] personal injury lawyer” in the top 333 most populous cities in the U.S. I looked at the titles themselves, their character counts, whether they included partial or exact keywords, and more. If you want the entire data set, send us a DM or Google "law firm title tags" and click the first result. But here are some of the key takeaways: – Aim for short title tags. The average character count for the title tags in this study was 47.54. The shortest one was eight characters (!). But I think that is likely overkill. – Use your location in your title tags. Of 333 top-ranking law firm title tags, 311 included the law firm’s area of service (usually a city). That’s 93 percent. – Target your keyword directly. 203 of 333 top-ranking personal injury firms (61 percent) used the exact words “personal injury lawyer” in their title tag. Lesson: Use your keyword in your title tag. – Avoid truncation. Only 89 of 333 law firms (27 percent) managed a No. 1 ranking with a title tag that was too long (and therefore truncated by Google). Stay under 60 characters to make sure you aren’t truncated. All of those findings track well with general best practices for title tags. Nice to know that all those best practices apply in the legal vertical.?

How to make law firm SEO more affordable, part 9: Test a Less Expensive (But Not Cheap) SEO Provider Affordable SEO for lawyers exists, but it’s not always easy to find. Still, if you keep shopping around, you’ll find the right blend of less expensive and effective. If you’ve got an SEO provider or a quote from one that’s too expensive, we encourage you to reach out to several more. Let them know what you’re paying or what you’ve been quoted. They may be able to beat it — and still deliver for you. If you’re interested in this approach, you’re in the right place. Contact our team for an affordable law firm SEO quote. Take us for a test ride and see what Law Firm Content Pros can do for you.

How to make law firm SEO more affordable, part 8: Take Advantage of Free Tools SEO isn’t free. But many of the tools you can use to improve your SEO are. And each of these tools has a paid alternative that offers advanced features. At this stage — and when you’re trying to reduce law firm SEO costs — you don’t need those. Here’s a list of free SEO tools and what they do: – Google Search Console. Google’s free SEO monitoring tool. See your impressions and traffic in Google, as well as keywords you rank for, backlinks, and more, for free. – Bing Webmaster Tools. This is more or less the same as Google Search Console — but for the Bing search engine. – Google Analytics. Google’s free tool for monitoring and analyzing all traffic that reaches your website. – Semrush (free account). A paid SEO tool that offers a robust free account. With a free account, you can run a website audit, track rankings, do keyword research, get on-page SEO ideas, and much more. – PageSpeed Insights. Google’s free tool for measuring your website’s loading speed (a ranking factor for most search engines). – Schema.org. A free repository of various types of schema markup code you can use to improve your visibility in search engine results pages. – Google Trends. See what people are searching for in near-real time so you can get ahead of legal search trends. – Rank Math?or?Yoast. Free SEO plugins for WordPress. You only need one of them. They offer a simple way to modify title tags, meta descriptions, and URLs, as well as various other optimization approaches. We prefer Rank Math. – Siteliner. Crawl your site for free to find duplicate content, broken links, redirections, and more. We run this on every site we do SEO for. – People Also Ask. This refers to the “People also ask” box in Google’s search results pages. These questions are informed by real queries people enter into Google, so you can see the questions people are asking and answer them on?your?website to get more traffic.

How to make law firm SEO more affordable, part 7: Follow Competitors’ Lead If you have the time and know what to look for, you can reverse-engineer your competitors’ SEO strategies. And that can save you a TON in lawyer SEO costs. Here’s what we're talking about: Poke around your competitors’ websites. See what pages and posts they’ve published. And plug your competitors’ sites into an SEO tool to see what they’re ranking for. You’ll start to see what they’re up to. You’ll get keyword ideas. You may even see weaknesses in their strategies that you can exploit. We recommend doing this with competitors you’re pretty sure are paying a reputable SEO agency. Why? Because they’re getting a real legal SEO strategy tailored to your market — implemented by experts. If you can reverse-engineer even part of that strategy, you’ll take your own SEO efforts a?long?way from where they are now. And you won’t have to pay for some or all of the strategy and/or implementation.

How to make law firm SEO more affordable, part 6: Target Low-Competition Keywords Targeting low-competition keywords is less expensive than targeting high-competition keywords. A high-competition keyword: Minneapolis personal injury lawyer Lots of established law firms are competing to rank No. 1 for this term. And doing so is a HUGE boost to any law firm’s business. A low-competition keyword: Brooklyn Park personal injury lawyer Brooklyn Park is a much smaller city in the Minneapolis metro area.?This keyword is likely to have far fewer law firms competing for a top ranking. But the population of the city (a little over 83,000) is large enough to suggest that there are clients there looking for a lawyer like you. So, which one do you target? Ideally, both. But if your budget is limited, start with the lower-competition keyword. It’ll be easier to rank for it. Which means it’ll be easier to get a few clients from it. Which means you’ll have more in the budget to invest into ranking for higher-competition keywords later on. Struggling to identify high- vs. low-competition?law firm keywords? It doesn’t have to be a guessing game. If you’re willing to pay for one of the popular SEO tools, like Semrush or Ahrefs, you can see their proprietary metrics that rank keywords by difficulty. And you’ll want to prioritize those with lower difficulty scores.

How to make law firm SEO more affordable, part 5: Build Links Last If you’re shopping around for affordable legal SEO agencies or freelancers, ask them if they’re willing to?not?charge you for any link building until later. The good ones will say that’s fine. Why? Because they realize that great content will naturally attract backlinks. In other words, while you’re getting everything else taken care of, you can be gaining backlinks?naturally?— rather than paying for them. It also happens that link building is typically one of the most expensive parts of any law firm SEO contract. So, if you can avoid paying for that part until later, you’ve just made your SEO much more affordable.

How to make law firm SEO more affordable, part 4: Go All In on Content If you want affordable SEO for your law firm, consider focusing ONLY on content to start. Here’s the truth about SEO that many expensive SEO providers don’t want you to know: In legal SEO,?everything?comes back to content. Yes, backlinks matter. Yes, technical website performance matters. Yes, your Google Business Profile matters. But if you don’t have a big SEO budget, content comes first. Why? Because content is what search engines serve to their users. Search engines reward websites that give them great content. That means you need blog posts and practice area pages targeting keywords people are actually searching for. And those pieces of content need to be?excellent. The other stuff — backlinks, technical SEO, local SEO, etc. — can (and should) come later. And later is when you’ll be able to afford them.

How to make law firm SEO more affordable, part 3: Make an SEO Calendar Another way to save on SEO costs for your law firm is to spread them out over a longer period of time. If you currently have an SEO provider, ask them to organize all of the SEO tasks they’re working on or planning to work on by order of importance. Then, schedule those tasks out in order. Pay only what you can afford in month one to get the most important task(s) done. Then, do month two. And three. And so on. Some SEO providers won’t accept an arrangement like this. And that’s OK. But if it’s the approach you want to try, you may need to find another SEO provider.

How to make law firm SEO more affordable, part 2: Make a DIY Plan with a Consultant If you have a lot of time on your hands, you can do your own SEO. DIY is probably the most affordable SEO method for attorneys. Of course, it’s not the most feasible approach over the long term. As your SEO efforts pay off, you get more clients. That means you get too busy to keep doing your own SEO. But doing it yourself is a great way to get the ball rolling if you don’t have a big marketing budget right now. However: We do NOT recommend just starting with a few online guides here and there. We recommend working with a law firm SEO consultant. Specifically, work with a consultant to?build?your DIY SEO plan. A great consultant will study your market and unique positioning and give you a tailored plan. Then, you can follow the steps until you get busy enough to outsource your SEO. (It just so happens that we act as an SEO consultant for many of our clients. If you’d like to explore this option during a free consultation,?contact us.)