5 Ways That Law Firms Are Still Dropping the Ball When It Comes to SEO

As an SEO consultant, I am often called upon to audit web sites’ on-page and off-page SEO factors. Many of the issues that I find are things that are easily resolved and will pay off fairly quickly in terms of improving search engine rankings.

Although these issues are common across all kinds of web sites, in a market as competitive as legal services, it is especially important that your SEO campaign be as solid as possible.

These are the five of the most common ranking factors either improperly implemented or overlooked altogether by law firms. For the purposes of this article, I am using the Law Firm of Jones & Jones as a generic and fictitious name.

1. Title Tags That Focus on the Firm Rather Than the Keyword Topic

If you do a search for city name + type of lawyer (e.g. Los Angeles dui lawyer) and click beyond the first few pages of results, you’ll start to see them – SERP listings that look like this:

Law Firm of Jones & Jones – Los Angeles DUI Lawyer – DUI Defense Attorney

You might be asking yourself what is wrong with this title tag. It contains the firm’s name and keywords that are relevant to the web page content, right?

True, but the information is in the wrong order. Google attributes more weight to the words at the beginning of a title tag than the ones at the end. So by putting your law firm’s name first, you are telling Google that your firm name is the most important and most relevant keyword phrase for that page.

SEO best practice is to front-load your title tags with your most important and most relevant keyword phrases first:

Los Angeles DUI Lawyer – DUI Defense Attorney – Law Firm of Jones & Jones

2. Not Paying Enough Attention to Meta Descriptions

Although meta descriptions are no longer a ranking factor, they are still an important part of SEO. Since the descriptive text of your SERP listings are usually taken from meta description tags, think of them as a 150 – 160 character ad spots.

A good meta description might look something like this:

Arrested for drunk driving? Call the experienced Los Angeles DUI lawyers at Jones & Jones for a free consultation. 213.555.1212 or toll free 800.555.3434.

It’s short, keyword and content relevant, and contains the firm’s name and contact information.

One other important thing to remember – if you don’t define your meta descriptions, Google will have to pull descriptive text copy arbitrarily from somewhere on the web page. Here’s an example of what can go wrong if you leave the descriptive text choice up to Google:

Dui? Get help now. Please fill out the following form and we will contact you as… When seeking an aggressive Los Angeles criminal defense lawyer to defend…

Yes, that is an actual description from an L.A. law firm’s SERP listing for Los Angeles dui lawyer. See the difference? Better that you define your descriptions through your meta description tags than to leave it up to Google.

3. Thin or Poor Quality Content

Ever since “content is king” became SEO’s mantra du jour, there have been constant debates over what constituted “good content”. I’ve seen arguments for 300 – 500 words per page up to 1000+ words per page but what many of these proponents fail to take into consideration is the intent behind the content.

If our fictitious Jones & Jones Law Firm’s contact page comes up in a search for their office locations, does that page really need 1000 words? 800? 300? Probably not. As long as the content on that page adequately answers the searcher’s query, then you’ve done your job.

On the other hand, I’ve seen individual practice area pages with less than 60 words of content. I don’t know about you, but I can’t think of many practice areas where viewers’ questions and concerns can be addressed in a mere 60 words.

When it comes to content, a good rule of thumb is to ask yourself “Does the information on this page adequately address the needs of visitors?” If the answer is yes, great. If the answer is no, then perhaps it is time to consider content revisions.

4. Little to No Internal Link Structure

Generally speaking, internal links are any links on one page of a web site that lead to other pages on the same web site. These can include navigation links, footer links, and links within web page content. It is this latter type of link that I would like to discuss.

This type of internal linking is considered by many in the SEO industry to be one of the most important – and often overlooked – ranking factors. As an SEO practice, internal linking has a number of important benefits:

• It helps establish content relevance and importance which can improve your ranking for certain keywords.
• It provides your visitors with additional relevant information on a specific topic.
• It helps Google crawl your web site easier and deeper and index pages more efficiently.

So now that you know why internal linking is important, let’s talk about a few implementation examples.

Example 1

If your law firm web site has attorney bio pages and those pages reference specific practice areas consider linking to those practice area pages. For example:

“Mr. Jones is one of only 5 attorneys in the state of California who are Board Certified in DUI defense law.”

In the example above, it would make sense to link “DUI defense” to your firm’s DUI practice area page.

Example 2

Like most law firms today, you probably have a blog on your web site (if not, you might want to consider adding one!). Blog posts are rife with internal link opportunities.

Let’s say you have written a blog post about the steps a person should take if they have been arrested for a DUI. If your blog post contains phrases like “fighting a DUI”, “an attorney that specializes in DUI defense”, etc… those are perfect opportunities to link back to your DUI practice area page.

One caveat to using this technique: Like alcohol and rich desserts, internal linking should be used in moderation. Not every single occurrence of a keyword phrase (or synonym of a keyword phrase) needs to be an internal link. That way lies spam and penalties. Personally, I try to limit this type of internal linking to one or two links per page – but only where relevant.

5. Not Policing Your Backlink Profile

So far I’ve been talking about on-page SEO factors that get overlooked or improperly implemented so for this last item I’m going to talk about an off-page SEO factor.

Backlinks.

We all know that backlinks are important. They tell Google that other people and organizations think that your web site’s content is important, which has a direct impact on rankings. Backlinks are also a secondary source of traffic called referral traffic.

Not all backlinks are created equally, however, and some backlinks can actually hurt you. Here are some types of backlinks that you should avoid:

• Blog comment links*
• Forum signature links*
• Guest blog post links*
• Backlinks from irrelevant web sites
• Footer, widget, or other sitewide links
• Article repositories (e.g. EzineArticles and similar sites)
• Porn sites (these crop up more often than you’d think)
• Gambling sites
• Low quality directories

* Though often sources of backlink spam, these types of backlinks can be beneficial – IF they are used properly.

How to view your backlinks profile

To view and manage your law firm web site’s backlink profile, you (or your SEO provider) will need to use a backlink tool. Many popular SEO tools like SEMRush, Moz, and Majestic have backlink checkers built in to their toolset. There are also standalone tools like Monitor Backlinks that are built specifically for backlink management.

Once you have identified the bad backlinks in your backlink profile, you can begin contacting site owners to have them removed. If that fails (and it often will), you can disavow those links using Google Search Console’s (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) disavow tool.

If you have any questions about anything you have read here, don't hesitate to contact me here on LinkedIn or via e-mail ([email protected]). I have created a free tool to help you visualize what your title tags and meta descriptions might look like in Google. Feel free to make use of my Handy Dandy Google Preview Tool :)