How to Create Your Personalized SEO Strategy Blueprint Before Building Your Website

The following is adapted from Law Firm SEO.

When you’re thinking about your law firm’s website, I know it’s more fun to think about design elements like color and logo than it is about SEO. But design comes way down the line.?

Would you ever build a home without a foundation, no matter how eager you are to get to the fun parts of interior decorating? Of course not. That’s the same reason you should never build a website without creating a solid strategy blueprint first.?

Chances are, you’ve been operating without a plan until now, but it’s time to change that. Read on to learn how to create your SEO roadmap and preplan your content strategy and website architecture. Doing so will give you a clear pathway to netting more clients and raising your bottom line.

Plan Your Pillar Pages

At the top of your strategy checklist should be planning your pillar pages. A pillar page is a webpage focused broadly on a single topic from which related, in-depth pages—called “cluster content”—branch out. Pillar pages could range from a thousand words to ten thousand words, depending on how competitive that keyword or phrase is.

Using pillar pages is a good strategy that silos and organizes your information by topic in a way that makes it easy for visitors to navigate and equally easy for Google to associate relevance while crawling and indexing. Crawlability, or how well Google can access your site's content without running into a broken link or dead end, is a critical component to the success of your SEO campaign and site integrity. It can have a major impact on whether or not your site ranks high in search results.

To demonstrate how a pillar page works, imagine that you’re an immigration lawyer. One pillar page you might want to create would be about how to get a visa to come work in the United States. This page would then link to subtopic pages that cover related topics and questions, such as “What is an H-1B visa?”, “How long does an H-1B last?”, and “What is the difference between an H-1 and an H-1B?” The pillar page would strategically and internally link to each of these subpages, using keyword anchor text to strengthen that content silo.

A critical part of your content strategy will be deciding what pillar-page topics will help you connect with your target audience. You’ll want to ask yourself:

• What topics are important to our clients?
• What questions are potential clients asking in Google searches?
• Who is already ranking on Google for these searches, and what does their content look like?
• What information does the user need to know?
• Do we have different geographic locations that need their own practice-area pages?
• What does the search volume and competition look like?

The benefit of preplanning your pillar pages and content strategy is that you can attract, inform, and educate targeted prospects who are looking for your specific services, at the exact moment they are ready to retain an attorney.?

You’ll also be able to measure your organic traffic for chosen keywords in Analytics, after Google crawls and indexes your content, and then you can re-optimize your content to increase your rankings and traffic, while signing more cases.

Study Your Competitors

To figure out what topics you want for your pillar pages, an excellent place to start is by studying your top competitors. If their websites are ranking at the top of Google searches, they’re doing something right.?

Your first step should be to find out who ranks at the top of Google searches for your market—they’re your main SEO competition. Identifying your competition is as easy as Googling your law firm’s practice area and location. If you’re a personal injury lawyer in Miami, for example, run a search for that and see who comes up.

Be aware, however: one thing to take into consideration is that the big spenders you recognize from television and billboards may not be using best practices with their technical SEO, but may still be ranking. They’ve likely built up years of natural links, from their advertising and community involvement, resulting in popularity superseding the technical aspects of their website.?

Don’t be surprised to find that newer firms are also top ranking for some of these searches—this is where recent law school graduates tend to have an advantage. Lawyers who have been in the market for a long time and have already built a brand may be susceptible to complacency, whereas a new lawyer with a more sophisticated SEO strategy can swoop in and start to take away some of their online market shares.

Reverse Engineer Your Competitors’ Strategies

Once you have a list of your competitors, it’s time to reverse engineer their SEO strategy. Start by crawling their websites, using tools like Screaming Frog SEO Spider, Ahrefs, or Semrush. These tools will provide insights and answer questions like: “What keywords does the website rank for?” and “What does their backlink profile look like?”?

Also, pay attention to how the websites are technically structured, how pages link together, and how URLs are formatted. I suggest analyzing your top three competitors and making a spreadsheet with the following information:

• Number of total pages indexed on Google
• Number of organic keywords they are ranking for on Google, using Semrush
• Estimated organic traffic cost, using Semrush
• Estimated branded and non-branded traffic, using Semrush
• Domain Rating (often abbreviated online and in SEO literature as DR), using Ahrefs
• Total number of referring domains, sorted by highest DR to lowest DR, using Ahrefs
• Top pages and all associated ranking keywords for each page, using Ahrefs

This information can inform your strategy, as you decide which keywords your website should include and where you should direct your link-building efforts, among other choices. As you’re studying your competitors’ websites, compare them to your own. You want to set baseline metrics for measuring progress later.?

Generally speaking the more unique pages you have indexed on Google, the better. There are only two ways to increase organic traffic to a website from an SEO perspective: you can publish more content, which will rank for more keywords, or you can push legacy pages higher in the search engine results pages with link-building strategies.?

For example, if you are ranking on the top of page two for a keyword that has five thousand searches per month, pushing your site to the first page of Google would increase your traffic, leads, and signed cases.

Be an Architect

Creating the high-level blueprint for your strategy might not be as exciting as designing the look and feel of your website, but it’s as necessary a first step as architecting a building before breaking ground.?

If you put in the time now to plan your pillar pages, study the competition, set baseline metrics and goals, and reverse engineer winning strategies, you’ll set yourself up for long-term SEO success.

For more advice on creating an SEO strategy, you can find Law Firm SEO on Amazon.

Jason Hennessey is an author, entrepreneur, and internationally recognized SEO expert focused on dissecting, demystifying, and reverse-engineering the algorithms behind the world’s most popular search engines. He’s the CEO and Founder of Hennessey Digital, a multimillion-dollar digital marketing agency recognized by Inc. as one of the fastest-growing private companies in the United States. A digital search marketing correspondent for the Washington Post, Fox Business, CNBC, and CBS News, Jason is also a highly sought-after public speaker, prolific angel investor, and an active board member of several nonprofits. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Bridget, and their three children.