Utilizing SEO for Your Law Firm

By: Malcom Chakery

There’s no denying how significant the internet has become in marketing for all kinds of industries. The question comes on how to use this kind of marketing for law firms. This is why there is SEO for attorneys. Short for Search Engine Optimization, SEO is a tactic used by websites to increase their traffic. There are many ways that SEO can be utilized, but it varies on the business and the website. In the case of law firms, strategies exist to further increase not just traffic but potential customers to your website. It’s possible that you’re thinking that SEO sounds like a lot of work and maybe it isn’t the type of marketing you want. There are many reasons why you should try out SEO.

Why SEO will Benefit Your Law Firm’s Website

As mentioned previously, the point of SEO is to drive more traffic to your website. Luckily, this isn’t a temporary burst of people who suddenly visit and then your website is back to receiving less attention. SEO is designed to increase awareness of your business online for the long term. More traffic leads to a higher chance of receiving clientele. SEO for lawyers almost never leads to fewer people visiting your site. Other reasons to consider SEO include:

• possibly being one of the top results of a search in your area
• it can be more effective than traditional advertising
• it’s simple and doesn’t take up too much time

Admittedly, SEO may require routine uses and updates. Businesses don’t always stay the same, after all. So why should their websites? Doing law firm marketing will help raise awareness about your law firm, provided it is done right.

Useful SEO Tactics for Law Firms

The powerful ways in which you can gain traffic for your law firms are included below:

• target keywords for your local areas
• invest in directories
• optimize the site to specifically talk about the practice areas your firm is involved with
• local citations
• make your site convenient, informative, and professional for your visitors

These are the more popular strategies used in law firm marketing. You may be unsure of where to start. Each of these tactics will be explained further below.

Targetting Your Local Areas

You must first understand that the way people will be finding your business isn’t by searching the name of your law firm. They will most likely find it by searching for legal advice for a particular issue. Even if they don’t specifically type the area they want information from, their search engine will likely tailor the results to their particular area. SEO for attorneys focus on making your law firm one of the top results for these precise searches.

It’s highly possible that you are not the only law firm in your area with your distinct practice. In turn, this can make getting a top search spot pretty competitive. That’s why SEO for lawyers must be done constantly. The particular place you will mainly need to add these is on your homepage. The homepage usually gets the most traffic, especially since it’s the main link to your website others will refer to.

You can also increase your SEO by adding these keywords to articles that further go into detail about your practice, why it’s important to get legal advice on certain civil issues.

The formatting of your keywords is important as well. Legal SEO keywords include the name of the city for your target audience, one of your available practices, and terms like “law firm” and “attorney”. For example, keywords like “Killeen family law attorney” or “personal injury lawyer Felton.” This format is similar to the way a potential client would search for legal advice. Once you start getting some decent traffic, you can branch out some more. Aim for the cities located near yours, then spread out further to the rest of the county. It’s possible that, with enough recognition, your business could become known statewide.

Use Directories to Your Advantage

There are a lot of directories out there for law firms. As SEO for lawyers, it’s important to make sure yours is on as many of them as possible. The reason being is that this increases the likelihood of having your business become one of the top searches in your area.

You first want to start with major directories, like Google Places. Google Places is one of the largest catalogs online. This will definitely help increase the chances of your business being one of the top searches. It will also help your business to appear on Google Maps. You want to try to be one of the highest, if not the highest, rank on Google Maps in your area. This will be a major source of traffic for you. The goal of SEO for attorneys, in this case, is to gain a lot of attention from different aspects of Google. Since Google not only is popular for its search engine but also Google Maps, it’s significant to utilize these tools to keep on increasing the potential client flow to your site.

Next, you’ll want to look up local directories that focus on your city and cities nearby. Try to add your business to them to further increase the possibilities of appearing in local searches. Finally, you’ll want to look up other major directories and add your business to as many of them as you can to raise your overall legal SEO. The more catalogs, the higher the chance for exposure to searches. If you feel there are too many directories out there, then only focus on the ones that can further your pursuit of being one of the top searches. Adding your business to these directories can require some capital investment. It may also take time, as there are a lot of different law firm guides out there. Regardless, it’s all worth it if you want to get more traffic to your website.

Gain Attention through Your Practice Area

It’s important to provide detail about all of your practices. This will raise the possibility of your page becoming one of the top search results, specifically for your practices. If you want to really increase your legal SEO, then provide as much detail as possible for each and every one of these practices.

More information will lead to more exposure to search results.

When talking about your practices, be sure to use the method of SEO siloing. SEO siloing means to separate all of your information into different categories and subcategories. These distinct groups should each have their own individual pages. SEO siloing is not only a law firm marketing tactic but commonly used for SEO in other types of businesses and websites in general. Examples of different categories of practices include:

• real estate lawyer
• personal injury attorney
• immigration lawyer
• criminal lawyer
• entertainment attorney
• family law attorney

Don’t stop here with these categories. Each of these may contain subcategories. A method used by many a lawyer SEO company, make a page detailing the category and separate pages for each subcategory adjacent to the categories. Don’t forget to link the subcategories to their respective categories and vice versa. The broad topic pages can talk about who would need this practice and the particular issues it entails. This helps the individual know which category best fits their dilemma.

The subcategories, like divorce for family law or car accidents for personal injury, go into greater detail of these problems. These will present common scenarios that visitors can relate to. It is here that people will see that you are an attorney they need. Through SEO siloing you can turn potential clients into new clients without the help of a lawyer SEO company. Though it takes time, it saves money.

Local Citations May Drive the Majority of Your Traffic

Local citations could be the most important law firm SEO strategy you can use. Local citations refer to your business information and website being referenced and recommended by other websites. It is said that this is where websites gain most of their traffic. This is because search engines, specifically Google, notice all of the recognition your website is receiving and, therefore, bumps it up in search results.

It also lets Google know that your business really exists. However, you must first know where to put your information.

The particular information to share for these websites includes the business’s name, address, phone number, and, usually, the website. Respectively, this group of information creates a commonly known law firm SEO acronym known as NAPW. Since you’re focusing on getting traffic to your website, try to add it whenever you can. An example of a local citation was already mentioned previously in this article: directories. Though you know how important it is to add your business information to directories, it could be difficult where to start. Below is a list of common citation sources, some of which you may already recognize:

• Angie’s List
• Legal Web Finder
• USA Attorney Network
• Yellowbook
• Yelp
• Foursquare
• HotFrog

This is only just a small list of the many major directories you can add your business to. Don’t stop here, however. Though these directories are broad, you also want to look for local catalogs to add your information. Don’t forget to do research on the local directories relative to your town. Not only references but social networking as well. It’s one of the most popular ways that people can communicate. So not only can they directly inquire you about your business, but you can also promote your website. Check out Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and other popular forms of social networking.

Another important detail about adding your business to these sites is to be thorough. First, make sure your business isn’t already on that site. Duplicate profiles actually reduce the chances of being at the top search results. Once you’ve made sure your business information isn’t on a particular directory website yet, then what you want to do next is make a profile. After filling out your NAPW to the profile, you’ll notice that some of them may have other areas of information to fill out. Fill out all of them, if applicable. You could have an opportunity to post a profile picture. It could be of your business location or one of your diplomas, just as a couple of ideas. The extra details help your clients and your law firm SEO.

The Presentation of Your Website Counts

This might be important to do before you try the SEO tactics mentioned above. You want your website not only to look professional but also be simple for your visitors to navigate. Make sure that if they want to find specific information, like your contact information or divorce law, then make it clearly and easily accessible. This can include having the topics in a row on the side of your website or in a column at the top. When the users hover their cursors over the different categories, it can extend to show the adjacent subcategories. This is a form of SEO that may be familiar to you from other websites you have visited.

Make sure you don’t use bright, neon colors for your website. Use colors that are pleasing to the eyes. The font should be big and legible. For a law firm website, the best kind of font would be one that is sans serif. That means that the individual letters of the font don’t have a “tail” attached to them.

In Conclusion

SEO for your law firm is vital to increase the traffic to your website. Gone are the days of traditional marketing, which is more expensive, time-consuming, and could take longer to see results. Through accomplishing simple SEO tasks like adding your business info to directories and putting the right keywords in your website, you could increase your search result exposure by an exponential amount. Contact me if you would like a free site audit to see where your site stands today and where it could be in the future. Email me at [email protected].