Creating A Law Firm SEO Strategy - A Guide By Experts
- December 15, 2022
What Is SEO & Why Is It Important For Your Law Firm?
When you’re looking to get more clients for your firm, nothing comes close to the value of SEO – Search Engine Optimization. With a good law firm SEO strategy and diligent work, SEO outperforms any other form of marketing, yes this includes the referrals your firm relies so heavily on.
With the right law firm SEO strategy and implementation, your firm would be able to get consistent highly qualified prospects flowing to your website, without having to rely so heavily on other methods. That being said, there is no better time to begin implementing SEO than there is now for law firms. The truth is that so many firms put their organic well-being on the back burner. But if you look at some of the largest firms in the country, you will notice that every single one has cleverly implemented a strong and durable law firm SEO strategy that keeps the clients coming and the revenue climbing.
With that in mind, if you shift your focus to optimizing your law firms website for high quality, keyword-dense, on and off-page content, you will find that your rankings not only drastically increase but the following will happen as well:
- Providing A Quality User Experience
- Increase In Organic Traffic
- Boost Referral Traffic From Other Websites
- Boost Your Firms Authority & Trust
- Increase Reviews/Ratings
- Book More Prospect Appointments
- Get More Local Traffic
- Improve Your Content Marketing
- Improve The Quality Of The Traffic Driven To Your Site
Creating An SEO Strategy For Your Firm That Works
At Path-Media we have learned that no SEO strategy gets better results than one that is truly personal. Law firm SEO and Law firm SEO strategies are different from SEO and SEO strategies of other businesses. Here are the steps we have found to be most valuable for getting your law firm organic results.
Step #1: Understand The Ranking Factors For Your Law Firm
You can’t have success with SEO if you don’t know what needs to be done to acquire success. Google has over 200 ranking factors that come into consideration for ranking law firms, and a major part of that has to do with keywords.
Each keyword has its own KD- keyword difficulty score which determines how hard it is to rank organically for that keyword. For example, looking at the keyword “Law Firm” we can see that it has a KD of 72% and a monthly search volume of 27.1K. A keyword like this would take years of high-quality SEO content to rank for whereas a keyword like “Chicago Law Firms” has a KD score of only 41% and would likely take only 4-12 months of high-quality content to rank for.
You can use tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, or MOZ to measure a keyword’s KD and search volume but be advised that a keyword’s search volume should always be confirmed using Google Trends. A digital marketing agency like Path-Media can also provide your firm with the team and tools it takes to get the right keywords ranking.
Targeting keywords for local searches is also a good way to get an influx of traffic without having to develop tons of content. For instance, if your firm is located in Trenton new jersey, and a person was recently injured, a good search term to target could be “personal injury law firms in Trenton New Jersey”. Once again, don’t forget to consult with your KD tool and Google Trends to ensure prospects are actively searching these terms.
Step #2: Content Creation & Optimization
Once you have successfully determined the keywords necessary to propel your law firm higher in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages), it’s time to optimize your content for those keywords. In order to make any impactful results this needs to occur both on and off your website.
On-page Optimization
On-page optimization revolves around optimizing the web pages of your firm’s website for your desired keywords. This includes the following:
- Optimize your heading tags
- Target Only 1-2 keywords per webpage
- Optimize your meta description
- Optimize your slug URL
- Have a good keyword density
- Don't target the same keyword for 2 different pages
- Have plenty of relevant internal links
- have plenty of relevant links to other websites
- Optimize image ALT text
When Creating a strategic plan for how to go about your on-page SEO, it is important that you focus on a good text-to-keyword ratio. We have found that having your targeted keyword for every 100 words is best for maximizing your results without being punished by Google for keyword spamming. YoastSEO is a great on-page SEO tool that we recommend to anyone looking to improve their law firm SEO strategy.
Technical Optimization
At Path-Media we preach technical optimization. Without it, Google will have trouble understanding your website which will likely have a direct effect on your rankings and ultimately your revenue. For this reason, it is important that you optimize and keep regular track of the following:
- Redirects
- Sitemaps
- URL Formatting
- Robots.txt or crawlability
- Structured Data Markup or Markup Language
Search these terms up and get a good understanding of what they mean and how you can control them specifically on your website’s hosting platform. Technical SEO is very important because it teaches google how to interact with and understand your website properly, so don’t skip this step.
Off-page Optimization
Off-page SEO is the most important factor when it comes to ranking high in organic search results. There are countless law firms that have great on-page and technical SEO but lack an abundance of quality backlinks and off-page content. Right about now is when things get expensive, but if you stick to the law firm SEO strategy you created, you’ll see a substantial ROI for years to come. Creating a comprehensive off-page SEO strategy includes the following:
- Plenty of relevant guest posts
- high-quality link insertions
- Optimized Anchor text
- Off-page SEO validation
The #1 thing to keep in mind when guest posting and inserting off-page links is that not all websites are equal. What this means is that while aimlessly guest posting and link inserting may bring traffic and a boost in rankings, it isn’t going to be the traffic you want. Thoroughly checking the DA – Domain Authority of your backlink and guest posts prospects along with the keywords they are ranking for is best practice when it comes to actually achieving your goal of onboarding more clients. SEMrush is a great tool for analyzing the keywords and DA of your prospects. As far as what qualifies a prospect, we recommend that you don’t obtain any backlinks from websites that have a DA of less than 25 and are ranking for less than 200 relevant keywords.
Step #3: Completing Your Law Firm SEO Strategy
Now you know the basic fundamentals of having a strong law firm SEO, we are going to dive into how you should focus your SEO efforts. Without a doubt, off-page SEO should take up the majority of the time and budget of the project. However, it is important that a complete on-page and technical SEO audit have been completed before the start of any off-page SEO work.
That being said, you are also going to want to audit your backlinks regularly. You can use SEMrush to view any toxic or low authoritative backlinks that could be hurting your SEO. Once all three aspects of your SEO are revised, you can move on to link-building and guest posting. We recommend a minimum of 1 guest post plus 1 link insertion a week for optimal results. Keep in mind this doesn’t include your on-page blog posts which should be given just as much attention and have plenty of internal and external links.
Finding topics to guest post on is simple, you can use SEMrush, or google search suggestions after searching a target keyword. After that, all you need to do is validate your keyword and get to blogging. Keep in mind that videos are a great way to get traffic also(if it’s your firm’s thing). With all that in mind, we know you are busy serving your clients, therefore we have decided to offer a 100% personalized Free Law Firm SEO Strategy Plan, all you need to do is follow the link, put in some information and we will get back to your with your law firm SEO strategy plan in no time.
