SEO for Lawyers: The Ultimate Guide to Grow Your Law Firm

What Is Lawyer SEO?

Lawyer SEO focuses on optimizing a law firm's website for search engine results in order to improve its visibility and position in search results. This includes improving the quality and authority of website content, obtaining page-one rankings for relevant keywords, and promoting the firm's website through online marketing endeavors.

By utilizing these strategies, you will be able to increase your law firm's online presence on search engines like Google and attract more potential clients. Search engine optimization is so effective that a study showed that 79% of law firms view SEO as their most important marketing channel.

Why Is Attorney SEO Important?

SEO is important for law firms because it helps your web pages display at or near the top of Google's organic search results, leading to an increase in traffic and leads. This is crucial because sites that don't earn those high rankings in search receive significantly fewer clicks.

The first organic search result in Google, for example, has an average click-through rate of 28.5%. This drops to 15% and 11% for the second and third results and falls off exponentially thereafter.

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As you can see, the importance of your site ranking in the top three results cannot be understated. After all, outside of referrals, search engine results and law firm website visits are the two most popular methods for finding an attorney.

Ways to Approach SEO for Law Firms

Now, there are three main aprroaches to doing attorney SEO. It is possible to have a successful website with any of these approaches, but the difficulty will wary drastically:

• Implement Attorney SEO Yourself: There's no prerequisite to start doing SEO. As a lawyer you can take improving of your website into your hand, but with the amount of SEO work needed your practice is likely to take a hit.
• Hire an In-House Law Firm SEO Specialist: This is a good step forward. It somewhat frees you to focus on your clients, while trusting your website to professionals. However, you will need to have some SEO knowledge to be on top of things and it can be really hard to change the team of experts.
• Hire a Law Firm SEO Agency: The best approach to law firm SEO. Gives you full freedom to focus on your practice and you can be sure that SEO expert team will keep you informed.

This table may help you with the final choice you have to make about improving your law firm SEO.

Grow Law Firm is a professional attorney SEO company with over a decade of experience. We offer SEO services that will grow your legal company, like we already did for our clients. Our expertise will help you grow revenue and get more clients.

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Measuring Your Law Firm's SEO Performance

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However, you may want to do SEO yourself. Or maybe you just want to know how ranking on Google works and be more informed about your SEO specialist's work. Then, let's take a look at our step-by-step lawyer SEO guide that will take you through the whole process of search engine optimization.

SEO Strategy for Attorneys

Effective SEO for lawyers begins with a strategy. The first step for creating that is a current state analysis. You need to fully understand your website's current performance. How are you ranking for the most relevant keywords? Where is the money you've budgeted for search engine optimization being spent? How much effort would it take for you to dominate search in your niche? Once you understand these things, you can begin working on a strategy.

Analyze the Current State of Your Law Firm Marketing

You must first evaluate your position. For one, you should examine your current law firm marketing budget, as well as what you can spend on search engine optimization in the future. This also includes potential spending on SEO tools and hiring new personnel.

Second, you must also evaluate the current state of your law firm's search engine performance. You will then be able to define realistic search rankings, ROI and conversion goals that are achievable within a reasonable amount of time.

This is also where you must consider the value of your time. Do-it-yourself SEO efforts take a significant amount of time. You would be losing billing time and reducing your return on investment from clients. If you have aggressive growth goals for your law practice, an agency could do the work more efficiently and potentially for less money than your average billing rate.

Create SMART Goals and KPIs for Lawyer SEO Strategy

After establishing some broader law firm SEO goals, it's time to move on to a new stage. This is where you will begin to form a more actionable law firm SEO strategy. The best way to start is by setting SMART goals. These are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Essentially, these are specific goals for which you set clear metrics for success that will lead to a meaningful accomplishment within a reasonable amount of time.

On the subject of SEO for lawyers, a SMART goal might be, “We will increase our traffic for keywords in the category of alimony and child support by 20% within 180 days”. This meets all of the criteria for SMART.

Additional SMART Goal Examples

• Optimize 10 pages currently displaying on page 2 of SERP to page 1 by Q3
• Increase overall organic traffic to practice area pages by 10% in 30 days
• Boost revenue from organic traffic sources by 15% in 2023
• Decrease bounce rate by 5% by EOY

Law firm SEO goals must be supported with key performance indicators (KPIs). These are often used as the specific measurements that indicate how well progress is being made when you apply your law firm SEO strategy. For example, average engagement time is an important KPI for search engine optimization. It indicates that people are clicking on your links and engaging with your high-quality content in meaningful ways.

Additional KPI Examples

Consider using some of these other important metrics when establishing your KPIs:

Niche and Competitive Research for Lawyers

For lawyers finding out who their local search competitors are poses no issue most of the time. Since most legal practice is done locally, they define their competitors as other local law firms that offer services in the same practice areas. As a result, many attorneys stop here when it comes to researching their competition, assuming that they already know who their competitors are.

This is correct but too limited. While these local firms are key competitors, keyword research and legal SEO can reveal other competing firms and entities that must be considered when it comes to marketing efforts. Attorneys must widen their view by examining the search engine results page carefully. When it comes to earning website traffic and leads, that's where they'll find their competitors.

Your keyword research will pay off significantly here. In addition to recognizing where your web pages are ranking and identifying missteps early on, pay attention to your law firm competitors' SEO strategy as well. Specifically, investigate those earning higher rankings for your target keywords (and presumably more traffic).

For example, an attorney who practices estate law may assume that their competition is limited to other lawyers in that niche. However, when they look at search engine results, they may realize that they are also in competition with companies that offer products such as do-it-yourself wills.

Bonus Tip: Don't neglect examining firms in other cities. Pay close attention to their online presence, particularly high quality backlinks and practice area pages. You could be the first law firm in your city and niche to adopt some of those practices, and that's a great way to create growth.

Lawyers' Backlinks and References Research

Competitive link research gives you some insights into what you need to do to achieve the same organic ranking that your better-performing competitors are enjoying. Here are the steps you can take to do this research yourself:

• Identify the right competitors. You want to focus on law firms that have an SEO presence that is at least as strong as yours, if not more.
• Choose a backlink and reference research tool. This will help you automate the competitive research you do. Semrush has a reputable tool, as does Moz.
• Be wary of outdated or questionable link-building tactics. If the law firm is still ranking well despite bad practices, it could be that they disavowed the links.
• Check for active outreach: Is your competitor earning links from bloggers or media outlets? That's a good sign that they are actively reaching out to these sources and building relationships.

Keyword Research for Lawyers

Keyword research is the work you do to identify the words and phrases that potential clients use to search for the legal services you offer. Keywords are the foundation of a legal SEO campaign; they impact content, metadata, tags, and even URLs. As such, keyword research should under no circumstance be treated as an afterthought.

There are two primary types of keywords. Short-tail keywords are phrases 1–3 words in length and typically quite broad, such as “criminal lawyer”. While this could be a good choice, it's difficult to optimize for these kinds of keywords because they come with a lot of competition in attorney SEO.

On the other hand, long-tail keywords are lengthier and more specific.  For example, “criminal lawyer for drug offenses”. Long-tail keywords make up 92% of all keywords searched on search engines. Long-tail keywords can also be location-specific. These keywords should be used to narrow your focus and ensure that you're getting relevant traffic.

But it is helpful for legal SEO to think beyond these two categories. Rather than just categorizing keywords as long-tail or short-tail, consider that they might be: Customer-Defining, Service-Defining, Evergreen, Short-Term, Geo-Targeted, LSI (latent semantic indexing).

All of them point to different attorney keyword intent. You must identify the intent behind the searches, because people who are entering legal-related keywords into Google could have a range of intentions. They may want to:

• Gather information about a legal issue that interests them
• Hire an attorney to assist them with a legal problem
• Determine whether they have a case worth pursuing
• Compare different law firms in the same region

When you understand the reader's intent, you'll be able to create high-quality content that matches what they're looking for, increasing your search ranking and UX factors, such as bounce rate and click-through rate as a result.

Keyword Research Tools

Several keyword tools make it easier to identify the right keyword phrases for optimizing your content for law firm SEO, ranking higher in search results, and attracting your target audience.

• Ahrefs: Ahrefs is a keyword generator that helps law firms identify long- and short-tail keywords, highlighting those with significant traffic potential and low competition. The platform also includes a competitive analysis tool.
• Google Trends: Google Trends helps identify trending keywords. This is an excellent resource for identifying keywords to use when creating optimized blog posts and guest articles that take advantage of current events and searches.
• Keyword Surfer: This is a free Chrome extension that displays search volume data from the Google search results page. It includes keyword suggestions, visibility information, page data, and cost per click.
• Moz: A comprehensive keyword research tool, Moz allows users to quickly discover and prioritize the best keyword phrases for their law firms.
• QuestionDB: QuestionDB is a tool that helps users understand which questions people are asking about a variety of topics. By simply typing in a broad topic keyword, the tool will return the most popular questions pertaining to it.

Self-Directed Lawyer Keyword Research

Keyword research can be made easier with tools, but as an attorney, you have a special insight into the needs of your potential clients due to an expert understanding of your area of law and your relationships with your existing clients. By applying your knowledge, you can derive a list of keywords to optimize for in your law firm SEO campaign that other firms may not be taking advantage of.

Here are some things to take into consideration:

• Questions you receive from prospective clients
• Keywords that are commonly associated with your practice area
• Location-specific keywords that target where you practice law
• Google search auto-complete for long-tail keyword building
• Trending topics in your practice area

For example, if you work in contract law, you know the business inside and out, you're in a great position to deduce what specific questions your potential customers have regarding contract law. This will help you come up with dozens of relevant keywords that a tool could easily miss.

When you've exhausted your efforts in self-directed research, taking advantage of powerful tools like Ahrefs can help you finalize a list of keywords. let's take a look at how it's done.

Example of a Keyword Research Process [with Ahrefs]

Ahrefs is one of the most popular keyword tools. Follow these basic steps to get started:

Enter a keyword in Keyword Explorer: Start by entering a base keyword into the Ahrefs Keyword Explorer. In the case of the above example, “contract law”.

Review Keyword Data: Once you enter the keyword, you will see details about the target phrase, including search volume and keyword difficulty. You will be able to see how frequently the keyword is used, where it is trending, and other information that indicates how competitive the phrase is.

Identify Alternative Keyword Ideas: In addition to showing data about the keyword you have entered, Ahrefs will also display additional keyword suggestions. This will include emerging keyword ideas that are newly trending.

Discover Search Rankings and Usage: Ahrefs will also show how the keyword you have selected has been ranking over some time. This includes displaying the URLs of competitors and other sites using the same keyword.

Open Content Explorer: Content Explorer allows you to drill down a bit further into the content that is using the keyword phrase you've selected. This includes the number of social shares, amount of organic traffic, domain authority, and referring pages.

Lawyer SEO Ranking Factors

Last, but not the least, acquaint yourself with Google's SEO ranking factors. Knowing yourself in important but knowing what are you going to work with is cricual.

Overall, there are 5 main ranking factors for websites on Google:

• Content Quality, Relevance, Originality, and Formatting: You must provide relevant, trustworthy content if you hope to rank highly in search. Make your content is readable and engaging.
• Use of Internal and External Links: Internal links give users a path to navigate your law firm site, and help search engines index your web pages. External links communicate information about the quality and the usefulness of your content.
• Technical SEO for Lawyers: Page performance is one of the most important aspects of technical SEO; slow-loading pages create a poor user experience and can lead to a lower ranking.
• UX and UI as Measured by RankBrain: RankBrain is an AI technology that Google implemented to help determine which pages should rank for which searches. This tool prioritizes search results based on its understanding of the context and relevance of web pages.

• Domain Factors: You should verify that your domain hasn't been used in any linking schemes that may have harmed it's credibility.

Create a Marketing Strategy for Lawyers with Grow Law Firm

You've accomplished quite a bit by this point. You've completed keyword research, identified your competitors, and clearly defined SMART goals and the metrics to track them. You've successfully taken the first steps of creating a law firm marketing strategy that centers on SEO for lawyers.

But you've barely scratched the surface when it comes to law firm SEO. The next step will be to take a look at your website, content and technical side of things to see how it can be optimized to reach your target audience, build authority, and earn top-of-page search rankings.

Keep in mind that a law firm SEO agency can make fast work of these processes. The experience an expert brings to the table means you can implement a winning attorney search engine optimization strategy that much sooner.

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Optimize Your On-Site SEO for Law Firms

Onsite optimization is a multi-faceted effort to improve your website's content, structure, and coding for the purpose of making it easier for search engines to index your site. This optimization influences some of the top ranking factors that Google considers, so it's one of the most important parts of SEO success.

Keep in mind that many of the changes involved in onsite optimization will require the help of a professional website developer. They have the skills needed to make changes to your site architecture, CMS, and hierarchy.

Law Firm On-Site SEO Checklist

SEO for lawyers is dependent on good law firm web design. Your website draws the attention of search engines and provides the information your audience needs. It's what allows you to rank for relevant keywords and increase your search engine ranking.

Use this checklist to ensure your law firm website is optimized for search.

• Select the right website structure
• Check for internal and external duplicate content
• Connect content marketing with your law firm's SEO strategy
• Create and implement a keyword strategy
• Test and improve page performance
• Use images that are optimized
• Add internal links for legal SEO and better navigation
• Optimize your URL
• Make your site secure
• Test it on mobile

Choosing the Best CMS for Your Law Firm's Website

A content management system (CMS) is a platform for managing your website. Law firms and other businesses often choose a CMS because it automates a significant portion of creating and managing a website. This can leave more time for practicing law, engaging new clients, and creating better web content.

Before you decide whether you want to use a CMS and which one is best for your law firm, it helps to understand some of the most common features of content management systems.

• Administrative dashboard and permissions management
• Collaboration between content creators and developers
• Analytics tools
• Social media integration
• Ability to add and modify web pages and blog posts

Additionally, many CMS platforms have tools or add-ons that provide your website with extra functionality. There are even tools to help with law firm SEO efforts.Lawyers will also need to consider ease of use, cost, and security before they choose a CMS. Some of the most popular content management systems are:

• WordPress: WordPress is an open-source CMS that is used by millions of lawyers worldwide. It is also supported by hundreds of developers that produce various wordpress themes for lawyers and plugins that provide businesses with a range of functions.
• FirmWise: FirmWise is specifically intended for use by law firms. It offers website hosting, administration, and scalable growth, and law firms can choose to use FirmWise solutions directly out of the box or bring in their own designers for customization.
• Joomla: Joomla is a free, open-source content management system. This framework allows developers to integrate advanced functions into law firm websites, such as communication tools and data reporting.
• LawLytics: LawLytics offers a site content generator, website security, reporting tools, and more. LawLytics is easier to set up than other CMS options, but the trade-off is less design flexibility, which can lead to a similar look from one site to the next.

If you choose a CMS tool for your law firm website, take cost and complexity into consideration as well. Although, in many cases, law firms will still hire a website development agency to help with their website creation and management, no matter which CMS they choose.

Creating a Proper Lawyer Website Structure

Your website structure your website can have a positive impact on law firm SEO. When developing a law firm website you need to plan a proper structure that works for search engines. Google gives priority to sites that are set up for ease of navigation, are easier to index and match to search intent. There are three primary structures that you can choose for your law firm's website.

1. Sequential

In a sequential website structure, the pages connect in a linear fashion. They tend to follow predictable user patterns. For example:

• The user goes to your law firm's home page
• User clicks on the service they are interested in
• User clicks on a CTA to fill in their contact information

This can work very well for sites that are very small and uncomplicated, especially for legal practices that offer very limited services.

2. Hierarchical

This is the most common structure for law firm websites. There is a homepage that is linked out to different section pages. Those pages may also link out to subtopic pages. Each section may be based on a practice area, location, or some other logical division.

Hierarchical websites are especially popular with larger law firms. Pages for multiple areas of law can be used to create entirely separate sections of a website. This structure also works very well for the pillar cluster method of organizing website content.

Here's an example of a hierarchical page layout:

• HomePage
• HomePage / CriminalDefense
• HomePage / CriminalDefense / TrafficOffenses
• HomePage / CriminalDefense / TrafficOffenses / TrafficMisdemeanors

Also, this structure does not assume that everyone visiting your law firm's website will start at your home page. For example, someone searching a keyword phrase that relates to traffic offenses will see your traffic offenses service page instead of your home page.

3. Network Structure

This is the least common type of website for lawyers. In this structure, every page is linked to every other page. This can work for small websites, but only if there is a logical connection between every page.

On-Page SEO for Lawyers

On-page SEO for lawyers is the practice of improving your website content, tagging, and internal linking to improve search engine rankings. On-page SEO is very effective, but it takes an ongoing effort.

URL Structure: A URL slug is the last part of a website URL that describes the specific page. For example, in the URL "LawFirm.com/legalservices/criminal/10-tips-for-hiring-a-lawyer" the slug is “10-tips-for-hiring-a-lawyer”. To optimize your URL slug use keywords, make it short, avoid using slugs that are generated dynamically and avoid repeating slugs in different URLs.

SEO Title tags and Meta Description for Lawyers: Title tags are used by search engines to understand and index page content. While meta descriptions aren't a direct ranking factor, they do impact your click-through rates. To optimize your search snippet use proper keywords, locations when optimizing for local SEO and use tools like SerpSim to check text for length. Also, keep an eye on competition to see how you can improve your meta.

Main H1 Heading: Your H1 heading is the face of your legal article. Users see it as soon as they open the page and Google puts heavy emphasis on it when indexing the page. Putting your main keyword there is a no-brainer, as it helps immensely with website's search engine rankings. It should be interesting and attention-drawing, just like your title tag.

Overall Heading Structure: Your H2s, H3s, and even small H4s present a number of SEO opportunities for lawyers. Add keywords, and make them attractive for Google to get ahead of the competition. Overall, any type of page can benefit from heading optimization, including your service, practice, landing, and other non-blog pages.

Image Optimization: Your images also impact how search engines view and rank your law firm's website. Use original images where possible instead of stock images. Use file names that are meaningful and reflect what is in the picture. Finally, add alt tags that explain what is in the image. These tags increase accessibility, and screen readers use them to describe images to users who may not be able to see or interpret them.

Keyword Usage: There are tools, like SurferSEO, that can help you check a page for proper keyword usage and even compare it to the competition! Don't forget, there are many places you can add keywords. Image ALTs and headings are also taken into account during indexing. Make sure to use relevant keywords there!

Table of Contents: A TOC can help both Google and the user make sense of an article. It leads to a better overall user experience, while Google can better understand and index the content of the page, provide extra backlinks, and show some of the topics in search results.

Schema for Attorneys: Schema markup is code added to your website from the Schema.org website. The purpose of this is to convert unstructured data to structured data. This is what is used to showcase web pages in rich snippets that appear at the top of organic search results. There are 4 main types of Schemas: location schema, attorney schema, FAQ schema and review schema.

Food for thought: Rich snippets generated by schema markup can increase CTR by up to 30%

The Power of Internal Linking for Attorneys

Internal linking helps search engines understand your website content and how different pages relate to one another. Internal links can also make your website structure clear. There are 2 main types of internal links.

The first type of internal link is contextual. This is an internal link that you use because the content is relevant. For example, if you talk about child support in a family law blog, you might also include an internal link to a post you wrote about new child support laws in your state.

The second type of internal link is a hierarchical link. This connects parent and child pages. It's these links that connect pillar cluster pages.

Here are some tips that can help you get the most out of internal links for law firm SEO:

• Add several links to a page with a related posts section
• Use taxonomies to add links
• Include navigation links
• Add a recent post section to your law firm website
• Avoid adding internal links just to have them
• Optimize anchor text with relevant exact matches keywords

There's another reason that internal links help law firm SEO. They keep visitors on your website, reducing bounce rates and improving other ranking metrics.

Important Technical SEO Factors for a Law Firm's Website

Technical SEO is a key component in law firm SEO success. It not only makes website more attractive to search engines, but ensures that your visitors will have a smooth experience, because 88% of online consumers are less likely to return if something goes wrong or doesn't load. Unfortunately, it can be challenging to incorporate technical SEO into your strategy because most law firms don't have staff on hand who are familiar with it.

Fortunately, good website design and administration can help with technical SEO for law firms. Using performance tools in addition to Google Analytics can also be helpful.

How Do You Check and Fix On-Page SEO Factors

You can verify these factors on your law firm's website with an audit. Start with your target keyword list. Search for them using a Google account that isn't associated with your law firm. Where are you on search engine results pages?

Next, go into Google Search Console to review your messages. You want to make sure you aren't being penalized. Verify that your pages load quickly enough. Google's PageSpeed Insights tool will help with this.

You can audit the images on your web page for optimization by starting with a general performance audit. If there are issues, you can make optimization changes to your images to ensure better rendering and page load times.

Finally, use Google Analytics or other tools to see which pages are performing well and which aren't. For the lowest-performing pages, you can conduct a manual audit. Verify that you have effectively dealt with the on-page ranking factors listed above. Then, make changes where needed.

Some helpful tools for improving on-site SEO include:

• SurferSEO: Verifies the use of keywords and LSI terms, as well as the use of headers
• Screaming Frog: Crawls your website and returns SEO analytics info
• Google Search Console: Reports on search traffic and performance

The content management software you use will also likely have native tools for tracking performance and conducting a website SEO audit for law firms. These tools will also provide you with helpful baseline information about your website. Use this data to optimize your URLs, tags, meta descriptions, and other on-page ranking factors.

Grow Law Firm Can Optimize Your Website for Best Performance

Website optimization play a crucial role in your law firm SEO. Having a flexible CMS will help you get out the content you want just like you want it and Google needs it. Different UX quality of life features will increase the retention rate of your clients and help you get more leads. And small technical SEO work will push your website beyond what your competition can do. Woeking with a professional law firm SEO company will help you to achieve all of those goals with ease.

Now, when we have a website, we need to put content in there. Let's take a lot at what type of content lawyers can create and how to do it right.

Law Firm Content Marketing and Creation

Content marketing for lawyers is the strategic use of blog posts, videos, and other content to increase interest in your services; 81% of law firms consider content marketing their top marketing investment.

It's a key part of any law firm's marketing strategy and one of the biggest influencing factors in SEO for lawyers. If you provide people with the content that they need when they need it, you will increase traffic, engagement, and search rankings. Also, content marketing is poised for growth, with 50% of marketers set to increase spending in 2024.

Additionally, content boosts brand awareness and helps to establish your law firm as a thought leader. It is also the ideal tool for reaching potential clients at any point in the sales funnel.

Types of Attorney Website Content

It helps to create a balance of lawyer content types and understand how each content type can add value to your content marketing and SEO for law firms efforts. Here are some of the most popular content types for attorneys.

Lawyer Practice Area Pages

These are sales-focused pages that you publish on your website. Each of these pages should focus on one specific practice area or specific sub-niches, like traffic law, felony cases, and appeals for criminal defense attorneys.

When creating these pages, it's important to optimize for the right search keywords, especially the titles and headings. For criminal law, it might be “Traffic Ticket Defense Attorney in Phoenix”. It's also important to make the process of contacting you easy for clients by providing multiple calls to action.

Attorney Blogging

Blog content is an important part of your SEO efforts, as it helps your law firm's website earn quality backlinks. Additionally, legal blog posts create awareness and build authority. They also provide your law firm with the opportunity to engage with potential clients who are in the research phase. However, only 27% of law firms maintain a blog.

There are plenty of interesting legal topics to write about, and they're typically separated into two categories. The first is current events; these could be recent court decisions, ongoing legal issues, or local cases that are getting significant attention. When you write about trending topics, you can integrate trending keyword phrases into your content and draw a larger audience to your website.

The second category is evergreen topics. These are legal topics that will always draw interest, no matter the season, and they can help establish you and your firm as a great source of information. These topics tend to relate directly to your practice area and give you the opportunity to showcase your expertise.

Consider adopting the pillar-cluster blog structure as a part of your SEO efforts. This is an ideal way of organizing blog posts on your law firm's website. Essentially, posts on a specific topic are linked together and back to a pillar post.

This approach works well for two reasons. The first is that by structuring posts this way, you help search engines like Google understand your content and how it relates to search intent. Also, by linking related posts together, you give website visitors a way to navigate from one post to another to gather more information.

It can help to view the pillar post as casting a wide net and the cluster posts as taking a deeper dive. However, all posts should follow best practices for blogging and web content. These include:

• Using subheadings
• Adding tags
• Inserting videos and other images
• Writing short paragraphs
• Using bulleted and ordered lists

Food for thought: nearly half (46%) of bloggers report gaining clients directly due to their blogging efforts.

Law Firms Location Pages

These are similar to service area pages. However, they include information that is focused on a specific location. These work well for law firms that cover a wider geographic area and want to provide more detail on the specific legal services they offer for each location.

For example, a large maritime law firm might have service pages for “commercial fishing accident attorneys in (city name)” for multiple coastal cities that they serve.

Single-location law practices should also create location-specific pages. These will be optimized for local search and help connect with area clients by drilling down into even more specific local keywords. For example, a Chicago law firm could mention Navy Pier or Lakeshore Drive.

Attorney Case Studies

Case studies are ideal website content for appealing to people who want to hire an attorney but are undecided about which law firm to use. Case studies go over the details of specific cases that your law firm has won. They describe the details of the case, the approach to assisting the client, and the outcome. Case studies showcase your expertise and can show potential clients that you have worked on cases similar to theirs.

Legal Infographics

Infographics are visual depictions of complex concepts. These are ideal for breaking down legal information in a way that people can better understand. For example, you can create or share an infographic that depicts the process of filing a lawsuit and going to court. Infographics tend to earn quality backlinks and help you establish your authority in your field. Like blog posts, they often appeal most to people in the awareness and research stages. Moreover, your infographics may appear on search engine results pages!

Lawyer Podcasts

Attorney podcasts are another way for attorneys to establish thought leadership by taking deeper dives into important topics. They also appeal to people who may not be inclined to engage with blog posts.  Podcasts can be published directly on your law firm's website. They can also be published on one of many podcast sites and apps, then linked back to your site. While still emerging, a quarter of marketers use podcasts or other audio content in their strategies.

Educational Attorney Videos

Lawyer videos are engaging and tend to draw views and backlinks. They can be created to appeal to people in various stages of the buying journey. For example, an introductory video describing your firm and what it does is ideal for the awareness stage. A detailed video describing how you advocate for your clients is ideal for people who are actively looking to hire an attorney.

There are different video types that you can create, and each can be used to achieve specific marketing goals:

• Attorney profile videos
• Client testimonial videos
• Thought leadership videos explaining popular topics
• Roundtable discussions between lawyers and other experts
• Practice area explainer videos
• Short format FAQ videos on twitter or TikTok

Do some competitive research here. Also, be sure to create and share videos that fit the platform you're using — the videos you upload to TikTok should be very different from the videos you share with your audience on LinkedIn.

Lawyer Guest Posting

Guest posting is very similar to blogging. It's posting relevant content in your area of expertise to connect with a larger audience.

The difference is that you do this on trusted platforms outside of your website. This helps to boost awareness of your law practice and connect with potential clients.

There are many platforms that welcome written contributions from attorneys. For example, reach out to:

• Legal and academic journals
• Business publications
• Relevant websites (like a realtor website for a real estate law attorney)
• Help a Reporter Out and #JournoRequest on Twitter to find media requests for attorneys

You may have to engage in some networking to find guest posting opportunities, but if you can establish yourself as a valuable content creator, other bloggers and publications will seek you out. Guest posting on relevant legal blogs and publications leads to a 63% increase in referral traffic and brand visibility!

Keep in mind that you only benefit from reaching a wider audience if those readers are interested in what you have to say and have the potential to be interested in your services. For this reason, you should avoid open contribution sites that allow anyone to upload content and publish it.

Social Media for Attorneys

An organic social media presence for attorneys can have a positive effect on your search engine optimization. However, it's important to temper your expectations. Traffic from social media to a company's website totals to about 16%. You will see much more of an impact by developing a solid keyword strategy and focusing on website optimization.

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While social media marketing may have other benefits, it isn't used as a ranking factor by Google. As such, your popularity on social media won't dramatically increase your ranking on the search engine results page. But what social media marketing can do is increase your law firm's brand recognition. This could lead to some additional traffic from search engine results simply because potential clients may recognize your name.

Food for thought: 72% of consumers use social media to research legal services before making a decision.

On the other hand, law firm SEO services create more concrete results. For example, 53% of website traffic comes from organic search, while traffic from social media is about 16%.

Ultimately, social media and SEO campaigns both offer a good ROI. However, when it comes to earning directly attributable leads and conversions, SEO for lawyers comes out far ahead.

Create a Content Marketing Strategy for Attorneys

A strong content marketing plan is a key part of your lawyer SEO campaign. When you use content to improve your law firm's SEO efforts, start with your own website. Relevant, well-written content that is organized into topic clusters is easier for audiences to consume and for search engines to index.

Make your website content more engaging with videos and other visuals. Bolster your content marketing strategies with social media content and guest posting to create more awareness, build a larger audience, and attract more traffic to your law firm's website.

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Lawyer Off-Site SEO Strategy

Links are a very strong force behind SEO for lawyers. With a focused link-building campaign, you can get the boost necessary to push your already-optimized website ahead of the competition. Keep in mind that the rules of lawyer link-building are always changing and you need to pay close attention to keep up.

There are also countless ways to do link-building: guest posting, sponsorships, collaborations, getting .gov and .edu links, crossposting, and much, much more. This makes link-building one of the most complicated parts of law firm SEO, but one that achieves incredibly rewarding results.

Link-Building Basics: How Does Link-Building Work

When other websites link back to your law firm web pages, that's called a backlink. Link-building campaign helps your site earn links from authority sources. That authority then gets passed to your site. It's one of the most important types of off-page SEO. However, legal SEO guidelines are changing quickly and constantly, so it's important to keep up with these changes to ensure your link-building outreach remains effective.

Before you begin working on a link-building strategy, it's important to understand some basic vocabulary.

• A "hyperlink" is simply an underlined bit of text that can be clicked to take the visitor to a website that matches the URL in the hyperlink.
• "dofollow" link attribute passes the linking page's ranking information
• "nofollow" attribute those attributes from being passed.

Backlinks are a reputation factor that impacts how your content is viewed by Google. If you earn quality backlinks from reputable sites, your law firm will move up in organic search results, as 94% of content receives zero external links.

The Most Important Link Factors for Google

After content, Google prioritizes high quality backlinks most when it comes to search engine rankings. However, not every backlink is treated equally. Here is what Google has established as its most important link factors.

• Age of the domain linking your site
• The reputation of the domain
• Number of referring pages and domains
• Links from GOV and EDU domains
• The reputation of the page
• Number of sites from pages connected to your industry
• Excessive reciprocal links

In total, there are well over 40 link factors. However, your law firm SEO success is going to be positively impacted by backlinks that are from reputable websites, are relevant to your content and theirs, and are not part of any sort of reciprocal link scheme.

Google EEAT for Lawyers

EEAT stands for Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust. This is not surprising, because the user experience is Google's top priority. They want to provide users with the most accurate, up-to-date information possible. One way they do this is by prioritizing content that is created by subject manager experts. The EEAT acronym is an indicator of this focus.

You can create the credibility that Google is looking for by taking these steps:

• Link to independent, high-authority websites to back up any claims you make
• Have other attorneys create well-researched content on law-related topics
• Create lawyer bios on your site to build trust and credibility

This will help your content get filtered to the top of search engine results.

Local SEO for Lawyers

Local SEO tactics help attorneys place on the top of search engines in specific areas they work. If your firm in located in Glendale, you want to be the first one, when somenoe googles "Glendale lawyer". You also want to be in the google map pack, that is often seen when looking for local services online, as they have an average CTR of 33% and will help you drive more clients for your practice.

Relevance. Distance. Prominence

Most people hire attorneys who work locally. Because of this, local SEO for lawyers is an important component of law firm search engine optimization. 64% of consumers turn to search engines when looking for local businesses. To help these people, Google uses relevance, distance, and prominence as ranking factors.

Relevance is how closely your law firm's web page content aligns with the user's search query and user intent, and 46% of all Google searches have local intent. Distance is simply the proximity of your location to the user, based on data pulled from their browser. Finally, prominence relates to popularity offline. For example, if your law firm is very well known in your city, it will be assigned greater prominence than other local firms.

Google My Business

Google My Business is a tool offered by Google to connect people with local businesses. It includes information about your law firm, location, hours, contact information, and details about your practice.

You must have a Google My Business account for your law firm to appear in search engine local three-pack or map pack results or in Google Maps search. If you have a business with multiple locations, it's recommended that you create a GMB profile for each one.

In addition to providing you with the opportunity to appear in a prominent position in search results, Google can pull in relevant information from your profile to display to users.

It's fairly easy to set up a Google My Business profile. You simply sign into your business account using the Google business profile manager. There, you will complete your location and contact information and verify your business. You can then customize your profile with information about your law firm, pictures, and even short articles. 70% of consumers are more likely to visit businesses with a complete Google My Business listing.

NAP Citations for Law Firms

NAP stands for name, address, and phone number. It is a hyperlink that is included in guest posts and directory entries, and any place with your NAP link counts as a NAP citation.

There are four major sources of NAP links for lawyers:

• Major Aggregators. Aggregator websites and directories collect information about all types of different companies. Common aggregator websites include Foursquare, Localize, Express update, and Info USA;
• Legal directory listings. Legal directories provide information about law firms and different legal practitioners in a selected area. Some may also rank firms based on different criteria. These attorney listings include Avvo, FindLaw, Martindale-Hubbell, Justia, and many others.
• Local government and other directories. This helps attorneys get citations based on their practice areas. This includes directories like your local chamber of commerce, your local BAR, and other similar sites.
• Yellow-page style directories. These are just general business directories. They may have no specific application, but they're an easy way to get NAP citations without running the risk of registering for the wrong niche, which is always a plus.

Know where your business NAP information is cited, and make sure it is accurate. This is a local SEO ranking factor, and in many cases, these citations also include a link to your law firm's website.

Reputation Management for Law Firms

Your Google My Business account will be connected to reviews from clients, employees, and others who have done business with your law firm. While a few negative Google lawyer reviews won't destroy your reputation, it's important to stay on top of this kind of attorney reputation management for law firm local SEO.

You can do this by monitoring reviews of your law firm on Google. Respond professionally and promptly to both positive and negative reviews. Don't argue with negative reviews, even if you think they are fake - simply report them.

Food for thought: 95% of clients read online reviews before hiring an attorney.

Finally, there is a space for people to ask questions about your practice. Pay attention to these, and provide the answers that people are looking for.

Off-Site SEO Will Get You Found

Link building and off-site SEO in general prove to be very powerful discovery tools for lawyers. Being in the 3-pack at the top of the search results page always helps, and you never know if people will find you browsing relevant websites and directories, so you'd better be ready and expand your online presence. An expert SEO company for lawyers, like Grow Law Firm, can do it all for you, while freeing your time, so you can work with clients instead of researching links.

And when it comes to major SEO work this is almost it! we have created our website, filled it with content and managed to get a few links. Now we just have to see how it all works out and adjust our campaign accordingly.

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Measuring Your Law Firm's SEO Performance

Creating the website is half the battle. Attorney search engine optimization efforts are an ongoing process that takes time. You may see your first results in 3 months, but to be sure that everything goes according to plan waiting for up to 6 months is recommended. But what should you keep track of? How do you know if your SEO bears fruit? Let's take a look at some of the most important lawyer SEO metrics:

Track the Keywords You Actually Care About: You've done the extensive legal keyword research. Now, you want to see how well you are performing in searches for your most targeted keywords. Fortunately, tools like Google Search Console, Semrush, AHREFs, AWR Cloud, and Moz can help with this task.

Monitor Organic Web Traffic: This is the traffic that enters your page from organic online search results. You have a few tools you can use to measure this. Google Analytics is the most well-known and easy to navigate. Google Search Console is another option, and so is AHREFs.

Goal Conversion and Tracking: When you establish your lawyer SEO strategy, you may be able to set specific conversion goals. Your law firm should track: Lead capture form submissions, Whitepaper downloads, Email newsletter subscriptions, Calls and texts, Consultation appointments made online. Google Analytics has a specific area for tracking these goals. HubSpot and BuzzSumo also track them.

Site Health and Lawyer SEO Parameters Monitoring: Issues that impact your law firm SEO performance can go undetected for quite a while. There are also internal problems that can occur, such as page speed and indexing issues. That's why it's important to provide constant monitoring. Try Google Analytics again, along with GSC, Semrush, Screaming Frog and Majestic.

Local SEO Presence Tracking: How is your law firm doing in local search results? In addition to Google My Business, SEMRush is also an option, along with Moz for local SEO tools. You can try Brightlocal and Whitespark as well.

Link-Building Activity and Profile Monitoring: It's important to stay on top of your efforts to earn links and track your company profile in various directories. For backlink monitoring, try Backlinko and AHREFs.

Measure Your Attorney SEO ROI: You invest money and resources into creating a lawyer SEO strategy and expect certain monetary returns. Fortunately, many website analytics allow you to check attorney SEO ROI. Try Google Analytics or the analytics software connected with your website builder or CRM.

SEO vs PPC for Lawyers

In many ways, SEO is the foundation of digital marketing, even for lawyers and attorneys. There are so many different activities that combine to make online marketing for lawyers successful. However, none of them are going to be very effective if there isn't a working, effective law firm SEO strategy. The truth is that attorneys can build a solid online presence with a sole focus on search engine optimization. They really can't do that with other digital marketing efforts.

Lawyers who are faced with the cost and effort of online marketing may ask, is search engine optimization necessary? Can't I just invest in top-ranking with pay-per-click strategies instead of SEO? That's a good question, and the answer is complex.

On the one hand, yes. PPC does have faster results in terms of ranking and traffic.

However, law firm SEO is a better long-term strategy and has a lower initial cost. Attorneys also want to pay very close attention to the ROI of their pay-per-click campaigns since law firm PPC is among the most expensive strategies, with clicks costing up to $1000 each.

Don't discount one for the other. The most effective results will come from a combination of both approaches. Consider the pros and cons of SEO vs. PPC, then determine the weight you'll give each one in your marketing strategy

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What Approach to Law Firm SEO Services is Best

There are two ways to approach law firm SEO. You can design and implement your own strategy or contract the work out to a professional.

Implement Attorney SEO Yourself

There's a lot involved here. You would have to stay on top of:

Continuing Your Education

This post contains a wealth of information on lawyer SEO, but it really is just the beginning, and you will need to expand your knowledge by delving into other sources. You can start by reviewing Google's Webmaster Guidelines. The Moz SEO guide is also helpful.

Keyword Research

It's crucial to identify the right keywords that will draw traffic to your site. Prioritize those based on competition and relevance. Try these steps to dial in your list of relevant keywords:

• Create a list of your practice areas locations and other specialties
• Make combinations of specialties/locations and practice areas/locations
• Use synonyms to create alternative keyword combinations
• Research the keyword combinations to determine competition and relevance

Creating and Publishing Content

Regularly create high-quality, relevant content that is formatted for readability and optimized for search engines. Then, publish that content regularly. This also includes monitoring legal trends.

Take these action steps to start and maintain a solid content initiative:

• Using the keywords you have identified, create a list of 20 or so topics for each one that reflects your customers' questions, concerns, and priorities
• Write a summary of your practice areas and location combinations
• Find opportunities where it is reasonable to use keywords (but avoid stuffing)
• Prioritize adding keywords to headers
• Create a separate web page for each summary
• Add CTAs on each web page to convert potential clients
• Stay current on web design best practices

Prioritizing Law Firm Website Tech Infrastructure

Before you implement SEO changes, you need to address technical issues. This means analyzing your site's performance and ensuring that it meets Google's minimum requirements for websites. This can be difficult to do without extensive technical SEO knowledge, so even if you handle the rest of your law firm's SEO, consider outsourcing this step.

Taking Charge of Your Website Presence

Your online presence is something that must be monitored and nurtured constantly. Here are just a few steps you will need to take:

• Submit your law firm to local directories
• Claim your GMB and other online profiles
• Make a plan to keep website and blog content updated
• Create and implement an aggressive link-building strategy to pursue a minimum of five new links per month

Managing Directory Profiles

You also need to create directory profiles on various websites. Then, update those if anything changes.

Improving Performance

Lawyer SEO also impacts your website's back end. You have to ensure it performs well, is mobile-friendly, and uses an optimized structure.

Reaching Out for Citations and Backlinks

Link and citation building often involves making contact with other content creators. That's an important step for earning references to your website that boost your reputation and improve your rankings.

Hire an In-House Law Firm SEO Specialist

If the task of overhauling and managing your firm's SEO is too much, you could also hire someone to work for your law firm and manage its SEO. This would involve determining the necessary qualifications, writing a job description, and hiring a candidate. You'll also have to consider the salary and benefits, as well as the administrative overhead of hiring a new employee.

At this point, you would have to train them, work with them to create a strategy, and set goals. You would also have to monitor and evaluate their success in their role.

Also, keep in mind that law firm SEO may be too much for a single SEO specialist to hire. Often, it takes a team's worth of experience and capabilities to manage SEO, content creation, on-page optimization, and marketing strategies. Yes, you could hire a generalist, but that often means working with somebody who lacks the required in-depth knowledge.

Hire a Law Firm SEO Agency

Legal SEO is a worthwhile pursuit, but it is also labor intensive and requires a set of skills that is outside of the average attorney's capabilities. If you're not inclined to add to your skillset, then you may be better off hiring an agency. This is doubly true if you believe hiring an in-house SEO team would be more trouble than it is worth.

If you hire an agency, you will take on less work yourself. Still, you have to set a budget for this. Your team will also have to form a cooperative relationship with the digital agency. This includes setting goals and tracking the outcomes.

Before Hiring a Law Firm SEO Agency

Before you begin the process of seeking out the right agency, take these things into consideration:

Your Budget

Law firm SEO services are not usually cheap, and you will likely pay a minimum of $1,000 per month for them. Some legal SEO experts have hourly billing rates, and they aren't too far removed from what you charge your own clients. Make room for this in your budget.

What to Look for When Hiring an SEO Agency for Your Law Firm

When you hire an agency, you'll want to find one that is reputable. It will ideally have a team that is specifically experienced in working in the legal niche. They should also be able to provide a clear roadmap to SEO success.

Think about this guide and use it as a litmus test. Is the agency you are considering bringing up some of the points and strategies addressed here? If so, that is a good sign. Inquire about content marketing, link-building, and technical SEO. Ask how they will incorporate these things.

Ask for case studies and work samples. Since law firm marketing is uniquely complex (and expensive), consider focusing on firms that only specialize in performance marketing for law firms. You want to be sure they understand your unique concerns and pain points.

Red Flags that Signal a Poor Law Firm SEO Company

Here are a few red flags you'll want to avoid when considering a lawyer SEO agency:

• Poor reviews and testimonials
• Inexperience with the legal niche
• Overpromising with too much focus on earning rankings and traffic quickly
• Vague goals
• Unwilling to explain their methods
• Use of paid search methods instead of SEO
• You have your choice of digital agencies, so don't hesitate to be choosy.

What to Choose?

When deciding on handling your own attorney SEO in-house, hiring an employee, or contracting an agency, these key points summarize some of the most important differences:

• Taking care of your own SEO is incredibly time-intensive and risky
• Hiring an employee creates overhead and could require you to bring on an entire team of experts
• An agency can offer a turnkey solution, but you must put in a significant amount of effort to source and vet potential agencies

Law Firm SEO Lets Your Practice Land at the Top of Search Result

Everything we've talked about in this law firm SEO guide is just the beginning of your lawyer SEO work. To keep your strategy working, you must continue creating content, engaging in link-building outreach, monitoring your website performance, and regularly engaging with potential customers.

To create a successful SEO strategy that is updated and monitored regularly, you can push your law firm's web pages to the top of search results and beyond. But just like you started your law firm with a plan, you'll need to have a plan when it comes to your law firm's SEO. You need to continue to grow and nurture your law firm, and how you approach your SEO will make all the difference in the world.

If you'd like to work with an attorney digital marketing agency that specializes in law firm SEO services and is exclusively committed to providing growth marketing services for lawyers, reach out to Grow Law Firm. We'd be happy to discuss different law firm SEO services with you.