Law firm SEO involves a wide range of steps you can take to begin building your strategy. We’ll walk through some of the most important steps to consider when creating your own unbeatable SEO plan.

Understanding the Importance of SEO for Law Firms

SEO is a critical part of any law firm’s overall marketing strategy. Investing in SEO allows your firm to generate targeted traffic to your website that, in turn, leads to an increase in qualified leads. Through SEO, you’ll be able to build trust and credibility both with your potential clients and with search engines.

It’s important to note that while you can do SEO yourself, your best success will come from engaging with an SEO expert. With Google’s algorithm constantly shifting and AI tools reinventing the game, there’s a constant flow of new information to keep up with. Your expert SEO partners are going to know how to utilize your keywords to climb the ranks of search engine results pages. They can find topics that will work for your business’s notoriety and help you build content that has a positive effect on your site. With a good partner executing a strong SEO strategy, you will be allowed to maximize the effectiveness of your website without jeopardizing the integrity of your website or reputation. Bake SEO into your marketing budget and strategy from the start so you’re not caught wrong-footed.

Identify Your Law Firm’s Unique Value Proposition

One of the first steps in beginning your SEO plan is to identify your law firm’s unique value proposition. To identify this, you’ll want to think about a few different aspects of your firm, such as the benefits of your legal services, the value of those benefits, and any pain points your ideal client(s) may have.

After thinking about those three aspects, you should be able to identify your unique value proposition. So what now? We’ll discuss this in more detail later, but once you start the content creation process, you’ll want to incorporate that unique value proposition throughout the content on your website.

Know Your Clientele

In order to properly plan your SEO strategy, you have to know who your target audience is. By knowing who your dream client is, you can consider user intent– what that client needs and how they might try to find you. Think about your ideal client, consider their pain points, and engineer a strategy that keeps the client, their needs, and their practice area in mind.

Conduct Comprehensive Keyword Research

The next and potentially most critical step is to conduct comprehensive keyword research. This is where keyword research tools such as Semrush and Ahrefs come in handy.

You will want to identify what people are searching for in relation to your services. For example, are they searching for the term “Business Lawyer” or “Business Attorney”? While quite similar, you might be surprised to know that “Business Lawyer” has an estimated monthly search volume of 17,000, while “Business Attorney” has an estimated monthly search volume of 6,500. That’s a huge difference! This is one of the many reasons why in-depth keyword research is so important.

Keyword research will also help you understand your audience’s user intent. Optimizing for user intent means aligning your content and keywords with the “why” behind users’ search queries. Are they searching because they want an answer to a specific question? Are they looking for a specific website, or perhaps they are searching for a specific service? Knowing what your audience needs will help you focus your law firm’s content.

Optimize Your Law Firm’s Website for Search Engines

Once you have completed your keyword research, you can start optimizing your firm’s website for search engines. There are many on-page SEO tactics you can use to do so, such as:

• Optimizing URLs, title tags, and meta descriptions
• Internal linking
• Improving page speed
• Implementing Schema
• Optimizing content headings and content as a whole
• Optimizing images with alt text

Create Optimized High-Quality Content

A crucial next step is to create optimized high-quality content for your law firm’s website. Google has emphasized the importance of generating high-quality content in order to rank higher within the search engine. This has been showcased through the several Helpful Content Updates Google has released over the past year or so.

So, now you may be wondering, “Where do I start with creating valuable and optimized content?” The best place to start is to work through your service pages, as those represent the bulk of the work your law firm does and are the most likely pages to generate leads. Once your service pages are thoroughly optimized, you should move on to creating high-quality blog content.

You can also channel this same energy into pairing your email marketing with your SEO strategy. Utilize CTAs and plan newsletter series that bring traffic back around to your site and tie in with your overall marketing strategy. Offer free subscriptions to your product, newsletter, or blog—it’s great for adding more website traffic and boosts SEO, too. Whenever you can offer something useful for free, people respond.

Utilize Local SEO Techniques for Improved Visibility

Local SEO techniques can help you target the area in which your firm is located. The best way to rank locally is to satisfy three factors.

• Relevance – Is the content on your website relevant to the searcher?
• Proximity – Is your business located within the city that the searcher is looking in?
• Authority – Your overall website authority is gauged by many factors, including content quality, site speed, and links from other websites.

The best way to capitalize on local SEO is to create a Google Business Profile. If you already have a Google Business Profile, then you’ll want to work to optimize it.

Build High-Quality, Relevant Backlinks

A backlink serves as a vote of approval from other websites which signals to Google that your site is trustworthy and authoritative because other sites are using yours as a source.

Generating high-quality and relevant backlinks for your law firm’s website will help rank your content above your competitors. Focus on creating highly-sharable content like infographics, and submit guest blogs to relevant sites to increase your visibility.

Media Appearances and PR

If you want to have access to high-end clientele, then you really need to work hard to set yourself apart as a leader in your field. In addition to SEO-led thought leadership content and traditional backlinks, you can also build your reputation and backlink profile via media appearances and quotes to reach a broader audience. That doesn’t mean you need to go big and try to land a commentator slot on CNN– you can accomplish a lot with a local news network, and your SEO team can help you find the ones that will be most relevant to you.

There are plenty of other PR opportunities aside from live media appearances that can help improve your SEO, as well as your public persona. You might consider speaking to major publications who are looking for contributors, as well as local business or trade journals in your area. If you are working on a high-profile case that you’re at liberty to discuss, cooperating with the media is a great way to get your name into these outlets. By generating strong backlinks through SEO-led PR opportunities, you set yourself up for continued success.

Monitor and Analyze SEO Performance Metrics

Last but certainly not least, you’ll want to have the right tools in place to monitor and analyze your SEO performance. The two most important tools to have set up are the following:

• Google Analytics – a tool that measures all of the traffic that is coming to your website. Within this tool, you are able to track important events or conversions such as contact form submissions or phone call clicks.
• Google Search Console – a tool that measures the organic traffic generated to your website. Within this tool, you are able to see the clicks and impressions for your website as a whole and for individual pages on your site.

Additional tools that would be helpful include Semrush, Ahrefs, Screaming Frog, and Google Keyword Planner.

Now that you have the right tools, what metrics should you be looking for to determine the success of your SEO efforts? Let’s dive in! Some key metrics you should be tracking to evaluate your SEO’s effectiveness include:

• Keyword Rankings – This is the position on search engine results where your actionable keywords are located and, as a result, where your law firm’s website appears on a search engine results page. For example, positions 1 to 10 are considered to be page 1. Ideally, you want all of your actionable keywords to be on page 1 but remember…this takes time.
• Organic Traffic – This is the amount of traffic that came to your site from the organic channel. This information can be found in Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
• Organic Conversions – These are any conversions (phone calls, contact form submissions, etc) that came from the organic channel, and can be tracked with Google Analytics.
• Organic Clicks – This is the number of times users have clicked through to your website from the search engine result page (SERP).
• Organic Impressions –This is the number of times your website showed up on the search engine result page (SERP), and can be tracked with Google Search Console.
• Number and Quality of Backlinks – This refers to the quantity and quality of the backlinks you have acquired for your website.
• Competitor Success – Some of these metrics will also be visible for your competitors– including their keyword rankings, backlinks, and Domain Rating. By monitoring this, you can see how you measure up, where you can improve, and even mirror their successes to surpass them.

Tracking these key metrics will help you understand what parts of your SEO plans are working, and where changes might need to be made.

Utilizing all of these tools will give your law firm’s website the best chance of being seen by the most prospective clients with a high chance of conversion.

Work with Experienced SEO Professionals for Maximum Results

If you want to maximize your SEO results, it’s best to consult the professionals, like the dedicated team at 9Sail. We’re happy to help improve your current SEO efforts or help create a brand new plan. Whether you handle elder law, business law, or anything in between, we’re ready to help you move the needle. Contact us to get started.