It’s clear to see that in the modern world, every business needs some sort of online presence, and if you’re going to get noticed online, you have to be ready, willing, and able to understand SEO. Or, if you’re not interested in learning SEO yourself, you need to find people who understand it and who can make it work for you.
The latter option may be appealing to lawyers, who already have very busy lives and lots of duties to attend to each day, but either way, if you’re in the legal profession, you need to make the most of SEO and use it to boost your firm’s website and online presence up the Google rankings, helping you attract more leads and interest in your firm and its services.
With Google being the dominant force in the search engine market and countless people relying on Google Search each and every day to find lawyers and legal representation in their area, savvy lawyers need to keep up with the competition. Dozens of other firms in your area could already be using SEO to get ahead, so here are some top tips to help you catch up.
Identify Your Keywords
One of the first things most people learn about SEO for lawyers is that it’s heavily focused on keywords. Keywords are small phrases or words that are relevant to your business and that people might use when searching on Google for the sorts of services you can provide.
For example, lawyers based in Arizona and offering services to car accident victims may want to build their SEO strategy around keywords like “Car accident attorney Arizona” and “Car crash lawyer AZ”. You can use different SEO tools to help you find your keywords or turn to the pros for help.
Put Keywords into Your Site Correctly
Once you’ve found some of the keywords you want to start ranking highly for on Google, you need to start putting those words into your site. This is a cornerstone of SEO strategy, but it’s important to do things the right way here.
You can’t simply start copying and pasting the same words all over your site, as this would not only look messy, but it also wouldn’t do much good with Google’s algorithm. Instead, the words need to be incorporated naturally and organically into useful content and displayed in a user-friendly way.
Make the Most of Title Tags and Metadata
When you’re creating new pages for your website, you might notice certain HTML elements like title tags and meta descriptions. Some people just ignore these elements or don’t know what they do. This is a big mistake from an SEO perspective.
Title tags and metadata are used by Google to essentially show off a “preview” of your page, encouraging people to click on your site and find out more if they’re interested in what you have to offer. Including keywords and phrases in these tags and descriptions is therefore really important for ranking highly.
Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly
For a long time, Google’s algorithm didn’t really take user devices into account, and it didn’t matter too much to Google if a site was mobile-friendly or not. Nowadays, however, the algorithm has been updated to reflect the increasing number of mobile users out there, and site owners need to adapt.
In its current iteration, the Google algorithm actually prioritizes sites that are mobile-friendly and responsive enough to work well on lots of different devices. If your site doesn’t run on mobile, not only are you excluding a lot of potential clients, you’re also harming your SEO scores.
Set Up a Blog
If you browse around lawyer websites nowadays, you may notice that they can have different designs and discuss different things, but most of them tend to have one key thing in common: a blog section. Increasingly, legal firm websites are setting up their own blogs and posting articles on a regular basis.
Why? Well, it’s all about the keywords we mentioned earlier. Blog posts basically give you a way to generate more and more pages for your site containing those keywords, along with other SEO-friendly elements like internal links and backlinks to reputable sites.
Lots of Links
As alluded to in the previous points, keywords and phrases are very important for SEO, but they’re not the only thing that matters. Links are also of high importance for making your site’s pages appear higher on Google rankings. This includes both internal links (to other pages on your site) and external links (to other reputable sites that add authority to your pages).
You also want to try and get your site as many backlinks as possible. Backlinks are links on other sites that redirect users to your site, and they’re basically like a badge of honor in the eyes of Google’s algorithm. You can join up on sites like Lawyers.com to start building backlinks or get guest posts written on other blogs with links that connect back to your site.
Fill in Your “Google My Business” Profile
Fill in Your “Google My Business” Profile Another good way to strengthen your law firm’s SEO strategy is to make sure that you fill out and finish your Google My Business page. Google My Business (GMB) is a program run by Google that is designed to make it easier for potential clients to find the business if they need to.
In many ways, it can be seen as a helping hand from Google to get your site seen by more relevant people who could become future clients, so it’s definitely a good idea to fill it in. All you need to do is provide some basic information about the firm like contact info, location, and opening hours.
Final Word
These are just some of the ways lawyers and legal offices can boost their SEO games and raise their sites up the Google rankings. Carry out additional research to find even more useful SEO methods you can start using today.