SEO for Lawyers: An Easy Guide for Law Firms

Search engine optimization tips for law firms to increase organic traffic and show up higher on SERPs.

So, you are running a law firm and looking for some effective ways to land new clients. SEO for lawyers is the result-driven way to attract interested clients for your law firm and achieve top position in the SERPs.  

In this competitive legal market, generating new clients for your law firm isn’t an easy feat. You need a competitive edge over other law firms to convince potential clients to take your professional services. This guide will help you understand the basics of law firm SEO and how lawyers can create a strong legal SEO strategy.

What is Law Firm SEO?

Law firm SEO, also called, legal SEO, attorney SEO is basically a process of improving the online presence of your law firm and driving more website traffic to your business’s website. A strong law firm SEO strategy can help lawyers to take their website at the top of organic search engine rankings and attract prospective clients.

If truth be told, it is a great opportunity for a law firm to stand out in a legal space with the help of a professional SEO agency that is good at local SEO, link building, and content marketing. Fortunately, there are many effective law firm SEO strategies that can be used to increase your website traffic and generate leads.

SEO for Law Firms – Why It is Important?

In this digital world, if people need legal advice, they will perform online searches to find a lawyer. According to a survey conducted by the National Law Review, 96% of people perform online searches to get legal advice and 74% of people visit a law firm website to find an attorney. Your website ranking matters most, the higher your website ranks on search engines, the more visitors your law firm website will get.

Keep in mind that only 2-3% of visitors go to the second page of Google search engine results. According to a recent study, the first organic Google search result has an average click-through rate of 28.5%, while the second and third page of search results have a 15% and 11% CTR respectively.

So, do your best efforts to make your law firm’s website visible on the first result page of Google. As more and more visitors choose the first three organic. Understanding the basics of SEO for law firms will help you increase your search engine rankings.

Benefits of Law Firm SEO

• The advantages of doing SEO for lawyers include:
• Attract more clients online
• Increase brand authority
• Improve your brand reputation
• Drive more traffic to your law firm website
• Increase keyword rankings
• Get positive customer reviews
• Generate more leads and conversions
• Build a strong network
• Build a positive PR
• Improving your return on investment (ROI)
• Stay competitive in the legal industry

Essential Parts of a Strong Law Firm SEO Strategy

Attorney search engine optimization involves following important steps:

• Keyword research for lawyers
•  Law firm Website optimization
• Organized Site Structure
• Optimize Page URLs
• On Page Content
• Local SEO for Lawyers
• Create Google Business Profile
• Online Reputation Management
• Quality Backlinks
• Performance Analysis

A robust legal SEO strategy will definitely increase website traffic, generate more leads and clients for your legal firm.

Keyword Research for Lawyers

When it comes to creating an SEO strategy for your law firm, you need to perform in-depth keyword research to find the targeted search terms. Fortunately, there are different SEO tools available that will help you discover how visitors find an attorney and search for the legal services. A professional SEO agency will help you find relevant keywords for your law firm. You can use SEO tools to find keyword suggestions, analyze competition level, or compare search volume. Here is a list of tools that will help you do SEO for lawyers.

• Ahrefs
• Google Keyword Planner
• KWFinder
• SEMrush
• SpyFu
• Wordtracker

Law Firm Website Optimization

Believe it or not, a website is a foundation of your business that can play an important role in promoting your brand. According to recent legal marketing statistics, more than 70% of law firms land new clients through their website. Make sure your law firm has a well-designed, responsive and SEO-friendly website. 

Organized Site Structure

Your law firm website should be logically organized so that it will become easier for visitors to find the information they need. Since the goal of your law firm website is to offer your professional legal service, make sure to highlight your services in the main navigation bar. This way your potential clients will find your legal specialties easily. Don’t forget to add sitemaps to make it easier for search engines to find and index your website.

Optimize Page URLs

Using targeted keywords in the URLs of each page is a sensible idea to improve your SEO efforts. It will help visitors understand about the particular page of your law firm website. Remember, having optimized URLs can make your website SEO and user friendly, both.

On Page Content

Content is a powerful tool that can have a significant impact on your website’s rankings and has potential to make visitors into paying clients. Creating engaging, user-friendly content for your law firm website can strengthen your SEO strategy.

Optimize your website content by including targeted keywords in your services pages to increase chances of your law firm’s website to rank top on Google. Add targeted keywords in about us page, service pages, and landing pages to attract users searching for these specific terms. Briefly describe how your law firm helps its clients solve their legal matters. Add CTAs to convince potential clients to get free case evaluation.  

Local SEO for Lawyers

Many law firms offer services in multiple locations. If your legal company is also serving in a particular area, doing local SEO is important to target users in a specific service area. Obviously, you want to reach prospective clients who are actually willing to work with your firm. With local SEO, you can optimize your website for geo-specific keywords.

Create different landing pages for different cities or states, add targeted keywords and contact details for each specific location. Writing informative content and incorporating local keywords will maximize your chances to appear higher in local search.

Create Google Business Profile

For law firms, ranking top on Google Maps is important to get a strong presence in the city/state. Unfortunately, a majority of law firms don’t know about a Google Business profile and don’t appear in local search results. To increase your local SEO rankings, you need to create a Google Business profile, add your business location, operational hours, types of services, contact details, website URL, photos of your staff and office and other relevant details.

Make sure your Google Business profile is frequently updated to increase your local search rankings. It is a proven way to attract more clients and close more leads.

Online Reputation Management

Client reviews can make or break your law firm image, so make sure to showcase positive client reviews to increase your brand’s authority and online reputation. If your potential clients search for your law firm and find local results with a lot of satisfied, positive reviews, chances are they will definitely consider your firm for legal advice.

Ask your happy clients to leave reviews on Google business profile, Facebook and other local directories. When your law firm website has a lot of positive client reviews, it shows that you are offering quality services and good customer service.

Quality Backlinks

When doing SEO for lawyers, you can’t ignore link building, as it is an effective strategy to build website authority and trustworthiness. In fact, link building is the most important factor that plays a key role in ranking your website higher on SERPs. Getting quality backlinks or inbound links for your law firm website require a lot of effort.

With the help of a law firm SEO marketing agency, you can generate high-quality backlinks for your website that can increase your page rank. When doing SEO for lawyers, you can place links on different authentic sites, social media accounts, forums, directories, and other online places.

Publishing guest posts on quality websites, legal article contribution, posting links on lawyer specific directories, Reddit, and Quora, creating infographics and posting it to other websites are a few link building best practices that can help you generate high quality links. 

Performance Analysis

When you incorporate these effective SEO tactics into your law firm marketing strategy, you need to start measuring results. Carefully check which law firm SEO tactic is contributing to increase website traffic, generating more leads and which strategy needs some changes.

Hire a Law Firm SEO Agency

Finding an SEO agency for your law firm is a sensible idea that can create a comprehensive SEO strategy for lawyers. They provide useful, engaging content for your prospective clients, generate quality inbound links, collect positive client reviews, and keep an eye on your SEO efforts. Whether you are doing SEO for lawyers on your own or with the help of an expert, the ultimate goal is to increase organic search rankings and generate more leads. Hopefully, these SEO strategies will help you grow your law firm and achieve more success.