Law Firm SEO

Our Best Law Firm SEO Strategies For 2021

Justice may be blind but your SEO campaign shouldn’t be. Having the right law firm SEO strategy in place from the start will help your firm grow exponentially.

What Is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? 

SEO is a long-term law firm marketing strategy that connects law firms with potential clients.

In short, SEO is the single most important investment you can make for your long-term marketing success.

That’s because a successful search engine optimization campaign creates massive visibility around your law firm in search engines. This means more potential leads can discover your legal services over your competitors.

The best SEO strategy targets topics your potential clients are already searching for in Google or Bing and leverages natural language content to help searchers solve their problems and answer their legal questions.

SEO is one of the most reliable and profitable online marketing strategies a business can have when done correctly.

But here’s the truth: Legal SEO is a powerful practice that most legal marketing companies haven’t fully figured out yet.

After an in-depth analysis, I discovered that the lawyer market is surprisingly underserved. There are plenty of digital marketing firms, sure. And lawyer SEO is highly competitive; make no mistake about it.

But when it comes to modern SEO success, well, let’s say there are still a few tricks these old dogs have yet to learn.

That’s where having the right knowledge comes into play. SEO for law firms doesn’t mean that you get shown your Google Analytics report and call it a day.

After more than 16 years in SEO, I’ve redefined modern SEO best practices and figured why not share them with all my attorney friends.

By the way, our research shows that the time for you to take advantage of a transparent, objective, and proven approach to SEO is now.

Keeping Up

Modern Law Firm SEO Services

We studied 15 of the most competitive metro areas for SEO and personal injury lawyers in the United States. We found that each and every one of these metro areas lack both strategy and consistency. This means that you can start fresh in any city in America and dominate the search engine results page. Targeted SEO efforts can help you drive a massive amount of new case leads.

Your SEO company should be focused on creating relevant content both on and off your website. This is the way modern search engine optimization is done. This is what it’s going to take for your law practice area to thrive among even the most competitive of niches, no matter which vertical you serve.

Your firm can attract qualified leads by targeting traffic that’s directly related to your firm’s core service offerings and practice areas.

97%

Of Law Firm SEO Campaigns

This is the percentage of law firms that have hired an attorney SEO expert and are under-served.

What You Should Expect From Your Law Firm SEO Company

A successful legal SEO marketing campaign will leverage best practices to boost the popularity and relevance of your website traffic above all other competing firms in your niche.

First, you’re going to need to create the high-relevancy, high-quality content for your practice area that Google expects; then, you will need to build links to your valuable content from trusted domains.

This strategy grants your firm greater visibility in the search results and a broader client base as a result.

What’s more, this approach gets you the prime real estate rankings in Google at a fraction of the cost of traditional digital pay per click (PPC) advertising.

Here’s how we do it:

Focus on the client. Win more cases.

You have no time to learn and execute a strategic SEO campaign. You need to be serving your clients and winning cases, not spending hours analyzing search traffic, and researching keyword opportunities.

The problem is, it’s real work to perform targeted keyword research to uncover the most significant opportunities for your practice areas while focusing on the consumer.

That way you’re getting the best value for your marketing dollar.

Focus On Your Firm

Learn about your firm’s challenges, goals, and ideal clients to understand what success looks like for you.

Competitive Analysis

Deep competitive marketing analysis in your specialty to identify the greatest opportunities.

Targeted Search

Target the most important search information to advance your campaign faster than traditional SEO for lawyers.

lawyer SEO

Proven Techniques

Focus on proven SEO techniques that produce first page rankings for your most valuable keywords.

Custom Campaign

Create a custom SEO plan that attracts new potential clients to your law firm website.

Meet The Competition

Meet the competition head-on and generate new case leads in the most direct fashion possible.

RESOURCE MAPPING

Optimize your sales funnel with SEO

Attracting cold leads is a thing of the past. You’re going to need to include keyword mapping in your strategy to identify what your prospective clients are already searching for, then map those target keywords to every step of your sales funnel.

Your focus should be on getting first page rankings for the most profitable “money searches” of your campaign from discovery to conversion. A plan that naturally increases your website’s exposure and attracts more organic traffic at all 4 stages of the funnel.

SEO for lawyers

Transactional Searches

These are the search terms of visitors who are actively looking to pay for your firm’s services. These “money terms” have the highest conversion rate for acquiring new clients through your law firm websites. In internet marketing language, these are searches at the bottom of the funnel.

When you start getting more phone calls, more leads, and more revenue every month, that’s when you’ll know it’s working.

Keyword Example: Hire a Denver personal injury lawyer, Denver personal injury attorney near me.

Navigational Searches

These are the search queries of people looking for information about your services. People want to know if they can trust you to be their legal representation. This means making sure your website is well represented in the search rankings around your company name.

Keyword Example: Denver personal injury lawyer reviews, Denver personal injury attorney cost

Commercial Investigation

These searchers are looking for relevant legal content and information about what your firm does. They’re also questions your target audience is asking to clarify your firm’s services and offerings. You’ve captured their interest. Now show them what you have to offer.

With deliberate law firm website design and website content, you must display this knowledge on your business page to be considered an authority on your firm’s expertise. This also provides a great user experience.

Keyword Example: personal injury only law firms in Denver, highest personal injury settlement in Colorado

Informational Searches

These are the searches prospective clients have to find more information around their legal case at the beginning of the sales funnel. These long-tail (typically) keywords will have the most volume and most immense potential to increase website traffic overall, attracting the right eyeballs to your website.

This information will exist as valuable website content on your law firm’s website, typically in the form of blogging. 

Keyword Example: How to find a personal injury lawyer, what is a personal injury claim

Your SEO campaign will target each of the four types of searches to drive traffic at each step of the sales funnel, with a particular emphasis on transactional (money) searches.

When you give the searcher the kind of content they’re looking for and do your SEO due diligence—optimizing meta descriptions, HTML title tags, header tags, and the rest—your campaign will be poised to succeed in the SERPs, that’s a fact.

SEO

Give search engines what they want. The way they want it.

As a webmaster, you can’t afford to guess what kind of content Google wants to reward in the search results.

Gone are the days of churning out average blog posts and inserting keywords, hoping something will slip past the algorithm.Google makes the rules, and you want to play to win, right? Google is a mobile-first search engine, so you better make sure your website is optimized for mobile devices.

And remember, they want to make their pay per click experience better, and your page should strive to do just that.

To help you win in the rankings, you’re going to want to optimize your content, and your website structure from the start to perfectly match the natural language patterns that search engines are looking for.

Website audit and optimization

  • URL Structure Analysis
  • Website Architecture Check
  • Coding Issues
  • On-page SEO Factor
  • Review (title tags, meta descriptions, content quality, internal linking)
  • Social Media Presence Check (Branding)
  • Mobile Friendly Check
  • Google-bot Crawler Issues
  • Website Design Issues
  • Google Search index / Power Index Check (Unique to Advocate SEO)
  • External Website Link Check

Cornerstone Content Curation 

The C3 Processing Model

If you’re competing in a highly competitive environment, your cornerstone content web pages or what some might refer to as landing pages (or evergreen content) must be optimized to rank for your firm’s most competitive search terms.
Optimizing the following page types and their organization “grants” you the ability to beat the algorithm and rank competitive keywords higher in the SERPs (search engine results pages).

lawyer SEO content

Static Pages

In addition to your home page, static pages are web pages that will be deeply relevant to your firm over an extended period. For example, a criminal defense focused law firms will have static pages detailing their services through clear copywriting, infographics, or testimonials. 

Blog Pages

Blog pages are SEO-informed resources that address the common questions and concerns your potential clients are searching for online.

For example, a DUI firm may have blog posts offering generic legal direction on what happens when you get a DUI, the legal penalties of drunk driving, or the fees and services associated with hiring a DUI attorney.

  • Organize and group your content, navigation, and URL structure to stand out on the Google search results page
  • Perform natural language processing using modern SEO techniques to match the language patterns Google expects and rewards.
  • Optimize key on-page factors, metrics, and metadata to improve click-through rate, decrease bounce rate, and strengthen on-site SEO.
  • Maximize the exposure of your most valuable pages in the organic search results
  • Resolve factors such as page speed or broken links that are hurting your site’s ability to rank
rank commanding search engine optimization

Establish your brand to command rank

Your brand must be highly visible online to succeed in lawyer SEO and clearly broadcast a strong professional reputation. You want a brand that can’t help but rise to the top of the search results pages. You will need to establish your brand and domain name online as a trusted and recognized authority. You can achieve this by building real profiles on real websites with real content. Not to mention including real case studies and online reviews to help solidify your brand reputation.

You can use the authority of established legal directories like Avvo, Justia, FindLaw, Best Lawyers, and the like, as well as social media websites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Use the ones that make the most sense for your firm.

  • Send Google the key signals that prove you’re a trustworthy brand that deserves top rankings in the SERPS.
  • Create a surround-sound effect of positive online signals that strengthen your law firm brand.
  • Work to establish your brand online quickly even if your brand is weak or not yet established.

Localization – win more business with local SEO

Suppose your law firm is a local business. In that case, potential clients are already looking for your services right in your neighborhood.

If your specialty is car accidents, then you want to be known as the big car accident law firm down the street that attracts more business than any expensive billboard ever could. Whether you’re a divorce lawyer, personal injury lawyer, or otherwise, when your firm’s website is optimized for local search, you’re positioned to capitalize on as many of these potential leads as possible.

Localization not only has a powerful impact on the top 10 results, but it also impacts your business listing’s placement in Google’s “map pack” or Google My Business. This type of snippet can show your NAP (business name, address, and phone number) in the top results located within your local practice area.

  • Google My Business page optimization & schema markup
  • Optimize authority, relevance, and trust factors to increase local website traffic
  • Effectively communicate your firm’s location in Google Maps to improve local SEO results
  • Expand your firm’s presence in aggregated directory listings like Yelp, Yellow Pages, FourSquare and Bing.
local SEO for lawyers

We Can Help You Win At SEO

The major players in your market are driving a huge number of new case leads with SEO. Our data helps us visualize your market and break down numbers so that you can understand the potential. We can show you how!

Law Firm SEO Professional