On paper, search engine optimization (SEO) is an amazing tool that can build organic search ranking. But when you go head and start doing it yourself, it might seem more overwhelming than a cool tool.
A couple of decades ago, word-of-mouth referrals and a listing in the Yellow Pages would have been sufficient to get clients in through the door. Today, most potential clients depend on the internet to research and find an attorney. As a result, law firm SEO plays an important part in making you and your practice visible.
However, SEO for attorney’s isn’t easy, as it can be quite volatile in nature and as a result, its complexity can be quite intimidating. But that shouldn’t stop you as law firm internet marketing can be highly beneficial if it’s done correctly.
What is Law Firm Search Engine Optimization?
Websites are indexed by search engines like Google that send bots out to crawl through webpages and links and learn what each page is about. But this doesn’t mean that these bots view the webpages in the same way that humans do. They read the content on the page as well as the code on the site to ascertain what the main topic is for each page.
Law firm SEO or law firm search engine optimization makes your webpage more visible for search engine results. A website that is search engine friendly will incorporate keywords that will be recognized by these bots to help the website appear in the search results. So basically it will help your firm’s webpage show up on the first page of the search results, making you more visible to potential clients.
More visitors to your website can mean more consultations. This, in turn, can mean more business for your practice. So what does an effective SEO campaign looks like?
Here’s a little bit of insight to give you an idea. SEO can be broken down into three main components:
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On-page Optimization
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Regular flow of quality content
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Build authority offline
On-page Optimization
To start building your law firm SEO campaign, you will have to begin with on-page optimization.
This will dictate the layout, structure, and content on your website. If the information on your site has value, the search engines that crawl through your website will recognize it.
Further, when it comes to on-page optimization, your website should feature the following components:
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Title tag
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Meta description
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Site navigation
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URL
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Internal links
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Quality content
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Security
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Speed
Title Tag
As Google uses title tags to understand the purpose of the page, each page should have one, and it should be written clearly without any odd or unnatural language. So if your page has a bunch of keywords without any resemblance of a clear sentence, you’ll need to change it.
Meta Description
The Meta description is a lot like title tags (and goes on each page), but these are longer and more descriptive. Meta descriptions should always be between 150-160 characters (which is enough space to get descriptive).
Site Navigation
It’s important to build a site that flows easily. In other words, it needs to be broken down into categories so that the audience can follow it easily. If potential clients are getting lost within your website, the purpose of your law firm SEO campaign and website will be futile.
URL
Don’t use symbols or numbers for each page on your firm’s website. Write a brief description or just the title of the page for the URL. It’s also a great way for your audience to go back to a page at a later date as they can view the page information in the URL while going through their web history.
Internal Links
Internal links (like this one) are important as it helps Google understand the relationships between the pages on your website. Further, it should only take a couple of clicks to get from one page to another. This will also help the search engine understand the hierarchy of the pages.
Quality Content
The content on your website needs to be unique, error free, complete, and informative. This part is important for Google to determine the value of your website.
Quality content for your law firm can include features like videos as well. However, most quality content these days can be found in blogs and newsfeeds.
Security
Security for your website is also important, but it only becomes a priority if you’re running an e-commerce site. For most law-related websites, you will just have to ensure that any data you collect through the site is kept safe.
So if you’re running forums or chats from your website, take the necessary steps to keep that data secure.
Speed
This is not as important as the other features, but it’s still significant as your content is worthless unless the page loads quickly. You can’t expect clients or potential clients to hang around and wait for your website to load.
Regular Flow of Quality Content
Once you have successfully optimized your website, make it a regular practice to go over each page and fine tune it to make it more significant, relevant, and unique. Once you got that covered, you can move on to the biggest feature of your campaign, which is quality content.
Content isn’t just for attorney SEO marketing. Content essentially breathes life into your brand. It’s a tool that can highlight your expertise, build authority, and be the backbone of email and social media campaigns.
The best way to go about building quality content is by writing some useful blogs.
Characteristics of quality content:
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Appropriately formatted
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Engaging
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Original
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Error free
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Provides some value
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Researched
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Relevant
Build Authority Offline
Everything outside your law firm SEO campaign must be focused on building authority and a presence on external platforms. The more times your name pops up, or an authority site points to your website, the more authority you will build in the eyes of Google.
It’s important as it will directly impact your website ranking in search results. At this juncture, it’s vital that you go through this process carefully. If links appear unnatural or like spam, it can get you penalized by the search engine.
Forget about manual link building, just focus on naturally attracting links via your content strategy. If you’re posting great content, people will want to link to it, so that should be the primary focus of your attention.
But how do you know if you’re making any significant progress?
When it comes to law firm SEO marketing, it’s hard to specifically define progress as there are several independent variables:
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Keyword ranking
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Content
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Links
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On-page SEO
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Organic search traffic
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Search impressions
When it comes to tracking the progress of your law firm SEO campaign, you will have to take the following steps to help build an accurate picture of the health of your campaign.
What’s your organic search?
When it comes to SEO, the best indicator of the overall performance of the campaign is the number of people who found your website via an organic search. This information can be easily accessed through Google Analytics under “Organic Traffic.”
This data is much more important than keyword ranking as this information will tell you exactly how many people visited your site and clicked through it. If you’ve put a solid SEO campaign strategy into practice, this number will gradually grow over the weeks and months to come.
What are your referrals?
Another important piece of information is how many people landed on your site through referrals. This is the traffic you got via external sites pointing to your website.
Although referrals have nothing to do with search engines, it will allow you to ascertain if you’ve got a good link building strategy.
So if you’re building links with quality content on authority sites, this number will grow gradually.
Which are the pages that get some search traffic?
Investigate which pages on your website are attracting some organic traffic. This will give you a good idea if your optimizing strategies are effective for each page and if you’re targeting your audience properly with new content.
You can also develop a specialized SEO strategy where you just optimize one or more pages, but it’s better to spread it across your domain.
Has my Google rankings changed?
As stated earlier, organic traffic is the best indicator of the overall effectiveness of your campaign. But that doesn’t mean that you should ignore keyword rankings.
If there is a sudden drop in one particular niche, it might be the result of a competitor who is gaining prominence in the marketplace.
So when that happens, you have to adapt your strategy to something more competitive to bring the organic traffic back to your website.
You can easily track your ranking by using the following tools:
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AuthorityLabs
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AgencyAnalytics
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AdvancedWebRanking.
Have I earned any new links?
Check and see if anyone has links pointing to your website. By evaluating the quantity and the quality of these links, you’ll be able to determine the strength of your authority.
You can also use the following link profile tools:
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Ahrefs
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BuzzSumo (real-time notification)
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Majestic
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Open Site Explorer
Is my content performing well?
You can figure out if your content is doing well by analyzing the data from Google Analytics. Look at the traffic data, comment threads, and social activity. This will tell you what’s performing well (adds value) and what isn’t (little to no value).
If you’re not slowly making progress, you’ll have to adapt your strategy to figure out what will work better. There is no easy fix here as you might have to make a few adjustments over a period to get it right.
Am I converting?
Building an effective attorney SEO campaign doesn’t have a direct impact on conversions. If your goal is to convert, then you will need to get into conversion optimization.
Try to figure out how many of your new clients found you via your website. By checking the conversion rate of your organic traffic, you can get a good idea if you’re attracting the right audience.
If your conversion rate is poor, it means that you’re not targeting the relevant audience efficiently. If that’s the case, you’ll have to reevaluate your SEO strategy and make amendments accordingly.
Am I getting any social signals?
Although social signals aren’t important to Google ranking, it does have an indirect benefit when it comes to brand awareness and visibility.
Capturing a lot of social shares doesn’t make a difference your law firm’s ranking, but if you identify what content is gaining shares. You can work on putting out more of the same (to help get more social shares and enhance your visibility).
How much have I grown since starting the law firm SEO campaign?
This question should keep coming up when evaluating the various components of an SEO campaign.
Compare each of these metrics month to month and to the previous year. Some might have grown; some might have fallen behind.
All this information will help you to figure out where you’re at the moment compared to where you were when you started.
It’s a “moment of truth” and hopefully your results are positive at this stage. If it isn’t, you can always go back and start making adjustments and tweak whatever strategies that are currently working for you.
Regardless of the outcome of your SEO campaign, it’s good to consider the fact that SEO is not straight-forward, and it’s not always something that you will get right with your first attempt.
What are the costs?
This is the most important question to ask at the beginning and the end of a SEO campaign. The answer to the question determines the value of your SEO campaign, so once you calculate the results of organic traffic, links, conversion, etc., you will have to ask yourself how much you paid to receive those conversions.
It usually takes time to build a successful SEO campaign, so it will probably take a year or so before the benefits outweigh the costs.
Digital marketing is important as it brings clients to law firms. So building websites, SEO campaigns, and blogging is now a natural part of running a healthy law practice.
There are loads of resources out there to help you get started on your own. But if you need help, that is also out there.
Conclusion
How effective was your SEO campaign strategy? Share your thoughts and experience in the Comments section below.
