What Is Legal SEO and Why Should Attorneys Embrace It?

Succeeding as an attorney largely depends on landing new clients. You can stand out from the pack in this competitive market and reel in new clients by investing in legal SEO. Lead generation via legal SEO is critical to ensure growth and profitability by capturing and converting new leads into clients.

Ignoring legal SEO not only stunts the potential of your firm but also makes it difficult for potential clients to find you. However, investing in legal SEO leads to organic traffic, higher ranking, and more leads which translates to more clients.

How Does Legal SEO Work?

The American Bar Association Journal estimates that up to 98% of legal consumers go online to look for attorney profiles, reviews, and websites before hiring. However, law firms are not following this trend with many relying solely on email which is outdated.

However, with over 1.8 billion websites currently online, how do you make your website stand out? This is where legal SEO comes to the rescue.

When people search online for legal services, they use Google and other search engines such as Bing to search for local firms. In their queries, they use keywords to search for answers or an attorney who deals with a specific type of legal issue.

As a discerning attorney, you can use these keywords to optimize your website and make it easier to find. The search engine will rank your website higher on the search results page if it offers answers to that specific query.

Google ranks qualified websites higher because it wants users to get the most relevant information to their queries. Ranking high is essential for your firm because you get more qualified leads who have a higher likelihood of engaging your services.

Effective Legal SEO Strategies for Your Law Firm

The most effective legal SEO strategy includes several tactics to increase your ranking on the search results page.

1. Targeting Keywords

An effective SEO strategy starts with targeting keywords. You need to find out which keywords users input on search engines to find the services that your law firm offers.

There are online tools such as SEMrush that help you discover keyword suggestions and compare the number of users searching for those words. These tools also allow you to analyze the competition and your likelihood of ranking for specific keywords.

2. Quality Content

Quality content is key. Your keyword research also plays a big role at this stage because you will need them to execute your content marketing strategy. Here you can use the keywords as titles or descriptions.

Content alone will not guarantee success but having SEO-friendly content is certainly the wind beneath your website’s wings. You will also need an effective content strategy that includes blogs, articles, service pages, and web pages among others.

The goal is to ensure all content on your website is optimized using keywords to target users with similar queries online.

You can perform these tasks yourself, but we recommend hiring a professional to ensure key aspects of on-page optimization are not overlooked.

3. Website Optimization

Website optimization often involves both on-page SEO as well as technical aspects such as creating a site map, optimizing your website for mobile users, loading speed, and improving user experience among others.

We also recommend hiring a web developer in addition to a skilled legal SEO specialist.

4. Local SEO

If you serve a specific location, your legal SEO strategy should target users in your local area. Local SEO allows you to optimize your website for geo-specific keywords that let search engine users know where you are located.

You can update your information on online listings such as Google My Business and Yelp to attract clients who can work with you. Some firms also use legal directories to grow their presence.

5. Link Building

Building high-quality links allow your website to build trustworthiness and authority. Backlinks allow search engine bots to search your site and decide which pages are relevant to the user.

The more backlinks your website has, preferably from high authority sites, the higher you rank. We recommend working with experts to help you identify high-authority sites that can link to your website.

6. Reviews

The more people who have a positive experience with you, the more other potential clients will want to work with you. Reviews are important for legal SEO, but they also represent you and your firm in the court of public opinion.

Ask your clients to leave reviews on Google, Yelp, and even social media. For better results, consider working with an expert to grow your review generation efforts more intentionally.

Benefits of Legal SEO For Your Law Firm

There are numerous benefits of legal SEO. Some of them include:

1. Discoverability

Using effective legal SEO strategies such as link-building and incorporating keywords into your content, you can improve your site’s discoverability. This means your site is more visible to legal consumers who are potential clients.

2. Authority

Google is intentional about giving its users actionable results. It achieves this by generating the most relevant and useful results for user searches. It, therefore, makes sense that Google would generate authoritative sites and steer clear of amateur pages that do not deliver the desired results for its users.

One major way to drive authority to your site is by using links to reputable websites. Using link-building as part of your legal SEO strategy is an investment that boosts your website’s reputation.

3. Conversions

As earlier discussed, legal SEO is designed to increase conversions and grow your client list. The right combination of legal SEO strategies including reviews, keywords, link-building, and website optimization helps you cast a wider net that leads to more conversions.

4. Sustainability

Many law firms choose to pay and get on page one using pay-per-click advertisements. However, once you stop making payments, all your traffic disappears because legal consumers can no longer find your website as easily.

Using legal SEO helps you build organic traffic that continues to grow long after you stopped investing. This makes it a sustainable model for finding new clients.

Summary

As you plan to implement legal SEO for your website, keep in mind that it is not an overnight solution. However, search engines such as Google are working hard to eliminate legal sites with poor content and poor SEO strategies. This makes it critical for modern law firms and attorneys to invest in legal SEO to ensure you remain visible to potential clients.