Lawyer: strategy and tips to getting more business Search engine optimization popularly known as SEO is the “ART” of combining content, website structure and back links in a specific manner to achieve higher rankings in the the Search Engines. Most lawyers and attorneys are eager to learn about this process because of their high cost of client acquisition and to lower that cost by getting leads on their websites. Rather than paying high cost per click ad platforms or the dreaded paper/media offline advertising which is hard to track and even harder to convert. While SEO is track-able and a lot more cost effective in the long run as you are producing an asset rather than a temporarily source of traffic other media outlets give you. Effective SEO is getting to be even more important now as local customers are heading to online to find all of their legal services such as Google Local.
Top Strategies for SEO for Lawyers
Top Strategies for SEO for Lawyers
- Targeting your local area: Even if you are an online legal service serving nation wide clients such as credit repair and such. It’s still a lot more effective to stay locally targeted. Going after nation wide keywords like “credit repair lawyer”, “bankruptcy lawyer” etc. is going to completely drain your marketing budget before you even get on to page one of Google and with the slight chance you do, the conversions to clients are going to be much more difficult to convert over the local businesses you are competing against. Leave that to the big names with enormous budgets like Lexingtonlaw. If you do offer nation wide services, it’s best to have your website properly structured to target all the major cities you want to be in, and if you have physical locations in those cities; setting up with Google local maps is going to be your fastest route to seeing a positive ROI on your investment, because while organic is “free” it’s by no means free.
- Posting Regular Content: There was an old saying in SEO that went “pages rank not websites”. This was true for a long time, but now it’s hardly the case. Google looks at your entire domain strength as a whole as the number one factor in ranking. Slim sites with just a few pages of content don’t do very well without the power of extremely high domain authority links pointing at it. It’s easier to not try and beat the content algorithm with power link building but instead just keep posting fresh content. How much? on a local competitive search, we generally make sure we post at least once or twice a week and no less than twice a month. If you have a large amount of content ready to post, we recommend you drip feed it to keep your site fresh rather than posting all at once.
- SEO optimized links : Getting links is the next most crucial aspect to getting your site ranked, quality is far superior than quantity these days. While spammers can debate that fact, their sites are usually burn and turn sites that only last a month or so before getting penalized. So if you are go that route, consult a black hat seo and build lead generation pages on web 2.0 domains that don’t matter if you lose them, but never do this on your main branded site. Instead, try and get links from business to business networking you have done that can recommend your services. These will go a long way and because they are properly themed and usually of a decent power you can rank quickly without a ton of work on your end. Also try and get local links from local sites in your city these are very powerful and will help your local rankings especially if they have your NAP (name, address, phone) in them giving you a citation.
- Include your keyword in your content- but don’t over do it. Usually once in your title, once in your meta description and once or twice in your content. I generally replace all the targeted keywords that put me over this amount with related keywords. For example if we were targeting Salt Lake City DUI Lawyer: Title and description would have it once and once in the body, rest of the time I would refer to versions such as “driving under the influence, SLC, Attorney etc” to avoid triggering an penalty.
- Optimize your pictures with keywords - in wordpress and other CMS systems you can replace the Alt text, description and title with your keywords. We don’t just stuff the keywords in there generally but put phrases in like “picture of our DUI lawyer firm in SLC” etc.
- Length of articles – don’t really matter, and we try to avoid footprints of the generic 500 word articles, but usually we like to have 400-1000 words on a page with images and a feature youtube video if possible.
- Be patient: SEO isn’t fast, and results aren’t overnight like paid advertising. It takes time, hiring someone like me or my staff can dramatically improve the times of rankings because we know the limits as we do it for a living but on your own do it slowly and your rankings will steadily improve until your there.
- Use Google rich snippets - such as authorship: These actually do help your rankings, they don’t pass link juice or anything directly but because they make your listing stand out; your click through rates will be higher than the rest and Google will reward you with a high position as it seems more relevant to the users searching if you are getting more clicks than the competition.
- Avoid Indian services: hate to say it, but you see these everywhere in Lawyer SEO related search terms, the fact is they are on paid search and why? because they don’t know SEO. They offer very low pricing because labor is cheap, and they literally give their staff about 2 hours of training. Are these the type of workers you want working on your websites? if so, go for it, but you won’t ever see a return no matter how cheap they are. They don’t know SEO, you can quiz them and you would probably know more than them just from a couple hours of research.