"Everyone says they hate lawyers, yet no parents wouldn't want their offspring to be lawyers..."
People often say LAWYER UP, when troublemakers get caught. But most troublemakers find it hard to get hold of good lawyers because they do not have reliable sources to go to. So is true for the righteous ones who have been wronged.
Surely an online search may give them a few leads. But the fact is: The majority of lawyers or law firms don’t have a strong online presence. That is when SEO for law firms comes into the picture. What most lawyers don’t pay attention to is that their next client is using Google search right now, seeking them.
Unfortunately, clients might not be able to reach out to lawyers faster because they might not have taken SEO seriously. So lawyers take heed: don’t be ignorant of what can boost your business hastily. Implement legal search engine optimization for your business and make it easier for your clients to reach out to you.
And if you think you might not have time, resources, or enough knowledge to get going, you can always rely on SEO agencies to assist you. They will do the needful, and just like Scandinavian Law Firm, your traffic will boost by 600% too. Legal SEO is similar to any other SEO and the rules. Thus, by the end of this article, you’ll learn:
- How to go about with attorney SEO
- What are its benefits
- What are its challenges
11 Tips to Change the Legal Game Online
Rather than handling your business to your competitors on a silver platter, try optimizing your website by doing SEO:
1. Determine the Keywords
The first thing to create the website is to determine the keywords. Without keywords, your website will be a mess that will neither rank nor will be trusted by clients. Hence, here are a few tips to determine the keywords for your website:
- Establish the goal for the website: Taking up a journey is useless if you have no destination in mind. Thus it is essential to establish a clear plan whether you are expecting to get more leads out of this or increase website engagement, or promote your brand.
- Evaluate SERPs: Search Engine pages are essential in determining the keywords. The first step to assessing keywords is to look for a reliable platform that can give you an idea about what keywords have the most volume and traffic for legal SEO and whether those are long–tail or short–tail.
- Finalize the keywords: Once a few keywords are obtained, make sure to pick the best ones to use in building the website content. They shouldn't feel stuffed, but they shouldn't be less, either. Make sure to include those on all of the pages.
2. Create a Website
It is safe to put creating a website in the category of necessity these days. It is no longer the luxury that used to be 20 years ago. Every business is looked up on the internet these days, and law business is not spared either. Thus, it is necessary to build a website if you want to thrive as an attorney.
Once the website is created and keywords are determined, insert them in content in such a manner that it looks flawless. Ensure that all of your website's primary elements, like your headline, sub-headers that break up topics (H2s and H3s), your call to action, and the content itself, use that page's keywords. But measure their density correctly; it should not be more than 3%.
Just determining the keywords and inserting them in the content is not enough. You need to check upon them time and again to see if they bring traffic to your website. Changing and updating the content twice a year is advisable, but you can also do it yearly. Thus, keep updating the keywords and content and align them with new Google algorithms.
3. Be Watchful of Your Competition
You aren't the only attorney in your time, and it is better to accept the truth as early as possible. Hence, many competitors in the market will benefit if you do not do what they are doing. Ever since the commencement of planet Earth, keeping watch on competitors has been a part of progress and success.
While unethical practices might be banned, seeing what strategy competitors are using and why is a part of healthy online growth. Thus, make sure to follow your competitors and ideals to see what they are up to. And not just that, you can also check out other local businesses that are doing well online.
While one cannot compare a law firm website and a fashion website, one can always see if local fashion or tourism, or healthcare business is doing fine online and use some of their strategies for their own website. The first clients are always from the town, and that is how you go for international clients. See how other local businesses acquire local as well as international customers (clients).
4. Improve the Page Loading Speed of Your Website
Page speed can be defined as the amount of time it takes to load all the contents present on the specific page that is opened or the time it takes for a browser to receive a web server's first byte. All the elements like HTML code and CSS that style page elements, various JavaScript files, images, videos, and other multimedia; affect the page speed.
And if the loading speed of your law firm website is slow, no one will stay there for more than 10 seconds. So, creating the website and inserting the keyword is not enough, but improving the website loading speed is important too.
Hence, the intelligent thing is to include as fewer images as possible and more write–ups. Also, if you render too many JavaScript scripts, the page will slow down. For most users, all they need is to see the first fold of the page. Thus, focusing on loading it on a priority basis is necessary.
5. Create a Social Media Page
No matter what you do, if you do not showcase it on social media, people will not consider you essential or trustworthy.
According to forbesindia.com, “On average, an internet user daily spends 6 hours, 53 minutes online!” And the study states that “The most used type of sites and applications on the internet are chat and messaging services, for 95.7% of users, social networks follow closely with 95.2%. YouTube is the most visited website, according to the Semrush ranking in February 2022, ahead of Google and Facebook. Keeping in touch with friends and family is the second most popular reason for using the internet for 54.7% of 16-64-year-olds. But top of the list comes "finding information," a rather vague reason, chosen by 60.2% of respondents.”
Hence, if you are not on social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, no one will be able to find you. Making a website doesn't suffice; promoting your law brand on social media is equally important.
6. Get High-Quality Backlinks
Getting high-quality backlinks is one of the essential steps to get the SEO for law firms done right. When more articles are sourced back to you proves how legit you are, that whatever you say or do, makes sense, and that your website is not just full of non-coherent sentences. So the magic question is how to acquire high-quality backlinks.
Any website can earn organic links by simply writing engaging content: the better your work is and the more closely you match with a person’s search intent, people will use your content as a reference. While you can simply reach out to other sites to trade links, there are plenty of other activities that can help speed up the process of getting high-quality backlinks:
- Feedback in the form of testimonials
- Guest blogging
- Creating content that people can share and download
- Answering people’s queries on various platforms like Quora and Reddit.
7. Make the website Mobile – Friendly
The first thing a person would do when they need a lawyer is to open a browser on their phone and search for “best attorney in XYZ city” or “law firm near me," etc. Hence, if the name of your firm is not on the top search list, you have lost a potential client. Forget about the computers, desktops, or even laptops; focus on making the website mobile-friendly.
While traveling by bus or train, they will look for your firm and then will open your website in their systems after reaching the office. So, responsive web design is a must. If a mobile responsive website seems like a costly task, you can go to an important webpage with the required information and call–to–action button, which can bring people to your doorstep without any hassle.
8. Keep Content Language Simple
People might not respond to complex content well. They need to understand the content better in order to respond positively. Working on legal search engine optimization might prompt you to put in everything that you have studied and experienced to date. But hold back, think, and then write the content.
Using complex words will not only confuse the client but will dominate them too. They will be scared to approach you, and you'll lose them. Hence, keeping the content simple might be challenging, and it might seem risky to be perceived as a novice, but that will work in your favor.
9. Ask For Feedback
Once the project is done (the case is solved), you can ask your clients to leave feedback on Google as well as on other platforms like LinkedIn or Multilaw. Positive reviews affect the reputation of the firm positively all over, and more people will be encouraged to contact you for their legal needs. Also, it will tell you where you lack and will help you polish your services for the better.
10. Analyze Where the Traffic Comes From and Work On It
You need to know exactly where your traffic comes from and from where the leads are generated. Whether your website works as a miracle for you or social media is your magic word. No matter what, make sure to analyze the source of clients and work on optimizing it. As mentioned in the 10th point, asking for feedback is essential, but what is the end if it does not reach enough people?
Thus, sending out feedback via emails could bring in traffic too. Most people send emails at frequent intervals saying, "Clients say XYZ good things about us" or, "Clients say that XYZ number of people trust our services. See what brings in more business and use it to your advantage.
11. Off–Internet SEO
And last but not least – you can try off-internet SEO. Networking offline via meets and gatherings enhances SEO for law firms too. How? When you meet more people who are in the same field, you can spread the word about how you can be contacted. Along with webinars and online workshops, you can participate in offline events for the lawyers and tell them about your website.
Also, you can hold the gathering occasionally and spread the word about your online presence. You can always give out your visiting cards whenever you meet someone prestigious. And even to the ones who might not be your potential client but can put in a good word for you regarding your business. It doesn't hurt to be outgoing and creative and promote business the old–fashioned way.
Reasons/Benefits of Legal Search Engine Optimization
There are tons of benefits to getting SEO for law firmsdone, just like it is beneficial to any other industry. A few of the benefits are as follows:
a. It Brings Organic Traffic (Clients)
Creating a website is easy, but keeping it going successfully with maximum traffic is challenging. Therefore, if you apply SEO tactics to your site, you're not just creating a website but also making a website that adds profit to it. Once your site is SEO-friendly, you differentiate your firm from others because it prioritizes the substance or the content over the form.
b. Legit Content Encourages People to Hire You
The content of your website cannot be baseless. It needs to be backed up by solid proof. For example, if you establish your firm as one of the top attorney websites in town, you should have certificates or client testimonials for people to believe you. Only legit content will encourage people to hire you; otherwise, it's all a moot point.
c. Local SEO can come to rescue
Let's suppose if you are based in Canada; the initial leads generated will be from your town. Lawyers, before taking up international clients, need to have local clients. People in their own city need to be able to find them and reach out to them with their problems, which is when local SEO can come to the rescue.
With the help of local SEO, you’ll be able to get local testimonials that will attract international clients. If you are stuck somewhere, you can take assistance from SEO companies in Canada who will provide the best services when it comes to SEO for law firms.
d. Reviews and Ratings Make You Seen
As mentioned above, local SEO will get you local feedback. When you format them and put them on your website along with the ratings, the trust factor will build, and you'll see a rise in demand. The reviews and rating might not be the base for your potential clients to approach you, but it surely helps.
Challenges of doing SEO for law firms
Getting SEO done for Law firms demands time and energy, which a person without perfect SEO knowledge might not have. Below are a few of the challenges:
a. Overcrowding Keywords Can Make You Lose Client
Overcrowding the keyword will surely make you lose clients. This issue is not limited to SEO for the law firm industry. As a matter of fact, any industry will be affected by stuffing keywords, and not only clients but Google will catch it and penalize the content. Inserting keywords that are out of place or context, or flow is not a new practice, but doing it tactfully is the key.
Client, while contacting your law firm – small or big, will cross-check the legitimacy of the law firm and only then will trust the keywords. Thus, make sure to hire an India – based SEO expert that will do the legal search engine optimization for you correctly at a fraction of the cost.
b. Indexing of Pages
Proper indexing is necessary for the website to thrive. If the pages that are irrelevant are crawled, then it is a waste of money, and you are preventing Google from indexing your high-priority, high-buyer intent pages. Why send your traffic to empty pages that are unlikely to convert? If Google finds issues with page indexing(duplicity or unmatched title-description and the content of the page), it will hide them, affecting the online business negatively. After all, it doesn’t want people to be deceived.
c. Poor Meta Titles and Descriptions
Meta Titles and Descriptions are the heart of SEO. Many law firms struggle to write the correct meta titles and descriptions as compared to their content. They do not know how to make people perceive them as they want them to. There are a few rules to writing meta tags:
- The title should not be more than 60 characters long, and the description shouldn’t be more than 160 characters long.
- Include the keyword once but don’t make it look like it is stuffed.
- The title and description should describe the page and not be generalized. Otherwise, people will not get the gist of what page it is about, and they will remain confused. Stating things like “home page” or “blog page” won’t make a searcher click through to your site.
Wrapping Up:
Gone are the days when people spent hours looking for an attorney. These days the first thing they do when in trouble is to tap a few buttons on the phone, and they have got themselves an appointment with the lawyer. If you happen to own a law firm, too, then be the first one to be in their reach, or else you'll miss the chance to get your hands on potential clients.
Get yourself the best Australian SEO Expert if you live in Australia, or hire the best SEO agency in Canada if you are based in Canada, but don’t take your online legal game for granted. Who knows, someone innocent might be searching for you to get out of trouble! Try doing legal search engine optimization for them. Remember that without a law firm website, you're handing off the potential business to other lawyers who do.
