Search engine optimization is a strategy that improves your website’s chances of appearing high in a Google search.

Google, and other search engines, rely on matching the search terms, or keywords, in a user’s Google search with the written content on billions of websites. 

Within .000002 seconds, Google will generate a list of thousands of search results listed by their relevance. However, the sad part is that most people will never look past the first page of Google search results.

So why is SEO important? Because you want to be on that first page of search results!

In this article, I’ll break down the strategies we use at Kaleidico to help you optimize your personal injury lawyer SEO. 

I’m not promising that my advice alone will help you get on the first page, since that usually requires the work of an SEO specialist or team — but I’ll try to get you close.

What is SEO and why is it important for personal injury lawyers?

When it comes to personal injury lawyer advertising, we’re all familiar with the conventional ad formats:

• Billboards
• Benches
• YellowPages
• TV ads
• Radio ads

These ad types work, but they’re not that targeted usually.

Instead, you’re going to focus on building a website and free, helpful content so that when people Google “lawyer near me” or “personal injury attorney near me” your website will appear first in the searches.

That’s what SEO, and local SEO, is all about — ranking high up in online search results.

Local SEO is simply search engine optimization for your website so that it includes addresses of all your locations and phone number. This information should be included on multiple landing pages and in meta descriptions.

The more details provided about your location, combined with the rest of your SEO strategy, will help you target personal injury clients in your area.

People who stumble on your website or blog posts are doing so intentionally — they’re not being blanketed by billboards passively. They landed on your website because they actively searched for legal services near them or legal advice online.

Search engine marketing is a free/low-cost way to target your local market and reach prospective clients, by offering them the solutions that they’re looking for.

10 tips to optimize personal injury SEO to generate new case leads

Can you have SEO without a website? Not really. I mean, you could just set up a bunch of social media accounts, but that’s not really going to cut it. That’s not enough to generate case leads.

You really need a website for your personal injury law firm. Why? 

• Websites are the main lead generators for most marketing campaigns
• Websites make it easier for clients to find your law firm online
• You get more control over your website’s designs. Social media sites don’t offer customizations.
• You can place contact forms everywhere (this is huge!)
• You can create virtually unlimited blog posts on your website, adding important keywords to your website organically.
• Your website makes you look legitimate and gives you authority.
• You can track every visitors’ interaction on your website to offer insights into how customers view your content.

I can’t really emphasize how important adding keywords to your website is for search engine optimization. The more keywords you have, the better you will rank, but you can’t type “personal injury lawyer” a thousand times haphazardly throughout your website. This is known as “keyword stuffing” and Google will penalize you for that.

Since you can only include so many keywords on your landing pages, you should really also include a blog on your website, but I’ll cover that more in step #3.

1. Consider upgrading your branding and logo

Let’s start with some basics for personal injury marketing.

First of all, does your personal injury law firm have a logo to begin with?

You don’t need anything too fancy or complicated, but it’s important that the logo and look is contemporary — meaning not cheesy and outdated.

Many law firm logos are just the law firm’s name in a serif font with a few design flourishes and embellishments.

If you want to update your logo yourself, there are plenty of free custom logo design websites out there — but I’ll warn these will give you a pretty generic logo.

I’d recommend working with a graphic designer who can find the right typeface and stylings that will give your web presence more “production value” than your competitors.

I guarantee you the top competitors in the personal injury law firm space have custom logos, so you should consider doing the same.

2. Make sure your website’s loading time is fast —or lose visitors even faster

Your website should take no longer than 2-3 seconds to load.

If it takes longer than that, your visitors will “bounce” off the page. 

Mobile visitors, which account for half of your website’s traffic, leave if the page doesn’t load in three seconds.

So what are some things that can make a website really slow? It turns out — a lot:

• Pop-up windows
• High-resolution images or file sizes larger than 1MB
• Too many plugins
• Bulky codes
• Scrolling banner ads and other animations
• Bad hosting
• Malware, spyware, and viruses from a hacked website

At Kaleidico, you’ll notice our website is pretty bare bones. There are many reasons for this:

• A faster load time
• Less distractions for the reader
• Improved scannability and legibility to comprehend articles easier
• Blog posts and web pages are printer-friendly
• Calls-to-actions and contact forms stand out better

Does your website need a whole bunch of features and junk on it? Not really.

You’ll be surprised how much better your website performs using a simpler, cleaner template.

3. Research your competitors’ websites to see their traffic and what keywords they’re ranking for

When I first started marketing, I had no idea you could spy on every website’s traffic data.

Try it out for yourself: Go to Ubersuggest and type in the domain name of one of your competitors. 

Are you surprised by the results you see? Did you expect your competitor to have more traffic or less?

Ubersuggest is a free tool, however, there are paid tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs that give you way more detail about your competitors.

Not only do you see how much traffic they’re getting, you see the main search terms that brought people to those websites.

After you’ve analyzed a few of your competitors, you’ll start to see the keywords and popular pages on their websites that are bringing in the most people.

Then it’s your job to compete by writing better, longer, and more helpful blog posts on your own site.

Over time, your well-written blog posts will start to appear higher and higher on Google’s search engine results page (SERP).

4. Publish at least 4 blogs a month

Did I mention that blog posts, aka content marketing, are often the main referral source for websites? Yeah, you really should be blogging.

Aim for at least 4 blog posts a month at a minimum. As mentioned in the step before, you can look to your competitors to see what blogs they are writing about to get inspiration.

Google favors websites that publish blogs regularly, and rewards websites for producing new content. Conversely, Google will push websites that don’t blog regularly farther down on their search engine results page.

Write “how-to” articles related to your key practice areas. For example “How to sue a doctor for malpractice,” or “how to sue for wrongful death.” When people search for these questions, the aim is to have people find your article, land on your website, and contact you.

Don’t have time to write all that content? Consider hiring a content studio experienced in legal marketing blog posts. They’ll be able to do all that competitive keyword research and blog writing for you, so you can focus on your clients.

5. Add multiple landing pages for your key practices areas

What’s “landing page” mean anyway? How is it different from a normal web page, you might ask.

A landing page is simply a page of your site that’s optimized for a specific campaign or purpose. Visitors “land” on it and are prompted with a specific call to action, such as to contact the car accident attorney at your firm.

When a person performs an action on your website, such as filling out a form, that’s considered a conversion. Other conversions can include making phone calls, subscribing to newsletters, or downloading a free eBook.

Therefore, you should set up numerous landing pages on your website to capture more conversions.

Create landing pages for each of your key personal injury practices such as:

• Personal injury law
• Wrongful death
• Motor vehicle accident
• Medical malpractice
• Construction accidents
• Etc.

The more landing pages you have on your website, the longer your visitors will stay on your website.

Each landing page is an opportunity for you to write a detailed description of each of your practice areas. This is an SEO tactic to add all those important keywords throughout your site. 

Remember “keyword stuffing” from before? That’s a no-no, but writing blogs weekly using these keywords is a yes-yes.

And of course, each landing page needs to have contact forms with calls-to-action such as:

• “Book a no-cost consultation”
• “Get your free consultation”
• “Get your free eBook”
• “Download our free Personal Injury Guide”

6. Organize and optimize your “On-Page” SEO content

Remember how I mentioned creating landing pages for your key practice areas? Those are important, but you also need other important pages such as:

• Homepage with a clear and concise mission statement
• About Us
• Contact Us
• A footer with the address, phone number, and email address visible
• Client reviews and testimonials
• Attorney bios

Yep, you guessed it, all these pages add more essential keywords to your website. But they also serve a purpose — to educate your readers and give them a good user experience on your website.

Note: Many of these pages will be listed at the top of your website as menu items. Just remember: don’t overdo it. You don’t want more than 7 menu items in your top menu. If you have too many pages, consider adding drop-down menus to keep the organization clean.

7. Consider running PPC ads for an immediate traffic boost

Marketers always talk about getting on Google’s “SERP” search engine results page. It’s the goal — get the top spot on Google.

I’m not going to lie, the competition for personal injury practice in Google is pretty stiff.

It’s a very competitive space and might take months for your website to start ranking higher with traditional SEO and content marketing. After all, content marketing is a long-term strategy.

But if you’re feeling impatient, you could buy pay-per-click (PPC) ads on Google and have your website appear first in the paid search results. Within a day or two, your ad could be placed at the top of Google’s SERP — it’ll cost you though. 

It’s best to work with a certified PPC company that knows what they’re doing so they can find the underused, and lower-priced, keywords for you to focus your PPC ads on.

8. Claim a Google Business account for better search visibility

This tip is pretty easy and really helpful for standing out in Google searches when people directly search for your law firm.

Google’s pretty smart. It likely already indexed your law firm’s address and put it into Google Maps, but we’re going to make it even more visible. 

Let’s do another exercise: type in your law firm’s name in a Google search. Do you see a big box on the right side of the page with your law firm’s name, Google address, phone number, hours, and reviews?

If not, then you haven’t set up your Google Business account yet. Do it. It’s free and makes your company stick out like a sore thumb in Google searches, in a good way.

9. Get more reviews — on your site and on your Google Business account

Speaking of advertising your personal injury legal services, you should really be asking past clients for reviews on your Google Business account.

Just be careful not to do anything that could be considered a bribe or compensate for your reviews, this is a huge no-no with the American Bar Association.

According to rule 7.2, lawyers can ask for reviews online, but can’t ask for fake reviews, and especially can’t bribe or pay people to leave positive reviews.

Also, it’s good practice not to ask current clients for reviews until their case is finished.

10. Be sure to add videos and images to your website

Here’s just another quick SEO tip that people don’t take advantage of — add more photos to your website or blog posts.

Yeah, I know I said too many pictures slow a website down, but some pictures are okay.

There are things called “alt-texts” which allow you to rename image files when placed on your website.

So if people search for “personal injury lawyers” and you have a photo on your website with the alt-tag “personal-injury-lawyers” this will improve your searchability.

The same goes for embedding videos on your website. 

Plus, videos and photos generally enhance your written content, so it’s good practice to add them anyway. 

Trust Kaleidico with your personal injury law firm marketing

Kaleidico is a lead generation agency for law firms, mortgage lenders, and fintech companies.

Are you a lawyer seeking a website upgrade to enhance your legal marketing strategy? We’ll help transform your website and digital marketing strategies to bring new clients to your law firm.

We are a full-scale digital marketing agency specializing in web design and development, graphic design, SEO, PPC, content strategy, and blog writing.