What's in this article?
Now, more than ever, attorneys need to understand the importance of law firm SEO so they can meet their target audience where they are — which is online doing legal research.
Yes, referrals still matter for generating new business, but referrals are not enough in a competitive market.
Today, people would much rather search online to find a lawyer than ask friends or family for recommendations due to privacy concerns.
As an attorney, you might be aware of the importance of SEO for driving more leads and traffic. But what exactly is SEO? Is it just a marketing buzzword or is it a legitimate strategy?
Please note that I am not a lawyer, but a content writer who specializes in law firm websites. Be sure to research your local laws before implementing these techniques.
Attract more qualified case leads to your law firm with our results-driven marketing services.
Lawyer SEO trends and updates for 2023
In 2023, Google’s search algorithm continues to evolve to provide users with the best and most relevant search results. As a result, it’s more important than ever for law firms to have a strong online presence that’s easily findable in a Google search.
This year, Google has placed extra emphasis on optimizing certain aspects of website SEO, such as:
- Enhancing user experience
- Optimizing for voice search
- Creating engaging and multimedia content (particularly videos, the fastest-growing content type)
- Staying up-to-date with algorithm changes
- Focusing on E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness)
Focusing on E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness)
Google emphasizes the importance of E-A-T, especially for law firms. This means creating high-quality informative content that demonstrates your expertise in law and builds trust with your audience.
This also means placing more importance on the author for blog posts, making sure to include their bio, and an author page, for added social proof.
Using AI and ChatGPT for content creation
In 2023, AI has made significant strides in content creation, with ChatGPT and other AI tools revolutionizing the process.
As some of you may already be aware, the latest version of ChatGPT 4 recently took the bar exam and scored within the 90th percentile — it’s scary smart and easy to chat with for coming up with new content or asking anything really.
For lawyers struggling to come up with blog article ideas, ChatGPT serves as a brainstorming partner, helping to generate topic suggestions or even proofreading lengthy paragraphs.
What is law firm SEO and why is it important for lawyers?
Lawyers rely on their law firm’s website to generate monthly leads and acquire new clients.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a strategy that improves website rankings in Google searches, with the aim of increasing visibility and boosting website traffic.
Did you know that approximately 50% of law firms’ clients begin their research with a Google search?
By the way, SEO is not limited to Google. Implementing law firm SEO tactics in your digital marketing campaign will also enhance your website’s visibility in other search engines like Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, and more.
SEO focuses on increasing organic traffic, which refers to visitors that naturally arrive at your website through Google searches. These visitors are typically searching for “lawyers near me” or advice blogs such as “How to Get a Divorce” to learn more about their legal situation.
As your SEO improves, you’ll receive more traffic, which equals more opportunities to convert website visitors into paying clients. Your next client is already searching online for legal assistance. Make sure they find your website, not your competitors.
How attorneys benefit from enhanced law firm SEO
Improved SEO for law firms leads to higher website rankings on Google, increased web traffic, more leads, and ultimately, new clients to grow your business.
See how Kaleidico can help you reach lead generation goals and get the best cases.
Outrank your competitors’ websites in a Google search
Getting on the first page of Google’s search engine results page (SERP) matters. A lot.
People often equate a website’s ranking with the law firm’s reputation. If your competitor’s website is outranking you, potential clients may perceive their services as superior.
Appearing on the first page of search results will improve your perceived reputation and dramatically increase your website’s traffic, as only 29% of users go beyond the first page of results.
Boost authority and credibility
This is another one of those psychological benefits, just like positioning your website above your competitors and outranking them in a Google search.
While it may be difficult to quantity, having improved SEO and a well-designed website can portray competence and inspire confidence in visitors to reach out to you for more information.
There’s sort of a halo effect that happens when people search online. They search for something, see the top-ranking websites, and think “these companies ranked high in a Google search, they probably know what they’re doing. I’ll click on these websites.”
Basically, people will assume that if your website’s Google ranking is good, then your company is good. If your website’s ranking and website are bad, then they’ll assume the company is bad too.
It’s not fair, but it kind of makes sense, doesn’t it?
Drive more traffic and generate more leads on your law firm’s website
This is the end game here — generate more case leads so you can continue finding paying clients.
With more visitors, you can convert them into clients through strategically placed contact forms, click-to-call phone numbers, or offering valuable resources like eBooks or free guides in exchange for their contact information. These are called lead magnets because people are tempted to give their email address in exchange for this content.
How does SEO work for law firms?
Google’s mission is to organize all of the world’s information and make it easy to find when people need answers to their problems.
For lawyers and their firms, this means your website needs to produce tons of valuable content that can answer Google users’ legal questions, such as:
Informative how-to articles
Create step-by-step guides that explain various legal processes that are easy to understand and provide practical advice for scenarios such as:
- “How to File for Bankruptcy”
- “How to Apply for a Restraining Order”
- “How to Contest a Ticket”
Legal advice forums
Set up a forum or Q&A section on your website where users can ask questions and receive answers from your legal team. This will showcase your expertise and encourage interaction and engagement on your website, which helps SEO rankings.
Regular blog posts
Publish blogs regularly that cover your legal area of expertise. Regularly updating your blog establishes you as a thought leader in your field and gives Google more articles to rank in its search results.
These posts can include:
- Case studies
- Updates on new legislation
- Insights into common legal challenges
Downloadable In-depth guides, aka “lead magnets”
Create comprehensive guides and eBooks on specific legal topics that your target audience needs help with.
These guides can be longer (around 10+ pages) and can delve into complex legal issues.
Because the guides are so long, your visitors will gladly exchange their email addresses in order to download the free guide, giving you another case lead.
Infographics
Design visually engaging infographics that can simplify complex legal concepts into a simple-to-understand format.
Infographics can help increase your website’s sharability and attract more traffic through image searches.
Videos
Produce video content that covers various legal topics and uploads them to Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.
Currently, video content marketing is the highest growing trend of 2023, so capitalize on the increased consumption of video content by recording short videos of yourself explaining legal scenarios.
Shortform video content, like YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels, can help you market to millennials and Gen Z if you’re going after that demographic.
FAQs
Develop a frequently asked questions (FAQ) page that addresses common legal questions and concerns. FAQ pages can be a fast track to getting to the first page of Google’s results page.
Webinars and podcasts
Host free webinars or create podcast episodes that talk about legal issues and offer expert advice.
By producing a diverse range of high-quality content, your law firm can answer the legal questions of Google users, improve your website’s SEO, and ultimately attract more potential clients.
The importance of keywords in law firm SEO
Keywords are what make the SEO world go round.
To put it simply, Google’s search algorithm prefers to connect keywords found in Google users’ searches with the same keywords found on a website.
For instance, when somebody searches for “Michigan divorce lawyer” or “car accident lawyer,” Google swiftly scans and matches keywords from the user’s query with those found throughout billions of websites.
Google will then provide thousands of search results organized by their relevance. By the way, it takes about 0.91 seconds for Google to do all of this!
As a result, it’s crucial that your website’s blogs, images, meta-descriptions, and embedded videos incorporate relevant law firm-related keywords.
This way, when people search for legal keywords, Google is more likely to recommend your website. This is known as “keyword optimization” or “on-page SEO” since it focuses on the visual elements of the website, such as text, images, and content.
Additional factors impacting a law firm’s SEO beyond keywords
Okay, we’ve got a handle on how important keywords are for search engine optimization.
But there’s more to SEO than just keyword matching. Let’s explore other aspects that affect your law firm’s website rankings.
Backlinks and outbound links
Google likes to recommend websites in search results that play well with other websites. What does this mean?
Well, when multiple websites include a hyperlink within their blog posts that direct back to your website, this creates a “backlink,” because they’re linking “back” to your website.
The more backlinks your website has, the more credible Google deems it, resulting in drastically higher search result placement. (Ever notice why Wikipedia search results are always first? It’s because each article has a million backlinks!)
Outbound links are the complete opposite. It’s when you place a hyperlink on your website that directs your reader to another website. Why do this? Because it enhances your articles’ credibility, especially when you make a statistical claim. It’s recommended that each of your blog posts contains at least two outbound links.
Of the two types of links, backlinks are more influential in improving your SEO, as you want more websites referring people to your rather than the other way around.
This form of SEO is known as “off-page SEO” since it involves the number of inbound and outbound links a website receives, which are only visible to the site’s administrator and Google.
Technical SEO
Believe it or not, but the first person to read your article isn’t a person — it’s one of Google’s crawling bots. So you better structure your website correctly, or else it will never get added to Google’s search results page.
Technical SEO can be tedious and technical, so I’ll keep this section short, as improving your technical SEO will likely require a skilled digital marketing agency to get involved.
Basically, technical SEO is about adhering to Google’s guidelines and structuring your website for efficient navigation by web crawlers (bot programs) allowing them to index your content into Google’s search results.
As a general rule, make your website mobile-friendly and make sure the navigation is intuitive and easy to follow. If a human has a hard time navigating your website, a crawler bot probably will too.
Consistently writing and publishing new blog posts
Every new blog post your website publishes is a new opportunity for your website to improve its Google ranking.
Google’s updated search algorithm rewards websites that frequently publish fresh content by improving their ranking in search results.
The reasoning is simple — Google wants to present its users with the latest and most up-to-date information so they will keep coming back to Google for answers.
Every time your website publishes a new piece of content, such as a blog post, Google’s web crawlers will detect this new change and index the new content to its search engine.
Regularly blogging also allows your website to legitimately incorporate more specific keywords to your website without “keyword stuffing” to enhance your law firm’s SEO.
Keyword stuffing is when you add too many keywords to your website in order to rank, but this approach will actually hurt your ratings. Blogging regularly, however, is a better way to add keywords to your website.
One last thing: If your website hasn’t published a blog in years, your web visitors will think your company is out of business and won’t want to engage with you. Google will also think your website is outdated and will downgrade your website’s ranking.
Attract more qualified case leads to your law firm with our results-driven marketing services.
How much do law firm SEO services cost?
This is a bit tricky to answer because the cost ranges depending on the client, their budget, their industry, and their competition.
Related reading: The Cost of SEO and Content Marketing.
First, let’s clarify the role of an SEO specialist:
- Monitors a website’s performance by examining search terms, keywords, rankings, and analytics
- Provides recommendations and develops strategies to improve a website’s ranking
- Conducts keyword searches for use across the client’s website and marketing materials
- Performs competitor keyword gap analysis (identifying underused keywords by examining competitors’ usage)
- Publishes new blog posts and high-quality website content regularly
- Updates existing content for maximum optimization and search engine ratings
- Create PPC ads and ad campaigns
As you can see, an SEO specialist is a strategist and a writer who helps assess your website’s current standing and guides you toward your traffic and lead generation objectives.
However, optimizing SEO can be difficult if the existing website is disorganized, or if someone still needs to write all the new blog posts. SEO works in conjunction with content marketing, PPC ads, web design/development, and email marketing.
Due to these many factors, providing an exact price range is nearly impossible, as each project is unique and requires varying levels of support across different marketing focuses.
However, when considering budget, consider this: Hiring a law firm SEO agency is often more cost-effective than employing a single individual. For a similar price, law firms gain access to an entire team of experts dedicated to enhancing their SEO processes.
Let Kaleidico reach your target audience right where they are so that you can provide the expert legal services they need.
How SEO, content marketing, and lead generation all work together for lawyers
SEO and content marketing work hand-in-hand to get your website noticed by your prospective new clients during a Google search.
SEO guidelines and competitive research tell you how to structure your website and what keywords to use throughout your site.
Content marketing works by writing blog posts that answer a Google searcher’s query. The goal is ultimately getting them to click on the blog to direct them to your website.
Once you have a visitor on your website, you’ll need to provide high-quality information and a great user experience. Visitors need to trust you so they reach out for help by filling out a contact form.
Both SEO and content marketing are essential for any legal lead-generation strategy. With no website or blog posts, there can be no answers to a Google user’s query.
Local SEO for lawyers
Stop what you’re doing right now and do a Google search for “lawyer near me” and see if your law firm is shown on Google Maps search results.
Did it show up? Does it have a lot of reviews? Are those reviews good or bad?
Now imagine, if potential customers in your geographical area did the same search, could they find your law firm? And would they consider using you over your competitors based on your search results ratings?
This is where local SEO plays a vital role.
One of the most straightforward ways to enhance your local SEO is by creating a Google Business account for your law firm.
Upon registering your law firm on Google Maps, you’ll receive a Google “Knowledge Graph” that displays:
- Your office’s location on Google Maps
- Streetview photos of your office, which you can replace with your own professional photos
- Address
- Phone number
- Hours
- Reviews
- Website
- Click to call buttons
- Social media profile links
Add your law firm to these 11 best local online directories of 2023
Listing your law firm on legal directories will help improve your visibility outside of Google searches to generate more leads.
Some of the best legal directories of 2023 to consider include the following.
1. Avvo
Avvo is a popular legal directory that displays comprehensive lawyer profiles, client reviews, and a Q&A forum for attorneys to answer questions and potentially find more clients.
2. Justia
Justia is a well-respected legal director for attorney profiles, practice area information, and legal sources for clients.
3. FindLaw
FindLaw is a popular legal directory that provides profiles of law firms, attorney bios, and practice area information.
4. Martindale-Hubbell
Martindale-Hubbell is a prestigious legal directory that’s been around for over 140 years. It offers a comprehensive database of attorneys and law firms, including peer and client reviews.
5. Lawyers.com
Lawyers.com is an extensive legal directory that provides lawyer profiles, client reviews, and a range of legal resources.
6. Nolo
Nolo is a legal directory that focuses on providing consumers with easy-to-understand legal help and attorney profiles.
7. Super Lawyers
Super Lawyers is a legal directory that only recognizes and accepts top attorneys in their practice areas through a rigorous selection process.
8. Best Lawyers
Best Lawyers is similar to Super Lawyers in that it only displays leading lawyers who have passed a thorough peer-review process.
9. LawInfo
LawInfo is a legal directory that displays attorney profiles, legal resources, and tools to help people find the best attorney for their cases.
10. Lawyer Legion
Lawyer Legion is another online legal directory that helps people find lawyers based on their location, practice area, and other factors.
11. YellowPages
Advertising legal services in YellowPages is a great way to find local clients in your geographical region.
How to choose the best legal marketing companies in 2023
With “SEO” being a popular buzzword in digital marketing, many agencies are adding “SEO services” to their offerings, sometimes as an afterthought to their existing products.
Before picking a company to handle your law firm’s SEO, consider the following steps.
Seek social proof
Ask for case studies or testimonials from current or past clients to evaluate the agency’s effectiveness.
Inquire about rankings
Ask if they have clients who rank on the first page of Google or for competitive search terms.
Estimate lead generation
Request a rough estimate of the leads they can generate for your law firm, including conversion rates into actual clients.
Ensure legal compliance
Familiarize yourself with the American Bar Association’s Rule 7.2, which outlines rules and ethical regulations for advertising legal services online.
Confirm your agency understands these laws to avoid potential issues with your marketing campaign.
The 90-Day Plan for better lawyer SEO: Updated for 2023
What is your ultimate goal for improving your law firm’s SEO? Is it to increase website traffic, outperform competitors, or generate more leads?
Trick question: You want all of the above.
Our comprehensive 90-day marketing plan for law firms breaks down the steps you need to take month by month. You’ll plan, execute, and evaluate your strategy to reach more potential clients.
The first 30 days: laying the groundwork
The first 30 days start with finding out exactly where your law firm’s website’s SEO currently stands.
Find out how much traffic you’re getting, and your search engine rankings, research your competitors, and establish your goals. Then decides if you need a new website or an upgrade.
Assuming your law firm already has a website, even if it needs an upgrade, let’s run an SEO audit.
Conduct an SEO audit on your website
Determine your law firm’s website traffic, search engine rankings, and competition. Set your goals and decide if you need a website or an upgrade.
Run the SEO audit to check for broken links, shady backlinks, and a messy site structure that are causing your website to underperform, load slowly, or rank poorly.
Use SEO tools
Use the following tools to analyze your site’s performance and rankings:
- Google Analytics
- Semrush
- Ahrefs
- Google Search Console
These platforms also make it easy to spot errors that need to be corrected on your website.
Update or revamp your law firm’s website
It’s likely that you already have an existing law firm website.
However, if the website is outdated it likely needs to be re-designed and revamped.
If needed, dedicate the first 30 days to redesigning and improving your website.
Evaluate traffic and organic keywords
Often many law firms come to us because they need more traffic to generate new case leads.
To get more traffic, you first must know how much traffic you’re currently receiving to measure against.
Establish a baseline for your law firm’s SEO progress after 90 days by measuring monthly organic traffic, click-through rates, bounce rates, keyword rankings, backlinks, site speed, and conversions.
Perform keyword research, including researching your competitors’ keywords
Using Google’s Keyword Planner, as well as Semrush and Ahrefs, SEO specialists can establish seed words, concepts, and overall keyword topics.
The key is to find search terms that have a high enough monthly volume without too much competition so that ranking on Google’s first page of search results is more achievable.
In addition, we will work with the client to understand who their main competitors are so we can do competitive keyword research.
When we study our client’s competitors, we’re looking to see how much monthly traffic their websites are receiving, keywords they’re ranking for, keywords they’re running PPC ads on, and their top 5 ranking pages.
Usually, the top-ranking pages are blog posts, which can then be used as inspiration for writing new blog posts.
Once we know about the competition and landscape, we can begin choosing keywords, topics, and seed words to build out an editorial calendar.
Create a content calendar
Plan topics, keywords, and blog post titles that incorporate targeted keywords. Keep track of everything in a central repository like a Google spreadsheet.
Depending on your lead generation goals, you’ll need to create a weekly or monthly blog schedule to ensure keyword-rich content is constantly being added to your website.
As a general rule, you should be publishing at least four blogs to your website a month. However, more is always better as it increases your website’s keywords and can significantly boost traffic from Google searches.
Establish a local SEO presence and social media channels
If you haven’t done so already, make sure to register your law firm with Google Business and the other online directories listed above in the previous section.
In addition, set up basic social media profiles such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
See how Kaleidico can help you reach lead generation goals and get the best cases.
Days 31-60: begin content marketing, blogging, and analyzing results
By day 30, these essential systems and features should be set up:
- A high-quality website design with a clean sitemap for improved SEO
- Essential landing pages created that are optimized around specific keywords
- Lead paths and contact forms on every page of your website to capture new leads
- A content calendar filled with targeted keywords, intriguing article titles, different content pieces, and deadlines to keep blog production running
- Social media and business profiles with updated information that directs to your law firm’s website
During your second set of 30 days, you’ll begin focusing on content marketing strategy:
Execute your content calendar and continue writing and publishing new blog posts
Publish at least four blog posts a month to boost organic keywords and traffic from Google searches.
Did you know some law firms don’t even pay for PPC ads or Google Ads? They just write enough blogs to keep the traffic rolling in continually.
During this second part of the phase, you’ll be focused on writing, editing, and publishing as many blogs as you can be entered into Google’s search results page.
Remember, the sooner you can write and publish blogs to your website, the sooner people will start discovering your website in a Google search.
Optimizing your website
In the first 30 days, you should have built a professional website and included all of the essential landing pages on your website, such as:
- About us page
- Contact us page
- Attorney bios page
Take time to review your website and click around to make sure everything is in working order. Make sure new contact form submissions are being sent to the right place, that all the new images are working, and correct any spelling errors on your website (in case you didn’t catch these during the first month).
Track key performance indicators (KPIs)
Continue monitoring traffic, lead conversions, and other important metrics after 60 days of content marketing efforts.
Use Google Search Console, Google Analytics, SEMrush and, Ahrefs to give you updates on the website’s performance and changes in its keyword rankings, which should be changing due to your recent blogging.
Days 61-90: monitoring, refinding, and maintaining lawyer SEO
Hopefully by now, you’ll start seeing a drastic increase in traffic, conversions, and generated leads from your improving SEO, which should be driven by more blog posts and an improved website structure.
Now is the time to go back and look at the past three month’s content to spot new opportunities for optimization, such as:
Reviewing and optimizing existing content
Because it takes Google a few weeks or months to crawl new website content, it might be hard for you to analyze your blog posts’ performance immediately after you published it.
However, after a few months, your new blog posts should all be in Google’s SERP, and you’ll now be able to analyze how much traffic each of your web pages and blog posts is bringing in.
With this information, you can update old content or redirect underperforming content as needed to get more traffic.
For example, 1,000-word blogs don’t perform as well as 2,000+ word blogs. If this is the case, you may want to add new updated information to your shorter blogs to revamp and expand them to rank better.
Expanding on successful keywords
If there are certain blogs that are performing well using your desired keyword, for example, you notice your “How to Contest a Speeding Ticket” article is getting a lot of traffic, then write more articles about “How to Get Out of a Speeding Ticket” and other related searches to capitalize in the success of your keyword.
Analyzing and planning for the future
At the end of 90 days, you’ll have a chance to review your initial campaign’s goals and objectives and compare them to your real results.
Did you see improvements in the KPIs chosen at the beginning of your law firm’s SEO plan?
If so, more analysis will be necessary to determine what strategies or tactics got you there. If you didn’t get the results you were hoping for, again, an analysis will be necessary for understanding what went wrong, and how to fix it going forward.
Note: Lawyer SEO is all about incremental optimization — finding and making little changes here and there that add up to make a huge difference.
Sometimes 90 days isn’t enough to achieve your goals, but it’s enough time to try out several ideas to see what works and what doesn’t, and then continue optimizing for the next 90 days.
Learn more
16 SEO optimization tips for law firm websites in 2023
Without getting into the nitty-gritty technical details of SEO, follow these tips for a quick refresh of your website for improved visibility, boosted traffic, and increased lead generation.
1. Position your website for success with a new design and look
If your website looks like it was designed in 1995, then you need to address your law firm’s website before even diving into an SEO strategy.
A clean, modern website is a must. Remember, your website is an extension of your brand and office’s reputation. If it’s clunky and outdated, people will assume your firm is too.
2. Optimize for voice search
“OK Google, find me a car accident lawyer.”
With the increasing use of voice assistants like Siri, Google, and Alexa, optimize your content by targeting conversational, long-tail keywords and answering common questions related to your practice areas.
3. Have a mobile-friendly design
Having an un-mobile-friendly design wasn’t a big deal 10 years ago — now it is. (Somebody tell the US Government to make their websites mobile-friendly, it’s 2023!)
Did you know that 54% of all internet traffic is done on a mobile phone? Yeah, that’s higher than what I originally thought too.
Ever tried to fill out a contact form on a mobile phone? Forgetaboutit! It’s not going to happen, and you can’t expect your visitors to fill out these forms either.
Having a mobile-friendly design has a two-fold benefit:
- It creates a positive user experience: Have ever visited an un-mobile-friendly website? If so, then you know you’re not staying on it very long.
- It’s more SEO-friendly. Mobile-friendliness is a big ranking signal in both Google and Bing’s search algorithms. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, it’s probably never going to rank well.
4. Always be blogging
Was your last blog post published in 2017? If so, you’ve got catching up to do.
As I mentioned before, you need to publish at least four blogs a month, with more being greater.
Don’t have time to write all of that content?
Considering hiring a content studio experienced in legal marketing blog posts. They’ll be able to do all of that competitive keyword research and blog writing for you so you can focus on your clients.
Additionally, new AI tools like ChatGPT make brainstorming keywords, topic ideas, and writing blogs faster and more efficient to help you publish more blogs on a monthly basis.
5. Perform keyword search and competitive research
I already mentioned this so I’ll keep it short — don’t keyword stuff as many words onto your website as possible. It will hurt your rankings.
Instead, blog regularly and run keyword and competitive keyword analysis to make sure you’re using the right words in your H1 heading (the title of your article) and H2 and H3 headings (the subheadings in your article).
Here’s a quick tip: Go to Ubersuggest, type in your competitor’s URL, and see what their monthly traffic is. Additionally, you’ll see which organic keywords they rank for, what PPC keywords they’re paying for, and their top-ranking pages. Then copy their strategy in a better way to outperform and outrank them.
6. Add attorney bio pages for better SEO and visibility in Google searches
Create individual landing pages for each of your attorneys with a short bio explaining who they are, why they got into law, and other personal info to establish trust and authority with your audience.
Additionally, when people search for a lawyer’s name in Google, your law firm’s website should be in the top results, making this a powerful SEO tactic.
7. Get more (good) Google reviews
The more ratings you have on Google, and the higher the ratings, the more likely your law firm is to be recommended to searchers when typing in “lawyer near me.”
However, you cannot bribe or compensate people for leaving positive reviews online, which breaks the American Bar Association’s Rule 7.2 on advertising legal services.
A good place to start is to ask former, happy clients for a review.
8. Upgrade your branding and logo
First of all, does your law firm have a logo?
It doesn’t need to be too fancy, but it does need to look contemporary — not cheesy or outdated.
Many law firm logos are just the firm’s name in a serif font with a gavel or the scales of justice.
If you want to update the logo yourself, there are plenty of free custom logo design websites out there, but I’ll warn you they’ll give you a pretty generic logo.
I’d recommend working with a graphic designer who can find the right typeface and stylings to give your company more production value than your competitors.
9. Make sure your website’s loading time is fast — or lose visitors even faster
If your website takes more than 3 seconds to load, your visitors have already “bounced” off the page.
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 running in WordPress or CMS system
- Bulky codes
- Scrolling banner ads and animations (please, nobody really likes waiting for animations)
- Bad hosting
- Malware, spyware, and viruses from a hacked website
10. Add multiple landing pages for each of your key practice 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 on 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
The more landing pages you have on your website, the longer your visitors will stay on your website.
Additionally, these main landing pages will also stand out better in Google searches when people search for “personal injury lawyer” or “wrongful death lawyer near me.”
11. Consider running PPC ads for an immediate traffic boost
SEO and content marketing are both long-term strategies that aim to get your website and its contents seen in more Google searches.
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!
It’s best to work with a certified PPC company that knows what they’re doing so they can find underused, and lower-priced keywords for you to focus your PPC ads on.
12. Add more videos and images to your website and blog posts
Here’s just another quick SEO tip that people don’t take advantage of — add more photos to your website or blog posts.
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.
13. Use internal linking in your blogs and web pages
When writing blogs, make sure to link to related blog posts on your website to help users navigate your website and improve your website’s SEO.
Generally, the longer people are on your website reading, the more likely they are to reach out to you for help.
14. Use header tags properly in your blog posts
Organize web pages and blog posts using header tags (H1, H2, H3) to create different sections in your content for improved readability and to make it easy for search engines to crawl your content.
15. Leverage email marketing for more referrals
Share your latest blog posts in email marketing campaigns and lead nurturing campaigns to increase visibility and get referrals from your existing clients.
16. Optimize title tags for headlines and rename and update old articles
Did you know many of Google’s top-ranking articles have had their titles changed multiple times?
Sometimes it can be as simple as revamping the article for a new year and changing the article’s name to reflect the new year. Other times it can be rewriting the article’s name to be more intriguing or click-worthy (without being too clickbaity).
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As people begin searching for legal help online, they will discover your website and its blogs to attract them to your website, converting them into new case leads to fuel your business.
See how Kaleidico can help you reach lead generation goals and get the best cases.