SEO for Law Firms: How to Get More Clients in 2024
Last update: 26 August 2024 at 09:58 am
4.50/5Is it easy for people to find your business on the Internet? If you don’t know the answer, go to Google and try different searches. Use your business name and try typing in some of your service names like “divorce lawyers near me”. Does your law firm come up? If so, where? If it’s not in the first three results, then this SEO for Law Firms guide is perfect for you.
In it, we cover the various reasons why your firm needs to invest time and resources into optimizing your site to rank in Google. We also explain how you or someone on your team can do it.
Let’s get started!
What Is SEO for Law Firms?
Law firm SEO refers to the process of optimizing a legal service provider’s website to improve its ranking – and visibility – in search engines. This type of marketing tactic makes it easier for potential clients to find your firm, visit your website, and convert into paying clients.
It’s important to understand that SEO takes time. As you begin to implement best practices, you will slowly see more traffic coming to your site, but it won’t be until after 6 monthsof effort that you will really see a difference. And why is that? In addition to the time spent creating and optimizing content, Google still needs to crawl, index, and rank your site. They need to see that the signals you are sending are consistent and valuable to the end user: potential customers.
Do Law Firms Need SEO? – SEO Benefits for Your Law Firm
Aside from the fact that this is virtually free marketing (you don’t have to pay Google or any other search engine to rank in their search results), it comes with several benefits that will help your law firm:
First, it gives you the opportunity to grow your business by attracting more qualified visitors and converting them into clients. According to the Legal Trends Report, the top ways clients search for law firms are through the firm’s website, search engines, and online reviews. If you don’t have any of these, how do you expect to attract new clients?
It also helps you rank among the first results for various keywords, increasing the chances that people will click on your site and browse through your content. Remember, the higher you rank, the better. Only 2-3% of searchers scroll through the second page of Google results.
And it helps users find useful information in a matter of seconds. SEO helps position your brand in Google and share quick bites of insights that answer people’s most common questions. Plus, the map snippet shares your address, phone number, website, and reviews.
What are you waiting for to get started with SEO for your law firm?
SEO Marketing for Law Firms
Let’s take a look at the actions that will help your site increase visibility and attract more organic traffic.
Work with the E-E-A-T Approach
Before you get started, you need to familiarize yourself with the E-E-A-T approach. It basically states that Google prioritizes, in its rankings, those sites that demonstrate:
- Experience
- Expertise
- Authoritativeness
- Trustworthiness
There are many different ways to do this. For example:
Add an accomplishments page where you can showcase case studies, awards, and more.
Provide information about your lawyers. Be sure to include a short bio, links to their LinkedIn profiles, and even a picture.
Keep your website content accurate and up to date.
Have an About page that clearly states who your law firm is and the various reasons why people should trust you.
Include the author of any blog posts you share.
Add links (both internal and external) to each post.
Analyze your Backlinks and Look for More
Your law firm probably already has a website, so you need to start your SEO efforts by performing an SEO audit. This will help you understand how many backlinks you have. Or, how many websites have included a link to yours.
To perform the audit, you can use tools like Ahref or Semrush. Both will give you a complete profile including insights into referring page, domain authority, domain traffic, anchor text, destination URL and more. They also allow you to compare your profile to your main competitors.
Once you have completed this first step, you will want to design and execute actions that will help you earn more backlinks. Some ideas are:
Publish press releases
You can do this around trending cases or news related to your own law firm. For example, many lawyers took advantage of the Johnny Depp and Amber divorce case. It was big in the news, and law firms felt the urge to share insights, comments, and recommendations.
Create Google Alerts for topics related to your law firm’s services
Stay on top of current events. If appropriate, create content around them and distribute it to specialized sites.
To set up these alerts, follow these quick steps:
- Go to Google Alerts.
- Enter the topic you want to be alerted about. For example: tech + law.
- Click Create Alert.
- To edit it, just click the pencil icon and specify how often you want to be alerted (daily, weekly, as it happens), sources, languages, region, and where you want it delivered.
Use publications, interviews, and podcasts to your advantage
As a lawyer, you have many opportunities to share your knowledge and thoughts. Make sure each of them includes a link back to your site.
Now more than ever, you should be looking to have your attorneys interviewed by specialized podcasts or YouTube creators. This will help you gain exposure, attract new leads, and earn backlinks quickly and easily.
Some great podcast options include
- Lawyer 2 Lawyer
- Strict Review
- Advisory Opinions
- Serial
- The National Security Law Podcast
Of course, you need to choose those that cover your areas of specialization.
Guest blog
Contact other sites that cover legal topics and offer to write a blog post for them. This way they get fresh, valuable content and you get a backlink from a reputable site.
To identify sites that accept guest blogging, you can
- Use your backlink audit and pay close attention to the ones your competitors have. Manually contact each site that mentions them and offer to guest blog for them. Be sure to share some content ideas.
- Do a Google search for “niche+blogs” to find relevant sites that publish content that you can contribute to. Again, contact them and offer to guest blog for them.
- Use tools like Ahref to identify sites that might accept a post from you.
Get your business listed in local rankings and directories
Not only will this help get your law firm in front of more people, but it will also help you earn a backlink. Try directories such as:
- Best Law Firms
- Avvo
- Justia
- FindLaw
- Check for others in your area.
Perform Keyword Research
The first thing you need to do when you start optimizing your website is to identify the keywords you want to rank for. In other words, the words that users type into Google to find businesses like yours and that you use in your website and content to rank in search engines.
There are several ways to conduct keyword research. Whatever you choose, just make sure you end up choosing keywords that have a search volume of 70 and a low difficulty. Usually this means keywords that consist of more than 2 words (long tail keywords).
Look for related keywords
Try using tools like Ahref Keyword Explorer. You can enter a seed keyword and the system will give you other keywords that people are using on Google. It includes insights such as keyword difficulty, volume, domain authority, and more.
Pay attention to other law firm website keywords
Using the same tool, go to Site Explorer and analyze other important law firm websites. Knowing what keywords they rank for will give you a great foundation for adding new keywords to your list.
Again, you want to pay close attention to keyword difficulty, traffic potential, and search volume. These three indicators will help you understand whether or not you can use that particular keyword.
We also recommend that you spend some time exploring Ahref’s Content Gap feature. It will help you identify which specific keywords your competitors are ranking for in the first search result.
Use Google for more ideas
You can also turn to Google for more keyword ideas. Just type in a keyword and scroll up to the People Also Ask snippet. These results will help you understand what your potential users are searching for on Google.
Optimize for Google Map Pack
Today, it is common for users to search for something specific to a location. Think about how many times you have turned to Google to find a restaurant or service provider in your area. It’s up to you to get your website ranked for these searches and to take advantage of Google Maps and Google Local Search.
How do you do it?
- You need a Google My Business profile, which we will cover later in this blog post.
- You need to add your business to local directories and local listings. We have a special section on this as well.
- You want to make sure your website is filled with the right information. It’s imperative that you list all the services your law firm offers and the different locations you’re in.
With that in mind, you need to:
- Have a contact page where you list all of your locations, you share the specific address, phone number and email.
- Include your locations in the footer of your website. You can simply list the region, city or state.
- Create subpages for each specific location and list your attorneys in practice.
Claim and Optimize your Google My Business Profile
This step, while important, will only take 5 minutes of your time. Plus, it’s free, easy, and will come with great benefits, including
- Helps your law firm get discovered on Google by users who are actively searching for legal services.
- Allows you to manage what information is displayed about your law firm: address, phone number, images, services, and more.
- Helps you build trust by displaying comments and reviews from your clients.
With that in mind, please follow these steps to claim your Google My Business profile.
- Go to Google My Business.
- Enter your business name.
- Select your business type.
- Enter your location. You can add multiple locations if necessary.
- Add your contact information.
- Verify your business. Google will send you a code for a physical location; if you have it, you will need to enter it to verify your business.
Once all of this is done, you will need to optimize your profile:
- Include your business hours.
- Add a complete description of your business. Add relevant local keywords.
- List the legal services you provide.
- Add relevant images of your attorneys and law firm.
- Allow reviews and comments.
- Respond to all reviews and comments you receive within hours of receiving them.
- Look for more reviews.
Make sure all the information you share is relevant, accurate, and answers your potential clients’ questions.
Get Listed on Local Citation Directories
Earning online mentions of your brand will help you increase your backlinks, improve your search engine rankings, and drive more organic traffic to your website.
In other words, adding your name to local citations and directories will make it easier for your law firm to show up in searches like: “divorce lawyers near me,” “best law firm near me,” or “lawyers near me.
There are many different ways to add your law firm to citations and business directories:
- Work with data aggregators (such as Express Update, Neustar Localeze, or Factual) to automatically submit your NAP (name, address, phone) to many sites.
- Submit your NAP information to relevant directories and business listings in the country (Apple Maps, Yelp, Yellow Pages, BBB, Foursquare).
- Do a quick Google search with keywords like “law firms + area,” “law firms USA,” “best legal services + area,” and see what directories and listings come up. Contact them manually and submit your information.
- Submit your NAP information to Avvo, Lawyer.com, FinLaw, Justia, Hg.org, LegalZoom, Lawlink, and others.
Create and Optimize Content
All of the steps above will help you rank, but if you really want your firm to outrank other law firm websites, you need to have a content creation strategy and on-page optimization process in place.
- Use the keywords you found in the keyword research to create content pieces (blogs, analysis, videos, case studies, white books, etc.) and publish them on your website.
- Work with a content calendar that outlines what content you will publish, when, who is responsible, keywords, and any other details that will help you stay on track.
- Work around content hubs to maximize your authority, relevance, and exposure.
- Remember that you are writing content for people with specific needs. So make sure you answer their questions, share insights that will help them, and write in an easy-to-read, easy-to-understand style.
- Follow our ultimate on-page SEO checklist to carefully optimize every piece of content you publish. This includes including your keywords:
- Page title
- Subheadings
- Image descriptions
- Meta tags
- Meta Description
- First paragraph
- Page Content
- URL
Technical SEO for Law Firms
You also need to make sure your website is performing well. This means that:
- Search engines can crawl and index your site.
- You have a logical, user-friendly site architecture.
- Submitting your sitemap to Google and other search engines.
- There is no duplicate content on your site.
- Site speed is under 3 seconds for both mobile and desktop.
- Your site is responsive and optimized for mobile devices.
- You optimize the core web vitals.
- You are fixing broken links and pages.
To learn more about how to implement this, please read our Ultimate Guide to Technical SEO Services.
Monitor and Analyze Results
As lawyers, you understand the importance of tracking and analyzing results. The same is true in marketing and especially in SEO. You need to keep a close eye on metrics that will help you understand whether or not the actions you are taking are helping you get closer to your SEO goals. That way, you can change what you are doing or just keep on doing it.
Tools like Ahref and Semrush can help you find these metrics (keyword ranking, backlinks, etc.), and Google will supplement them with performance data points. These include searches, users who viewed your Google My Business profile, directions, calls, website clicks, and more.
It’s important to monitor metrics on a monthly basis and analyze performance over time.
Law Firm SEO Services: Who to Work With?
If you have reached this point, you are probably considering implementing SEO for your law firm. Congratulations, you’ve taken the first step toward improving your visibility and attracting new clients.
You have two options for SEO. You can work with an SEO agency or you can hire an SEO expert to do it for you. Let’s look at the benefits and challenges of each.
Law Firm SEO Expert
SEO for law firms can be handled by hiring an expert and adding them to your team. Make sure that this person has the knowledge and experience to work with:
- Law firm websites
- Understands who your users are
- Technical SEO
- On-page SEO
- Off-Page SEO
- Keyword Research
- Link Building Strategies
- Quality content creation
- And much more.
The main benefit of having this person on your team is that you have complete control over how they spend their time, and full insight into what they do, how they do it, and the impact it has. However, you need to keep in mind that you are adding an additional cost to your payroll, plus you will need to spend money on tools, software, and more.
Law Firm SEO Agency
The other option is to hire an SEO agency to design, implement, track, and adjust your strategy. This will definitely help you a lot as you would have a team of experienced professionals helping you rank for different search queries, optimizing your website, and putting in place different actions to achieve your goals.
With an agency, you have access to a full team of experts, a set of tools and specialized software, and more. However, you need to keep in mind that they also work with other clients. So you have little control over how they spend their time or when they work on your site.
If you choose this option, be sure to look for agencies that have experience working with law firm websites.
How Much Does SEO Cost for Law Firms?
The cost of SEO varies depending on several factors, including who you work with, the size of your project, your goals, how competitive it is to rank, and more. However, most law firms spend somewhere between $2,000 and $5,000 per month.
Conclusion: Is Law Firm Search Engine Optimization Worth It?
The short answer is yes! Investing time, budget and resources in SEO is well worth it for law firms. Especially if you want to increase your client base.
Every SEO action you put in place:
- Brings you one step closer to attracting more people to your website.
- Helps you increase your brand visibility and awareness.
- Is designed to increase your click-through rate and conversion rates.
- Positions your firm and attorneys as thought leaders.
Don’t waste another minute and start planning how you’re going to drive these efforts at your law firm.
