SEO Content for a Law Firm: Why Is It Important?
Boosting your law firm’s online presence through the use of tried-and-tested search engine optimization (SEO) strategies is at the heart of marketing efforts for 2022. These strategies range from providing content that promotes the services and expertise of your firm to technical tasks such as ensuring the structure and coding of your website are properly optimized.
If you’re operating in a highly competitive marketplace like the legal field, SEO will be an important element of your overall marketing strategy. However, there are hurdles to achieving the best result. The failure to boost search engine results may frustrate law firms that hire external digital marketing services with no expertise in legal marketing.
In order to save money, several law firms delegate basic marketing and SEO efforts to paralegals. While the temptation to keep everything in-house is understandable, this strategy is bound to fail. Firstly, there may be a scarcity of competent manpower who are strong at local SEO, content writing, link building, and lawyer marketing if you try to handle SEO in-house. All of these abilities are unusually hard to come by in a single person. Hence, you should not expect paralegals to expertly handle SEO and marketing.
Hiring a professional law firm marketing agency gives your company access to a wealth of highly talented and qualified marketing specialists who will all work together to make your goals a reality. Such marketing services cover a wide range of expertise, from paid ads (i.e., Google ads, Facebook ads, etc.) to complicated conversion rate trials. With so many areas of concentration to keep track of, expecting your paralegals to provide real-world results with little time and skill is unrealistic.
At Advantage Attorney, we have legal industry specialists uniquely qualified to address your marketing and technological concerns. We understand what it takes to build your law firm and help you thrive in your practice area. Advantage Attorney was founded by legal professionals like you in a law office!
Our team has experience working as office managers, paralegals, and attorneys in a number of practice areas, and has a strong grasp of how law firms operate and what has to be done to help them succeed. We have the knowledge and background to create a suitable marketing plan that will work for you. Schedule a call with us today!
What Is Law Firm SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of attracting more visits to a law firm website by raising the website’s rank in search engine results pages – the links that appear when you type anything into Google, Bing, or another search engine.
In other words, if your law firm ranks towards the top of search engine results, particularly on the first page, you will receive more traffic to your website. Ads that appear in search results are not included in SEO. Visitors that click on your link in the organic results will contact you to learn more about your legal service.
The biggest issue when performing SEO for law firms is figuring out how to bring your law firm to the top of the organic search results. Though there are many service providers offering law firm SEO, there really are no surefire plans or guarantees that you will rank at the number one slot of the organic search results.
Fortunately, there are several strategies for increasing your chances of landing on the first page of search results. It’s easy to break through the market noise and attract the attention of prospects if you grasp the basic elements search engines use when determining which websites provide the greatest value to internet users.
There are three types of factors that contribute to law firm SEO ranking:
- Content
- Backlinks and off-page citations
- Technical SEO
What Is “Content”?
Content refers to your law firm’s website information, library or resources, including the words and images that appear on each page. Your website’s user experience and search engine rankings both benefit from high-quality content, which will be more likely if you satisfy your readers’ purpose.
What are “Backlinks” and “Off-Page Citations”?
It is your law firm’s internet reputation, integrity, and authority compared to other law firms. This is largely influenced by the volume of external website domains and pages directing visitors to your website.
What is “Technical SEO”?
In the process of Google determining your website’s ranking on their search engine, the user experience is an important ranking factor. This means that you should consider aspects such as page speed, title tags, and site structure in the long term to optimize the results for your firm.
Law Firm SEO Content 2022: How Should They Look Like This Year?
A technically optimized website provides a better user and search engine experience. Here are a few things to consider when planning your law firm website:
Faster Loading Speed Of Your Law Firm Website
An important SEO ranking factor is the speed with which your law firm website loads. Slow-loading websites can annoy visitors and ruin their browsing experience.
It may also cause them to leave your website, resulting in the loss of a prospective client. This is particularly true for mobile device users since internet speed could fluctuate, resulting in longer loading times for your website if it is heavy.
In fact, page loading time is so critical that even a 0.1-second increase can boost page visits. As such, increasing your site’s loading speed is a major element of the SEO services provided by law firm SEO agencies.
Google recognizes the significance of page speed performance in the browsing experience, and this is why the Core Web Vitals update is being rolled out. This update emphasizes the need of optimizing your site for three Core Web Vitals, which are as follows:
- First Input Delay (FID)
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
To boost your chances of ranking highly in search results, make sure your website meets these requirements. If your website performs poorly, it may lose the opportunity to rank higher in a relevant Google search.
Minifying CSS, JavaScript, and HTML (optimize code by eliminating spaces, commas, and other unnecessary characters) and compressing images are other ways to increase your site’s loading time. For this technical process, it would perhaps be best to hire an SEO agency to help. A small misstep in code could stop your law firm website from working.
Robots.txt Files
Text file webmasters create robots.txt files that direct search engine robots to crawl your law firm website. They guide robots on which web pages to crawl and which not to crawl in order to prevent overwhelming your website with requests.
They prohibit search engines from accessing particular portions of your website, eliminate duplicate content, and provide useful tips on how search engine robots can explore your law firm website most effectively. Crawling too many pages has a detrimental impact on your Search Engine Results Page (SERP) ranking. When you optimize your lawyer technical SEO, you ask Google to crawl just the most relevant pages.
Optimized For Mobile Devices
Mobile devices currently account for around 51% of all web traffic. Their screens, however, are much smaller. As a result, the sizes of all site elements must be adjusted to accommodate such screens. This must be done to improve your law firm website’s overall browsing experience.
You should use the mobile-first design strategy to ensure that your law firm website is mobile-friendly. When you start creating a website for your law firm, you should choose a responsive theme.
Responsive web design utilizes responsive web elements that scale themselves according to the screen size. In this way, you can ensure that your site looks its best on whatever screen size.
However, user experience isn’t the only reason you should create mobile-friendly websites. Google is releasing its mobile-first indexing update, which claims that websites that load and look better on mobile devices will rank highly in search results pages than those that don’t.
The same principles of attorney SEO apply here. Because mobile devices have smaller screens and are mostly used in vertical mode, the layout and architecture of your website should be taken into account. Avoiding pop-ups is advisable because they do not translate well and adhere to standard SEO best practices.
No Dead Links
When people click on a dead or broken link, they are sent to an empty or nonexistent external webpage. Because they hinder the flow of link equity throughout your law firm website, 404 error pages cause a negative user experience and undermine SEO efforts.
There are various free web tools for checking for dead links, with Google Analytics rating best. External or internal dead links can be corrected by updating or eliminating them completely.
No Content Duplication
Duplicated content hurts technical SEO attorneys because this confuses Google and pushes search engines to decide which one of the identical pages should rank in their results. Most of the time, the original page will not be picked as the top search result. You must identify the “correct” version and send the content back to the original page to eliminate duplicate content.
Organized Law Firm Website
Websites with higher Google rankings have flat, orderly structures. To put it another way, their pages are only a few links apart. Flat structures have consistent URL structures and allow search engines to crawl all of a website’s pages.
Imagine a clear, hierarchical tree structure to see the architecture of your website. Experienced back-end and front-end developers can assist you with optimizing and organizing your legal website in order to achieve this type of structure.
Local SEO
SEO is an essential component of law firm SEO because law firms are companies that serve a particular practice area or city. This type of SEO enables you to list a law firm in local search results and can help you gain more visibility on search engines such as Google.
You can appear in local search results such as Google Maps listings, Knowledge Graphs, and others.
If you’re interested in improving your website’s local SEO, here are some tips:
Claim Your Listing On Google My Business (GMB)
Nothing beats Google My Business (GMB) when it comes to local SEO. In reality, it’s a critical component of local SEO and it can help you get significant visibility in local searches.
As a result, it is vital that you claim your GMB listing and fill out any necessary details about your legal practice. This information contains your law firm’s name, phone number, address, business hours, and so on.
This is necessary because these are the information that will drive visitors to your website and provide you the opportunity to attract clients. In fact, between 2017 and 2019, the number of “where to buy” and “near me” searches increased by 200%.
Listing On Bing Places
Bing Places for Business, like Google My Business, is for local business searches on the Bing search engine. If you want to increase the visibility of your law firm on search engines, you should also consider acquiring a Bing Places listing.
You’ll need to claim your Bing Places listing, just as you would with GMB, and then complete the profile by adding essential information. Following that, you will be prompted to validate the listing using a PIN.
Your Bing Places listings, like GMB, will appear on the right side of Bing’s search results page and will help bring traffic and potential clients to your website.
Citations
Having citations can help you improve your site’s visibility in local searches, as much as getting backlinks and brand mentions can help you improve your site’s visibility in off-page SEO. Thus, it is one of the most effective methods of increasing your site’s local search rankings.
Legal directories are the most effective locations to obtain citations. When you get your business included in such directories, people will have an easier time finding your law office.
There is, however, one catch.
You shouldn’t submit your firm’s information to every legal directory you can find. You should instead undertake extensive background research on each of the directories in order to gauge their reputation. After all, being featured in a lousy directory may have a negative impact on your business brand.
Maintain Consistency In NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number)
The name, address, and phone numbers of your law firm are crucial since they are the means through which people can contact you.
So, you need to make sure that this information is all correct and consistent in all the places where it’s mentioned. This covers social media platforms, directories, legal websites, and even the Google My Business (GMB) listing.
The reason for this is that inconsistent information can undermine your law firm’s credibility, causing search engines to favor competing law firms over yours. To avoid this, keep your NAP information up to date everywhere.
Improve Your Law Firm’s SEO. Now Is The Time To Contact Us!
In choosing Advantage Attorney, you’re partnering with legal experts who are committed to helping small law firms and solo practitioners like you succeed.
You can rely on our legal marketing specialists and tech experts to ensure that your law firm is found by the right clients and that your legal team works effectively through quick and secure digital workstations and cloud-based solutions.
Because we’ll take care of all of your law firm’s marketing and technological needs, you can devote your time and energy to what you do best: helping your clients. Contact us now to know more on how to start your law firm SEO!
