Legal SEO Success: 5 Powerful Strategies That Actually Work

Intro

If you provide legal services, then you need a website. But you probably already knew that. Chances are, you already have a website. You just can’t get any worthwhile clicks to it. People may visit, hang out for a bit, and then return to the SERPs page to look for more.

For your law firm’s SEO, that’s bad.

It’s telling the search engines that your site doesn’t have anything valuable to show to the users and that’s why they are not staying for longer. Search engines do not like such sites and drop their rankings in the SERPs for future queries.

But you aren’t the only one who’s suffering.

You’ve got a whole community of lawyers in the same boat. According to a Reboot 2020 study, law firm websites all over the internet suffer from some serious issues that are holding each of them back. 73% of websites reviewed in the study did not have any internal linking and 67% of sites were working with unoptimized keywords.

As an SEO and marketing person, I’m writing this guide to tell you how you can fix these issues. Let’s start with the machine-learning bot that helps Google rank your website, and whose favors you should be vying for through an excellent, high-quality, SEO-optimized website.

Google’s RankBrain bot

RankBrain is an AI algorithm developed by Google, which helps the search engine sort the results on the SERPs, plus enables Google to understand and process the search queries with more depth and context.

For example, if a user is looking for ‘work injury lawyers in Pennsylvania’ and another one about ‘work comp lawyers in PA’, RankBrain has the brains to know that both users are probably looking for the same thing. So, the results it’ll give to SERPs won’t be too different from each other.

It can also instantly tweak the search algorithms on the go. So if it shows you certain web pages for a given query and you don’t click on the top 3 or 5 or go to them and then return quickly and then spend more time on result #7, it’ll remember what happened and boost up #7 result a few positions higher on SERPs for the next time that same (or similar) query is given.

Pretty neat, right?

Sure, if you are the #7 result. Because people on #3 or #5 aren’t going to be happy.

But RankBrain, and by extension, Google, doesn’t care if you and I are happy. They are more concerned about users and searchers. Are they happy? Did they find what they were looking for? Because if they didn’t on your page, your page is going to lose its ranking.

So how do you make sure your site has EVERYTHING that your potential clients may be looking for? Here are 5 things you can do.

Top 5 strategies that’ll work for lawyer SEO

1. Increase your brand awareness

When people look for legal help, they usually start with places like attorney directories or lawyer review websites. After their initial research, they go to Google for the next steps.

If your law firm brand has an active presence on all those supportive directories and websites, having a good SERP ranking will ensure that when people see your name on the results page, they’ll recognize you and click on your website.

These are a few things you can do to increase your brand awareness online:

• Create a Google Business Profile so you also show up on places like Google Maps. There, you can add your law firm logo to give a professional face to the brand, add essential info about your services, including work hours, and other information to create a rich online listing.
• List yourself on lawyer review websites such as Avvo, FindLaw, and LegalMatch. Positive ratings there might even land clients directly to your website if they feel sufficiently impressed. In any case, a strong presence there will boost your online visibility incredibly.
• Maintain an active presence on social media, too. You can do that by collaborating with other local lawyers on community outreach initiatives or just answering questions in your comment section can be enough to help you stick in people’s minds when they are looking for legal help.

Increased brand awareness means more qualified click-throughs with a high intent for conversion.

2. Create in-depth content that covers multiple-tier keywords

UI and design are important factors to consider in webpage optimization but they perform a supportive role when it comes to actual conversions. Nice graphics might lure people in but if your content is all fluff, disorganized, or difficult to understand, users won’t hang around.

To create high-quality content for your law firm website, focus on details. For example, while lawyers usually remember to create Practice Area pages where they talk about your specialties, you can also create location pages to highlight geographical areas that you cover, like this law firm has done.

Caption: A local law firm uses its location pages to stand out

In your blogs, cover in-depth topics instead of short, 500-word pieces where you can cover a topic more comprehensively and answer all the related questions a client may have. This will allow you to create a highly relevant content piece, targeting a wide variety of keywords, ensuring you have everything from main to secondary and third-tier related keywords all covered in a single topic.

RankBrain loves such content and usually ranks these high-quality pieces for several closely related keywords.

Also, as a lawyer, you may want to highlight your achievements and that’s cool. But your focus should be on providing information to the users. Use your blog, landing pages, service pages, and other areas on the website to tell potential clients what you can do for them.

3. Push your content above the fold

Above the Fold was prime real estate for any website a few years ago. We all wanted all of our main content to be there. But as people have developed banner blindness (ignoring the banners on top of a web page and scrolling straight down) and as mobile has replaced desktop viewing, above-the-fold obsession does not hold the same power.

That said, you still can’t ignore this space. People usually look to the top third of the page for all critical business details like the site name, URL, business logo, and the main call-to-action button.

What you can do to make this space work for you even more is add your contact details there too so high-intent potential clients can immediately call you as soon as they land on the website.

4. Rethink your keyword research and prioritize medium-tail keywords

Everyone wants to attack long-tail keywords because they are an opportunity to create in-depth and niche content, without fighting for high-competition keywords. But it can quickly become limiting.

But medium-tail keywords, on the other hand, give you more volume than niche long phrases. For example, if you focus on ‘work comp lawyers Pennsylvania’, you get a ton of related keywords to optimize for.

Image: Answer The Public

What does it mean? You can create and optimize content that covers many of them, and in return, RankBrain will give you a boost on SERPs when it sees you have information on many related topics that people are looking for.

Granted, creating such content can be time-consuming and require much effort, but it is better to write a 2000-word in-depth guide as an expert than churn low-quality 500-word fluff pieces that don’t help you, the searchers, or the search engine.

5. Pack your title tag and description tag with emotion

Copywriters and advertisers have known for a while now that emotional language impacts conversion rates. So it’s time to enrich your meta tags with action-packed words that inspire and excite.

A title heading ‘5 SEO Strategies for Law Firms’ may convey accurate information with brevity, but it lacks that oomph that inspires clicks and attracts eyeballs. So how do you make it better?

“Legal SEO Success: 5 Powerful Strategies That Actually Work”

On AIOSEO, the headline analyzer tool gives it a fantastic rating.

Image: AIOSEO

A few things that this headline has going for it include having a number in the title. Searchers love seeing numbers and prefer SERP results that have numbers, percentages, or statistics in the title.

The heading also has emotional words (powerful), a positive sentiment, the main keyword, plus the perfect word count. It also is a list that, again, searchers love because it aids in skimming through the article and breaks down large chunks of text into digestible bites.

For the description tag, repeat the process. Emotional language, put in some relevant numbers, remember to add your keyword and be direct. It’s a small space so don’t be flowery. Tell searchers that you mean business and hook them in.

Will this be enough?

When you are looking for SEO success? Not by a long shot. But it’s somewhat advanced stuff which means your basics are good and now you can do more.

Isn’t that exciting?

You can now begin with things like internal linking, organic link building, technical SEO, and much more. Remember that consistency is key with SEO. what you do today, you must be willing to do tomorrow, the day after, and the day after that. You also need to be constantly learning and updating yourself, pivoting at a hat’s drop so you don’t lose all the hard-earned links and SERP rankings.