The legal field is an extremely competitive one to work in, right from securing a place at law school to landing clients once you’ve qualified. As such, once your law firm is up and running it’s crucial to think carefully about your marketing strategy. If you don’t, you will find it much harder to be successful. These days there are a multitude of different tactics and techniques you can employ to attract more clients, and the right ones for you will depend on a number of factors. These include the personality of your brand, your area of expertise, and your target market.
Therefore, the first step should be choosing the type of clients you want to focus your marketing efforts on. Once you have that figured out, you’ll be able to determine factors such as what sort of tone to strike with your adverts and where to place them. Regardless of who you’re trying to attract though, law firm seo should be a key part of your marketing strategy.
An Overview Of SEO
Let’s start with the basics. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and essentially relates to how easy it is for people to find your company online. At first glance it can seem like an overly complex field for lawyers who are not savvy in technology and digital marketing to navigate, but luckily there are lots of simple tips you can use to harness its power.
SEO tactics are designed to help ensure that your law firm shows up on the first page of Google (or whichever search engine people use) when someone searches a keyword that’s relevant to your business. Put this way, it’s easy to see why it’s important. The vast majority of people never click past the first page of search results, so if your company isn’t on there, then you’re missing out on a lot of potential business.
Introducing Local SEO
So now that you know what SEO is, let’s focus in on local SEO. This helps to increase a company’s visibility in local search results specifically. An example of this is when someone searches for a phrase such as ‘coffee near me’, ‘movie theater’ or ‘Taiwanese restaurant’. In these cases, Google will tailor the results to make them relevant to the location that the person is searching from. That’s why you often get different results when looking something up on your home computer compared to the one in your office.
Focusing on local SEO in addition to the more general kind widens your marketing net, because you’ll ensure that potential clients near you are directed to your firm when they conduct a relevant search. Local SEO for lawyers as a strategy can therefore be very effective because it is an industry in which location matters.
What Advantages Can Lawyers Get From Using SEO?
SEO is not something that’s reserved only for tech firms – lawyers can get huge benefits from using it. The most notable advantage is that it drives more traffic to your website organically. That means more potential clients visiting your website, finding out about what you have to offer, and ultimately choosing to hire you to work on their case if they like what they see. This is important, because although you can pay for adverts on Google and other sites, many people specifically choose not to click on them as they don’t necessary trust what they say.
Good SEO will also increase awareness of your brand. That’s very helpful because even if people aren’t looking for a lawyer right now, if they need one in the future, they’re more likely to be drawn to a firm that they’ve already heard of. The best part about all of this is that you can improve your SEO for free, so it’s also a much more cost-effective strategy than using paid ads.
Ways To Improve SEO
It’s time to get into the nitty gritty of how you can actually boost your SEO in order to gain these advantages. One of the most straightforward ways to do this is to reevaluate your website and ensure that you are providing the sort of content that potential clients genuinely want or find useful. In terms of the legal field, that could be through a blog that covers relevant topics in the law, or an FAQ page which answers common questions people have about the sorts of issues your company deals with. Not only is this helpful to the public, but it also demonstrates your firm’s knowledge and expertise in your field. This in turn raises your credibility and the trust people have in your company – and should ultimately persuade more clients to work with you.
The next top tip is to make sure that your website is accurate and easy to navigate. The idea is to not only get people to click on your page in the first place, but to then stay on your site for as long as possible (plus return frequently). In line with this, you need to optimize your website for cellphones and other mobile devices, because these days ever greater numbers of people use these as their primary way of accessing the internet. Finally, you also want to check that the pages are quick to load, because if it takes too long people will simply go back to Google and try a different link.
Don’t worry if this all sounds a little overwhelming. You can take it one step at a time and make improvements slowly. Alternatively, you could always hire a professional agency to assist you with everything related to SEO. They can audit your current website to work out exactly what optimizations are needed and then put them into place. For instance, this could include readability, formatting, broken links, URLs, images and meta descriptions.
Another factor they can help with is identifying the top keywords for your particular field of law, and then figuring out how to ensure that you rank highly for each and every one of them. An agency can even work on generating appropriate and authoritative backlinks to your firm’s website, which is another way to boost your ranking on Google.
