Law Firm Seo - Strategies

Law Firm Seo

We receive a lot of questions from legal professionals asking what they can do to increase their visibility in search engines. The truth is, there are a multitude of techniques that can be implemented to grow your law firm's web foot print. However, not all of these methods and strategies are worth their potential risks. Here is a brief outline of how to go about getting started with a law firm SEO campaign.

A Place To Drive Visitors

The first thing that you need is a location to drive search engine users. Perhaps you have an established law firm website. Perhaps you are using a legal blog. No matter which direction you go, you need a "base of operations" to which to drive traffic and prospective clients.

Generally speaking, I recommend implementing a blog solution. From a monetary investment standpoint, executing a legal blog can be very cost effective and almost free. On the other hand, effective blogging requires an investment of time. However, when it comes to effectiveness and efficiency, time spent on blogging is some of the best marketing time in which a legal professional can invest.

Once you have a place to drive visitors, the next step is building the authority of that location.

Keywords

As you probably know by know, a large portion of the Internet is made up of words. Internet users, for the most part, use words to find what they are looking for online. That means you need to discover which words Internet users are likely to use when searching for the services you offer. This is commonly referred to as keyword discovery.

There are three predominant considerations for keyword discovery: relevance, search volume, and competition. Relevance is a measure of how relevant the search term is for your practice. For example, the phrase "Chicago injury lawyer" is more relevant to a Chicago injury law firm than the the terms "injury lawyer" or "lawyer". Search volume is a measure of the number of people using that term to perform searches in search engines. Finally, competition is a measure of the difficulty of gaining a top position for a particular term within a search engine.

With all of the tools available for performing keyword research, one of the most simple methods remains one of the best, brainstorming. Start thinking about how you might try to find yourself online. Try to think like one of your prospective clients. Avoid using industry jargon or technical terms with which your clients may not be familiar. On the other hand, if you service a sophisticated client, then using technical terms might make sense. Always try to think like your client.

Once you have brainstormed a list of between 20 and 50 keywords, begin to organize these terms based on relevance, search volume, and competition.

On-Page Optimization

The next step in executing a law firm SEO campaign is on-page optimization. This is just another way of saying, use your best keywords on your website or blog. Here are the most important places to include your target keywords:

• Title tags
• Heading tags
• Internal link anchor text
• Bolded text
• Regular text
• Image alt attributes

Don't go crazy trying to get all of your keywords on any particular page. Try to limit the number of keywords you target on a particular page to 3 or less. Also, don't try to excessively repeat your target keywords on your pages. Write as you would naturally. Just be mindful to use your target keywords where appropriate.

Off-Page Optimization

This is where "the magic happens". It's important to understand how search engines organize the web. In a nutshell, search engines create a "copy" of the entire Internet in their index. They identify what they think each web page is about, and then order them based on a mathematical formula for a particular search phrase. Search engines use many signals to perform this ordering. One of the strongest signals is the number of inbound links that a particular web page has. Inbound links are the links that point TO a website (as opposed to outbound links which point away from a website). In other words, inbound links are like votes for a particular website however, not all link votes are created equally.

Off-page optimization includes all of the ways that webmasters can use to influence the number of inbound links that a website has pointing to it. This is the real essence of law firm SEO.

Content

Having a quality content strategy in place is another core component of a successful law firm SEO campaign. Content is like fuel for search engines. If your law firm website or blog lacks frequent, quality, and unique content, you will be unlikely to have success in search engines. Generally speaking, the more content the better. However, don't add content for content's sake. As a general guideline, you should aim to add 2-3 new pieces of content to your website or blog per week.

Gyi Tsakalakis is a legal web strategist with AttorneySync.

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