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In today’s digital age, having a strong online presence is crucial for any business, and law firms are no exception. The importance of SEO for law firm cannot be overstated, as it plays a vital role in enhancing the quality and quantity of traffic to a law firm’s website. With the sharp increase in online searches for legal services, particularly in areas like personal injury, achieving high Google rankings is essential. This not only helps in attracting potential clients who primarily rely on search engines to find legal representation but also taps into the considerable revenue potential from organic traffic.
What is Law Firm SEO?
Law firm search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of enhancing the quality and quantity of traffic to a law firm’s website from search engines. An important SEO ranking factor includes various elements that influence how Google ranks websites, such as user experience (UX), page speed, and backlinks. Unlike direct traffic or paid channels like Google Ads, SEO traffic is organic, meaning it comes from unpaid search results. A well-executed SEO strategy can significantly boost a law firm’s online visibility, driving more organic traffic and ultimately leading to more signed cases. By optimizing their website for search engines, law firms can ensure they appear prominently in search engine results pages (SERPs), making it easier for potential clients to find them.
Why Law Firms Need SEO
In today’s digital age, having a strong online presence is crucial for law firms. Millions of people search for legal services and information on Google every month, and a law firm’s website must be optimized to rank highly in search engine results pages (SERPs). The higher a law firm ranks in organic search results, the more exposure and clicks they’re likely to receive. SEO marketing for law firms is a cost-effective way to attract new clients, helping law firms stay competitive in a crowded market. By investing in SEO, law firms can ensure they are visible to potential clients when they need legal services the most.
Understanding Search Engines
Search engines like Google aim to provide users with the most relevant and helpful results. One critical SEO ranking factor is the combination of elements that influence how Google ranks websites, such as user experience (UX) and technical aspects. They use complex algorithms to analyze various factors, including content quality, link-building, technical SEO, and user experience (UX). For law firms, understanding these ranking factors is essential to optimize their website and improve their search engine rankings. By focusing on these elements, law firms can increase their online visibility, drive more traffic to their website, and attract more clients. Prioritizing search engine optimization ensures that a law firm’s website meets the criteria set by search engines, leading to better rankings and more organic traffic.
Law Firm Website Optimization
A well-designed law firm’s website is the cornerstone of a law firm’s online presence and SEO campaign. Think of your website as your #1 salesperson, working around the clock to attract clients. To optimize a law firm website, it’s crucial to focus on technical SEO aspects such as site structure, page speed, and mobile-friendliness. Additionally, user experience (UX) should be a top priority, ensuring that the website is easy to navigate, informative, and engaging. By optimizing these elements, law firms can improve their search engine rankings and drive more traffic to their site, ultimately leading to more client conversions.
Measuring and Tracking SEO Results
Measuring and tracking SEO results is crucial to understanding the effectiveness of your law firm’s SEO strategy. By monitoring your website’s performance, you can identify areas for improvement, adjust your strategy, and optimize your efforts for better results. Here are some key metrics to track:
- Organic traffic: Monitor the number of visitors coming to your website from organic search results. This metric helps you understand how well your SEO efforts are driving traffic to your site.
- Keyword rankings: Track the position of your target keywords in search engine results pages (SERPs). Keeping an eye on your keyword rankings allows you to see how your law firm is performing in search engines and identify opportunities for improvement.
- Conversion rates: Measure the number of leads, phone calls, or consultations generated from your website. High conversion rates indicate that your website is effectively turning visitors into potential clients.
- Bounce rate: Analyze the percentage of visitors who leave your website without taking any action. A high bounce rate may suggest that your website content or user experience needs improvement.
- Average session duration: Track the amount of time visitors spend on your website. Longer session durations typically indicate that visitors find your content engaging and valuable.
To measure and track these metrics, you can use tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and SEMrush. These tools provide valuable insights into your website’s performance, helping you refine your SEO strategy and improve your online presence. By regularly monitoring these metrics, you can make data-driven decisions to enhance your law firm’s SEO efforts and achieve better search engine rankings.
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Local SEO content to bring in online bookings.
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Link building to boost authority and brand awareness.
Technical
On-Page and off-page optimizations to your Law Firm’s website.
Law Firm SEO Tips & Marketing Strategies
Everything to know about law firm SEO. Get website marketing tips, research the best law firm SEO companies, and leave feeling like a law firm SEO expert.
You want your law firm website to attract potential clients to your practice areas through internet marketing tactics like SEO (search engine optimization).
What can you or a law firm SEO company do to get on the first page of Google and get phone calls from new clients?
SEO for lawyers involves specialized practices to optimize their online presence. This includes understanding ranking factors, local SEO, keyword research, and using Google Business Profiles to attract local clients and navigate the competitive landscape of legal digital marketing.
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What makes a Law Firm SEO Expert?
There’s not an exam that you pass to become a law firm SEO expert.
So what makes up a law firm SEO expert?
Quite simply, a lawyer SEO expert knows how search engine optimization works and how to apply SEO best practices to increase the visibility of a law firm online.
Clients of law firms are primarily on the local level. A law firm SEO expert needs to know Google My Business, and how to get your law firm in both the local listings and organic search results of Google.
Blogging about personal injury isn’t easy. Even finding quality legal blog topics can be a challenge. An expert needs a process to create high-quality articles for your target audience. Low-quality content won’t rank in organic search results and may drive potential clients away.
Link building is a critical part of a law firm’s marketing strategy. The legal industry is highly competitive. An expert should be able to build a link profile on both the local level and within the legal industry, to help a law firm’s website rank for competitive keywords.
Title tags, meta descriptions, search engine snippets, page speed, and other on-site SEO elements pertaining to web design should all be within an expert’s skill set.
Just like lawyers write articles for publications, SEO experts often share their best digital marketing practices on outlets like Forbes.
SEO and Social Media can work together. An expert should know how to increase social shares organically through content marketing.
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Local SEO for Law Firms
Local SEO markets the services of your law firm at the exact moment when a potential client needs an attorney.
There are three ranking factors for Local SEO: Relevance, Distance, and Prominence.
Relevance
Let’s take a look at the Google My Business results for personal injury attorneys in Phoenix:
You can see a map of law firms near the local search, along with a sponsored ad and the top 3 organic listings.
Let’s take a closer look at these results. What do you notice?
The first thing that stands out is the “Category” of each result: “Personal Injury Attorney.” Each business owner has self-identified that their firm is about “personal injury.” This is significant because “Relevance” is a local ranking factor.
Just look at a few of the options lawyers have at their disposal with Google My Business categories:
Selecting the right practice area on a Google My Business listing significantly impacts how your firm appears in a Google search.
Another thing that stands out? Business hours! This search was conducted after traditional business hours (6:04 pm) and the local results show three firms that are either open 24 hours or until 10 pm.
Again, Google cares about the user experience and the relevance of search results. If a business isn’t open, how valuable is that result to a searcher? Perhaps that’s why Google allows a searcher to filter by “Hours” (only one of two filters available for searchers):
Distance
Now, what about distance – another significant ranking factor for local search?
The top 3 results for our search were Goldberg & Osborne, Lamber Goodnow, and Kelly Law Team. In looking closer at the map, these certainly aren’t the closest law firms to our local search. But, they are relatively close.
Prominence
Prominence, according to Google, is how well-known a business is. We’ll cover Prominence more in the Backlinks for Law Firms section of this article, as well as the Technical SEO section. But, items like links, articles, local citations, online reviews, local keywords, and even schema markup factor into this umbrella category. Basically, anything online marketing-related that falls outside of “Relevance” and “Distance.”
You can learn more about how Google determines local ranking here, or read on as we examine these top results in greater detail.
Content Marketing for Law Firms
Great content on a law firm’s website appears in search rankings. Simple as that.
Your firm needs an SEO agency that can produce quality content around client faqs and keywords pertaining to your practice areas.
For example, let’s say you are a criminal defense lawyer in Phoenix looking to build up your personal injury practice. If you are considering PPC vs SEO, you’ll quickly find out that the keyword “personal injury lawyer phoenix” commands a cost of $150 per click.
And not only that, but only an estimated 11% of all clicks go towards paid advertisements. The other 89% of clicks go towards organic search results.
Here’s an example of PPC advertisements:
And, skipping over the Google My Business results we covered in the previous section, here are the organic search results on Google for “personal injury lawyer Phoenix”)
So, the $108,000 question (1,200 monthly searches for “Phoenix personal injury lawyer” x 5% click-through rate on a paid ad x $150 cost per click x 12 months of running PPC ads = $108,000) is how can a law firm use a SEO campaign to rank organically for this keyword?
To answer that question, let’s look at the top results for this search query.
The top result is the home page of a personal injury lawyer in Phoenix (which, interestingly enough, also markets their Chicago-based practice).
The #3 result is a personal injury practice area page of a law firm.
6 out of the top 10 search results (and 3 out of the top 5) are directory-style listings of the “Best” personal injury attorneys in Phoenix (Superlawyers.com, Yelp, Expertise.com, Justia.com, Avvo, FindLaw.com).
The bottom two results are also the home pages of personal injury attorneys.
What do these search engine results pages (SERPs) tell us about Content Marketing for Law Firms?
- Searcher’s intent is to find the best personal injury attorney in Phoenix
- 60% of content in the top search engine rankings are about the “BEST” and are directory-style listings
- To compete on personal injury, a law firm should have a primary focus on personal injury
There’s also a variety of insights from these SERPs that can help inform and guide a marketing strategy.
- Law firms should focus on long-tail keywords (like car accident lawyers in Phoenix, slip and fall lawyers, etc) to establish authority in the personal injury category
- Law firms should create directory-style “BEST” content listing out other personal injury lawyers in Phoenix, as well as their own law firm, in order to satisfy searcher intent
- Getting visibility in Local SEO listings, based on distance, maybe a way to connect with nearby potential clients
Search terms are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to content marketing. Above all, producing high-quality content that focuses on the user experience is the best way to appear in a local search. Doing keyword research, identifying content types, and then producing great content is the complete package to getting SEO results.
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Backlinks For Law Firms
Search engine algorithms make heavy use of backlinks. Google was founded on the premise of hypertextual web search. Links have been at the core of search engine optimization for the last twenty years, and they’re not going away any time soon.
That’s why you’ll find that many of the top search results for competitive legal keywords will be populated by companies with strong backlink profiles.
Let’s take a look at our personal injury lawyer example to show how backlinks can factor into rankings. We’ll analyze the first three company results (Lamber Goodnow, Phillips Law, and Gary Phillips) to see how their backlink profiles stack up.
Here’s the analysis:
The chart above may be hard to read (click on the image to open in a new tab). It also has some SEO terminology that may need definitions.
SEO term definitions
- Domain Rating: The relative “backlink popularity” of the website (higher = stronger). DR is based on the number of websites linking to the domain’s URLs and their backlink profile strength.
- Backlinks: How many links point to the website in total?
- Referring Domains: How many unique referring domains link to the website in total?
- Organic Keywords: Total number of keywords that the website ranks for in the top 100 organic search results.
- Organic Traffic: Estimated total monthly search traffic from the top 100 organic search results.
- Traffic Value: The equivalent value of the organic search traffic, should that traffic have been acquired via PPC.
- PPC Spend: Estimated amount of monthly spending through Google Ads.
- Ahrefs Rank: The website’s position among all other websites in the Ahrefs database rated by the “strength” of the backlink profiles (lower = stronger).
With those definitions out of the way, here are some of the major takeaways from the first-page search results:
- The #1 result has the highest domain rating (55). The #2 result has the second-highest domain rating (40). The #9 result has a Domain Rating of (29).
- Backlinks and Referring Domains also follow this trend, where the top-ranked domain has the highest number of Backlinks & Referring Domains, followed by the #2 result, and then by the #9 result.
- The gap between the #1 and #9 result is quite large; their #1 result is about 7x larger than the #9; meaning it will be hard to overtake that result in organic search
- This traffic is valuable. The #9 result, despite driving just a couple hundred organic search visits per month, is estimated to be driving the equivalent of $24,000 / month in PPC replacement costs. That’s because personal injury keywords can cost up to $150 per click.
- The only law firm not spending on PPC is the #1 result (probably because they don’t have to).
Those are some solid takeaways, and the numbers speak for themselves. But to truly understand backlinks, and how each law firm website arrived in their respective search rankings, it would be beneficial to take a look at each site. Let’s go even deeper into backlinks and analyze the backlink profile of each search result. Just click on the accordion below, or, you can skip to the next section on Best Legal Directories.
What’s the takeaway from all this analysis?
- Backlinks matter to search ranking
- More authority can lead to higher rankings
- Building authority with high-quality link-building can be done in a variety of ways (scholarships, blogs, legal directories)
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I can’t recommend Markitors highly enough from both a speed and investment angle. Their SEO services are very effective in growing your brand online.
Technical SEO Services for Law Firms
Technical SEO helps search engines discover and index content on your law firm’s website.
Why is Technical SEO important to a law firm? Well, sometimes a website redesign or an innocent error can cause search engine traffic to go like this:
Technical SEO ensures that your website stays clear of issues that could derail your SEO campaign.
What makes up Technical SEO? Here are a few areas of focus:
- Title Tags, ALT Tags, Meta Descriptions
- User Experience
- Page Speed
- Snippets
- Web Design
- Mobile Optimization
- Internal Links
- Rendering & Structured Data
The process behind Technical SEO starts with an audit to identify issues within your website. This audit gives an SEO company a list of items to address, as well as an overall “health score” for your website.
From there, a company will identify and implement solutions to address these issues. Once issues are addressed, a company will work on improving appearance in a search engine through Schema markups that produce snippets in search results. These snippets can help improve user experience and click-through rates on search engine results pages.
Bottom line: there are too many ranking factors within Technical SEO to ignore. Make sure that Tech SEO is within the scope of work for any SEO services.
LET'S REWARD YOUR SCROLLING
How to vet SEO services for attorneys.
There’s 16,000 digital marketing agencies in the United States. How do you find the right SEO service to support your law firm?
- Review case studies. Take a look at the SEO company website. What case studies exist that highlight client stories, demonstrating their ability to get results for your law firm?
- Conduct interviews. Schedule 15-minute introductory calls with each of the companies listed above.
- Ask for a proposal. SEO service providers are happy to provide you with a proposal. Is the information standard, or customized to your legal practice?
- Ask other marketing experts. Everyone knows someone who “does” SEO. Ask them for their advice, referrals, and recommendations.
- Conduct a background check. Not in the literal sense. But there are several ways you can learn about a company online
- Tour the office. Last but not least, tour the office. There’s no hiding who you are (and, who you aren’t) by making a personal visit to the HQ of a SEO company.
SEO Strategy Tips for a Law Firm
Law Firm SEO Keywords is where an SEO strategy starts. Here are some keyword structures and tips that should help craft the foundation for your online marketing.
- Practice Area + CITY NAME. Personal Injury Lawyers in Phoenix. As we’ve seen in this article, these keywords have high competition but can drive more potential clients to your firm.
- Directory Listings. Searchers are simply looking for the best law firms. Creating content that provides a list of law firms around a given practice area or locality has proven to perform well.
- Settlements. Have a high profile case that ended in a positive result? Create a case study or article illustrating the work that was done to arrive at the result. Many cases have search volume around them.
- FAQs. The questions clients ask you are the same questions they ask a search engine. Answers these FAQs in an article can help attract potential clients with the same needs as current clients.
- Local News. Does your firm cover auto accidents? Consider incorporating the coverage of local auto accidents on your law firm website as part of your SEO campaign. That way, when people search “accident on the FREEWAY NAME” – your firm appears for brand awareness and topical content.
Law Firm SEO Tools
Here are the top tools to utilize when performing SEO for law firms:
- Google – Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Google Search, Google Page Speed, and Google My Business all provide incredible insights to move digital marketing forward. Google Search Console is essential for tracking organic traffic, identifying technical errors, and optimizing content based on user intent.
- Lawlytics – LawLytics is an easy and intuitive platform for running law firm websites that work. Attorneys use LawLytics to have a more effective web presence.
- Ahrefs – Audit your law firm website, explore competitors, research keywords & backlinks – all in one place. Powered by seriously big data & trusted by top SEOs.
- Moz Local – Check your law firm’s local listings across multiple directories to consistent business name, phone number, address, and more.
- Clearscope – Content creation powered by natural language processing and IBM Watson machine learning.
What to expect with Law Firm SEO Pricing
We’ve covered a lot in this guide to Law Firm SEO. From Content to Backlinks, Technical SEO to Local SEO – there’s a lot to achieving more visibility online through organic search.
So what should you expect in regards to pricing? In general, expect to spend between $2,500 – $5,000 per month on Law Firm SEO services.
According to one Law Firm SEO company:
Our ongoing SEO programs begin at $2,000 per month. At this cost we’d be able to produce for a single area of practice in a single market. As the number of practice areas and the competition of the market increases, as do our rates. The majority of our clients are in the $5,000 per month range.
Expenses that drive up the cost of Legal SEO include:
- Expert writers & editors. Creating legal content calls for experts (legal professionals). These hourly rates for writing are not cheap.
- Directory fees. Getting listed in a high value directory sometimes requires a placement fee.
- SEO Tools. Whether you’re doing SEO independently or through a company, tools that can help deliver key insights require steep monthly fees.
- Industry. The legal industry is highly competitive, which requires more hours devoted to strategy, relationship building for Digital PR, and outreach for successful results.
But the real question is, what’s the ROI of SEO?
As we saw in our Backlinks section, the value of organic search can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars each month in PPC replacement costs. Factor in the value of clients, and it’s easy to see the potential value of SEO for law firms.
Have Questions?
Now that you have this guide, it’s time to execute on your law firm marketing strategies!
If you need assistance marketing your law firm’s website, contact one of the best law firm SEO companies or Markitors by clicking the Live Chat button, filling out a contact form, or calling us.
Thanks again for reading and stopping by.
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SEO is a vital component of any law firm’s online marketing strategy. By understanding the fundamentals of SEO, creating high-quality content, building strong backlinks, and optimizing your website for technical SEO and user experience, you can improve your search engine rankings, drive more organic traffic, and attract more clients. Remember to measure and track your SEO results regularly to refine your strategy and optimize your efforts. With the right approach, your law firm can dominate the search engine results pages and establish a strong online presence that drives business growth.
By investing in a comprehensive SEO strategy and leveraging the expertise of a law firm SEO company, you can ensure that your law firm’s website stands out in a competitive digital landscape. Stay committed to continuous improvement, and your law firm will reap the benefits of increased visibility, higher search engine rankings, and a steady stream of new clients.