These days it’s more important than ever to bring your business online. Hopefully your law firm already has a website and a presence on relevant social media sites. Now, what else can you do to increase your online visibility, better search results and drive more traffic to your website?
Here are three starter steps for SEO for lawyers:
1. Start a Blog
You may wonder why there is so much talk about blogging. Why is it so important and what can it really do for you? Blogging is incredibly important because of the tremendous SEO benefits it provides.
Google ranks sites by how relevant their content is to search queries. The more high-quality content you have on any given subject, the more likely you’ll rank higher for those queries.
For example, say you write a post entitled “5 Traits to Look for When Doing a Lawyer Search.” If you provide valuable information to your audience (people on the hunt for a lawyer), they’ll read your post, possibly share it on social, and maybe even contact you to see if you’re a good fit.
You see, the more relevant, valuable content you have—which is what blog posts provide—the more likely you’ll rank higher, reach your target audience, and drive traffic to your site.
Lawyers are busy and we know that. So if you don’t have time to do the writing yourself, you can have someone else at your office pen your posts or hire a freelance writer to do it for you.
2. Be Active on Social Media
Social media should be both for business and pleasure, but make sure you distinguish between the two. If you have a personal Facebook profile, create a different one for your professional persona.
Once you’ve chosen which social media sites are best for your target audience, like Google+ and LinkedIn for example, make sure you are active on those sites.
Post at least once a day, comment on others’ activity, and stay active in communities and groups you join. The most important part of social media is to create and nurture relationships. After all, the more people you connect with on social, the more likely they’ll be to share your content, driving links back to your site (link building is a huge factor in SEO).
3. Know Your Keywords
It’s important to know who your target audience is and what they’re looking for online. Let’s say you’re an intellectual property lawyer in the San Francisco Bay Area and your want to improve your Google or Bing ranking for searches done for intellectual property lawyers in Palo Alto, California. The primary keywords you might want to focus on could include:
Intellectual property lawyer Palo Alto
Intellectual property lawyer Palo Alto California
Lawyer ip Palo Alto
Once you’ve done your keyword research and find those that are best suited for your site, use them naturally in your 1) site pages and 2) blog posts. Site pages should include your most important keywords (see above), and your blog posts should include a mix of both your primary and secondary keywords.
Just make sure that if you’re already ranking for a keyword, don’t steal your own keyword juice by using it on another page!
Conclusion
SEO for lawyers may seem like a difficult concept, but the more you dip your toe in the water, the more and more comfortable you’ll get with the temperature.
Remember that the positive ramifications of building up your law firm SEO take time to see, so don’t get discouraged if your traffic isn’t spiking or you’re not on page one of search engine results pages (SERPs) within the first few months. Be patient and consistent and you’ll soon reap the rewards!
