Search Engine Optimization for Law Firms

Yes, SEO is extremely important, but if everything you write and optimize is for the search engines you are neglecting the most important person of all: your potential client!

When we are working on the law firm’s SEO for our clients, we always remember to put the user first. Focusing on the searcher also happens to be a great SEO tactic.

Think about the signals that get sent to Google with bad quality, keyword-stuffed, content.

If someone searches for your firm and your content reads like a robot wrote it, the site doesn’t relate to the prospect’s problems, and there is no feeling of your brand vs. any other law firm, what do you think they are going to do?

They are going to hit the back button and leave.

Someone leaving the site right after they visit is called a bounce. Your bounce rate is a signal that something about your content did not resonate with what the user thought they were going to see based on the search result. If you do all the work to get ranked, but a user hits your site, doesn’t like it, and leaves, that was probably a waste of marketing investment.

There are competing arguments in the SEO world about whether Google uses bounce rate to factor into ranking — Our stand on the issue is that they do not. But it is an important factor to keep an eye on to make sure you aren’t missing the mark on what a page is ranking for and what the searcher is wanting to see there.

If you give the searching user a great experience from start to finish, you are likely to have a very low bounce rate.

It’s also not just about the content, it’s also other factors like the ease of use of the website, the load time of the site, and having proper conversion elements in place.

What’s the point of putting all this effort into improving your search rankings if you underwhelm the people visiting your law firm’s website and they decide not to reach out to you?

Therefore, we firmly believe a conversion-oriented site, complete with an understandable next action for the visitor to take, the best content to read, a phone number to call, forms to fill out, or text chat, are in the same general category as SEO.

Again, if people leave the site and don’t contact you, your site really isn’t optimized.

Give the users a great experience and you will benefit.

This is a question that we get asked quite a bit. Our answer: it depends. (we know our law firm clients use that answer a lot so we figured it was ok)

There are so many factors that go into a legal SEO strategy, and as we said earlier, it is all based on your goals.

Before we can answer that question, we need to understand your goals, evaluate your competition, and audit what you currently have.

It will take a lot less time to get to page one if you are going after a less competitive practice area in a less competitive city.

But if multiple of your online competitors have been investing thousands of dollars a month in marketing for many years, you have a bigger SEO hill to climb.

One thing that our team has proven they can do to help speed things up is to keep an eye on the law firm’s goal while digging into the competition to look for those hidden gems of keywords that the competition is missing that could still provide great prospective clients.

As we said above, it depends on a lot of factors. After we understand your goals and have done a competitive audit, our team can provide a better time-bound goal.

We have many examples of overhauling a client’s website and getting them from Page 5 to Page 1 in less than 6 months. Yet, we have other clients where because of the competition, something similar took almost 12 months to break into page one.

Check out some SEO success examples in our Case Studies section.

Search Engine Optimization is also an ongoing activity. We don’t want to put all our effort into ranking on one keyword and then call it a day. The goal should be to continue to invest in SEO so that over time, Google knows that your website is the right resource for all the many variations your perfect clients use to search for answers to problems that your law firm can help them solve.

If you’ve ever talked to a marketing agency, you will be familiar with the term competitive audit. It is one of the first things we do to gauge your level of competition.

In this audit, we work with you to prioritize the types of legal issues (keywords) that you want to rank for. Of course, this should all be based on our agreed SMART goals for your firm. We then use tools to see the competition and even compare that to manual searches in your area.

Our goal is to understand the current search landscape specific to your law firm.

Common things we look for in a competitive audit include:

1. Your current search position: If your goal is to be number 1 in your area and you are currently not even ranking in the first 5 pages, you have a lot of work to do. In a competitive market, it might be a two-year investment to make the charge to the top.
   On the other hand, if you are on the top of page two, you most likely already have some positive inertia that we can use to our advantage. There is still an investment needed, but it likely won’t take years to accomplish.
2. Your competitors’ search position: If your competition is currently holding the top spots, it means that one of two things are true:
   1. First, it means they are spending money. Using tools available to us, like SEM Rush, we can get a historical analysis of ranking data and get an idea of the value of traffic coming to the competitors’ site. It is likely that they’ve been spending a good deal of money for years to rise and hold that top spot. For you to compete, you either need to outspend them, develop a multi-year strategy to do some things better than them, or find an alternate keyword that is a subset of the bigger keyword.
   2. Second, they could be in that top position simply because they were there first. Sadly, we see this happen quite often. Sites that haven’t been updated in 6 years still stay in the first position. Domain age definitely plays a factor that can be sometimes difficult to overcome in smaller markets. We believe that this is due to the lack of data available to Google. If you are in a small town and are a bankruptcy attorney, bankruptcy-related terms might get 100 searches a month. There are 100 billion searches a month, which means your bankruptcy searches account for only 0.000000009% of all searches. It takes Google a lot longer to run the data tests to prove that your better site should rank better than the one the algorithm has, unfortunately for no great reason, trusted for years.
3. Opportunities: No website is perfect. There are always multiple ways to reclaim that top spot in Google. Part of an audit is to identify what the competitor is doing right, and where there are holes. Generally, those holes tend to fall between keyword selection, content creation opportunities, and backlink acquisition opportunities. Finding those hidden opportunities is a great way to start ranking and driving new clients while you wait for the overall strategy to start moving you up on the more competitive keywords.

Understanding what your competition is doing is imperative in setting a solid legal SEO strategy.

You don’t want to simply be on par with your competition, you want to be 10x better than them for the search algorithm to notice!

The second half of the equation is all based on what your current marketing efforts are. If you don’t even have a website yet and want to start ranking for personal injury terms in Chicago, you are about 10+ years behind the curve.

If you are ranking on page 2, that means you’ve probably put some effort into your SEO in the past and now we just need to optimize the site, produce the right content, and possibly get a few local backlinks to move you up to page 1.

Every market is different. We’ve seen sites rank within a month of them going live, and we’ve seen websites that take 2 years to break through to that first page. As you can see it depends on a multitude of factors, but the SEO quality of your existing website will have a big impact.

One of the most painful early conversations we occasionally have with a prospective new client is to tell them that the beautiful website they just paid someone to design and develop for a lot of money is structured very poorly for SEO.

In fact, sometimes the entire back-end needs to be restructured and depending on how bad it was setup, it is sometimes faster (and cheaper) for us to mimic the design on a better structured back-end that provides a strong SEO foundation.

Great design firms that don’t focus on SEO can build beautiful sites. But, if they don’t factor in SEO from the beginning many strong onsite SEO elements are completely ignored.

It is hard for a law firm owner to hear that, but as our founder says, “the ROI from some investments is just a great learning experience of what not to do next time”.

If you are in a situation with a beautiful website that is not structured right to perform well in SEO, talk to our team about the options to move the design you like to a better-structured website for SEO. The small budget hit will be more than made up for in the ability you will have to grow your firm by gaining the right prospects from organic SEO traffic.

The GNGF team is proud to be an award-winning website design and development agency that also builds strong onsite SEO into our websites from day one.

You’ve heard the phrase, “content is king” probably hundreds of times. We have a strong opinion that the most important part of SEO is Content.

We’ve seen Google evolve its algorithm enormously in the past, and every algorithm change is essentially trying to do the same thing. Provide better, more relevant results based on the search query.

Google continues to get better and better at determining the relevancy and quality of the content that is on your site.

It’s that simple.

With the Artificial Intelligence (AI) content generation happening by so many website owners, quality content will become more important not less.

Yes, there are basic SEO tactics that need to be done on a website. But without strong, compelling content, that time and money is often wasted.

This is an easy question for us to answer. Like we just talked about above, look at your own site then look at your competition that is ranking, and start by filling in the gaps.

Typical types of content will be your homepage, attorney bios, practice area pages, and FAQs.

You should have at least as much content as your competition. If you practice in the same areas, make sure you have the same practice area pages they have.

Here’s the catch. If they are ranking in front of you, your content needs to be 10x better than theirs. If their practice area page about DUI is 600 words, make yours 3,000, or even 5,000!

The key to using content to crush your competition is to make it significantly better than the content that is already ranking.

You don’t have to do this all at once.

You can create a lot of pages that are about 1000 words, and then each month think about the questions people ask about that practice area and add a little bit more to the pages.

Where did you hear this or more important WHEN did you hear this.

Why should you focus on writing 400-word blogs — or having someone write them for you?

What is the goal with those blogs?

This is one of our biggest pet peeves in the legal marketing industry. People are stuck years behind the curve. Trust us, as recently as 7 years ago, we used to write a lot of blogs for all our clients and yes it used to work great.

But times and the Google algorithm change. Blogging just for SEO reasons, the way most people say to blog started not working as well as other types of content.

Blogging isn’t bad when done right — when done right, it is a great way to increase your authority in the eyes of your prospective clients and referral networks.

But don’t just put a law firm blog on your site because your marketing agency said it will help with SEO, and if you do have a blog on your site, do not sign up for an “X blogs a month” package, it just doesn’t compare to a content strategy that focuses on answers in your brand’s voice to questions from the right prospective clients, mapping to the right competitive keywords, and continuing to grow that focused content over time. Learn more about GNGFs unique approach to content strategy for law firms

We could write thousands of words on this topic alone in this page, but we’ve already talked about this quite extensively.

In this video and in this blog post

Check out why we strongly believe legal blogging for SEO doesn’t work as well as the strategies we have perfected over the past seven years.