Chris and his team at GNGF have been an outstanding addition to our marketing team. Not only is Chris knowledgeable, but he is forward-thinking, collaborative, generous with his time, and continuously on top of all of the tasks that keep us where we need to be. Thanks so much, Chris. And, thanks to the entire GNGF team!
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a key marketing strategy to accomplish that. For over a decade, our goal at GNGF is to educate and empower you, the lawyer, to grow your law firm. When it comes to SEO, there is a lot of misinformation out there. We created this page to help you understand the various strategies and tactics behind law firm SEO because we want to make sure you are the most informed buyer of law firm SEO services in your region. You should understand what SEO means for your law firm and why you need it! Bottom line, this personal injury law firm set a record for new client sign-ups just six months after launch – and is opening another law office this year. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is often presented or sold as some magical black box that only certain experts know how to do. The truth is there are no real hidden SEO secrets. Of course, like any professional, there is expertise and efficiency gained from years of work in an area of focus. This is the benefit of hiring an experienced agency like GNGF to help with your law firm’s SEO. Are you already investing in SEO with limited success? We have helped many law firms who have invested in SEO on their own or with another service but were stuck and couldn’t break into that lucrative page one and even position one listing. Here is what happened to the website traffic with one client who had been investing in SEO for years but was stuck on page 2 or 3 of Google. They switched to GNGF and we quickly investigated the competitive keyword issues, restructured the website, reworked their content, and updated other SEO tactics. After just six months we finally helped them break into the first page of Google. Looking at their website traffic, can you pick out when they broke into Page 1? We have had great success with law firms that: - David J. Crouse, David J. Crouse & Associates We are getting good contacts...I would say though that we are getting 1-2 good cases per week off of our website/Google leads on average. We are very transparent about the time to ROI. We typically say it takes about a year to really see great ROI from SEO. But, having worked with hundreds of law firms for over a decade, we know the returns will be there. However, our team works hard to find the cracks in the competition and has been able to get Page One listings for important keywords that convert to new clients in under six months. You can see what happened to the traffic of a client’s website after they moved their marketing to our agency. They went from practically non-existent on Google (with less than 10 people visiting his website in a month) to the first page on some key search terms in under six months of working with us. This isn’t a firm in a small rural town either, as that would make things easier, this is a law firm in a competitive top 5 market. 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: 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. If you made it this far, we did our job in giving you a better understanding of Legal SEO. We will never hide behind magical SEO secrets, but instead, pride ourselves on the full transparency of our process and progress, all while educating you on what we are doing and why. You will always have access to YOUR Google Analytics and other tools we use (like CallRail and SEM Rush) as we explain what we are measuring and using to adjust tactics. If you are looking for a legal marketing agency that will include you in the process, work to understand your goals, and then help you reach them, contact us for a free consultation.
What if your perfect prospect always found your law firm when they were looking for help?
SEO Drives Record New Cases for Personal Injury Law Firm
Law Firm SEO Agency
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We can help your PERFECT Prospective Client FIND YOUR LAW FIRM when they search Google for answers to their issues that you know you can help them solve.
What Our Clients Are Saying
We are totally full caseload-wise. The three primary litigators...are actually over-capacity...It is a good problem to have though. We have hired another attorney that starts in August...He will be excellent. We are also recruiting another attorney...Our current attorneys are happy about this as they have all gotten substantial raises due to the caseload volume they are handling. Law Firm SEO Done The Right Way
SEO Strategy Drives Client's Web Traffic Growth & Increase in Law Firm Revenue
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How Do Law Firms Evaluate their Online Competition?
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.
How Does the SEO Quality of My Existing Law Firm Website Affect Search Rankings?
How Important Is Content For My Law Firm SEO?
What Content Should I Focus On?
Ok, I Understand Content is Important, But I Heard I Should Be Blogging?
How GNGF Can Help?