• Legal Marketing Services
    ▼
    • SEO
    • Online Paid Advertising (SEM)
    • Website Design
    • Content Strategy and Development
    • Branding
    • Review Management
    • Social Media
    • Conversion Strategies
    • Legal CRM Implementation
    • Group Coaching
  • About GNGF
    ▼
    • Team
    • GNGF Way
    • Our Partners
    • Careers and Internships
  • Proven Success
    ▼
    • Case Studies
    • Awards
    • Testimonials
    • Portfolio
  • Resources
    ▼
    • Videos
    • Podcasts
    • Our Book—Online Law Practice Strategies
    • Our Blog
    • CLE Presentations
  • Contact
  • Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
GNGF Marketing

GNGF Marketing

GNGF Marketing

513.444.2016
  • Legal Marketing Services
    • SEO
    • Online Paid Advertising (SEM)
    • Website Design
    • Content Strategy and Development
    • Branding
    • Review Management
    • Social Media
    • Conversion Strategies
    • Legal CRM Implementation
    • Group Coaching
  • About GNGF
    • Team
    • GNGF Way
    • Our Partners
    • Careers and Internships
  • Proven Success
    • Case Studies
    • Awards
    • Testimonials
    • Portfolio
  • Resources
    • Videos
    • Podcasts
    • Our Book—Online Law Practice Strategies
    • Our Blog
    • CLE Presentations
  • Contact

Search Engine Optimization for Law Firms

Search Engine Optimization for Law Firms

Home » Legal Marketing Services » Search Engine Optimization for Law Firms

What if your perfect prospect always found your law firm when they were looking for help?

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!

SEO Drives Record New Cases for Personal Injury Law Firm

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.

view this case study
117% Organic Traffic Increased

Law Firm SEO Agency

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?

WebTraffic Graph of Law Firm that GNGF helped with their law firm seo

Do you want to improve the SEO of your Law Firm’s website?

We have had great success with law firms that:

  • have been investing (a lot) with another agency for many years but are not moving up the search rankings
  • or were told their basic website package “included SEO” but after years they were not even listed on the first five pages of a google search.
  • or haven’t invested much in SEO in the past but are now ready to start

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

- 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 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.

read more testimonials

Law Firm SEO Done The Right Way

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.

 

Law Firm SEO Overview

When you are looking for an answer to a question that is stumping you such as:

  • “how much of my car can I deduct off my taxes”
  • “Should I take a client to that new restaurant that just opened up
  • “What is the best price on the latest TV for my conference room (or home)”

How do you find that information?

Of course, you Google it. Whether you are on your phone, asking Siri or Alexa, or sitting at your desk on your computer, it’s now the first place people go to find information.

You type the question into the google search bar see the results and click on it to see what answer google has provided you.

You’ve probably clicked thousands of search results on Google, but have you ever stopped to think why or how that result is there?

  • Why did Google provide that article from TurboTax’s website about car business deductions?
  • Why were there 10 results from other websites talking about the restaurant, but I had a hard time finding that restaurant’s website?
  • How does Google know the images, the prices, and where I can buy all of these different TV Options?

Understanding how Google decides which results it should put at the top of the SERPS (search engine results page) can be eye-opening, and can often change the way you look at the search results in the future.

How does Google decide which sites are worthy of a prime-time spot?

First, it is helpful to answer:

“Why does Google even care about the order of what is shown in their search results?”

It’s because Google must make sure that you have a positive experience when using their search engine or you might go somewhere else to find the answers to your important questions (or not-so-important questions).

Google makes over $200 Billion a year from Google Ads. Because this is over 80% of ALL of the parent company Alphabet’s revenue, you can see that they have to protect this revenue at all costs.

It may be hard to imagine, but over 70% of that $200 Billion in Ad revenue comes from people clicking the tiny little ads that only appear when you go to their search engine to look for something. If you are curious, the remaining 30% was divided between YouTube ads (~14%) and ads that websites put on their sites from the google ad network (~15%).

While this is a page about Search Engine Optimization, you must understand that ads like these drive over $140 Billion in revenue for Google.

Image of Google search result for Divorce Lawyer Near Me showing where Google PPC Ads vs SEO organic

What happens to Google’s revenue if people suddenly get frustrated with the poor results they are getting in the search engines and stop using Google as much?

We don’t have to imagine too hard, as Microsoft’s Bing Ad Network made 93% less than Google. Which correlates strongly with the fact that Microsoft’s Bing search engine receives just over 3% of search engine market share worldwide while Google receives about 92%.

Google must keep all of us coming back to its search engine or its cash cow driving most of the revenues will disappear.

Therefore, the organic search results must be the type of results we as consumers expect to see.

  • They can’t take us to spammy websites that don’t have anything to do with our search.
  • They can’t take us to the wrong information.
  • If we are looking for something local they should not show us a business that is 300 miles away.

Google knows this and therefore invests a lot of time and effort in building and modifying an algorithm that shows us the right results while combating unruly website owners who try to game their algorithm.

Image showing Law firm SEO influence on Organic results for divorce attorney near me search

 

The majority of people click on organic search results over the ads. In fact, organic searches received about 90% of clicks based on an 8-year-old study. While organic search clicks are still the majority, that number has decreased a bit as Google Ads have become harder to differentiate from the organic search results the past few years.

Google understands that website owners need help to ensure that the right information is getting crawled and ranked in the algorithm.

In fact, Google has created a great SEO Starter guide and in that guide, Google even mentions that hiring SEO agencies can be a good thing for many businesses.

“Deciding to hire an SEO is a big decision that can potentially improve your site and save time. Make sure to research the potential advantages of hiring an SEO, as well as the damage that an irresponsible SEO can do to your site. Many SEOs and other agencies and consultants provide useful services for website owners, including:

  • Review of your site content or structure
  • Technical advice on website development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript
  • Content development
  • Management of online business development campaigns
  • Keyword research
  • SEO training
  • Expertise in specific markets and geographies”
Read more

Introduction to SEO for Law Firms

At its core, SEO (search engine optimization), is simply the process of optimizing your law firm’s web presence to increase visibility in the search landscape.

We use the term web presence because SEO is more than just optimizing a website. When we talk about SEO, we must leverage all your web properties. These include your website, social media profiles, directory listings, and even content that lives on other websites.

These days, SEO is typically divided into three categories:

  • Onsite SEO: This is search engine optimization that is done on your website. Its purpose is to help search engine bots — like the Googlebot – understand who you are, what you do, and why you are an expert on that topic. Onsite SEO includes the keyword targeted and quality written content on your site, the technical markup and metadata on that content, the correct structure of the website, and even the speed and layout should be considered. It is also the ongoing adjustments of structure, content, and technical metadata based on continuously measuring the performance of the pages and keeping an eye on what competitive firm sites are doing.
  • Offsite SEO: This is optimization done off your website. Getting other websites to point to your website as a reference for different topics. It helps provide proof to google that others consider you an authority on this topic and that your site can be trusted to be the answer for certain search queries. It includes building real backlinks to your websites the right way, building local PR and social media awareness, and at a bare minimum, creating, editing, and verifying the important directory listings.
  • Local SEO: This is optimization done around directory listings, such as having your Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business or GMB) show up in the ‘map pack’ in the search results for searches that Google believes have local intent – (search engine results have shown that they feel law firm related keywords definitely have a local intent). It includes setting up the profiles correctly and completely, getting great reviews, and optimizing for the right category keywords.
Read more

The First Step to SEO: What are YOUR Law Firm Goals

Legal services are one of the most competitive, cutthroat areas on the web. As a matter of fact, Wordstream ranked Legal keywords as the 4th most expensive keyword in English-speaking countries, with the average CPC (cost per click) coming in at a whopping $42.50!

As a comparison, many e-commerce keywords that people search all the time are under $3.00 per click.

Infographic about most expensive keywords in google advertising from Wordstream

While this is paid search data, your organic search position still holds a very tangible value based on the keyword you are ranking for. For example, the search term “los angeles car accident attorney” costs $187 per click and is searched 1,300 times per month. If you were to hold the top spot for that keyword organically, with #1 organic positions, on average, getting about 27.6% of clicks, that one position could be valued at over $67,000! Do that for a few important keywords and the organic search could be equivalent to someone spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on Google Ads.

Let’s be realistic, not many law firms can shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in AdWords spend. Many law firms also don’t have a budget to execute a legal SEO strategy that will yield them top results in a hyper-competitive market like Los Angeles for those big money keywords.

That’s why a law firm’s SEO strategy should come down to one thing: your business goals.

I’m sure you have heard of S.M.A.R.T goals. To set a goal, it must have 5 criteria:
• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time-Bound

We work with clients to make sure their SEO strategy maps back to these 5 criteria.

“I want to rank number one for ‘car accident attorney’ is not an optimum goal.

A better goal that our account managers push our clients to develop could be:

“I want to hire two associate attorneys next October. Therefore, based on my average case value, I need to bring in 4 new car accident cases a month in order to be able to hire those associates and maintain my target margin.”

The difference is extremely noticeable.

This goal is:
Specific: hire two associate attorneys
Measurable: 4 new car accident cases a month.
Achievable: 4 new car accident cases a month sounds more achievable than just ‘rank number one’
Relevant: as it is tying the measurement back to a business goal
Time Bound: next October.

Your law firm’s SEO strategy can now be created in order to meet this goal.

Here is a simplified example of how a GNGF Strategic Account Manager would walk someone through an SEO strategy for this goal:

Based on historical conversion rates of leads to cases that we have measured with you these past few months, in order to get 4 new cases a month, on average, we need to bring in about 20 more car accident leads a month to the firm.

Our data shows that there are around 1200 searches a month for “car accident” related keywords in your area. On average, for this type of search result, data shows the top spot on Google receives around 30% of total clicks, which is about 360 clicks a month. Our average conversion rate on the site is currently at 10%, which means that would bring in around 36 leads. The second position for this type of result is returning 17% of clicks therefore 204 clicks at a 10% conversion is about 20 leads.

Currently, your site is ranking in the 5th position, which receives about 7% of total clicks, leaving you with less than 100 clicks to your site. Maintaining a 10% conversion rate will yield less than 10 leads a month for those keywords. To meet your goal, we need to get your site to the number 1 or 2 spot. In looking at the competition we feel that we can leverage the following SEO strategies to meet the goal:

  • additional targeted content that allows us to build out your sites keyword structure more

  • a few simple backlink acquisition methods, like some local PR or local sposnorships

  • reorganizing some of your current content and the metadata of that content to try to increase ranking on the better ranking pages

  • Cross linking better ranking pages to some of the new keyword targeted copy

  • In our experience, this entire process should take 9 – 12 months.

  • We will report on directional measurement every 3 months to see if we are getting the gains we want and continue to monitor if the competition adjusts.

As we mentioned, this is a simplified version of a strategy. There are other nuances your GNGF team would take into account for example:

  • If you are ranking on that one term you are likely ranking on other terms that we would track that would also affect measurable traffic and leads.
  • Ranking higher sometimes leads to some less qualified traffic and conversion rates actually might dip a little bit
  • Increase in your ranking on an organic keyword could be the factor that helps push your local google business profile into the map-pack and therefore supporting that move with extra reviews could generate even more traffic.

But this example gives you the concept of using goals to drive the strategy.

Once we have an agreed strategy in place, we can use many specific tactics in order to help you reach your SMART goal.

Read more

SEO Tactics for Law Firms

As mentioned above, we believe that the most important part of legal SEO is working with our clients to map their SMART business goals to their SEO strategy. Then define the metrics to track that the strategy is working. Everything else is really just tactics.

Oftentimes, we hear attorneys, as well as other marketers, focus too much on the importance of one tactic over another and forget to step back and tie it to an overall strategy that maps to your law firm’s business goal. That is why we work to make sure we always do that first.

In fact, many law firm owners are surprised that before they can even become a GNGF client our marketing consultants dive into a lot of business metrics and business goals before we recommend any marketing strategy.

It’s not that one SEO tactic is better than another, it really is about what SEO tactics map to your law firm SEO strategy right now.

Most Law Firm SEO tactics fall into a few main categories:

  1. Onsite SEO optimization: The hub of your online marketing efforts, your website, must be optimized for search. Having proper metadata, like title tags, meta descriptions, proper use of header tags like H1 and H2 tags, all factor into how well a specific page can rank for certain keywords. Adding rich markup, like Schema, is also a great way to communicate to Google what the page is about, highlighting certain elements on the page, like questions and answers, and describing images and videos.
  2. Content: The actual content on your site is arguably the most important factor when it comes to SEO (not to mention that it is the content that connects and builds trust with your prospective client). Your goal is to have high-quality, informative content on your site that your audience likes to engage with. We always focus on quality over quantity. A well-crafted article or how-to guide that maps correctly to the keyword goals is usually better than 10 low-quality, 400-word blog posts. Your content is what helps Google understand what you do. Your content should be planned out ahead of time and always work towards your goal. Sometimes you need to enhance and expand the content on existing pages, combine a few pages into one topical and informative page, or build new content pages specifically targeting important keyword topics. This is why we switched to selling our content strategy and execution in buckets of words to use across a website, not by the old ‘number of blog posts’ method.
  3. Website Structure: Often the most overlooked, your website needs to be properly set up on the back end for success. Think of your website like a book. Your book has a cover (your homepage), an introduction section (content on the homepage), chapters (top-level navigation pages, also called parent pages), and paragraphs (actual content on the pages). A book with no chapters or structure would be extremely annoying and difficult to read. In addition to the structure of the pages, websites should be built for two things: mobile and speed. If your site doesn’t load quickly or look good on mobile, there is no way your site is going to rank in Google over the long term.
  4. Offsite SEO: The reason Google has remained the top search engine in the world is how they judge quality sites from crummy ones. Historically, Google has used backlinks as a key factor in measuring the quality of a site. Backlinks are essentially an endorsement of your website from another website. The more endorsements (backlinks) you have, the more Google trusts that you are a legitimate resource.
    In 2012 Google started the first of many algorithm updates that put a heavy focus on using the quality of the content as a stronger factor in measuring the quality of a site. Because of that, over the past few years, we have shown that a law firm could get ranked in the top spots on Google with a well-designed content strategy and not as many backlinks needed as before, especially if the links we are able to get are quality, local-oriented backlinks.
    However, in the past year, we have seen a huge increase in the use of AI content generation tools. In fact, the quality of those tools also increased and is incredibly close to being useful with limited editing for some things. While we use some content AI tools to help with content strategy and keyword outlines, we are not comfortable enough yet to use them to create content that goes directly on a law firm’s website. But, with the fast increase in the use of AI-based content generation, we feel Google is going to have to swing the pendulum back to their old tried-and-true method of using backlinks from other websites to differentiate the trusted authority from a not-so-trusted authority. Of course, it won’t be the only ranking signal, but once again, we believe that if you look at the top-ranking sites for any major practice area in your location, chances are they will have a higher number of backlinks compared to the rest of the field. It’s something we are keeping a close eye on.

 

One of these tactics is not going to be better than the other, but when you combine them together the right way, you will get a well-rounded web presence that helps your perfect prospect find your law firm.

Read more

SEO Strategy Drives Client's Web Traffic Growth & Increase in Law Firm Revenue

1110% Organic Visibility Growth
1137% Organic Traffic Growth
89% New Client Growth
view this case study

Topics:

Don’t Forget About the Users!

How Long Will SEO Take To Help My Law Firm?

How Do Law Firms Evaluate their Online Competition?

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?

Don’t Forget About the Users!

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.

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!

...
read more

How Long Will SEO Take To Help My Law Firm?

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.

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)

...
read more

How Do Law Firms Evaluate their Online Competition?

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!

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

...
read more

How Does the SEO Quality of My Existing Law Firm Website Affect Search Rankings?

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.

The SEO Quality of your existing law firm’s website is very important to understand.

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

...
read more

How Important Is Content For My Law Firm SEO?

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.

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.

...
read more

What Content Should I Focus On?

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.

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.

...
read more

Ok, I Understand Content is Important, But I Heard I Should Be Blogging?

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.

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?

...
read more

What Our Clients Are Saying

- Marc Lazarus, Russell & Lazarus APC

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!

read more testimonials
- Morris Lilienthal, Martinson and Beason, P.C.

GNGF has proven to me why they are leaders in their field. The marketing work done by the GNGF team goes far beyond successful rankings and a website we can take pride in…At GNGF, I am treated with personal attention.
Of course, the new business gained from our web efforts is nice too.

read more testimonials
- Cheryl David, The Law Offices of Cheryl David

GNGF is definitely the best web and marketing company that I’ve ever worked with... During my 30+ years of practice, I’ve worked with numerous companies and in-house marketing coordinators... I was never satisfied... Fortunately, for the last 2.5 years, I’ve been working with the GNGF team, and they’ve been incredible teachers... They’ve truly transformed our site and our marketing. The team is not only responsive, organized and creative. More important than those qualities, they’re friendly and truly skilled adapters of their ever-evolving trade.

read more testimonials

How GNGF Can Help?

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.

connect with us
expert@gngf.com 513.444.2016

Privacy Policy Terms of Use