Law firms rely heavily on their website for organic traffic, which in turn converts into paying clients. And as you probably already know, the most dependable way to increase your organic traffic and outrank your competitors on search engine result pages (SERPs) is to work on your website’s SEO. In fact, that’s what any digital marketing agency will do if you consult them for your website’s growth.
In this guide, we’re going to discuss 5 effective strategies ranging from keyword research and local SEO to UX optimization and link building—With practical advice and actionable intelligence on how to get started with each!
Top 5 SEO Strategies for Law Firms
SEO is an often-complex process. It involves working on a bunch of things that are hard to grasp. But we have demystified it all and summarized, with practical guidance, the strategies that will help you rank higher on SERPs and get more clients online.
Given below are the 5 most reliable, proven, and trusted SEO strategies for law firms out there. These are strategies any law firm marketing agency will swear by!
1. Keywords & Content
You need to make a plan about what keywords, queries, and phrases you want to rank for. Create content around those keywords, focusing entirely on educating, informing, or helping the reader. Only valuable content sells, the rest just gets discarded by Google.
That’s precisely why you shouldn’t stuff keywords, robotically optimize for exact keywords, beat around the bush to inflate the length of your article, and so on. In simpler words, write for genuinely helping a human, not pleasing an indexing bot!
Incorporate keywords naturally into your website content. This includes page titles, headings, meta descriptions, URLs, and of course, body text.
Only create informative, engaging, and authoritative content that addresses common legal questions. If it provides valuable insights or has a personal touch, all the better. You can experiment with different content formats—Blog posts, articles, case studies, and FAQs.
These will not only attract search engine traffic but also position you as a trusted resource in your field.
2. Link Building
Earn high-quality backlinks from reputable and relevant websites to boost your law firm’s authority and visibility. These are links pointing to any page on your domain. Backlinks from reputable and trusted websites can mean a significant jump in your organic traffic. It’s even better if they’re in the same niche as you or if there’s some topical overlap.
- You can try guest blogging and reach out to authoritative legal publications asking for link exchanges or promotions.
- It’s also useful to get listed in industry-specific directories.
- High-quality content that answers hot questions often gets linked by other websites.
- Infographics, visual guides, and video explainers are highly shareable and tend to have a higher likelihood of being linked.
- Google doesn’t just consider links from reputable sources that are marked “dofollow.” It’s best to also have UGC-style and “nofollow” links, which are thankfully very easy to create from forums like Quora, Reddit, Medium, TheLaw.com, and so on.
Whatever you do, always aim for natural, organic link-building practices rather than engaging in manipulative link schemes or buying links from cheap sources such as private blog networks.
3. User Experience (UX) Optimization
Focus on delivering a positive user experience by improving website navigation, reducing page loading times, enhancing readability with proper formatting and typography, and optimizing call-to-action buttons. A seamless and user-friendly experience encourages visitors to stay on your site longer, engage with your content, and ultimately, convert into clients.
Just check out the best law firm websites and you’ll understand what we mean. These websites leave no stone unturned in optimizing the experience to ensure there’s no friction when using them. Information is super-easy to find and all content is packaged neatly to not overwhelm the user.
4. Social Media Engagement
Social signals can indirectly impact your search engine rankings and drive traffic to your website. They also add authority to your website when you link out to your actively managed social media handles.
In fact, no digital strategy is complete without social media presence. However, we’d recommend you against going overboard and managing a bunch of accounts. That way, you’ll be spreading your resources and attention too thin to have any significant impact.
Adopt a platform-specific strategy and just start with Twitter and LinkedIn. Next, scale up to Facebook. After that, it depends on what you want to do!
You can start your:
- YouTube channel for long-form videos
- A medium blog for more topical coverage
- Pinterest page for infographics and shareable data
- Instagram account for sharing clips and images
- TikTok account for short advice-like videos
- Reddit subforum for long-form digressions and hot takes
Social media helps you engage with your audience, create a loyal following, and build excellent brand awareness. It will all fail if you choose to go with a cookie-cutter approach and publish the same posts on 5 platforms or publish content that’s not valuable or too generic. We recommend starting with legal insights and opinions on pressing matters.
5. Local SEO
Sometimes, the answer to how to get clients as a lawyer is as easy as optimizing your pages for the city or region you serve!
Implement local SEO strategies to target potential clients in your specific geographic area.
There are four main ways to do this:
- Optimize your Google My Business profile.
- Create localized content and landing pages.
- Gather positive online reviews from satisfied clients on your Google Business listing and Yelp. Also, feature these on your website.
- Utilize local keywords and location-specific information throughout your website.
Wrapping Up
If you’re just starting out, you’re likely to get discouraged when even the most time-tested and reliable SEO strategies simply return no value.
That’s mistake #1.
Only knowing what to do without sticking to it in a competitive niche like legal advice is a terrible mistake. And it could very well be your last. Yes, taking note of all these strategies is essential but following through with proper devotion and effort is even more so. In the end, your investment of time (and possibly money) will pay off.
That’s why we recommend you bookmark this page for reference. It’s not rare for law firms to take months to get these strategies incorporated into their SEO, website, and content management workflows!
