Successful law firm SEO requires equally successful keyword ranking. The more keywords you can rank for the greater the chance you can attract more, new clients to your firm.
Ranking for keywords is an essential part of any online business strategy. It helps you reach new customers and keep existing ones engaged. This article will give you seven top tips for ranking for keywords that will dramatically life your law firm’s SEO and rankings.
Top law firm SEO requires finding and using keywords that are going to accelerate your law firm up the search engine rankings – providing links, authority, categories and these tips will ensure you not only increase your firm’s SEO, but actually rank for many more keywords too.
So what steps can you take to explode the number of keywords your law firm ranks for?
1. Use Detailed Pages
Describe your services in detail. By providing pages that details your firm’s services you can focus on each of the terms (that is, the ‘keyword terms’) that you want to rank for.
Remember that each of these key terms – let’s say you are trying to rank for ‘drunk driving lawyer in Phoenix’ – then you can rank for many keywords related to such a term, such as ‘dui attorney phoenix’, ‘dui lawyer arizona’, ‘scottsdale dui attorney’ and so forth.
A well written page will help you generate high content value with an equally high keyword usage.
Key Tip: Create individual pages for everything you have to offer in your law firm.
2. Use Internal and External Linking For Better Law Firm SEO
Internal linking is vital to link your content, being your law firms services, to one another in a manner that will provide greater ‘juice’ for Google to see the relevance of your keyword terms.
What is internal linking?
Here is a definition from SEO developer Yoast:
An internal link is any link from one page on your website to another page on your website. Both your users and search engines use links to find content on your website. Your users use links to navigate through your site and to find the content they want to find. Search engines also use links to navigate your site. They won’t see a page if there are no links to it.
The links can come from your website’s category pages and from contextual links within the website. These help with navigation for visitors – and prospective legal clients, obviously – but also they help Google index your law firm’s pages in their engine.
The more links you have to that page the more attention is given to it by Google, being not just external links but also the internal links you generate.
A good WordPress plugin providing this services automatically is LinkWhisper, which will find the pages that contextually link to the content in the page you are writing.
This practice is even recommended by Google itself in the Google SEO Optimization starter guide.
But external links are also very important. Most external links will go your home page, but you should also focus on links to your specific service pages.
They can be difficult to obtain, but if you create content pages that are useful and interesting you will find outside links coming to your page and this is something that is particularly useful for lawyers who can highlight specific news, information and general content around legal news and developments which, if timely and authoritative, will receive links from those external sources.
The result can be a massive lift in your own ‘service page’ ranking – for instance for your immigration, insolvency, litigation services and so forth.
3. Create A Great Home Page For SEO
The home page is obviously the one that is going to get the most traffic and attention in most cases, with external and internal links pointing to it and to the categories in your homepage menu.
When you link to key content on your website from your home page it helps generate traffic to the content page, but these internal links from the home page also let Google and the search engines see how valuable and important the page is. It helps them to understand what your site is about, what the authority is (the links) and how to index the various pages on your site.
This will help Google understand what your site is about and why it should rank higher than other sites. Include your main keywords in the title tag and throughout the body text of your website.
If you provide a list of your law firm services, make sure you also provide a brief description of the services with a link that uses the service term. In other words, instead of saying the generic “More Info” with a link, put in “More on Bankruptcy Law” and so forth. This reinforces what the link and the page is about, helping with the keyword ranking for that term.
Links from your home page to post articles will carry greater weight or authority if they are linked to from your home page, than if they are linked to from a category page.
But the links from your home page do not need to be to blog posts, they can go to service pages (your company law, family law etc pages) which will then carry the home page ‘authority’ and direct that power to the appropriate services or posts.
You are effectively enhancing your law firm’s SEO with that linking strategy, using your home page power.
4. Make the Most of Your Business Categories in Google
You should use your business categories as a way to organize your website so that people can find what they are looking for more easily. Many businesses and firms simply overlook the key category that they should list under and so they miss important opportunities to lift your law firm ranking by using this important Google tool.
You can read more about local SEO ranking tips in our article here.
The primary category is extremely important in getting your firm listed, but many firms are unaware that they can also list their secondary or subcategories on Google in order to achieve high rankings and vastly improve their overall law firm SEO results.
It’s also a good idea to make sure that each category has its own subcategory. These secondary categories are important even if not as much as the primary categories.
But if you have a service that matches one of Google’s secondary categories you will receive higher Google ‘love’ and rankings will follow for that service-category. It is surprising how often law firms and local businesses miss the important opportunity provided to them with these sub-category listings, by not using them for their own business.
To find out what the categories are you should search Google under your business name and you will see your option to edit your business profile.
Check the categories listed and see if you can fit into others that fit your practice areas. You click on the business information data and the ability to add categories that fit your law firm.
4. Use Keywords in Your Google Reviews
Google reviews are an important ranking factor for your website and should be used to achieve maximum law firm SEO power.
You can check our earlier article on how to get great Google reviews, but put simply when you ask clients to review your legal services, if you also ask them to add the keyword(s) you are targeting in their review you will receive a boost to your ranking. This is an entirely simple, achievable way to lift your legal SEO power and achieve the rankings boost you want.
Naturally you can’t tell your clients what to write, but you can suggest things to them, including the keyword inclusion relating to your selected keywords, to help build your online business enquiries.
That is one of the simplest and easiest ways to boost your law firm SEO.
4. Build Links to Your Site From Authority Sites
Great law firm SEO requires authority. You need to build your own authority through great content, but also help generate it with links to authority websites.
you want to rank for certain keywords, you need to build links to your site from other websites with a lot of authority. This will help Google understand that your site has something worth ranking for.
Law Firm SEO Summary
We all know that achieving good search engine optimization is something of a moveable feast, with algorithm changes and other factors complicating the process. SEO is not an exact science and when you are looking to boost your law firm’s search engine optimization you will need to monitor your efforts and make sure the steps we have outlined are being followed.
But adhering to these six key SEO princples cannot but boost your law firm’s rankings.
Remember, if you have questions or comments about law firm SEO, or want some assistance with rankings and content marketing, then let us know right here.
