You are here because your law firm wishes to encash significant opportunities offered by digital marketing. Perhaps you plan to work with a local SEO services agency to improve your firm’s search engine visibility but want to understand legal SEO fundamentals. Let’s get the basics right and be on the same page.
After reading this post, you will understand:
- Crucial elements in law firm’s local SEO strategy
- Importance of locally relevant content
- Why are E-A-T and YMYL algorithms important for law firms?
- What is legal or law firm SEO?
Legal SEO is a set of processes that aim to improve the law firm’s visibility in search results.
Enhancing the website’s technical framework and publishing fresh content are the most crucial aspects.
There’s no option to achieve overnight success in the form of new clients. Legal SEO is a long-term process that provides lasting results.
Now you might wonder if the investment is worth it
Well, roughly 96 percent of people use search engines to find legal remedies. More than 85 percent of people use maps to find nearby law firms. Around 74 percent of internet users contact the attorney after searching online for the same.
You surely don’t want to ignore these potential clients. Thus, start building your local SEO strategy to ensure your firm remains visible in search results.
- Significance of local SEO for small law firms
Small law firms primarily serve clients living near the office or the same part of the city.
Roughly 85 percent of internet users open Google Maps to search nearby law firms. Thus, appearing in Google Maps results and organic listings is vital for the practice.
People prefer using smartphones and tablets to locate a lawyer with relevant skills nearby their home or office. Your law firm’s details and relevant content should come up in their local search.
Once implemented, local SEO works like a bridge between law firms and prospective clients.
Here are essential elements for a law firm’s local SEO strategy:
- Accurate name, office address, and phone number (NAP)
- Optimizing your firm’s profiles on social media
- Promoting client reviews
- Citations
- Making the site components voice search friendly
- Ensuring information accuracy in Google My Business Listing
- Registration with online business directories
- Creating a location-specific “About Us” page
- Integrating local keywords in the content
- Focus on the E-A-T and YMYL algorithms
E-A-T, or the Expertise, Authority, and Trust algorithm focus on the trustworthiness and authoritativeness of the author and website. These factors are significant for law firms as people prefer taking legal advice only from reputable sources.
The concept has become a crucial element for the search engine optimization process.
E-A-T can improve with the following best practices:
- Backlinks from high-authority domains
- Mentions from trusted and influential sources
- Accurate and up to date website content
- Ample reviews
- Publicly available contact details
- Wikipedia page
- Verified author credentials
What’s YMYLalgorithm?
The YMYL, known as “Your Money or Your Life,” algorithm applies to pages that share legal, medical, financial, government policy, shopping, and news pieces.
Put simply; it applies to information that can impact a user’s financial position, health, and happiness.
As your law firm shares legal advice via blogs and other content, most of the website consists of YMYL pages.
To get the best out of YMYL, ensure your site is mobile-friendly. Make sure the information in the About US section is accurate, with complete details of team members. Blog posts should have bylines with a link to the author’s bio.
- Winning content strategy for legal SEO
Your content strategy must include blog posts, location pages, and audio podcasts.
Blog posts
Blog posts can attract the most traffic for any given website.
Please choose a topic that your audience cares about, and write a blog post for straightforwardly communicating with them.
Choose the keywords after conducting thorough research, and write the content carefully. Link the blog post with the website’s main legal service page and other top-level pages.
Long-form content, specifically blog posts, offers an opportunity to connect with prospects. People appreciate case studies, examples, and recent developments in those cases.
Remember Google Passage’s algorithm? Search engines are not dumb anymore. Your team should write the content for humans, not for search engine spiders.
The content in blogs and location pages needs to be top-notch.
Let the content marketing team interact with the firm’s lawyers on a variety of legal topics. Then, let writers refine the content and present it in readable format for the audience to make it more effective.
Your readers will consider the content as sound legal advice. Thus, make sure the content is accurate to the last detail.
The blog administrator should publish the content only after a review by someone from the legal team. You can catch easy-to-miss errors with multiple sets of eyes. Also, legal content should end with a CTA button. This step can help in converting visitors into genuine leads.
Location pages
People prefer traveling short distances, around 10 to 20 miles, to access the services of highly experienced lawyers.
Law firms operating in multiple cities should consider creating location-specific pages targeting the selected geographical areas or cities.
Podcasts
No doubt, blog posts are a phenomenally crucial tool. But audio content can fill the void.
As a local search engine optimization company, we suggest law firm clients create audio podcasts using the website’s old content. The strategy can help improve organic rankings.
Audio podcasts do not involve any visual elements, so they are easy to produce. The firm’s attorneys can select any legal subject and go into detail. People who do not wish to spend time reading can listen to the audio while on the go.
Let your attorney explain everything, from personal injury, homeowners association laws to types of bankruptcy. It proves to be the easiest way to educate the public.
Importance of locally relevant content
You can draw local audiences with localized topics. For example, if you can publish blog posts concerning the rights of homeowner’s associations, you can attract people seeking related legal services in the area. You can target keywords like “Sue a homeowners association in Surfside” and write a post about steps people should take to suing homeowners association in Surfside town.
The content can help establish the firm as an authority in the area resulting in mode leads.
- Possible KPIs for your attorney website:
- Organic traffic
- Key rankings
- Calls from Google My Business listing
- Bounce rate
- Time on page
- Soft and hard conversions
- Pages viewed per session
Measuring conversions
Do you wish to monitor stats yourself rather than waiting for reports from your agency? Besides other professional tools, you can use Google Analytics to access information about the impact of content SEO.
The quality of the inbound leads should show drastic improvement after publishing content. The intention behind content marketing is to get new clients.
Final Thoughts
As a lawyer operating a small firm, you probably wish to let experts care about your website’s local SEO and content. Connect with PeddleWeb, let our team create a strategy for you.
