With the average small business now set to spend around $75,000 this year on digital marketing, thankfully there are shortcuts to marketing your law firm. Law firms face stiff competition against one another with billboards and print ads. Taking advantage of SEO for law firms, you can outsmart other firms in your area without them even knowing what hit them.
Search engines use a tool called web crawlers to rank sites across the internet for relevance, freshness, and how quickly they load. That’s how search engines can return such fast results on a search. By designing with these concepts in mind, you can ensure that your site ranks highly when search engines come crawling.
Follow these 5 tips to ensure that your SEO game is top notch.
1. Start A Blog
When search engines return results to users, they love to return sites that are updated often with fresh content. One of the best ways to always be offering fresh content is to start a blog on your site. While it might seem like a big time commitment, the rewards for your investment are huge, especially in SEO for law firms.
With a blog, you can offer responses to frequently asked questions and build a strong reputation for your site. Readers will repost your blog posts and could even reach out to you for press opportunities. By sharing a peek behind the curtain of what your firm has to offer, you can tell your potential clients that you’ve got expertise that’s overflowing.
A blog is a time and energy commitment, so make sure that you’ve mapped out the subjects that you want to cover in advance. Have a deployment calendar with keywords that you want to focus on. If you find that people ask about cases for a certain type of legal defense during a given part of the year, make sure you’re focusing on that on your blog.
2. Go Mobile
In recent years, mobile traffic has definitively surpassed desktop and laptop browsing. Because an increasing number of clients will be finding your firm via mobile devices and tablets, you need to ensure that your site looks good on these devices.
If you’re in the middle of a redesign or are thinking about one, make sure your design takes on a “mobile first” strategy. Rather than build for desktops and try to work backward, design for mobile first and then allow the page to be scaled.
With an increasing number of users finding out about new services via apps and mobile browsing, you need to look good when users come for you. Your menus should be clean, easy to read, and intuitive. When people click, they should get the right kind of feedback.
If you’re new to web design for law firms, research what other firms are using. Stay tuned to trends in the legal world and be sure that you’re ready for changes to come. Designing a mobile-friendly website can be the best defense to changes that come from new device releases.
3. Use Local SEO
Using local terms is the best way to get high-impact users clicking on your site. When people type in “pizza” into a search engine, search engines now know that they probably want to find pizza in their area. The top ranking results that they’ll get are going to be the closest pizza shops to their search area.
Using local terms can clue search engines into where you’re located. If you’re by the Mississippi River or Mount Rushmore, make that plain somewhere on your site. Name your city or neighborhood as often as is reasonable.
Combined with the adequate amount of keywords, your local terms will start capturing results and let people know where your firm is located. If you’re utilizing custom web development, make sure your developers know the keywords that are important to you.
When you upload photos and video files to your site, make sure you drop those terms into the titles of the files. Instead of “Video123.MOV”, change it to “Albuquerque-Hit-And-Run-Lawyer.MOV” and you’ll see your results start to climb.
4. Check Your Links
Dead or expired links can spell trouble for any law firm that’s trying to have a strong showing in the SEO game. If web crawlers sniff out any dead links, they’ll lower your ranking precipitously.
The same will go if you constantly link to sites with a low reputation. If one of your most frequently linked sites turns out to be a fake news site or just an opinion page, you won’t rank highly.
Find statistics and the high-quality links to back them up. Connect with reputable news sources and you’ll find that your ranking will go up in response.
Check your blog posts every few months for broken links.
5. Use Social Media
Social media is the key to connecting with just about any demographic out there. Every lawyer at your firm should have a public profile page separate from their personal profile. Connect with each other and then with local businesses in your area.
Take the connections one step further and start reaching out to the kinds of clients you’re looking for. If you’re in corporate law, connect with corporations located nearby to get the word out about what you do. When people search for that company, you’ll be riding their coattails in search results.
Ask for clients to write reviews on social sites like LinkedIn or Facebook. Claim the Yelp page for your firm and try to get results there too. Offer a discount to any repeat clients who leave a review on Avvo.
SEO For Law Firms Is Always Changing
The trends and algorithms that make sites rank highly on search engines are changing day by day. In order to stay at the top of SEO for law firms, you need to watch trends. Designing for mobile and watching changes is the best way to future-proof your site for changes.
For more on the basics of SEO, follow our guide to reaping the rewards of a strong search engine strategy.