As an attorney looking for clients, you may have heard the buzzword “SEO” and wondered how it can increase visibility for your firm. Whether you are a large or small firm, building your client base always matters. Your reputation as a legal expert is what keeps you in business. Now that word of mouth travels via 5G in the palm of your hand, you need to rank in search results. It’s time to learn about law firm SEO and how to optimize your content to bring in more business.
Understand SEO
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is just another term for increasing your visibility so that others find you online. Think about what happens when you type search terms into google. You are usually looking for an answer to a question. If you type into Google search “Recipe for coq au vin,” you expect some of the best recipes to show up first in the search results (after the ads, of course).
These high-ranking results get there because SEO optimization increased their visibility. Ranking high brings in more traffic. So whether you rank for a blog or a webpage, your firm receives visibility when you rank in search results.
Visibility Means Brand Recognition
When you rank as the leading answer for a question or topic, others begin to see you as the expert in that area. What law firm does not want to be known for its legal expertise?
For example, if you are an estate planning attorney, you might want everyone over 18 to know why it’s essential to have a will. You may also want them to understand why they need other planning documents such as a power of attorney and advance directives. When you have the most knowledgeable and SEO-optimized article for the subject matter, you establish your brand as the premier law expert for that topic area.
If others can see you as the go-to legal knowledge and experience base in their local area, it’s almost like they have just placed your business card in their wallet.
Gaining Trust
Giving away knowledge on your website and blog is one powerful way to gain the trust of your client base. With fully optimized content creation, people you’ve never met rely on your legal answers to inform their lives. Your website and blog content bring your future client base much-needed answers to the legal issues in their lives. This free exchange of information brings your value up in their eyes.
Once they’ve read your blog or website to find answers, they remember you in the future when they need legal advice. So they pull out that “business card” they had filed away in their mind and find your site online again.
Bringing Traffic to Your Website
Optimization is the key to ranking high on search engine results, bringing more traffic to your website.
Let’s say your expert article on the legal ramifications of a DUI brings a reader to a life-changing decision in her life. You can bet she will look for other content on your website to find more answers that make a difference.
The more traffic to your website, the higher the likelihood someone will contact you if they need legal counsel. SEO optimization works for you by:
- Increasing traffic to your website
- Helping your local community notice your law firm
- Solidifying the expertise of your law firm in the public eye
- Eliciting 5-star Google reviews from clients
- Engaging potential clients with your content to bring name recognition
- Converting your visitors into clients
- Increasing your rankings so that you are higher than other local firms
Create Expert Level Content Written For Laypeople
Your content includes all of the web copy written for your web page and blog. What you write is just as important for SEO purposes as your choice of keywords.
Recently, search engines have increased the ranking of longer content (content longer than 800 words). For this reason, you will want to write blogs that dig into the subject you write about and fully explain. Go deep into one carefully chosen topic area but don’t try to cover a broad subject comprehensively in one blog.
With blog writing, it’s best to keep a conversational tone and use words that make sense to most casual readers. Explain any legalese you use or leave it out entirely and use layman’s terms. Carefully think about how to phrase complex concepts.
As an expert in your field, you can explain a challenging subject in 800-1200 words, but only if your language is clear and straightforward with plenty of illustrative examples. You don’t want surface-level content that pushes readers to look elsewhere for answers, but you don’t want to write a treatise either.
Expert Level Content Draws Backlinks
One of the essential building blocks for SEO is drawing in backlinks. Backlinks are simply when another source links to your article. For example, let’s say a popular local doctor writes blogs about medical issues and links to your article on estate planning in his blog. In this case, you gain a valuable backlink.
Perhaps the doctor writes, “My experience with patients who become incapacitated has shown me the importance of estate planning.” He places a hyperlink on the words “estate planning” so patients can learn more. His link to your website shows the world that he values your input on the subject of “estate planning.”
To continue the example, the higher ranking his website is on search results, the more his backlink to you will matter. So if you have many high-ranking sites linking to your website content about estate planning, your ranking will skyrocket, and more people will find you in their Google search for “estate planning.”
Backlinks are why the content you write matters just as much or more than having properly placed keywords.
Why Keywords are Important
The quality of your content matters, but keywords also count. Naming your blog or webpage with a well-thought-out title is crucial to ranking high in SEO. The reason for this is because the web categorizes topics according to the exact words used.
It’s essential to take advantage of a keyword optimizer like Ahrefs or a chrome extension such as Keywords Everywhere to find the topics and titles that will bring in traffic.
In addition to finding the right title, you need to incorporate those exact title keywords into your blog or website content, generally within the first paragraph or two. You’ll also want to use the exact words again at least once more in the content you write.
By using keywords to signal what your content is about, Google and other search engines “read” your site as having information about that particular topic. Thus, the web bots categorize your written content correctly, rather than placing it in some dark forgotten corner of the world wide web.
We Can Help
Whether you are a do-it-yourself kind of individual who just needs a bit of help or a large firm looking for a full-service marketing solution, we’ve got you covered at Whoosh Agency. We specialize in helping law firms rank using SEO optimization and other digital marketing tools. We do it all, from creating, maintaining, and hosting websites, to writing expert legal blogs and creating social media content. Our marketing solutions increase your visibility thereby affecting your revenue. Contact us to find out how we can help your firm grow its client base.