5 Cutting-Edge SEO Tactics for Lawyers and Law Firms

You can employ and partner with the most qualified attorneys in the area, but you won’t get the business leads you deserve unless you take full advantage of online marketing strategies. If you’re serious about strengthening your online presence, set aside some of your marketing budget to focus on search engine optimization. SEO in 2019 is more important than ever before, but as more law firms wise up to the benefits of optimizing their brand for search, doing the bare minimum is no longer enough. With these fresh tactics geared towards SEO for law firms, you can give your firm or practice the boost it needs to move ahead of the competition.

Build Your Law Firm’s Local Search Presence Online

SEO for lawyers doesn’t have to be a comprehensive battle plan encompassing the entire country; when it comes to exposing your business to the right people, don’t be afraid to think small. Most businesses have the “who” and the “what” locked down—but what about the “where?”

There are hordes of potential clients in your area that simply don’t know the name of your practice. Yet. Local SEO works to get your business in front of their eyes and show them that you offer the legal services they need, where they need it. You can accomplish this by pushing out content that makes use of locally targeted keywords (think “attorneys in Miami”), adding these keywords in heading tags on your site or for internal link anchor text is a good place to start. Claiming and optimizing your Google My Business listing is a basic tactic, but adding photos, getting your practice photographed by a Google-approved photographer, and making posts on your Google My Business account will increase your exposure in local searches! Make sure to add or claim your Google My Business listing to get started with this process.

Optimize Content

Writing quality content is a marketing tactic so old that it’s new—and it’s still just as hard to find good writers today. Writing copy is even more of an art now than when it was done exclusively to attract people (the golden age of advertising) or just for search engines (the early days of online advertising). Now, you need to marry searchable content with copy that actual humans will still enjoy reading. That means every word on your site, every blog post, landing page, and paragraph needs to be written with both humans and search engines in mind. In this vein, consider writing content with featured snippets in mind. A featured snippet is a search result in Google that you don’t have to click on to get an answer or information for your query. Having your website’s content in a featured snippet will ensure searchers see your business first and build trust as an authority in the eyes of search engines and searchers. An effective tactic to appear in featured snippets involves answering a question relevant to your business in under 29 words in the first paragraph of content on a page, followed by a deeper exploration of the question and topic. You can use keyword tools to discover FAQs relevant to your practice that you can answer in content.

Utilize Schema Markup

Bear with us—we’re going to get just the tiniest bit technical with this one. Schema markup involves adding the appropriate pieces of HTML code to specific areas of a site so that search engines can efficiently and effectively interpret a page. Essentially, what you’re doing is handing Google or another search engine a handy map to your site. Now that the search engine can easily figure out where certain information lives, it can spit that back out to searchers. What this ends up looking like is labeled information in search results. For example, if you have a blog that is optimized with schema markup, search engines can display author, date, category, and title information in search results, this typically results in a higher ranking and increased clicks to your result. As an added bonus, you can actually help search engines recognize your site as legal content by using attorney-specific schema.

Optimize Your Content for Voice Search

AIs like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri have been helping users navigate the internet for years, and their usefulness continues to increase as more businesses take their offerings online. The public has taken to the technology with vigor—after all, who wouldn’t want to ask a question and get an answer without having to type or click or scroll? Some marketing experts are actually predicting that voice search queries will make up half of all online searches by next year! Before this technology gets any more popular, make sure that your content is optimized for it. While this process isn’t quite the same as SEO for normal website browsing, some techniques do overlap. One is creating those featured snippets we mentioned! Search engines prioritize them in voice searches as well, allowing you to satisfy their algorithms as well as the searcher.

Publicize Reviews

This is not the time to be modest—it’s the time to brag! Let the world know just how great you are at your job by securing and sharing positive reviews. Make your current clients aware that you would appreciate a Google review. You’d be surprised by how many loyal customers will take you up on that and leave written appreciation. Once you’ve built up a nice bank of reviews on your business profile, use a service like Google’s Small Thanks to create shareable social posts that show off the quality of your work and increase your search visibility.

Conquer the Competition with a Marketing Agency

We’d love to tell you that there’s a shortcut that can guarantee a high return on investment, but no single SEO tactic is the key to success—generating meaningful results depends on finding the right strategy for your business. That can take some trial and error, testing that you don’t necessarily have the time to tackle. If you’re dedicated to getting the most out of your marketing budget, consider working with a digital marketing agency. But not just any agency. Do your research, and find one that specializes in working with law firms.

At Ten Golden Rules, we’ve helped a number of law firm’s grow their web based leads. With a wide range of services and years of experience in the digital marketing sphere, we can help put your firm on the map. But we’ll let the data speak for itself: we grew web leads for one firm from two to three per month to over 100! Contact us today to learn more about how we can optimize your online presence.