Law Firm SEO – The Guide to SEO for Lawyers
Google, will on a daily basis, process over 3 billion inquiries per day. As at the time of writing this article, the search engine has already processed a little over 4.2 billion queries – and it was only after 4 pm. This translates to well over 40,000 inquiries every second, which is already a lot to comprehend. Now, how likely is your page or content to feature on the coveted first page of this search engine?
As a Google user, you hardly ever go past the first page, do you? Matter of fact, you most likely only focus on the first three articles on the first page and dismiss the rest. How do you as a business ensure that the first article prospective customers read is yours?
What to Consider in Search Engine Optimization for Lawyers?
First, what is Search Engine Optimization and why should lawyers bother with it? SEO is the structuring of online content so that it ranks well on the search results for keywords or phrases related to them. Google has the largest market share as far as search engines are concerned, which is why it is the benchmark for SEO to most content creators. Creating legal content that ranks well in Search Engine Results Page (SERP) is quite tricky due to the various regulations that the law places on the industry, but it is doable. The advertising guidelines are clear as far as the legal profession is concerned, but that does not mean that players in the industry cannot safely create awareness of their business and services.
SEO for lawyers means doing things a little differently so that;
- You analyze the existing online presence of the law firm and work on improving what already exists.
- Your business stands out from the crowd.
- The SEO strategy you set can be beneficial in the long-term.
An SEO strategy may not yield immediately, but you will see the effects much later, and they will serve you well for long. You may want to engage an SEO expert to help you go through the initial stages first, or you can decide to do the campaign in-house. Either way, this guide contains some gems that will get you started and bring the dream of having your website ranked on the first page to life.
Incorporate these when Optimizing for Lawyers
There is this general idea that SEO is all about finding the right keywords and incorporating them into your content. While there is some truth in this, it is not nearly enough.
- Website Customization
Imagine a bookstore with thousands of books representing a variety of topics and genres. Each segment has to be correctly labeled so that buyers find their preferred titles easily. If not, they could walk out of the bookstore believing their title wasn’t available. The same applies to a website. Search engines need to know the proper way to categorize them, and so you want to mark it properly with Meta descriptions, headers, the URL, as well as images and content. These start the journey towards customization.
- Navigability
First, let us talk loading speeds. No one has time for slow-loading sites, and so you want to have the fastest speeds to keep visitors on your page – more of this later. How do you like to get lost in a site when you urgently need information? The way our lives are designed, we have no time to go through tons of documents to find the right one. The ideal site – that will retain visitors who you can then convert – will visitor-friendly and easy to navigate.
- Content – King
It has been said repeatedly that content is everything and we couldn’t agree more. Content that is regularly updated and relevant to your niche clientele will bring visitors to your site all the time. In between pertinent information, you can throw in useful keywords that will make the content easily noticeable to search engines.
- The All-important Backlinks
A search engine has limited time to spend on each page considering how fast it has to return useful information to the user, and so it crawls through pages very fast to determine the relevance of each to the search it is conducting. When searching, it will pick any link related to your site from other websites and send traffic your way. This improves your page’s rank, which emphasizes the importance of internal and external linking.
To recap, we emphasize on website navigability. While SEO works ideally in bringing web traffic to you, structuring your site properly makes it easy for search engines to find your page and for other users to share it on various platforms.
Internet Marketing Analysis for Law Firms
Marketing analysis is the best way to tell where your site is underperforming, so you know how to optimize it for better performance. The main areas that you want to check include backlinks – both internal and external, content and its size, as well as common gateway errors.
When it comes to word count, the longer, the better. While some content creators are concerned with this as they think readers may not want to commit to a long read, the opposite is true, in some cases. Say, for instance, you want to create content on inheritance law. Being as the topic entails a lot, you may want to create an article of over 1,000 words to address everything.
Backlinks, whether internal and external, are supposed to be relevant to the article. It helps to remember it is quality and not quantity that matters. Also, linking to authority non-competing sites adds more value than linking to just any shallow piece you find online. Broken links will also hurt your ranking as they show a lack of authority.
Steps in Analyzing your Website
An analysis of your website measures your site’s performance against the set targets to see how you are doing. This analysis also informs your SEO strategy.
Develop a Strategy – If you start a journey without a clear idea of where you are heading, you will not make it too far. A clear internet marketing strategy helps you identify your SEO needs.
Use Available Tools – The internet is a whole school in its own right, complete with all the tools you will need to get started. Adwords, Google Analytics, and Keyword planner are only a few of the available tools that will give you clarity on what your audience wants to read as well as measuring the effectiveness of your SEO strategy. How many people are you reaching? These tools will establish this for you.
Link Analysis – You cannot be a guru on every topic and so search engines recognize that you may have to use other sources when creating content. Are you linking out to broken links that are harming your SEO strategy? Are the links authoritative enough? Analysis will help you know more about linking internally and externally.
What On-Site and Off-Site SEO Mean for Lawyers
Onsite SEO is as simple as it sounds – these are actions that take place on your website that contribute to your optimization efforts while off-site SEO is the effort that you put away from your site that will improve its ranking. Examples of off-site or off-page SEO include link building, social media marketing, and social bookmarking.
On-site SEO for Lawyers
We have already established that having an SEO strategy will make it possible for search engines to rank your site appropriately so that users can find your content faster. These are some of the areas you will need to address for better on-site optimization.
- Valuable Content
You will never regret creating valuable content that is engaging and value-adding to the reader. The content should answer all relevant questions the reader may have and to do this; it has to be lengthy. The longer the article, the more you address and the better it meets the needs of the reader.
- Website Structure and the use of Headline Tags
A properly structured website has web pages for different topics so that a visitor doesn’t have to spend lots of time finding information. The headings in the form of H1, H2, H3, H4, and others will make it easy for search engines to organize your site and send the right traffic your way.
- Meta Descriptions and Title Tags
Meta descriptions are short texts that will describe your article’s content to SERPs. They are limited in word count – 160 characters – but they could make all the difference in your site’s ranking.
Title tags are similar to file names on a folder. They guide the user to your web page, and so it is important to add keywords to them for SEO purposes.
- Google Analytics
This tool is one of the many available for SEO purposes. It helps you track your traffic, see your keyword rankings, and even click-through rates. Google Analytics will give you visuals on the progress of your SEO strategy, so you know what needs to change.
- Quality Content
Your blog and/or website should be able to answer a visitor’s question or provide a solution. If your content isn’t doing either of the two – or both, visitors will move on to other sites with better quality information, and you will miss the chance to convert them to sales. Lengthy articles are beneficial because they allow you to say all you wanted to without rushing ideas and words.
- Security
On-site security is vital as it prevents information shared by those who seek your legal services from falling in the wrong hands. How will they trust you with their legal matters if you can’t protect their gadgets from vital attacks when they visit your site?
- Load Speed
How annoying us it when you have to wait for a website to load? Most people can only wait for 10 seconds before they move on to the next site. The slower your site’s loading speed, the lower your ranks as traffic will not be coming your way.
- Call to Action
After you have created quality content, you want to direct your visitors to your site where they will access the services you have just told them about. This part of the content is vital.
High-Quality Content – Why is it so Important?
Innovative website design is great, but it does nothing for you if the content on your site is poor. The one thing that leads visitors to your site is content, and so they will not sit and read through articles that do not address their needs.
Maintaining a Blog
A blog cannot be underestimated when it comes to creating value for your site. Maintaining a blog enables you to create content that is geared towards your niche market, and that will make it possible to address all the areas of practice. If, for instance, your area of practice is family law, you can create content to target the various aspects of this including property division after divorce, legal separation, and child custody among other areas. You cannot address all these areas in one post, and so you need an avenue to create as much content on various topics as possible.
When planning content for your blog, these are some of the questions that you should ask yourself so they can guide you to creating vibrant content;
- Who is your target and what message do you want to pass on to them?
- How regularly will you be posting? Consistency is critical in blogging, so the best approach is to choose a day and make it the regular posting day without missing.
- What visuals will you be using for your blog? Visuals help a great deal.
- Who will be creating your content for you? Will you be posting all the time or will you incorporate guest posts for variety as long as they stick with the theme?
- Will you market the content yourself or will you hire an internet marketing company to help with that? They will undoubtedly be in a better position to implement an SEO strategy and get you an audience.
Creating a blog is a commitment that you will need to be consistent with, especially if you intend to keep subscribers on your list. If you only blog once then take a break for weeks, you will lose will the mileage you had at the beginning. It helps to have a dedicated person create this content and manage the blog while you focus on growing the client base that the attention from internet marketing is bringing to your law firm.
Apart from creating valuable content, you want to interlink your articles. If you create content that touches on a topic you have already talked about broadly in a different article within your site, link that other article to redirect traffic there. The bots will know there is more when they crawl your page and this simple act will improve your ranking. Remember to only link to relevant articles.
Advertising within Legal Limits
When promoting your business as a lawyer, you are bound by ethics and should, therefore, steer clear of anything that would be termed unethical as it could earn you fines and penalties. Rule of thumb as far as marketing goes – for lawyers and other professionals – is to ensure that any information going out there is valuable to the user. An advertisement should not be false, misleading, or offensive. Even if the law doesn’t catch up with you when you advertise unethically, your brand will suffer when your target audience realizes your advertisement is misleading.
So, what qualifies as misleading advertisement?
- Promising things your legal practice cannot deliver.
- Posing as a certified lawyer when you know pretty well you are not.
- Knowingly giving misleading information.
These three will only hurt your brand, but they could also lead to penalties that will dim the light on your career.
Should you create your Content?
While you want to create your website’s content because it is based on your area of practice, it may be better to hire an internet marketing company that is well versed on matters advertising for legal businesses. A dedicated marketing company not only focusses on great content but it will also take care of the smaller matters that structure your website so that it is in line with the overall SEO strategy for the company.
Geographical Target
When creating content and tagging your web pages, you want to be sure that you are targeting the right audience. DUI laws in one state may differ from another, even if minute details, and so you want to be sure your content is not misleading.
Local SEO marketing targets potential clients in your geographical area and so keywords such as “Family Lawyer in Detroit” will be vital as they help you rank better in the mentioned location. National SEO marketing will not require you to tag a city or state as the idea will be to appeal to a broader audience anywhere in the world. Words like “Family Lawyer” and “Divorce Attorney” will suffice as you don’t have a geographical limit.
Website Organization for Navigability
A well-structured website makes it easy for visitors and search engines to navigate so that they give your site a better ranking. These four elements are vital when structuring your website for easier navigability;
Simplicity – An overly made site with tens of drop-down menus and links will do your site more harm than good. They will not only slow it down but also make it hard for search engines to crawl through.
Hierarchy – If you create content on various topics, it is easier and much better to arrange it topically to make it easier for visitors to find it. The bots also find it easier to crawl through well-organized sites, which leads to better ranking.
Site Maps – a sitemap is a list of web pages on your site that tells Google bot and other web crawlers where to find content on your website. The crawlers will be able to crawl your site more intelligently, and this will improve your site rank.
Mobile User Experience – In this day when worldwide mobile penetration is close to 70%, most people browse the internet through mobile communication devices. You will have failed miserably if you fail to make your website mobile-friendly.
Is Off-site SEO Important to your Law Practice?
Yes, it is, and this is why. Increasing mentions on social media will lead to increased traffic that will eventually lead to better ranking on search engines. The best way to improve your offsite SEO game is by linking externally to authority sites, linking internally through targeted keywords to relevant articles, as well as social media marketing. You want to use keywords that Google Analytics deems appropriate to the topic for more effect.
Building a Link Profile
Backlinks – basically links from authority sites that link back to your site – will significantly affect how your page or site ranks on SERP. They will also determine the strength of your Domain name, and so it would be beneficial to build a strong backlink profile.
There are a few ways of gaining backlinks, among them guest-posting and ego-baiting. Guest-posting means creating content to post on an authority site, and then linking back to your site so that traffic flow can be directed to you. The main – and only – condition to this tactic is the value of content. If you create mediocre content to direct traffic to your site, bots will bot rank it, and your effort will be wasted.
Ego-baiting is quite popular too where you mention a few industry leaders positively to entice them to share your page on their sites. Doesn’t always work but if the mention is cleverly done, they will bait.
A healthy link profile establishes you as an authority in your area, being as you have appeared on other sites that are deemed to be just as authoritative. You will rank better in SERPs with a strong link profile, and you will also gain the trust of search engines. While focusing on building a link profile, only pick the choicest – guest-post on respected sites with a reasonable following and also avoid broken links. Those will make you lose credibility.
Facebook Marketing for Law Firms
One of the best and cheapest ways to implement an off-site SEO strategy for law firms is through social media. Billions of people get their news through social media – Facebook especially – and you can take advantage of this potential traffic. However, law firms have more restrictions when it comes to social media advertising, and so you want to stay within the law. It is always safe to create a post or article focusing on a particular area of law then adding a creative call to action at the end. Just as is with blogging, consistency in posting increases your chances of interacting with your audience and conversion.
Social Media Marketing for Lawyers
Social media has come a long way, from when it was an avenue to show off and link up, to becoming one of the most powerful marketing platforms. The statistics are mindboggling – Facebook had as many as 2.27 billion active users as at the first quarter of 2018, while Instagram had 1 billion active monthly users as of June 2018. Twitter, which has been the preferred platform by most users for communicating with the corporate world, had had 330 million users as at the end of October 2018. These numbers show the force that social media has and the benefits that your law firm could have using these mostly free platforms.
Being as the guidelines on advertising for professionals are quite clear – especially on social media – you will need to be creative when talking about your firm and services. One of the most used ways is giving free advice when people share their legal dilemmas and then adding a creative call-to-action at the end of the advice – such as “visit our site for more details.” Podcasts are also quite effective as they allow you to share all you need in one platform so that your listeners can use that information to their benefit.
Whichever social platform you choose, you will benefit from being strategic with the community you have created. Vibrancy is, and so you want to post consistently – at least four times a day – so that you create some structure. Legal stuff is great information, but it can get a little boring. Add life to your social brand by bringing your community behind the scenes when you go to events or random office tours. They feel more part of the community and will over time start participating in discussions.
When you post online content, ask questions at the end of a post to engage your participants. Offer free legal advice periodically – you could set a day, say Legal Thursday when you answer all questions in the line of your practice.
Choosing an Internet Marketing Company for your Law Firm
When it is time to select the right company to build your SEO strategy, you want an organization that understands your law firm and one that will respect your ethics. There are mainly two types of internet marketers; white hat and black hat agencies.
White hat agencies are legit, run by humans and will work with you hand in hand to come up with the strategy ideal for your business. Their focus is long-term, and they lay the foundation for a strategy that will reward you several times over in the future. Blackhat agencies are more concerned with quick results, and so they will engage in some dirty tricks to give you the impression of victory quite early in strategy implementation.
Where white hat agencies focus on creating quality content that adds value to your visitors, black hat will use shallow articles and stuff them with keywords to get the attention of crawlers. Never mind that the keywords are not related to the material. White hat strategies will make use of quality internal and external links while black hat agencies will only be concerned with linking. It will not matter much whether the links match the content.
Naturally, black hat tactics will only work for a short time before search engines catch up with them and even penalize your site. While white hat strategies tale a while to show results, the effects are felt for a long time.
How to Track Growth in Internet Marketing for Law Firms
Once you have a strategy in place, you naturally want to see how effective it is and whether it really is working.
These are some of the ways you can measure growth through your marketing strategy;
- Are you getting more visitors or inquiries since you started your online campaign?
- Has your client base grown and is the growth attributed to your internet marketing campaign?
- Has your SERP ranking improved?
If your strategy is working already, you may not want to change a lot; instead, you may want to commit to it for the long-term. If the various available tools say there could be some improvements – say, your keywords could be more relevant to the topic, or you are not getting as many click-throughs as you would expect – then strategy change would be a good idea.
Return-on-investment (ROI) from SEO
ROI on SEO for a legal site may not be directly in terms of money, but the activity that it brings. You want to consider these factors;
Is there more interaction on social media or your blog since you rolled out the strategy?
Is the site structure much better so that users fund it friendly?
Is your search engine results page – SERP ranks improving? Are your articles ranking better on search engines?
The time it takes for the effects of an SEO campaign to kick in differ from business to business, and so it is best to consider this effort a long-term process that you will reap from over time. Here are some of the factors that will determine how soon you see results.
Time – you don’t plant a tree today and start enjoying the fruits tomorrow. The longer the SEO strategy is in place, the sooner you will see results.
Navigation – we mentioned earlier the need to have a properly structured site that will be easier for the web crawlers to navigate. Unless this is fully implemented, you won’t see much from your SEO campaign.
Content Quality – You may have started a blog three weeks ago, posting one piece every week. Three articles are on the lower side, and so you may have to wait until you have 10 or so articles to really see the magic. Still, you could increase the frequency of posting to get you there faster.
Using Tools to Evaluate the Strength of your Selected Keywords
When it comes to choosing keywords, you have to be strategic as not every combination will bring the desired traffic your way. Using tools such as Google AdWords will change the way you select those keywords, so they are useful to your writing.
A keyword planner is your best bet when you are in doubt. It helps you find the right keyword combination that will generate the most traffic. It also suggests the keywords that would be best for your organization or article and the approximate amount you would spend if you decided to make this tool part of your plans.
How to use these Tools
Keyword planner is quite easy to use. Just select keyword planner, type your business and location for better results, then click “Get Results.” You will see the traffic associated with each keyword and then on the right-hand side, an option to download keyword ideas.
Another useful tool for assessing your website’s strength is Ahrefs.com. This resource keeps check of your backlink situation to tell you who has linked to your site and also analyze the strength of keywords. Over time, keywords do depreciate and lose the effectiveness they had when you first used them. Checking their strength helps you know which ones to change so that you keep ranking well and reaping the fruits of great content. Ahrefs.com also lets you know how your domain ranks. The higher its rank, the more traffic you will get.
Google my Business for Law Firms
Location is everything when it comes to building trust, and so you want your clients to know where they can find you. With a few tweaks from your mobile device, you can easily change the opening and closing hours of your business as well as update your address.
Google My Business – GMB – is more or less like a blog as it allows your clients to leave comments, ask questions, request that you expound on a few things and such. When clients or web visitors can share experiences, they create a community, and in so doing, you get some form of free advertising.https://www.justia.com
References
You want to encourage visitors to leave some comments about the services they received from your law firm in the comment section of your blog. That information will really play a part in SERP ranking. Remember that online reviews are influential when customers are making their decisions, and so you want to check what has been mentioned about your law firm regularly.
Do you need to clean bad reviews? Well, it looks shady when your business only has extremely ‘nice’ reviews. It is almost impossible for everyone to have nothing but good things to say about you and so it would be better to address those no-so-good reviews instead of removing them. Reply to negative reviews by apologizing to the client - because they are king – and then offer to look into the situation if it is a matter of poor customer service or so. If the customer was on the wrong – entirely possible – explain the situation, separating their expectations from the reality in a tactful manner. What matters here is that you be the voice of reason.
No Overnight Successes in Digital Marketing for Lawyers
The most important things to remember when it comes to digital marketing is that nothing is ever an overnight success. You will need to start from somewhere – the most critical part – and then follow things up over time. Even more important is consistency. You can’t stop when it comes to improving your online presence and SEO strategy because that would take you back to where you began.
When implemented correctly and with the consistency it deserves, an SEO strategy will bring your law firm more business, create awareness, and generate more traffic to your site. Finding the ideal marketing company is the first step as the marketer will employ their knowledge of the market, industry, and SEO to build a website that will be a traffic magnet from the get-go.
How do you choose the Right SEO Expert for your Law Firm?
Choosing the right professional is as important as choosing the right law graduate. Your marketing expert will either add lots of value to your online presence, or they will be a waste of money and worse, cause you to lose credibility when they use black hat tricks.
When do you know you need an SEO expert?
- You have just started a website and do not know how to generate traffic.
- You have no online presence at all, and yet your competition is ruling the interwebs.
- You have an extremely busy practice and have no time to create regular content for your website or blog. As a result, the information in there is outdated.
- Your website and social site do not target the right people.
- Your website is quite good-looking, but isn’t navigable, a factor that is causing you to lose traffic.
- You are not able to convert your visitors to sales.
If you are not sure about whether you should be spending on SEO, just take a look at what the competition is doing, and you will be surprised. Billions of dollars are spent every year by companies on SEO, and this is bound to get even bigger. A professional SEO marketer will not only create useful content, but they will also stay on their toes as far as changes in algorithm are concerned.
This is why SEO for lawyers is quite a challenge.
- Search engines are always changing the game. You have to stay on top of their algorithm game.
- SEO technology is ever-changing, and so you have to stay afloat.
- Keywords aren’t evergreen. They expire, and it is up to the SEO expert to know that and change them accordingly.
- Keywords do not carry the same weight. Some are more relevant to your practice than others, and you will only know this if you have the right tools and knowledge.
- Optimizing is more than stuffing keywords in an article and while at this, remember there is such a thing as over-optimizing.
- You need a winning strategy – one that will return value for a long time.
The ideal SEO expert for your law firm will not only take the responsibility off you but also show results in the time you have agreed.
Our Tried-and-Tested SEO Process
We have been offering SEO for law firms for years now, and we know what the industry expects. We also know the rules and regulations that govern the profession. We do most of the work I the first two months then spend the rest of the time after that maintaining your site and ensuring that it ranks appropriately.
Month One – Laying the Foundation
The website is everything to the SEO practice, and so it needs to be at its best for the program to start. We spend the first month looking into your site, its content, structure, and making it ready for a new SEO strategy.
- We check that the images are the right size to avoid slowing down your site.
- We check whether the structure of images and content on your site is proper for mobile browsing.
- Performing keyword searches to get the right keyword combination for your area of practice and also align it with your geographical area.
- Fixing indexing problems.
- Structuring your site to improve navigability.
- Checking the title tags and headers and optimizing them.
- Re-doing the content on your page to optimize it and ensure that it targets the right clientele.
- We implement a schema markup on your site.
- Ensuring that internal and external links are not broken and that they are relevant to your article.
These are only a few of the things we do in the first month. There are hundreds of other smaller things that we won’t bother you with but that we will do to get this SEO strategy started. The target for the first month is to ensure that your website is at its best. At the end of this, your site should not only look better organized but also be more accessible to navigate, the information in there is not only high-quality but better optimized too, and most importantly, the website loads faster.
Month Two - Branding
On the second month, we shift attention to the brand. Everything we do from now on will be aimed at strengthening the brand and making your name an authority in the industry. Attorney SEO is not just about stuffing keywords in paragraphs, but more about building the brand of the website. As much as we focus on on-site SEO here, we will pay due attention to off-site SEO for your business.
- We start by writing high-quality posts for your website and blog. We will even look into guest-posts for those external links. Note we will only post in authoritative blogs and sites.
- We verify local directories listings – including legal directories for off-site SEO
- Write press releases on events concerning your business and distribute them to outlets that will yield the needed attention.
- Website sponsorships with respected brands.
- Set up and manage social media accounts relevant to your brand.
- Create high-quality infographics in your area of practice.
We are always keen on local SEO as your clientele will mostly come from your local area. We ensure that your business is on Google maps so that they are able to find you easily when they come to your site, blog, or any of the social sites.
Maintenance from Month Three
The foundation has been laid, and now your site is ready for the crawlers. From the third month, we keep checking on the structure to be sure that you are still ranking highly and that the quality of content remains high. We will keep doing the things we did in month two as those are required for the site to stay in great shape.
Our primary focus areas will be;
Structure – Tags, headers, and other small details could hinder your website from ranking highly, and so we check to ensure that the structure remains at its best.
Content – Nothing hinders top ranking as much as poor quality. We write high-quality posts with relevant keywords and post it regularly for an active blog.
Off-site SEO – Internal and external links are essential as is social media. We ensure that your social presence reflects your brand.
Maintenance means lots of things. We mentioned that SEO changes every day and so part of maintenance is ensuring that the site is up to date and adhering to all relevant SEO rules. Just as important is keyword update being as new and more relevant keyword are available every few months. Part of maintenance is also anticipating changes and preparing to make them before your competition does.
The Duration
No two businesses are the same and so the time taken to implement an SEO strategy differs. It depends on the time you have been online – or whether you had a website, to begin with. If you already had an established site, it could take 3-5 months to start seeing some good traffic and results. A new website takes a bit longer – between 6 and eight months before it gains traction. Of course, this is not cast on stone. Some sites generate traffic faster than others depending on the aggressiveness of the campaign.
FAQs
What is SEO for attorneys?
Search Engine Optimization is the process of ranking websites and web pages in search engines. Among the hundreds of things main search engines are looking for when raking your site are relevancy and authority. You build authority by having other high-quality websites link to you. Google will know the relevance of your page by looking through the content you provide. If you say you are a family lawyer, your site should have articles on Divorce, Child Support, and such material that speaks to your skills in your area of practice. These are only two of the things that determine your ranking on SERPs.
Do I need to continue with a chosen SEO strategy if my site is already ranking well?
Well, if your site has benefited from SEO, then it would only be wise to keep things up. As we noted above, it takes a while for the benefits to kick in and so it would be unwise to stop after all the work you have done. Besides, an SEO strategy is like a muscle in the body that needs constant nourishing and practice. If you stop now with your website ranking in the top three, it will only be a few weeks till you start noticing a decline. Once you start, you cannot and shout not stop.
Can I do this on my own or must I hire an internet marketing firm?
Some law firms decide to go it alone and to put in the work following guidelines that have been laid out in this article, but others choose to hire a dedicated digital marketer. Whichever way you choose, you are right. However, a dedicated marketer has done this before, and they know exactly where to start and which parts to target. They will do more in a shorter period that you can do when you are not well versed in digital marketing.
Do I need social media pages?
Yes, apart from a website and an active blog that is updated regularly, you do need social media pages for off-site marketing. A dedicated marketing company will set them up and manage them as a package.
How long does it take for my site to be ranked?
It depends on a number of factors. If you already have an active site, then it is easier to generate traffic as it mostly needs restructuring and creation of quality content with the right keyword density. 3 to 5 months is usually the acceptable time it takes to generate traffic.
If you are new on the block and your competition is well ranked online, it could take you a while to be ranked. A new website could take as much as 12 months, which is why we insist SEO for lawyers is a long-term investment — good thing you see the value of laying the right foundation for years.
How much is a proper SEO strategy going to cost my business?
We work with law firms of various sizes, and so we cannot out rightly mention a figure until we know what we are working with. Usually, an SEO plan ranges from $2,000 to well over $20,000 depending on the existing structure, target, and goals. We can only comfortably give you a definite figure after a thorough analysis. Also worth noting is that larger cities command costlier SEO plans being as the geographical coverage is larger. Our thoughts on price: do not let price influence your choice of digital marketer. It makes no sense to hire a company that charges you $1,000 a month but never ranks your website while another charging $2,500 a month and ranks your site top on Google in 6 months.
Is it okay/ethical to pay for backlinks?
There are two angles to paying for links. There are link farms that could send traffic to your website, and there is buying links to build your link profile. Now, paying a firm to send links and traffic to your site is a waste of your money and time, but there is nothing wrong or unethical about buying links from reputable sites. You can also buy domains of old websites that have built an audience and then link to your site from them.
While paying for links from established organizations is okay, it does not compare to having a dedicated team work on your website. If you must buy links, then make them worth your money and time – high-quality – but don’t forego hiring an SE company in favor of expensive links as the company will give you more return on your investment.
Are there legal issues likely to arise with SEO?
Not as long as you work with a reputable SEO company that knows the rules governing online marketing and advertising. Rogue SEO “experts” that use blackhat strategies of SEO will also harm your website and break a few rules. You will know them by reputation – they will mostly charge cheaply and promise you quick results.
Which areas of practice do you handle?
We currently provide SEO strategies for many practice areas. Also, size and locality don’t matter to us.
- Personal injury.
- Criminal defense.
- Estate planning – and all matters inheritance
- Bankruptcy.
- Family Law.
- Financial Fraud and
- IP Litigation among others.
Quality Vs. Quantity – what matters the most when it comes to links?
Most people believe that they need three thousand links to get better ranking, but we maintain it is the quality of the site that links back to you that matters. You could have two links from two authority sites and yet have some great vibes trickle down and improve your site’s raking. Having lots of external links to weak sites could actually harm your ranking if any harmful activity affects their ranking.
Ready for a Digital Marketing Campaign for your Law firm?
Do you think it is time for a digital campaign aimed at moving your legal practice to the next level? Contact us and let us put together a strategy that will change the way you market your business.
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