seo for law firm

Legal profession has always been very competitive, more so in today’s digital world. Almost every lawyer and law firm have created their website to promote themselves. SEO is crucial for any website to rank high in search engine results, and getting it right is even more critical. Keeping yourself updated with what search engines, especially Google, favours is very important; if you get your strategy wrong, SEO could be dangerous for your firm. However, no firm can afford to do without SEO, but getting it right is the key. This article tries to explain why SEO is so important for a law firm, and how it can prove counterproductive if it is not properly implemented.

Poor SEO Affects your Rankings

As mentioned earlier, SEO for law firms is extremely important as it directly affects your ranking in search engine results. It decides where your website appears on the result pages. It has been noticed that most searchers don’t go beyond the first page, so it is important that the website appears on the first page, or at least the second page.

With so many good content management systems and tools available in the market, creating a strong website with useful features is not a difficult task. However, no matter how good your website is- responsive and easy to navigate, if it is not consistent with SEO best practices, it will all go in vain.SEO for lawyers is all about staying ahead of your competitors in search engine rankings.

It’s not just about using the right keyword to improve your rankings, but you also have to ensure that your website loads fast as Google takes loading speed into account when deciding about the rankings. A visitor doesn’t wait for more than 3 to 4 seconds for a website to load, and moves to some other site. Also, a poorly designed site that has broken links and a lot of pop-ups irks a potential client. You not only lose a client, it also reduces the dwell time- the average time a user stays on your website. Longer dwell time is rewarded by the search engines as it means the website contains useful and relevant information.

Good SEO strategy implementation not only enhances your law firm’s reputation, but it also improves its online visibility.

Get Your SEO Strategy Right

Online marketing for lawyers can only be successful if you get your SEO strategy right. Use of right keywords and strategic use of links enables your target audience to find you quickly. Without the right strategy in place, it becomes difficult for your potential clients to locate you.

There are about 1.5 to 2 billion websites on the internet, and a good percentage of them are related to the legal industry.  For people to be able to find you among a myriad of legal websites, using the right keywords in your content is critical. Keywords are the words or phrases that people type into the search engines to find what they are looking for. Therefore, keyword research and using them strategically is an integral part of SEO.

Your keywords should be relevant to your practice area, the field you specialize in. In the legal industry, most of the clients come from your geographical area,so your keywords must include your location. It not only ensures that people who live in your vicinity and need your services are able to find you online, but you too can locate these potential clients. SEO could be dangerous if you don’t include location based keywords.

Use SEO to Establishes Yourself as an Authority in the Legal Field

Legal profession is not easy. It takes years of study to earn your degree, hard work to establish your practice and earn a reputation for yourself, and create a network with fellow lawyers and potential clients.

Now that you have done the hard work, you need to implement a right SEO strategy to translate that into prominent digital presence. A good legal SEO will help you establish yourself as authority on legal matters in your practice area.

This can be done making your presence felt on various online platforms. Whether it is writing blogs on your own website or other popular websites, YouTube, or social media platforms, you have to engage with as many people as possible. But make sure that you post regular, relevant, and useful content to keep people interested.

As much as it is important to post informative content on your own website, your social media profile and guest blogs on legal websites and the reviews that you get from visitors and past clients are equally important. That is to say you need to seamlessly integrate your presence across all online platforms to get your SEO strategy right, or else,SEO could be dangerous. Instead of getting increased traffic to your site and improved conversion rate, you could end up losing clients.

Author Bio

Sophia Dicosta, a Google certified online marketer, and blogger at Conroy Creative Counsel, best agency in the USA, provides marketing for lawyers.

By Anurag Rathod

Anurag Rathod is an Editor of Appclonescript.com, who is passionate for app-based startup solutions and on-demand business ideas. He believes in spreading tech trends. He is an avid reader and loves thinking out of the box to promote new technologies.