Entering the digital marketing space for your law firm can be filled with opportunities to grow your business, consume information and get distracted by gifs of cats. (Just keep scrolling!) Luckily, there are a few key things you can do that can tremendously improve your law firm SEO.
SEO stands for ‘Search Engine Optimization’ and represent a channel of marketing that focuses on driving traffic from search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo) back to a website (i.e. www.headnote.com) This article covers 5 ways to get started with law firm SEO as well as guides from reliable sources to help you dig deeper. SEO for your law firm can be an easy after a bit of research and a relatively inexpensive win to bring clients to your website.
1. Claim Your Local Listing
Go to www.google.com and search your city, state, and company name. The search results will have a ‘local listings’ map that will look like this:
Your business should show up here (hopefully with a 5-star rating!) Once you find your listing you know you’ve got a local listing to ‘claim.’ If you don’t see your business listed in your area, then you will proceed to Google’s recommended steps for going through the claim process.
Don’t have the rating you were hoping for or the information is wrong?
Google has a step-by-step guide to help you navigate this process. However, a proactive way to start on your own is to ask clients for reviews. If you are like the majority of businesses and you’d like to gain a 5-star rating, you can simply navigate to your local listing, copy the URL, and paste it in your emails to your clients. The best time to do so is after you’ve successfully completed a project for them – no better time to ask them for positive feedback! Here is what the landing page would look like on Google once you navigate to your page below. Just grab the URL above, copy and paste into your emails. Try sending an email to yourself with the hyperlink just to be sure it will work. Not sure on how to ask? Here’s a quick snippet for you:
“Hi {Name}, I’ve enjoyed working on your case and truly value your feedback! If you have two minutes to leave us a review on our Google local listing, I’d really appreciate it. {Click here} to review us!”
Can’t get enough local listing tips? Bookmark MOZ’s local listing guide for a truly in-depth resource.
2. Read & Utilize MOZ’s Beginner’s Guide To SEO
You did research in school, right? Well, this little diddy is our go-to resource for SEO. It’s updated regularly and designed in such a way that any type of reader can leave understanding what SEO is, how search engines work, and what to do about it for their own website. We highly suggest digging into this one evening over a glass of wine. You won’t regret it.
3. Launch Social Media Accounts
Once you are feeling confident in your quick and easy knowledge on local listings and SEO we encourage you to implement keyword research and the basics on your website and then launch social media accounts. (Hey, then you can direct people back to your website and it will look and rank wonderfully!) Not only is social media a very popular outlet for consumers to go and find out more about you as a lawyer, but it’s also full of opportunities to grow your business.
Today readers are interested in many types of content and are utilizing social media platforms more than ever before to digest this information. In fact, research from Hubspot in 2015 stated, “We’ve found people have dramatically increased content consumption on the three most popular social networks in the last two years: Facebook (+57% increase), Twitter (+25% increase), and LinkedIn (+21% increase). That’s a lot of opportunity and growth in consumers’ eyes on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIN.
SOFTWARE TIP – Luckily, you can also use an easy tool like SproutSocial or Hootsuite to post on all of these platforms at the same time. These platforms do cost a monthly fee, but they can be worth the price of your time to post to all 3 major social media accounts.
4. Utilize Google Search Console
Given Google is the #1 sender for traffic of all the search engines (accounting for 90.52%), we suggest starting with Google until you reach high traffic to your website and have hundreds to thousands of landing pages live. Google Search Console is a free service that tells you the performance of your website as Google sees it. You can login, check on how many of your landing pages are showing up in Google search, how many errors you may have, etc. This is a crucial step that will keep you informed.
SOFTWARE TIP – Sign up for Google Search Console
The best way to get valuable data from Google Search Console is to connect your sitemap. A sitemap is a file where you can list the landing pages of your website to tell Google and other search engines what’s live. You can generate one in minutes!
5. Create A Website That’s Worth Reading
Part of search engine’s ranking factors deal directly with what users do when they come to your website, and by ‘do’ we mean click, read, fill out a form, or take any other action. Search engine’s are very good at determining the good from the bad these days, so start your planning by first asking yourself, “What do my clients want to know about my business?” If you always circle back to that question before creating, you can’t lose. More on UX (user experience) can be found here.
This law firm SEO guide is meant to get you started on the right path. Our true north for understanding quality SEO has come from years of experience, A/B testing, our friends over at MOZ, and just plain learning. If you have questions please don’t hesitate to reach out or leave a comment for us!
Approach The Bench 