There are plenty of different types of digital marketing that can benefit your law firm, but one seems to stand out from the rest.
SEO is hands down one of the best ways for your law firm to attract new clients. The problem is that it’s not a secret. There are so many other attorneys and lawyers investing heavily in their SEO efforts, but I keep seeing law firms approaching their SEO efforts in the wrong way. Let me throw a quick stat at you before I jump into some tips.
This is huge. This means that if you either don’t have a website or aren’t focusing on the correct areas of your SEO strategy, you’re missing out on huge opportunities. Not let’s dive into what those “correct areas” are with some:
SEO Tips for Attorneys & Lawyers.
1. Get Specific
One of the first things I have been noticing with attorneys (and a lot of other professionals too) is that they’re too afraid to get specific with their SEO strategy for the fear of missing out of opportunities outside of your focus.
I’ll use a real example. We have been talking recently with a “Family Lawyer” out of Milwaukee that focuses on divorce law. Their big target keyword has been “Wisconsin Family Lawyer” because that was what they were told they should do (bad advice). And it made sense to them because they’d rather have all of Wisconsin’s business in the family law area vs a specific type of sector of family law (like divorce law) in a specific area (like Milwaukee).
While it’d be great to really have a monopoly on Wisconsin Family Law services, there’s a much better way to go about it. The better way is to get more specific with your keywords based on your services. If you’re a law firm, you have specific areas of law that you focus on and that people are looking for. Utilizing to use as your keywords makes it easier for people to find you.
This is the smarter SEO strategy for your law firm for two big reasons. First – There are a lot fewer attorneys focusing on divorce in the Milwaukee area than family law in Wisconsin. It’s better to get a piece of the pie by focusing on your niche vs holding a pieless plate by trying to get the whole thing. Second (which should ease your potential worries with my first point) – People aren’t going to be searching for family attorneys or family lawyers in the first place, and they’re really not going to be searching for them in “Wisconsin”. If someone has a problem they need to be resolved by an attorney, they’re going to search for that specific problem, in this case, divorce. And they’ll be searching for it either in the area they live or Google will place a location to them automatically (and it won’t be the entire state of Wisconsin). The more specific you can get with your keywords (long tail keywords) usually will make a higher chance for your visitors to convert. This chart below will go more into what I really mean by long tail keywords.
2. Have specific services and location pages
You’re more than just a divorce attorney in Milwaukee, I get that. You’re really able to utilize specific service and location pages to communicate this. Do you have 5 different services? Great! Make an individual page for each of those services. By adding these additional services pages you’re eligible to rank for more specific searches. The more pages and content you create, the more niche traffic you can capture.
For example, one service we offer is SEO, so we have a completely specific page for that here: https://socialsurgemarketing.com/seo/
It’s great for the niche traffic, and it’s also a great way for people to really get a grasp on what a specific service looks like to you.
If you have multiple locations it’s possible and helpful to have sub-pages for each location. For example, if we offer SEO services in Milwaukee and also SEO services in Racine these two different pages’ URLs could look something like this…
ssm.com/milwaukee/seo
ssm.com/racine/seo
Something that is important to note here is you can’t just copy and paste content when you make these pages for different cities. You can actually get penalized by Google if you do that. But when it’s done correctly, it can definitely have benefits for your SEO of the different locations of your law firm.
3. Local Listings
Another incredibly important area to focus on for law firms, in particular, is local directories. Google Maps, Yelp, and Avvo are all huge. Making sure all of these listings are up to date, personalized, and have reviews on them in very important for your local SEO strategy. A stat to help emphasize the importance of reviews is as follows…
So not only will focusing on your Local SEO by managing your local directories help you be found online, but it will also help you convert at a higher rate if your reviews are good.
If you’ve been a law firm for a while, and haven’t already claimed these pages, make sure you do ASAP so you can control the information. If you don’t know if you have pages on Google Maps, Yelp, and Avvo, make sure to do a search on them for your law firm or name if you’re a solo attorney and you’ll be able to see if there is a page active.
SEO ranking improvements isn’t something you’re going to see overnight. It’s a long-term game and it’s not easy, but it’s worth it. There’s a lot more to it than just these 3 SEO tips for attorneys and lawyers, but you have to start somewhere. Make sure to do your keyword research, have a plan to track your SEO efforts so you know when something is or isn’t working, and ask questions when you have them.
Bonus Local [Milwaukee] SEO Content
If you’re writing blogs for your law firm, there are tips you can take away from our post to use for yourself. You might have noticed that we try and use keyword phrases very similar to “SEO Tips for Attorneys & Lawyers” throughout the post. We’re hoping that you as attorneys and lawyers will be searching for either that phrase exactly or very similar to it.
You’ll also notice that we tried to hit home for local, Milwaukee Attorneys & Lawyers by using those keywords through our blog too, but not trying to just plug in those words where they didn’t make sense. Using examples that are relevant to your blog topic can really help you naturally plug in these keywords.
