Successful SEO Campaigns
With the continuous advancements in technology and the internet, marketing has moved away from the tradition methods of newspaper and radio to something more effective – the internet. Online marketing is quickly becoming the go-to method for many businesses and it has been seen to be very effective for law firms who are struggling to get clients. One of the effective methods is search engine optimization (SEO) – a method that is used to get business websites to the top of Google. Google is an internet monster and receives billions of daily searches for various search terms. The issue with the methodology is that SEO is complicated and isn’t exactly something Google enjoys because you’re essentially gaming their system. But, with the right techniques and skills, a law firm can get the top spots and reap the benefits from the natural traffic which Google produces. To lend you a helping hand, this article will list the key components of a successful lawyer SEO campaign so you’re never lost in the dark.
On-Page SEO
Before you even begin to build out your website with inbound links you need to focus on the internal workings of the website first. If you are looking to get more clients using SEO you will have to develop your website and make is ‘crisp’. It is all well and good to have a website at the top of Google but if your lawyer website looks like trash you won’t get any leads or potential clients. Working directly on your business website is known as on-page SEO and it can sometimes be life and death if you want a successful lawyer SEO campaign. Luckily, there is a general consensus around the technicalities of on-page SEO and they include internal links, quality content and appropriate keywords.
Strong Internal Linking
When you begin to build out the backlinks to your lawyer website you are going to want the “link juice” from the authority sites to flow thoroughly through your site (backlinks will be explained later). Having 1000 links hitting your site is fantastic but if you are not linking your content together in a relevant and non-spammy manner then the link juice will struggle to flow through the site adequately. Sure, having a little header menu will have some positive effect but you want Google to see your site as a law-relevant powerhouse. Link your content together using contextual anchor text to give every article relevance. Anchor text is the word you embed your hyperlinks in when you’re creating links. Each internal link you build creates general site relevancy and this allows Google Spiders to crawl all around your lawyer site – spreading link juice to the darkest corners of your law blog.
Content Development
This is the crème de la crème of SEO. I am sure if you have been doing your research you have come across the term “content is king”. It is a statement that is thrown around loosely but content is something that will be the key to getting into Google’s good book and ranking higher than your lawyer competitors. Content development involves every aspect of your website – the blog, the sales page, the home page and even the landing pages/squeeze pages. You need to be cranking out a blog a day and that blog needs to be relevant to the website, so write it about law stuff! The bigger the site the more authority it will build, so fill up your website with good, quality content. As for the content itself, make it unique and very high-quality. Never use spun or duplicate content if you are serious about ranking in Google and getting those top spots. Take the time to formulate the title and pick your law-related keywords correctly!
Keyword Research
Keywords are the things you will be ranking for and are the things people are searching in Google. It is very important you do the research and find some golden words that you are going to rank your site for. Using the Google AdWords tool can find a good number of keywords to target and if you want any more words you can use Moz’s keyword tool which gives you a search analysis and related keywords that you could also rank for. There is a little skepticism on the percentage you should use when placing your keywords but just make it look natural and keep it over 1%. Keywords that you should use are ones that are low in competition (are not littered with ads) and are low in volume (low SEO competition) – but you can go for high volume keywords if you think you have the SEO skills to compete.
Off-Page SEO
Once you have sorted all of your on-page optimizations and your lawyer website is looking pretty snazzy you are going to want to focus the rest of your efforts on inbound links and off-page SEO. This is basically when you get other, authority sites to link back to your site and, in doing so, their link juice will be slowly dripped over to your site boosting your domain authority. In the past, you could spam your site with backlinks from trash sites and still rank but Google have got smart and you now have to get backlinks from relevant and authority sites that are already ranking on Google. When you are building backlinks for your website you have to be very precise about what you do. Every marketer worth their salt knows what a backlink is. Building backlinks can quickly become a minefield of mistakes and mishaps for the uninformed SEO. Check out this step-by-step process on how to build backlinks the right way in 2018. There are a number of ways to get backlinks and they will be listed below.
Citations (NAP)
Citations are an excellent way to get backlinks if you are a physical business and they are sometimes known as NAP for name, address, and phone number. You can get these style of backlinks from big business listing on the internet like Yelp but there are also a number of other ways to get them. The main aspect of citations that you need to maintain is consistency. By that, I mean that you need to make sure that all of your online citations are the same and that there are no discrepancies. Google is, fortunately, smart enough to know common abbreviations like St. for street, but go through and clean up any mistakes.
Blog Comments
These are an underrated method and something that can give your site a well-deserved boost if you perform this method correctly. Blog comments can be performed on just about any website blog and it is good practice to write and engage with the article rather than shamelessly posting a comment for the specific purpose of getting a backlink. There are systems in place that can detect when someone is spamming and they will destroy the comment making it all for nothing. Try to make sure the blog comments are relevant to law and comment and interact with people in the comments – always add value!
Directories
Directories are slowly becoming an unused method for easy, powerful backlinks because they are not as powerful as they used to be. However, if you do it right you can get some great link juice from the directory to your site. The best way to do it is through niche-related online directories which will not only pass on link juice but it will be relevant to your niche, giving your lawyer site a significant boost in Google.
Broken Link Building
If you have been doing your research into SEO to boost your law firm, you may have come across the term “PBN” and how it is the only real way to rank quickly. This is kind of true when you make PBNs correctly but it won’t take long for Google to catch up and shut them down. The best way/white hat way to build PBNs is by stealing their links. Don’t worry, we are not doing anything illegal because the sites are shut down and are redundant so we would be doing the linkers a favor telling them they are linking to a parked domain. Find a nice, juicy domain and contact the sites linking to it. Make sure the sites are relevant and then tell them they have a broken link and offer your site as an alternative. You can essentially turn your site into a PBN without any worry of penalization. A good service to use is Linkio.com, it helps when it comes to managing anchor text/backlinks.
Conclusion
Search engine optimization is a fantastic way to boost your law firm and achieve more clients but only when you perform it in the right way. There are a lot of methods and ways to get your site ranking and some are more useful/safer than others. For a law firm, it is better to play it safe rather than dabbling in black hat methods that could get your site penalized and de-indexed which could really damage your law business. While the above topics aren’t everything to SEO (they’re just the basics), you can use those tactics to flesh out your campaigns and hopefully you’ll be ranking in no time.
Hiring an SEO Agency
If you don’t have the time or you’re not sure exactly what you’re doing for your SEO campaign on your law firm’s website, then it’s best to let the experts handle it. Our agency, CoFlex Marketing, works exclusively with law firms like yours across the United States to generate new cases by providing web design and SEO Internet marketing services. Our work experience has significantly impacted the success of each SEO marketing campaign resulting in satisfied and loyal clients. Let us show you what we can do to help your firm increase your caseload. Let’s start working together so we can both grow together! Fill out this quick contact form and we’ll arrange a time to talk on the phone with you.
