When you are marketing your law firm, there are a lot of different avenues that you should take. One of the biggest and newest marketing strategies for just about any industry is to utilize search engine optimization (SEO). It is arguably one of the most effective ways to get your law firm’s name out there, but a question that any law firm is inevitably going to ask is, how can a good SEO strategy help your law firm grow?
Tips to form a good SEO strategy for your law firm
SEO is a marketing strategy that is designed to, as the name implies, optimizes a search engine in order to improve your law firm’s website on various relevant search results. There is a lot of competition to be had for law firms, and SEO can be a great equalizer for smaller law firms. How SEO works is that you, or someone you hire, writes content for your website that is optimized around certain keywords and phrases. This kind of content is usually either specifically about your respective industry, or at the very least, related to it. These articles then are populated with certain keywords, with the intention of having that website show up in the search results for those keywords. Of course, just because the article has keywords in it does not necessarily mean that it will show up higher on the search result for that word or phrase. There is a lot of work that needs to be done to do SEO properly, and not just anyone can do it right.
The first tip that you need to understand with SEO is that you either have to learn how to do it yourself, or — and this is the more advisable solution — hire an expert in SEO for lawyers. For all the time and effort that you may put into learning SEO yourself (and potentially getting it wrong), it would ultimately be a net gain to simply outsource your SEO work. No matter how good at marketing you are, SEO is not going to be a self-explanatory system.
Once you have gotten in contact with an SEO firm for lawyers, the next step is to work with them to determine what keywords you want to use for your website’s SEO marketing strategy. This is a more complicated process than it may seem, mainly because certain keywords are going to be more effective than others. When you pick a keyword, you have to make sure that the keyword is not too general. For a small SEO firm, not only is it not advisable that you gun for such a competitive keyword, but you are highly unlikely to be even remotely competitive for this keyword, especially if you are competing with general information articles.
For example, if you simply use the keyword “law firm,” you are not only going to be competing with any and every law firm you can find, but also any articles defining the phrase.
However, there may also be such a thing as picking a keyword that is too specific. You want to pick a keyword that is not too big as to be unhelpful, but also not too small as to be obscure. Your SEO partner can help you figure out that sweet spot, ensuring that you compete with law firms in your area on the level you are comfortable with. There are various tools employed, such as Moz and Semrush, in order to determine what keywords hit that sweet spot best.
Once you have actually settled on keywords to use, the next step is to craft posts that use the keyword. One issue that poorer SEO writers have is that when they put the keywords into the articles, they do a poor job of making them fit naturally, or they even overpopulate the article with the keyword. Not only does this serve as a turn-off for the readers that the SEO firm is attempting to attract in the first place, but it also increases the risk that Google notices attempts to game the system using poor-quality SEO articles. Whatever is worth doing is worth doing right.
You should also ensure that whatever posts you are crafting are worth reading. This may seem obvious, but all too often, the authors of these posts care only about the SEO and not whether they made something of worth. If a reader feels like they just got tricked into reading a junky article, then they are going to look down on the website as a whole. By providing them useful, well-written content, they may regard the website as one that they have a use for.
A lot of articles you will be posting will have to do with law, but that is not always going to be the case, at least not directly. For example, if a person operates a personal injury law website for their law firm, having an article about how to safeguard their property from risk of injury is going to be immediately valuable to people concerned with personal injury lawsuits and claims. They may even be people who do not have a need to file a personal injury claim, but by getting eyes on your website, they may go to your law firm when they need to pursue such a claim.
You also need to make sure that the website is well-designed. People are not going to be excited to use an ugly, unresponsive website. On top of that, poor load times can be fatal, as people are not going to be inclined to stick with a website that is not giving them a good use experience.
