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Law Firm SEO Guide

Nowadays, people rely on the internet when looking for services and information. The internet allows them to compare their options, shop for the best offers and find bargains.

If your website is not optimised, and therefore making it difficult for people to find your law firm on the internet, you are potentially losing out on a significant number of enquiries.

Learn about Law Firm SEO from our legal marketing experts.

SEO for Law Firms

Considering optimising your website for Search?

To give your law firm a better chance to show in search results, you need to implement SEO techniques on your website. You also may want to learn a little bit about it before you employ a specialist.

If you are considering optimising your law firm’s website for search engines, read our guide to the basics of legal SEO to gain a better understanding of what may need to be done.

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What is SEO for Law Firms?

SEO (short for Search Engine Optimisation) is the practice of driving more traffic to your law firm’s website using website optimisation techniques. The goal of implementing SEO is to increase your website’s position in search engine results pages so that links to your website show up after a searcher (your prospective client) enters key phrases on Google, Bing or any other search engine.

When you appear near the top or at the top of organic search results, you will naturally get more visitors to your website. And if your page provides exactly the information visitors are looking for, there is a better chance they will reach out to you or provide their contact details for you to get in touch.

SEO may sound pretty straightforward and easy but it is not just about writing blogs. Moreover, there is no single, perfect, foolproof method of optimising a website.

There are hundreds of various factors that search engines (we will focus on the most popular one – Google) analyse when deciding how to rank your website. Therefore, your site needs to perform well in various areas, not just one.

What factors can affect my law firm’s Google rankings?

Some of the main factors that can strongly affect your law firm’s website’s rankings include:

  • whether your website complies with Google’s Core Web Vitals requirements, has good navigation, and therefore, provides a good user experience (UX),
  • whether it features helpful content that has been written primarily for people, not search engines,
  • has a lot of good-quality, reputable backlinks pointing to your law firm’s website,
  • includes keywords in your meta descriptions, titles, and throughout the web copy,
  • whether you consistently publish high-quality content and focus on a niche (or specific area of law),
  • and hundreds more!

Google is by far the most popular search engine on the planet and uses over 200 ranking factors to decide where to place your law firm in its search.

We introduce some of the most significant factors below.

Core Web Vitals and Page Experience

Core Web Vitals, introduced in 2021 as part of the Page Experience Update, is a set of metrics that help Google understand how users experience your law firm’s website.

The metrics include your page loading speed (how many seconds it takes to fully load) and user interaction measurements.

Failing to meet the Core Web Vitals and providing a poor user experience (UX) can result in lower rankings. If your competitors meet them, they may get a boost.

The technical side of your website is essential for SEO’s effectiveness. You need to pay attention to the structure of your website and how well it performs to achieve success online.

Ewelina

Your SEO expert

Pro Local SEO Tip

Maximise your ‘real estate’ in search results by implementing both SEO and PPC techniques. While SEO and PPC differ, both methods aim to achieve similar goals. 

Read more about this in my blog!

Technical SEO

Ensuring your law firm’s website meets the technical requirements of Google is essential.

If the technical side of your law firm’s website and your technical SEO are all over the place, you unlikely to see your website at the top of Google Search results. This is why many law firms decide to hire a law firm SEO specialist. 

At the most basic level, Google needs to be able to first find your website, crawl it, render it to then index the pages. But that’s just scratching the surface.

Unfortunately, just because a website looks great, doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s technically sound. For this reason, you may want to request an audit from an SEO specialist to find out if your website was built with SEO in mind and what’s going on with it.

If you start creating content yourself but your website’s SEO basics are not covered, your efforts may result in… No improvement.

The technical aspects of SEO you need to cover on your law firm’s website

Technical SEO is not easy. However, there are a few aspects of it your website needs to definitely meet. Your law firm website should be:

  • Fast – people nowadays are impatient and if your website doesn’t load fast, Google will refuse to show your website to your searchers to avoid bad experience. Ideally, your law firm’s website should load in less than 2.5s.
  • Crawlable by bots – search engines use bots to crawl (or read) your website. If they can’t do that, they will not put it in their index (Search). Make sure your website has a good structure, pages are linked well and there are no ‘no index’ or ‘no follow’ tags on any crucial pages.
  • Secure – privacy matters more these days so you need to make sure your law firm’s website is secure with SSL / HTTPS.
  • Has Structured Data – structured data helps search engines understand your website. Implement it on your pages to help the bots understand your website better.
  • Has an XML Sitemap – the sitemap lists all of your pages and serves a ‘roadmap’ to the bots / crawlers making sure they don’t miss any pages.

Ensure your website doesn’t:

  • Confuse search engines with duplicate pages – this can confuse the bots and rank pages with the same content lower,
  • Have many dead links – if these annoy or confuse your visitors, search engines may rank you down for bad experience.

How to improve law firm website’s technical SEO?

To improve your law firm’s website’s technical SEO, you need to implement and pay attention to the following:

  • XML sitemaps
  • SSL certificate (and your hosting)
  • Website’s information and navigation architecture
  • Mobile friendliness
  • Duplicate content (copy and titles)

Simply put, if your website’s health and structure are poor, the bots will not be able to check it and consequently Google will not be able to index it (show it in Search). This includes URLs – they can’t be too long.

Your site structure also influences everything else you do to optimise your law firm’s website (your URLs, your sitemap, etc.). It is fairly important.

A visitor needs to be able to navigate your website with ease. Their experience is Google’s priority as this is essentially how Google retains its users.

If you want to learn exactly what you can do to improve your law firm’s technical SEO, read Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Alternatively, you can book a jargon-free chat with our team.

Optimisation for users

Recently, Google has rolled out the Helpful Content Update which means that your law firm’s website needs to be designed by people, for people, to be able to rank in Search.

Law firm websites that provide answers to users’ questions, in-depth guides, and regularly publish content are set to get a boost – unlike websites that are primarily optimised for search engines (with AI generated content) and have been designed primarily to rank and generate traffic.

Quality and authority of your backlinks

Good quality backlinks (inbound links) give your law firm’s website more credibility. A good backlink from another website means someone else is vouching for you and you can be trusted.

Toxic backlinks, on the contrary, may signal to Google that your website may also be ‘toxic’. This can affect your domain authority and therefore your rankings.

Backlink generation is an important task in SEO.

Legal content featuring keywords with the right user intent

Legal content is all marketing content you produce and publish on behalf of your law firm. This can include written copy, images, audio materials and videos.

High-quality written page content, featuring keywords, organised with titles, headings and subheadings, providing the right user-intent with no spelling or grammar errors, will improve your UX and contribute to improving your search rankings.

Producing and publishing content focusing on your niche will help you achieve better rankings.

Legal Content Optimised for Search Engines

Writing high-quality, helpful, legal content is essential for securing Google rankings by your law firm.

From the SEO point of view, for crawlers to be able to find, index and rank your web pages, your word count (especially on services pages) needs to be minimum 300.

In addition, your law firm’s pages need to achieve the following:

Answer questions or key phrase used by the searcher

The content on your law firm website needs to be focused and helpful, and answer your searchers’ queries.

Search engines, including Bing and Google, always prioritise sending their users to the best website possible to help them find answers to their questions.

If Google presumes your law firm’s website is likely to fulfil the searcher’s intent, it will display your website higher up in its search results.

Put yourself in your clients shoes and think about what questions they may have, and answer them on your pages. It may help if you think about the questions your clients usually ask you when they call or visit your office. 

Implement on-page optimisation

Your website needs to be optimised for specific keywords to show for them in Google search results. However, don’t make this a bigger priority than answering your visitors’ queries.

Read more about Google’s Helpful Content Update on their blog.

Let’s say, you own a law firm in Liverpool specialising in family law and you want a page to show for keywords such as “family law solicitor in Liverpool”. To achieve this, you need to (at least) make sure the keyword is included on one of your pages in the title / heading, subheadings, and throughout the copy. All while also presenting your USPs, achievements and examples why the searcher should instruct your firm.

It is important to note that keywords can’t be overused. This is called ‘keyword stuffing’; it is bad practice.

To fully optimise your content for key phrases, it is important to optimise your pages in other places, including: 

  • Title tags,
  • Description tags / meta tags,
  • Headings and subheadings,
  • The web page’s URL / permalink.

If you have a WordPress website, you may choose to use the Yoast plugin to help you out with this.

Ultimately, on-page optimisation is all about finding the right balance between satisfying the search engines and your prospective client.

Create content targeting keywords within the same family

This involves identifying primary keywords and then different variations of these keywords (long-tail keywords). This generally helps you cover as much ground when prospective clients are searching for legal services online and target keywords that are less competitive. 

Many people will search by the most common keywords, say ‘personal injury solicitors’. But others will ask questions in natural language. Here you can find out how Google uses AI to learn more about language.

The goal is to create content that does not consist of duplicates, but that addresses search queries related to your keywords.

Ewelina

Your SEO expert

Pro Local SEO Tip

Your potential customers will research you before they make a decision to use your services. Make it easy for clients to review your firm for them to read!

Backlinks and off-page citations

In addition to captivating legal content, the quality of websites linking back to yours is also important. In fact, it’s one of the major factors affecting your domain authority score which tells Google whether your website can be trusted and if it’s a good source of information.

For UK law firms, The Law Society legal professionals database and the SRA Registry are quite valuable. They both have high authority scores and the people using their databases usually have the same intent – to find a good law firm or solicitor to assist them with their legal issue.

If you can get a mention on a local news website, that can also help. A higher authority score will help you rank for more keywords.

Stay away from purchasing backlinks. You could end up reducing your own score if Google decides they are spam. It could be tempting to purchase a few for a little bit of money but it’s unlikely they will help your law firm in any way.

* Generally speaking, Google favours white-hat SEO techniques. Grey or black-hat techniques could get you penalised as Google continuously updates the algorithms to prevent people from using them.

The most recent update is the Helpful Content Update which aims at promoting content written for people by people, not AI.

Ewelina

Your SEO expert

Pro Local SEO Tip

When deciding which directory to join, ask yourself: “are people actually likely to visit this website and contact my firm?”. If the answer is ‘no’, skip it as some directories have a high spam score (even the popular ones) and could lower your domain authority score.

How can I check if my SEO consultant is doing the job (right)?

You can judge how well your Law Firm SEO expert is doing by these 3 metrics:

  1. The amount of traffic – has it increased since they’ve started working with you?
  2. Is that increased traffic resulting in more cases (or other goals)?
  3. Are you moving up in Google rankings?

As they say, the proof is in the pudding. If the above 3 things are not happening, the rest is insignificant because SEO only has one goal for your law firm – to generate more leads that are affordable.

How can I check my website’s traffic?

First, ask your SEO consultant to provide a Google Analytics ‘Audience Overview’ report. They should be able to generate this. If they refuse to provide you with a report, you should be able to generate one yourself.

Simply log in to your Google Analytics account and see your ‘Audience Overview’ report. This should tell you how many people visit your website every day.

If you can’t get any data from your Google Analytics and you have an SEO consultant working on your website, you should query how they are tracking the site’s progress.

If you don’t have access to your account, you may have to dispute it with Google.  You can contact us for assistance.

How can I check if I’m ranking for any keywords and moving up in rankings?

Your SEO consultant should be able to deliver a report.

You can also check if you are ranking for any keywords in your Google Search Console – see the Performance tab.

Alternatively, use Moz’s free keyword explorer tool.

If you want to, you can also do a quick Google search.

Bear in mind that that the way that your SEO consultant goes about getting results really matters.

You want to be sure that the steps they are taking will have long-lasting effects that don’t disappear the next time Google cracks down on “black hat” SEO techniques that seek to manipulate the rules!

On Page SEO & Off Page SEO

The two things your SEO expert will be doing to help your rankings improve will be On-Page Factors and Off-Page Factors.

On-Page Factors

These will be easy to spot.

They may add or improve content on your site, change the layout of your pages, tweak the overall design, change the URL structure, or re-organise your content to make it better.

*If your website was built in WordPress, you can make use of the Yoast plug-in. It’ll tell you how well your web pages are optimised for search engines and give you a readabilty score!

Off-Page Factors

Off Page Factors mostly comes down to link building.

Ideally, your SEO consultant is building links in places your prospects already visit or helps you obtain valuable backlinks.

*A backlink is simply a link from one website to another. Google uses this as a ranking signal!

What you want to avoid is hiring a black hat SEO consultant who builds backlinks to your site on Private Blog Net- works (Google this term) or in shady web locations.

It may work short-term, but black hat link building can come back to bite you in the backside and even earn you a Google penalty!

Conclusion

To sum up, you’ll know if your SEO expert is doing a good job if:

1. Your phone starts ringing more often,

2. You start getting more online legal enquiries.

If you are wondering how much time you should give your SEO consultant to prove they are doing a good job, the most reasonable time frame to see results in most categories is about 6 months.

Keep in mind that Bing seems to reflect SEO changes more quickly than Google does. Google seems to implement changes to rankings a bit more slowly.

Depending on how competitive your area is, it may be less or more time to get the exact results you are looking for. However, 6 months should be more than enough time to determine whether you are seeing progress or not.

Resources and SEO Tools for Law Firms

There are so many SEO tools and resources to help your law firm get started, that it’s hard to know where to start. To make it easier for you, here are some of my favorite:

MOZ: THE BEGINNERS GUIDE TO SEO

This in-depth resource is arguably the most universally accepted and best introduction to SEO. It’s not specific to law firms, but most of the information is applicable to most industries.

Alternative: Google’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide

MOZ: CHECK YOUR ONLINE PRESENCE

This tool allows you to easily check your law firm’s presence and NAP on top citation websites including Google, Bing, Facebook, Foursquare and more.

GOOGLE ANALYTICS

Google Analytics is a must-have tool for your website. It measures the performance of your website and gives you information about your visitors, conversions, traffic sources and so much more. Best of all, it’s free.

GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE

This is Google’s tool that helps show you how your website is performing in its search engine. You’ll be able to see

Start your law firm’s SEO today with our specialists. Together we make ranking on search growing your organic traffic easy.

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