If your law firm website is not consistently delivering the amount of traffic you need to generate leads, you could be the victim of bad SEO. (Search Engine Optimization)
Here are five tips on how to right the wrongs that could be plaguing your SEO strategy:
#1: Conduct an SEO Audit
You can’t fix what’s broken if you don’t know about it, which is why conducting an SEO audit to uncover issues affecting your website’s performance and visibility is critical before you do anything else to improve SEO.
If you hired a website design firm to create your site, do you know if they were equally skilled at SEO? If not, there could be some very common errors on your site that are negatively impacting performance, such as:
- Google Search Console was not set up, so you don’t know if Google is having any difficulty crawling and indexing your website.
- Bad or broken links have built up over the years.
- Page speed is too slow.
- Your site was not built with responsive design and is not mobile-friendly.
- Images are not optimized or compressed.
- There are inconsistencies in your NAP (name/address/phone) listings all over the Internet.
- Your site has too many pages competing for the same or similar keywords, which means that you are competing with yourself (keyword cannibalization).
- There are no AMP (Accelerated Mobile Page) versions of your webpages.
- No one has added Attorney schema markup — computer code that lets Google know what is on each page of your website — to your site.
#2: Put Your Videos on YouTube and Connect Your Website
Links are valuable when it comes to SEO, and links from YouTube — one of the Internet’s most popular sites — are a good thing. You need to do two things:
- Upload all your videos to YouTube and link to your website from your YouTube channel.
- In the description area for each of your YouTube videos, add links to the most relevant web pages on your site for that video (bio of attorney featured in the video, any blog posts you’ve posted on the subject discussed in the video, service area, etc.)
#3: Develop Foundational Content
To drive traffic to your site, you need to rank well in search for your keywords. You need to create content pages that target relevant keywords for your practice areas and services as well as content pages that target long-tail keywords.
#4: Obtain Reviews
People looking for an attorney rely on online reviews and they also carry a lot of weight with Google. It’s important for you to establish a process for gathering reviews for your firm, especially on Google. Add a link to your Google Business page in the email signature of everyone who works at your firm. At the end of each engagement, send clients an email thanking them for their business and provide instructions on how they can leave a review for you with a link.
#5: Use Email
Email is a great way to drive traffic, and there are several types of email campaigns that work well for lawyers, including:
- Following up with new leads — let prospects know what their next steps are in hiring an attorney with a series of emails that lead them to book an appointment.
- Lead magnet — give away a Freemium — an eBook or access to informational Videos.
- Obtain reviews — once a case is settled, email clients asking for a review with links to your pages on review sites. Making it easy for them to leave a review for you will result in more reviews, which helps to drive more traffic to your site.
Once you’ve implemented these fixes, you should see a jump in your traffic and search visibility, providing you with much better results from your SEO efforts.
If you do not rank well in “Search” then you are losing potential clients to competitors that have deployed better search strategies than you have. So it’s way past time to get savvy about SEO.
The FREE eBook titled “6 Law Firm SEO Strategies to Drive Targeted Leads” will let you gain key insights into:
1. The basic concepts of modern SEO & why it is critical for business development
2. How to optimize your law firm website for local search to increase your online visibility in your targeted geographical location
3. The importance of understanding user intent when developing content
4. The 4 questions you need to answer to create content that will attract your ideal client
5. How a blog helps your SEO
6. The importance of backlinks for SEO
…and more
