Let’s be clear: No matter what kind of law you practice, a law firm is a business. To be successful, a business needs a consistent stream of clients or at least leads. While traditional marketing channels like referrals are great, they can be inconsistent and are rarely enough to meet the demands of a law firm looking to grow.
As a marketing agency experimenting with cutting-edge marketing strategies and SEO tactics, producing consistent results, we can tell you that law firm SEO can not only help you generate a consistent stream of high-quality leads but also convert them into clients.
The component critical for the success of your SEO marketing is that it acknowledges, respects, and plays by the rules of the legal industry. Let’s see what they are.
What is law firm SEO marketing? What makes it unique?
Marketing law firms is unique because when clients are on the legal precipice, they’re not necessarily looking for the ‘best law firm’ or ‘law firm near me.’
Instead, when customers become hyperfocused on solving a serious legal issue, they search for lawyers in specific legal fields, such as corporate law, personal injury law, or other legal specialties. This means your marketing needs to consider your law firm’s specializations.
Secondly, whether your law firm caters to all types of law or not, the challenge is that when you begin to demonstrate your expertise (which you must) to gain clients, it needs to be done tactfully. This is because your SEO marketing needs to comply with and adhere to the legal marketing restrictions in the US and the specific state rules and regulations.
This aspect is well appreciated by anyone even remotely associated with the legal field, so let’s move on to the third unique consideration for successful law firm SEO marketing.
Trust is critical for favorable marketing outcomes in all industries, but its importance can’t be overstated in the legal sector. It’s no surprise, either, as clients are required to divulge sensitive and confidential information to their lawyers.
So, the goal of a good and effective law firm SEO marketing strategy has to revolve around building trust in clients based on your reputation. The challenge in doing that comes from a culmination of all the other factors.
Marketers have to build trust for their clients in front of a highly specific audience while abiding by all the regulations to show the law firm’s expertise without talking too much about the work they’ve done (attorney-client privileges). That’s the challenge.
How do law firms get clients with SEO?
Most marketers struggle to craft effective strategies for marketing law firms when faced with this triple complication. Experts practicing law firm SEO treat these challenges like goalposts for their client’s individual campaigns.
They know how to wield SEO to ethically navigate the tightrope between marketing and marketing to get results. Here’s how they use SEO to get you clients:
SEO helps your website be more visible
Even if a client has come through a referral, you can be sure they’ve been to your website and looked around. SEO helps your website be more visible and appear higher on the Google search results pages when a client searches for certain keywords.
It’s worth the SEO work, as Google’s first page receives 90% of the traffic for that particular search. Every client who gets on your website is a lead. When you have a lead, you can work on converting them.
Enhanced visibility also builds credibility and trust, as clients often perceive top-ranking websites as more reputable. Further, SEO analytics can provide insights into client behavior, allowing you to refine your marketing strategies continuously toward a more client-centric practice.
SEO creates authority for your law firm
While focusing on visibility is a good strategy, you also have to appreciate that clients don’t just want anyone who shows up on Google. They want the best in their respective fields—someone who’s knowledgeable and authoritative.
SEO can create authority for your law firm by establishing your website as a credible and reliable source of legal information. High-quality content that addresses clients’ legal queries and concerns directly demonstrates your firm’s expertise and builds credibility.
Also, you enhance your visibility when your informative and well-researched content starts garnering attention from other reputable legal sources online through backlinks. This is a virtuous cycle that all marketers want for their clients.
SEO builds trust with potential clients
Trust is the most potent psychological lever when it comes to buying behavior. Whether your leads come from referrals or online searches becomes irrelevant when you understand that even when you get a referral, a potential customer will first visit your website before contacting you.
This is why building trust is imperative, and SEO is great at doing it. When you’re authoritative by virtue of being highly visible on the SERPs, you’ve already done half the work needed to build trust with potential clients. At this point, when a potential client comes to you, they’re essentially pre-primed to becoming a client.
This point deserves reiteration: SEO can not only help you get leads but also convert them into clients. So, how do you go about executing SEO for your website? Find out below.
Law firm SEO best practices to follow
When embarking on SEO to market your law firm, you can’t go wrong when you:
Build off a solid foundation
First impressions are everything, and lawyers know that. Your website is your first impression for potential clients searching for a law firm online. When 47% of law firms fail at making a positive first impression, don’t you think you can make a giant leap of improvement in your marketing by simply ensuring that your website does not put clients off?
What puts off clients from certain websites? Your potential clients will surely click away if your website is slow, unresponsive, technically glitchy, or poorly organized, among other factors. So, make sure to build a solid foundation with a technically sound website.
Technical SEO is how SEO agencies optimize your website’s infrastructure to improve its visibility, ranking on search engines, and performance. Key aspects include improving site speed, ensuring mobile-friendliness, securing your site with HTTPS, and optimizing the site’s architecture.
The goal is to enhance user experience by making your site faster and easier to navigate so your potential clients stick around. When they stick around, you have better chances of converting them, as user retention is positively linked to conversion. So, what else can help retention? That’s the next point.
Create content based on keyword research
You have to give them something to stick around for. Create content that keeps your potential clients engaged and informed. This way, your potential clients will spend more time on your website, and you will get the chance to demonstrate your expertise in the field.
The key here is using appropriate keywords to create content instead of simply writing about topics. Keywords reflect the topics that your ideal customers are already pondering. When you write with appropriate keywords, you have a better chance of connecting with your audience.
Keyword research is the cornerstone of effective SEO. Integrating keywords into the content your audience is searching for with the services you provide while ensuring that they rank in the SERPs is as much an art as a science. Working with a good content agency can be helpful, and the results will be worth it!
Focus on local SEO
If keywords or search queries are one thing that brings potential clients to your website, proximity is another. Many times, potential clients search for ‘civil lawyers near me’ or ‘law firms in [Area]’ because they want to associate with a law firm within their vicinity.
Local SEO involves optimizing your law firm’s website to attract more business from relevant local searches like the ones mentioned above. Other aspects include a complete Google My Business profile, consistent NAP (Name, Address, Phone number) across online directories, and strategies for garnering local reviews.
Local online community building is also an important aspect that you should consider. When you cultivate a local audience base and form new and meaningful relationships within your community, you open yourself up to—guess what? More referrals.
Work with an SEO agency for lawyers
This trifecta of investing in a technically sound website, creating keyword-optimized content, and focusing on local SEO can be very effective for bringing in new leads for law firms.
However, practicing as a lawyer and, on top of that, having to take into account the business considerations associated with running a law firm can be time-consuming enough. To get the full benefits of each aspect of SEO, it’s best to work with an SEO agency that specializes in delivering complete SEO services.
But that’s not all. Remember, marketing for law firms is unique. So, the last best practice for law firms looking for SEO marketing is to partner with SEO experts who are also well-versed in the legal realm and know how to navigate it to get the best results.
Get a free SEO audit for lawyers from the Ranq team
Legal marketing is challenging. The audience is niche, and the playing field is strewn with legal rules and regulations. SEO marketing has the breadth to turn each one of the challenges into strengths, but only if you choose SEO experts who are aware of the subtleties inherent in the legal industry. We are Ranq. We’re a complete digital marketing agency, and our SEO experts keenly understand the legal industry. Work with us if you don’t want templated or uniform protocol SEO marketing but law firm SEO marketing. Get your free SEO audit quote for lawyers.