Many lawyers do not realize how many potential clients they are losing every month from the search engines.
Did you know that more than 20% of people who need an attorney turn to the search engines first? In addition, the majority are now using their mobile devices to perform their searches. Why is this important? Desktop search engine results vary greatly from mobile results. If your website has not been optimized for mobile users, chances are Google is going to drop your rankings in the mobile listings.
Our recommended Law Firm SEO practices begin with:
A. Targeting Local Attorney Keywords
If there is one local market that is extremely competitive in terms of SEO, it is the legal marketing niche. Competition is fierce, and the longer you wait, the more time your competitors have to keep stealing your potential clients.
If your website is new, we recommend that your expectations from the start would be to perform branding first. If you are not ranking #1 for your brand name, there is work to be done before you can expect to rank for the hot industry keywords.
Once you get there, it’s time to take it up a notch and begin a search engine optimization campaign to target local keywords that focus on your area of practice.
We hear too often from attorneys that look to us for SEO that they want to rank for “City + Attorneys”. The general search engine visitor is not going to use this term when they are looking to hire an attorney. They are going to perform a more specific search for what type of lawyer they need. An actual search may look something like this: “City + Best DUI Lawyer”. That is a keyword that will make your phone ring.
Example DUI Lawyer Keywords:
Here is just a short list of some of the top keywords that we target for our DUI attorney clients:
- City + DUI Attorney
- City + Drunk Driving Lawyer
- City + OVI Lawyer
- DUI Defense Lawyer + City
- DUI Lawyer + City, State
There are so many keyword variations that I could list hundreds. These are some of the top keywords for an attorney specializing in DUI charges. We provide local SEO for lawyers in all specialties.
B. Ranking in Google Maps and Other Authority Websites
Let’s face it. People are impatient in this day and age. We struggle to find time for anything, and even if we have time, we don’t want to spend hours (or even minutes) looking through the organic listings for an attorney.
Your web presence must include being optimized to rank in the maps listings, preferably in the top 3 positions, as that is the limit of view when a search is made on Google.
It is also a great SEO strategy to optimize your other profiles to rank on page one, such as an AVVO listing, or your Lawyer.com profile page.
The above tactics are just the beginning when targeting any form of lawyer service keywords.
If you need help, we are attorney marketing experts. We will get your website up to speed so that you too can benefit from the thousands of attorney searches that are performed every month in your city.
