Ensuring that your law firm is searchable should be at the top of your marketing to-do list. When members of the community seek the assistance of professionals like you, they take to search engines like Google to help them find qualified counsel. Are you showing up locally when potential clients are searching for law firms? If not, you’re missing out on a huge number of leads.
Follow this local SEO checklist and establish a solid online presence that will direct online traffic to your practice.
Target Local Keywords
As legal marketing becomes increasingly competitive it is vital for you to establish your brand and market your location. It’s important to keep in mind that ranking, especially with major metropolitan areas (i.e. New York, Los Angeles) will take time. If you’re just beginning to think about local SEO, the results will not be immediate. If you’re new to the optimization process, start by honing in on the smaller neighborhoods and cities. The competition is less fierce when you set your goals on the traffic in your city.
To find keyword volume, you can use keyword research tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner, SEMrush, or Brightedge. Investing in keyword research is an essential part of your local SEO strategy, and monitoring your changes over time will provide insight into what works.
Focus on Practice Areas
Since prospective clients are specifically searching to learn more about potential firms in certain practice areas, focusing on practice areas will increase your chances of ranking for different search terms.
For example, Personal Injury Attorneys can specify the following practice areas:
- Car Accidents
- Traumatic Brain Injury
- Bicycle Accidents
If your website’s practice area pages are too broad, potential clients may not know which page they should be looking at, which can hurt conversion.
Presence on Google My Business
To increase your chances of ranking, include your brand and firm in Google Places and other directories. This will put your practice on the map; Google Maps that is.
Remember that Conversion is the Goal
Although directing prospective clients to your site through local keywords is the goal, it should not be the only objective. Conversion should be the focus of all attorneys. You want site visitors to become clients. This depends on your website. Before optimizing, update your website to ensure that it is informative, up-to-date, and easy to navigate.
Name, Address, Phone
One of the most important parts of local SEO is making sure your firm’s Name, Address, and Phone is consistent across your website and any other official channel, like your Google My Business listing. Only after achieving this consistency should you be submitting your business to local directories.
This local SEO guide for lawyers will lead you to better ranking and quality leads for your firm. At Walker Advertising, our marketing/research group is always looking for the next needle-in-a-haystack insight that leads to better results for our attorney members. Sometimes an insight comes out of one of our focus groups with consumers and attorney members; other times, from analyzing existing strategic data. New solutions even come from putting existing creative and media plans under the microscope.
We are a full-service advertising agency. In marketing speak, this means we do it all, from creative development to buying media to consumer research to operating the call center. Put another way, under one roof, we have everything and everyone necessary to help our attorney members.
