Having a high-profile presence in organic search on Google and other search engines helps law practices attract new clients, when campaigns are executed properly. Look for a legal SEO company with a solid, long-term track record of performance in your field. Best practices for SEO change frequently, and out-of-date techniques will hurt rather than help your client acquisition efforts.
Areas of Focus for a Legal SEO Agency
There are several areas for your legal SEO firm to focus on in your campaign. These are the most important.
1. An SEO-Ready Website
If your practice is new to SEO, or had a poorly managed campaign in years past, your website is likely too deficient in its ability to support SEO. A great deal of new content may be needed to support targeted campaign keywords. Technical problems such as slow-loading pages, poor internal linking structure and poorly optimized meta data must be corrected. Perhaps most important, your website must not only be mobile-friendly, but deliver an exceptionally strong mobile viewing experience. Google crawlers are placing more and more emphasis on mobile-friendliness as mobile Internet usage continues to skyrocket.
2. Local SEO Practices
Local SEO, a specialized area, is a necessity for legal firms serving a local or regional geographic market. A number of techniques are involved, the most critical of which are cultivating client reviews, obtaining citations (mentions) on authoritative websites and directories in the legal community, and adding various elements to your website to enhance its position on Google SERPs (search engine results pages).
3. Keyword Targeting
An SEO campaign is only as good as its targeted keywords — the ones selected must drive a critical mass of organic traffic and conversions. Thus, your legal SEO company must consider keyword attributes including search volume, competitiveness, user intent and relevance. In the legal profession, national and online legal services firms dominate many of the most popular terms, making it difficult for a smaller practice to compete. In these cases, a better strategy is to focus on long-tail keywords — that is, keyword phrases that are more specific but highly relevant and likely to convert.
Critical Capabilities for Your Legal SEO Agency
- Your agency should have a strong team of copywriters experienced in legal copywriting. To succeed with SEO, your campaign will almost undoubtedly need fresh website content and off-site content (articles, primarily). On-site content serves to increase the authority of your website’s domain and targeted pages; off-site content is indispensable for obtaining backlinks. Both authority and backlinks are important ranking criteria for Google.
- Lead tracking capabilities are also very important. Without accurate tracking, you will never know how many leads your SEO campaign is producing. Campaign setup must therefore include granular phone and inquiry form tracking, so that phone and form inquiries can be identified as coming from SEO. Once identified, these conversions must be validated, to separate real inquiries from other types of conversions such as spam, personal phone calls, misdials, etc. Our extensive lead tracking data reveals that about half of all conversions are not leads — so be sure you understand the data you are looking at in your monthly campaign reports.