SEO for Lawyers - Search Engine Optimization
In a competitive industry, it is essential to make the best use of SEO to help your firm stand out in online searches. A cohesive strategy with Search Engine Optimisation at its heart is the first step towards bringing future clients to your website. Here are four key tips to incorporate into your marketing plan which will improve your law firm’s ranking on popular search engines and ensure a steady stream of high-quality traffic to your website.
Over 90% of digital searches start by using relevant keywords and over 70% of users don’t go beyond the first page of SERPs – Search Engine Page Results. However, optimising your website isn’t a one-off exercise. Search engines alter or completely change their algorithms on a regular basis which is why your firm can appear on page one of the results one week and then disappear without a trace a few days later. It’s crucial to devise a policy that keeps your website under regular review and up to date with current SEO practices. There are lots of SEO tools that can help you do this including strategies which also improve online visibility on other media and platforms.
One of the first things people look at on a website is the ‘About Us’ page. Most legal services offered by law firms are very similar and so the ‘About Us’ page is an opportunity for your company to stand out. Describing the qualifications and experience of legal staff is a shop window. It presents the chance to promote authority and confidence with detail about each lawyer’s legal training. For example, US lawyers will have had to pass the bar exam and UK lawyers will have had to pass the SQE (Solicitors Qualifying Examination)
. There is the option to personalise each profile to add a human touch, especially important in some areas like family law.The ’About Us’ page is the most important page on your website and the one that visitors will quickly hop onto from the home page if they want to find out more about the firm. Make this page easy to find and use it as a vehicle to portray the personality of the firm. This doesn’t need to be overt but can be achieved using colour, layout and style which should be consistent with all the other pages on the website.
Avoid legalese in the descriptions and steer clear of generic text. Keep descriptions short and genuine. Long tracts of text put visitors off and they are more likely to click away from the page and onto another website.
A slow website will instantly lose traffic as people want quick delivery. A slow loading speed will drive potential business to your competitors. The other important factor is to ensure your website appears quickly and in full across a range of devices. If your mobile audience is at or above 10% then it’s time to start optimising your website for mobile devices. Responsive Web Design (RWD) ensures that all your website’s content displays in full and uniformly across a range of devices, platforms and screen sizes. This is achieved using special coding techniques and offers the best user experience.
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Knowing your audience and how they behave is crucial to understanding how a website is performing. Google Analytics is a free SEO tool that offers insight into crucial metrics such as who is using your website, how they discover it, the number of visitors and how much time they spend on the site. This information is essential for a comprehensive and targeted marketing strategy.
In a competitive marketplace, SEO is something no law firm can afford to ignore. However, it is complex and may require specialist input and strategy with either an in-house marketing team or the help of external experts such as a good SEO agency.