Odds are, you are far from the only lawyer in your town. This means that if a potential client were to go on to a search engine, such as Google (News - Alert) and search for a lawyer near me, they will be displayed a list of lawyers who practice in the area. SEO, or search engine optimization, is the practice of helping you to increase your rankings with search engines, so when people search for the type of law you practice in the area you practice, your name is displayed at or near the top of that list. Unfortunately though, a lot of research goes into determining how to improve your search engine ranking and what SEO techniques to use to improve that ranking. Here are five examples of SEO research that every lawyer should do or have done for them.
1. Searching Your Business
One of the first types of SEO research that you need to conduct when you are starting search engine optimization is to search your business online. One of the biggest mistakes that law firms make is searching their business utilizing their law firm name, such as Smith Law Firm in Los Angeles. If you search your own business name, you should be at the top of the rankings. However, people who are looking for the services you offer do not know you by name, and instead will be searching for things such as personal injury attorney in Los Angeles or divorce attorney Southern California. Use some of these search terms to see where your business ranks with popular search engines, such as Google or Bing. This helps to tell you where you rank and gives you a baseline that you can use to see growth.
2. Keyword Research
The next thing you want to do for strong SEO research for lawyers is to do keyword research. You want to find out what terms people in your area are using to find lawyers. You may think that people are searching for divorce lawyer, when in reality, more people in your area search for family law attorney. You want to do keyword research to find out what keywords are searched, so you know what keywords to target. You can target keywords in a number of ways, including on your website, on a blog or through pay-per-click keyword marketing techniques. Keyword research may also help you to see what keywords your competitors are targeting, so you can target some of the keywords they are not targeting and attract more clientele.
3. Content Driven SEO
After completing keyword research, you then want to incorporate those keywords into content driven SEO pieces. There are a number of ways to do this, including social media posts and blog posts. In addition to targeting the keywords that you have selected, you also want to ensure that you are creating content that potential readers will find valuable. You do not want to have pieces that are poorly written or do not add value and are simply there just to put up keywords. Think about questions or concerns that your clients may have and then put up blogs or social media posts or videos that answer some of these questions. Creating valuable and content driven pieces can help to boost your search engine position.
4. Structured or Individual Websites
One of the lesser-known ways to boost your search engine ranking is to structure your websites by location and practice type, or even create separate websites for different locations or practice types. Doing SEO research will help to tell you whether creating separate webpages on one larger website or creating individual websites is the better choice for you. For example, many law firms handle different types of law. Your law firm may handle criminal defense case and personal injury cases. You may want to create a separate criminal defense attorney website and a separate personal injury website to boost SEO for each type of law you handle. At the very least, if both are on the same website, you want to ensure they are on separate pages with different targeting keywords to boost rankings for both types of law that you handle.
5. Create Backlinks
The final type of SEO research that lawyers need to do is to research where and how to create backlinks. Backlinks are links that link to your website that are placed on different websites. There are different ways to create backlinks, including paying to post an advertisement or link on another website, guest posting on other websites, or even posting a link in the comments section of certain websites. Research where you can create backlinks without spamming and then create these links to help boost your search engine position.
SEO research and implementing SEO techniques is something that every law firm needs to do to help ensure that they appear at the top of search engine listings. Unfortunately, SEO is time-consuming, and it is something that you need to be educated on to help achieve the results you are looking to create. Outsourcing your SEO marketing to a company that knows what they are doing can help you to achieve the desired results in a timely manner, without taking away time from your firm or time with clients.
