Let’s face it, doing SEO in the lawyer space is quite competitive. Large markets like LA, Chicago, New York to name a few are really hard to rank in. You have 20 to 50 law firms or more all trying to rank for a single city.
There are a few key takeaways I have learned over the years that can help a law firm rank.
It’s Going To Cost You
Successful law firms make a lot of money and they spend a lot on advertising (TV and print), PPC and now Local Service Ads. Many however still are a little rusty when it comes to SEO. They know SEO needs to be done, but they aren’t quite sure how to go about it, so they hire a reputable SEO company.
The law firms that are successful know that an SEO strategy that works will cost thousands of dollars each month. A good-sized SEO campaign can run upwards of 10K to 30K a month.
Honestly if you don’t have the money to spend, be prepared to spend hours writing, optimizing, and link building. We are not talking just a few hours a week, but 2 to 3 or more full-time positions. In the end, most law firms figure out, it is better to pay someone else to do the heavy lifting.
Content Is King
To really dominate a market you are going to have to produce content that ranks. Many law firms are paying SEO companies big bucks to generate content. The sweet spot seems to be around 30 – 50 new pages a month. You can do less, but it will take much longer to rank.
There are 3 main areas to concentrate on
- Practice Areas
- Locations or Areas of Service
- FAQs
Practice Areas
Practice Areas are things like personal injury cases like car accidents, truck accidents and motorcycle accidents.
Locations or Areas of Service
Locations can be physical or city locations the law firm is trying to rank for. Physical locations are easy since you can create Google My Business accounts and citations. For areas other than your physical location, you will need to write content specific to that location. For example, if you are trying to rank in Chicago and you are a personal injury lawyer, you might create a page focusing on Car Accidents like “Chicago Car Accident Lawyer“. Kryder Law has done an excellent job of getting the article ranked on page 1.
FAQs
Answering Frequently Ask Questions is a very good way to draw traffic to the website. While much of the traffic probably will not convert, it still is a way to boost a websites overall Domain Authority, which in time will help other pages rank.
Link Building Isn’t Dead
Another key factor in SEO is building out relevant backlinks to pages you want to rank. For example, if I wanted to help boost the law firm Underwood Law Office who is trying to rank for personal injury in McKinney Texas for “Car Accident Lawyer“, all I have to do is create several backlinks to the page.
In general the higher the Domain Authority of the page that the backlink is coming from the more link juice it will provide to the page it is linking to.
Don’t Forget To Disavow
Now of course over time as your website gets more backlinks, you will have to evaluate the relevance of those backlinks and remove the ones that appear to be spammy. This is known as performing a Disavow, where you submit a list to Google to deindex links that appear to be spammy.
Skyscrapers And Keyword Rich Content
Remember how I said content is King, well for law firms, you will often have to create what the industry refers to as skyscrapers or keyword rich content. For instance if I want to rank for Auto Accidents or Car Wrecks, I might want to consider writing up a really long article that goes into various issues that people might ask about car accidents and also have 10 to 15 pages that link from the main skyscraper page.
Menu | Nav Positioning
When Google or any other search engine scans your website, the higher the links are on the site navigation, the more important Google sees them. If you want a page to have the most website authority, put it front and center on the Nav bar. Pages that are linked lower down or internally don’t have as much punch and therefore are harder to rank starting out.
