Simple Tips to Boost Your Law Firm’s Online Profile

by Daniel Raymond · December 29, 2024

Getting a law degree doesn’t automatically mean clients will start lining up. Sure, you’re probably going to field a ton of questions from family and friends but they’re not exactly paying for your legal advice. Even if the competition isn’t fierce, finding paying clients is probably a little harder than expected.

Table of Contents

Launching an online website can help get your law firm noticed. However, this typically only works when you understand the key fundamentals of legal SEO strategies. Are you already feeling a little confused? Don’t worry, we’re going over a few simple SEO strategies.

Why Lawyers Need SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of strategies that help move your website up in the search engine result rankings. These are the pages that pop up after you type a query into the search bar. Ideally, you want your website to appear in the top five and always in the top ten. Higher-ranking websites tend to see more traffic. The increase in visitors to your law firm’s website typically translates into an uptick in clients.

Still not sure if SEO is necessary. After all, you have a live website and plenty of print advertising. This is a great start. However, did you know that around 74% of practicing attorneys who participated in Legal Trends Report’s survey indicated they rely on their website to help them reach potential clients?

Just think about it for a minute. What do you usually do when you need to find a product or service? Chances are you turn to the web. This is also what your potential clients are doing. When they need an attorney, they search for the closest lawyer near me. If you’re not using SEO, these potential clients probably aren’t going to find your firm’s website.

Key SEO Strategies

Okay, you have a better idea of why your law firm’s website needs SEO. So, how do you get started? SEO is confusing and constantly changing with search engine algorithms. With that being said, some strategies stay the same. For some of the more advanced strategies like technical SEO, it’s probably best to go with a service provider.

Your in-house IT department may be able to take on technical SEO like optimizing your website’s loading speed. Other tasks may not be in their skill set. Besides, keeping up with SEO can easily turn into a full-time job. This means your IT staff doesn’t have time for other tasks.

Optimize Your Content

What’s wrong with your content? Hopefully, not a whole lot. When was the last time you read through your website’s published content? Scan through your content and see if it answers some common questions like:

The law firm’s location
Type of law the firm practices
Average rates and fee structures

These are only a few examples of questions you want your website to answer. Search engines crawl websites looking for the best places to send online users. If the search engine finds answers to the query, it’s probably going to send the traffic to your website.

Your content can contain literally all of the information a potential client can want and your site can still miss out on traffic. What’s going on? Chances are, you’re not using keywords. These are words that let search engines know what your webpage is about.

Finding keywords for rankings can be a bit of a pain. Some keywords have a high competition rating. This means your website is competing against a ton of others to catch the search engine’s attention. Other keywords aren’t as popular and this can make ranking a little easier.

Go Local

Something you don’t want to overlook is local SEO. This is also the easiest SEO strategy for law firms to tackle. Head over to Google Local AD services. This handy tool happily walks you through the entire advertising process.

With local SEO, every time someone searches for an attorney near me, your law firm will appear in the results. You can list everything from the type of law you practice to your business hours and location. You can also link back to your law firm’s website and even a review page.

Even though it takes a few minutes to get everything set up, it’s worth the effort when clients start contacting your law firm.

Backlinks Are Helpful

Popularity can seem like a running theme throughout life. Guess what, it’s also an effective SEO strategy. Backlinks are when another website inserts a link back to one of your web pages. In a sense, you’re sharing traffic with the other website. The more backlinks you have scattered throughout your web pages, the higher your website’s popularity. Yep, this is also something search engines factor into their rankings.

Getting backlinks isn’t too difficult. However, you don’t want links showing up on just any website. Authority is also key. You only want backlinks appearing on credible, informative, and authoritative websites. In other words, avoid any site that seems spammy or even a little fishy. Instead of boosting your online profile, spammy backlinks can drag it down. Sometimes, it’s all but impossible to recover in the rankings.

Use Off-Page Citations

This ties into backlinks. You’re still getting backlinks on other sites, the only difference is where they’re placed. Typically, backlinks go into a web page’s content. You know a link that’s embedded in a paragraph. This is usually a backlink.

Off-page citations are when you link to local businesses, usually somewhere in their contact information. Some places you may want to use off-page citations include:

Legal directories both local, state, and national
Google Business Profile
Social media sites like Facebook and X (Formerly Twitter)

Don’t forget about linking to endorsements and reviews posted on other websites.

Mastering Legal SEO Made Easy

Even these simple SEO strategies take time if you want to do it right. This is before you get into the technical side. Sometimes, it’s best to let the professionals handle your law firm’s SEO needs. This way, you have time to get ready for your uptick in clients.