The arrival of digital marketing methods replaced traditional advertisement campaigns. Old-fashioned marketing mediums, such as television and newspaper ads, didn’t become obsolete. But the efficiency of digital marketing to grab people’s attention compelled people to advertise their business on the internet. Most attorneys nowadays market their legal services online and receive incredible results. These results include a swift enhancement in brand recognition and customer engagement. That’s why SEO for lawyers has become an essential component in any legal firm’s marketing strategy. It provides a steady increase in leads, but it is also cost-effective and much more permanent.
The internet isn’t a luxury anymore in First World; it’s a commodity required by the masses. The success of small/multinational and private/government business sectors depend on online customer engagement. The internet has become an integral part of our everyday life. That’s why it’s more common for people to seek legal services online than to look for an attorney physically. This necessity motivates law firms to invest their time and money to appear on a search engine’s first page. Online visibility increases your chances of appearing before potential clients. Applying SEO can help fetch you more traffic via Google and enhance your business productivity.
HOW SEO BENEFITS ATTORNEYS?
With proper understanding and the correct approach, SEO can be a useful tool for business promotion. It benefits every company, and law firms are no exception. Your local search engines depend on multiple factors. These factors include your content, its backlinks, customer reviews, and rankings. In the modern competitive world, the company with the right marketing strategy wins the game. That’s why you require an SEO guide for law firms to breakdown the terminologies and prioritize the factors for fruitful implementation. We can declare that digital marketing improves brand awareness, generate better leads, and enhances thought leadership. It also provides more value to existing clients. Other advantages of SEO to law firms are:
1. Publishing informative content:
Content makes your website more informative, accessible, and discoverable. SEO allows you to publish relevant legal information on your website. It doesn’t only help random visitors to become permanent clients. But it also helps search engines enhance your site’s rankings. You can publish case studies on your website. Regularly updating the site and posting blog posts also enhance visibility. Content is one of the key factors behind your marketing strategy.
2. Reforming your website:
Digital marketing strategies reform your website to make it SEO-friendly. Marketing expertise allows you to include such content to your website that attracts more customers. That’s how SEO boosts the ranking of your website. Your site represents your online presence and enhances your connectivity with customers. An SEO-friendly page will be more visible and lucrative for potential clients. Visual appeal is also an essential part of your digital marketing campaign.
3. Targetting relevant traffic:
The trick to gain quick visibility online is to advertise to a target audience. Marketing to people who may not need your service is a waste of potential. SEO helps you in finding out the relevant audience to target. Such an advertisement is more effective than pay-per-click marketing. This traffic is more advantageous than irrelevant ones. Relevant traffic also established your market position as a reliable legal company. SEO lets you quickly gain public trust.
4. Popularizing your brand:
Traditional marketing focused on a limited amount of popularity that used to fade after time. Digital marketing attends to long-term brand recognition. Applying SEO doesn’t just bring you’re a larger number of customers. It allows you to achieve a unique place among law firms and appear distinctive from the crowd. Your audience finds a bond of trust with your firm, and your brand gains recognition. You don’t market your services; you do the entire brand.
5. Increasing your ROI:
SEO helps more clients reach out to you. It increases your chances of turning them into paying customers. An increased conversion rate enhances your face-to-face interaction with the customers. Search engine optimization works against your rivals by giving you a higher return on investment (ROI). You need to optimize your website and follow the SEO protocols explained below. Here is a brief list of SEO strategies you should try for your website’s promotion.
SEO STRATEGIES FOR LAW FIRMS
Different SEO strategies exist for businesses worldwide. Attorneys need to incorporate the relevant ones into their digital marketing campaigns. A 2018 Digital Marketing Survey revealed that 35% of law firms considered digital marketing ‘very important.’ But half of these companies allocated less than 15% of their marketing budget on digital marketing. Only 7% of legal companies were investing more than 40% of the advertisement budget on SEO strategies. Most legal firms admit that they’ve failed to convince the management to try better SEO tactics. Others complain of a lack of time and resources. So, here is a breakdown of some simple SEO insights for you to try:
1. Begin with keywords:
Let’s start with a simple SEO trick everyone’s familiar with: keywords. You need to optimize your website for specific keywords relevant to your brand. You can’t optimize your site for a keyword nobody searches on Google. Relevancy of keywords enhances your chances to appear first in SERP. If you use local keywords, Google will crawl your website and brand it as a local business. Now you don’t want a Wisconsin-based company to show up to people searching in Arizona. Study the analytical results of your keywords and find out which keywords you’re target audience searches. Use tools for keyword research such as SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Google‘s Keyword Planner.
2. Impactful meta description:
When your website appears on a SERP, the audience looks at its meta title and meta description. What is a meta description? Well, it’s merely the shortest search engine optimized description of your site. This summary of your brand/services matters to your target audience. Don’t let Google automatically pull something random to display as your site’s meta description. It’s always smart to write one on your own. How to write a killer meta description?
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- Make it as brief and concise as possible.
- Think outside the box when writing a meta description.
- Incorporate your keywords in it for search engine optimization.
- Don’t be repetitive; use attention-grasping content for a better click-through rate.
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Don’t use alphanumeric symbols (such as plus/hyphen) as search engines confuse them with HTML code.
3. Positive customer reviews:
Another way to boost your search engine rankings is to get more customer reviews. People prefer companies that have been positively reviewed by others. Websites with multiple reviews also gain favor with search engine algorithms. It’s crucial to ask your clients to write testimonials for you for better rankings. These reviews enhance relevant traffic and make potential clients trust your brand. Even negative reviews are tools for search engine optimization if handled like a pro! Quickly respond to negative reviews and online complaints. It’ll show your current/potential clients that your customer dealing is polite, productive, and professional.
4. Content rules SEO:
Compelling content helps you win the race of digital marketing. Content is one of the three major searching ranking factors used by Google. Backlinks are also vital if you wish to improve your website’s ranking. Make authoritative and informative content that compels visitors to hire your legal services. Regularly publishing educational and attractive content makes your site useful to clients. That’s why content marketing is a strategy that requires your attention. Guest posting also helps you achieve high-quality backlinks. Spend on images/videos too because nobody likes to skim through image-less articles. Incorporate keywords into your content.
5. Visuals:
The visual aspect of your website is essential for visitor engagement. Your potential customers won’t just go through dull textual content. They’d also like to watch informative videos and study statistical graphs. Being visually appealing also means what kind of layout/structure your site follows. Is it mobile-friendly? Is web design up-to-date? What type of user interface does it have? Ease-of-access helps visitors spend more time on your website. The SEO world gives significant importance to images/videos. Audio/visual aids help customers grasp your content more easily. You can also recycle your old content and refresh it from time to time.
6. Simplicity, readability, and understandability:
Avoid legal jargon in your content, and don’t use words that aren’t commonly readable. The readability score of your content matters as you add its total SEO score. We know that lawyers are exceptional writers, but your potential clients require simplistic content. Remember that you’re writing for people who don’t necessarily have a law degree. Jargons matter less than the keywords you’re audience is searching online. Don’t intimidate your readers with your legal-descriptive expertise. SEO works best with easily understandable content. Even if you have to use specific technical terms, make the overall content clear, proper, logical, and browsable.
7. Make a MyBusiness profile:
We talked about some tools you can use to search for keywords or produce customer-friendly content. These tools should be an integral part of a law firm’s SEO campaign. Google MyBusiness is also one of these useful tools; it improves your Google Search and Google Maps placement. Users can get comprehensive information about your business, such as your home address and phone number. Creating a MyBusiness profile puts all your sought-after information right before the client’s eyes. You have to keep updating your accurate information and ask clients to add Google reviews in your favor.
8. Social media:
A study confirms that most lawyers use social media platforms. Many attorneys are available on LinkedIn. But Facebook brings more business than LinkedIn does. These two channels and other social media websites can help attract customers to your website. You get good reviews and connections when you participate in online communities. It also improves your reputation and enhances brand recognition. Social media is a unique place to display your legal expertise and offer free legal counsel. These tactics help you gain followers and contribute to indirect promotion—this kind of engagement to market your legal services.
9. Marketing automation for lead generation:
The invention of automation has done wonders for the modern world. Automated machines have taken over certain aspects of the business sector. You can now automate the process of lead generation for better marketing results. This sort of automation saves you the trouble of investing time or involving old-style outreach maneuvers. Many business companies are now utilizing marketing automation. Automated lead generation works this way: software programs capture, qualify, and score each lead. Then these leads are sent to the correct staff and are nurtures for future use. All this process is automatic and machine-controlled.
10. Bring issues to the limelight:
Of course, you’re a legal firm and not an entertainment company. So, writing about controversial topics doesn’t come inside your horizon. But your content must invoke problems faced by your target audience, i.e., legal complexities.
CONCLUSION
Nobody can ignore the importance of digital marketing for the 21st-century business world. No matter what kind of business you own, Search Engine Optimization is a necessary marketing strategy. It allows algorithms used by search engines to grace you with favor and help you show up in SERPs. Consider strengthening your SEO efforts to achieve meaningful online visibility. That’s why law firms prefer first page rankings because 96% of people search for attorneys online. That’s what we learned from the Google Consumer Survey, November 2013. Moreover, 3/4th of online legal searches concludes with a phone call to your office. Also, 87% of such people will contact only one attorney.
These legal statistics of the previous decade show that your website must achieve first page rankings. SEO makes it possible for a law firm to become potential clients’ first choice. Remember that people barely use yellow pages nowadays. Gone were the days where people remembered the giant billboards they saw that morning. If you wish to promote your career as an attorney, you better call SEO. Don’t forget that you can bury a dead body on the second page of Google search results! Internet users don’t have time to go beyond the 1st page, and most of them click the first result that appears. SEO helps you become one of these “first results” in the American legal search history.
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