SEO
What’s The First Step In Law Firm SEO?
Getting a law firm to rank at the top of Google Search is often a hefty task.
As one of the most competitive industries out there, legal professionals can struggle to stand above the rest.
Most lawyers know SEO is the key to ranking high on Google.
But how do you know where to start?
And how do you know if the first step will set you up for success?
Here I reveal the first fundamental step to SEO for law firms – plus what’s next in creating an effective legal SEO strategy.
Step 1: Familiarize Yourself With SEO
The first step to SEO for lawyers is to familiarize yourself with the subject of SEO.
This may seem backward since you don’t know where to start with your SEO strategy, but this is exactly the point.
Education is the key to establishing an effective, data-driven strategy.
Further, learning the fundamentals will equip you to hold your internal team or external partners accountable for getting you the results you expect.
That way, you aren’t going in blind and you can set realistic expectations for your SEO team.
You can familiarize yourself with SEO by watching YouTube videos, joining Facebook groups, attending conferences and masterminds, or reading articles about the subject online.
There are also books on the topic, (such as Law Firm SEO) that help educate and empower attorneys to increase the visibility of their website, leverage SEO, and increase Google rankings, web traffic, leads, and signed cases.
Some Of The Best SEO Professionals Are Self-taught
When search engine optimization first emerged as an area of practice, there were no college courses, books, or videos on the subject.
Many early SEO professionals learn by doing; by creating a website, optimizing it, watching it rank, and measuring the results.
This means that many of the best SEO pros are self-taught, and today self-education is still a great way to learn SEO.
SEO is accessible to everyone, and today there are more resources than ever to learn SEO – even for free!
Where To Start? – Basics Of Law Firm SEO
Every SEO strategy is built on the fundamentals.
Even the best “SEO strategy” won’t succeed unless there’s an understanding of basic SEO practices.
Later on, you’ll build upon these fundamentals by testing different approaches and discovering what works best for your website.
Here are the basic SEO fundamentals you should know.
Keyword Research
Keyword research involves identifying the search terms (“keywords”) users search for in search engines to find businesses, products, services, and information.
Your SEO strategy is based on optimizing your website and platforms for the keywords your target audience is searching for as they relate to your services.
When it comes to law firm keyword research, search terms are primarily aligned with two audience personas: Legal information seekers and lawyer seekers.
There are users looking for information about a legal issue or problem, and there are users looking specifically for a lawyer or law firm.
When doing keyword research for your law firm, you’ll want to identify search terms for both categories.
For example, if you are a family lawyer, you might identify terms like “how to file for divorce” or “how to settle a custody dispute” for information seekers, and terms like “family lawyer Kirkland” or “Kirkland divorce lawyer” for lawyer seekers.
Website Compliance
Law firms face specific regulatory and accessibility requirements in website marketing.
In particular, The Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) provisions now apply to business websites, physical offices, and businesses with websites.
That means your website needs to make accommodations for those who have auditory, visual, or physical disabilities.
When it comes to SEO, this may mean optimizing image alt text for e-readers or adding subtitles to your YouTube videos.
Another consideration is your marketing content.
Lawyers must adhere to certain advertising rules that may not apply to other businesses. For example:
- Avoid making claims of being an “expert” unless you are certified or accredited.
- Don’t make false or misleading claims, such as saying you are the “best” law firm. The State Bar of California’s rules on advertising requires law firms to avoid any solicitations that are “untrue, confusing, deceiving, or misleading” to users.
- Check your state laws before operating under a trade name. For example, practicing under a trade name is not allowed unless under certain circumstances.
Off-Page SEO
“Off-page” SEO is optimization that occurs off of your websites, such as Google Business Profile optimization, link building, or directory listings.
Off-site SEO is an important way for law firms to drive backlinks, referral traffic, reviews, and leads via online listings.
Positive reviews can help build trust with potential clients and even help your Google My Business profile rank higher than other lawyer profiles.
However, keep in mind that the American Bar Association Rule 7.2 (b) specifies that lawyers cannot compensate anyone for a testimonial or recommendation, so make sure your testimonials adhere to this.
Local SEO
Local SEO involves optimizing your website and online platforms for geo-specific search terms.
It takes advantage of proximity signals to help you rank for the localized terms users are searching for – and target users in a specific location.
You can improve your law firm’s local SEO by using keywords that specify your law firm’s location or service area – for example, “LA Personal Injury Attorney” or “Denver Family Law.”
You can also include your address, directions, and a map of your law firm’s location on your website.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO involves addressing your website’s site structure, security, indexation, and speed.
To ensure your website is fast, accessible, and crawlable by search engines, you’ll need to address technical SEO.
The basics of technical SEO for all types of businesses include:
- Optimizing page speed/website load time by reducing image sizes and improving content rendering on your website.
- Fixing broken links/404 pages with redirects.
- Avoiding duplicate title tags, meta descriptions, page content, and H1 headings.
- Ensuring your website has a secure SSL certificate (HTTPS) set up.
- Making sure your website design is optimized for mobile and desktop.
- Finding and fixing crawl errors and sitemap issues.
Content
“Content” can refer to any visual or textual content on your website but most often refers to the words on the page – such as on your web pages and blog articles.
Your content tells users and search engines what your business is about.
Law firms can attract users organically through both web page/service page and blog article content.
For example, you may have several service pages (optimized for service- and geo-specific keywords) and blog posts (optimized for informative, “long-tail” keywords).
Think back to the two audience personas – information seekers and lawyer seekers.
Try to create content for the two audiences by providing informative blog articles and pages and more descriptive service and sales pages.
Link Building
Link building is an important activity in SEO and involves actively, passively, or organically attracting links to your website from other websites.
“Backlinks,” as they are called, add authority to your website.
We talk more about link building for law firms below.
Tracking And Analytics
Platforms like Google Analytics and Google Search Console tell you how much traffic you’re getting, where it’s coming from, and more important metrics to your business.
Tracking and analytics are important for determining if your SEO strategies are working.
For your law firm’s marketing purpose, you’ll want to pay attention to a few key metrics:
- Impressions – The number of users who see your page URL in the search results (can be found via Google Search Console).
- Clicks – The number of users who click on the URL to your web page or post (can be found via Google Search Console).
- Users – The number of users who have visited a particular page or within a particular period (can be found via Google Analytics).
- Goals – Conversion tracking on your website; how many users complete a specified action (can be found via Google Analytics).
- Bounce rate – The percentage of times users visit a single page on your website and then immediately leave the page or your website overall (can be found via Google Analytics).
Image from Google Analytics, March 2022The above metrics can tell you how many people are visiting your website, from which channels, and how many users are taking action (like completing a contact form) on your website.
This way, you can measure the effectiveness of your SEO and marketing campaigns.
What’s Next? – SEO Strategies Going Forward
The first step of SEO is to learn the fundamentals to build a more advanced strategy off of the basics.
Not only will education make you more well-versed in SEO, but it will also help you see through any shady tactics other SEO salespeople may present.
Whether you choose to DIY your SEO or hire an agency, here are some other steps to take in your law firm’s search strategy.
Develop A Content Strategy
The content on your website serves a valuable purpose in telling Google and users what your site is about.
Further, optimized content can work to attract new users to your site via keywords.
Developing a content strategy is one of the best early steps for setting your site up for success.
This means publishing descriptive and engaging web page content, posting blog articles, and experimenting with media like images and videos.
Build Authority With Article Marketing
The content on your website plays an important role in SEO, but creating content off-site can be valuable as well.
Article marketing presents many ways to generate great results from your content.
You can publish content on your blog, post on other blogs, write articles on LinkedIn, become a contributor to other publications, and so much more.
You can generate organic traffic to your site, referral traffic from other sites, and grow your authority with expert-level content.
Earn High-Quality Backlinks
Once you have great content on your site, you can start driving links to it.
Sometimes, this will happen organically, such as when other websites find you and choose to link to you; other times, you will take a more active role, such as through outreach or content marketing.
There are a few ways to earn backlinks naturally.
These methods can include publishing “link-worthy” content, sharing valuable tools, creating a resource guide, showcasing an infographic, and other creative ideas.
Link building is an activity you should always keep in mind to improve your website’s authority.
Take The First Step In Law Firm SEO
SEO shouldn’t be intimidating.
In fact, one of the best ways to demystify SEO is to just start reading.
Read articles about SEO online.
Read books about SEO.
Read how-to’s from expert forums.
Over time, you will become more confident in your skills and be able to develop a well-informed strategy.
Search Engine Journal is a great source of accurate, free information about SEO.
Start with the fundamentals, try out more advanced strategies, and implement SEO on your website.
Who knows, maybe one day you’ll become an SEO pro yourself.
More resources:
Featured Image: create jobs 51/Shutterstock
SEO
Measuring Content Impact Across The Customer Journey
Understanding the impact of your content at every touchpoint of the customer journey is essential – but that’s easier said than done. From attracting potential leads to nurturing them into loyal customers, there are many touchpoints to look into.
So how do you identify and take advantage of these opportunities for growth?
Watch this on-demand webinar and learn a comprehensive approach for measuring the value of your content initiatives, so you can optimize resource allocation for maximum impact.
You’ll learn:
- Fresh methods for measuring your content’s impact.
- Fascinating insights using first-touch attribution, and how it differs from the usual last-touch perspective.
- Ways to persuade decision-makers to invest in more content by showcasing its value convincingly.
With Bill Franklin and Oliver Tani of DAC Group, we unravel the nuances of attribution modeling, emphasizing the significance of layering first-touch and last-touch attribution within your measurement strategy.
Check out these insights to help you craft compelling content tailored to each stage, using an approach rooted in first-hand experience to ensure your content resonates.
Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or new to content measurement, this webinar promises valuable insights and actionable tactics to elevate your SEO game and optimize your content initiatives for success.
View the slides below or check out the full webinar for all the details.
SEO
How to Find and Use Competitor Keywords
Competitor keywords are the keywords your rivals rank for in Google’s search results. They may rank organically or pay for Google Ads to rank in the paid results.
Knowing your competitors’ keywords is the easiest form of keyword research. If your competitors rank for or target particular keywords, it might be worth it for you to target them, too.
There is no way to see your competitors’ keywords without a tool like Ahrefs, which has a database of keywords and the sites that rank for them. As far as we know, Ahrefs has the biggest database of these keywords.
How to find all the keywords your competitor ranks for
- Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
- Enter your competitor’s domain
- Go to the Organic keywords report
The report is sorted by traffic to show you the keywords sending your competitor the most visits. For example, Mailchimp gets most of its organic traffic from the keyword “mailchimp.”
Since you’re unlikely to rank for your competitor’s brand, you might want to exclude branded keywords from the report. You can do this by adding a Keyword > Doesn’t contain filter. In this example, we’ll filter out keywords containing “mailchimp” or any potential misspellings:
If you’re a new brand competing with one that’s established, you might also want to look for popular low-difficulty keywords. You can do this by setting the Volume filter to a minimum of 500 and the KD filter to a maximum of 10.
How to find keywords your competitor ranks for, but you don’t
- Go to Competitive Analysis
- Enter your domain in the This target doesn’t rank for section
- Enter your competitor’s domain in the But these competitors do section
Hit “Show keyword opportunities,” and you’ll see all the keywords your competitor ranks for, but you don’t.
You can also add a Volume and KD filter to find popular, low-difficulty keywords in this report.
How to find keywords multiple competitors rank for, but you don’t
- Go to Competitive Analysis
- Enter your domain in the This target doesn’t rank for section
- Enter the domains of multiple competitors in the But these competitors do section
You’ll see all the keywords that at least one of these competitors ranks for, but you don’t.
You can also narrow the list down to keywords that all competitors rank for. Click on the Competitors’ positions filter and choose All 3 competitors:
- Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
- Enter your competitor’s domain
- Go to the Paid keywords report
This report shows you the keywords your competitors are targeting via Google Ads.
Since your competitor is paying for traffic from these keywords, it may indicate that they’re profitable for them—and could be for you, too.
You know what keywords your competitors are ranking for or bidding on. But what do you do with them? There are basically three options.
1. Create pages to target these keywords
You can only rank for keywords if you have content about them. So, the most straightforward thing you can do for competitors’ keywords you want to rank for is to create pages to target them.
However, before you do this, it’s worth clustering your competitor’s keywords by Parent Topic. This will group keywords that mean the same or similar things so you can target them all with one page.
Here’s how to do that:
- Export your competitor’s keywords, either from the Organic Keywords or Content Gap report
- Paste them into Keywords Explorer
- Click the “Clusters by Parent Topic” tab
For example, MailChimp ranks for keywords like “what is digital marketing” and “digital marketing definition.” These and many others get clustered under the Parent Topic of “digital marketing” because people searching for them are all looking for the same thing: a definition of digital marketing. You only need to create one page to potentially rank for all these keywords.
2. Optimize existing content by filling subtopics
You don’t always need to create new content to rank for competitors’ keywords. Sometimes, you can optimize the content you already have to rank for them.
How do you know which keywords you can do this for? Try this:
- Export your competitor’s keywords
- Paste them into Keywords Explorer
- Click the “Clusters by Parent Topic” tab
- Look for Parent Topics you already have content about
For example, if we analyze our competitor, we can see that seven keywords they rank for fall under the Parent Topic of “press release template.”
If we search our site, we see that we already have a page about this topic.
If we click the caret and check the keywords in the cluster, we see keywords like “press release example” and “press release format.”
To rank for the keywords in the cluster, we can probably optimize the page we already have by adding sections about the subtopics of “press release examples” and “press release format.”
3. Target these keywords with Google Ads
Paid keywords are the simplest—look through the report and see if there are any relevant keywords you might want to target, too.
For example, Mailchimp is bidding for the keyword “how to create a newsletter.”
If you’re ConvertKit, you may also want to target this keyword since it’s relevant.
If you decide to target the same keyword via Google Ads, you can hover over the magnifying glass to see the ads your competitor is using.
You can also see the landing page your competitor directs ad traffic to under the URL column.
Learn more
Check out more tutorials on how to do competitor keyword analysis:
SEO
Google Confirms Links Are Not That Important
Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed at a recent search marketing conference that Google needs very few links, adding to the growing body of evidence that publishers need to focus on other factors. Gary tweeted confirmation that he indeed say those words.
Background Of Links For Ranking
Links were discovered in the late 1990’s to be a good signal for search engines to use for validating how authoritative a website is and then Google discovered soon after that anchor text could be used to provide semantic signals about what a webpage was about.
One of the most important research papers was Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment by Jon M. Kleinberg, published around 1998 (link to research paper at the end of the article). The main discovery of this research paper is that there is too many web pages and there was no objective way to filter search results for quality in order to rank web pages for a subjective idea of relevance.
The author of the research paper discovered that links could be used as an objective filter for authoritativeness.
Kleinberg wrote:
“To provide effective search methods under these conditions, one needs a way to filter, from among a huge collection of relevant pages, a small set of the most “authoritative” or ‘definitive’ ones.”
This is the most influential research paper on links because it kick-started more research on ways to use links beyond as an authority metric but as a subjective metric for relevance.
Objective is something factual. Subjective is something that’s closer to an opinion. The founders of Google discovered how to use the subjective opinions of the Internet as a relevance metric for what to rank in the search results.
What Larry Page and Sergey Brin discovered and shared in their research paper (The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine – link at end of this article) was that it was possible to harness the power of anchor text to determine the subjective opinion of relevance from actual humans. It was essentially crowdsourcing the opinions of millions of website expressed through the link structure between each webpage.
What Did Gary Illyes Say About Links In 2024?
At a recent search conference in Bulgaria, Google’s Gary Illyes made a comment about how Google doesn’t really need that many links and how Google has made links less important.
Patrick Stox tweeted about what he heard at the search conference:
” ‘We need very few links to rank pages… Over the years we’ve made links less important.’ @methode #serpconf2024″
Google’s Gary Illyes tweeted a confirmation of that statement:
“I shouldn’t have said that… I definitely shouldn’t have said that”
Why Links Matter Less
The initial state of anchor text when Google first used links for ranking purposes was absolutely non-spammy, which is why it was so useful. Hyperlinks were primarily used as a way to send traffic from one website to another website.
But by 2004 or 2005 Google was using statistical analysis to detect manipulated links, then around 2004 “powered-by” links in website footers stopped passing anchor text value, and by 2006 links close to the words “advertising” stopped passing link value, links from directories stopped passing ranking value and by 2012 Google deployed a massive link algorithm called Penguin that destroyed the rankings of likely millions of websites, many of which were using guest posting.
The link signal eventually became so bad that Google decided in 2019 to selectively use nofollow links for ranking purposes. Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed that the change to nofollow was made because of the link signal.
Google Explicitly Confirms That Links Matter Less
In 2023 Google’s Gary Illyes shared at a PubCon Austin that links were not even in the top 3 of ranking factors. Then in March 2024, coinciding with the March 2024 Core Algorithm Update, Google updated their spam policies documentation to downplay the importance of links for ranking purposes.
The documentation previously said:
“Google uses links as an important factor in determining the relevancy of web pages.”
The update to the documentation that mentioned links was updated to remove the word important.
Links are not just listed as just another factor:
“Google uses links as a factor in determining the relevancy of web pages.”
At the beginning of April Google’s John Mueller advised that there are more useful SEO activities to engage on than links.
Mueller explained:
“There are more important things for websites nowadays, and over-focusing on links will often result in you wasting your time doing things that don’t make your website better overall”
Finally, Gary Illyes explicitly said that Google needs very few links to rank webpages and confirmed it.
I shouldn’t have said that… I definitely shouldn’t have said that
— Gary 鯨理／경리 Illyes (so official, trust me) (@methode) April 19, 2024
Why Google Doesn’t Need Links
The reason why Google doesn’t need many links is likely because of the extent of AI and natural language undertanding that Google uses in their algorithms. Google must be highly confident in its algorithm to be able to explicitly say that they don’t need it.
Way back when Google implemented the nofollow into the algorithm there were many link builders who sold comment spam links who continued to lie that comment spam still worked. As someone who started link building at the very beginning of modern SEO (I was the moderator of the link building forum at the #1 SEO forum of that time), I can say with confidence that links have stopped playing much of a role in rankings beginning several years ago, which is why I stopped about five or six years ago.
Read the research papers
Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment – Jon M. Kleinberg (PDF)
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
Featured Image by Shutterstock/RYO Alexandre
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