SEO Tips for Law Firms

Implement keywords 

Keyword research and implementation is one of the most effective ways to organically increase your leads. Keyword research involves using professional tools and strategies to discover what people are searching and how you can use this to your advantage to attract them to your site. 

Your ideal keywords will range from highly searched, significant industry terms to long-tail, low searched terms that capitalise on a small audience to aid in conversion. 

Keywords shouldn’t be too general, as it will become increasingly difficult to rank for them – for example, the simple term of ‘family law solicitor’ is searched 4.6k times per month in the UK (Correct on Ahrefs as of August 2023). Perhaps, instead of initially trying to rank for the term “family law solicitor”, you could aim to rank for “family law solicitors Bolton”.

Search Intent

You will also want to rank for keywords/queries whereby you understand a clear search intent behind them. These are often queries which include words and phrases such as “why”, “how” and “can I”, as people are seeking to have questions answered.

The most common search types are:

• Informational
• Commercial
• Navigational
• Transactional

This means that your on-site content must match the intent of a search. For example, if you want to talk about how your Family Law firm supports people when choosing Grounds for Divorce, you may think about creating a page to showcase this service.

However, if you analyse what’s currently ranking for key terms and searches around ‘grounds for divorce’, the results are mostly blog posts. This would suggest that the search intent is informational, and you should create articles around the main topic: ‘What are the Grounds for Divorce?’.

This will then likely break down into more questions and more niche blog posts, such as ‘What Does Irretrievable Breakdown Mean in Grounds for Divorce?’. These types of content help to increase your online authority, showcasing your firm as knowledgeable in all areas and having answers to all questions surrounding one topic.

On-Page Optimization 

To fully optimise your content for keywords it’s important, that they are used in the following areas on a page:

• Title tag
• Meta Description tag
• Heading 1 and subheadings 
• Throughout the blog content (where relevant – never keyword stuff)
• More often than not, the URL

Having great content and a Google friendly site is one thing, but having backlinks and off-page citations can help to boost your presence even more. 

For SEO, backlinks work somewhat like a popularity contest. If a law firm website gets a lot of backlinks from other high profile sites, they essentially receive backing that the content on their site is correct and reliable.

Increase local SEO through off-page citations

The contact information of your law firm shows up in all kinds of places online, making it both visible to search engines and potential clients. That’s why the best way to gain more visibility from local SEO is to obtain backlinks from places where your business is displayed. 

Some examples of where you can get off-page citations to improve your local SEO include:

• Legal directories
• Local directories, including your Google Business profile
• Social profiles 
• Reviews and endorsement websites
  

Collect positive client reviews 

Part of a successful law firm SEO strategy is generating more positive reviews. These reviews show users that your law firm can be trusted and will provide high-quality services. 

If you have more positive reviews than your competitors, this may lead you to outrank them. As well as this, users will be more likely to choose your firm over others which have little to no reviews.

There are many easy ways in which you can increase your positive reviews. This could be by using a new review platform that offers more support than just Google reviews, or you could utilise email marketing to encourage new and existing clients in your database to leave reviews.