Design
It goes without saying that, in order for your law firm to succeed, you need to be visible to potential clients. That’s what search engine optimization, or SEO, is all about—ensuring your law firm shows up when local clients conduct online searches.
It sounds simple, but actually, SEO can be quite complex. Google’s search algorithms juggle a number of different factors, or ranking signals, to determine where your website falls on the results page.
With that said, there are some basic principles you can implement as you seek to position your firm for ideal visibility.
5 Key SEO Principles for Your Law Firm
- Don’t try to fake it.
A common mistake is believing that you can “trick” Google’s search algorithms—but rest assured that you can’t. Tricks, gimmicks, and surface-level strategies ultimately fall short. Rather, it’s important to understand what Google really wants—namely, to provide its search engine users with access to relevant, valuable content. In other words, your best bet is to focus on making a website that will actually be beneficial to the end user.
- All SEO is local.
The old-fashioned way of doing SEO was to relentlessly focus on being the #1, page-1 listing for all relevant Google searches. Not only is that an unattainable goal, it’s really not even a worthy goal. Your firm ultimately just needs to be discovered by locals, so the focus should always be on ranking well in localized searches. Things like the Google Map Pack, Google My Business, and Google Reviews are all of much greater significance than the pursuit of a top ranking.
- Search is always changing.
Something else that’s important to remember is that search behaviors are always changing—and your strategies should adapt in kind. One obvious example is the advent of voice search. More and more people are using Siri and Alexa to assist in their searches, which means that natural-language keywords are increasingly important. The point here is that your law firm can’t afford to let its SEO strategy go stagnant; you’ve got to keep up to date with the latest search trends.
- White hat is always better.
This one goes back to what we said about tricks and gimmicks. There are a lot of shady ways in which you can try to improve your SEO rankings—for example, buying backlinks, or by jamming a ton of keywords into your content. These are called black hat tactics, because they explicitly go against Google’s stated rules and regulations. Black hat strategies can provide you with some short-term value, but they ultimately lead to penalties in the end. It’s always better to play by Google’s rules, which means using white hat SEO strategies.
- Give the people what they want.
To sum all of this up, it’s tempting to create website content with the algorithms in mind—but actually, it’s smarter to just focus on providing a meaningful user experience. Remember, Google wants to furnish its users with good, value-adding content. If you can make that happen, it will probably help you land some better rankings improvements.
Improve Your Law Firm’s SEO Rankings
The bottom line for legal professionals is that SEO can be a full-time job in and of itself, and there are always a lot of factors to take into account. All of that points to the value in hiring a skilled, seasoned SEO company.
Driven2020 provides digital marketing expertise to countless law firms throughout California and across the country. Reach out to us today to learn how we can help you generate improved search rankings!