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The American Bar Association lists that over 1.5 million active lawyers are practicing throughout the United States; over 15% more than a decade ago.
Attorney competition is physical, including everything from law firm locations and community involvement to media advertising on radio, television, print, and billboard.
Local SEO for attorneys allows law firms to compete in the target market where their clients need them the most.
While every attorney’s local reach and practice areas are different, several common SEO factors will allow a law firm’s website to stand out from their competition.
They include:
Let’s get started.
Law firm SEO begins with attorneys understanding exactly where their clients are coming from.
When lawyers understand each of the touchpoints their clients have with their law firms, it becomes easier to place their attorneys at those interaction points.
These touchpoints help influence the discovery of your law firm, either in person or online, and will heavily impact their decision making.
The more you know about your target audience, the easier it will be to provide the information they are looking for, in terms they understand.
The best law firm SEO strategies in 2020 include knowing who your target market is, and where they are, so you can get directly in front of them each time they are looking for an attorney in your area.
Users must always feel safe while visiting an attorney’s website.
Their arrival to your home page must be secure, using HTTPS instead of HTTP protocols, to avoid high bounce rates.
Simply put, if a prospective client arrives at an attorney website, and a warning appears, stating that your website is not secure, you may lose their trust instantly as they exit the site and move onto the next attorney on the search engine results page.
Since Google wants to provide all its users with a secure browsing experience, they reward secure websites with an SEO boost.
More importantly, HTTPS gives website users a secure connection that is both encrypted and authenticated, protecting any collected form data submitted by the users.
Featured Snippets usually appear above the number one organic ranking on the search engine results page, and account for nearly 55% of clicks from Google users, driving more than half of user traffic in their direction.
Featured Snippets are important to local SEO for attorneys and represent a great opportunity to generate more organic traffic even when their law firm is not ranking at the top position.
Your law firm’s website design must provide an exceptional user experience, or you may lose the prospective client before they even have time to view your practice areas or legal expertise.
First, internet users will exit a webpage immediately if it does not load within seconds.
Other factors that determine a positive user experience include:
High-quality legal content allows prospective clients to learn more about their legal needs, and how you can help them create solutions, which provides confidence in your ability to take their case.
Attorney website content must be well-written and relevant while providing the value and details your clients need to make a connection with your law firm.
High-quality content is an essential element of effective SEO strategies, allowing Google to reward the attorney website with higher search engine rankings.
Valuable attorney website content can include:
When determining the value of your content, remember that content length matters.
Web pages that contain longer, high-quality content typically receive higher visibility, allowing users to easily digest all the information they need from a single and reliable attorney source.
By 2021, internet users will spend up to 100 minutes per day watching videos; up from the current rate of 67 minutes per day.
The more time users spend on a web page, the more likely Google will reward that page with more organic traffic.
Voice searches are becoming a popular trend among internet users, as smartphones allow easy access to digital information simply by saying, “Ok, Google. Where’s the closest personal injury attorney?” or “Alexa, find the top five divorce attorneys near me.”
Optimizing your attorney website for voice search can help generate more organic traffic by implementing conversational and targeted searches into your SEO strategy.
Successful attorneys understand that search engine optimization is imperative to their online ranking and that their law firm’s strategy for driving more prospective clients to their website should be unique — not a canned approach to boosting your ranking.
At the Attorney Marketing Network, our experienced law firm SEO staff creates unique solutions that will allow your law firm to push past the competition and thrive online, starting with your local reach and expanding into target markets that make sense for your law firm.