SEO for Lawyers: 5 Strategies to Outrank Your Competitors
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You know the basics of SEO for lawyers. They’re necessary. But, if you really want to rank higher than those you’re competing against, there are other steps to take. We’ve helped so many lawyers over the years to stand out in any geographic location who practice essentially any kind of law.
Dominate Your Domain Name
Everything starts with your website’s domain. Your fundamental URL (yourlawfirm.com) will be, often, the first thing anyone sees about your firm. Most of them are “brand-only” domains. That means it’s basically just the name of the practice, “Smith Law Firm,” “Jones Attorneys,” etc.
However, roughly one-fourth of all law firms include both your brand name as well as search keywords. That would be something like “Smith Personal Injury Firm,” “Jones Bankruptcy Attorneys,” etc. This is a decision only you can make, but a digital marketing agency can help you to determine which would be better for making your firm stand out that much more.
Certified Secure
An SSL certificate may not seem like a “big deal” when it comes to SEO. After all, it’s not a ranking factor. But, it is an important factor when it comes to actually secure your site. Roughly nine in ten websites have an SSL certificate (and truthfully, that number should probably be higher).
If you think of your website as your online office (which it very much is) then an SSL certificate is like a lock on the door. Sure, it might not make a big deal when someone comes to your office for a consultation, but it’s important to have a lock on your door, to make sure that no one breaks in. Any competent digital marketing agency that you work with, for example, should absolutely ensure that your site has an SSL certificate.
WordPress Sets the Tone
Many of these “strategies” don’t directly impact your SEO. However, they put you in a position to really take your SEO to the next level. Case in point: WordPress. It’s by no means an SEO ranking factor. But, if you use it, it makes it possible for you to get everything out of your on-page SEO and so much more.
Moreover, WordPress is customizable in a way that basically no other CMS are. Essentially all of the websites that we design for our clients (whether in the legal field or not) are on WordPress. Then, when we turn the sites over to them, not only is everything optimized, but they’re able to control their website how they would like.
On Target Title Tags, URLs, and More
SEO for lawyers is, almost inevitably, local SEO. In more than 95% of ranking firms’ pages, the name of a location (city or state, but mostly city) appears in the title tag of a page. This makes sense, as basically no matter what kind of law you practice, you want to be able to connect to the potential clients in your area.
That said, just the city and/or state usually isn’t enough. Roughly 90% of the time, a keyword about the kind of law appears in the title tag, too. “Bankruptcy lawyer,” “personal injury lawyer,” “head injury lawyer,” and so forth – incorporating all of these into your title tags helps to make certain that you “clean up” all of the potential clients in your geographic region, thus outstretching the competition.
Optimize and Update, Now and Forever
Optimizing your site is like making sure that your car has wheels – it may not be the biggest part, but it’s absolutely necessary so that you can get where you want to go. On-page and off-page optimization are so important because it helps your page to climb the rankings.
That said, just because you’ve optimized your site once or uploaded several blogs at a time, that doesn’t mean you can just let it go. Instead, you need to update the website consistently with high-quality, fresh content. Google’s search bots (and others) need to know your website is active, that you’re still in operation, and provide quality information, so as to rank you where you deserve. Besides, it’s a great way to show potential clients how you can help them today, too.
SEO for Lawyers Pros
The above represent just a few of the factors that have helped our lawyer clients to stand out from the rest. There are many others. So many of our clients came to us initially because they knew they had to do something for their firm in regards to SEO, but they just didn’t have the time to do so.
That’s where our work helped.
We’re able to do the above and so much more to make your firm stand out from the rest, in even a crowded field. For a free consultation with our SEO for lawyers experts, call (888) 477-9540.
