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Google is hands down the easiest way to drive clients to a law firm.
The problem is, every law firm know this and invests heavily into their website and SEO.
This has made the legal space one of the more competitive verticals in SEO.
Hopefully, this post will save you time:
Ahem, you can also set a time on my calendar to chat directly.
Google’s search results are changing. There’s currently 19 result types that dominate Google’s top spots.
This applies to the legal space as well. When searching for “Miami DUI attorney“, there’s a lot of noise:
Think about that – of the 10 organic results, half of them are aggregator sites (Avvo, Yelp, etc) – only 25% of organic results are really available.
The competition for those spots is tough – you need to be realistic about your campaign and adjust strategy accordingly.
Aside from just ranking your website, there’s other tactics that will increase your overall organic exposure.
My best piece of advice is instead of fighting aggregator sites, leverage them. Avvo, Justia, Super Lawyers – they’ve done the hard work, they rank for everything.
The beauty of these sites is they have their own internal algorithms to rank profiles.
If you optimize your profile to rank in Avvo, you’re essentially ranking for your “money” keywords right off the bat.
On top of that, you can pay for ads within Avvo. These are a great way to bypass the ridiculous CPCs for legal keywords in Google, and capture that traffic through Avvo.
The point is, in competitive spaces, you have to realistic about your goals. The competition is only getting stronger, keep your mind open when it comes to capturing “organic traffic” – it doesn’t have to come from Google.
I’m not going to cover how to find keywords – others have already done that (see Brian Dean’s guide).
Instead, I’m going to cover keyword mapping.
Keyword mapping is the process of optimizing pages and based on keyword intent.
We like to visualize using the “funnel” model.
“Money” keywords.
“Discover” keywords.
“Attention” keywords.
The main goal is to rank your “money” keywords. But … we want to dominate and rank for everything.
This strategy allows you to triple your organic exposure and get traffic in the door much faster.
To do so, you need to clearly understand how your keyword list maps to intent.
It’s a tedious process, but it helps you clearly understand how your website should be setup and the type of content to populate it with.
It’s important for rankings and user experience to have an easy to use site.
That means grouping content, navigation and URL structure into organized buckets. Sounds easy, right?
It gets a little more complicated depending on your firm. Speaking strictly from a website perspective, there are 3 types of law firms:
If your firm specializes in 1 type of law (DUI, criminal, etc), structure your site as follows:
Use exact match domain (EMD) for your website URL.
Add services pages that drill down into your main niche.
If your firm offers multiple services (i.e. criminal law, corporate law, business law and more), this is how to structure your site:
Use branded domain – NOT exact match domain (EMD).
Add service pages for each offering.
Add sub-service pages to capture additional traffic.
If your firm has multiple office locations (i.e. Miami, NYC and LA), this is how to structure your site:
Add city into URL for each office location.
Include a menu navigation to switch between cities.
Most of “local” SEO is covered by the traditional SEO discussed throughout this guide.
However, there are a couple of additional actions you’ll need to take to make sure your site is optimized for local search as well.
GMB plays a HUGE role in local SEO. In fact, GMB listing titles get displayed in localized results, not websites:
If you haven’t already, set up and verify your Google+ Business page: https://www.google.com/business/.
Google will send you a post card in the mail with a verification code. Until you verify your page, you won’t be eligible to show up in localized / maps searches. Do it as soon as you get it!
After you’ve entered the code, click the big red “Edit” button from your “My Business” screen:
First, edit the title of your page:
This is important for 2 reasons:
Next, we’re going to edit the description of your page:
This creates valuable deep links to your service pages (more on links later).
Reviews not only help your website rank for local searches, but they pull through valuable stars in the SERP listing.
I’m not going to cover how to get reviews in this post because I wrote about it depth in a previous guide.
Local citations and directory listings are business profiles on websites like FourSquare, Yelp, Yellow Pages and Brown Book.
These citations are valuable to local SEO because they’re essentially online phone books that associate your website with a physical location.
There are hundreds (thousands) of potential sites to build your firm’s listings in.
It’s a mind numbing process to manually create these listings and it’s easier to outsource.
I hope you’ve stuck around to this point – your SEO success hinges on the ability to create and distribute content.
You’ve heard it before: “content is king”.
I hate it.
This buzzword has sites launching blogs with content adding no value. In fact, it’s driving potential clients away.
Allow me put it in perspective.
Let’s say you’re in the market for SEO services. You do a Google search for a couple of agencies in your area and you click on the first couple of results.
Let’s be honest, they all say the same thing. How can you tell the difference?
Every business’ website claims to be an expert. A great blog proves it.
You think I enjoy spending hours on end in front of my computer writing?
I live in Miami. On the beach. Trust me when I say I have better ways to spend my time.
Great content is why I’m able to live in Miami. On the beach. It fuels my business.
Start by heading back to your list of keywords separated by intent.
This is SEO 101 – I’m not going to spend a lot of time on it.
Keywords with purchase intent should be targeted at sales / service pages. Each page should be themed at one main keyword. Include that keyword in:
I’ll use the keywords from my “Miami DUI Attorney” as an example.
Main KW: Miami DUI Attorney:
Repeat this on every page for every “Purchase” keyword you’re targeting.
99% of SEO agencies will stop at “purchase” keywords.
Thing is, you need more than words on a page to get Google’s attention. You need social shares, brand mentions and a lot of high quality links.
Why would someone share your homepage? Why would a website link to your services page about DUIs?
They wouldn’t. I know this. You know this. Google knows this.
If your website has a ton of links pointing to 1 page it looks like spam and your website is going to get bitch slapped by Google.
“Info” type content is what generates real shares and links. That’s why you need a blog.
Let’s go back to the “Info” keywords I generated earlier. Keywords like “DUI trial”, “DUI first offense” and “DUI trial questions” generate a good amount of monthly searches.
These are the keywords to build content around.
That’s the easy part. The hard part is creating content people actually care about.
People don’t care about “10 Reasons to Hire an Attorney”. Give them something they can’t find anywhere else.
You paid $300,000 for an education – show us what you learned!
Don’t skimp on the details. Prove you’re an expert. Show why you’re worth $300/hour.
This content drives social shares, links and traffic. More importantly, it establishes your firm as a trusted voice and industry leader for legal advice.
Links are still the #1 ranking factor. However, it’s not as easy as it used to be.
14 months ago I could rank a site with click of a button. Literally – it was that easy.
Unfortunately, those days are over. Now, you need more than a handful of links.
In competitive verticals, Google ranks sites with authority and trust. Authoritative and trustworthy sites don’t have 1 type of link pointing to 1 page.
Building trust with Google is a process. Here’s how I do it:
This is a long process – it takes a lot of time, resources and effort. I promise you – if you do what I’m telling you, it will pay off.
It’s not enough to post links to owned accounts. You’ve got to build a buzz around your site.
The best way to do start is get your content in groups and forums.
The mistake most make is pushing content in front of their target audience.
No one with a DUI is going to share an infographic about a DUI. However, if the content is good enough, your peers will.
Quora is a high visibility question and answer site. I’ve driven thousands of visits in the last few months alone using it.
The key to Quora is finding threads related to the content on your blog.
Let’s say you took my advice and wrote the guide: “What to do When Arrrested for Your First DUI”.
Start by doing a Google search command: site:quora.com what to do dui
This search brought back 6,350 results. Click through and find questions you can answer with your content.
Write a response (150 – 300 words) of advice and drop a link at the end.
Rinse and repeat.
Linking pages internally passes link equity and ranking signals. You can use them to pass that valuable juice from your blog content to your money pages by interlinking them.
I’ve written extensively about internal linking in another post: How to Set up Internal Links for SEO
Link outreach is great because you can score high powerful “white hat” links for free.
Link outreach only works when you’ve got content worth linking to. You can write perfect emails but no one is going to link to your home page.
These are dedicated pages listing links to useful resources. To find these pages, use Google search operators:
You get the point. I like to add a city into the search as well. Here’s what I found:
Brought up this result:
Bingo! A perfect opportunity.
Reach out with a nice note about your law firm and what you should be included in their list of resources.
Well, not borrowing, stealing. I love this technique because it evens the playing field.
If you land the same links as your competitors you can neutralize their advantage. From there, all you need is a few additional links to easily push past them.
It’s extremely easy to do. In fact, you already did the leg work in your competitive analysis. Remember this?
You’ll now see a list of the website’s linking to your competitor’s. Simply click through on to each site and look for opportunities to drop a link. These usually come in the form of:
The majority of sites will be tough to get links, but the ones you can will give you a huge boost.
I don’t care what Matt Butts says – guest blogging is a great way to build quality links to your site. Use advanced Google search operators to find opportunities:
I strongly suggest you write the content yourself – don’t outsource it. It will be a complete waste of your time. Here’s a snippet from a legal website that accepts guest posts:
Any website worth posting on will have high standards. Read through their articles, get a feel for what they publish and replicate it.
I’ve been using this technique for a while but have yet to share it.
SEO agencies have been taking out “press releases” for clients for years.
These are merely syndicated statements on sites like PR.com that have little effect on SEO and zero effect on traffic/PR because nobody sees them. They claim that they get sent to real news sites, but never do.
I go straight to the source. Newspapers make money from 2 sources:
Since more people turn to the web for their news, revenue models have shifted towards selling ad space.
I’ve landed dozens of links on MiamiHerald.com by reaching out to their advertising team. You can find contact links in the footer:
CALL them, don’t email. Email responses generally get ignored or they tell you they don’t offer that service.
When you call them directly you can negotiate with a sales person. Simply tell them you’re with XYZ law firm looking to drum up online PR and you’re not interested in traditional media buys.
Everyone has a price – it generally ranges in the $400 – $600 range.
It’s expensive, but you get a high quality link, traffic and exposure for your firm.
Organic traffic is not free – there’s a considerable investment of time, resources and capital to get results.
To justify the cost, we need to understand the outputs of SEO.
The following sub sections will outline everything you need.
See how we build custom SEO reports for our clients.
It takes a while for your site to reach the top of Google and start getting traffic (6 to 12 months).
In the meantime, we can measure “SERP visibility”.
SERP visibility = the total number of keywords your website is indexed for.
To check overall visibility:
After a few months, your traffic from Google should be picking up. We can easily verify this using Google Analytics:
While overall organic traffic is good, we want to make sure it’s meaningful traffic. We can dig into that by segmenting organic traffic reports to look at where traffic is going.
Most importantly, we want to know how SEO is impacting your top line. It’s tricky, but we can use analytics to track your firm’s leads and phone calls from organic search.
SEO in the legal space is competitive and there’s so sign of this changing anytime soon. If you want to rank, you’ve got to do things the right way.
If you have any questions, you can reach me here.
David Smethie Says Awesome post Ryan. Thanks for sharing real tactics that have been proven to work-not just rehashing Google’s “best practices” which should be taken into account, but will limit results if you take their suggestions literally.
Ryan Stewart Says Thanks David. When I wrote the post, I got a lot of feedback from fellow SEOs that the post was TOO in depth for attorneys. I told them that’s kind of the point!
Andy Macgregor Says Ryan,
thanks for the tips, I am currently helping law firms in Europe with their holistic digital marketing and SEO.
I will put your method to work this side. Quite positive it will help my Legal clients rank – up to the top!
Drew Says Ryan,
Thank you for your time in creating this great article. I have a couple legal clients who will benefit from these tips. I do have a followup question: I happen to have an English degree and law degree, so I can draft good content for my clients in the legal industry in order to focus on those “info keywords.” However, for some industries, I do not know where to begin and have no success in convincing clients that they need to blog regularly and blog well. In fact, most are just bad writers if they even try. Any suggestions?
Ryan Stewart Says head to industry specific blogs and contact the writers with freelance offers. they will usually respond well and you can grab some high quality content.
Elinor Says This is a really really in-depth article, and one that delivers the message in a very clear framework – thank you for sharing this!
I have a couple of questions:
1) I don’t understand the benefit of calculating the analytics conversion rate and the lead->sale conversion rate – I’m not clear on why this calculation should be used, because the one metric calculates visit->lead (someone who signed up on a form) and the second is lead -> sale – does this metric really measure the conversion of the entire sales funnel from visit to sale? I feel like there are missing steps along the way… so, i guess i’m just trying to figure out the logic behind this number
2) you talk about the conversion rate from organic lead to client – do you not agree that most clients do not know which marketing channel generated which sale? Yes, we can see the leads in analytics, but how do we ‘help’ the client document to which marketing channel to attribute the sale (i’m having a lot of trouble with this, any ideas would be helpful)..because once the sale is closed offline, some data is lost…
Thanks!
IndioBailBonds Says Very Nice Post Ryan.Great guide.No doubt it is the most important investment for any law firm and beneficial too.
LawyerDirectory.legal Says Really good article, nice to find an easy to read article with so much information.
Mark Says I once paid someone $600 a month to get an 1/8 of this information little by little….Mind blown – time to get to work!
Stephan Says Recently started following you. Truly enjoyed the article. Thanks for taking so much time to educate. Its nice to see someone digging into the nitty gritty. Its unfortunate that the whole concept of SEO has been bastardized by too many “web marketing” agencies who cut corners for a quick buck. Your content is very refreshing. Keep it up.
Ryan Stewart Says Thank you Stephan!
Brian Park Says I thought in Google My Business Page, You not suppose to use City Keyword in business name unless your business name is with that city keyword.
Ryan Stewart Says According to Google, you’re not. This post was written about a year ago, but it still works.
cavite Says This site really has all of the info I wanted concerning this subject and didn’t know who to ask.
Ryan Stewart Says you’re welcome
Hamamd Hussain Says Ryan you nailed it men, It’s the most comprehensive and complete guide I have ever read and at first glance an idea popped up in my mind to write a post but not on the same niche and not similar like yours.
Ryan Stewart Says thank you!
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North Lakes Property Lawyers Says Thanks for sharing this information with us. It is very informative post. Keep posting and keep sharing like this.
Ryan Stewart Says You’re welcome!
Daniel Says You have given the right ways to do SEO for a law firm. The site structure and technical things matter too along SEO activities.
Ryan Stewart Says Thanks Daniel, I agree!
Stephanie Jones Says We implemented these strategies for a legal client, they worked!
Jim B Says Very interesting post. Thanks
Ryan Stewart Says Thank you!
Christy Says Hi Ryan, I see that this post was written in 2015. Do you think it is generally still applicable now? Is there another article you can point me to that might have more current information?
Ryan Stewart Says This was updated a few months ago – more relevant now than ever!
Chris George Says Thanks for sharing this article This article is very useful for me and i am currently working law firm in USA.
Jennifer Says Thanks for sharing such an interesting article. These tips help me to implement for my clients.
SHIVANI UMEACADEMY. COM Says There is a great blog, very good information in it, very good its content, this has helped me.
Carolina Barbosa Says thanks for sharing SEO Tips for Law Firms
Daniel Says This was great! Question: outside of google my business, is it worth putting keywords (the same) into your business title for other citations? Such as hotfrog, etc?
Joe Rubino Says Commercials – Position your attorneys and firm as thought leaders on a given topic, or shine the spotlight on your firm’s experience and victories, new services, attorney recruiting, and more.
Ryan Stewart Says 💪
Rinkatokiariri Says It was really amazing.I’ve learned so much from you Ryan!
Brian Nagele Says Great job! Do you outline all of your blog posts? I’ve read a few of them now and they are way higher quality than other blogs I’ve read.
Ryan Stewart Says Nope, I just freestyle them I write what’s on my mind
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Interesting post Ryan, Thanks for sharing