If you are interested in or associated with the practice of law, one of the most curious topics presently is how law firms can promote themselves.
Federal and local legislation can regulate or restrict the promotion and advertising practices of law firms. But are there any alternatives? Such as online law firm marketing? Yes, indeed!
There are several approaches to initiate a law firm marketing strategy and brand awareness in the digital environment. The most efficient method is SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and the most viable strategy is to invest in law firm marketing strategies.
Why is Law Firm SEO essential to law firms?
Many lawyers or law firms can find digital marketing in general. Search engine optimization may seem too cumbersome for law firms when they compare how those activities are vital to other businesses, i.e., an e-commerce firm.
When users want to learn about the products and services they wish to use or buy, search engines are generally the first places to reach out. The same applies to clients who have legal questions and dilemmas, including protecting assets from lawsuits. As a result, search engine results, platforms, forums like Quora are becoming ever more critical to addressing consumer queries that seek legal services.
How Law Firm Marketing Benefits for Law Firms?
All marketing activities, including law firm SEO services, should be measured by reaching a specific goal. This target means how many customers you have gained for online law firm marketing efforts.
If you noticed, smartphones have completely changed the way we access information. Whenever we have a question or need, we ask our smartphones, and most of these questions are answered through Google.
Your customers want information on how you can help them solve their legal problems. They want to learn online and immediately! That is why you need to create an online persona and presence based on the target clientele's behavior.
Law Firm SEO Tips in a Nutshell
Best law firm SEO practices can go through typical stages that are valid for many websites. However, there will be things that should and should not be done in the practice of law. Because you are not selling an end-consumer product, you are selling a much more niche and vital service.
Let's examine them one by one.
Keyword Optimization
Firstly, you need to research, examine, and decide the relevant words to your business and those you want to be ranked for. You may also use this list to apply these words to your website when creating new pages and content. Simultaneously, all the redundant content and the unnecessary use of the keywords will be eliminated.
Secondly, you can divide your pages into categories depending on their rankings, impression rates, and CTRs. High-performing pages will be your top stars, so you can pay particular attention to the quality of their text, the use of keywords, not to over-stuff such keywords in general. For example, if you're a law firm specializing in business formation in a specific state, you might optimize for location-specific keywords like "Virginia LLC formation" to attract local clients seeking these specific legal services.
Finding and Optimizing Keywords
Google Keyword Planner can work as a useful and free tool when starting SEO. It can prevent you from using too many keywords with random search volumes and generating the best keywords possible using this application's data-driven mechanism.
The Most Important Locations to Use the Keywords in the Website
· H1, H2, H3, H1 Tags,
· Meta Description
· Tags, Meta Description Titles, Alt Texts
· URLs and Image Names
The importance of Page Speed
Page speed has always been a hotly debated phenomenon of desktop searches for several years and has become a factor for mobile searches. Considering that your target audience will be in a rush to answer their question or receive legal consultancy and guidance, page loading speed also matters for law firm SEO services. Otherwise, it is possible to see that visitors leave your website and click to the next result, probably your competitor.
Your content must load quickly first when a visitor clicks on the URL. Your site doesn't need to be better than rival pages to outrank them, but it needs to be fast enough to annoyed users.
Mobile experience matters more than anything.
Google AMP technology is preferred for many websites that aim for fast loading and heavy traffic and to improve mobile users' experience. With Google AMP, information is stored in the Google cache and loaded more quickly on a particular device.
As far as mobile experience is concerned, AMP provides a great advantage, and Google considers mobile page loading speed as a ranking criterion. AMP can give you an edge in law firm SEO services in this aspect.
Creating QA and FAQ Sections
For several reasons but specifically at some turning points of their life, people need legal assistance. They often apply online searching to relieve themselves or take the edge off if they face a challenge. Brainstorming on what people ask you most via phone calls, interviews, and other channels can benefit your website if you use QA sections on each service you provide or popular legal topics/ most asked questions.
If you have sentences explaining these issues in your post, your website will start to climb to the top in search engine results.
Note: The aim of giving readers the answer they needed is one of SEO's most critical points. However, merely writing search engine-focused sentences would indicate low quality to the very same search engines. Because if people cannot find what they want through scrolling, they will leave your page, which will increase your bounce rate in search engines' eyes. So, do not forget to think like a real person when writing content. Think it out loud!
Actively Blogging About Your Niche
Targeted blog posts will provide information related to particular topics important to your potential clients.
To do this, you may establish a blog strategy that will include different blog categories, including current news, legislation changes to your niche and insights about them, more promotional articles explaining what you do, how you do, and why people will need this particular legal service, informative content on general legal problems in your niche that anyone may encounter, and several other content categories.
Adding new, relevant, and original content and providing real answers to specific questions will bring you both traffic and engagement. Blogs reinforce engagement by providing a space for feedback and other queries that will increase your website's SEO performance and, at the same time, give you more chances of conversion.
Using Socials Effectively to Boost your Law Firm SEO
Social media now has so many platforms, content bombardment, and each platform has its unique nature and content type, branding, and ads it embraces. At this point, social media for a law firm can still play a supporting role for law firm SEO.
With LinkedIn, networking and collaborating with related business partners, customers, influencers, opinion leaders in your niche positively affect your awareness. At the same time, blog content can be shared as articles on this platform.
Twitter will also be a useful social channel to play an agenda-setter role among law firms or position itself as a key opinion leader for current legal issues, legislation updates, and legal concerns related to your field. Creating a knowledgeable and respected key opinion leader persona here can also benefit visibility, popularity, and referrals to the website, getting quality backlinks. Of course, this also depends on the law firm's structure, its founders, and their characteristics.
You must plan your law marketing strategy according to get maximum engagements. And to get those awareness for your target audience, you must post in the times when your followers are most likely online.
Further, Circleboom's social media publisher will allow you to have an excellent opportunity to schedule your tweets to publish at the best time to post on social media.
Perks of Informative Video Content
We always hear the phrase that Gen Z is the generation of YouTube. It may be so, but isn't it valid for all of us to a certain extent? Watching videos is more convenient than reading long posts these days.
Explaining the most frequently asked questions or giving information about news/changes in legislation in informative videos will be excellent content for your social networks, embedding video content in your blog, and receiving backlinks to your pages. The last one concerns law firm marketing performance in particular.
When people watch/share/link video content?
When it is essential to understand or learn a topic, specific and tailored, engaging, useful for daily life or their problem, rich content needs to be shared or linked rather than summarizing or telling.
In this case, via using Twitter analytics tools you can get more detailed information about your target audience. Hereby, you can increase the conversion rate via driving your audience to your website.
Concluding thoughts
Law firm marketing services have more dimensions and techniques that can benefit your business further. However, the law firm SEO tips we mentioned in this blog will be practical to apply right away and a guide for you before investing in more comprehensive, costly, and technical law firm SEO initiatives.
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