Fast Guide to Local SEO For Lawyers & Attorneys
Your prospective client is looking for an attorney, and local SEO for lawyers can significantly improve the chances of your clients finding through the Google haystack.
Visualize this: potential clients type “lawyers near me,” and a second later, your law firm’s homepage appears flawlessly on page one. As they scroll through the search results, they keep coming back to your law firm to check it out.
Most of the information they see demonstrates your ability to be there when they need you. This is already a strong argument of why they should choose your law practice over the others in the digital space.
They come to terms with how complete your online profile is, and they click on your slink because you stand out. Improved visibility would positively impact your legal practice. If you think this vision aligns with what you have in mind this year, follow these steps for better local SEO for lawyers.
Step One: Claim and Optimize Your Google My Business Profile
If your foremost goal is to rank first on Google, then it naturally follows that you need to optimize your Google My Business (GMB) profile as well as other channels that serve your law firm or law office. Professional GBP profile can significantly increase your brand exposure, improve lead generation, heighten customer engagement, and boost local SEO efforts.
It is amazing what just one verified online profile can do for professional websites and other businesses. Lawyer SEO would not be complete without the local SEO component. These two complement each other.
GMB is also the best place to monitor any reviews or sentiments from previous clients. If you get any negative reviews, you can rapidly perform damage control from a central location – your GMB profile, visible to everyone who uses the search engine.
Step Two: Maximize the Exposure Afforded by Reputable Lawyer Directories
There is plenty of evidence in the long-term practice of local SEO for lawyers that legal directories can truly support both established and new legal rules online. Attorney directories provide an easy-to-use and intuitive platform to consumers who wish to find the right legal professionals.
Statistics from a recent Thomson Reuters survey show that consumers who run into legal troubles tend to look for a local lawyer within 24 hours of the problem, and they only speak to one law firm or law office each time.
That means if your law office is not in front of the right potential clients, they’re going to move on to contacting the next law firm that remembered to sign up for a free or paid listing at reputable and growing legal directories. And if you’re wondering – is it a good idea to sign up for more than one legal directory, the answer is yes, you probably should. You will not be penalized by Google, and you will benefit from the domain authority and page authority of all the directories where your profiles appear.
Step Three: Add Schema Markup to Your Website
Schema markup is an excellent tool for making your website stand out from your peers in legal practice.
Schema markup (reference: Schema.org, is a type of microdata found in websites. Following its inclusion on a webpage, schema markup services generate an enhanced description (also known as a rich snippet), displayed alongside the webpage in SERPs.
Top search engines, including Google, Yandex, Bing, and Yahoo, first began working together to create Schema.org in 2011 to standardize structured data finally.
Schema markup is also critical for local SEO for lawyers. This is because the quality of a search result is determined by how a search engine interprets the context of a query. Schema can provide context to a webpage that would have been ambiguous to both machines and humans.
Rich snippets do have the effect of making your web pages appear more prominently on search engine results pages. It has been demonstrated that increased visibility leads to higher click-through rates. While it may not be the most significant SEO factor out there, your website cannot be without schema markup, either.
Step Four: Start Generating More Content
Many law firms struggle with updating their blogs. Visit any random lawyer website, and you’ll likely find a blog with posts that are months or even years apart. Let’s stop that trend. Legal blogging works, and it will help your law firm generate more leads.
If you don’t believe us, ask law firms who blog intensely and ask how much of their business came from people who found their content and called them to schedule a consultation. That’s how content works on the internet. Information (including blogs) drives the world wide web regardless of your market or industry vertical.
Your content should focus on responding to your target clients’ common questions and needs. Your legal expertise determines the central theme of your posts. You can talk about the services you offer, how people can contact you, what they can expect when filing a case, etc. There are many ways to highlight your approach to legal practice and clients.
LinkedIn content is a type of content that is frequently underutilized by businesses. Start writing informative, insightful, and easy-to-read LinkedIn articles and share these with your network. If the content resonates with them or finds it useful, they will share it across their networks. Just one well-written piece of content, and your audience can grow exponentially on this business platform. Writing LinkedIn articles has always been a fantastic strategy for expanding your legal network and boosting the likelihood of client referrals.
And if you like writing so much, you also have the option of developing and releasing a digital book or eBook. Compared to print books, electronic books require almost no financial investment, and they are also easy to distribute. Some attorneys use electronic books as a vehicle to provide in-depth guides to clients who are interested in their legal services. Others repurpose online content and compile previously written content into digital downloads.
eBooks have been used as lead magnets for over two decades now. For instance, an attorney specializing in personal injury litigation might give away a copy of “10 Common Challenges in Personal Injury Cases in California” to those who subscribe to site updates.
