Free Attorney SEO Web Audit
Should your law firm invest in attorney seo? As with most everything else, the answer is that it depends. U.S. legal services consumers spend over one-hundred million dollars annually in legal fees. On the other hand, the number of people using attorney seo techniques continues to increase rapidly. Hence, it has become one of the most competitive industries on the Internet.
Can Attorney SEO Produce A Return On Investment?
Of course it can. But it really depends how you structure your pricing agreement, your target audience, and your overall commitment to building a web presence.
One thing is for sure, attorney seo is not a silver bullet that will make your phone ring off the hook with new business. It is an investment in growing exposure for your law firm online. Over time, as your search engine visibility increases, you will have noticeable increases in traffic to your law firm website, inbound phone calls, and eventually new clients.
3 Groups Of Attorney SEO Knowledge
Most lawyers we talk to about their law firm on the internet fall into three categories:
- I have a website, so I’m done.
- I have a website, I know that’s not enough, but I’m not sure what else I need.
- I have a website, I know what I need to do, but I just don’t have time to do it.
The “I have a website, so I’m done’ers”.
It’s time to come out of the shadows! You have strength in numbers. The overwhelming majority of lawyers in the United States are in this group.
In our experience, if you’re in this group, it usually means that you have been actually practicing law instead of surfing the internet trying to learn about internet marketing.
Good for you.
Don’t be embarrassed, ashamed, or afraid. You have the most to gain from this guide.
But first, we have to dispel some common myths held by your group members:
Myth 1: Having A Website Is Enough To Get New Clients From The Internet
If you bought (or built) your website/blog simply to have something to show people over the holidays, then you don’t need this guide at all.
However, if you bought your website in order to get new clients from the internet, then I might have some really bad news for you. Unless you’re a helicopter passenger discrimination lawyer, chances are that no one can find your website.
Myth 2: Putting Relevant Keywords On Your Website Will Get You Found
Sometimes a little information is more dangerous than none at all. We talk to a lot of lawyers who say that their site “is already optimized”. The truth is, that while “on-page optimization” (keywords, title tags, meta tags, and internal links) are a part of the puzzle, they are a very small part (perhaps around 25%).
Googleland is a continuously evolving place. Therefore, optimization to “get found” in Google never really ends.
The “I have a website, I know that’s not enough, but I’m not sure what else I need’ers”.
So you’ve moved ahead of the pack and you know you need to do “stuff” in order to get found, but you’re not exactly sure what you need to do.
In our experience, your status in this group will be very short lived, as you will quickly move into our next category.
We will share with you the majority of the strategies that you need to implement in order to get found. But be careful for what you wish. Most of the time, the lawyers we talk to simply don’t have an extra 5-20 hours per week to dedicate to internet marketing.
Nonetheless, we will show you what to do, and where you can find reliable answers.
The “I have a website, I know what I need to do, but I just don’t have time to do it’ers”.
So you’ve sat through webinars, you’ve downloaded whitepapers, and you’ve checked out all the top sites on search engine optimization. You know about paid search. You know about on-page optimization. You know about link building. You know about conversion optimization, testing, analytics, web reputation management, blogging, and social media.
That’s great. When are you practicing law?
Unless you’re more interested in becoming an online legal pundit on a particular area of law, than you are in actually practicing, you probably just don’t have enough time to do all this stuff.
For you, the question is no longer how do you get found, but who can actually help and provide you a positive return on your web marketing investments.
The Shortest Attorney SEO Guide
PLEASE NOTE: THIS IS NOT “THE MOST COMPREHENSIVE GET FOUND IN GOOGLE LIST EVER”.
In the interest of keeping the list short, simple, and only offer free tips, I have made some oversimplifications.
1. Keyword Research
The first step is figuring out what keywords you want to “target” or “go after”. To do this, it’s time to brainstorm.
Think about your law firm. What do you do? What kind of clients do you want? Where are you willing to take on a new client? Build a list of 10-25 of these keywords. Keep in mind that keywords can actually be keyphrases. For example, if you’re a personal injury lawyer in Chicago, you’re list might look something like this:
“Chicago personal injury lawyer”, “personal injury lawyers in Chicago”, “Chicago car accident lawyer”, “Chicago accident lawyer”, “Chicago personal injury attorney”, “Chicago personal injury law firm”… etc.
Next, you have to figure out how difficult it will be to rank for these terms in order to prioritize your efforts. Ok, get ready, huge oversimplification time:
Go to Google. And type in the following: allintitle:your keyword
In our example, you’d type: allintitle:Chicago personal injury lawyer
In the upper right hand corner you will see: Results 1 – 10 of about Some number.
Write down the “some number”. For example: Results 1 – 10 of about 37,300, you would write down 37,300 next to the keyword for which you searched.
Repeat this process for all your keywords. This number is an indication of the total number of websites in Google that are competing for this keyword.
Order your keywords from smallest number to largest. This is the order in which we will prioritize your keywords.
Disclaimer: This is a very rough number. A better indicator is the number of anchor text optimized back links the top 10 ranking sites have coupled with the diversity and authority of those sites. That calculation is beyond the scope of this guide.
2. On-Page Optimization
The next step is to optimize the individual pages of your website for your target keywords.
Take the keyword at the top of your list (the one with the least results returned number) and the keyword at the very bottom of your list. We’ll optimize your homepage for these two terms.
Right click on your homepage and go to “view source”. This will show your site’s source code. Depending upon what platform your site is built (assuming it’s on a platform at all), you will want to look for the following tags:
<title>, <h1>, <h2>, <img>, <b> or <strong> and <a href>
To optimize this page, you want to include your target keywords inside this tags, without compromising the usability or readability of the page. Here are some examples:
<title>Chicago Personal Injury Lawyer | Lawyer Law Firm</title>
<h1>A Chicago Personal Injury Lawyer That Fights For You</h1>
<b>Get A Free Chicago Personal Injury Lawyer Consultation</b>
<img src=”chicagopersonalinjurylawyer.jpg” alt=”Chicago personal injury lawyer” />
Do this for both keywords that you are targeting on your homepage. Repeat this process on different pages of your site with your remaining keywords. Try to limit your targeting to 2-3 keyphrases per page.
3. Off-Page Optimization
Here’s where we separate the part-timers from the pros. Again, I’m going to be oversimplifying here, so don’t bite my head off.
The most important component to off-page optimization, in my humble opinion, is building links to your site that contain your keyword in the anchor text. In other words, you need to find ways to get other people to put the following on their site:
<a href=”yourwebsite.com”>Your Keyword Here</a>
At the same time, you don’t want links just from any old place. You want them from sites that are about what your site is about. In our example, we want links from other personal injury lawyer sites.
While there are literally hundreds of ways to get links, here are 3 easy ones (not necessarily the most effective):
1. Write great content- This one is becoming something of a joke to me. Of course, write great content. Most of the time, this is much easier said than done. In any event, the idea here is that if you write something interesting, valuable, or informative, other websites will begin to link to you.
Pros: This is the most natural form of linking and the form that Google most strongly advocates.
Cons: It’s hard. It’s time-consuming. You don’t have input on the anchor or location of the link
2. Ask for links- Asking your friends, colleagues, and family members for linksis a great way to get links (especially if your friends, colleagues, and family members are lawyers that practice the same law as you do). You can also consider asking others for links, but keep in mind that some people may become offended by this (link snobbery is getting out of control). The third way you can ask for a link is suggesting a link swap, trade, or exchange.
Pros: You can influence anchor text, location, and the type of sites from which you ask for links.
Cons: The effectiveness of asking for links varies greatly. While getting an anchor text optimized one-way link from a very relevant and authoritative site can be very strong, getting a reciprocal link from a less-relevant, non-authoritative site can be worthless, or even worse, detrimental.
3. Link-Baiting- Link baiting basically encompasses all of the “clever ways” of getting other sites to link to you. Some of the most common are badge strategies, contests, reviews of other sites or services, and top X lists (where is a number like 10, 25, or 50) just to name a few.
Pros: Link-Baiting can be the ultimate way to get many great links from very relevant and authoritative sites.
Cons: Like “writing great content” Link-Baiting requires skill, time, and effort.
Like most other things in life, valuable links take more, time, effort, and even money, than cheap, less-valuable links. Getting a good combination of both is important to realizing both short-term and long-term benefits in Google.
Well there you have it. By my count, I’m already at 7 pages and pushing the envelope as short guides go.
So, did you “change groups”?
At the very least, I hope I have demonstrated to you that simply having a website is just a needle in the internet haystack. There are many things that need to be done over time to actually get your site found.
If you already knew there was more to it than that, hopefully you picked up some knowledge and can implement some of these strategies on your site. If I did my job properly, you should now recognize that getting found in Google actually takes a combination of technical know-how, a lot of time, and even some creativity.
You should also now recognize that it’s not about magic and mystery.
If you started reading this guide knowing that there was a lot to do, and that you simply don’t have the time to do it, then it’s time to make an informed hiring decision about getting some law firm web marketing assistance.
Check out our free guide on Hiring A Law Firm SEO Consultant. Avoid the most common scams.
Also, check out our full library of free guides for lawyers. Use the icons at the bottom of each of these pages to connect with us. We love feedback.
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