100 Internet Marketing (SEO, Inbound) Tips for Law Firms

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Categories: Blog, SEO

Photo from: Inbound Marketing is Taking Off by Rand Fishkin

I’m not really into spending a lot of time debating the differences between internet marketing generally, inbound marketing and SEO. So I stuffed them all into my title.

Whatever you want to call it, earning positive attention for your practice is really what any form of internet marketing should be all about. And while ultimately, earning positive attention comes down to providing excellent service to your clients, there is a variety of other “stuff” that you can do to nurture you firm’s presence online.

Will marketing yourself on the internet make you rich all by itself? Of course not. In fact, doing it poorly is likely to do you more harm than good. Nonetheless, there’s no question that what people find out about you online matters to some people. And that seems to be enough reason alone to take control of your presence on the web.

Here are 100 tips to help you do just that. It’s a long list and the suggestions range from extremely basic to sort of advanced. Admittedly, some may seem plain obvious to you. Hopefully not all of them do. When it comes to marketing your practice, there really aren’t any one-size-fits-all solutions. But there are some best practices that I think will help you avoid some of the most common mistakes.

  1. Review your state’s Rules of Professional Responsibility especially as they pertain to advertising and communications about a lawyer’s services.
  2. Always remember that clients, judges, lawyers and jurors might find what you publish online.
  3. Assume everything that you put online is public and permanent.
  4. Make the web better.
  5. Consider how the audience that you want to attract uses searches and the internet.
  6. Spend a lot of time learning about search engines.
  7. Read Google’s Webmaster Tools Help on SEO.
  8. Read Google’s SEO Starter Guide.
  9. Read SEOmoz’s Beginner Guide to SEO.
  10. Read our Google Guide.
  11. Read the Legal Marketing posts at Lawyerist.
  12. Think of your firm as both law firm and publisher.
  13. Brainstorm what search phrases your target audience (the people you’re trying to get to your site) would use to find you.
  14. Spend most of your time planning out your content strategies (i.e. posting schedules/topics, interactive media, videos, etc).
  15. Plan out “calls to action” to motivate visitors to take action (i.e. contacting you, downloading something, click on something, subscribing).
  16. Add web forms to your site that provide a means for visitors to contact you.
  17. Provide an easy way for site visitor to leave you feedback about your site.
  18. Create experiments in Google Analytics to test different versions of your pages.
  19. Consider appropriate disclaimers regarding confidentiality, advertising and attorney-client relationships.
  20. Use real professional photography of the people at your firm. Consider using real photography of your office.
  21. Don’t use cheesy stock legal imagery like gavels, legal books and scales of justice.
  22. Make sure your website is optimized for mobile devices like tablets and smartphones.
  23. Add social media buttons, especially Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Google Plus to provide a means for visitors to share your content.
  24. Allow moderated comments and treat comments like emails, respond to them when appropriate. Participate in the conversation.
  25. Begin to build a list of these search phrases (I recommend using a spreadsheet).
  26. Use Google’s free keyword research tool to compare relative search volume and advertiser competition.
  27. Download phrase match and exact match keywords and they’re relative competitions and volumes to add to your spreadsheet.
  28. Go to Google and search for these phrases. Scroll to the bottom and view the “Searches related to” phrases. Add those to your list.
  29. Prioritize keywords base upon relevance to your practice, search volume and relative competition.
  30. Begin to plan which pages of your sites will be optimize for which keywords.
  31. Consider using the ‘keyword 1 keyword 2 | Firm Name’ convention for titles.
  32. Optimize meta descriptions to attract the attention of searchers.
  33. Consider using contact information in meta descriptions.
  34. Think about your site’s layout before you begin creating posts and pages.
  35. Sign-up with a reliable hosting company
  36. Site speed matters, choose a hosting plan that will keep your site fast.
  37. Choose keyword-rich domains that describe your practice & location.
  38. Avoid using hyphenated and ridiculously long domain names with strange domain extensions.
  39. To control results for searches on your name, consider also registering the domain for your name (i.e. gyitsakalakis.com).
  40. If you’re running a blog, choose a domain that is interesting and will draw the attention of readers.
  41. Just use WordPress. That’s the self-hosted kind from WordPress.org (not WordPress.com).
  42. Harden your WordPress installation.
  43. Go to Settings -> Privacy and make sure that “Allow search engines to index this site” is selected.
  44. Go to Settings -> Permalinks and make sure that they’re pretty. Select “Custom Structure” is selected. I recommend /%category%/%postname%/.
  45. Install Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin.
  46. Configure page & post title and meta templates in Yoast’s plugin.
  47. Check the ‘nodp’ and ‘noydr’ boxes in Yoast.
  48. Consider whether you want archive pages to be crawled and indexed. Will your archive pages be creating duplicate content issues?
  49. Choose a theme that generates good, clean code.
  50. Install a web analytics program, probably Google Analytics (it’s free).
  51. Listen to online conversations to understand for what information there exists a demand.
  52. Supply that demand.
  53. Add you firm’s name and the names of the attorneys at your firm to Google Alerts.
  54. Monitor what is being said about you and your law firm online.
  55. Where appropriate, respond to questions and comments concerning you and your firm.
  56. Create goals in your analytics software to track key events that take place on your site (i.e. form fills, downloads, etc).
  57. Configure your RSS Feed (I’d recommend Feed Burner, but there are rumors it’s on life support).
  58. Verify your site in Google Webmaster Tools.
  59. Don’t forget about Bing Webmaster Tools too.
  60. Where appropriate, add schema markup for reviews.
  61. If it makes sense for your site and/or blog, link your Google+ profile to your content.
  62. Validate your markup with Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.
  63. If local search matters to you, make sure that your firm’s name, address and phone (local phone) appear prominently on your site.
  64. Claim, update and optimize the local profiles recommended at GetListed.org and the citation sources specifically recommended for your city.
  65. Use tools like Whitespark to find quality citation sources.
  66. If permissible in your state, encourage happy clients to review your work on your Google+ Local page, Avvo, Yelp and Yahoo Local.
  67. Look for citation and link opportunities from authoritative legal sites (i.e. state bar associations, law schools, legal information sites).
  68. Find citation and link opportunities from reputable legal directories (i.e. Avvo, Justia, Cornell’s Legal Directory).
  69. Use tools like OpenSiteExplorer, Majestic SEO and Ahrefs to find where and how your competitors are acquiring quality links.
  70. Avoid all link schemes.
  71. Don’t do quid pro quo link exchanging.
  72. Don’t drop spam comments with optimized anchor text links.
  73. In fact, don’t over-optimize anchor text links period. Use descriptive language, your name and firm name in anchor text.
  74. Don’t straight buy links for the purpose of manipulating PageRank.
  75. Add answers to questions to your site that are frequently asked by your clients and prospective clients.
  76. Discuss how a recent change in law might impact outcomes for prospective clients.
  77. Write about a book that you recently read.
  78. Discuss a seminar or CLE that you recently attended and how it might impact your practice.
  79. Outline your practice areas in a way that can be more easily understood by your target audiences.
  80. Create separate niche microsites that zero in a particular topic in your practice and deliver very unique information on the subject.
  81. Don’t limit your target audience solely to prospective clients. Think about others that you may want to attract to your site (lawyers, legal bloggers, journalists).
  82. Find other people online that are writing and discussing topics that interest you and that you believe might be of interest to your target audience.
  83. Subscribe to their sites/blogs in your feed reader.
  84. When they publish something about which you have something intelligent to say, leave a thoughtful comment.
  85. Use your real name when commenting and include your email and a link to your website.
  86. Use data visualization tools (visual.ly) & techniques (i.e. infographics) to present relevant information in an interesting way.
  87. When you have developed online connections with people, share your writing with them via social networking tools.
  88. Don’t feed the trolls.
  89. Prepare an email newsletter that can be sent to people who sign-up to receive updates from your firm through your sites.
  90. Publish a whitepaper or research paper covering a specific topic in your practice that would be of value to your visitors.
  91. Make it easy for people that visit your site to interact with the site and the people at your firm.
  92. Host a Google Hangout on Air to discuss a case that has attracted the public’s attention.
  93. Conduct a webinar and optimize it for marketing on sites like YouTube, Vimeo and Wistia.
  94. Publish a slide deck to Slideshare. Link slideshare to linkedin.
  95. Create a demonstrative image with Pixlr and share on Google+.
  96. Share interesting news articles on your firm’s Facebook page. Share your thoughts on the article.
  97. Submit an article for publication to a popular legal news site, organization or blogger who accepts guest contributors.
  98. Create a library of cases on your site and provide case summaries and links to .pdfs of Court decisions.
  99. Curate excellent sources of information on a topic all into one place.
  100. Provide excellent service to your clients and find ways to encourage others to evangelize the quality of your work on the web.