More and more legal services consumers are looking for law firm online. Whether it’s for help with their criminal defense or advice on financial debt issues, people are turning to the web to find local law firms. When people begin searching for something in their area, they tend to do multiple searches. They might search for a list of law firms and then search for specific information about each , like which one has experience handling legal matters like theirs.
Last month, Google introduced Place Search, a new type of localized search result that sorts information around local places.
These new results are marked with red pins, and contain relevant information and links from across the web. Now, local legal services searchers can see location and contact information right from the results page. In addition, searchers can see place information gathered from a variety of other sources all in one place.
In the above example, users can see that this lawyer serves injury victims, and they can click yelp.com, to read reviews. Before this new update, the same search would return links with information about this law firm in different areas of the results page Now information is grouped conveniently to make it easier to digest and compare.
With Place Search, Google is dynamically connecting websites from all over the web with their corresponding real-world locations.
What Does This Mean For Your Law Firm?
In short, local search marketing strategies are even more important than they were before. Law firms that have focused on traditional search engine optimization strategies, and ignored their local presence, may find themselves in much lower positions than they previously held. On the other hand, firms that focused on both traditional and local search strategies are likely to enjoy much greater search engine visibility for local searches.
Free Local Legal Web Audit
As part of our continuing commitment to provide the most up-to-date information on law firm webs strategy, we’re offering U.S. law firms a FREE Local Legal Web Audit. Let us show you the most important strategies necessary to remain competitive after Google’s Place Search update. You can register for the audit by calling us at (877) 619-5775 or filling out the form here.
Here's a recent Google SERP for "𝘄𝗵𝗼 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗰𝗮𝗿 𝗮𝗰𝗰𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗹𝗮𝘄𝘆𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝗽𝗵𝗶𝗹𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗹𝗽𝗵𝗶𝗮." Ads? ❌LSAs? ❌Local Pack? ❌Links? ❌ 🔷 AI Overview? ✅ 6 firms listed. Only one tiny 🔗. Click the 𝗦𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 button? 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗴𝗲𝘁: Here's a more detailed look at some of these firms: THE PEARCE LAW FIRM, P.C.Edith Pearce, […]
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Meh, links! All things being equal, links still tend to move the dial more than any other factor in legal SERPs. Maybe links are having a diminishing impact internet-wide. But in my experience, quality links, especially relevant links (both topically and geographically), tend to improve law firm visibility in search more than most everything else. […]
