SEO Should Take Center Stage in Your Law Firm’s Digital Marketing Strategy

SEO Should Take Center Stage in Your Law Firm’s Digital Marketing Strategy

A law firm’s success rests on the quality of representation that the lawyers provide for their clients.  If your law firm has a bad reputation because you have alienated most of the clients and judges with whom you have interacted and violated the ethical standards of your profession, no amount of marketing can fix that.  Despite this, your knowledge, work ethic, professionalism, and professional connections will not win you as many new clients on their own as they will if accompanied by an effective digital marketing strategy.  Search engine optimization (SEO) is the most important part of a law firm’s digital marketing strategy, because, just as law firms do not operate by selling, SEO is more about effective communication than it is about marketing.  It is possible to waste a lot of money by asking your employees to take time out of their regular work tasks to write web content when they are not specialists in SEO, and even more money if you hire digital marketers who might be knowledgeable about SEO but know very little about the legal profession.  The best choice is to entrust your law firm’s SEO strategy to the WordPress developers at High Converting Media.

Law Firms Need Informative Web Content

Unlike with most other businesses, clients tend to read extensively before deciding to contact a lawyer.  Therefore, law firm websites tend to contain a lot more text than most other business websites.  Some people visit your site because they need a lawyer, while others visit your site simply because they have a question about the law.  These are a few of the many questions that law firm websites can answer for users who are not immediately in the market to hire a lawyer:

•   What happens if I am partially at fault for a car accident?
•   What does my will need to include?
•   Is cannabis legal in Florida?
•   Does child support automatically end when your child turns 18?
•   How can you protect yourself against used car fraud?
•   What is New Jersey’s lemon law?

Business blogs might seem like an outdated fad for many kinds of businesses, but they are an important part of a law firm’s digital marketing strategy.  Your law firm should publish at least one blog post per month about a practice area of the law that your law firm practices.  Your blog posts can be about basic explanations about relevant laws, how to guides for legal processes that don’t require you to hire a lawyer (for example, uncontested divorce or car accident insurance claims), current news stories, or landmark court decisions, to name just a few examples.  In other words, you can provide value to your target audience not only by representing clients in lawsuits but also by sharing your knowledge of the law, and Google will reward you for this.

How Does Google Know How Valuable Your Web Content Is?

Search engine optimization is about convincing Google that your website is what users most want to see when they type a certain search query.  Therefore, a popular saying among SEO professionals goes that “content is king.”  It is hard to apply that maxim, however, if you do not have experience with SEO.  Google uses dozens of criteria to determine where to rank each site on a search engine results page (SERP), and while it updates its algorithm frequently, these are some of the factors it considers:

•   The length of the content on each page
•   The presence of keywords
•   Readability of the content (not excessively repetitive, free of grammatical errors)
•   How frequently the site is updated with new content
•   Conversion rate (the percentage of visitors to the site who contact the law firm through the site)
•   The average length of time users spend on the page
•   Links from your site to others sites and vice versa

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SEO Is a Full-Time Job

Truly effective SEO is never completely finished; it is an ongoing process.  Only the biggest law firms can afford to hire a full-time digital marketing team.  For small and medium-sized law firms, it is a better idea to outsource your law firm’s SEO strategy and its implementation to High Converting Media.