Law Firms Have Room to Grow Online in 2018
Unlike a variety of other business sites, law firms don’t have the luxury of using clickbait and catchy social media contests to fuel their search engine optimization goals. Instead, most law firms operate in a highly traditional online presence, if they’ve managed to garner one at all. This is unfortunate because law offices have the advantage of reduced competition when it comes to search. While there are plenty of firms per radius in any given city, they don’t seem to saturate the web space the way that ecommerce sites do.
If your firm has yet to embrace 2018 and the SEO concept, you’re not alone, and here’s the great thing, it won’t take that much to catch up either. If you’re looking to get involved in the search engine rat race and boost your business’ rank with Google and other search engine giants, here are a few tips to consider.
Write Long Blog Posts
It might sound a little strange to start off with, but one of the major advantages your firm has over some other business is authority in your area of expertise. Google can’t come into your office and look at your law degree, but it can send bots in to check on the content you post to your site. Long-form content proves that you’re not just trying to build a site quick and rolling the dice with your SEO, it shows that you’re committed to the site, and are willing to spend time and energy researching and writing long articles which cover topics your readers want to see.
Not only will these long blog posts of 1200 to 2000 words keep the search engine bots happy, it will appease potential clients as well. When new clients visit your site and scan its pages to see what you’re all about, they’ll likely be impressed with the amount of work that’s gone into each post. If you’re stuck on what to write about, choose a topic you get asked about a lot in your field and then create headers for each point you want to touch on within that topic. For instance, Securities Litigator Martin Chitwood in San Diego gives great insight on his blog, ranging across a variety of legal topics.
Specify Law Fields in Their Own Categories
If you specialize in more than one area of law then separating each field into its own section with a neat little header and description goes a long way toward boosting your online ratings. These specialization categories are called hubs, and law hubs help your clients find the pages they’re looking for. This not only reduces confusion and unnecessary correspondence but looks great to search engine crawlers and provides further opportunity for more long-form content. Each area should have its own FAQ section for frequently asked questions regarding that field of law. Practices which appear to know what they’re doing are more likely to bring in new business.
Be Thrifty With Keywords
One of the major things search engine optimization experts harp on is keywords. Usually, it’s because businesses aren’t using enough or using them properly. Law firms fall into a category all of their own when it comes to keywords because some keywords can cause problems grammatically or appear forced. The law is no joking matter, especially when clients are paying as much as they do for your expertise. Using too many keywords to get ahead of the competition online is called keyword stuffing. Unfortunately, most human web surfers pick up on it quite quickly, and a Google bot will spot it too.
Rather than focusing on quantity of keywords, focus on the few keywords that you do use. Carefully apply them to blogs and landing pages in a natural and business-like tone so that they seem effortless and don’t look like keywords at all. For example, if you want to use the name of your firm, combined with its location so that searchers find it quickly when they Google it by name, you can effortlessly add these keywords to the contact and about pages without making it look forced or out of place.
Focus on High Quality Meta Data
Your meta title and description tell web searchers what they’ll get when they click on your link. This is a quick tag referring to the name of your site or the page being visited, and a short breakdown of what’s on the page. For example, your description could include information on the fields of law you practice and how many years you’ve been in business. This is a short burst of information, but it yields enough data for search engine users to see whether you have information on the type of law they need help with.
You’ll also use tags to name or describe images and videos on your website. Don’t disregard these portions of the site as they make wonderful places to sneak in keywords which still sound authentic and efficient.
Communicate with Users
Law firms sometimes get intimidated by the idea of conversing with potential clients through social media and other non-traditional methods of communication. While it’s true that these forms of chat should be monitored and kept professional, there’s nothing wrong with responding to general questions or comments. In fact, the more action your website sees in terms of comments, and links, the more popular it appears to Google bots. When web crawlers see a site which is garnering a lot of attention from online users it automatically assumes that site is more useful than others in its category.
Law firms may have more restrictions than the general public when it comes to advertising and content control, but there’s no reason your site needs to get lost in translation. Applying a few minor SEO hacks can go a long way.