Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a pillar of legal marketing in the digital age. Your business website is the most valuable digital asset you have. Most searches today start with Google, and SEO helps your website get found on the search giant and other search engines. A good SEO can increase the number of people visiting your website, which greatly expands your potential customer base. Like a great oak tree, SEO can have many branches, but to flourish it needs a healthy foundation. At LISI, we believe that a good foundation starts with connection, content creation and local SEO
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It is important to “connect” to useful analysis tools, as we noted in our recent article, 5 Steps to Getting Started with Search Engine Optimization, because you need to measure your efforts to know if they are working. To that end, two tools we recommend setting up before you begin your SEO efforts are Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
Google Analytics (H3)
Google Analytics (GA) is the web’s most popular web analytics tool. GA allows you to measure most user interactions on your law firm’s website. For example, let’s say you have an “About the firm” video on your About page, and you want to know how many people watch it, how long they watch it, where they went on the site after watching it. watched, etc. . Google Analytics can help answer all of these questions. If you don’t know how to install Google Analytics, see our google analytics 4 install guide.
Google Search Console (H3)
Although GA alone is a good start, to have a 5-star setup from the start, we recommend installing Google Search Console (GSC) as well. Google Search Console is like opening the hood of your website to see how the engine is working. It might get a bit technical, but some of the things we love using Google Search Console for include:
- Ensure site plans are submitted correctly. GSC will let us know if we submitted the sitemap successfully, and will also let us know if there are any warnings or errors as Google crawls and indexes the website.
- By using GSC, you can discover the search queries that triggered your site in Google’s SERPs. This report is called Performance on Search Results. This is particularly useful for determining which queries led to which pages of your site. You can also see which queries may be getting high impressions (meaning your site appeared in the SERPs) but users don’t seem to be clicking.
Content creation
SEO isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it tactic, it’s a long-term strategy that requires ongoing effort: content is an essential part of that effort. As stated in our recent blog on SEO you have to produce valuable content To be successful in SEO, you not only need to make sure the pages in your practice area are optimized for the right keywords, but you also need to create content that users are looking for.
When users undertake a search on Google, they are looking for information. The advent of Google has opened a portal with which humans around the world converse daily, at the rate of 5.6 billion times per day. Potential customers ask questions and producing new content helps your business answer those questions.
Let’s say Example & Martin is a company serving entrepreneurs. The company could produce content focused on common startup challenges such as “Should I incorporate an LLC or a C Corp?” or “How to register a trademark or obtain a copyright”. Potential customers are asking these questions and you want them to come to you for the answers. Content production allows you to answer these questions and expand your keyword profile outside of your defined practice areas. Example & Martin may have a trademark practice area page targeting terms such as “trademark counsel” and “trademark attorneys”, but there are many terms related to this topic, and producing content also helps you target these keywords.
Content also helps you get backlinks: links from other websites to yours. Backlinks are like votes of confidence. Think of all the times you’ve recommended something to a friend. Maybe you have a mechanic that you have a lifelong relationship with, and they are fair and do a great job. You would recommend this mechanic to a friend rather than the nearest workshop, right? Backlinks work on the same principle. You want to get links from reputable sites that tell Google that you are a reliable source for this information.
For example, you can produce content on a change in labor law. If a CNN article links to this article, it is a high quality backlink for your site. These are the types of links you want. In this case, CNN says it trusts the law firm Example & Martin as a thought leader on this particular topic. Building backlinks is one of those branches we alluded to earlier and rightly deserves its own article. For now, just know that they are important and producing content consistently can dramatically increase your chances of getting them.
Local SEO Law Firm
Our final point hits close to home, literally. You now know that you should claim your Google Business Profile. But why? Earlier, we talked about the sheer volume of searches that hit Google every day. The volume has increased over the years and the way Google presents results has changed dramatically. Google has become extremely sophisticated in an effort to better serve its users. The search engine results page (SERP) is no longer a list of blue links. There are maps, purchases, images, advertisements, etc.
Claiming and optimizing your local listings in Google Search will allow you to optimize your office locations so you can appear on the map and in traditional Google search results. There are also many other location citation providers, and we recommend you claim and optimize them. There are tools to achieve this, or we can help you.
SEO is not a one-time tactic. On the contrary, you should regularly cultivate SEO on your website. As search trends change and you continue to produce new content, you need to make sure that you are always optimizing for SEO. Even a few hours a week spent on the activities listed in this blog post can go a long way to your SEO success.
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