Lawyers have understood the importance of having a good looking website that well describes their practice areas. But having a website is not enough if users can not find it while searching with relevant term (terms that relates/describes your law business). The implied meaning of ‘web presence’ is a website that makes its presence felt to search engine as well as the human searchers. For that lawyers need to optimize their websites for top search engines, such as Google and Bing.
However, it is not expected from a lawyer who has a very busy schedule will himself take up the search engine optimization tasks. But knowing the basics of SEO would definitely help.
The first and most important step to successful SEO for Lawyers is choosing your keywords properly. Choosing the right and effective keywords for your law firm marketing is necessary. Keywords are the terms that indicate search engines what you want your website to rank for. So, it sets up a strong platform on which your law firm marketing campaign can grow online.
For a small business like law firms targeting the local market with place name in the beginning/end of the keyword/key phrase will be a wise decision initially. For example, Miami personal injury lawyer or personal injury lawyer Miami ensures highly targeted traffic. Such keywords not only focus your practice areas but also point out the region where your business is physically located. If your law firm has branches located in multiple cities in the state of Florida, such as Orlando, Plantation, or others then you can choose keywords as –
• Orlando personal injury lawyer
• Plantation personal injury lawyer
The above keywords will target the visitors from the respective cities and nearby areas only. If you want it on a larger scale you can increase your area with Florida criminal lawyer and so on as your business grow.
Another point is being specific on your practice areas. That is, letting people know where you specialize. For instance, there are several specializations of personal injury law practice. Some SEO for Lawyers focus on medical malpractice while some specialize on accident injury or workplace injury. So, when you use the term ‘personal injury’ the scope might get bigger than using more descriptive ones like accident injury lawyer, workplace injury lawyer or medical malpractice lawyers but the descriptive ones promises higher conversion rate.
But again, you can not just rely on long tail keywords only since they do not ensure good ROI. Long tail or descriptive keywords are not popular search terms. So, prepare your final keywords list as a mixture of popular 2 words to 3-words key phrases along with some specific location based long tail keywords to increase effectiveness.