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When it comes to finding legal services, people turn to Google. Ensure your law firm stands out with expert SEO guidance tailored for lawyers.
Why Does SEO Matter for Lawyers?
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🌐 Tap into Popularity: Harness the appeal of law-related keywords without the high ad costs.
Unlock Success with Our 4-Step Guide!
📍 Optimize for Google Map Pack: Stand out on Google Maps with strategic profile optimization.
✅ Improve Local Visibility
✅ Boost Discoverability
✅ Increase Client Trust
📈 Dominate Organic Results: Craft compelling content to rank higher in organic search.
✅ List Your Services
✅ Highlight Expertise
✅ Cater to Search Intent
🔗 Build Quality Backlinks: Boost your authority and credibility with strategic link-building.
✅ Publish Press Releases
✅ Engage in Guest Blogging
✅ Leverage Local Rankings
🛠 Ensure Technical SEO Health: Maintain a high-performing website that search engines love.
✅ Site Audit and Fixes
✅ Error Correction
✅ Optimal Site Crawlability
Track Your Progress and Dominate the Legal Scene!
📈 Monitor Rankings: Stay updated on your keyword performance.
🗺 Local Insight: Gauge map pack impact with local tracking tools.
💼 Expert Assistance: Partner with SEO pros specializing in legal practices.
Ready to Elevate Your Legal Practice’s Online Impact?
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Why is SEO important for lawyers?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the practice of increasing traffic to a website through organic search results. The end result of SEO is better visibility for your website on search engine results pages (SERPs) so more people can engage with your firm.
That, in a nutshell, is how searchers can become visitors and how visitors can become customers. Also, the great thing about organic traffic is that it lasts as long as you rank, and you don’t have to pay for every click (unlike digital advertising).
Speaking of advertising, law-related keywords can be quite expensive in the legal niche. With SEO, you can benefit from their popularity without needing an advertising budget.
The reason law firms, attorneys, and lawyers need SEO is the same as why they need a website: because people search for legal services online.
If your business isn’t showing up in Google, you’re simply leaving money on the table. Another way lawyers can benefit from SEO is by gaining the trust of potential clients with helpful content. When people are looking for solutions to their problems, they can come across your content through Google and see that you know your stuff. So without further ado, let’s take a look at how lawyers can get the most out of SEO.
The Google Map Pack (also called the Google Local Pack and Google Snack Pack) is a so-called rich result that Google displays to searchers to help them find the best result based on location, among other things.
In most cases, the searches your potential customers use to find businesses like yours trigger the Google Map Pack because Google “thinks” people want to find something related to a location. Google Map Pack vs. Regular Organic Results As you can see, the Google Map Pack is displayed above the organic results.
And aside from the ads, it’s the first thing searchers see. So if you put your name there, your chances of being discovered increase dramatically. No one and nothing can guarantee you a spot in the map pack. That’s because your competitors will take similar measures to get there.
Besides, no one but Google itself knows exactly how local ranking works.
What we do know are the three principles that Google fluently applies to determine what gets included in the local pack:
Relevance – How well a business profile matches the importance of the search query.
Distance – The distance between the search result and the searcher’s location or the location specified in the search query (e.g., “mountain view attorney”).
Prominence – Several factors come into play here: popularity in the “offline” world, online reviews and rankings, links to the site, and interestingly, rankings in organic search results.
Based on Google guidelines and known local ranking factors, there are three things you should do to increase your chances of showing up in Google’s map pack.
Create and optimize your Google business profile
The Google map pack consists of Google business profiles. Therefore, it is important that you list all your business locations with this service (but do not use virtual offices). In addition, your business can be displayed on Google Maps with this profile. Also, Google can display a local knowledge panel in search queries, which includes the name of your business. If you are starting out, you will need to create your business profile.
If the business already exists or has been claimed by someone else, you will need to claim your profile instead. Filling out the information in your company profile is similar in both cases. And it’s pretty simple – similar to setting up a social media account. But to make sure your profile is optimized, check out the tips in our guide: How to Optimize Your Google My Business Listing in 30 Minutes.
Remember, the more specific information and relevant photos you provide, the better. And when in doubt, follow Google’s guidelines. Because violating them can lead to a profile suspension. Some SEO guides claim that the information displayed in these Rich Results comes from schema markups. This is not correct. Primarily, they come from company profiles. So there’s no harm in applying schema markup to your website, but you should focus on optimizing your Google business profile.
Get listed on local websites and directories
Local citations and directories are online mentions of your business that include your business name, address, phone number, and in most cases, your website.
You need them for three reasons:
They are a ranking factor for the Google Map Pack; they can help you rank better in those results. While all local directories can help you rank better in Google Map Pack, those that link to your website can also help you in organic search results.
They help searchers find your business a) in search engines like Google and b) in the search results of those directories. “Lawyer near me” leads to directories, directories, and more directories. But these can potentially lead to your business if you get listed in them.
Start by getting listed on major aggregators like Foursquare. Then submit your information to popular platforms like Facebook, Yelp, and Bing Places, and choose popular directories in your region and industry like FindLaw, Justia, or LegalMatch. Just make sure your citations are always consistent.
One method that will save you time when manually searching for local citations is to use Ahrefs’ Link Intersect tool. Simply open the tool, enter your competitors’ URLs, and leave the last entry blank.
Ahrefs’ Link Intersect tool
You can find the Link Intersect tool by clicking More in the top menu. Then fill in the fields as shown in the example. You can examine up to 10 domains at once (click “Add Target”). Here are some sample results. Note that you can also use the tool to find other link opportunities. (In this case, the tool shows us almost 15K domains).
Encourage your customers to leave reviews
According to Google, positive reviews and rankings help Google’s algorithms understand which businesses stand out. You can ask your customers to leave reviews in any way you want. Since we’re focusing on Google rankings, the reviews left there are probably the most important.
What you should keep in mind: Don’t buy reviews, don’t offer consideration for reviews, and try to respond to reviews as often as possible. (You can find Google’s guidelines for managing reviews here).
Google can help you with this by allowing you to create a special link that you can share to request a review from Google. That’s it for optimizing for Google Map Pack. Now let’s move on to the slightly more complex topic of optimizing for organic results, i.e. the results below the Map Pack.
Optimize for organic results
To have a chance of ranking in the organic search results, you need pages with content that is relevant to a particular search query. The more useful, interesting, and well-linked this content is, the better your chances are. This is exactly what we will focus on in the future.
List your services
SEO or not, you need to provide your visitors with a list of the services you offer and also share where you offer your services. Some of the services will have significant search demand, others may not.
Later, we will delve into this using keyword research. Let’s say you specialize in entertainment law, including a number of areas such as talent contracts, music law, and publishing. The bare minimum here is to create a page that explains your expertise in entertainment law and mentions the aforementioned specialties.
A more effective tactic, however, is to create a content hub where the main page talks about your expertise in entertainment law in general while linking to subpages that address each of the areas of law you cover.
This page is an example of a content hub (also called a topic cluster). On the left side of the page, you will find general information about entertainment law (more on the page below this part) and links to relevant areas. Each link leads to a page dedicated to a specific area.
In short, here are some benefits of the content hub approach:
More topic authority – interlinks from related content build semantic relationships that can be a signal to Google of topic authority (read more).
More link authority – Pages linked in a hub benefit from each other’s backlinks. A user-friendly way to navigate your site – information is just a click away.
Higher perceived value – people often see such hubs as a valuable resource on a topic (which can also make them more willing to link to your hub).
Another idea worth considering is creating separate hubs for practice areas and industries. This way, you increase the number of keywords you can rank for while providing a clear structure for users. According to JurisPage, an agency specializing in legal marketing, long-form content works best for service pages. So when you create your hubs, be sure to fill them with informative and engaging content.
Listing your locations
The goal is to help Google index your site for keywords with local search intent. Some of these will be explicit. This is the case when the searcher uses a location modifier like “Heidelberg attorney corporate law”. Some will be implicit, which is when there is no location modifier, but Google still assumes local search intent (“bakery” will show you bakeries in your area).
So here’s a tactic that will save you the time of creating a multitude of pages for each location and save you from duplicate content issues: you can create a page (e.g., “contact us”) that includes at least each location’s exact address (including state/region), phone number, and email address (if email addresses vary).
Include your locations in the footer. So if you have multiple locations, you can simply include the name of the region and city and link them to the location details page. If you want to provide more specific information about the locations, such as practicing attorneys, you can create subpages for each location.
Research keywords
Up to this point, we’ve thought about what we should create content about from the attorney’s perspective. Now let’s look at the searcher’s perspective. From a searcher’s perspective, a keyword is a word or phrase they type into Google to find things like local products or services.
For us, this means that keywords become the topics of our content, blog posts, landing pages, etc. and/or things that should be mentioned in our content. More importantly, they will be the drivers of organic search traffic.
Here are some ideas for keyword research for attorneys.
Expand your services by analyzing other ranking pages – To do this, you’ll need a keyword research tool like Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer. Access the tool, enter a starting keyword like “corporate law” and go to Related Terms. The tool will show you keywords that other sites are ranking for and talking about while ranking for your starting keyword. You can toggle between the “Also rank for” and “Also talk about” reports, or show them all at once.
Choose Top 10 or Top 100 to narrow or broaden your search.
Some of your competitors will already be ahead of you when it comes to SEO, targeting lucrative keywords with their content. But that shouldn’t stop you from ranking for the same keywords (and even outranking your competition).
There are two methods to analyze your competition in this area. The first method is to enter your competitor’s domain into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, set to “Subdomains”.
This will display all the keywords that your competitor ranks for. To get a more manageable keyword list, you can also enter the URL of a specific page (e.g. the blog or practice areas) and/or use filters to display keywords by criteria such as search volume, traffic potential or keyword difficulty.
Applying the Position filter to the Organic Keywords report.
If you filter the results on keywords with a position from 1-20, you will get a clearer list. The second method allows you to examine several competitors at once. Go to the Content Gap report in Site Explorer, enter your competitors and leave the last input file open.
Set up a Content Gap report in Site Explorer to show only competitors’ keywords This will show you keywords where at least one of your competitors ranks in the top 10.
Content gap report results
To increase the relevance of the results, you can uncheck the “1 Target” intersection. If you already have an active website, you can also enter your domain to see the keywords your competitors rank for but you don’t.
To do this, use the last input field for your domain. If you want to uncover more ways to increase organic search traffic, spend a little more time in Keywords
Explorer and take a look around:
- Google Autosuggestions.
- Common Questions.
- Topics your competitors are blogging about.
For example, we can take our “Also Rank For” report and only show keywords with questions by including words like “why”, “how”, “when”, etc. in the “Include” filter.
Filtering the “Also rank for” report to reveal common questions.
In this way, we can uncover common questions related to areas of law such as the following. Notice that the first five search results belong to law firms; it is not uncommon for law firms to attract visitors through education. An important skill in keyword research is keyword selection and prioritization. Learn how to do this step-by-step here: Keyword Research: The Beginner’s Guide by Ahrefs.
Create optimized pages
Now that we know what to create content about, it’s time to learn how to create that content. So in this section, we’ll focus on optimizing what we call on-page SEO factors: things you can include on your page or in its HTML code to improve its ranking and visibility in the SERPs.
Align with search intent
Search intent refers to the reason for the search. It is one of the strongest ranking factors. The search intent of a particular search query can be determined by looking at the SERPs and noting three things:
Content type – Is the dominant type a blog post, landing page, video or free tool?
Content format – Common formats include how-to posts, list posts, opinion posts, definition posts, etc.
Content Angle – The unique selling point of the results, such as “in 2022” or “for beginners.”
For example, looking at the top ranking pages and the “People Also Ask” box for “lawyer Heidelberg”, Google seems to think that people want to know what it is.
The SERP suggests that people are primarily looking for knowledge
So the best way to adjust for search intent is to have an article that explains what emancipation is, and perhaps even explains the processes behind it. To learn how to optimize for search intent, read our guide: What is Search Intention? A complete guide for beginners.
Create high-quality, up-to-date content
Google is getting better at recognizing high-quality content. To give you a quick overview of SEO guidelines, you should craft your content so that it:
Easy to read – If you’re writing about the law, you probably won’t be able to avoid jargon. But you can still explain it sufficiently and use simple phrases that anyone (even a 9-year-old) can understand.
Clear – Organize the text into sections with meaningful headings.
Current – This is especially important for legal topics.
Unique – You can take a cue from the most successful content, but at the same time, you should try to provide unique value to your readers. For example, you can offer a unique angle on the content or include educational material like an infographic.
This is also the point where you should include link bait. Focused on providing essential information to solve a searcher’s problem – Longer content doesn’t mean it’s of higher quality.
Aligned with E-E-A-T guidelines:
Show E-E-A-T
E-E-A-T- stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust. In other words: competence, authority, and trustworthiness. The concept comes from a guideline that Google quality raters (humans) use to help engineers improve the Google algorithm. It means that Google wants to promote sites that have E-A-T, and it’s getting better at it.
E-A-T is most important for YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) topics. Certainly, the law is one of them.
Besides the very obvious things like making sure your content is accurate and up to date, and citing your sources where required, it can also be helpful to show your credentials. To create an About page that features you and other attorneys at your firm, and shows why you should be trusted. Mention things like education, bar admission, memberships, awards, etc.
Bragging about credentials is not bragging. If you are an experienced attorney, people (and Google) will think you are more trustworthy. Be sure to mention the author in every article you publish and provide a link to their About page.
Two other tactics that can help you demonstrate your expertise, authority, and trustworthiness are: Using schema markup on pages where you feature the attorneys – Schema markup is simple code that helps Google better understand your content.
Learn how to use it in this guide:
Obtain links from reliable sources – I will explain some link-building tactics later in the article.
Optimize page titles and meta descriptions.
Page titles and meta descriptions are important because searchers can see them in the SERPs and this can influence what they click on. In addition, page titles are considered a “minor ranking factor.” When designing a page title, keep the following in mind:
The title should be eye-catching and precise – Write a line that piques users’ interest and describes exactly what is unique about your content/offer.
Include the target keyword in your title – Make it sound natural to the reader. Make sure that the Title of your home page includes the name of your business.
No longer than 60 characters.
And this is important for meta descriptions: They should be captivating, but not click-heavy. It should be no larger than 920 px – you can use a tool like SERPSim to help you with this.
Synchronize the description with the title – The description can be an extension or support of what you claim in the title.
Use short and descriptive URLs: URLs are another “small” ranking factor. And you should optimize the URL with the user in mind. This means:
Keep them short – Don’t use an overly convoluted structure. URLs should indicate to the user where they are on a website.
Make them human-readable – Use a few words that describe the page. Don’t use cryptic characters.
Get an SSL certificate – This shows users that the connection is secure and private; they will see “HTTPS” at the beginning of your domain as a sign of a secure connection in the browser. It’s also an easy ranking signal.
Here’s an example of a user-friendly URL that meets the above criteria. It comes from a subpage on art law – part of a content hub on entertainment law.
/entertainment-law/art-law/
Add internal links
Internal links are the links to other pages on your site. You need them for several reasons. They can:
Provide a crawl path to the target pages.
Strengthen other pages that you own – This means that they pass on link equity. So pages that get lots of links can help other pages (where link building is more difficult) rank better (see the “middle man” method).
Help Google understand what the page is about – This is possible with the anchor texts of the internal links.
Help users navigate your website.
The content creation phase is the best time to add internal links. The three places you should consider when adding internal links are:
Your conversion pages, are the pages that describe your services or where visitors can get in touch with you. Don’t force this though, add them when it’s a natural next step for the user.
Related articles.
To find internal linking opportunities, you can use search operators in Google. Use the site: operator along with a search term in quotes, something like this:
Using search operators in Google
Another option is to use the Link Opportunities report in Ahrefs’ Site Audit. It focuses on the top 10 keywords for each page on your site and looks for mentions of those terms on your other pages.
Optimize images
Optimizing images for SEO is about these three things:
Compress image file size – You can use a plugin like ShortPixel or a bulk image optimizer like Kraken. This will make your site load faster, and loading speed counts for SEO (as shown in this case study).
Use descriptive image file names
Use descriptive alt texts – along with file names, they help Google understand the context of your page. In addition, alt texts help visually impaired users.
Using a person’s name in their portrait file name – a good practice discovered at wilmerhale.com Using a person’s name in their portrait file name – a good practice discovered at wilmerhale.com.
Translate your content (for multilingual regions)
International law firms and lawyers operating in multilingual regions and offering services in multiple languages should consider translating their content. They should do this at least for the pages they want to rank for multilingual phrases, such as homepage, services, locations, and contact page. The reason is this:
Content written in the same language as the search query is likely to be more relevant to that query. It helps with link-building in the same language.
Translated content is more accessible to the group of people who speak that language.
Canadian lawyer’s website with content in English and French ranking for a search term in French Canadian lawyer’s website with content in English and French ranking for a search term in French. Multilingual SEO involves a lot of details and technicalities, so I would like to refer you to our guide on this topic: Multilingual SEO: Translation and Marketing Guide. This concludes our treatment of the on-page factors. Now we can turn to the off-page factors, that is, the factors that lie outside the website.
Building links
Links from other websites are one of the most important ranking factors. The more good quality backlinks you have, the higher you can rank in organic results. You can get backlinks in two ways:
Gain them organically through link-worthy content on your website.
Build them through link-building methods (which I will explain in this section of the article).
According to some SEOs, all backlinks can help you rank both in Google’s map pack and in organic results. This actually makes sense if you read the advice Google gives us on how it determines local ranking: Generally speaking, to improve your local ranking, you should give preference to those link opportunities that are simultaneously contextual, locally relevant, and from authoritative sources. With all that out of the way, let’s now look at some ideas on how attorneys and law firms can build relevant backlinks.
Publish press releases
After an important case, it’s a good idea to issue a press release and distribute it online. Depending on the nature of the case, this can attract interest from international, national, and local magazines. An example of this is the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard case, which was handled by Camille Vasquez and Benjamin Chew of Brown Rudnick.
As you can see below, this case earned the law firm follow links from 213 high-value domains. Some of these are local, others are national/international. Honestly, this case has attracted so much attention worldwide that the law firm probably doesn’t need to issue a PR release. I bet there are some unlinked mentions that can be turned into links, so the number could be even higher.
Some other ideas for press releases are:
- New hires.
- Mergers.
- Important company announcements.
- Look for newsjacking opportunities
- Also known as “reactive PR,” this technique is all about providing reliable information about current events. To do this, you need to regularly track what’s happening in the world or in your region related to your field. Here are two ways to do this and stay healthy in the process. You can:
Hire someone, such as a local PR agency.
Use a web monitoring tool like Google Alerts. If you are an Ahrefs user, you can also use the Mentions tool. This alert setup sends daily emails about new content that mentions the words “startup” and “law” on English-language websites with a DR of at least 40. As an attorney who provides legal services tailored to startups, you can offer your expert opinion when there is news on the topic.
Link to your publications, teaching, or public appearances
Lawyers often have the opportunity to teach at universities and speak at conferences. Often, there is then an opportunity to include a link in the speaker’s bio. This is a great opportunity to get a link from a domain with high authority (strong backlink profile) and local relevance, as in the example below.
Take advantage of guest blogging opportunities
Guest blogging is a common practice for link building. However, the availability of opportunities varies by topic. Below is an example of a guest post on
TechCrunch about the legal issues surrounding the startup credo “move fast and break things,” which links to the authors’ law firm.
- Enter law AND (“guest article” OR “guest post”) in the search bar. This will search our database for the word “law” and at least one of the two phrases “guest article” or “guest post”.
- Set the website traffic filter to “From 500” to filter out new websites and websites with potentially low quality.
- Enable the “Live only” filter to weed out broken pages.
- Use the “One page per domain” option, as we only want to get a single result from a website. Example of advanced search in Content Explorer
- Respond to journalist queries
- Services like HARO, ResponseSource, and SourceBottle allow you to track requests from journalists for expert commentary on legal issues (or from a legal perspective). If your commentary appears in a newspaper or magazine, you’ll have a double benefit: you’ll get a link and increase your firm’s visibility. All you have to do is sign up for their services, subscribe to topics that interest you, and wait for an email with the latest request. If something piques your interest, respond as soon as possible.
Local Rankings
Here’s the last item on our menu: local rankings published by local magazines, blogs or review sites. Not to be confused with the local directories and listings presented at the beginning of the article.
Even though “link building for local rankings” is a good tactic for any local business, I haven’t seen many of these opportunities in the legal niche. However, if this type of opportunity comes knocking on your door, you should seriously consider it. Just remember to evaluate them in terms of contextual relevance, local relevance, and authority. That concludes the section on link building. If you want to learn more about link building, feel free to contact us:
Keep your website “healthy”
The “SEO health” of your website can impact your rankings or prevent you from showing up on Google. This is where we get into the territory of technical SEO: optimizing your website so that search engines can find, crawl, understand and index your pages. Luckily, there are tools for that. Tl;dr:
The easiest way to keep your site’s SEO in shape is to get a tool like Site Audit and fix any errors it reports (also available for free in Ahrefs Webmaster Tools). Looking for technical SEO issues is not something that will take a lot of time on a regular basis.
Once you’ve made sure your site is crawlable and indexable and fixed any errors or warnings that may already be occurring on your site (e.g. broken links, slow page loading), you’ll only need to check the report occasionally.
Track your SEO progress.
“Manually” tracking your progress on Google is not reliable because Google personalizes results based on factors like search history, device, and current location. Here are some tools you can use instead. Starting from Google’s business profile, you can track a number of performance metrics within the service for free.
For example, you can see the searches that found your profile, the number of directional queries, or the number of people who viewed the profile. You’ll also need a tool to track the performance of your Google Map Pack, such as the free Grid My Business or Local Falcon.
If you want to track all your keyword rankings, try a tool like Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker. This allows you to track up to 10,000 keyword rankings for “normal” organic search by country, state, city and even zip code.
Hire VikingLinks as your SEO agency and get your business growing:
SEO can bring you traffic you don’t have to pay for, but this marketing tactic takes time and effort. The more competitive the keywords you are seeking to rank for, the longer it may take you to rank for them.
The first steps will likely be the hardest, so going all-in on SEO right now may not be the best idea. But once you get the process started, you can use the same techniques over and over again to get consistent results that reinforce each other.
If you need professional search engine optimization help then we could help you: we help law firms and attorneys generate more visitors and qualified inquiries or sales in general, in addition to better search engine visibility (SEO).
For more information and booking requests, please feel free to contact us
