When it comes to law firm SEO, it can tough to keep up with the ever-evolving theories and tactics. Although the changing criteria can seem impossible to follow, search engines do operate with calculated strategy. Essentially, all the constant updates point to one simple goal: Providing the best user experience for search engine users.
When you know this fact, keeping up doesn’t need to be painful. Yes, there are many technical aspects about which your blog writers need to stay informed. However, it all boils down to the two most important points:
- Provide quality content people want to read.
- Publish that content often.
So while there may be various tweaks, these basic principles are pretty timeless. For those interested in law firm SEO, it’s important to understand that good search engine presence is going to improve your status and make it easier for potential clients to find you.
Most of the Google SEO updates have been necessary. For example, in the earlier days of Google, Bing and others, companies paid enormous amounts of money to establish link-building. But these link-backs weren’t organic, so they weren’t actually valuable to readers. Other companies resorted to a practice called “keyword stuffing,” which involves loading a page with keywords in an effort to manipulate the site’s ranking in search engine results. These words might appear in a group or list or completely out-of-context.
Both practices gave these firms and unfair advantage for “cheating” internet users of an optimal experience. Users would search for certain terms and be routed to these sites that did not actually contain the information users sought. Search engine updates ended this free-for-all and prioritized good, quality content that gave users what they wanted.
This all brings us to: What still works?
Some timeless approaches:
- Quality Content. Good content is really timeless. If you want to boost your law firm SEO, this is hands down the best way to do it. Your content needs to meet your audience’s informational needs and work appropriate keywords into the text naturally. Someone searching for a personal injury lawyer in Fort Lauderdale has a specific set of information needs. Lawyers who can meet them where they are and provide those answers are going to get more page views, have a lower bounce rate and rank higher on Google and other search engines. When you have good content on your website, you can promote on social media, send it in email marketing campaigns and be proud to offer it up to potential clients.
- Quality Relationships. It used to be that huge numbers of back links from any site were prized. Today, that could get you penalized. Good links are going to boost your law firm SEO, but they have to be earned the right way. That means your blog is noticed or shared by other bloggers, media or individuals willing to give your site a mention or your blog a share. In order to do that, you need to be offering great services, but you also need to be serving up quality content on your website.
- Prioritizing Local Search. This involves a few different steps, and some can be somewhat technical. However, they are usually worth it to do because frankly, a lot of law firms don’t even bother. Taking a few extra minutes could set you ahead and boost your law firm SEO. These include: Building up your Google Business listings, making sure have location pages on your website (populated with good content) that are optimized for local searches in your practice area and finally making sure your contact information is applied directly to the HTML markup (structured data) so search engines – and users – don’t have to work too hard to find it.
- Having a Social Media Presence. Although Facebook and Twitter aren’t everything, your law firm SEO does benefit from social media shares and likes. Here again, this is where good content is so helpful. When you have a solid, regular blog, you can be regularly posting these to your social media feeds.
Although it may seem that SEO is simply a set of technical rules, there really isn’t a one-size-fits-all checklist that can be applied to every site. Again, the most important thing is that your site is easily crawled by search engines, you’re ranking for the right keywords and you’re providing information that’s worthwhile to people in your area. The more you do this, the easier you’ll be to find online.
Contact Law Firm Ghost Writer to learn more about our legal blog writing services at 1.888.901.3939 or email info@lawfirmghostwriter.com.
Additional Resources:
SEO Tactics That (Still) Work In 2017, April 6, 2017, By Bryn Dodson, Forbes.com
More Blog Entries:
Law Firm SEO: You Can’t Afford to Ignore It, April 5, 2017, Law Firm Blog Writer Blog
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