As competition tightens, marketing costs rise, and technology encroaches upon what lawyers and attorneys have historically provided, more and more practices are asking “What Is SEO for Legal Websites and How can it make mine more effective?”
Today, having a strong online presence (focused on your website, strategies promoting organic traffic, paid search advertising, etc.) is a powerful mechanism to increase the ROI from your marketing budgets.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) helps increase your organic website traffic and unlike other tools like paid advertising can keep producing returns over the long haul. In addition to helping to draw visitors to your website, it can increase the visibility of and promote your Legal Practice overall.
Whether your competitors already have their strategy in place or you can be one of the first in your area to develop one, use this information to get started on one for your legal website.
You can expect a strong fundamental understanding of SEO for your legal website as well as practical tips for implementing these strategies.
Since SEO, both overall as well as within the legal industry, is such an expansive topic, do not miss these highlighted opportunities for additional info, references, and links (also shared within the sections below).
1. Understanding SEO Basics for Legal Websites
In this section, you will get a fundamental understanding of Search Engine Optimization. It will include basic terminology and concepts which ultimately impact your positioning in search engine results (and subsequently visibility within your target audience).
What is SEO and How Does It Enhance Your Online Visibility
If you aren't producing your content with your audience in mind, they can't hear you!
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is defined by MailChimp as “the process used to optimize a website’s technical configuration, content relevance, and link popularity so its pages can become easily findable, more relevant and popular towards user search queries, and as a consequence, search engines rank them better.”
For a legal website, your end goal is getting more paying clients for your firm’s services. As the costs of marketing continue to skyrocket, digital strategies (including SEO) have to increase your visibility and attract more clients at a rate of return enabling your to meet the revenue and profit margins for your practice.
Beyond your goals and objectives, you must always remember the primary goal of search engines! They exist to satisfy and answer user queries to meet their needs as quickly and as completely as possible.
When optimizing for search success, always bias your strategic decisions toward partnering with them to meet the needs of their users! If you hold to this foundational goal, your SEO efforts are going to produce positive results over time.
Here are a couple of important concepts to understand.
Audience
Effective SEO starts with the definition of an Audience. It is a targeted group made up of individuals or organizations with a similar set of desirable characteristics, sharing a common affinity among them, and with whom you can build a relationship. In a nutshell, they represent a group interested in what you want to share!
Important Reminder!
Be sure to focus on the topics and interests of value to your target Audience. SEO (and Digital Marketing) identify intersects between their needs and what you offer.
Make sure that your content and materials satisfy their queries; not sell your products and services.
If a neutral third party would classify it as a “sales pitch”, find additional ways to add more value.
Publish
As part of a digital strategy, you publish content (for the purposes of this article) to your practice’s website. This material should be relevant and valuable to an audience interested in your firm and the services that you offer.
It can provide solutions to problems they experience or any other topics of interest to them.
Crawl
Search Engines (like Google, Bing, etc) use programs (often referred to as “bots” or “spiders”) to intermittently review materials published online. As part of that exercise, the crawled content is evaluated using a number of defined characteristics. This process is often referred to as “indexing” as it identifies topics to which your content is relevant.
Editor’s Note:
Keep in mind that search engines are constantly adjusting and evolving the characteristics that they measure as well as their algorithms (discussed below). For this reason, it is good to remember that the main focus of your content should be to satisfy the needs of your target audience.
While individual characteristics or algorithms may change, producing material that addresses a user’s wants and desires should be your primary objective.
Rank
Once your website is crawled and indexed, it earns a ranking among other websites whose content is related to topics like yours. These rankings are influenced by factors like relevance, authority, and proximity to the user interested in the topic.
Ranks rise and fall all the time as the search engines continue to crawl your website along with the many others available online.
Intent
Intent refers to what a search user wants. Within the query that a user initiates, this is their fundamental objective and the goal of search engines is to quickly and completely satisfy it.
The more you understand what your intended audience wants and the better your content satisfies it, the more successful you will be in producing and ranking content for your legal website.
Search Engine Ranking Factors and Algorithms
Search Engines calculate rankings based on a number of factors. These factors are collated and prioritized in complex algorithms that make up the “secret sauce” for how they operate.
In the early days of Search Optimization, the logic for how these calculations worked was much simpler. Techniques like “keyword-stuffing” (adding high-value keywords to a webpage unrelated to the topic) were rampant. As the algorithms got better at evaluating user intent in relation to the available topical content, practices like this became severely punished!
Avoid these types of “quick” or “easy” techniques! Not only will they not help your rankings, but they will actually negatively affect them.
Your most effective SEO techniques for a practice website will target two groups of factors: Content-based and Technically-based.
Background:
To get a more historical perspective on how search engine algorithms have evolved over time, you can check out this post from SearchEngineJournal.com.
Content-based
First and foremost, your website must provide high-quality, user-focused content. Material that does not target the needs of users whom you are trying to attract is simply not going to rank well.
Poorly-written posts that do not engage your reader’s interest are a waste of their time (and ultimately yours as well).
The heart of SEO (for legal websites and all others) is knowing what your audience seeks and providing it. This ensures that you meet search intent and your content is relevant to it. Your keyword strategy (mentioned in more detail below) will be a big part of identifying what your audience will know about you.
Backlinks and Domain Authority are also important factors that will affect your ranking.
Backlinks represent references (“links”) to your website. They can be internal (from your website) and external (from other websites). Internal links highlight other related material about the topic in which a reader might be interested. External links direct readers not engaged with your website to it.
Both types are informative to search engines and can help increase your Domain Authority. This rating signals to search engines how trustworthy and valuable you are within the legal industry and your local area.
The better your content, the more you accumulate links (internally and externally), and the greater your authority, the higher you will ultimately rank.
Editor’s Note:
Domain Authority is one component of Google’s EEAT concept. The acronym stands for:
- Experience
- Expertise
- Authority
- Trust
For more information on this topic specifically, check out this article.
Technical-based
In addition to the optimization of content, there are other SEO practices that target the technical aspects of your legal website.
Two of the main ones are Page Load Speed and Mobile-Friendliness.
Users are not interested in waiting and search engines know this. If your website does not perform well and load fast, very few users are going to wait. They will simply hit the “Back” button abandoning your interaction and select the next option that they feel will better (and faster) meet their needs.
Similarly, more users interact with websites on their mobile devices than ever before. If your website does not provide a good user experience, it will not rank well.
The most engaging and well-written content published on a slow or poorly-designed website is just a waste of time.
Additionally, the structure of your legal website (specifically how you organize its features and topical layout) helps users and web crawlers understand what you offer.
Researching Keywords and Using the Most Relevant Ones
Keywords and Key Phrases are major components of both the Content and Technical aspects of your SEO strategy. All industries have topics that make up the foundation of what audiences (interested in it) want to know. Your objective is to find and use the best ones most relevant to the legal audience you target.
Relevance can be easily compared on these two characteristics.
Value
Value is the easiest and most desirable of the two.
For your legal website, you want to target the most valuable keywords that attract the biggest audience most easily converted to a client for your practice.
For a Bankruptcy Attorney, this might be the phrase “How Do I File For Bankruptcy In [YOUR-TOWN]?” There is no ambiguity about what this user seeks and that user is probably motivated to find a lawyer who can help her.
As a byproduct of its value, it is likely that competition for this key phrase is very high. Many legal websites (and most digital advertising) will target it and the costs to rank for it will be equally high.
Availability
Availability is the characteristic that measures the ease or difficulty to rank for particular keywords.
From an effort and budget standpoint, you want to target the keywords and key phrases that are most available.
For example, keywords related to car accidents might be the most valuable for a Personal Injury website, but you might find that it is much easier to rank for keywords related to motorcycle accidents.
Pro Tip:
Depending on your SEO budget, identify the highest-value keywords and key phrases that are available based on the dollars and effort you can invest.
This is a high-leverage arbitrage opportunity central to developing an effective SEO strategy.
Since Value and Availability characteristics change over time, be sure to schedule reviews where you can prioritize or minimize your usage.
On-page Optimization and Its Effect
There are a number of “On-Page” Optimizations that you can perform on your legal website. These techniques are more technical in nature, but you optimize them on the actual content page.
They include things like the following.
- Title Tag and Meta Description are attributes that you set on your content pages. An effective Title immediately tells a reader what the topic is. A good Meta Description gives hints to your reader (and the search bot) about what to expect.
- Optimized Images are created and designed to deliver high-quality images in the best format, size, and resolution to best engage your reader.
- Optimized URLs clearly communicate what the page is about and do so in easily understood language. Avoid complex numbering or encoding that obfuscates your topic for the reader.
- Improved Load Times refer to two different measures. First and of most interest to users is the speed that your page loads (Page Load Time). This is the time between when your reader requests the page and it is successfully delivered to them. Google and many other search engines calculate the “Time To First Byte” (TTFB) as their measure of page load speed. This is the time between when the page is requested and a user’s browser receives the first byte of the response.
Editor’s Note:
On-Page Optimization quickly becomes a very technical topic. Whether optimizing the performance of your website code, or your database, or utilizing more advanced techniques like caching, there are numerous related topics that will improve your legal website’s speed and behavior.
For more information, you can check out this post from SemRush.
Why Content Matters for SEO (especially for Attorneys!)
Even with the most effective keyword-targeting strategies and rock-solid optimization of your legal website’s technical and on-page processes, well-written content targeting your audience’s topics of interest is fundamental!
Your content and its ability to satisfy users signal Google and other search engines to rank your website.
Google identifies a four-part evaluation of websites and web content called E-E-A-T (formerly E-A-T). Using these measures, it assigns every site a quality score that ranks you among your competitors and other content producers.
The four components are as follows.
Experience
Experience is the newest characteristic that has only recently been added.
When considering Experience, this focuses on human experience (most importantly, first-hand human experience).
- What have you done?
- What was someone’s experience with you?
Experience differentiates you as an attorney from software that can generate content (AI).
AI tools are trained from external data and generate material based on what they have learned. They can produce content about the experiences of others (which were programmed into their models), but they did not experience them.
Editor’s Note:
The roles of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools in SEO and Content Development will be addressed in more detail below in the section, Looking To SEO’s Future in the Legal Space.
For the purposes of E-E-A-T and content quality, always keep in mind that search engines are continuously evolving to ensure the most authentic engagements for their users.
As AI advances, search engine algorithms will adapt to differentiate so be sure that your content accurately represents you.
Expertise
Not to be confused with Experience, Expertise is your knowledge, understanding, training, and grasp of the topic or topics about which your legal website contains.
This is a metric where AI tools are strong because their Expertise in a knowledge area is only limited by their inputs.
As humans, our strength lies in the application of what we know in valuable ways so be sure that the content you publish displays that.
Authoritativeness
Authoritativeness relates to how you and your website are perceived within the scope of a particular topic.
- Do you cover it holistically and completely? (Completeness)
- Do others look to you as a source of information? (Links, Mentions, etc)
When measuring authority, search engines attempt to identify the best candidate most likely to answer their user’s query.
The more you become “the one someone would ask” if they could only ask one person; the higher your authority score will rise.
Trust
Trust is exactly what you would think it to be! It is the fourth metric but is largely influenced by the three previous ones.
Make sure that your legal website gives accurate, timely, and unbiased information about the topics that you cover.
Publishing content that is “spammy” and low value diminishes your Trust score greatly.
Remember – Search Engines exist to satisfy users’ queries as quickly as possible (preferably on their first click).
Special Consideration Affecting Legal Content
There is a second acronym and concept that affects Legal Content (as well as other industries with powerful influence on users’ lives).
This idea is labeled Your-Money-Your-Life (YMYL).
Google, Bing, and the other search engines take people’s data, financials, and meaningful life decisions very importantly!
The content on your legal website will face greater analysis, scrutiny, and review than another website that sells tennis shoes.
Again, be sure that your website contains accurate and unbiased information published in the best interests of your target audience.
2. Tailoring SEO Strategies for the Legal Niche
Beyond the basics of Search Engine Optimization for a Legal Website, there are additional activities and topics that make up an effective strategy. The following areas supplement your existing work identifying keywords, generating content, and addressing technical aspects of your website.
Conducting a Competitive Analysis
The legal industry is a very competitive space. Your airwaves and roadways have seen massive increases in marketing budgets in recent years. Messaging for small-to-medium-sized law firms is rapidly growing within the digital arena (search engines, social media, etc) as a mechanism to compete against larger competitors with much-deeper pockets.
Identify Your Audience
As previously shared:
It is a targeted group made up of individuals or organizations with a similar set of desirable characteristics, sharing a common affinity among them, and with whom you can build a relationship.
One of the best sources of information about your target audience is your current clients. Do not overlook this already captive wellspring of knowledge and data.
If your legal office does not have an intentional follow-up process with current clients, former clients, and even former prospects who (for whatever reason) did not choose your practice, take this opportunity to create and execute one.
Take the time to get details on the following:
- What problems led them to seek legal counsel?
- How and where did the prospective client become aware of your practice?
- What sources did they use to help them to decide on the next steps?
- Are there things that could have been done differently to guide them to a different decision?
- How could their experience (whether with you or a competitor) have been improved?
- What types of content and material would have been valuable on a legal website as they were working through their situation?
Use the answers to these questions (and others) to guide the further evolution of your legal website into an authoritative resource for your audience.
Identify Your Competitors
In addition to your Audience, the most successful Legal Practices invest time and resources into Competitive Research.
Reviewing the legal websites, keyword strategies, and published content of other attorneys is a good starting point for developing your own.
Develop insights and strategies by watching the actions of similar-sized practices working in your niche; watch more prominent industry leaders observing perspectives on client behaviors and overall market trends.
Identify Your Strategy On Your Field
Using what you learned about your audience and your competition, define the objectives and goals for how your practice and your legal website will operate. Done effectively, you will design a competitive space within which you will operate.
In their book Blue Ocean Strategy, authors Kim and Mauborgne recommend identifying market spaces available for growth.
Instead of letting the environment define your strategy, craft a strategy that defines your environment.
Take this opportunity to set the competitive battleground on your home field where you hold unique advantages.
Whether that represents services or processes targeted for your audience or messaging focused on their specific problems, the more you define success on your own terms, the most likely you are to achieve it!
Link-Building Strategies
Specific to defined Link-Building Strategies, these are almost entirely focused on generating external links to your legal website from others.
To create an effective strategy, you need to invest time and resources into each of these.
Content Production
Content Production relates to the processes that you follow to develop materials for your legal website. As previously noted, you should be focused on satisfying the queries of your intended audience.
The more you understand their needs and position your capability to address them, the more effective your content will resonate (and ultimately rank/generate traffic).
Content Promotion
The most comprehensive material on any subject that is not seen by an audience has little value (to either you or your audience).
No one can link to a legal website that they have not yet found.
Your efforts promoting your own content (be it social sharing or even paid advertising) is an effective tool for “priming the pump” and attracting attention to your materials before search engines might organically serve it.
Content Sharing
Humans naturally share worthwhile things!
If you effectively develop content and have a consistent process for sharing it with your audience, they will naturally share it with theirs. This widens your exposure and signals search engines that it is worthy of wider distribution across their channels.
Editor’s Note:
If you invested the time and resources to develop top-notch content, do not be shy about asking others to share it on your behalf!
- Ask clients to share your content or share their stories.
- Ask other websites that might link to a competitor related to a topic that you cover if they would be willing to share your link as well.
Local SEO for Lawyers
While not all businesses need a Local SEO strategy, attorneys and law offices representing clients in a localized service area absolutely need one! For most smaller-to-medium-sized practices, this represents a prime opportunity to compete against larger, regional players.
In addition to claiming your Google Business Profile, here are some additional steps that you can take to enhance your localized SEO results.
Positive Client Reviews
Google, Bing, and other search engines value reviews! It is one way that your practice’s expertise is highlighted.
Where and to the extent possible, develop a recurring process of requesting client reviews.
While you may not have the size and scope of other practices, the personalized service and positive reactions of satisfied clients are strong ranking factors.
Localized Content and Messaging
If your legal practice is more closely aligned with a particular area of service, use that to your advantage by focusing your content more tightly on that area as well.
If you primarily serve clients in defined cities, counties, or regions, be sure that is a focal part of your message.
Community associations to schools and other organizations will help make your content (and your legal practice) more relatable to the clients whom you intend to serve.
Competitor Gaps
Often, larger practices that target a wider audience will overlook topics or keywords important to a segment of the audience.
Since you are more knowledgeable about local events and your local area, be sure to target gaps of which your competitors are unaware.
Directory Listings
Most locales have lists and directories for professional niches. Attorneys are no different.
Be sure that your law firm is listed on those directories and be absolutely sure that your Name, Address, Phone Number, etc. are accurate and consistent across them.
If you find one that is incorrect, make an immediate effort to get it corrected.
Localized Landing Pages
If your legal website has landing pages where clients can connect with you, consider creating locally-focused landing pages for clients.
Using these, you can target messaging specific to their unique affiliations and interests.
Added Tip:
These same localized landing pages can serve a dual purpose for your targeted paid advertising as well!
Breaking down your paid advertising based on geographic factors can lead to cost savings and greater return on investment versus untargeted efforts.
Mobile Optimization
As mentioned earlier, users interact with your legal websites on their mobile devices more than ever. That trend is unlikely to change as performance and capabilities expand.
Based on this, the mobile experience is a growing ranking factor for search engines. To that end, here are some suggestions to ensure you optimize for these users.
- Check to see how your content appears on smaller screens
- Pay specific attention to images and infographics to ensure that you are delivering your intended message
- Where you share other links, calls-to-action, or next steps, make sure that they are clear to users within this segment of your audience
3. Synergy of Content Marketing and SEO
Content Marketing and Search Engine Optimization are related topics for legal websites.
Both utilize information and materials targeted to a defined audience to attract attention and ultimately acquire new clients. As part of your overall digital strategy, improvements to one can strengthen the other making both more effective.
Below we will review ways that they work together.
Why Content Marketing Is Important to Legal Websites
Content Marketing (and your practices around Content Development) are important for your Legal Website because it is the content that formulates a relationship between your Practice and potential clients.
Strategies around keywords, topics, and technical aspects of your website serve to help uncover and attract an audience, but it is your content that makes a connection and fosters a relationship.
While SEO techniques can identify what you talk about, how you talk about it and the things you say make up your unique voice.
Make sure that your content answers questions that they have and does so in the best ways for them to understand and engage with it.
Ultimately, it is your content that helps move an audience member to a prospect and a prospect to a client.
Optimizing Your Practice's Content For SEO
When optimizing your content for SEO, keep these things in mind.
- Be direct. Titles and introductions need to speak directly to the question that attracted them. If they have to hunt for the answer, they will most likely abandon your website for the next best option.
- Be conversational. Humans prefer to interact with humans. You have a unique lens through which you see the world. Your ideal clients may or may not completely share it, but they will almost certainly relate to it.
- Be authentic. If your topic is important enough for a user to search for it, there is likely an emotional connection to their need. Let your emotion and connection to it show just as much as your knowledge about it!
- Be supportive. Most people want to be enabled; few of us enjoy being taught! Where possible, provide them with the understanding and tools to find solutions. Guide them along their journey!
By developing your content targeting these objectives, you will optimize both attracting attention as well as engaging with them while they are on your legal website.
Integrating Social Media and SEO Strategies
Another way to extend your influence and capability is to align your practice’s social media accounts and pages with your search engine optimization strategies.
Do not overlook including your targeted keywords and messaging as a consistent part of your posts.
Members of your Legal Website audience will likely find and connect with your posts and material on social media. Likewise, your connections on social media are equally likely to navigate to your website to investigate further.
Take the time to develop consistent strategies targeting search optimization and social interaction enabling the synergy between the two to strengthen your relationship with your audience.
Editor’s Note:
There are numerous ways to produce content. Whether it be templates, keyword research, or creating a strategy targeting your local audience, check out this post for Tips on Writing Effective Content for your Legal Website.
4. Monitoring and Analyzing SEO Results
What gets measured, gets managed.
You can find other quotes similar to Drucker’s above from a multitude of sources. Fundamentally, if it matters, you need metrics to measure it. It is only through the comparison of results versus expectations and changes over time that you justify an investment of money and resources.
SEO is no different and as a longer-term initiative for your legal practice, how you classify, measure, and report results is an important element of your digital strategy.
Properly implemented, analytics data from your legal website provides insights that guide and help prioritize future strategy decisions.
Introduction to SEO Analytics
SEO Analytics represents a host of different measures that help you score the effectiveness of your strategy.
Depending on what outcomes are most important to your legal practice, metrics can answer a number of different questions.
- What sections, segments, and pieces of content draw the most traffic to the website?
- From where do the best clients come?
- What parts of the website generate the most engagement?
- Which posts generate the most external links?
- How are my rankings (for keywords and/or topics) changing relative to other law firms?
Analysis of your SEO data can answer these and many other questions.
Combined with techniques like A-B Testing, good SEO metrics help chart a roadmap for your practice’s website.
Editor’s Note:
When getting started, choose a few (no more than 3-5) measures that you want to use.
SEO Analytics and the metrics that you can track are a huge topic that can very quickly become overwhelming.
Remember: The more characteristics that you measure and change, the less fidelity and certainty you will have about the impact of any single one!
Key SEO Metrics for Your Legal Website
Here are a few metrics to consider.
Website Visitors
The number of Visitors is one of the easiest metrics to calculate. It can also be one of the biggest “vanity” (i.e. least-value) metrics that you can report.
You will likely have some measures related to your visitor count. Be sure that you are differentiating unique visitors from repeat visitors.
Characteristics like where they are from and how they found your website help you learn more about them.
Likewise, measuring the amount of time that visitors spend on your legal website and what they do while they are on it grants invaluable insight into new things that you can add to it !
New Clients
While Visitors are cool, it is Clients who pay the bills for your Law Firm!
The number of Visitors who visit your “Contact Us” page, call your Office Phone Number or even subscribe to your Practice’s newsletter is a more motivating metric for your Partners than the number of Visitors who read a blog post.
Think of how a website visitor makes the transition from an interested party to a signed client.
Metrics comparing users along that journey are key insights into the real dollar impact that your legal website produces.
Editor’s Note:
For users who have completed that journey (aka – they have transitioned from Visitor to Client), do not miss the opportunity to ask them what attracted them to your website or what led them to become a client.
Does your Law Firm ask these kinds of standard questions as a part of your initial Client Interview process? If not, why not?
Does your Law Firm have a process for asking related questions to interested parties who did not choose to become clients? If not, why would you not ask them?
Rankings
There are a plethora of different rankings that you can measure for your legal website.
Positionally, where does your website rank on a search engine results page (SERP) overall?
Where does your Law Firm rank on the Google Maps portion of a SERP? This ranking is directly correlated to Local SEO efforts. (see image to left)
Are you improving or declining overall?
How are your rankings growing or shrinking for the legal (or location-based) keywords and topics that you target?
Backlinks
As mentioned earlier, external links to your legal website have a tremendous impact on your search engine rankings.
- Are you consistently generating them organically (i.e. another website links to yours without you directly asking)?
- Do you have an active Link Building strategy? Is it effective?
- Do you have an intentional process for expanding your Internal Linking between your content? If not, do you not think that your efforts to cross-promote your material will not help promote it externally?
Pro Tip:
Using SEO Tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush, Ubersuggest, etc, you can collect and measure these types of metrics for your competitors as well!
Reviewing your metrics in relation to theirs tells a powerful story to decision-makers and highlights your knowledge of your legal market.
5. Looking to SEO's Future in the Legal Space
Due to the ever-increasing cost of legal advertising and the hyper-competitive nature of advertising in general, Search Engine Optimization (due to its ability to produce organic results over time) can only grow as we move into the future.
Long-term assets (like a legal website) that serve as an attractant and gathering place for your target audience interested in your legal services will only get more valuable.
A good SEO strategy needs to be a part of your Law Firm’s marketing strategy.
Emerging Trends (and How They Will Impact Your Strategy)
Competition is at a all-time high; Automation has never been easier. "Set-It and Forget-It" techniques are working less and less because there are too many people trying to make a lot doing very little!
Impactful trends for Legal Website SEO will focus on a few key areas.
Fundamentally, most of them will relate to the quote above where we will see more and more content published with more and more of it generated by automated means.
Focus time on these topics.
First Person Experience
As mentioned earlier, Google’s addition of the E-Experience attribute for its E-E-A-T quality standard is a big change in search engine technologies.
The second item below (Artificial Intelligence) has so quickly become a disruptive force in marketing overall that this change by search engines became necessary.
Keep in mind the salient point that search engines will continue to evolve in ways that more-highly value experience over knowledge. Computers can more quickly catalog information, but Humans have experience utilizing it!
Artificial Intelligence
AI in SEO and Content is a reality in the industry and will equally be so for legal websites as well. While technology is limited from an Experience standpoint, there is no denying the powerful opportunities available (and coming) using AI and Machine Learning (ML).
One of the best ways to utilize these new tools for current benefit and future-proof value is to blend their usage.
- Combining tools (ChatGPT for outlines and Bard or Bing for the development of specific content or background data) offers efficiency (speed) with measures of effectiveness (more conversational).
- Using tools for content ideas or production that are subsequently edited for voice, tone, and messaging helps create a more polished, user-focused finished product.
- Automated auditing and topic analysis (both individually and compared with competitors) can help identify untapped gaps that your legal website can exploit.
Keep in mind that these new technologies are tools. They hone and augment our skills; they are not a replacement for them!
Audience Targeted Content
For long-term success in SEO, never forget your objective is the audience (who are using search engines to find answers to their questions).
Your primary intent may be to attract visitors or (ultimately) acquire new clients, but keep in mind that those platforms on which you operate are informational, not transactional. Different than advertising (which is paid intent to generate sales), SEO and content are attraction based on interest and association.
If your content is too promotional or focused on sales, it is unlikely to rank well over time as other legal websites do a better job of focusing on your audience.
Voice Search
50% of the US population use voice search features daily.
As reliance on and usage of mobile devices increases, so does the adoption of Voice Search.
It is easier to speak rather than type in the same ways that it was not long ago that typing eclipsed writing.
Interestingly, in this infographic (see right) from Oberlo.com, checking the weather is the most executed voice search by users.
Of greater interest for legal websites is action #2 (Local “Near Me” searches).
As mentioned in the Local SEO for Lawyers subsection, ranking locally within your service area is quite possibly one of the most important steps to start your search optimization journey (especially as Voice Search continues to grow).
![Infographic from Oberlo.com - Breakdown percentages of Voice Searches (credit - Oberlo.com [https://www.oberlo.com/blog/voice-search-statistics])](https://sirusdigital.b-cdn.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/oberlo-voice-search-statistics.webp)
- Keep in mind that Voice Search is often more exclusive than even the Google Maps (“Local Top 3”) options on a search engine results page.
- Organically, top of the fold on Page 1 of Google gets better than 70% of clicks.
For Voice Search, there is one result (the answer)!
Geek Moment:
Transparently, I was going to put an image here of either Duncan MacLeod (“of the Clan MacLeod”) saying “There can be only One” or Dr. Strange holding up a single finger prior to the Battle of Titan.
Both would have fit, but I would love to hear which one YOU would have preferred to see here.
Shoot me an email (david_at_sirusdigital.com) with your choice and reasons why.
Evolution of Algorithms and Practices
You always can't time things perfectly.
Neil Patel of NP Digital is a digital marketing wizard and has forgotten more about SEO and content than most will ever know.
While it is unlikely that his quote above was meant for SEO and search algorithms specifically, it is wholly accurate about their development and changes over time.
It is impossible to time things perfectly as it relates to search technologies. Search Engines, while dependent upon content producers for results that their users demand, are perpetually at war with those trying to “hack” their algorithms to boost their rankings in relation to others. Algorithms, rankings, and factors change continuously.
However, you can build and implement an SEO strategy for your legal website if you keep your primary focus on satisfying the singular need of the search engines themselves.
They exist to satisfy queries expressed by their uses!
The more that your legal website identifies the type of users that you wish to attract (your target audience) and addresses their needs with most valuable and engaging content, the higher you will rank.
Starting Your Law Firm's SEO Journey
Search Engine Optimization is not easy and it constantly changes. However, do not let that dissuade you from starting the process for your legal website.
Few things are less engaging for users than a website that behaves like a brochure left atop the checkout at your local restaurant. If that is your site, here are a few quick steps that you can take to improve it.
- Make a list of the services that your practice offers. Which ones bring in the most revenue/produce the most profit? Does your legal site communicate those services that you would rather do?
- Make a list of the characteristics of your ideal client. Why would they choose your firm to represent them? Are the keywords and topics attract that audience?
- Rank the areas that you serve. Does your content focus on those locations in such a way that it is obviously important to your firm?
- Identify the “human” process gaps within your practice that will best support your physical (and automated) work improving your legal website.
Interestingly, each of these represents the work that goes into search engine optimization. They are the ways that you infuse your legal website as a representative of your practice.
The more that you make a user feel that your website and content were made “for them”, the more likely they are to be attracted to your legal website, engage with it, and ultimately become a client.
It is something that is absolutely worth your time and that you are most capable of doing.
If you need some help or have additional questions, feel free to shoot me an email (david_at_sirusdigital.com).
