To succeed as a lawyer, you don’t just need to have top-notch negotiating skills, ample legal knowledge, and a flawless track record. You need to know how to market yourself as well. And in this day and age, you need lawyer SEO services to have a good online presence.
Now while SEO isn’t rocket science, it’s still best not to go at it on your own. Instead, you should partner up with great SEO companies and focus on what you do best: lawyering. So if you’re an attorney and you want your firm to enjoy quality lawyer SEO services, then better check out the guide below.
Tips to Find the Best Lawyer SEO Services
First things first: You need to list out the SEO companies near your area. You can also consider adding agencies from farther areas, as long as they can deliver results. To ensure you find the best provider of quality lawyer SEO services, try the following tips:
Determine Your Goals
As King Solomon once put it, “Without vision, the people perish.” You need to get clear on your goals if you want to enjoy the best lawyer SEO services. And no, having vague general objectives like “increase website traffic” and “create quality content” won’t do. You need to be as specific as possible when determining your goals. That way, you can set realistic expectations and choose the right company to partner with.
Decide on Your Budget
Like it or not, quality lawyer SEO services don’t come cheap. So before outsourcing it, best prepare your budget for it. Know what you want to achieve and set the right goals (as discussed earlier), then consider your best ROI options. Once you’ve done these two, allocate a specific budget and stick to it. This will help you prevent your law firm from needlessly bleeding out cash.
Read the Reviews and Testimonials
As you probably already know, you need to do background checks on the SEO companies you’re considering. One simple way you can do this is by reading what previous clients say about them. Believe it or not, reading reviews and testimonials can help you get a glimpse of the quality of an agency’s SEO services, as well as their work ethics. So while you create a shortlist of companies you want to work with, best pass by their website’s reviews and testimonials section. Don’t hire an agency or specialist that doesn’t have that!
Look for Google Certifications
Another way to vet an SEO agency is by checking if they have Google certifications. Working with Google-certified professionals ensures your law firm becomes well-versed with Google Search and the search engine’s best practices. It will also allow you to enjoy the level of care Google requires. More importantly, it will help you stay up to date with the latest trends in the SEO industry. So as you browse an SEO company’s website, look for the Google badge that signifies their certification.
Contact Them Via Phone
In this day and age, contacting someone via phone can seem old-fashioned. However, phoning an SEO agency is a great way to gauge their quality. Even today, the ability to answer the phone and explain the services they offer is important for any company. If you call the SEO agency’s phone number and you get ignored or redirected to a voice mail or chatbot, then best move on and find someone else.
Check Their Portfolio
Alternatively, you can take a look at an SEO agency’s portfolio. Inspect if they have successfully optimized a previous client’s website for search engines. Test if the website shows up (and check their rankings) by typing their keywords in the Search box. Doing these and other things will help you determine if the company can deliver the lawyer SEO services you need.
Ask About Their SEO Processes
When all else fails, you can simply ask the SEO agency about their processes. Quality marketing and advertising involves properly doing research, gathering all the necessary data, and knowing their client’s market. The SEO industry works similarly. So check if the agency you’re considering can at least provide online growth opportunities, detect potential campaign roadblocks, and reverse engineer your competition.
Tips to Build a Great SEO Strategy
Through the list above, you’ll be able to find the best SEO agency for your law firm. But once you’ve found the right company to work with, you can proceed with creating the best SEO strategy to implement for your firm. Below are a few pointers to help you do just that!
Prioritize the Right KPIs
Key performance indicators (KPIs) help you keep your objectives in mind when implementing an SEO campaign. If you want your form to enjoy premium lawyer SEO services, then you need to prioritize the right KPIs. But with so many of these indicators clamoring for your attention, picking the best ones can be quite challenging. To solve this, choose only the KPIs that follow the SMART model. That way, you can make sure it’s realistic, measurable, and attainable.
Analyze Your Website’s Build
Once you’ve determined the best KPIs for your law firm, proceed with analyzing your website’s setup. This means checking the quality of your site’s platform, its current web design, and its overall user-friendliness, among other things. If you find your website lacking in any one of these, then you need to fix these issues before you begin your campaign’s optimization process. Otherwise, your campaign will have little effect and your firm won’t improve its rankings on search engines.
Audit Your Site’s Current SEO
After you’ve finished improving your website’s build, you can begin your SEO campaign. And the best way to jumpstart your campaign is by performing an audit on your site’s current SEO stats. Doing this will help you know what areas needed improvement regarding on-page SEO. It also determines the strengths and weaknesses of your off-page SEO. So take a look at your page inventory, find any accessibility issues, and evaluate your on-site optimization through tools like Ahrefs, Moz, and SEMRush.
Perform Keyword and Topic Research
As soon as you’ve gauged your website’s current SEO status, go ahead and do your keyword and topic research. Best perform the topic research first, as it will help you determine the best, most realistic keywords to target. Begin by typing the topic phrase on Google. Then browse the results and open the first non-advertised website you encounter in a new tab. Check the quality of their content before entering the site’s URL into your favorite keyword research tool to extract the keywords.
Build Backlinks
Next, you need to come up with various ways to get quality backlinks for your website. No SEO strategy can succeed without backlinks. Aside from driving more traffic to your website, it’s also a surefire way to catapult your pages’ rankings to the top. Just make sure you stick with white-hat techniques so as to avoid getting in trouble with Google. Some backlink building techniques you can try include guest posting, Skyscraper technique, and manual outreach.
Create Quality Content
Simultaneously, you need to create quality written pieces for your law firm’s website. Content is crucial for any SEO campaign. Without it, Google won’t be able to index your pages properly, thus negatively affecting your rankings. Quality content can also drive traffic and improve your online presence, especially if your articles are fun, interesting, and relevant. So make sure your site is loaded with good written works.
Monitor Your Campaign’s Performance
Lastly, you need to constantly watch over your SEO campaign and track its progress. That way, you can tell whether or not it’s working. This is where the KPIs you set come in. By focusing on these indicators, you can determine which tactics to replace or maintain, as well as save your firm significant amounts of time, money, and resources.
Best Tools to Improve Your Firm’s SEO
Aside from creating and executing the right SEO campaign, you need to arm yourself with the best tools if you want to enjoy premium lawyer SEO services. These include:
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is the gold standard as far as SEO tools go. Used to analyze a website’s keyword rankings, link profile, and overall SEO health, it can help you significantly improve your rankings on Google and other search engines.
SEMRush
On the other hand, SEMRush can aid you in your keyword research and backlink building. Aside from providing you the keywords used by your competitors, it will help you find new link building opportunities. What’s more, it’s a great tool if you want to regularly perform SEO audits.
MozPro
Meanwhile, MozPro offers powerful tools like Keyword Explorer and Link Explorer to help you improve your keyword research and banklink outreach. The best part is, MozPro is extremely beginner-friendly, allowing marketing-novice lawyers like you to enjoy its tools and benefits.
Google Trends
With SEO constantly evolving, you need to stay on top of the latest trends to ensure your firm maintains a good ranking. Through Google Trends, you’ll have a trend tracking tool to see what everyone is searching and to check how trendy your website currently is.
Screaming Frog
To monitor and improve your on-site SEO, you need to invest in Screaming Frog. This software provides an SEO spider that will crawl through your pages to detect any issues. It will also gather enough on-site data that will help you make better-informed decisions during the campaign.
Get Quality Lawyer SEO Services
Attorneys need SEO if they want to thrive and succeed in this digital aid. Through the guide above, you’ll be able to enjoy premium lawyer SEO services, find the right agency to partner with, come up with the best campaign, and arm yourself with great tools.
