Optimizing a lawyer's website for search engines, also known as law firm SEO, is a significant part of any law firm's marketing plan. Developing, executing, and managing a strong SEO strategy takes time, energy, and technical expertise that most busy attorneys don't have.
When your law firm partners with Twofold, our marketing experts manage all of your digital campaign features to guarantee you see the results you want. Visualize having less stress, more time, a better return on investment, and more clients from the web.
If you are eager to take the next step with your marketing plan:
Search engine optimization can generally be described as the science of getting individual pages from your law firm's website to show at the top of search engine results pages (SERPS) whenever a user searches for a specific term. For law firms, SEO is an art as much as it is a science, and experts must have creative and technical skills.
A focused SEO marketing strategy for law firms is one of the best ways to get increased visitors, leads, and more cases from the web.
When correctly maintained, a law firm's website and SEO campaign can be one of its most significant sources of new cases and leads, and it can bring an excellent return on investment (ROI) to the firm. An SEO campaign that isn't correctly handled can be a consistent source of work, frustration, and stress, not to mention wasted time and money.
Successful law firm SEO campaigns will:
Hiring a business to help with your website can feel similar to taking your car to the repairman, in that you must trust their expertise and hope for the best. You may not understand everything that is done to get your vehicle operating smoothly, but you absolutely should be asking questions, so you know exactly what you are paying for.
While our results and client reviews speak for themselves, the experts at Twofold are always ready to bring you "under the hood" of your marketing plan. We are glad to talk about every aspect of your campaign by explaining how we administer local optimization, technical ("on-site") optimization, and off-site optimization. The Twofold marketing team is also happy to personally answer questions about why we are doing what we are doing.
Effective SEO for attorneys is not a static process. It takes regular monitoring from the moment of launch, which means we evaluate and adjust sites continuously to provide visitors with the information they are seeking and help firms reach their goals.
From the time your website launches and for as long as you partner with Twofold, our team will guarantee your site supports attorney SEO best practices and Google Webmaster Guidelines for on-site optimization. A few of the significant areas incorporated as part of our SEO structure:
Links, content, mobile-friendliness, page speeds, titles, and the various other SEO aspects that are quality-checked by Twofold for our clients share one primary point: the visitor.
You recognize them as potential clients and current clients - the searchers who view your site in hopes of obtaining legal help. How thoroughly our lawyer marketing campaigns work for clients depends on the user experience. To be precise, users need to find relevant information, efficiently delivered to them, and optimized for the devices they are using.
Our digital media specialists and content experts are devoted to practicing a people-first strategy to lawyer marketing. We work with numerous law firms and attorneys, giving us insights into what will work — and just as important, what won't work — in law firm marketing online.
Our guiding belief is that technical SEO for attorneys should never get in the way of the visitor experience. We believe that your prospective clients are the most critical factor in any decision, and we strive to guarantee they find your site and reach out to get help if needed.
At Twofold, we get all kinds of questions from lawyers and legal marketers about SEO and different online marketing projects. While the most reputable law firm SEO results are based on multiple components of search engine algorithms, the info below is intended to give you further insight into how law firm SEO works.
Google, the world's prominent search engine, is estimated to use nearly 200 ranking factors to determine how a site ranks for a given search query. The business declares that SEO is about executing minute adjustments and incremental enhancements to your law firm's website that affect your site's user experience and performance in organic search engine results.
It's vital to note how Google relates user experience and search results. Many of Google's most notable changes to the way it ranks law firm websites concentrate on the user or the person searching. Google algorithms (the complex formulas it uses to arrange website rankings) measure website quality, as explained in their company memo.
Google algorithms are created by people trying to put themselves in users' shoes to determine which pages/sites they view as high-quality and which they see as low-quality. Likewise, SEO for lawyers is the work of online marketing experts. They use technical tools and their knowledge of consumer response to determine what searchers want and how they can implement it.
Strong search engine marketing for attorneys is not merely the method of meeting the particular standards defined by Google. Expert legal marketing professionals can keep pace by also focusing on the user experience.
SEO concerns optimizing your website to get higher rankings and extra traffic from organic search results. Search engine marketing (SEM) goes past SEO and utilizes paid options to produce more visibility and traffic. It includes techniques such as law firm PPC promotions with Google Ads and Bing Ads.
Off-site SEO is associated with the promotional methods that are used to increase traffic and rankings of your website. This involves link outreach for valuable content that you have on your site.
It depends on how useful your content is. If you are posting just because you think regular posting is good for SEO, then continuous blogging isn't going to improve your rankings. This could potentially hurt your rankings in the long run. If you have a website that produces thin, boring content with limited views, Google may recognize your site as low quality and lower your SERPs rank.
Still, if you are focused on producing content that stimulates readers, gets traffic, is shared on social media, and is often linked to, blogging may serve to give you a constant stream of new leads.
It all comes down to the quality and relevancy of the directories. Don't fret about wasting time or energy on non-specific directories. Instead, concentrate on getting registered in industry-relevant lists that have viewers that could turn into leads for you. Directories that can produce good traffic and qualified prospects are great ones to consider.
We hear about this difficulty occasionally. Some SEO businesses may preserve the rights to your design, content, or even your domain, so be careful when weighing your choices. Others may use restrictive platforms and say that websites can't be granted to you without notable costs to transfer the site to a different host.
Regrettably, if you sign a contract and accept similar terms, there may not be many choices outside of starting fresh. In most circumstances, if you're looking to change vendors, you're not getting the results you desire. A new look for your website and some expertly written and optimized content is precisely what you need. At Twofold, the websites and content that we create always belong to our clients. We don't hold your content or website hostage.
From a brand administration viewpoint, it may be a good idea to secure your firm's name in various top-level domain URLs. From an SEO view, there is likely little difference between .com, .law, .lawyer, and others. Don't assume that by establishing your website on a .law or .lawyer domain will make it easier to rank. You should still have a great design, well-thought-out website construction, high-quality content, and authoritative links to have the best chances to rank strongly.
Backlinks are when a website has a hyperlink to another site. Backlinks are one of the various quality signals that Google uses to decide what pages should rank for a given keyword or phrase. Several years ago, whoever had the most backlinks won. Now, it is much more about quality than quantity, with high-authority links equaling a signal to search engines that there is something important on the page that is being linked to.
First, are you sure you have excellent content? When is the last time you checked your analytics? Are viewers reaching your site and leaving instantly? Are visitors turning into new leads? If you genuinely have excellent content and it is indicated by how viewers interact with your website, you probably won't need as many links as you might think to rank well.
Google wants to rank sites that answer the searchers' queries. If your website has excellent content, you have a much better shot at ranking favorably, but receiving a few high-quality links to your pages will help your results.
The center of producing valuable, actionable content solves a problem, presents insights, and leads people to their desired goal. Start sharing content with your audience and others related to your industry. If you've made it your goal to produce value, instead of only attempting to get links, you won't have to worry about black-hat or gray-hat link building tactics that could get you a Google punishment or negatively influence your results.
Your NAP is the proper Name, Address, and Phone Number of your company. Various business data aggregators capture and distribute this information to other businesses. When deciding how you rank in local results, Google examines the web for mentions of your company name, address, website URL, phone number, and other data points. It then relates that information to other data sources, including the major data providers. The more comfortable you make it for search engines to discover the correct data, the easier it is to rank in your area.
A citation is a mention of your business Name, Address, and Phone Number (NAP) on another site. Citations can arise on any website. Law firms may have quotes on relevant sites such as Yelp, Bing, Avvo, and Facebook. The more high-quality citations your site has, the better the likelihood of getting traffic and visibility from Google's map results.
Duplicate content can be a significant issue when it's on your website. Years ago, when Google published its Panda update, it was scanning for sites that were weak in quality from a content viewpoint. As the algorithms have developed, they have become somewhat picky regarding what they incorporate in their index. If you have several pages on your site that cover the same topic or use other filler types, you could experience a decrease in web traffic.
Moreover, if your website includes large sections of content that also appear on other sites, it could negatively affect your site's ability to rank. Notably, if your site is not recognized as the official version of the content, you could be dropping out on vital search traffic if users are sent to a separate website. Make sure the content on your web pages and posts is original and valuable to your viewers.
Below are some basic metrics that you'll want to observe to ensure your campaign moves in the right direction:
Site Performance
SEO Metrics
Social Metrics
It all depends on where you're beginning compared to those ranking higher than you. If you have a brand-new site and your competitors have been marketing for years, you should be ready to accept that you have some catching up. Depending on the strength of the competition in the market, the expenditure of time and resources into your approach, and many other factors, catching up could take several months or years. If you have an established website with genuine traffic and suitable rankings, the time to see results will undoubtedly be reduced.
References and reviews are significant pieces to how Google ranks your website locally. Reviews can serve as evidence to your prospects that your firm will provide excellent service. The more reviews you gain on various platforms like Google, Yelp, and Facebook, the higher quality signals you'll send back to Google and your prospective clients.
Getting reviews from satisfied clients can be difficult without the proper methods in place. There are lots of ways to get more online reviews. Merely asking your clients is an excellent place to start. A few different ideas include:
Twofold has resources to help you on your way. Remember to keep all of your practices in line with relevant bar regulations and review platform policies.
Provide value to your community, such as:
The better known you are in the community, the easier it will be to dominate online.
If you trust your content's writing to someone outside your firm, we suggest obtaining someone who:
At Twofold, our content team consists of qualified law firm marketing directors and legal marketing professionals who have extensive expertise crafting high-quality, conversion-focused content for law firms.
TV ads can have a fantastic effect on the amount of brand searches people in your area perform to get to your site. Google prefers brands because they already have a level of trust associated. When more viewers are searching for your brand, it can make it easier to get ranked for other words online.
If you showed up to court in a t-shirt and sweat pants, would the judge, jury, client, or peers take you seriously? In the same regard, if the pictures and videos that you are applying on your site are low quality, old, unprofessional, or poorly lit, your visitors are inclined not to take you seriously.
If you seek to get a new design executed for your website, your firm should be ready to invest in having high-quality photos and videos produced. High-quality media will impress your visitors and appropriately represent who you are.
If your law firm is getting started with SEO, some keywords are likely too competitive to go after right away. In most circumstances, you're going to get much more traction by concentrating on long-tail search phrases. These are defined as searches that have three, four, or more words in them. These phrases have less search traffic in general but are easier to rank for and will produce a boost in traffic quicker than merely focusing on the high-volume (and often high cost-per-click) phrases that everyone seems to go after.
Some long-tail searches may have more associated purposes than other more extensive volume searches. Focusing on the long-tail may also give you opportunities to rank in the search results' featured snippet segment.
Only because you're ranking well today doesn't mean it will continue that way. Everyone is competing for the top spots, and if you let off the gas when you're close to the finish line, your competition could pass you. Legal SEO isn't only about getting ranked. It's also about making sure you stay on top with your lawyer marketing strategy.
Google makes adjustments to its algorithm frequently and doesn't always let people know what they have changed. You may bring in experts to help build a strong case for your clients, and in the same way, you should be sure that your marketing is being monitored by experts who are passionate about growing your business.
At Twofold, we believe that giving an exceptional user experience for your potential clients is essential. However, our team delivers much more than that.
In addition to designing stunning websites with high-quality content, we also work on the technical aspects of lawyer web optimization. Our SEO experts maintain your website's backlink profiles, tags, click-through-rates, titles, keyword tactics, meta descriptions, and "off-site" metrics. We handle all of the time-consuming aspects so that you can focus on running your law firm.
Twofold adds benefits in ways that other SEO vendors don't, and we provide results that you can measure. Learn more about how Twofold is uniquely positioned to help your law firm succeed - contact us for a free consultation.
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