4 Tips for Lawyers to Earn Leads and Traffic Through SEO

About 21.9 percent of prospective clients search for a lawyer online. This is according to Lawyernomics. Robert Ramirez, a senior SEO analyst for Bruce Clay, Inc., presented his ideas in his Legal Marketing Series. Even legal firms need to optimize their online presence if they want to have more leads and traffic, and SEO plays a big part in it. In it, he outlined four tips on how to the convert prospective legal clients from online searchers.

1. Using local keywords

Lead conversion does not happen overnight so your digital marketing expectations should be set accordingly. It will take years to rank highly in search engines, as it is a very competitive marketplace. The first thing to do is beef up local presence. For instance, you specialize in personal injury. Your target practice area is the entire Southern California and your base is in Thousand Oaks, Ventura County, which is adjacent to Los Angeles County. Start off by using local keywords, such as “Thousand Oaks law firm,” “Thousand Oaks accident lawyer” or ”Personal injury attorney Thousand Oaks.”  With these local keywords, you are targeting online clients around your base of operation. You are a new law firm operating in the neighborhood and need to be noticed. In your long term digital marketing plan, you widen your target areas, setting your sights on capturing traffic and leads from Ventura County, then Los Angeles County and the rest of Southern California.

2. Ensuring inclusion in Google Places and local directories

Still thinking locally, you must plan to be included in Google Places and the available local directories that matter. Getting a local listing in Google Places provides your company the chance to be prominent in SERP (search engine result page) and you’ll appear in Local Carousel and Google Maps. These are very useful for finding local traffic. You have to invest time and money to develop your local market and aim to be included in all the listings for major attorney directories online. You have to build traffic to gain higher rankings in search engines.

3. Siloing (isolating) by practice areas

You do not have to compete with every lawyer in town. In order to ensure success and develop better leads and traffic that can lead to conversion, it is imperative to silo by practice area, meaning, target those clients who need a lawyer for a specific area of law, such as personal injury attorney, divorce or family law attorney.

4. Optimizing UX (user experience)

To convert clients from online searchers, you first have to convert traffic to your website. Be competitive by having a very informative site. It must also be professional in look and content and impress customers immediately, by providing answers to their needs. With about 55.7 percent of potential clients referred to law firms by word of mouth according to Lawyernomics, there are plenty of people who will visit your site. It is imperative to have a high-quality website. Improve your potential clients’ user experience by presenting a site that connotes expertise and trustworthiness.

Effective SEO techniques, applied to lawyer websites, will ensure that you get higher search engine rankings, to ensure more traffic and leads that have the potential to be converted into clients.  Performance First Marketing can help get your Law Firm on the 1st page of all the major search engines.   Contact us to find out about our innovative program we call Marketing On Contingency.