When searching SEO tips for your law firm, you likely found some advice helpful and some contradictory, leaving you unsure of what steps to take next. The good news? You don’t have to tackle everything at once. Optimizing your law firm site can be broken down into manageable steps, and I’ve outlined some key best practices to help you get started.
If you’re holding off on optimizing because it seems optional, it isn’t. SEO is a necessity for law firm websites, helping increase online visibility, improve lead quality, and make client acquisition seamless. The sooner you start improving your site’s SEO, the sooner you’ll see results. Let’s dig in.
Best Practices for Law Firm Website SEO
Before you latch onto fast, easy tricks disguised as ‘tips,’ let me warn you that following unethical, manipulative SEO methods—aka black hat tactics—to boost site traffic is detrimental. Google penalizes websites that disregard its guidelines and spam policies. Besides negatively impacting your rankings, manipulation won’t move the needle where it matters most: client satisfaction.
I like to remind legal clients out of the gate that strategic updates and improvements take time. But honing in on the right optimizations (and doing them the right way) ensures your law firm’s efforts aren’t wasted.
An impactful legal SEO strategy focuses on best practices, such as improving your on-page SEO using the right local and legal keywords, making technical enhancements for better site performance, and incorporating solid content marketing.
Tips for Researching Legal Keywords
Think about the last time you bought a suit jacket online. Did you type in men’s suit jacket, suit jacket for men, women’s blazer, big and tall suit jackets, or navy blazer? People phrase things differently, and getting to the heart of what your clients are searching for—and the words they use—is essential for a legal site’s rankings. Researching these terms is SEO 101 for law firm websites, providing a strong foundation for on-page improvements and content marketing.
To comprehensively cover each practice area or legal situation, you’ll want to identify a variety of smart, targeted keywords. This article provides a bunch of free and paid SEO tools to help kick-start your research.
Once you begin, keep these tips in mind:
- Consider Competitors: Getting ahead of your competitors is difficult if you don’t know where they excel. Drop their site into a keyword research tool to evaluate their rankings and see which terms you can target and overtake using a superior SEO strategy and high-quality, optimized content for your law firm.
- Target Long-Tail Keywords: Phrases provide a one-two punch because they target a niche audience’s search plus a higher-volume term within them. Check out the example below for ‘car accident lawsuit,’ a high-volume keyword contained within the long-tail keyword ‘civil lawsuit for car accident.’
Targeting the longer tail phrase ‘civil lawsuit for car accident’ can capture those searching for civil lawsuit information and car accident lawsuits.
Keys To Optimizing Law Firm Metadata
Every page element, including the title tag, URL, H1, and meta description, should reinforce the content (i.e., target the primary keyword). Even attorneys who fundamentally understand this best practice have inadvertently left fields empty or updated the page without adjusting the metadata. I recommend a law firm with minimal budget and time to update metadata as its first step for SEO because tackling these updates is easy, impactful, and essential to organic rankings.
Google pays close attention to metadata, which is why this is one of the first law firm SEO tips I offer. Search engines rely on these details to determine what the page is about and decide if it answers a searcher’s question.
If you look at an attorney’s website following SEO best practices, you’ll see a pattern emerge. Every target keyword for each practice area page, blog, and resource page will be well-represented throughout the page’s metadata, as shown below on our agency’s content marketing landing page.
When Google sees a page consistently optimized for a target keyword and offering supportive content, the search engine doesn’t doubt what the page is about or which queries it qualifies for.
Content Marketing Tips for Law Firms
This is the really fun part. I’ve seen legal blogs carry the load for a law firm’s contact form submissions, bringing in qualified potential clients thanks to optimized, quality content. Consistently creating high-performing posts takes a focused approach and people-first content—two key elements of a law firm’s SEO marketing strategy.
If you think you’re writing to please algorithms, you aren’t. Your content should focus on your audience first and search engines second. If you aren’t sure how to do this, let me fill you in:
Showcase Your Expertise
Ditch the idea that an attorney’s blog is giving away legal advice and consider your content an arena to let your expertise and knowledge shine. You don’t need to divulge law firm secrets, but you should provide valuable tips and advice to help clients start their legal journeys (and they might choose your firm to lead the charge!). Compose tightly focused, helpful blog content that answers questions about various situations within your practice areas, and then link to your contact form or practice area landing page where potential clients can take the next step to initiate a meeting.
An important clarification: Showcasing your expertise doesn’t mean spewing legal jargon and statute numbers. It means telling case law stories, sharing courtroom experiences, and speaking to your website visitors as you would if they were clients sitting across the desk from you. What should they understand about insurance adjusters’ tactics? Can they sue a dog owner for an animal bite? What do the local government changes mean for the community?
Balance Your Content
While news-based articles and litigation updates certainly have a place on a legal content calendar, a law firm’s SEO strategy must also include evergreen content—that is, content focused on topics that remain relevant for a long time.
I’ve seen droves of people land on a law firm’s website as a class action deadline nears, giving the firm a juicy spike in traffic. I’ve also seen the repercussions when a firm doesn’t offer any content relevant to topics beyond the hottest trend. Instead of putting all your eggs in the proverbial class-action basket, create a balance of optimized content to support your core practice areas, frequently asked questions, and emerging lawsuits to drive short-term spikes in search and support long-term search patterns.
Market to Your Local Audience
Consumers appreciate the convenience, accessibility, and relatability of nearby counsel. A law firm’s SEO strategy must attract these searchers using local keywords, including city-based and geographical terms, and topics relevant to the community. A smaller law firm using SEO marketing to reach a local audience can compete with larger firms by optimizing for long-tail geo-based keywords, such as ‘medical malpractice attorneys near Charlotte’ or ‘Gainesville divorce lawyer.’ When a law firm follows local SEO tips, their business can earn a coveted listing on the local maps pack, shown below.
Fine-tuning your local targeting goes beyond keywords. Here are a few other areas to boost your law firm’s SEO strategy and improve your rankings for local searches:
- Optimize Your Business Profile: If you haven’t checked in on your Google Business Profile since you created it, you’ll need to optimize it for keywords and confirm all your information is accurate. If you haven’t been responding to reviews, you have catching up to do!
- Feature Local Content: Opine on a local case everyone is talking about, provide insights on changes affecting the city’s legal landscape, or offer FAQs for navigating ordinances or state laws to connect with community members looking for knowledgeable resources or counsel.
- Build Your Local Reputation: Sponsoring and participating in community events, increasing your social media activity, and joining online legal directories are the extras that will build your online presence and reputation as a trusted local law firm. (These also boost Google’s trust in your business—a big SEO bonus.)
- Generate Local Citations and Backlink Opportunities: Submit articles for area publications or legal journals and join legal directories to earn local citations and mentions and boost your website’s backlink portfolio.
Don’t Ignore Your Landing Pages
Landing pages are essential for moving people from your blog, social media site, or other source to a contact form and securing a consultation. When these landing pages aren’t optimized, compelling, or engaging, people don’t hang around to convert. If you aren’t sure where to start, use these law firm SEO tips to improve landing page engagement and performance:
- Create compelling, keyword-driven headlines that quickly tell people what you practice and where you’re located—Are You Filing for Divorce in Minnesota?
- Write substantial page content—fluff and filler won’t do—to address site visitors’ concerns, relate to readers, and clearly explain what you have to offer, positioning yourself as a resource and authority.
- Include testimonials, case studies, and statistics to build trust and credibility.
- Incorporate share links, strong CTAs, form fields, FAQ dropdowns, and other elements to increase visitors’ engagement with your site and show search engines the value of your content.
Organizing the Site and Navigation
Your next client’s first impression will likely be made online. This puts a lot of pressure on your website to deliver, and optimizing it can prevent a potential lead from bouncing. Before you begin, I’d recommend objectively looking at your website. (If you can’t be impartial, survey outsiders.)
Think of the home page as the front door of your law practice. Do you like what you see? Is it clear what you sell? Does the ‘office’ look organized and professional? If you answered no, it’s time to optimize.
Most people assume that a new website is the only way to impress customers, but let me make it clear: Even a spiffy new website can miss the mark on SEO.
Here are some tips for navigational SEO improvements to boost the user experience and Google’s understanding of your law firm’s site:
- Brush up on internal linking best practices. Hyperlink targets should be accurate and helpful, and they should guide search engines on page relationships and structure.
- Update unclear or inaccurate menus and link titles to SEO-friendly, concise headings.
- If your legal landing pages are lengthy, consider UX design features (like a ‘back to top’ button or breadcrumbs) to help people return to the contact form or essential information quickly.
- Google favors mobile-friendly sites, and so do your potential clients, so prioritize mobile-responsive design features.
Improving Site Speed and Performance
A slow site is equivalent to keeping a new client waiting in reception past their appointment time. And people only wait seconds (and only three seconds, tops) before exiting a website. Before you assume your site is up to speed, I recommend you run a speed test to see for yourself. Pro Tip: Use Google’s PageSpeed tool and get insights into what’s slowing your site down. Prioritize these updates to boost performance, clear the clutter, and improve accessibility—factors that matter to Google and your audience.
These SEO projects aren’t one-time efforts. Be prepared to monitor your performance and adapt for long-term success. With a strong SEO strategy, your law firm can increase its visibility and prove its authority in the legal space to attract qualified leads. If you need help staying on top of search trends and your competitors, contact Eight Oh Two Marketing today.
