Marketing Tips For Lawyers: Growing Your Firm With SEO Part II

In our previous marketing tips for lawyers blog post, we discussed the importance of SEO, and provided some advice for getting started in search marketing.

You can read the post here: Marketing Tips For Lawyers: Part I

If after reading, you still don’t feel 100 percent confident marketing your firm through search, don’t worry. There is a lot that goes into putting together a proper SEO marketing strategy, and a lot more for you to learn.

In this blog post, we’ll aim to further your SEO education by going over some key things law firm marketers must be aware of. This includes an increased emphasis on mobile search, the importance of developing high quality content, and the role social media plays in SEO.

Adapt To Google’s Mobile First Index

A recent study revealed that 55 percent of all web traffic is now coming from mobile devices. Google is quite aware of this trend and has been updating it’s search algorithms, putting a heavy focus on website mobile friendliness.

Google has been talking about about switching to a mobile first index for years now, and the transition is currently underway.

In December of 2017, the Google Web Master’s Blog released a statement saying, “Mobile-first indexing means that we’ll use the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking, to better help our – primarily mobile – users find what they’re looking for.”

So what can you do to adapt to this switch?

• Make sure your website has a responsive design and fits well on all different types of mobile screen sizes.
• Make sure you verify the mobile version of your site with Google Search Console.
• Make sure your mobile site is running at a high speed.
• Make sure your mobile site is easy to navigate. This process may include simpliflying navigation menus, a eliminating certain heavier design elements like header images.

Much of Google’s focus is giving their users the best search experience possible, by presenting them with sites that they will find to be the most user-friendly. With Google now acclimating to its users mobile-first tendencies, you need to get on making your mobile site as user-friendly as possible.

Produce High Quality Content

You’ve probably heard the phrase “content is king” before. It gets used a lot in pieces doling out search marketing advice. While the emphasis on producing content is essentially correct, the phrase itself can be somewhat misleading.

Producing content in bulk for your web pages does not guarantee positive SEO results. Many spammy sites have tried this approach and not gotten anywhere. SEMrush presented a better take on producing content in one of their recent blog posts, in which they stated that, “Great Content Strategy + SEO Is King”.

In their piece they advise carefully planning out content that provides a solution to a certain issue or problem in a search engine friendly fashion.

How can you accomplish this

• Make sure to use relevant keywords throughout your content, including the title of your content.
• Use headlines and subheaders in your written content to make your writing skimmable and therefore easier to read. If you make your content just one long block of text, most of your readers will likely jump ship on reading it pretty fast.
• Always aim to provide value to the content you create. Before publishing a piece, ask yourself, “what are my readers or viewers gaining from this?”. If you’re able to teach, inform, or entertain your audience, there’s a better chance of them coming back for more.
• The more you update your blog content, the more frequently search engines will look over and index your site pages. So make frequent edits to old blog posts, and give them more opportunity to achieve a higher page rank on Google.

Related: How exactly should you go about revamping old blog posts?

Additional SEO Marketing Tips For Lawyers

Be Active On Social Media

There are a lot of reasons your firm should take the time to engage in social media networks, and improving your SEO results is one of them. Not only is just about everyone taking part in some form of social networking these days, having a strong social media presence can have a very positive impact on your web traffic results.

A few ways social media can positively impact SEO

• Sharing links on social media can help drive traffic back to your firm’s website and indirectly increase the organic search ranking of your pages.
• Social media profiles are often indexed near the top of brand related searches. Having multiple pages show up in search results for your business will add to your firm’s online credibility.
• Having social profiles makes the user experience of learning about your business more personable and fun. Offering a better user experience can often lead to more page clicks and lower bounce rates.

Related: Learn more about how having a strong social media presence can help advance your firm.

Be Present on Google+ and Google My Business

Joining Google My Business is also a must for law firms. The service provides you with a free Google listing to attract new customers with. This listing will appear when people are searching for your law firm or businesses like yours. The listing shares helpful law firm information, displays customer reviews (which you can easily respond to), and discover how people find your business.

While not as apparently popular as some other social networking site, Google+ is one of the most important social platforms for firms to be on. Keep in mind that a networking service attached to Google, and its pages are more likely to receive a higher ranking in Google search results. Using Google+ is also important for developing an online identity and reputation, which is another factor in determining your firm’s Google search engine rankings.

Get Some Backlinks

Take the time to find websites or blogs that your target audience reads and reach out to their page runners to see if you can provide them with content in exchange for a link back to your website. Having links to your site exist on other sites can boost your authority with Google, helping to increase your rankings without the need to touch your website.

The last piece of advice we’ll give you in this post, is to remember that impressing search engines isn’t your only goal. Always keep in mind that there are actual humans looking at your website, and that providing a quality user experience for them is a must. That is why taking the time to learn as much as you can about best SEO practices is so important, so you can continuously improve both the way search engines and actual users consume your web pages.

Continue your legal marketing education

• Learn here how to become a thought leader in your industry
• Check out the inaugural edition of our “Let’s Talk Legal Marketing” series
• View 5 new trends legal marketers need to be aware