Do you want to know how to attract clients online? You’re in the right place. This law firm SEO guide is exclusively for you where you’ll discover some of the best SEO tips for lawyers and attorneys. Although there are a ton of best SEO training courses online but this post gives you an idea of how you can successfully run a law firm website. If you have a law firm website, you’ve probably heard of the importance of SEO for law firms and attorneys to bring more clients online. This detailed guide on SEO for attorneys is for everyone who wants to get started online to attract clients. So are you ready to find out the best SEO tips for lawyers? Let’s jump into the details.

Law Firm SEO: 10 Powerful SEO Tips for Lawyers In 2023

1. Local SEO Is The KEY

“Things to do near me”

Law Firm SEO: 10 Powerful SEO Tips for Lawyers In 20231. Local SEO Is The KEY2. Start A Blog So You Can Attract More Clients3. Law Firms Optimization: Avoid These 3 Major Google Penalties4. Focus On the Major Local SEO Ranking Factors5. Get Local Reviews on Your Law Firm Website6. Submit Your Site On Law Firm Directories for Building Links7. Use This 5 Point SEO Checklist for Law Firms8. Target Long Tail Keywords9. Invest In SEO10. Best Website Design Practices for Law FirmsFinal Thoughts on SEO for Law Firms In 2023

“Best hotels near me” “Attorneys near me” Have you ever ranked for a “near me” search? This is commonly known as local SEO. Local SEO is what plays a crucial role and helps you easily get tons of clients in 2023 and beyond. What is local SEO anyway? When people Google for a product or service that they need, Google has various algorithms that filter your information based on nearby businesses that match those keywords. Ranking your law firms for local searches in your nearby area can generate a ton of local revenue for your company and allows you to find local clients. Here’s what a typical local search term looks like on Google: What did you understand from the above search term? When you search for “lawyers in chicago” (which is a local SEO term to find nearby lawyers in chicago), Google’ll give you a list of all the nearby law firms and law offices instantly. That’s the beauty of local SEO. It helps you find nearby services, companies, and more. Yes, in the above illustration you’ll find 100% of ads above the fold but when you scroll down to the results page, you’ll find a list of all the sites that are optimized for local SEO. Here’s what the search results looks like (after Google ads). The above screenshot shows us all the results which are perfectly optimized for local SEO searches for the keyword phrases “lawyers in chicago”. What happens when you rank for those keywords in the first page results of Google? You’ll be getting hundreds (if not thousands) of fresh leads every single day. Just imagine turning those hot leads into high-paying clients. Your revenue will skyrocket. That’s why you should focus on local SEO. If you’re wondering about how to use local SEO to your advantage to make your law firm rock-solid, implement the following techniques.

Get listed on local directories such as Yelp, Google My Business, Yahoo, Bing and more. Make sure to use the same data such as your website details, address, phone etc across all these listing sites. Make sure you have a physical address in the area or city you are targeting for your law firm. If you don’t have any physical address for your law firm website, mention your address where you reside along with the zip code so people can directions to your site (and they will also show up in Google search results and maps). Google takes user reviews about various businesses seriously and that’s the reason why few people get better rewards in local SEO because they focus on getting as many positive user reviews as possible. So start working on them to improve your law firm website’s local SEO.

Recommended: Top 10 Local SEO Tools to Improve Your Local Search Rankings

2. Start A Blog So You Can Attract More Clients

Although there are a ton of ways to attract new clients to your attorney’s firm but the proven way to generate clients regularly is to start a blog. You might ask, why start a blog? Here are some of the biggest reasons to start a blog in 2023 and beyond.

Helps you get a lot of search traffic Increases your brand exposure Helps you position yourself as an authority in your industry Helps you generate more leads and sales Gives you an opportunity to engage with your target audience And the list goes on and on

That being said, if you’re curious to know why every business should have a blog, here are some interesting business blogging stats you should know.

Companies that blog have 97% more inbound links 73% of consumers trust the information on a business’s website over other sources. 61% of U.S. online consumers have made a purchase based on recommendations from a blog Companies that blog receive 55% more traffic than companies that don’t and they have 434% more indexed pages compared to those that don’t

Above all, blogging is NOT so hard as most people think and creating blog posts don’t take much time too. Have a look at the following illustration to know why. So what are you still waiting for? Click here to find out how you can start a blog in 10 minutes What kind of content should you create when you’re running a blog related to law and attorney or legal advice online? Cover local news and information. By writing about local news and information on your website, you’ll naturally attract website visitors from local metro areas where your target audience are. That way you can attract a ton of local audiences who are interested in hiring or getting law and attorney-related services from you. The more often you publish local news and information related to your target audience the more often Google search crawlers crawl and index your website. This will definitely increase your overall search engine rankings and your website starts getting more links and brand exposure as well. But how to come up with a ton of useful local news and informative ideas to cover within your website and blog? Here are two of the simplest ways to come up with new ideas to create content.

3. Law Firms Optimization: Avoid These 3 Major Google Penalties

Running a law firm website is one thing. Keeping your site safe from Google penalties is another thing. Most new sites get affected by frequent Google algorithm changes and if you don’t want to get penalized by them, you need to act smart. Here are the 3 major Google penalties you should avoid from getting better SEO results. Let’s talk about each of these major Google algorithms in detail so you can better understand how you can avoid getting penalized by them.

  1. Google Panda update Google Panda update was launched in 23rd February 2011 to focus on promoting high-quality content and punish the sites with thin content by dropping their search engine rankings. The primary goal of this update: To rank websites with high quality content higher and to remove websites with low-quality content from top pages of search results. Here’s what you can do to get the best results out of Panda updates from Google.

Write in-depth and highly informative content by keeping your target audience in mind (as it always ranks well) Make sure to focus on reducing your website’s bounce rates and increasing your dwell time (people spending their time on your site) by using related posts, creating detailed content, using a lot of images within your posts etc.

Here’s what you should avoid saving your sites from getting penalized by Google Panda updates.

Avoid thin content. Never copy-paste content from other sites. It’s just a shameful thing in blogging. Not only does it degrade your site’s authority but your audience will hate it when they find copied content. Never go for any tool or plugin that allows you to create auto-generated content. Gone are the days when you spin articles using various tools, Google simply penalizes you if you do so. Avoid content farm which is a bad SEO technique where people use search algorithm data to create articles, videos, etc to rank higher in the search engine results.

  1. Penguin update Google Penguin update was launched on 24th April 2012 to punish the websites which are using manipulative methods to get higher search rankings (black hat SEO techniques such as keyword stuffing, link farms, hidden text links etc). The primary goal of this update is: Penalise the sites which are practicing black hat SEO techniques to obtain backlinks. Here’s what you can do to get the best results out of Penguin updates from Google.

Always focus on getting quality links from highly relevant sites. It’s better to get 1 link from an authority site than to get 10 links from new sites. Quality matters over quantity. Use the Google Disavow tool to remove all the toxic links from your website so you can easily get higher rankings and more search traffic in future Penguin updates.

Here’s what you should avoid saving your sites from getting penalized by Google Penguin updates.

Stop over-optimizing your content by keyword stuffing. Never repeat your primary keyword too many times (it’s better to keep your keyword density to 0.5% or even low to avoid getting penalized by Penguin update) Say no to low-quality links. Don’t even think about getting links from Fiverr or buying links from low quality platforms.

  1. Hummingbird update Google’s Hummingbird update was launched in August 2013 which affected almost 90% of the search queries on Google search results to give better information to users search queries instead of showing irrelevant information. The primary goal of this update: To provide better content that satisfies searchers, so create content that is answering your target audience questions. Here’s what you can do to get the best results out of Hummingbird updates from Google.

Write content that delivers direct answers to your audience questions. Ultimately these will show up in Google search directly. Start using LSI keywords and focus on using a ton of questions while creating content to get the most out of this update.

Here’s what you should avoid to save your sites from getting penalized by Google Hummingbird updates.

Stop practicing keyword-based optimization and focus on providing useful information to your audience. Use platforms like Quora to find answers that your target audience are asking. Focus on providing answers, not keywords. Once you shift your focus from keywords to answers, your content starts getting better rankings on Google.

4. Focus On the Major Local SEO Ranking Factors

Google uses hundreds of factors to rank a website or keyword. To get the best results from local SEO, make sure to focus on the major ranking factors. Moz did a case study on what local search ranking factors impact Google search results and discovered the following 8 things that impacted the search results. Here’s the illustration of local search ranking factors by Moz team. If you carefully observe the above illustration, you can see the #1 ranking factor is My Business Signals, which means you’ll need to properly optimize your Google My Business listing in order to get the most out of local SEO for lawyers in 2023 and beyond.

5. Get Local Reviews on Your Law Firm Website

One of the most effective tips of SEO for attorneys is to get local reviews. Let’s assume you found 2 hotels nearby on Google search, one with 4.2 rating and other with 2.5 rating. Which one would you rather prefer? The first one, right? That’s the importance of having better and positive local reviews. Did you know that 87% of people trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations? If you really want to attract new clients to your law firms, make sure to get as many local reviews as possible and try to get as much high star ratings as possible. So how can you attract local reviews for your business website? Here are some of the surefire ways to get positive local reviews to boost your online presence and attract positive attention from people. Find and join customer review sites This is a no brainer. If you want to get more positive local reviews for your business, make sure to find and claim your business profile on top review sites. Yelp is one of the best customer review platform where you can get a ton of customer reviews which has also become a name synonymous with local business reviews as Yelp has over 100 million reviews from users all around the globe. So Yelp is the best place to join if you want customer reviews and positive feedback from real people. That being said, here are few more customer review sites you can join for free and claim your business for local reviews. Now if you’re wondering why should you list your business law firm across the above mentioned sites, here’s a simple reason: by having your business listed on as many online local review sites as possible, you can make sure that your business is highly visible in most of the local searches people make online. Apart from that, having your business listed with the same business (NAP) information on various local business listing sites helps search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo! to show your information more often for various relevant keyword searches. That being said, make sure to keep the following things in mind while submitting your business listing on the above mentioned sites. Keep your NAP consistent. Make sure that your NAP is consistent while listing your sites so you people don’t get confused, just in case if you’re wondering what NAP is;

Business’s Name (N) Address (A) Phone number (P)

Make sure to link to your website. Most of the customer review sites including “Google My Business” allow you to link to your website so people who are looking for more information about your services can directly visit your site to know more details, contact information, your portfolio and so on. Last but not least, always make sure to encourage your customers to leave reviews of your business and you should also make sure to respond to each one of those reviews as a token of thanks.

One of the best ways to attract more clients to your website is to harness the power of SEO. But here’s the thing: SEO is not easy. Getting search traffic to your sites for free is definitely a tedious job and you need to build a lot of backlinks to your site to get higher search rankings. Getting links to your law firm site is a tricky part but you can use law firm directories for building links. If you’re wondering about why should you use law firm directories, here are few compelling reasons;

By using law firm directories, you can easily advertise your blog, content, services and so on By using law firm directories, you can grab attention of other lawyers who are already blogging (you can use this opportunity to build rapport with them) By using law firm directories, you can generate links to your site which gives you additional value in search engines like Google By using law firm directories, you can find ways to get positive reviews which can help you get ahead in search results with star ratings (you can do reciprocal reviews for other lawyers to get positive reviews for yourself) You can also find a ton of blogs to write guest posts so you can drive more traffic, links and leads to your own law firm sites

So are you convinced to use the law firm directories? Are you looking for the best law firm directories to submit your site links? Here’s a list of some of the best legal law firm directories you can use to submit links and promote your site and yourself.

Findattorneys.org Finduslawyers.org Attorneys.org Attorneyyellowpages.com Courthousesquare.com

The above list consists of free and premium directories which means some of them are free to join and few are paid directories where you need to pay a few bucks to be able to submit your website. Quick note: There are also a ton of free law firm directories which accept free guest posts on legal topics, so go check out the list mentioned above to start building links to your site. Pro tip: It’s a smart strategy to outsource blog directory submission to a virtual assistant so you can save a lot of time. There are so many people you can find online (Fiverr, UpWork and so on) where you can pay a few bucks to submit your site on these directories. You can also ask them to find and submit your site on the best free directories.

7. Use This 5 Point SEO Checklist for Law Firms

One of the best tips of SEO for lawyers is to have a checklist. Creating and running a law firm website can be really a daunting task. It not only takes a ton of time but also consistent efforts to make it profitable and attract clients regularly. By having an SEO checklist for law firms can make the whole process of running a website much easier. So here’s a 5 point SEO checklist for law firms SEO. Let’s discuss all of them in detail so you can understand the law firm website SEO checklist better.

  1. Determine the purpose and priorities of your website What’s the purpose of creating an online website for your law firm? Do you want to get more clients and leads through social media or search engines like Google? Or do you want to educate online audience about the services you offer? Once you’ve clearly set your purpose of running your law firm website, things get easier. Also make sure to set priorities for your website. What do you want to get out of your website? More traffic? More sales? More email subscribers or more leads? Determine what is really important for your website today. Is it enough for you to have a single page website? Or do you want a gorgeous-looking website design? Asking these questions before you even start a website helps you save time and money.
  2. Choose the right hosting solution Whether know it or not, one of the biggest investments you make while running a website is hosting. Don’t go for a cheap or pathetic hosting choice to save some bucks as a web hosting service can make or break your website’s success. Go for those hosting solutions that offer;

Ultimate website security SSD storage or dedicated hosting servers Instant customer help when you need any hosting or website assistance Proven track record of providing better hosting features such as uptime, zero to less downtime issues, enough bandwidth and storage etc

Our suggestion is WPX hosting which we are currently using here at Bloggers Passion. They are worth every single penny. You can read our WPX hosting review to know more about them (you’ll also find an exclusive link in that post where you can get 50% discount). 3. Create a funnel to turn website visitors into leads Do you’ve ideas to turn your website visitors into clients? The best to turn random visitors into hot leads is to have a website sales funnel. It involves in the following basic steps;

Build an email list Offer something for free in exchange of collecting emails (a cheat sheet, your best tips, a video or anything that adds value to your target audience) Start creating educational emails and send them regularly to your email subscribers to build trust Occasionally talk about all the services you offer (so you can convince some of them to try your stuff)

Also make sure to find ways to promote your website. Try to include your website address everywhere possible including

business cards social media profiles Paid advertising Online business directories and so on

  1. DIY or outsource your website tasks Have you decided to do it all by yourself or outsource it someone else? Let us clarify it in detail so you can understand it even better. DIY means, you’re going to everything by yourself which includes;

Setting up your domain and starting a website Managing plugins, data, hosting and so on Managing your email marketing Social media accounts Creating content Promoting your website Competitor analysis SEO and so on

Yes, doing it all by yourself is definitely time consuming especially when you already have a full-time job. So it definitely makes sense for you to get help. Outsourcing involves in the following things;

Outsourcing your content creation process Outsourcing your SEO (to build links, leave comments, write guest posts, track keyword rankings, fix website issues and so on) Managing your day to day website tasks (social media promotion, blog posts, replying to emails or comments and so on)

It all comes down to two things;

Time and Money

If you’ve time and not interested in spending money, you should be doing it all by yourself. If you’ve money and not time, you’ll need to outsource your stuff. 5. SEO and competitive analysis You should know what to do before when you encounter any technical or SEO related issues with your website. Google always updates with new algorithms which affect overall search queries. That means if you’re relying too much on SEO to drive traffic and leads to your website, you need to constantly monitor your organic traffic and search rankings. In other case, you can also use various paid promotion tactics to drive leads to your law firm website which include;

Google ads Bing ads Facebook and twitter ads Instagram ads and so on

Also make sure to do competitor research to find out what helping lawyers who are already running websites to drive more leads and clients. What type of content they are creating? What promotion tactics are they using? If you’ve answers to these questions, you can manage your site easily. Bonus: Track results and your website performance You must track your website performance. You should know how much visitors you’re generating from various channels such as social media, search engines, paid channels and so on. You must also use Google Analytics to find out the behaviour of your website visitors, bounce rates, top performing pages and so on. You should also track your keyword rankings and make necessary changes if they are not performing well on Google search. You should always look for broken links and any website issues your site has so you can get better rankings on Google search results.

8. Target Long Tail Keywords

Long tail keywords are the backbone of any successful SEO strategy. If you’re looking to get FREE traffic from search engines like Google, you need to start focusing on finding and using your law firm website for a ton of long tail keywords. In case if you’re wondering what long tail keywords are, let us explain in simple terms. A long tail keyword consists of 3 or more keywords in it and it is easier to rank for, brings you qualified search visitors and you can rank for multiple keywords by targeting a single long tail keyword. Have a look at the illustration below to understand more about the importance of long tail keywords. In the above example, you’ll notice several keywords including;

Head Body Tail

Long tail keywords which are shown in the above illustration rank well in search engines. Let’s talk about an example related to law firm SEO so you can understand even better about the usage of long tail keywords.

“Law firm” is a short tail keyword “Best law firms in chicago” is a 5 word long tail keyword (which is easier to rank for when compared to the short tail keywords like “law firms” or “law agencies” and so on

So if you’re running even a new site, you still can achieve #1 search rankings by targeting long tail keywords. But how can you find long tail keywords to your law firm in 2023 and beyond? Get access to the right keyword research tools If you really want to find highly profitable and low competition long tail keywords for law firm website, make sure to get access to at least one of the following tools;

SEMrush: When you type a keyword into SEMrush dashboard, you receive a live update of the search volume and number of results for organic searches for that keyword along with all the other essential details like cost per click and competition of the paid searches, organic searches, number of backlinks, top 10 search results for the keyword, keyword difficulty and so on. So make sure to give a try to SEMrush if you want to find long tail keywords for your law firm to increase SEO. Ubersuggest: This is a free tool by Neil Patel which pulls data from Google’s autocomplete feature to provide a list of long tail keywords that you may not have thought of originally, no matter what industry you are in. This incredible keyword research tool allows you to extract information from other Google sources as well including Images, Shopping, Trends, News etc. So it’s a very handy tool for long tail keyword research. Keyword Tool: This is another widely used tool which is great for viewing a list of useful long tail keyword phrases for free. It provides you a huge list of keywords that add terms both prefixes and suffixes to the keyword you searched for finding long tail keywords.

Grow your law firms with proper on page SEO What’s the point of doing keyword research if you don’t utilize them properly within your law firm websites for SEO? If you want to increase your web page rankings, you need to learn the art of on page SEO. Here’s a detailed guide on on-page SEO that give you a ton of practical tips to improve your page rankings on Google search. In a nutshell, On-Page SEO is all about optimizing website pages to help them get rank in Google & other search engines. Here are few key places where you can insert your long tail keywords if you want to get better rankings on Google.

Titles URL Image alt tag Meta description Sub headings such as h2 and h3 Within the text and so on

Pro tip: Install Rank Math Plugin to easily optimize your law firm site for any keyword you want to rank for. Just make sure to use both on-page and off-page SEO right and your law firm website will only skyrocket. Off page SEO deals with backlinks, social bookmarking, forum posting, press releases and so on. It’s equally important as on page SEO if you want better SEO results. That being said, here’s the summary of a few of the key points you need to remember while doing long tail keyword research for attorney website.

You need to get access to a keyword research tool like SEMrush, Ubersuggest or Keyword planner and Webmaster tools Make sure to focus on one long tail keyword per page (so you can also rank for several of head keywords) Spend quality time to conduct keyword research to find really low competitive long tail keywords in your industry (preferably keywords with 1000 or less monthly searches) Make sure to track results in Google Webmaster Tools so you can make changes to your content and SEO strategies Make sure to properly optimize your web pages by inserting them in title, meta description, image alt tags and so on to increase their rankings in Google search.

9. Invest In SEO

First things first: SEO is not an expense, it’s an investment. If you consider SEO as a long-term investment, you’ll get 10x or even 100x more returns to your law firm websites in the long run. Just make sure you are not spending money on things that are not adding any value to your business. If you’re wondering why should you invest in law firm SEO, here are a few of the reasons.

SEO gives you passive results. That means, once you’ve set up a law firm website properly for Google search, you can expect lifelong traffic, leads and profits to your business. SEO gives you highest ROI. On average companies that invest in SEO see a HUGE return on investment of 200% to 300%, that’s a lot of returns right. If done right, search engines can send you highly qualified visitors to your websites giving you maximum results and profits

In a nutshell, investing in SEO provides you the best long term results. That being said, here are few places where you can invest in SEO.

SEO tools: SEO tools such as Semrush, Ahrefs, Moz etc are an absolute must when it comes to finding keywords for doing competitor analysis. If you’re really serious about using profitable keywords in your industry, you should invest in premium tools because most free SEO tools don’t provide much data. Content marketing strategist: From content ideas to content creation to optimizing your site for better rankings and conversions, you need a content marketing strategist. Make sure to find someone who has decent credentials instead of looking for someone cheap on sites like Fiverr. Web designer: If you’ve access to a designer, you can make any kind of changes on your site whenever you want. From logo to navigation to setting up your whole law firm website for better SEO, investing money on a designer really helps you in the long run.

Apart from the above, if you’ve budget, try to invest money in hiring an SEO specialist to take your website law firm SEO to the next level. Just make sure to stay away from the people who are following the below mentioned bad SEO practices.

Avoid those who don’t update your site regularly Avoid those who are using black hat SEO techniques such as buying links from Fiverr, keyword stuff, cloaking etc. Avoid those who aren’t building links for your law firm’s website at all Avoid those who aren’t bringing your results even after 6 to 8 months (SEO usually takes some time and you should wait at least to 8 months to see noticeable results in terms of your traffic, growth or links) Avoid those who depend too much upon paid traffic sources such as Google ads, Facebook ads etc Avoid those who focus on publishing thin content

Make sure to carefully analyze the portfolio of the SEO agency or in-house SEO expert that you want to work along with. Focus on finding their results over the years instead of knowing their experience. That’s when you can find the RIGHT SEO guy who can actually help you take your law firm SEO to the next level.

10. Best Website Design Practices for Law Firms

Isn’t it enough to have single or multiple pages law firm websites? If you want mediocre results, yes, that’s fair enough but if you want to build a profitable law firm website that attracts a ton of potential clients, you need to follow some of the best web design practices. Make sure to follow the below-mentioned website design practices in 2023. Work on your most important pages Here are 5 of the most important pages on any law firm’s website. If you don’t have them yet on your site, make sure to create them and optimize them for better SEO and higher conversion rates. Minimize clutter and use a strong call to action What happens when you give too many options to your website visitors? They choose nothing and abandon your site if it’s heavily cluttered. So make sure to declutter your website design (especially the home page and other important pages which are listed above) to increase your website conversions for your law firm. Also use a strong call to action while collecting leads, emails or while offering your services on your law firm’s website instead of using generic buttons like “sign up”, “join” and so on. If you want to really find some powerful and interesting call to action that you can use to improve your conversions, you can skim through the websites of your competitors to see how they are offering their services and building their email lists to get the most out of their sites. Browse more SEO Tutorials:

How to do Keyword Research Like a Pro if you Don’t Know Much About SEO How Does Your Website Loading Time Affect Your Rankings on Google Search? SEO Checklist for a New Website to Get High Rankings in 2023 SEO vs SEM: Which is Better? How to Get Google to Index Your New Website Quickly? Moz vs Semrush: An Honest Comparison Top Ahrefs Alternatives: Free & Paid Tools Best Backlink Checker Tools to Check Backlinks for a Website People Also Search For: How to Rank for These Queries?

Final Thoughts on SEO for Law Firms In 2023

SEO is constantly changing. That’s why it’s essential for you to come up with a foolproof law firm SEO strategy to generate more traffic, links and leads to your site. Make sure to outsource a few of the daunting tasks such as content creation, promotion, directory submission, etc to save your time and focus on generating high-quality leads to increase your revenue. We hope you like this massive post on SEO for attorneys. So what are your thoughts on this detailed post on law firm SEO? Did you find the SEO tips for lawyers and attorneys useful? Do you have any questions? Share your thoughts in the comments below.