In the United States, the SEO (search engine optimization) market is worth over $80 billion as of 2021.
As a result, large and small businesses alike are increasing their investments in organic online traffic by investing in SEO For Law Firms.
According to WordStream, the legal services industry is one of the most competitive verticals in search engine marketing, with an average cost per click for AdWords of $54 per click.
Spending some time on marketing strategies along with case preparations can take the lawyers or their law firm a long way. You can now hire experts for lawyer marketing and become the next rainmaker in the industry. These stats might overwhelm you if you’re looking to begin your online marketing journey. That is why we bring you five law firms’ SEO marketing strategies to help you kickstart your online growth.
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Choose The Right Domain Name
Your online presence starts with a domain for your website. This domain is the fundamental URL (example.com) that every website uses as its web address.
We examined the domains of the legal firm’s websites and were able to categorize them as follows:
- Branded
- PMD / EMD (Partial / Exact Match)
On average, websites without exact or partial match domains have more words on the ranking page than sites with EMD/PMDs (961 vs. 855 words).
However, we see a clear trend when comparing this data to the data on referring domains (i.e., links).
Take-home tip: Brand-only domains account for 57% of all websites, and 26% of domains include the brand name and search keywords. Therefore, consider this stat while deciding on your domain.
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Secure Website With An SSL Certificate
While this is undoubtedly a minor factor in SEO rankings, we’ve found that the vast majority of first-page law practice websites carry an SSL certificate. Our analysis shows that 89 percent of all websites possess a valid SSL certificate.
Furthermore, as we crawled deeper pages (2-10), we found that while there were still plenty of sites ranking substantially lower using HTTPS, there was a 30-40% drop-off depending on the field of law and city.
There are a few things that this demonstrates:
- In the top 100 results, there are a lot of secure, HTTPS-enabled websites. This statistic isn’t limited to the first page of results.
- It’s a sign of safety and security, as well as attention to detail and a professional edge (on the designer’s or webmaster’s part).
Take-home tip: Invest in SEO services for lawyers that prioritize getting a secure website for you. Your website needs to reflect relevancy and competency with present times.
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Choose WordPress As Your CMS
WordPress isn’t a factor in search engine algorithms or an SEO ranking indicator. It is, however, a testament to the WordPress ecosystem’s power and versatility.
It offers limitless customizability in building and designing a personalized site, being relatively ready for on-page SEO, and having some of the best functionality in the form of plugins. It’s difficult to disagree with this statistic.
Take-home tip: When optimizing SEO for lawyers, you should strongly consider using (or keeping with) WordPress for your law firm’s website, especially since so many WordPress sites rank highly in the Google SERPs.
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Use Target Keywords In Title Tags And URLs
According to statistics, the search keyword or stemming of the keyword (e.g., “family lawyer,” “family law,” “family lawyers,” etc.) appears in the title tag of 89.7% of law firm web pages on the first SERP.
Furthermore, the name of the city or state appears in the Title tag of 95.1% of ranking firms’ pages. Thus, a vast majority of them have city names in the title rather than state names.
Research from expert SEO agencies for lawyers shows that 51.2% of law firms’ URLs include either the keyword for the city, or at least one area of practice, or both in their URLs.
The average URL length was 34 characters. This number may appear to be a short length until you realize that 87.8% of the first-page results were for the website’s homepage rather than an internal page.
Take-home tip: Law SEO agency marketing must include best and relevant practices. Google’s algorithms are constantly searching for how you can provide value to your visitors, and using the keywords they actively search for enables you to win with the algorithms.
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Optimize Your Site
Although optimizing your site isn’t an SEO ranking indication, it’s a measure of a company’s commitment to its website. Research from expert SEO agencies for lawyers shows evidence of top-ranking sites in organic search showing a descending trend the longer they wait to update their website with fresh content.
In the last three years, 75.6% of the top ten law firm websites have received significant updates or redesigned. However, only 24.4% of business sites were four years or older in terms of major on-site changes.
Take-home tip: SEO strategies for lawyers include this major step because search bots need to know that your website is active and that you’re constantly providing fresh information to your visitors.
In conclusion
This post contained the basics for kickstarting your SEO efforts for law firms. However, there are a lot of things in this post that we didn’t cover. For example, we could have dived deeper into the technical aspects of SEO like on-page SEO metrics (header tags, image count, and meta descriptions).
However, we feel it’s vital to cover a few fundamentals before delving deeper into the trends and statistics of law firm websites, what they’re doing, and how that fits into their entire SEO strategy.
While you can find a plethora of resources online on how you can optimize your website’s SEO, we suggest you partner with an expert agency that’s known for its SEO services for lawyers. That way, you can focus on the aspects of your practice that matter most to you while your SEO expert can optimize your website and outrank your competition.
So go ahead, partner with an expert SEO agency for lawyers today!
