SEO For Solicitors: How To Increase Your Online Visibility And Caseload

What is important about SEO for solicitors? Isn’t establishing a law firm and creating a website enough to get clients? Unfortunately, they aren’t. You still have to create awareness for your business, which is where SEO comes in.

Now, picture this: your law firm isn’t as profitable as you would like. You aren’t getting calls, and your mail inbox is empty. Most of your competitors are getting leads and doing great, but you don’t know what they are doing differently.

Interestingly, they have robust SEO strategies. That is why they are getting more clients. It is easier for prospects seeking legal representation to find them.

Here, I’ll explain what search engine optimization for solicitors is, its benefits, and what steps you can take to increase your caseload. Keep reading to get key insights.

What Is SEO For Solicitors?                             

SEO for solicitors and law firms involves strategies tailored to improve online visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs). An improvement in online visibility can lead to a corresponding increase in patronage.

When you rank high in search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc), it will enable prospects seeking solicitors to find you with ease. Many people seeking legal representation do so online. They enjoy the convenience, swiftness, and comfort that online search offers.

By implementing a proper SEO strategy, you can improve your law firm’s website ranking in SERPs. That way, prospects seeking solicitors online can find and hire you.

Search engine optimization for solicitors involves a combination of various strategies – finding relevant keywords, optimizing web content, building a healthy backlink profile, and more.

How SEO Benefit Solicitors

As a solicitor, your two main priorities are to acquire more clients and deliver results. In other words, your services must be top-notch.

The issue many solicitors face is finding new clients or making it easier for prospects to find them. That is where SEO comes in.

Let’s discuss how SEO can benefit your law firm.

1. Reach people interested in your services at the right time:

Most individuals seeking legal representation turn to search engines to find one. The majority of them utilize Google since it’s the most popular and largest.

By implementing a robust search engine optimization strategy, your law firm website will rank high in search engines. That way, people searching online for solicitors can find you.

SEO will place your law firm’s website where prospects can find you. It will help you create a massive brand awareness that would increase your caseload.

2. A cost-effective marketing strategy:

SEO is an important marketing strategy for several reasons. Among those reasons is the fact that it is cost-effective compared to other marketing strategies.

SEO’s initial cost might be a bit high, depending on several factors. These include the agency managing your campaign and the SEO strategies being implemented. However, in the long run, you’ll discover that search engine optimization is cheaper.

With SEO, you don’t have to continue paying search engines to promote your website. Additionally, you don’t need to fund an ad account. All you need to do is to plan and implement a robust SEO strategy.

You can implement the strategy yourself without anyone else’s help. You can also outsource your SEO campaigns to a competent law firm SEO expert.

Here is a good example of why SEO is cost-effective and delivers better results compared to paid adverts.

With paid advertisements, you have to keep adding funds to your ads account to sustain your campaign. Once the funds in ads account becomes empty, your website will disappear from the search engine result page instantly.

When you hire an agency to manage your law firm, you are only going to pay the agreed monthly fee to that agency. You don’t need to pay search engines to promote your website.

Another advantage SEO has is that you can decide you want to take a break from investing in SEO after hitting your targeted spot on the search engine result page. Your website’s ranking won’t drop automatically or overnight, as is the case with paid advertisements.

Once your law firm website starts appearing in the search results, you’ll keep generating leads. Even when you stop investing for a while, the leads will still keep coming.

NOTE: SEO is not a one-off marketing strategy. It will be a huge and risky mistake to treat it that way. Your SEO plans should be well thought-out and executed. Additionally, you must continue implementing and evaluating your search engine optimization strategy.

The reason you cannot reduce your pace or abandon your SEO campaigns partially or completely is that your competitors are working hard to overtake you. Reducing your effort will only empower your competitors to move ahead of you.

3. Guarantees lead generation for your law firm:

As a solicitor and business owner, you must have realized how complex and difficult lead generation is. Every business need clients to generate revenue and keep running. But then, you can’t fold your arms and expect clients to keep trooping into your office.

With SEO, you can create massive brand awareness in your county, city, or state. You can dominate your local area and be the go-to solicitor for people in your locality.

You can target local keywords to drive traffic to your law firm website and improve your search rankings in local search. And by implementing an effective local SEO strategy, your law firm can gain popularity in your locality.

4. Build trust and brand credibility:

People appreciate Google’s effort to provide valuable search results whenever they use the platform. Given the search engine’s reputation, users know they cannot promote spammy and low-quality websites to the front page.

Prospects will trust your law firm more when they find you on the front page of their search results. Occupying the top position in the search engine result pages will convince prospects that you are a top-quality and dependable solicitor. They know you earned your position on the search result on merit.

When potential customers trust you, it’s going to be easier for them to patronize and even refer others to you. They will be more comfortable doing business with you.

There are so many ways SEO can benefit your law firm. With improved online visibility, your caseload can increase massively. You will become a popular law firm in your locality, which is something that can transform your business.

Solicitor SEO Guide To Improve Ranking And Caseload

Now that we have discussed how SEO can benefit you as a solicitor, let’s discuss the various moves you can make to improve your ranking and organic traffic.

1: Fix your website’s technical SEO:

Having a website is the first thing you need for SEO. Visitors will first land on your website, navigate from one page to another, and consume your content before even making a move to contact you. If they like what they see and consider you as a capable solicitor, they’ll contact you.

Making sure your website is professional-looking and attractive is a great move to keep your visitors hooked to your web page. It can lead to an increase in dwell time and reduce your bounce rate. But while focusing on the aesthetics of your website, pay attention to the loading speed and responsiveness.

Ensure your website loads fast and it’s a breeze to navigate. Use a responsive design to improve user experience, an important metric that can impact your website’s ranking potential. Google prioritizes user experience. So, if your website is user-friendly, you’ll have a better opportunity to rank high in the search engine result pages (SERPs).

Another thing you need to take care of is your website’s mobile-friendliness. Mobile-friendliness is a major ranking factor for Google. So, if your website is mobile-friendly, it will have a better opportunity to rank high in the SERPs.

Fix your website’s technical SEO before you start publishing any material. Ensure it’s well-optimized and a breeze for Google crawlers to crawl and index.

2: Conduct professional and detailed keyword research:

Keywords are important in SEO for obvious reasons. Google operates on keywords. Additionally, your website will only appear in prospects’ search engine result pages when your target keyword matches their search terms.

Finding the right keyword is crucial in search engine optimization. That is why businesses and even SEO agencies need to conduct thorough keyword research before writing blog posts for a website. Check the search volume, keyword difficulty, and other relevant details about each keyword before targeting.

Information such as keyword difficulty and search volume helps you deduce how demanding ranking for such keywords would be. An SEO expert will help you choose the ideal keywords to target.

A Handy Tip: Keyword placement is another thing to consider after conducting keyword research and identifying the right ones to use. You must ensure you place your keyword in the first and last 100 words of your blog content.

You can incorporate your keyword in other places like your subheadings, title tags, meta description, URL, and alt text. Furthermore, avoid keyword stuffing, as it will impact your website’s ranking negatively.

3: Write high-quality content:

Expect visitors with varied needs to your website on a regular basis. While most might be searching for a solicitor to hire on the spot, some are only seeking information about a legal topic.  Even prospects searching for a solicitor to hire will still consume your content. So, make an effort to populate your site with high-quality and well-optimized content.

When you provide the information your visitors seek, they will consider your website a go-to destination for information on legal topics. Additionally, even though most visitors seeking information might not hire you instantly, you’ll be the first on their minds whenever the need to hire a solicitor arises.

You can write your content by yourself since you’re a solicitor and have in-depth knowledge about legal topics in your area of practice. But if you can’t, then consider outsourcing to competent writers. Writers with experience and expertise in writing blog posts on legal topics will do great.

Remember to place your keywords strategically in your content. And incorporate pictures in your content to capture attention and increase your dwell time.

Must-Know Legal Blog Post Writing Tips

Now that we have discussed the importance of populating your law firm website with high-quality content let’s discuss how to write the content.

• Understand your target audience:

Your target audience refers to those you are hoping would find and read your content. Your audience is those you hope will visit your website, consume your content, and pick up the phone to call you or refer you to other contacts.

So, who are your target audience? What are their possible age group? What sort of information do you think they will be looking for? How can you provide the kind of information they seek? Think about these questions before you start writing. You can even come up with other questions to enable you understand your clients better.

If your audience involves lawyers like yourself and prospective clients, then you should consider producing two types of content on the same topic. But don’t make the mistake of targeting the same keywords in both content. Use different keywords to avoid keyword cannibalization.

If you’re writing for lawyers who you’re hoping might refer you, use legal terminologies in your content. You cannot produce simple content for fellow lawyers like yourself and expect them to understand. You must prove that you’re qualified for the job they are referring to you.

On the other hand, if you’re writing for potential clients, make your content as simple as possible. Make it so simple that even an 8th grader can read and understand your content easily.

• Create content that satisfies users’ search  queries:

Proper optimization of your content is necessary to improve your chances of being found online. When you follow SEO best practices, you’ll make your website attractive to search engines and visitors.

When writing your blog posts, consider search engines and users. Make it easy to read and well-optimized for search engines. Populating your law firm website with high-quality blog posts can benefit your law firm in diverse ways. Besides convincing prospects that you’re the real deal, other blogs may want to reference your posts.

Having other high-quality blogs or websites referencing your post is a great development. It is a great way to earn valuable backlinks.

• Promote your law firm and services professionally:

Your main aim in writing your content isn’t just to provide information but to let people know about your business. However, trying to overpromote your law firm isn’t a great move. Instead, focus attention on delivering quality information. Then, you can promote your services later in the content.

Even if the content is about your law firm, don’t make it obvious to the readers. Otherwise, you’ll have a higher bounce rate and dwell time, as most visitors won’t consider your content useful to them.

4: Build high-quality backlinks:

Backlinks are a vote of confidence from other websites to yours. The signal they pass to Google is that other reputable websites consider the web page the links are pointing to as high-quality. This convinces Google to view your web page in that manner and reward you accordingly.

Google wants only web pages with valuable and helpful information to appear at the top of the search engine result page. The tech company wants prospects to find the solutions to problems with ease.

Backlinks are one of Google’s major ranking factors. So, when you build high-quality and niche-specific backlinks, you’re setting your website up for massive growth in ranking, organic, and referral traffic.

While building backlinks is a great way to improve ranking, ensuring that your backlinks are top-quality should be your major goal. Your backlinks won’t count if they are of poor quality. That is why Google places more emphasis on the quality of your backlinks rather than the quantity.

5: Focus on local SEO:

As a solicitor, know that the majority of your clients will come from people in your locality. Your major clients would be people in your county, city, or even state. However, anyone who’s seeking legal representation would want to hire someone close to them. That is where local SEO comes in.

With local SEO, you can rank high in local searches.   Ranking high means you’ll appear at the top of the local search result page for your target location-based keyword.

Another way you can perform local SEO is by creating a professional Google Business Profile (GBP), which was formerly called Google My Business. With this, the chances of your law firm being found online will improve.

Conclusion

SEO for solicitors is important to improve online visibility. As a lawyer, you want prospects to know your law firm exists. That way, they’ll consider you whenever the need to hire a legal professional comes up.

We have discussed several benefits of SEO for a solicitor looking to improve their caseloads.  Search engine optimization (SEO) puts your business where prospects looking for solicitors can find you online. It helps create massive brand awareness and build trust.

Another advantage SEO has over other marketing strategies is that it is cost-effective. The initial cost might seem a bit high depending on the agency handling your SEO projects, but in the end, it’s actually the cheapest. Once you rank high on the search engine result page, you will keep getting organic traffic and more caseloads, even if you reduce your SEO effort for a while.