Online search engines are the first port of call for your prospective clients. As much as 96% of people looking for legal help first turn to a search engine to aid them in their search, and of those people, around 66% will follow up their search with a call to your office. That is, of course, provided your website is easily discoverable online and has been optimised to draw in organic traffic.
Search engine optimisation, or SEO for solicitors, is the primary factor determining whether or not your website will rank highly enough in search engine page results to attract potential clients. As such, knowing how to master solicitor SEO is fundamental to the success of your business.
In essence, if you can rank highly in your field of legal expertise, it could soon lead to a vast increase in new customers and customer loyalty. By the end of this article, you will have learned what SEO is and why SEO can be so beneficial for solicitors and legal professionals, as well as how to apply solicitor SEO best practices to improve your ranking on Google and other major search engines.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for ‘Search Engine Optimisation’. It is the process by which you can make your website appear higher in search engine rankings for search terms relevant to your business and industry.
There are lots of different processes, strategies and techniques which go into a quality SEO practice, most of which are informed by Google’s own guidelines, since it is Google that sets the standard for almost all other search engines.
SEO for solicitors helps to make your website easier to find, more engaging, and more accessible. The best local SEO for solicitors puts your services directly in front of people in or near your location who are actively looking for legal advice. If done properly and consistently, your SEO efforts can bring huge rewards.
The 6 key benefits of SEO for solicitors
Around 74 per cent of visitors to solicitors’ websites are there because they want to take action and purchase your services. Not only are the vast majority of potential clients using search engines, but they are also ready to buy. Let’s take a look at some of the other major benefits which SEO can offer solicitors and law firms operating in the UK and further afield.
- Level the playing field: Done well, SEO can give you a competitive edge over bigger, more established competitors in your industry and in your local area. Google doesn’t care that the solicitors next door has been operational for 100 years and you only 10, it cares about how user friendly your websites are.
- Boost brand awareness: The higher you can appear on SERPs (search engine page results) the more facetime your solicitor brand will have with potential customers. Even if they don’t convert on their first search, your name is more liable to stick in their head.
- Associate your locale with your offering: Effective local SEO for solicitors ensures that your business’s online presence is tied to your specific location, both narrow (e.g., York) and broad (e.g., England or the UK). This type of SEO helps drive organic local traffic and place your website high on local search results, generating a higher quality website traffic which is more likely to engage with you and your services.
- ‘Bee’ accessible from anywhere: SEO best practices include optimising your content and website for all potential clients, including those with additional needs (such as seeing or hearing impairments) and for those searching for legal advice from their mobile phones whilst on the go.
- Keep marketing costs down: The true beauty of effective SEO is that it is one of the most affordable modes of legal marketing available. Whether you choose to run SEO in-house or partner with SEO experts for maximum return, good quality SEO doesn’t have to demand much of your marketing budget, yet can show excellent financial yield in return.
- Organic search has one of the highest conversion rates: SEO for solicitors drives the traffic you receive from so-called ‘organic searches’, which in the legal sector have the second highest conversion rate of any marketing practice, at 4%. This falls just behind email newsletter marketing, with a conversion rate of 4.5%.
How to improve SEO for solicitors in 10 simple steps
So we’ve discussed the key benefits of SEO for solicitors, but how do you actually go about improving SEO so that you can enjoy them?
Let’s take a look at the 10 most important steps to developing a winning SEO strategy for your local solicitor business or services.
1. Sign up for Google My Business (GMB)
When it comes to SEO, solicitors should give priority to local search results. That means ranking for searches related specifically to your geographical area, for example, “solicitors in York”.
Google treats local searches a little differently. It still displays the usual results to the end user, but does so alongside a map and list of local companies situated at the top of the page. To appear in these local results gets your business in front of the right potential clients at the right time, but in order to place yourself there, you’ll first need to complete a Google My Business directory form.
To make your GMB directory stand out from your competitors’, make sure to fill in all fields accurately and clearly. When writing the description for your business, keep it short and snappy, describing clearly what services you offer, where you are based, and what makes your offering unique from your competitors’.
2. Get some client reviews
You should encourage satisfied clients to leave great reviews for your firm. You could link to review sites from your own website or point clients in the right direction when speaking directly to them.
The trust that comes from excellent reviews will help to improve your Google ranking. It also helps when you reply to your reviews, as this demonstrates engagement with your audience and care for your customers, so it’s worth making this a regular task.
3. Increase trust even further with backlinks
The best SEO for solicitors can be summarised in just a couple of words: building trust. In an industry which can directly change its clients’ lives – for better or for worse – trust in your brand, your authority, your discretion and your expertise is absolutely fundamental to whether or not a prospective customer will engage with you.
SEO can be used to build trust not only in customers, but also in Google and other search engines. Their algorithms also want to know they can trust your content to be accurate, engaging and useful to their web users before they’re willing to rank you highly in SERPs. Building backlinks is one of the best ways to improve trust through SEO.
A backlink is a link from another website to a page on your site. It is seen by Google as a vote of confidence in your content, especially if the website linking to you is also reputable in Google’s eyes. Spend time securing high-quality backlinks. If you can work with trusted partners or industry authorities to get links back to your site, you’ll see a positive increase in rankings.
4. Sign up for local directories
Seven out of every 10 clients think that it’s important for their law firm to be local, emphasising the importance of local SEO for solicitors. Many searchers include the search term “near me”, or even an exact location, in their solicitor searches.
Sign up for online local directories to increase your chances of being found.
5. Rank for relevant keywords
When improving solicitor SEO, you should target specific services, such as “family law,” for example. Finding underutilised niches in your industry and locale could be the key to earning an advantage over competitors, and putting your name above theirs in search engine results.
You can find niches and exploit them by carrying out keyword research and aiming to rank highly for the right keywords relevant both to the services you offer and the services your prospective local clients are most in search of.
Again, make sure that your target keywords include local searches. Find keywords that include your city or area to increase your chances of being found by the right customers, and use a carefully judged combination of short and longtail keywords to broaden your SEO appeal. Short keywords like “solicitor” will be much harder to rank for than longtail, location-specific keywords like “family solicitors in York.”
6. Blog regularly
SEO is about more than just keywords and directories, reviews and backlinks, it is also all about content. The ‘content’ you produce, from blog posts to social media photos and videos, LinkedIn articles and more, acts like bait.
If you can produce high-quality content which Google deems original, useful, and accessible to its end users, then it is more likely to rank this content high in SERPs. One of the best forms of content for solicitors and legal firms to generate is blog content.
For example, you could keep an active blog containing legal advice on issues and questions regularly enquired about and searched for. If you’re able to draw in potential clients with quality blog content, you can then link to your services to try and drive customer conversions.
7. Optimise your website design and UX
When deciding which websites and pages to display to their users, Google and other search engines go beyond assessing the originality, quality, and trustworthiness of your content. They are also looking for websites which are highly accessible, easy to use, and will satisfy users’ desire for a quick solution to their problems.
It benefits both the website owner and the search engine algorithm to deliver a streamlined website to the user, since it keeps the user coming back for more.
When developing your solicitor website, pay close attention to UX, or ‘user experience’. You want your website to be designed so that it is easily navigable, with your services, location, contact form, blog and ‘About’ sections all clearly labelled and enjoyable to scroll through. For example, get to grips with how to properly implement H1 headings and tags. These elements help format your pages better, making them easier to navigate and more likely to rank highly in SERPs.
Slow-loading pages, cluttered design, and broken links are all surefire ways to aggravate a visitor to your website, reducing the chances of them converting their visit into a sale or enquiry.
8. Get to grips with technical SEO
Another aspect of SEO for solicitors which improves your chances of ranking highly is called ‘technical SEO’, or ‘meta SEO.’ This is a branch of Search Engine Optimisation in the legal industry that deals with all of the behind-the-scenes formatting and cataloguing of your website for search engine trawlers.
Metadata, for example, is what you create for Google to quickly assess the relevance of your page for each user’s search query. A meta title and meta description are what is first displayed to a prospective client in their search engine results pages. As such, optimising these with local SEO for solicitors improves the chances people will click on your link.
Other forms of technical SEO optimise your pages for search engine crawlers and indexing. They act like big bold badges on each of your pages, telling crawlers exactly what’s contained on each and exactly how to organise them. ‘Robots.txt’ tags, for example, tell crawlers which parts of your website are open to visitors and which are not.
9. Compliment comprehensive SEO with quality social media and PPC marketing campaigns
SEO on its own can take your solicitor firm, small or large, to the big leagues, but to stay there you’ll need to broaden your marketing strategies to include two other fundamental digital advertising methods: pay-per-click (PPC) ads and social media.
Social media marketing takes your brand onto the platforms which almost every internet user in the world uses every day, whilst PPC bids place your links as ads at the top of SERPs for the search terms most relevant and convertible to you.
Pairing SEO best practices for solicitors with a comprehensive social media marketing strategy and PPC advertising maximises your chances of seeing a healthy return on your marketing budget.
10. Create content following Google’s YMYL guidelines
Because of the industry you’re in, Google treats your website and its content with a much more scrutinous eye than it would, say, the website of a personal fitness trainer or music teacher. The advice you provide your clients can dramatically alter their lives, for better or worse, and as such Google must rank legal pages with a fine-toothed comb.
It applies a specific set of algorithmic rules to the legal industry, known as YMYL, or ‘Your Money or Your Life’. In essence, you must ensure that the content you produce for SEO purposes is 100% accurate, original, trustworthy and demonstrates a genuine authority on the subject derived from experience in the field. These principles are summarised by Google as EAT or E-A-T: ‘Expertise, Authority, Trust.’
It is definitely worth, for example, including a legal disclaimer at the top of blog posts on YMYL subjects clearly stating that you are providing advice only (rather than instruction), and listing the risks associated with the topic. You can always turn this to your advantage in the same post by redirecting to the services you offer, which help mitigate the risk your clients might otherwise face.
Take the first steps toward SEO supremacy with beefound
SEO for solicitors can quickly place you and your business ahead of your competitors and in front of potential clients searching for local answers to their problems. And yet a dedicated SEO strategy demands time, experience, and careful assessment and recalibration.
Few small solicitor firms have the budget nor the resources to ensure their SEO achieves its full potential, bringing in scores of new clients and motivating them to get in touch.
If you don’t have the time, tools, or expertise to rank effectively, it’s a wise investment to instead employ the services of an SEO partner like beefound.agency – a dedicated Google Partner with years of experience helping businesses in the UK and overseas market themselves more effectively online.
New clients are already out there searching for you, and by improving your SEO, you can help them find you. So what are you waiting for? Speak to beefound.agency today.
