SEO for Lawyers – What You Need to Know

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) isn’t a term you need to learn in law school, so why is it so important for lawyers today? To be more specific, it’s not just lawyers who need to be concerned with SEO, it’s anyone with a digital media presence in the current technological era. Search Engine Optimization affects how easily people (and search engines like Google and Bing) are able to access your website content. SEO itself describes a variety of techniques used to make your content as accessible as possible.

In order to determine what content is physically on your website, search engines send out digital bots (also referred to as “spiders”) to gather data about all existing web pages. From there, search engines rank these pages based on perceived value and credibility. You want to make sure your content is getting picked up during these crawls and receiving a high rank, which will ensure it appears in search results when users type in related keywords. This is where Search Engine Optimization comes in. The information on your website should be clean, easy-to-understand, and valuable to your audience. By utilizing key SEO techniques such as keywords, metadata, and structured formatting, you can increase your website’s overall performance.

What Is Organic Search?

You may hear the terms “organic search” or “organic SEO” thrown around quite a bit when it comes to optimizing your law website. Both of these terms reference the same general concept: utilizing SEO “naturally” (versus through paid methods) to improve the overall ranking and results tied to your website. To do this, you utilize search engine approved techniques to design a website that is, overall, user-friendly and easy to access.

What Does It Mean to “Optimize” Your Website for Organic Search?

Focusing on content creation that embodies all the best SEO practices is how you can optimize for organic search. But what does this look like? To start, consider your keywords. Keywords are words or phrases that lead users to your content via search engine. Keywords you rank for are commonly used terms that already exist in your website content. To ensure you continue ranking for these keywords, continue to utilize them throughout your site. It’s also smart to see what kinds of keywords your competitors rank for. Are there keywords you would like to begin ranking for? Start to utilize these regularly in your content and metadata. Metadata is what tells search engines and users, at a glance, what is on a web page. When you think of search engine results, these are the little blurbs that appear about each result with the name and description of a webpage. Metadata can be written directly into your websites code or added via a plugin or through your Content Management System (CMS) depending on which one you use. Another way to make your content more approachable is by varying your formatting. Use headers, bullet points and lists, icons, or graphics to break up bigger concepts and larger sections of text. Doing this will help you improve the overall readability of the content and allowing for skimming, which many modern readers who are used to the “bite-sized” social media internet climate are expecting and find valuable. Images, too, are a great way to break up large blocks of text while also providing a more visually engaging content that will draw in the reader. While custom imagery is always recommended, stock imagery (which you can find both free and paid online) can also be a valuable solution.

What Is Paid Marketing or PPC Marketing?

Similar to “SEO” and “Organic Search,” “Paid Marketing,” “PPC Marketing,” and “Paid Search” are all interchangeable terms referencing the same thing: digital marketing you pay for. PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click and refers to marketing efforts that enable you to put the web content of your choice in front of a very specific audience at a set cost. This can be a cost that you determine (a per-day budget allotment you set for your ads) or a cost that is established by competition. For example, highly in-demand keywords will cause the cost of related search results to be much more expensive.

Paid marketing can be a great solution if you want to expand awareness of your website quickly, but it also comes at a price – quite literally. Depending on the method of paid search you choose to adopt, you may be facing a pretty hefty price tag.

Organic and paid search efforts can and should be used in conjunction with one another. The efforts you put into your free, organic SEO will only help to enhance the natural/unpaid awareness of your content, which will then benefit any paid efforts you choose to implement and help keep costs down overall.

The Value of Knowing Your Competition

Competition is everywhere, even in the legal industry, and understanding your competitors’ digital presence to the best of your ability is key to developing a strong, resilient Search Engine Optimization strategy. By acknowledging your competitors when building your SEO strategy, you can make more educated decisions when it comes to keyword selection, content formatting, and overall industry approach.

Okay, but what does this mean exactly?

Having a solid understanding of the keywords and frequently searched questions your competitors are attempting to win can help you frame out what search terms you would like to go after. Is there one search term that everyone in your industry is after—something that you need to make sure you’re including in your content? What about a search term that is used less often by your competitors but is still as effective? The proper implementation of this term could shoot you to the top of the search results and give you an edge.

Are your competitors using paid marketing efforts? How much? Knowing the answers to these questions can help you determine if PPC marketing is something that’s right for your company and, if so, what a healthy budget might look like.

SEO for Lawyers – What Does It All Really Mean?

So now you know about search engine optimization, organic search, and paid search, but what does it all really mean for your law website?

At the end of the day, SEO and law firms have a lot more in common than you might think. It’s all about reputation. Search Engine Optimization just happens to be how you build your reputation online. While, of course, SEO is nothing without valuable content to promote, it is how you can ensure the right people are seeing your content at the right time.

SEO, just like the law, doesn’t have to be confusing. Ensuring your content is concise, clear, and easy-to-read will not only help your users to engage more, but it will also make your content more valuable to search engines (and, therefore, appear higher in search engine results).

Have more questions about how SEO relates to lawyers and your law website? Our team is here to answer all your Search Engine Optimization questions. Contact us to learn more.