Local search engine optimisation (SEO) for law firms is one of the best ways to attract potential clients to find you online. Optimising your website and content for local search terms can attract more clients. It can attract clients searching for legal services in your area.
Local SEO for law firms is undoubtedly one of the most important strategies in running a successful law firm. It helps us attract new clients and keep current clients for legal websites. SEO does this by building trust and confidence in your services.
Key takeaways
- Business listings on GMB and Bing Places can increase visibility in local searches.
- Location-targeted keywords and landing pages help Google recognise a law firm as local.
- Positive customer reviews can increase the number of potential clients who choose a law firm.
- Encourage reviews by actively asking for feedback from past and current clients.
- Local link-building can increase trust in a law firm. Partnerships and collaborations with reputable local resources are ways this can be done.
- Mobile SEO, including a mobile-responsive site, can help law firms reach clients on smartphones.
Claiming business listings is critical to Local SEO
One of the first things we do in SEO is to claim our client’s business listings. We do this on popular sites like Google My Business, and Bing Places. Having an up-to-date profile that includes all the necessary information is essential. It helps our clients show up in local searches. Ensuring our client profiles are accurate and contain relevant links is critical. This is important so potential clients can easily find them.
Tip: Creating daily and weekly schedules to update business listings is how we get our clients to the top of the listing directories.
Image: Google My Business registration page
Image: Bing Places registration page
Optimising law websites for higher rankings
Once our business listings are in place, we ensure the websites appeal to our local clients. This way, search engines recognise that were a local law firm. It helps us display higher in search engine result pages (SERPs) for related queries. Next, we add location-specific keywords throughout the content of our websites. We do this on landing pages and include H1 and H2 tags with the name of relevant cities and suburbs. We then consider creating dedicated pages for each location’s services. This will make it easier to list them separately in Google’s index.
Tip: We ensure our website has the exact same information as our business listings. This can make it easier for Google and Bing to recognise websites and listings with businesses.
Customer reviews attract more engaged clients
When optimising for local SEO presence in Australia, client reviews play an important role. Positive reviews have the potential to attract more clients to your business. They are more likely to choose you as their legal representative. Getting as many positive customer reviews as possible is essential. When we start with a new client, we ensure there is a reply to all past and current client feedback or reviews. You can share these reviews across all business platforms. Sharing social media testimonial reviews on our client websites helps increase brand trust.
Tip: We always reply to reviews past, present, and future, whether negative or positive.
link-building strategies increase client trust
link-building strategies increase client trust Wikipedia defines link-building as: “
Link building is the process of establishing relevant hyperlinks (usually called links) to a website from external sites. Link building can increase the number of high-quality links pointing to a website, in turn increasing the likelihood of the website ranking highly in search engine results.”
An effective local SEO strategy to attract more law firm clients is link building. Specifically, link building focuses on building relationships with other websites. Partnering or collaborating with niche businesses is mutually beneficial to all. The goal is to get as many quality links to your website as possible, increasing your presence online. Engage in local link-building via news and other local resources websites. Websites that have an established name for themselves within the area you serve. Look at the domain name authority of each site, the high the better the link quality. It will help you gain the trust of potential clients. Clients are more likely to believe the reviews of articles written about you than vice versa.
Tip: We don’t buy links we create collaborative partnerships.
In fact, Google says that its Webmaster guidelines ban buying links just to pump search rankings. Other search engines including Ask, MSN, and Yahoo!, which mimic Google’s link-based search rankings, also discourage buying and selling links.
Focus on mobile SEO
A mobile-responsive website is essential today, as more and more people rely on their smartphones for online searches. To capture the attention of those searching for legal help in your area, focus on effective mobile SEO. This means ensuring that your website is optimised for small screens, with content that is easy to navigate and quickly loads. Additionally, use location-targeted keywords so your site appears higher when customers search for attorneys near them.
Tip: We focus on optimising our law clients’ desktop, tablet, and mobile websites.
As always, feedback is welcome. Contact us with any questions about how to grow your law firm with any of these proven methods.
