The Ultimate Guide to SEO for Law Firms

I’m not going to lie to you – we want you as a client.

With that said, I’m not going to cold call you or spam you like other SEO companies do. I’m going to win you over by showing you the exact blueprint to ranking your law firm’s website.

This is the same step-by-step guide we have used to rank the websites of other solicitors and law firms.

Now I know you’re probably not going to read all of this post due to the fact that I know that our other clients that are solicitors barely have time to read emails, never mind an SEO guide for solicitors.

So you might ask yourself why I’ve spent tens of hours writing it, as I could’ve written a lesser quality post like every other “SEO Expert” in an hour or so.

Well, we’re not like every other SEO services provider and the only way to prove that is to actually show you.

I’m making this post our sales pitch!

1. How to Track the ROI of SEO

This section is normally at the end of guides but it is so important that it needs to be put first.

We’ve said it before – marketing efforts are completely lost without proper analytics. To get this you need to use two tools:

1. Google Webmaster Tools
2. Google Analytics

If you don’t have these set up already, do it now. There are plenty of resources available online for doing this.

In this section of the guide I’m going to show you 3 reports you can use to gauge the ROI of your SEO campaign.

1. Analysing Organic Traffic

Tool Used: Google Analytics
How to find the report: Go to Audience > Mobile > Overview and select the Organic Traffic segment.
What this tells you: This kills two birds with one stone as it tells you the amount of visitors you are getting via organic search and also what type of device they are using. It also tells you bounce rate, time on site and goal completion.
Why you need it: If your organic traffic isn’t increasing then your SEO campaign isn’t working!

2. Analysing Organic Impressions and Queries

Tool Used: Google Webmaster Tools
How to find the report: Go to Search Traffic > Search Analytics
What this tells you: Every time your website shows up in a search on Google (this shows up as an Impression) and the keywords (Queries) that your website is showing up for.
Why you need it: This allows you to check that your website is showing up for the right keywords and also allows you to make sure your impressions (and clicks) are increasing.

3. Analysing the Value of your SEO

To truly analyse the value of your SEO you need to be tracking goals.

In the steps below we’re going to set it up to track form submissions and will assume that the contact form on your website takes visitors to a “Thank You” page.

1. Click on the “Admin” tab in Google Analytics.
2. Under “View” click “Goals”.
3. Click “New Goal”.
4. Give the goal a name – you can just use “Contact Form”.
5. Under “Type” select “Destination”.
6. Click “Continue”.
7. In “Destination” select “Equal to”.
8. In the space available enter the exact URL of your “Thank You” page (i.e if your site is www.example.com/thank-you/ you should just type /thank-you/)
9. Click ‘Verify Goal” and if you have set this up correctly it should show a conversion %.
10. Click “Save”.

This will now allow you to see how many form-fills you get on your website and where they are coming from (organic search, social media, PPC, etc)

2. Selecting Keywords of High Value

Great keyword research enables you to really take control of your rankings, traffic and leads. Without great keyword research you’re operating in the dark.

I always find it’s easier to illustrate this by example. For example, let’s imagine I’m doing research for a Manchester based solicitor.

Step One:

Come up with a list of initial keywords based on the business. For example:

1. Manchester Solicitor
2. Solicitor Manchester
3. Divorce Solicitor Manchester
4. Manchester Divorce Solicitor

Step Two:

Google has a tool that’s available for free that shows the average monthly search volume for keywords that you enter.

To access this, you have to sign in to AdWords (if you don’t have an AdWords account you can create one for free – https://adwords.google.com) and select “Tools” and then “Keyword Planner”.

When you’re on the Keyword Planner you then have to select “Search for new keywords using a phrase, website or category”, input your keywords and then click “Get ideas”.

Step Three:

The resulting screen will bring up hundreds of keywords ideas that can be used and how many times per month on average they are searched. Click the “Download” button.

Step Four:

Open the data you have just downloaded in Excel (or any other software you have that can open CSV files) and remove columns A, C, E, G, H, I, J, K and L.

You should now have a file that looks like this:

Because the keyword planner has given us hundreds of keyword ideas, we’re going to filter them to find only the most relevant ones. For this example we’re going to use a divorce solicitor, so I’m going to filter column A to only show me keyword ideas with “divorce” in them.

Step Five:

We now need to organise the keywords by what the person’s intent is that is searching. Let’s take a look at the first 8 keywords in the table that I have:

1. divorce solicitor manchester
2. manchester divorce solicitor
3. divorce lawyers manchester
4. divorce lawyer manchester
5. divorce manchester
6. divorce solicitors in manchester
7. divorce lawyers in manchester
8. divorce law

While all of these keywords are potential valuable to the website, some queries are informational and some have purchase intent.

You now need to separate the keywords that drive traffic from the ones that drive leads.

We do this by adding another column in the spreadsheet labelled “Intent” and tag each keyword with either “Purchase” or “Info”.

You now need to sort your keyword list by the number of monthly searches from high to low. The most relevant keyword with the highest search volume is going to be your main keyword. Later in this guide I’ll show you how to leverage it.

NOTE: Just for fun I totalled up how much it would cost to drive traffic to your site with these keywords using Google pay per click ads and found that it would cost £66,674.08 per month! An SEO campaign with us won’t cost anywhere near that.

3. Analysing your Competition

Here’s my competitive analysis for Solicitor SEO:

It’s incredibly competitive.

You have the absolute perfect situation for internet marketing

High value services + high demand online = a lot of competition

It’s really hard to rank a law firm’s website because any law firm’s with half a brain are investing in SEO.

The only way you’re going to rank is to be better than your competition.

Step One:

First, we’re going to need a couple of tools:

1. Majestic Toolbar
2. Moz Toolbar

These browser plugins enable you to analyse the backlinks of your competitors (backlinks are still Google’s biggest ranking factor)

Moz Bar: The Moz bar will show you 2 statistics in the search engine results page:

1. Page Authority (PA) – Calculated based on how many websites are linking to the page. The higher this number is, the harder it will be to rank above it.
2. Domain Authority (DA) – Calculated based on how many websites are linking the domain. The higher this number is, the harder it will also be to rank above it.

Majestic Toolbar: The Majestic Toolbar will help us understand a lot of things:

1. Trust Flow (TF) – Calculated based on the quality of links that are linking to the website. The higher this number is, the harder it will be to outrank.
2. Citation Flow (CF) – Calculated based on the power of links that are linking to the website. The higher this number is, the harder it will be for you to outrank it.
3. Anchor Text – The anchor text that is used to link to the website. This will allow us to see if the owner of the website has invested in a bad SEO campaign. The more diverse that the anchor text profile is, the harder it will be to beat.
4. External Backlinks – The amount of backlinks that the website has.

Are you lost yet?

Here’s a quick summary of what we need to do:

1. Find your competitors that rank for the keywords you want to rank for.
2. Analyse the PA and DA of your competitors.
3. Analyse the TF and CF of your competitors.
4. Analyse the anchor text of your competitors.

Step Two:

We’re going to need to keep track of our findings, so we’re going to open the spreadsheet we made earlier of our keywords and create a new tab.

On the new sheet, add the columns “Keyword”, “URL”, “PA”, “DA”, “TF”, “CF”, “Anchor”, “BL” and “RD”.

Step Three:

Google your main keyword and record the following:

Keyword: solicitor manchester

URL: www.slatergordon.co.uk/contact-us/manchester/

PA: 42

DA: 49

Step Four:

Go to the organic result and click on the Majestic plugin’s icon.

In the spreadsheet record the following:

Trust Flow: 34

Citation Flow: 38

Backlinks: 10

Referring Domains: 7

Note: You should always use the URL’s stats rather than domains.

Once you’ve noted these down, you need to click the URL outlined in the screenshot above in blue.

Step Five:

Scroll to the bottom of this page and you’ll find a pie chart showing the anchor text that is being used to link other websites to this one.

This chart isn’t the best one to use due to the URL not having many backlinks (it has just 10), but there is plenty of variety being used such as Naked URLs, Keywords and also Generic anchors.

From looking at this I can see that the anchor text profile is clean and can add this to the spreadsheet.

Step Six:

You now need to do this for the entire first page of the search results.

It’s a lot of work and now you can start to realise why SEO services can be costly!

Here’s how my spreadsheet starts to look for “solicitor manchester”:

Step Seven:

There isn’t a magic way to take all of this data and create a magical formula to enable you to rank. With this being said, as an experienced SEO of over 9 years I can form an educated plan of what it will take:

• The top results are ranking with very few backlinks – This is getting more and more common these days. Sites are ranking higher than competitors with more links due to them having less links but of a much higher quality. I’d focus on building high quality white hat links using guest blogging and outreach.

I’d estimate that it would take around 3-5 months to get a site ranking in these results with a heavy focus on getting high quality backlinks, social engagement and content.

4. Creating the Optimal Website Structure

It’s very important to have a site that’s easy to navigate and use from a rankings and user experience perspective.

This basically means that you need to have all of your content, navigation and URL structure organised properly.

This sounds incredibly easy, but can get complicated depending on what type of law firm you are:

1. Law firm providing a single service (i.e Divorce Solicitor)
2. Law firm providing multiple services (i.e Divorce, Criminal Law, Personal Injury, etc)
3. Law firm with multiple locations

I’m going to break this section down for each of these types.

Law Firm Providing a Single Service

If your law firm provides only one type of service (i.e Divorce) then you should structure your site in the following way:

• Use an exact match domain for your website URL (these are still powerful).
  • Example – www.divorcesolicitormanchester.co.uk
  • Generally I would suggest not using exact match domains as I prefer to use branded domains as using an exact match domain can hinder your ability to rank for other thing.
• Add service pages that drill down to your main line of work.
  • Example – www.divorcesolicitormanchester.co.uk/our-services/divorce, www.divorcesolicitormanchester.co.uk/adultery-solicitor, etc
  • By adding in these extra pages you’re also able to target more specific searches that relate to your service.

Law Firm Providing Multiple Services

If your law firm provides multiple services then you should structure your site in the following way:

• Use a branded domain.
  • Example – www.thomsonlaw.co.uk
  • Using an exact match domain will send mixed signals to Google in this instance so it is much better to have your domain be your brand name.
• Add pages for each service.
  • Example – www.thomsonlaw.co.uk/our-services/divorce-solicitors, www.thomsonlaw.co.uk/our-services/personal-injury-solicitors, etc
  • This enabled you to rank for all your services, as it’s incredibly hard to get Google to rank your homepage for everything.

Law Firm with Multiple Locations

If your law firm has multiple locations then you should structure your site in the following way:

• Add each city to the URL.
  • Example – www.thomsonlaw.co.uk/manchester/our-services/divorce-solicitor, www.thomsonlaw.co.uk/liverpool/our-services/personal-injury-solicitor, etc.

5. Ranking in Local Search

Most of the Local SEO is already covered by the traditional SEO that is covered in this guide.

Although this is the case, there are still some specific things that need to be done to rank locally in Google.

Google+

Rather than put the information about Google+ here, we wrote an eBook dedicated to setting this up correctly (and many more things to do with local search) that you can access for free here:

http://www.searchup.co.uk/free-local-seo-ebook/

Reviews

While reviews aren’t a ranking factor, they enable you to get stars show up next to your listing, which will improve the amount of people that click through to your site massively.

The best way to get reviews? Ask your customers!

Local Citations

Local citations are incredibly important for ranking locally. These are listings on directories and other websites that display your Name, Address and Phone Number.

There are literally thousands of places you can get citations and we made a list of them here:

http://www.searchup.co.uk/local-seo-citations-guide/

It’s incredibly important to do this and to make sure that all of the information is correct about your business on all your citations, but it is also an incredibly mind numbing process building them.

Because of this, it’s far better to outsource them and we have a service for this here.

6. Creating Content That Google Loves

Hopefully you’ve managed to last this long and are still reading this guide – your SEO efforts rely on your abilities to create and distribute engaging content.

Everyone’s heard the term “content is king”.

At SearchUp we HATE it.

This buzzterm has resulted in lots of sites launching blogs full of content that provides absolutely no value to anyone and is, in fact, driving potential clients away.

Let’s put this into perspective and assume that you’re looking for an SEO service provider and search for some local agencies and go to their websites…they all look the same, don’t they?

They all claim to be experts, but does their blog prove it? Are they regularly providing in-depth, industry-related content?

Content fuels our business.

Assign Keywords to Content

Lets go back to our list of keywords that we labelled by intent.

You need to be using the keywords labelled as “Purchase” in your service pages and you need to be using the keywords labelled as “Info” in your blog posts.

Using Purchase Intent Keywords

This is on-page SEO 101 and I don’t want to spend too much time on it as there’s a wealth of resources already available on this topic.

You should be including these purchase intent keywords on service/sales pages in the following:

• URL
• Title Tag
• H1 Tag
• Image Name
• Image Alt Tag
• 2-3 times within the content (ideally keep content above 500 words per page)

Let’s look at an example:

• URL: www.divorcesolicitormanchester.co.uk
• Title Tag: The Number 1 Divorce Solicitor in Manchester | Thomson Law
• H1 Tag: Rocky Relationship? Hire the Number 1 Divorce Solicitor in Manchester!
• Image Name: divorce-solicitor-manchester-thomson-law
• Image Alt Tag: Divorce Solicitor in Manchester Thomson Law
• Content: 500 words about divorce solicitor services in Manchester. Aim to include 5-6 variations of keywords and synonyms throughout the content.

You should repeat this on every page that you’re using to target purchase intent keywords.

Using Keywords with Info Intent

The truth is that 99.9% of SEO companies will only ever use purchase intent keywords.

This is where they make a huge mistake. Google doesn’t just look at the words on pages – they look at brand mentions, social shares and the quality of your backlinks.

Think about it.

Why would another website link to your home page, or your service pages? It happens, but very rarely does it happen naturally.

If i know this and you know this, then Google definitely knows this.

If your website just has links going to your home page then you’re going to get hit with a spam penalty.

Informational content is what naturally generates links and social shares. This is why you NEED a blog.

Create in depth guides and case studies. Prove that you’re an expert and that you’re worth the fees you charge. Become an industry leader in your field.

7. Building Powerful Links

We covered this earlier – links are still the number 1 ranking factor.

Back in 2011 I used to be able to rank sites clicking buttons and using automated tools.

Things have changed. Google got smarter.

In competitive industries (such as law) Google ranks sites that don’t just have 1 type of link all pointing to the same page.

Link building is a hugely time consuming process and takes a lot of time, resources and effort (it’s more like blood, sweat and tears!) but when done correctly it really pays off.

Instead of putting everything about link building here, I created a guide that shows you the best link types you can get and how you can create them step-by-step. You can check that out here:

http://www.searchup.co.uk/15-link-building-techniques-that-work/

8. Conclusion

Do you still think you can do your own SEO for your law firm? Do you still want to?

SEO is getting harder by the day. With this being said, it is without doubt the best investment you can make for your law firm.

SEO is something that if you’re going to do it, do it right. We do it right – get in touch.

The Ultimate Guide to SEO for Law Firms was first seen on SearchUp