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25 Advanced SEO Tips for Law Firms

Written by Erik J. Olson on . Posted in .
Home > Blog > 25 Advanced SEO Tips for Law Firms

0According to a 2020 study, statistics show that 85% of internet users prefer Google as their primary resource when searching for a lawyer. If a competitor ranks ahead of you in search engine results, they could be getting hundreds or even thousands of more clicks to their business than you. Knowing how to take advantage of the latest search engine optimization, or SEO, techniques is essential to getting in front of clients.

Some people rely solely on software like Ahrefs or Moz to build their SEO plan, but even good software needs knowledgeable strategists to use it properly. At Array Digital, we have helped clients across the country reach the top of the SERPs and grow their business while staying a step ahead of the competition. Explore 25 proven advanced SEO tools and tips to take your law firm’s internet marketing to the next level, and get in touch with us for more information today.

Why Is SEO Important for Lawyers?

Search engine optimization can undoubtedly be a significant investment, but it is a vital part of your digital marketing strategy. The legal space is a highly competitive market, and you need to take every step possible to give you an advantage over the competition. Google algorithms get more complicated yearly, and understanding how to use those search algorithms for your marketing gives you a marked advantage.

When working with an agency to execute an SEO strategy, it is always important to thoroughly investigate your competitors’ stats. If you are just starting in the SEO game, but several of your competitors have been consistently doing SEO for years, you cannot expect to outrank them within a couple days, months, or in some instances, years (i.e., extremely competitive markets like New York and Los Angeles can take years of strategy to begin outranking huge competitors).

But don’t let this discourage you. There are still several ways to garner attention online using SEO, even if you’re starting out small. Working with an SEO agency like Array Digital will help you identify gaps in your competitors’ marketing and take advantage of said gaps.

Furthermore, SEO allows you to target law-related keywords without needing an expansive budget as you would need for advertising. This is another reason why SEO is so vital. Law firms, attorneys, and legal professionals need SEO for the same reason you need a website. People look for their legal services online first and foremost, and SEO allows you to rank higher when someone performs a Google search.

What Types of SEO Techniques Do Lawyers Need to Use?

Lawyers use a wide range of different types of SEO techniques to make the most of Google search algorithms. These include, but may not be limited to:

  • Technical SEO
  • On-Page SEO
  • Local SEO
  • Off-Page SEO
  • Content Marketing

Let’s review each one.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is among the more complex of the different types of SEO. It requires optimizations to both the website and its servers. This can be a huge feat if you are not technologically proficient, so it is important to have a qualified SEO agency with technical knowledge of the SEO tools and programming needed for these updates.

When we conduct preliminary audits for prospective clients, they are often posting content consistently and getting great backlinks. Their SEO should be performing well, right? Not exactly. Lawyers can be doing everything right on their website. However, if your website has poor health, all of your other SEO efforts will see their limits.

Remediating technical SEO issues is always a top priority for our team when helping a client get back on track.

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO works in tandem with content to ensure your web pages utilize the right keywords for your business. Strategists in this area also build internal links through anchor text, ensuring that each piece of high-quality content has optimized meta descriptions, title tags, and headings.

However, the key here is that while conducting keyword research and keyword inclusion is important, all pieces of content must execute natural human language.

Never write content solely for Google! Instead, write content that will help your readers while simultaneously including keywords that Google can use to contextualize each page on your website.

Local SEO

Local SEO strategy is specifically designed to target local businesses’ home region, so their page rank is associated with the area where you practice. If “general” SEO is designed to help you come closer to the top of the SERPs when someone searches a particular question related to your area of practice, local SEO is intended to be closer to the top when someone searches “[your city] law firm.” In this case, your target audience is people who live in or near your town. Google Business Profiles (formerly Google My Business) are essential to local SEO.

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO is primarily marked by link building. Link building refers to getting enough websites to feature backlinks to your site so that people are filtered to your web presence and social media from other places. Backlinks show Google that you have internet capital, or value, around the web, and that you are viewed as having authority. This also means that you must feature quality content on your web pages. If the content is poor, people are not likely to read or link to it, as previously mentioned.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is a means of strategic marketing that focuses on creating and distributing valuable, consistent, and relevant content. It is built to attract and retain a clearly defined target audience and turn visitors into customers. It turns clicks into customer actions.

Content marketing is not just about pitching products and services. It is about providing informative and relevant content that makes customers see you as someone who can solve their problems. In the legal world, your blog content exists to educate prospective clients on the depth of their current legal situations and options they can take with your firm. This is typically done in the form of blog posts on your website.

Blogs let you tackle “long-tail keywords,” or specific, long-form queries that may get less search traffic, but often result in a higher conversion value due to their specificity. When writing SEO content, be careful of your keyword frequency. Lack of keyword research may yield a blog post that doesn’t get noticed by the Google algorithm. However, if you go to the other extreme and say the same keyword repeatedly, you can get flagged for keyword stuffing, which goes against Google’s spam guidelines.

Is There Such a Thing as Bad SEO?

There is, after a fashion. Certainly, SEO that does not work is bad, but there is another kind of bad SEO as well. This is called black-hat SEO, where white-hat SEO is “good” SEO. White-hat SEO is in line with the terms and conditions set by search engines like Google. It improves your search engine ranking and ensures that your website maintains its integrity with the terms of service of each engine used.

White-hat SEO uses detailed keyword-rich meta descriptions, offers quality, relevant content to visitors, and ensures a solid user experience. White-hat techniques maintain ethics while still being effective. The objective is to drive organic traffic to your website without unethically exploiting loopholes.

On the other hand, black-hat SEO exploits weaknesses in search engine algorithms to “cheat” its way to higher search results and feign a level of domain authority that does not exist. This can include several methods, such as spam, certain types of bots, cloaking, keyword stuffing, and other unethical methods that provide instant results. However, if Google catches this, you will see a significant loss in rankings.

Array Digital does not condone black-hat SEO, nor will we ever use it. We adhere strictly to Google’s terms, even if this means that SEO growth occurs steadily rather than overnight.

Ready to get more inbound leads for your law firm?

How Can I Improve My Ranking in Search Engine Results Pages If I Am Already Doing SEO?

Even if you are already making SEO efforts on your page, it is essential to kick up your website’s rankings, so your law firm appears as high as possible on the first page of search results. The first page of Google has been reported to capture 92% of all traffic clicks after a search query. Legal SEO is highly competitive. The following techniques, from using the right title tags, URL structure, and improving user experience, can all help to improve your ranking factors. You might even secure a featured snippet after completing many of the tips below!

25 Advanced SEO Tactics for Law Firms

We have examined how and why SEO is vital for your law firm and the different types of SEO techniques of which you need to be aware. Now we will explore the necessary tips, tricks, techniques, and metrics you need to consider to make it happen for your company. Remember, if it all seems too much, you are not alone, and Array Digital is ready to give you the advice and experience you need for your legal content optimization. SEO strategy is a full-time job, after all. Contact us online, or call us at 757-333-3021 for more information.

Advanced Technical SEO Techniques

Technical SEO is about all the things that go on behind the scenes. It deals with such actions as server optimizations that enable spiders to crawl and effectively index your site, so you can improve your organic rankings.

It also deals with the backend and coding of your website.

Technical SEO can also help establish domain authority, control broken links and bounce rates, and deal with redirects within pages. This is the most complex part of SEO and often requires help from an experienced SEO service provider to accomplish it effectively.

1. Optimize User Experience

User experience is essential to your search engine optimization efforts. If people do not enjoy using your site, find it confusing to navigate, or cannot easily identify the information they seek, they will click away without delving further.

Likewise, if a user visits a page and immediately leaves without clicking on any other internal links, this increases your bounce rate, and the site, in turn, loses ranking. This is the core of user experience. Your internal links and URL structure are important for navigation, but there’s more that goes into site layout. Can users easily find what they want? Is your contact information easy to find in the header or footer of the page? Is your contact form easy to fill out and submit? Understanding how visitors will interact with your site is critical.

2. Use Mobile-First Indexing

Mobile-first indexing involves optimizing your website for mobile friendliness when it is accessed by mobile devices. Most Internet users today access the Web on mobile devices, whether that’s with smartphones, tablets, or other on-the-go options. With mobile-first indexing, Google will use the mobile version of your content for indexing your website instead of the desktop version. It will use the smartphone agent primarily going forward since 2019. To get the most from Google’s algorithm, you must optimize your site using intelligent design for mobile devices, not just desktop.

Additionally, be sure that Google can correctly crawl all of your ideal pages. Avoid using the “disallow” directive, which blocks Google’s crawlers.

Above all else, ensure that your mobile and desktop sites contain the same content or as close as humanly possible. This does not mean you cannot optimize the user experience. It is just the opposite, in fact. You can ensure the available content is the same so mobile and desktop users get the ideal experience.

3. Increase Your Site Speed

Increasing your page speed will encourage people to use your site more comfortably. We have all been on websites prioritizing beauty over content and form over function. If we have to wait several seconds for a site to load, most of us are clicking off of it. The same goes for your site. If you have tons of embedded content on your page and it all takes forever to load, the end result is counterproductive and causes a higher-than-normal bounce rate. Some tips to get your website to load faster include:

  • Conduct website speed tests to assess your performance.
  • Optimize your images by reducing dimensions and using file compression.
  • Use a content delivery network or CDN that can cache your content to speed loading.
  • Reduce HTTP requests if you can. This requires reducing the assets any given page needs to load.
  • Use browser caching, allowing browsers to store information to load recently visited pages more quickly temporarily.
  • Minimize external scripts.
  • Minify your JavaScript and CSS code. This means removing any extraneous info the computer does not need, such as whitespace, comments, extra semicolons, and the like.
  • Avoid redirects. Redirects add time to page loading.

4. Utilize Dynamic Parameters for Pagination

Dynamic parameters are a means by which Google’s spiders can work out your page’s URL patterns. They differentiate static URLs from dynamic ones, specifying a placeholder rather than a specific, set value.

If, for example, your website has the URL www.mysite/pages/page/2/, the same site using dynamic parameters might be www.mysite/pages?page=2. The first URL, a static one, points to a set website (“page/2/”) which has to be re-reviewed and re-indexed every time. The dynamic second one points to a place in the URL hierarchy, which Google has an easier time parsing as part of your site.

Without dynamic parameters, getting any new page you create indexed can take days or weeks. When you use them, by comparison, Google spends less time re-crawling existing pages and more time looking for and indexing the new content you are creating. In some cases, dynamic parameters might push the spiders to crawl more pages.

5. Get an SSL Certificate for Your Website

Having SSL on your website is now industry standard. Every new website should have an SSL certificate, or it can hurt your rankings. SSL certificates show visitors that your site is protected from hackers, and that it is verified. For this reason, it can improve your SEO rankings.

Content Marketing and On-Page SEO Techniques

On-page SEO techniques and the right content marketing refer to the structure and schema of your pages, the way your content reflects on you as a business, and which use solid titles, headlines, text, images, and information. Put simply, on-page SEO is what makes people want to visit your page from the SERPS. Content helps them stay on your website to read about your business.

It is critical to note that content marketing and on-page SEO work hand-in-hand. The tips below intertwine both of these paramount SEO techniques.

6. Build Pillar and Cluster Pages

The pillar and cluster model refers to how you organize related content on your website. This is vital to keeping your site search-engine friendly. Helping users quickly and easily find the information they need can be as simple as a practical navigation bar. The main services that you offer are your pillar pages. Cluster pages would be blogs or location-based landing pages that fall under one of your pillars.

For example, your legal site should have a navigation bar with “Services,” and clicking on “Services” will drop down to things like Car Accidents, Wrongful Death, Divorce, Estate Planning, and the various services you offer. Each of these is a pillar that directs the user to a high-level content page that gives a broad overview of your practice areas.

Clusters, then, are blogs that discuss the various subtopics of these areas. A blog discussing what to do after a car accident, or when to call a car accident attorney, for example, would be categorized as clusters.

Creating an SEO topic cluster includes three main components.

  1. A single, broad pillar page
  2. Multiple detailed cluster pages related to the pillar page
  3. Strategic internal links to build connections between each cluster page within its associated pillar

7. Write Quality, Evergreen Content

Evergreen content is content that will remain useful, relevant, and authoritative for a very long time, if not permanently. It is content that does not focus on fads or trends (though there is a place for such content in blogs), but is content that someone who visits your site in two years can still find interesting and valuable.

Evergreen content becomes more useful as social sharing of web content continues to degrade (it has halved over the past few years) because of content saturation. Evergreen content, however, will mark your site as authoritative, and you will gain a strong reputation in the field. If your content is well-researched and valuable for reference purposes, you will gain more genuine backlinks.

To show search engines that your content is evergreen, authoritative, and in-depth, stick with long-form content that exceeds 1,000 words. While SEO professionals might go back and forth on the significance of word count, making sure that you accurately explain legal concepts in a detailed manner to your readers will inevitably require longer pieces. If your content is expansive and well-researched, it will catch the attention of web crawlers.

In addition, be sure you use LSI keywords or search terms related directly to your main targeted keyword. LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing, or indexing based on looking for synonyms to establish relationships between context, concepts, and syntax on a site.

Google claims that there is no such thing as “LSI keywords,” but they likely use a very advanced approach to a similar concept, which looks at more than related words but analyzes your entire page to determine its topic. LSI keywords have become industry shorthand for this concept.

While you are identifying keywords to target, keep search volume in mind. Search volume is the number of searches for a given keyword within a specific timeframe. While search volume can be a useful metric, you must always consider intent.

For example, if I opened a law firm called “Nike Law Firm” and targeted the keyword “Nike,” my efforts would be a waste. Nike is already a well-established brand. People searching “Nike” are looking for shoes and apparel, not my law firm. So, targeting “Nike” as my primary keyword would have the wrong intent, even though the search volume is astronomical.

8. Rewrite “Almost First-Page Content”

“Almost first-page content” is precisely what it sounds like-content that ranks high on the second page of a Google search or below the first ten listings on page one. To understand which keywords each site is ranking for, view Google Search Console’s performance tab.

Any articles with search engine rankings below the first page should be reevaluated. Add statistics, images, quotes, further detail, examples, helpful answers to common questions to refresh the piece. You may not even have to worry about keyword usage; if you focus on quality, you are likely to gain organic keywords naturally.

For maximum effectiveness, check all page rankings, so you don’t harm something that is ranking well in favor of fixing another page. Pay attention to all connected subtopics and adequately work them into your architecture. Finally, consider doing a quarterly audit to see how your content is performing. Array Digital provides these audits to our new and existing clients.

If you find that refreshing your content still does not result in great rankings, this likely points to other issues such as poor technical SEO, not enough backlinks, or targeting the wrong keyword. Our team is able to help you identify and remediate these challenges.

9. Craft Powerful Headlines

Strong headlines and page titles will increase the click-through rate (CTR) of your site. When you first start crafting your page, a draft headline can be created as a placeholder, but even your draft should directly address the topic at hand. After this, expect to write a few dozen variations.

Why should you write so many headlines? The simple answer is the more you write, the better you will get. The effort will not be wasted, either. You can use the variant headlines in other places, like social media posts, that link back to your content.

10. Rank for Featured Snippets

Featured snippets are still an essential part of Google’s search algorithm. They are very tough to secure and even tougher to maintain. Getting a featured snippet means creating content that uses high-ranking keywords and answers questions you are positive your audience wants to know. Content should be formatted in tables, lists, short paragraphs, and formats that allow Google to easily grab snippets.

In short, to get that snippet, consider the hot topic FAQs in your practice areas. Answer them using short paragraphs but helpful paragraphs or bulleted lists. Next, keep working on getting that first-page SERP ranking. Ensure your page is optimized and that any images you feature are given relevant alt-text descriptions.

This does not guarantee you will grab a featured spot, but it is a great strategy.

11. Allow Comments on Your Blog

Too many sites these days eschew comment sections because they worry that comments just open the door to arguments and negativity. While this can certainly be the case, even arguments can sometimes be helpful in your SEO ranking. Allowing comments on your blog almost always helps SEO efforts and page rankings.

First, encouraging comments create a thriving community, which Google seeks when ranking sites. Engaging with each other shows enthusiasm for the topic, which leads to increased overall interaction. Comments also encourage users to stick around and read them, which boosts your dwell time, another critical factor in search engine rankings. The more comments you have, the more time people will spend reading them.

Finally, Google will also crawl, index, and rank your comments section. Everything posted will help to showcase a living, evolving site. In some ways, blog comments are like modern-day discussion forums, where people engage in conversations about specific topics, and Google pays attention.

12. Enrich Pages with Content Features

Anything you can add that legitimately supplements your content can enrich your page and will be noticed by Google’s spiders. Images, videos, diagrams, graphs, charts, surveys, forms, and questionnaires increase user engagement and encourage people to explore your site deeper. Using such interactive elements also improves user experience.

Be sure, however, that all of the links and features you add to your page are highly relevant. Everyone should increase the authority and relevance of the information you are presenting. Images, videos, infographics, and text should all work together to capture the reader’s attention and get them more focused and engaged with the content on the page. For example, relevant internal links are an outstanding way to keep users clicking through your site.

13. Optimize for Voice Search

Recent studies indicate that anywhere from 34% to more than half of users now use voice search when looking for information about local businesses. The number is growing, too, as features like Alexa, Siri, Cortana, and Google Home become more integrated into our daily lives. Using geo-targeted keywords to optimize your local SEO is an absolute must.

This is especially true for law firms that practice in a given area. Even if you offer legal services to your entire state, creating location-based pages for your ideal cities will help capture that audience more directly.

In addition, be sure that the way you present your name, address, and phone number (NAP) are 100% consistent across all online business listings. Do not put your area code in parentheses in one place, then eschew the parentheses for a dash in another. If you use a nine-digit zip code in one place, use it everywhere. Quality voice-search optimization can be vital in your local SEO ranking efforts.

14. Integrate Related Keywords and Phrases into Content

Earlier, we mentioned LSI keywords. Google uses these related keywords and key phrases to learn what your web page represents. These conceptually related terms give spiders a better idea of what your content is all about and help to rank it against other, similar pages. Please note that we are not simply talking about synonyms but rather related terminology to the overall topic. For your car accident attorney page, it may look for words like car crash, personal injury, wreck, lawsuit, loss of consortium, pain and suffering, motor vehicle accident lawyer, and similar related terms to understand your page.

This becomes important when considering issues like keyword stuffing. In the early days of web indexing, people used a single targeted keyword repeatedly. For example, you might put “car accident lawyer” on your page as much as possible to let Google know this was a car accident lawyer page. Today, Google notices that as a tactic and too much keyword density can hurt your rankings.

15. Target “People Also Ask” Keywords

When you perform a Google search, you will notice right below the first few results is a section entitled “People Also Ask” with a list of three to five questions. As you write your content, try doing a web search for the topic, and review those questions. Of course, the more accordions you open in that section, the more questions you will find. Web tools online can help you to target these faster and easier.

Consider working the information for these questions into your main content. If the questions veer off in another direction, use them as inspiration for additional content down the road. Remember, this is all about relevant and authoritative information on your site that engages users and gets them to stick around. The “People Also Ask” section is a great way to discover exactly what people want to know and can form the inspiration for your future content, as well as directly help with your page rankings.

16. Experiment with Video

Younger people want video. That is a generalization but also a truism. There are two types of web users: those who will not look at a page with no video and those who will not look at a page that forces them to watch video. This means that video is king for compelling content but does not exist in a vacuum.

YouTube gets billions of video views every single day. It is the second largest search engine out there. TikTok is growing by leaps and bounds, with a staggering number of people getting information they consider authoritative from that platform. In fact, 96% of web users now watch more videos than in 2020.

As you experiment with videos, start with short brand and educational videos offering legal advice and essential information. Avoid simple commercials, but stick to interviews, webinars, and video blogs (vlogs). As you create and upload your videos, include necessary metadata like rich descriptions and shorter titles. Exact keyword matching is still vital-fill in your YouTube keyword tags. They can be used when the engine ranks recommended videos.

Upload your videos to many platforms: go for it with YouTube, Instagram, Vimeo, and even TikTok. Also, include a written transcript of your video. That way, you are catching both the “I must have videos” and “I won’t watch videos” crowds in your content.

17. Design Infographics

As younger people want videos to engage them, they also look for visual representations of information that offer them a quick, easily digested, but still authoritative answer to frequently asked questions. They provide a fast, simple means of delivering information to a target audience.

A well-crafted infographic can turn a complex or boring subject into an exciting and fun-to-digest experience. They are a proven, highly effective digital marketing strategy for converting raw data and information into a graphical form that is visually engaging, appealing, and has more detailed support across your website and social media. This last bit-the detailed, well-researched, and authoritative support-sets them apart from your standard webpage.

An effective infographic should be unique, with a design that captures the attention of the targeted audience and does not look rote. It does not overwhelm the audience by presenting lots of unnecessary extra information. It sticks to a bold and creative message with minimal text. It should also allow for easy sharing to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and other social networks, with included sharing buttons.

Infographics are among the most effective ways of link building, capable of generating tons of backlinks. They are an effective marketing tool that can help to spread your brand awareness. They directly target your intended audience and create additional marketing opportunities for you by reusing the research that generated the graphic.

Finally, infographics are ideal for those who use smartphones and mobile devices to search for information, so they play directly into your site’s mobile friendliness.

18. Appear on Google Discover

Google Discover is the current version of Google’s social media newsfeed. Rather than showing you posts from your followers, however, Google shows quality content that it thinks you will enjoy based on your usage of the platform. Google Discover has the potential to bring in a vast amount of traffic.

Google claims that you cannot optimize content for Discover, but this may not be true. High-quality images, charts, graphs, and the like (such as infographics) have been shown to help rank on Discover. Fresh content that is continuously updated also helps, as does high engagement on Twitter. If you have a high level of traffic to one of your pages, you may also rank higher. Finally, content about particular popular topics that are likely to be frequently searched will improve your chances of appearing.

If you are looking for help optimizing your website to appear higher in the SERPs and need advice and assistance, Array Digital is here to help. Call us at 757-333-3021 or use our online form for a consultation today.

Off-Page SEO Techniques

Off-page SEO techniques are the things you can do which are not part of your site’s coding, backend, or direct user experience, but that still have an immense impact on your website traffic. These techniques have nothing to do with your on-site content, but the strategies you use to let people know that content is there, and the ways you get people to go check out your articles and information.

19. Work with Journalists

Journalists are always looking for compelling interviews and information to present. If you can work with a journalist (or several) you may actually acquire some very authoritative backlinks. There is a platform called Help a Reporter Out, or HARO. This platform provides bloggers and journalists with sources for stories and news. You can sign up from the HARO homepage as a source and pick a pricing plan. (There is a free basic plan.)

From there, you will get emails with requests from media outlets looking for quotes, tips, advice, and stories. You can respond to those relevant to your law firm, and if they pick up your answer, you will get backlinked from the news website where the story is featured.

20. Star on Podcasts

Starring on podcasts can garner backlinks in much the same way as working with journalists. Podcasts are the new radio, and many podcasters actively seek guests for their shows who can provide engaging, entertaining, and insightful commentary on their chosen topics. Seek out those podcasts that focus on what your law firm does and reach out. If they like your pitch, they may have you on as a guest, and you will get a chance to pitch your firm and get backlinks from the cast.

When reaching out to podcasts for the first time, start small. Even if they only have a few listeners, the small cast will enable you to get your feet wet, and they are more likely to be eager for a guest. You will also build your skills as a guest, and you can leverage those appearances to more prominent podcasts.

Remember to pitch to the audience of the podcast. You are trying to get them to see you as a worthy guest, which means looking interesting to their target audience.

When you are accepted, get a good microphone and a good pair of headphones. Good podcasts care about audio quality, and your computer’s mic and speakers will not do the trick. You need not spend hundreds of dollars, but a reasonable $40 pair of headphones with an integrated microphone arm will serve you well.

21. Author Guest Blogs

Guest blogs are a fantastic way to get a backlink to your own site and social media platforms from someone else’s service. This tried-and-true strategy still works today and will work in the future. Look for sites compatible with your firm’s work and reach out to see if they would be interested in you submitting a guest post. Many sites may even have a “write for us” section or contributor account allowing anyone to write for them.

Be prepared to put in a bit of work here, however. When you write a guest blog, you will likely need to write a draft, which will go through editing, and you may have to write several rounds of revisions before it goes live. Still, it helps your link-building strategy.

22. Disavow Spammy Backlinks

Backlinks are important. Backlinks that are spam can hurt you. Google has a Disavow Tool that is essential in getting rid of those spam posts. Google claims that its algorithms are powerful and intelligent enough now to ignore bad links to your site instead of penalizing you for them. Still, if you see a significant traffic drop in Google Analytics and notice several bad backlinks, you should take the time to investigate.

Disavowing spam links can involve some work and research. It is a good idea to begin by using a spreadsheet to review your links-look for sites with an unusually high number of backlinks as opposed to others, and seek out links that are nofollowed, 404, expired, or otherwise poor. In the case of the high-instance backlinks, think about whether there is a reason for the instances other than security compromising or financial motives.

Disavowing links can be complicated, and it is easy to wipe out strong links accidentally and unintentionally hurt your site’s optimization for SERP. For this reason, it is a last resort. To tackle the process, it is often best to work with professional SEO companies before simply starting to disavow links, which cannot be taken back once it is done.

Local SEO Techniques

Local SEO focuses on the target audience in your region. It is vital to businesses like law firms, particularly if you focus on a given city, but even if you are statewide, targeting searchers within your area can be quite helpful. If, for example, you are in Minnesota, you do not want people contacting you from Pennsylvania. You do, however, want to be among the first results someone in Minnesota sees.

23. Add Location Pages for Your Business

Location pages, also called city landing pages, are a type of service page highly focused on presenting key information for nearby customers and search engines. For example, if your law firm is located in Georgia, you may have a landing page focusing on your services in Atlanta.

The page will discuss your contact details, products and services, business offerings, directions, and customer reviews. In addition, it will talk about the great things about living in Atlanta and mention regular goings-on there and nearby landmarks. The idea is to let Google know that you are focused on that city and to let readers know that you are familiar with the area, that you know the region and the people you live there.

Location pages allow your target audience to find specific information about you and serve as a ranking factor for local search results. Top-ranking features for local SEO include Google Business Profile elements, the proximity of the searcher to your firm, your Google reviews, your physical address, the consistency of your citations on other platforms, engagement, click-through rate, and several other factors.

24. Optimize for Google’s Map Pack

The Google Map Pack appears at the top of SERPs for local searches. It includes the top three businesses that Google thinks best suit what the searcher wants. It’s a superior way to outrank your competitors and increase your visibility. To optimize for the Map Pack, use local keywords when possible, keep your citations accurate and consistent (and create as many as you can across social media and sites like Yelp), and encourage your customers to leave Google reviews.

25. Solicit Reviews for Your Law Firm

As already stated, soliciting reviews for your law firm is excellent for your SEO results. The more positive reviews you have in as many places as possible, the more you look like an authority in your field. Reviews on your site are good, but you can control them. Reviews on Google and Yelp are viewed as more independent and honest since the business owner cannot easily delete them. When you have a satisfied customer, request that they leave a review for you in as many places as possible.

Focus on Your Clients-We Will Focus on Everything Else

If all of this seems complicated, you are not alone and need not worry. Your job, after all, is to provide legal services, representation, and advice to those in need. It is not to spend hours daily optimizing a website to boost your SEO rankings.

At Array Digital, that is precisely what we do: we will focus on getting the job done to boost your website rankings so you can focus on providing outstanding, personalized legal services to the people in your region. We have years of experience doing what we do, and our team is ready to build a custom strategy for your company that will take your SEO to the next level. Call us at 757-333-3021 or contact us online today for a consultation and more information from our founders.

Written By Erik J. Olson
Founder & CEO
Erik J. Olson is the Founder & CEO of Array Digital—a marketing agency that enables its clients to achieve their dreams, fulfill their missions, and impact more lives with their services.

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  • “Erik and the Array Digital team are top notch in the digital marketing spaces, particularly for SEO. Their understanding of Google, the algorithms, and the work involved to get websites ranking on the first page is unparalleled. Thank you Erik!!”

    Andrew Zihmer
    Zihmer Law Firm
  • “I had a chance to consult with Kevin Daisey for my law firm’s marketing needs. He is knowledgeable, kind, and helpful. He provided me with a great marketing analysis. He also invited me to their podcast as a guest speaker. Thank you Array Digital!”

    Merve Kati
    ZMK Law
  • “The legal profession needs more architects and designers…folks who are thinking about the future of the profession and who are assembling a tribe of like minded lawyer leaders. Erik and his team are certainly ‘that’.”

    Ben Glass
    Ben Glass Law & Great Legal Marketing
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