8 Top Tools Lawyers Should Have in Their SEO Arsenals

We know that accumulating all the SEO tools required to create optimized content may become pricy if you do not know what you are looking for and try to do it alone. SEO can easily become time-consuming, especially for an attorney who is busy with their own clients. While this blog intends to demonstrate the SEO tools at the top of the legal marketing field, if you want expertise to kickstart or continue your SEO, schedule a free consultation with Array Digital.

Do law firms need SEO?

You may have heard this question before and have already seen the answer. Why rehash it here? Because search engine optimization (SEO) is not just necessary but often critical for law firms working to scale their practice.

The legal field is one of the fastest-growing fields for SEO, and keywords are increasingly becoming more challenging to rank for because of all that competition. Even within your local area, chances are very good you have other attorneys working to increase their digital presence and build the law firm’s website using a highly crafted, specialized SEO strategy.

Why do that? The answer is simply because this is how potential clients find you. Potential clients continue to turn to search engines to find the law firm they need to solve their problems. They are less likely to find a law firm any other way.

If you do not have a website or it is not performing well in Google search, you are missing core opportunities to reach the clients you need.

Does your law firm need SEO tools?

Your law firm’s website is a critical component of your digital marketing strategy. We recommend hiring a professional to help you build your SEO strategy and move your site forward.

However, you can do this in-house as well. If you do, then you will need to use some highly effective SEO tools to help you. Without these tools, it’s hard to know if you are making positive changes or not.

These attorney bundle SEO tools can help you stay on top of several factors, including tracking your metrics. Metrics are the data points that tell you if your SEO efforts are achieving your desired goals (you’ll need to establish those goals, too!).

Professional SEO services can help you with these tasks, but if you plan to do the work yourself, these tools will be core resources to use. Remember that your ultimate goals include:

• Getting on the first page of the Google search results
• Providing a good user experience so that those who get to your website can then easily navigate around the site
• Improving your click-through rate, which means people are not just on your site but they are taking steps to stick around and learn from you because you are meeting their needs
• Providing exceptional on-page, high-quality content that improves conversions, meaning people go from visiting your website to contacting you as new clients
• Ensuring that you are easy to find through your Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) on the search engine results (which uses Google Maps so locals can find you!)

Many factors contribute to this process, regardless of how easy it may seem. With the tools presented here, you will gain the insight you need to make better decisions in creating your law firm marketing strategy and your next SEO campaign.

How would an SEO agency benefit my law firm?

An SEO agency will provide the expertise you need to achieve the best possible results. That’s because an SEO agency has strategies and experts in the field of digital marketing. More so, they have all the tools needed for SEO and know how to use them expertly to benefit their clients. If you use these professionals, you don’t have to pay for those tools, learn to use them, create a strategy, or build your own effective website.

If you are a personal injury lawyer, you spend much of your time educating your clients on their rights and legal strategy. You are a pro at what you do. Using SEO experts through an SEO company with a proven track record in building website traffic to law firm websites makes sense. It makes the best use of your time and your investment. Yet, you can and often should learn about SEO ranking and how to improve your outcome for yourself. These tools will help you with that.

Four free SEO tools for your legal marketing strategy

A quick Google search will show dozens of SEO tools, all of which promise to help your site rank quickly. That’s hard to navigate. However, some tools are free to use that can help your law firm and attorneys optimize their online presence. These high-quality tools allow attorneys to effectively reach their target audience (your most likely potential clients). These are a few of the free tools we recommend at Array Digital.

Google Analytics

If you want to rank in Google, you need to use Google Analytics to find out how well you’re doing. There are several key benefits to attorneys:

• You can understand what type of content or which services on your website attract the most attention.
• You will learn where your website visitors are coming from and how they find your site.
• You gain insight into how your visitors interact with and move through your website.

Ultimately, Google Analytics will help you optimize your law firm website for your target audience, even if you are looking for a narrow field of clients.

Ubersuggest

The free version of Ubersuggest is also a good tool for attorneys looking for help building their websites. The benefits to attorneys include:

• Find relevant keywords that potential clients might use to search for the legal services you offer, allowing you to target those keywords within your content.
• Use it to analyze competitors, which can help you to refine your law firm SEO strategy both to compete better for keywords and to target weak spots in their strategy.
• Get ideas for content that potential clients need and want, which ultimately encourages them to visit your site, stay and read it, share it, and connect with you.

Ubersuggest has a paid version with additional features, but the free version is a good starting point for attorneys seeking help in these key areas.

Moz

The free version of Moz is another excellent tool for attorneys. It’s a well-known tool for search engine rank improvement with several benefits to attorneys:

• Understand how your website stands against competitors, including in terms of authority, which Google values heavily.
• Get insights into where you can improve your site and your strategy.

Moz also offers an upgraded version, but starting with the free version will provide a good overall level of insight into your website.

Answer the Public

Another helpful free SEO tool for attorneys is Answer the Public, which lets you get more insight into potential client needs. The benefits to attorneys include:

• Unearth potential content topics by better understanding potential clients’ questions and concerns, much like knowing what people are asking so you can answer them.
• Get content ideas that you can turn into blog content or an FAQ section on your website.

Answer the Public offers better insight into what people are asking, and though you may think you know what your clients need to know, this gives better insight into what and how they are asking it.

Eight of the most useful paid SEO tools and what they do

There are several free SEO tools, but the paid version of many of them can offer better insight and more targeted support to you as you build your website’s online presence. Paid SEO tools like the following can give you insight into what you can do to scale your current efforts.

As you work to grow your initial SEO strategy, these tools will become critical to use within the industry to compete in the legal field.

Yoast

Yoast SEO, used for WordPress websites, is a fantastic tool. WordPress is also one of the most commonly used content management systems. Yoast allows you to improve your SEO without learning how to code, which can help speed up some of your efforts without being a time suck. It also helps with ensuring your website content is easy to read. If you do not have much SEO experience just yet, this is a solid tool to pick up the slack.

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is known for its exceptional SEO tool called SEO Spider Tool. It is one of the best tools for gathering data in one place to apply the information to your SEO strategy. With it, you can crawl unlimited URLs. It then gives you details like schema categories, content data, link information, etc. It’s not overly complex to learn if you put the time into it.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs Webmaster Tools allow you to understand keywords that can help drive traffic to your website. They can also help you learn where to get backlinks — links on other sites that point to yours — and improve common SEO problems that could hamper your efforts. It can help you see what steps to take to improve your rankings. The SERP Checker (Search Engine Results Page) will tell you the top 10 rankings for any keyword, while the Site Explorer tool gives you a competitor’s historical performance in organic search. You can also use it to generate keyword ideas for YouTube, Google, and Bing.

Moz

The paid version of Moz, called Moz Pro, takes much of the complexity out of SEO and helps create a custom-designed site that competes better. It will create custom reports for your site, and tools like Link Explorer can help you find opportunities for linking to help you with backlinks. MozCast is another component that monitors Google algorithm changes that could impact your search rankings.

BrightLocal

BrightLocal targets, as its name suggests, local SEO. As an attorney, most of your potential clients will be within your local area, and this tool will help you determine how to compete within that area. It does an excellent job building citations, monitoring your online reviews, and tracking your rankings.

Semrush

Semrush is an all-in-one SEO tool. It offers more information and is a bit more complex in its overall function, though the interface is relatively easy to use. It comes with several helpful features, including tools to help with keyword research, local SEO monitoring, PPC ads tracking, competitor analysis tools, content marketing analysis, and more. It even allows you to monitor any other website and track desired keyword performance, allowing customized insights.

Majestic

Majestic’s specific benefit is in analyzing backlinks. (We keep mentioning this because Google values backlinks, which directly help boost your rank). Majestic can help you locate any issues with your backlink profile and offers some interesting metrics you can use to determine how well your backlinks are meeting your needs.

Ubersuggest

The paid version of Ubersuggest is a highly effective way of identifying keywords and pinpointing their search intent. Not only do you need to rank for keywords, but you also have to provide your potential clients with the type of information they need so they see your site as valuable. This tool can help with that by providing insight into competition, volume, and seasonal trends.

Narrowing down the SEO tools you need as a lawyer

They sure are a plethora, right? First, do not invest in every tool you encounter or invest heavily in tools that take significant learning time. However, if you plan to do SEO in-house, you will need to use many of these tools over time to build your success.

We encourage you to create a combination of SEO tools to cover your bases, providing you with the most relevant and helpful information. So, which bases do you need to cover? Here’s what we suggest starting with.

Keyword research

You cannot develop a successfully ranking website without keyword insights. Keyword research tells you what people are putting into search engines to find the information they need. The best tools for this include:

• Ubersuggest: Not only does it help with finding keywords, but it also gives your user intent information behind them, which can help you craft better website content to meet your readers’ needs.
• Ahrefs and Semrush: These are the best all-in-one tools that are easy to learn. They help those who may also be using pay-per-click (PPC) ads alongside their legal SEO strategy. These platforms are good options to help you determine a target keyword for any campaign.
• Moz: The paid version is an excellent keyword planner and a good way to build keywords that meet Google’s changing algorithm.

Rank tracking

Some of these tools are vital for those who need to monitor rank or where they are sitting in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Rank tracking isn’t just about knowing where you currently stand in the search engines. Rank tracking also informs you where your business ranks against competitors, allowing you to tailor your SEO strategy to attract potential clients better. These tools help you see where your competitors are and the difficulty of competing with them:

• Moz: A good option for monitoring competitor ranking and changes over time, Moz is a solid choice for those who want a less complex tool for the job.
• Brightedge: Brightedge, a tool we have not mentioned yet, is an excellent option for supporting organic search and content performance. It allows you to measure the blended rank for all keywords and keyword groups, providing better insight into your competitive trends.
• Ahrefs: The SERP Checker tool from Ahrefs is a good option for those who want to understand better where they rank, especially since it will tell you the top 10 rankings and search volume of any keyword. You will learn more about your backlink profile here, too.

Technical SEO

Though we have not mentioned technical SEO much yet, this is the type of behind-the-scene tool that helps to communicate with search engines effectively. Effective lawyer SEO strategies have to consider technical SEO. It helps to monitor your website’s functionality in the search engines, with your visitors, and how your web pages look. Ultimately, search engines cannot crawl your site effectively if your technical SEO is not working well. The best tools for improving technical SEO that go beyond on-page SEO include:

• Semrush: The features here can help with everything from finding broken internal links on your site to creating a link-building strategy. They can also help with the site’s overall function by looking at and optimizing meta descriptions, header information, title tags, anchor text, and more.
• Screaming Frog: Screaming Frog will help with schema categories, link information, and much more.

Local Listing Management

Local listing management is software that helps businesses ensure all of their essential data is represented equally across the website. That is details like your practice areas, your firm’s hours, your phone number, your firm’s location, and other information that helps people find you in person. A mistake in just one of these components frustrates clients, confuses the search engines, and limits your SEO. Local listing management also ensures everything is in a central location to streamline this data. The best tools for the job include:

• BrightLocal: It’s easy to use and allows you to generate more traffic and leads from local searches, directories, and other resources.
• Yext: This tool is a powerful one that will help answer any question about your law firm, including tools like Knowledge Graph, reviews, pages, listings, and more.

Choosing a CMS for SEO plugins

The next step for companies that plan to do SEO in-house is to have a way to manage all of these tools and create a website that will rank well for them. That is not as simple as it sounds!
The best way to do that is through a CMS system designed to make the entire process easy to manage. Though older options were more complicated and required a lot of learning, some very effective and useful tools are available today that are easier for you to learn. They can still provide the exceptional user experience you need and want, but they do so without requiring as much background knowledge in coding.

Several CMS options are available, and some will make your life a bit better by providing you with a smoother way of managing the process. That includes offering SEO plugins that can improve outcomes.

These are the options we recommend for most clients.

• WordPress: Often noted as the standard in the industry because of how robust it is, WordPress is good for most law firms. It offers great flexibility in creating your site and can be easy to use without technical skills or coding experience. There are also dozens of themes to choose from, and finding the right plugin for any task is easy. It also incorporates SEO into its design.
• Wix: Another option to consider is Wix, which offers a drag-and-drop interface that makes it a bit easier to create your website. The pre-made templates are helpful, too. Several apps are available to customize your site, including social media and mobile-friendly design.
• Weebly: Weebly is a CMS that helps you design your website without any coding experience. It is a drag-and-drop style tool that incorporates good usability and many themes.

How are you monitoring your website?

Do you know how well your website is doing? For example, are you tracking page speed, ranking factors for keywords, and even updates to your organic traffic over time due to algorithm changes? SEO is a changing tool, and having a way to monitor how well you are doing at any given time is critical. Tracking your website is essential. You will need to know where your traffic comes from. Some of the best website analysis tools include:

• Google Analytics (and you can use Google Search Console to help with this). This web analytics service helps to provide you with a way to track website traffic and see information about it in a streamlined report. This data helps you to understand your potential clients better.
• Adobe Analytics: An advanced tool, Adobe Analytics allows you to get in-depth information and reports about your website metrics. It’s a useful measuring tool to know how well your site is performing.

Looking to stay in-house with your attorney SEO, or are you ready to branch out?

Many sources offer insight to help you build your website, and having the right research tool is often critical. Yet, beyond a doubt, you also need some expertise, and that is where working with our team at Array Digital can make all the difference.

Contact us now through our contact form or call 757-333-3021 for a free consultation to learn how we can help you.