How to Speed Up Organic Growth on Your Law Firm Site

The lack of organic growth on your law firm’s website represents a significant challenge in today’s competitive marketplace. Your firm may be struggling with stagnant or declining online visibility, which goes beyond concern to a pressing business problem.

As the digital landscape continues to evolve, the time it takes to grow your organic results threatens to become even longer, potentially leading to a decline in client acquisition and overall success.
By engaging the services of an experienced SEO agency, your law firm can optimize its online presence and align its website with its reputation for legal excellence. Our strategists use individually-tailored strategies that can enhance organic growth, connecting firms with the clients who need their services most. The result is a digital presence that accurately reflects the firm’s value and expertise and positions our clients effectively in the online marketplace.

Understanding organic traffic

Organic traffic is critical to the success of your law firm’s website and digital presence. It refers to all traffic that comes to your website from search engine results rather than paid advertising. Your law firm’s website will rank in search engines like Google Search when you incorporate the proper search engine optimization (SEO) strategies.

To gain organic traffic and increase potential clients visiting your website, you have to develop an SEO strategy. You cannot pay to be at the top of Google search results.

Your domain and prior SEO work make a difference

Many factors contribute to your website’s ranking in the search engines. It starts with having a higher domain rating. Your domain rating refers to how much the search engines trust your site. For example, a higher domain rating means that your site is trustworthy. That is an important factor in your SEO efforts as a law firm. Trusted websites rank faster for harder keywords.

The second factor to consider is the length of time you have been using SEO strategies. Newer law firm websites that are just starting to incorporate SEO need more time to mature in the search engine’s eyes. If your firm has just started the SEO journey, you will notice that it takes longer than expected to capture keywords and begin seeing SEO results. This is normal.

Why does SEO take so long for law firms?

Law firm SEO will take time, no matter what type of digital marketing strategies you use. It will take longer for you to see organic growth for several reasons, including:

• Market competition: How many other law firms are trying to get to the top of the search engine rankings like you are? Your law firm’s SEO strategy needs to take this into account.
• Your budget: Working with a marketing agency will cost a bit more, but the more you put into your legal marketing strategies for organic traffic growth, the more results you will see.
• Your existing website: Do you have quality links on your existing site? How quickly does your website load? How is your current content marketing going? All of these factors will impact your rank in Google’s algorithm.
• What tactics you are using: We use an effective SEO strategy, which incorporates a wide range of tools, including keyword research, local SEO, technical SEO, and content marketing. The more diversified you are, the more likely you are to get results.

Do you have an established SEO strategy? What about a content marketing plan incorporating high-quality content into your website and social media? If you want to be on the first page of the search engine results pages (SERPs), you have to work on developing a law firm marketing strategy that addresses all of these needs.

As an attorney, you are experienced in the law, but unless you have invested heavily in learning SEO, you will find it hard to master every component. This will change the trajectory of your law firm’s growth online.

You may already have a blog and website. Perhaps you paid for web design but did not hire SEO experts. Maybe you are writing content without doing any competitor research or developing your practice areas in a way that draws potential clients to you. Unfortunately, this means you may be spending time on content that does not benefit your firm.

Your time is too valuable to spend on ineffective SEO content marketing. To understand where your site stands online, schedule a free assessment with our experts.

What can your law firm do to see results quicker?

One of your goals may be creating a website that leads to conversions, which means people visit your web pages, use your site, and contact you. Organic search results help get people to your site, and we can use a few strategies to attract the positive attention of search engines.

Build backlinks

Backlinks are helpful for both old and new websites. Link building is the strategy of getting other sites to link to your website. The higher the domain authority of the site linking to you, the better.

There are multiple ways to do this. The first is guest posting, which involves having something you publish appear on another website. Even a non-legal website with a high domain authority will help you.

Spammy backlinks are not helpful to your site. In fact, they can incur penalties that hurt your overall SEO progress. Rather, we create high-quality content that is valuable to other sites. For example, you can gain valuable backlinks by publishing research and becoming a source for a news outlet or journal. You may be able to publish something on a college or other higher education website (.edu sites). Google has a high level of trustworthiness on these sites, so having a link on their page helps your site.

Do your research

Before writing content and developing a content strategy, we need to know what your SEO targets are. Without some research, how do you know who your ideal searchers are and what they want?

Conducting keyword research is a good starting point for your SEO campaign. We want to develop a list of target keywords for which you want to rank. At the same time, we want to complete a competitor analysis to gain insight into your competitor’s page rankings. We can then target their weaknesses to boost your site’s attractiveness to the search engines.

Every single piece of written content needs to go through this process. This will allow you to understand what to include to rank well.

Increase budget

Increasing your budget for SEO content is another way your firm can help speed up your organic growth. The higher your budget, the more content we can produce. The more content we produce, the faster your organic growth.

How does content help speed up my organic growth?

Creating more optimized content per month allows search engines to index more of your website pages. The more it indexes your website content, the more keywords your website will acquire. Page rankings improve faster when there’s more high-quality, topic-related content for the search engines to analyze.

Receive Google reviews

Yes, reviews matter, and having positive testimonials from your clients on your Google reviews listing is good for your business. Encourage your clients to leave reviews on your Google Business Profile. This can help to encourage people to visit your site, which also helps to drive page rankings. Accurate, honest reviews from real people make a difference.

Along the same lines, you may want to work to establish a presence in legal directories like Justia and FindLaw. These directories are powerful resources that help people find you and create a secondary link to your website that can help with page ranking.

Use social media

Most law firms do not put enough effort into social media. Though years ago it may have seemed like something “the kids did,” today it is one of the most critical components of building out your online presence and having success with digital marketing. The bottom line is social media is where people go to get referrals. If they cannot find you or find positive information about you on social media, they will find your competitors and contact them.

To see improvements, create social media accounts on each major site. That includes Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Then, once you have your accounts established, you need to post there. Social media posts create links back to your website content and allow for higher user engagement. That means that you can interact with more of the people that are likely to become your clients. While you are not giving them legal information per se, a personal injury lawyer could create content that explains a recent case or what to avoid saying when speaking to insurance companies.

Create videos

As an attorney, you have value to offer your potential clients but rarely enough time to do so. For some people, creating videos is a more efficient method. You can create a YouTube channel, design a podcast, or even appear as a guest on someone else’s podcast or YouTube channel. Any of these will create links to your website, and all can help improve ranking factors.
Since search is becoming more oriented to visual content, this is also a great way to capture the attention of people scrolling through search engines.

How Array Digital can help your organic growth

Our strategists work closely with law firms to create a foundation for long-term, sustainable success. That starts with assessing your website and making personalized recommendations to achieve higher growth. The first step includes an internal audit that reviews information such as the following:

Backlinks

Do you have backlinks? Do you have high domain authority links? If not, that could be limiting your ability to reach your audience. If you have spammy links, that could be hurting you, too.

Technical SEO

This is more of the back-of-the-house work, but it is just as important as our on-page SEO strategies. It includes optimizing your headings and ensuring that your website visitors have a good user experience when they land on your site.

Content

As noted, your content is a core component of your success online. We analyze your existing content, determine if you are ranking for any keywords, and then work to create a content strategy.

I was told SEO only takes six months — how long does SEO really take?

If another company tells you this information, they are either not following best SEO practices or misleading you.

It takes time to build up your organic growth. There is no way to pay to be ranked higher, nor any way for you to rush through Google’s processes. It takes time to build, but there is also no way anyone can provide you with a timeline in which you will see guaranteed results. There are many variables to consider, including:

• Location
• Existing competition
• Your legal niche
• How long your website has existed
• Your current backlink profile

The variables also include all of the information that we have provided to you thus far. Every one of these factors matters.

Even if you can show an SEO company every one of these metrics, search engine ranking for organic growth is an always-changing process. It often requires updates to your processes when Google changes the algorithm or when your competitors begin to notice your growth and adjust their own strategy. Even the season can impact when an attorney receives more leads. For example, divorce attorneys often experience a spike in cases in the first quarter of the year and a dip during the summer when children are home with their parents.

What kind of growth should I expect from an SEO agency?

While we cannot promise any specific timeframe, that is not to say that you will not see results within that timeframe — some law firm websites begin to see improvement sooner.

Once your strategy begins and starts to “bake” (begin indexing) in search engines, you will start to see your site’s metrics changing. Once the search engines have had enough time to index your site, you will likely see steady and slow growth. This is evident in a few different ways.

For example, when using our SEO services, we provide our clients insight into who is coming to their website and what people are doing there. We use a variety of metrics, including those in Google Analytics and Google Search Console, to monitor changes. This includes keywords gained, how long visitors stay on your website, and how many conversions occur.

Eventually, you will begin to see your organic search rankings improve. This often means you will start ranking in the top positions for your targeted keywords. The trajectory is different for every law firm, though. Initially, you will not likely receive phone calls and form submissions. Instead, your SEO agency should meet with you frequently to help you gauge where you are in your SEO journey.

With routine insight, careful consideration of your metrics, and adjustments over time, most law firm websites begin to grow and gain clients. Remember, too, that this is the long game. You could invest in pay-per-click (PPC) strategies. When you invest in this form of paid advertising, you are likely to get leads quite quickly, but you spend a significant amount for each click, even if they don’t become your clients or never call you. You must also keep pumping money into PPC to get those results. The same isn’t true with SEO. Every effort you make builds up over time, and though you will need updates, you are not starting fresh every time.

Results in six months is a minimum, not a standard

Do not get discouraged if you do not see immediate results. Ranking well in organic searches will continue to get harder as time progresses and more law firms compete against you. The key to success here is choosing an SEO agency that constantly communicates with you and follows an actionable, personalized strategy.

Many digital marketing agencies help clients in multiple industries. At Array Digital, we specialize in law firm SEO, giving us keen insight into marketing for the legal industry. Let’s have a conversation and start working out a plan together. Call 757-333-3021 or fill out our contact form to schedule a free assessment and learn how we can help.