Attorney website marketing and local SEO for lawyers are very competitive and best left to experienced professionals. Unless you are in a tiny town with few law firms law firm marketing and SEO is very difficult and ranking for competitive keyword phrases takes effort. In this post, we are going to go over some of the strategies and components we use at FORWARD Lawyer Marketing to get our clients first-page rankings.
Table of Contents
Attorney website marketing begins with custom web design for lawyers built to be responsive for Google’s mobile-first indexing methodology. Potential clients today are searching online for a reputable and experienced attorney to handle their case, not thumbing through the Yellow Pages. Most of these internet searchers are performing these searches on a mobile device as well so this s why it is crucial that your website displays properly on mobile devices.
An old static HTML website will hurt you in today’s world of mobile web design. If you already have an updated mobile-friendly website design, great, if not FORWARD Lawyer Marketing can design and develop a beautiful website for your law firm that will help attract the clients you want to work with. Because adding new quality content is a very important aspect of ranking we use WordPress to build websites for lawyers because it is SEO friendly out of the box and has built-in blogging functionality.
Our experienced law firm marketing team of technicians, designers, and SEO strategists emphasizes three core components when designing new websites for law firms: visualization, functionality, and usability. All three of these are crucial for achieving your online marketing goals for your law firm. Following these basics, we follow a custom law firm web design process as described below.
Law firms are all different and have different needs depending on the size of the firm as well as areas of practice and location. Optimal law firm website design always meets the unique requirements of the attorneys it is built for. The first step we take is to identify your preferences and the goals you have for your website. A small law firm that only handles tax issues or estate planning will have different needs than a larger multi-practice law firm with numerous attorneys. A law firm in a small town won’t need as extensive a website as one in a large highly populated city with thousands of lawyers.
Once our web design team has a thorough understanding of your project requirements we begin the process of creating the custom website design for your law firm. We have specialized in web design for lawyers since 2013 and have completed hundreds of custom websites for law firms nationwide. Our designers will first create two unique static designs which are basically a web design version of a sketch. Once we have done this we share them with you and take suggestions or ideas from you and refine the web design until you are totally happy with the website design we plan to build for your law firm.
Once you give us the go-ahead to continue the process we work on creating a fully functional version of your website and keep it on a private server so it isn’t shown to the public until completed. We give you login information so that you can check on our progress anytime you want. The duration of the buildout will depend on how simple or complex your web design is. In general, it can take as long as two months or as little as two weeks depending on the size, design, and content. In this phase, our SEO Director also makes sure that all pages have proper internal linking structure and external links to appropriate authority sites.
Once we have tested the functionality of your new website and have made sure it displays properly across all devices we seek your approval to launch. During this process, we migrate the private version we built and launch it on your law firm’s domain. Our SEO Director double-checks all of the internal and external links he set up in the design phase.
Once we are done with your website we offer ongoing services to help you market it and increase your ranking. Just building a website will not bring you business any more than putting a billboard up in the middle of the desert! We provide hosting services, website maintenance, content marketing, SEO, PPC, social media management, and more to help you get the best search engine rankings possible.
Many people are familiar with the acronym SEO, which stands for search engine optimization these days. For most law firms a further area of specialization is necessary due to most law firms operating in a specific local area. This makes local SEO for lawyers a necessity so let’s take a look at what it includes.
This is where we begin for local search engine optimization. This entails writing quality geo-targeted content that mentions local areas of interest and links to local non-competitive websites. We call these city pages and they should be at least 1,500-2,000 words. If structured properly your website should rank well in the immediate area around your office due to Google showing results by closest proximity on mobile devices. To rank in desired nearby areas we will write city pages for those specific areas and for particular areas of practice.
Far too many local businesses don’t realize how important it is for them to claim their GMB or Google My Business page and lawyers are just as guilty as others. The Google My Business page is created by Google and once you claim and verify ownership it’s free advertising and marketing from Google.
All you have to do is claim your GMB page through Google via a phone call or postcard. Once you have your page claimed, you then must optimize it. This post goes into detail on what you need to do to optimize your GMB page.
In some cases, this may be difficult to do but for most law firms it is possible. Someone involved in a criminal defense case may not be too anxious to give a public review but for things like family law, we have many clients that get raving reviews daily. It is also a good practice to reply to reviews both good and bad so that anyone that looks up your firm sees that you care about your reputation and that you don’t ignore people.
In addition to getting links from law firm organizations such as Avvo and Justia, it is very important to create local citations from sites like these:
These types of backlinks help build local authority and help increase your rankings in the search engines.
One way that many of our attorney clients help to build their authority is to host local events and post about them on your website’s blog. This not only creates authority but also creates links that help Google understand your relevance in the local community.
We have been providing lawyer marketing services and web design for law firms nationwide since 2013. Give us a call at (888) 590-9687 today or contact us here for a free consultation.
Download Your Copy
