SEO for Criminal Defense Lawyers

SEO for Criminal Defense Lawyers

Getting the Attention You Need To Grow Your Business

FORWARD Lawyer Marketing offers customized SEO for criminal defense lawyers. As a criminal defense attorney, SEO is an essential part of your online marketing toolkit. When done properly. SEO helps you appear at a higher level in the Google search results, also called SERPs. 

Climbing the search results is important and criminal defense is a very competitive area of law. Most of your prospective clients need to make a decision quickly.

People searching for criminal defense services online might be facing investigation — might even be acting for someone who’s currently under arrest. They probably aren’t going to look past the first search results page. In fact, when was the last time you clicked past page one? According to heat map tracking most people don’t look past the top three or four results on page one.

Getting the Attention You Need To Grow Your Business

You already provide quality legal representation. Now, it’s time to let your best prospective clients know why they should choose you over your competitors.

SEO, which stands for “search engine optimization” is a long-term strategy that helps you get and sustain the right type of attention for your criminal law practice. It doesn’t happen overnight, but FORWARD Lawyer Marketing can help you build a winning plan and help you keep track of your progress.

We know the legal profession, and we know online marketing. Please contact us directly via our contact form, call us at (888) 590-9687, or read on for more information:

  • How we’re maximizing incoming calls for one of our clients
  • What is SEO? Why does it matter?
  • What makes criminal defense SEO different?
  • The benefit of a customized approach
  • Forward Lawyer Marketing SEO services
  • What types of criminal defense firms need SEO?
  • The Certified Google Partners program
  • Building a reliable source of information

We can handle the web side of things. That leaves you free to do what you do — protect your client’s rights.

How We’re Maximizing Organic Incoming Calls for a Criminal Defense Firm

Let’s start with a case study where a client doubled his revenue. We took on a Texas criminal defense SEO client in 2019. We started with a modest budget. In the first year, we more than doubled incoming organic traffic.

“Organic traffic” means people who visit your site after doing a Google search. It’s the bread and butter of SEO.

After these results, our client decided to increase the marketing budget. That kicked things into gear, and his average monthly organic traffic is now more than five times what it was before we started.

Of course, you want more than just visitors — you want leads and new clients. We built motivational, accessible, high-quality website content that made people pick up the phone.

Our changes increased the number of incoming calls by 192 percent. That’s not even counting the people we motivated to send emails, interact with chatbots and fill out contact forms.

SEO for criminal defense lawyers

What Is SEO? Why Does it Matter?

Backing up for a moment, “SEO” stands for “search engine optimization”. It’s an analytical, evidence-based set of practices that observes how search engines function and builds websites accordingly.

There’s a lot of possible variation here, so you have to narrow things down. At FORWARD Lawyer Marketing, we look at three main things when determining our SEO techniques:

  • The overall goal of search engines (to connect searchers with the information they’re looking for)
  • Observed and measured search-engine behavior
  • The unique goals of our clients

SEO is usually focused on keywords and keyword phrases first. These are words or phrases that people use while searching for things online. We want to match your website with those searches by including the right keywords.

Of course, modern SEO techniques go far beyond diction. Search engines now track many different site attributes, user behavior, and link structures. We take all of this into account while making our recommendations and crafting our content.

There are many things to consider. However, regardless of how complicated it gets, SEO is still based on one common-sense principle: You have to build a website tailored to your ideal clients. Google’s algorithm is constantly learning in order to provide the best possible results for human searchers.

The most recent technological advancement in machine learning for search was developed by Google in 2018 and is called BERT for short. It means Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. BERT is a Transformer-based machine learning technique for natural language processing (NLP) pre-training.

Why Is SEO for Criminal Defense Lawyers Different?

SEO for criminal defense law firms has some unique constraints. Arguably more than any other legal practice area, you have to motivate people to make a tough decision quickly. At the same time, you still have to operate within the restrictions of your jurisdiction’s advertising ethics.

You also probably have a fair amount of competition in your territory. That means you have to focus your SEO strategy by:

  • Clearly defining your best cases
  • Writing useful content (and updating it)
  • Commenting on new events and changes to the law
  • Providing clear methods to contact you
  • Capturing common-language search keywords
  • Establishing credibility and authority
  • Reinforcing your brand and setting communication-style expectations
  • Connecting your site to other resources, including other aspects of your web presence

The Benefit of a Customized Approach

As a criminal defense attorney, you know the difference that a thoughtful, personalized strategy can make. After all, that’s what you provide for your own clients.

A customized approach for SEO is the only way you can reliably attract the types of cases you want. You need to build the best website for your unique practice and you have to make sure that it is easily found by your optimum prospects. It doesn’t matter how great your website looks if nobody can find it, it’s kind of like building a billboard in the middle of the forest.

To do this, you need someone on your side — someone experienced in law firm marketing who will take the time to understand your goals and help you work towards them. That’s FORWARD Lawyer Marketing. We work within your budget and towards your goals, maximizing the ROI on every marketing dollar you spend.

FORWARD Lawyer Marketing SEO for Criminal Defense Lawyers

Law firm marketing is what we do at FORWARD Lawyer Marketing. It’s the core of our business, and we have extensive experience with many types of organizations.

We offer complete SEO services for law offices of all sizes nationwide and our SEO Director has well over two decades of experience. We also have a diverse set of marketing, advertising, and design services. Here are some of our most popular ones for criminal defense practices:

  • SEO analysis: Research your specific market and determine the best keywords.
  • SEO campaigns: Create optimized content, post that content regularly and link to appropriate sites to increase your search ranking.
  • Website rewrites and redesigns: Keep and upgrade your existing content for SEO.
  • Communications services: Set up chatbots, live chat, contact forms, call tracking, and more to generate, track and manage leads.
  • Online law firm advertising: Get laser-targeted attention on Facebook, Google, and other online marketplaces.
  • Campaign tracking: Establishing, managing, and compiling tracking and reporting functions to give you a data-derived, up-to-date, high-level view of your progress towards your business development goals.

What Types of Criminal Defense Firms Need SEO?

So, do all criminal defense law firms need SEO? We would say yes — we have seen many kinds of practices benefit from a customized strategy. If you depend at all on Google search to generate business, then properly performed law firm SEO will be a benefit.

Some of the types of criminal defense law firms that use SEO might surprise you. Here is an incomplete list of practice areas that stand to gain from using SEO techniques:

  • DUI, DWI, — all intoxicated driving practices
  • Violent crimes: murder, assault, battery, and so on
  • Drug possession, distribution, trafficking
  • Theft, arson, vandalism, and other property crimes,
  • Counterfeiting and forgery
  • Fraud, embezzlement, and other white-collar crimes
  • Corporate crime, especially small-to-medium business focus
  • Federal crimes 
  • Tax crimes
  • Firearms offenses
  • Sex crimes
  • Internet crimes
  • Appeals, expungements, sealing, probate violations, parole violations, and other post-conviction relief

You don’t have to be in a highly competitive, public-facing field to use SEO. There are plenty of cases in which highly experienced, focused legal specialists would benefit from having their names come up in the top of search results.

Even if something is a small element of your practice, you probably want to rank for it. Any type of business you want is a good candidate for SEO.

Certified Google Partners

SEO is a major project that requires regular maintenance and oversight. It will take a considerable amount of in-house resources to do correctly.

At FORWARD Lawyer Marketing, we keep our prices competitive because we work as a team. We have internal experts in SEO, project management, editing, writing, web design, and business development.

We are also set up to scale instantly to meet the demands of any project. We have a trusted network of contractors to provide specialized writing, video, graphic design, photography, and audio content when necessary.

Another way we provide value for our clients is by staying updated on SEO best practices through the Certified Google Partners program.. This is the leading industry credential, with a requirement for annual recertification.

Building a Reliable Source of Information

We believe that one of the cornerstones of a sustainable SEO strategy is creating great content. This means creating detailed, informative, clear, and unique content:

  • Articles
  • Profiles
  • Videos
  • Photos
  • Interactive web elements

Over the course of your SEO campaign, one of our goals will be to build a library for your perspective and current clients to easily find relevant, useful information. Years into your campaign, you should still be able to use (and might even still be seeing SEO results from) the first article we write for you. We also go back to older articles and update them periodically which results in new traffic coming in on older articles.

Contact FORWARD Lawyer Marketing for a Personal Consultation

If you are still not sure about SEO, feel free to contact us for a personalized consultation. We can discuss your business, look at any web presence you have, and recommend the services we think would make the most impact for your budget. Call us at (888) 590-9687.

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What Our Clients are Saying

Here is what some real clients have to say about Us

Really happy with my choice to hire Matt and his team for my digital marketing campaign. Was previously using SMB Team and they charged ridiculous fees with little to no performance. Switching to Matt and…

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JOHN BUCHMILLER

CRIMINAL DEFENSE ATTORNEY

I’m a solo immigration attorney, and I worked with Matt and the team at FLM to create my firm’s website. To say I’m happy with the process and the results would be an understatement! Matt…

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ESTELLA CASTILLO

IMMIGRATION LAWYER

This is a marketing company that has taken a couple of my website ideas from concept to completion. They are also handling a modest click ad budget for us. I have been impressed with their…

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JOSEPH RICHARDS

PERSONAL INJURY LAWYER

Matt and his staff are great to work with and provide superior and effective services to my firm.

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ALAN ORLOWSKY

ESTATE PLANNING & PROBATE LAWYER

So happy to have connected with Forward Lawyer Marketing! They are great to work with, knowledgeable, and will guide you through every step of the way. Highly recommend!

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ALEX BRINKMEIER

DIVORCE & FAMILY LAWYER

Many thanks to Forward Lawyer Marketing  for creating our website. Anderson & Anderson, LLP was particularly impressed with the quick and comprehensive responses to our many questions. Open communication is vital in conducting business, and…

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KAREN ANDERSON

CRIMINAL DEFENSE LAW FIRM

Very professional, responsive, innovative and willing to adapt to your needs. I have used MANY marketing companies over the years and Forward is the best I have encountered.

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MARK DIAZ

CRIMINAL DEFENSE ATTORNEY

Contact Us Today To Discuss Your Law Firm's Goals

Why Work with FORWARD Lawyer Marketing?

  • We are a team of seasoned professionals who understand the legal marketing space and how to drive results for your specific area of practice.
  • We shoot it to you Straight. No cheesy sales pitches or false promises. After understanding your practice and its goals, we’ll develop a custom solution tailored to your needs.
  • Our personal approach to your practice is what sets us apart from other agencies. Think of us as your own in-house marketing manager, without the salary.
  • Established in 2013, we have worked with hundreds of firms nationwide helping them establish and improve their online presence.