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FAQ pages are a staple on many websites but it is hit or miss with many law firms we have researched. Adding an FAQ page to your law firm’s website is one of the easiest things you can do to increase rankings and traffic. Why do I say it’s easy? Simple. Because if you have been practicing law for any amount of time you should know the common questions your clients and potential clients ask. This makes it easier than writing content about a topic that you may not be well versed in.
While it seems relatively straightforward, you should plan a strategy for adding FAQ pages to your site. If you have multiple practice areas you may want to have separate FAQ pages for each. For example, if you handle workers’ compensation and social security disability, you would want to have separate pages for each in order to maximize the SEO benefit. A Law firm that specializes in family law could probably be okay with just one FAQ page to cover issues like divorce, child custody, support, etc. You also want to make sure that you feature the FAQ pages in your top navigation menu. Use drop-downs if you have multiple pages and make them geo-targeted. For example “Illinois Personal Injury FAQs.”
Here is a sample law firm FAQ page from one of our personal injury law firm clients:
If you notice, the first thing you see at the top is a list of the questions in the form of a Table of Contents. This gives your website visitors a quick look at the questions you have on your FAQ page. If you’ve done your due diligence, it should have questions a client would want answers to. This is another good reason for having separate FAQ pages if your law practice handles a variety of different types of cases.
The key is to create FAQ pages that contain helpful, informative content that answers the concerns your visitors are seeking answers to. It’s also a way for you to quickly establish yourself as an authority on the subjects. This plays into how Google uses data for rankings according to E-A-T.
Obviously, the primary reason for having FAQ pages on your law firm’s website is to answer questions that potential clients may have about a legal issue that your firm handles. In addition, as mentioned above, if these pages are done correctly they will also give you an SEO benefit that will result in higher search result rankings, more traffic, and more phone calls and visits to your office.
Thanks to the internet, consumers are much savvier these days. Having a world of information literally at one’s fingertips has increased competition in all areas, perhaps even more so in the legal profession. Potential clients will peruse the websites of lawyers that specialize in the area of law they need help in to decide who they will hire to take on their case.
Law Firm FAQ pages can go a long way to helping potential clients to see that you are knowledgeable in your field. This in addition to great Google reviews can encourage a prospect to want to retain your legal services. We will also utilize the FAQ pages for doing questions and answers on the law firm’s Google Business Profile. More on that later.
Doing the proper research will not only help us to find the best questions to include but can also help us to rank for the keyword phrases in the questions and answers. If you do a lot of searching online you are probably familiar with the “People Also Ask” section below the first search results. This section is populated with questions that Google has collected that it deems similar to what the user is searching for. There is an excellent tool we like to use that will pull these People Also Ask questions from a seed keyword.
As mentioned previously, to keep things easy for visitors and also for maximum SEO benefit, we want to stay within a given area of law. At Forward Lawyer Marketing, we have some law firm clients that handle broad areas of the law. For example, one of our attorneys in Illinois handles all of the following:
Looking at the diversity of these areas of practice it should be evident that we would need separate FAQ pages for each of these as they are completely different areas of law. Even under a broad practice area such as personal injury, it could be divided into sub-categories for things like car accidents, construction accidents, slip and fall, etc.
Linking to your own blog posts not only gives the visitor more detailed information on the answer you provided but also helps search engine crawlers like the Googlebot to understand your website better. These internal links are considered good SEO practice.
The majority of questions will probably be generic and not specific to a particular geographic area. However, when the opportunity presents itself, you should always answer questions with references to the local area you serve. With few exceptions, the vast majority of our attorney clients serve specific geographic areas. At the very least you want to reference your state. For example, if you are talking about personal injury and the statute of limitations you want to include the law for your state and link to it.
As you saw at the beginning of this post, we like to use a table of contents in our law firm FAQ pages. We also like to use them on long-form content when we write over 1500 words to make it easy for visitors to scan the content for what they are looking for. By placing the table of contents at the very top of the page you create a user-friendly experience. Since we build our attorney websites in WordPress, we like to use a plugin called “Easy Table Of Contents.” This plugin automates the process and even updates your table of contents anytime you add new questions.
In order for the plugin to work properly you have to put the questions in H-tag formats. Depending upon the header tags we use for the main headers we will use H2 or H3 tags and designate that in the plugin so it can create the table. This is also good SEO practice.
While it’s a good idea to not be overly complicated on anything you write for the consumption of the general public, it applies even more when writing your FAQs. You want to make the questions and answers easy to comprehend. As a general rule, we want to try to keep it on a 6th-grade reading level because that is the average level for most Americans. You also don’t want to get too wordy, you can link to a blog post that goes into detail for people that want more information. Doing this also increases the chances you will get listed in the People Also Ask section.
After you have created your FAQ pages you can use them to create questions and answers on your Google Business Profile which can help with local rankings as well as get your phone ringing from people that find your questions when doing a local search. At Forward Lawyer Marketing, we handle the entire process for you. Our legal content writers will create your FAQ pages and our Google Business Profile optimization team will create the questions and answers on your Google Business page.
Our team of lawyer marketing experts has decades of experience in law firm marketing. Our SEO Director has two decades of online marketing experience and oversees every aspect of this process. Call us at (888) 590-9687 to discuss all of your law firm marketing needs or contact us via our online system for a free consultation.
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