One of the most asked marketing questions from lawyers concerning their business is how they can use SEO to boost the rankings of their website and thus see more visitors land on their websites in the expectation that those visitors become paying clients. In truth, it is a question not unique to lawyers as it is also asked by business owners in every business niche and sector you could possibly think of.
However, it is lawyers and law firms we are going to focus on, and in doing so we want to highlight ways in which SEO can help boost their search engine rankings. If you were to study SEO for any length of time, you will soon discover that there are hundreds of ways that have been suggested as to how SEO should be done or rather hundreds of ranking factors that could be optimised.
That can seem daunting, and whilst we do not suggest you ever not seek to improve your SEO in every way you can, it needs to be done within an overall strategy. Part of that strategy should include focussing on tasks and actions that are proven to play the most significant role in producing results, aka higher rankings.
As such, we are not going to outline dozens of actions you could take but instead highlight just five. These are five steps that every SEO expert will tell you are essential and known to make a large contribution to SEO campaigns and their goal of getting a website ranking on Google’s first page. Incidentally, we recommend you follow these in the order they are presented.
Step #1 – Keyword Research
No improved and consistent search engine rankings are possible without keyword research. Without it you have no idea what searches are being entered by those searching for lawyers online, nor do you know which are highly competitive and which could be ranked for relatively easily. Keyword research can be done using software and online tools, and we also recommend competitor research to see what keywords other lawyers’ websites are ranking for.