This is a fundamental SEO guide specifically written for solicitors. It explains the essentials of SEO in plain and simple language, with no technical jargon.
By the time you finish reading this article, you should have a clear understanding of how SEO rankings work and what you need to do to help your website rank higher in search results.
I hope this article answers all your questions about SEO. If not, please feel free to send me your questions, and I’ll respond within an hour.
In simple terms, it means ranking your firm’s website higher than your competitors on Google search results and increasing its organic traffic. When people search for solicitors, your website appears in the search results before your competitors.
SEO targets specific keywords or keyphrases, increases your website quality and attracts high-quality leads to your website.
People search for solicitors on Google when they need to hire a solicitor. The keyword Solicitors has 9,900 monthly searches in Ireland and 74,000 searches in the UK. Keyword Solicitors near me has 60,500 monthly searches in the UK and 2,900 searches in Ireland. If your website is not ranking in those search results, you are missing out on getting clients.
There are four areas in the SEO service.
On-page SEO means everything you do on your website, including content, articles, and products.
Off-page SEO is Everything you do not do on your website. This includes Link building, digital PR, outreach, and driving traffic from social media.
Local SEO means optimising your website for local searches. For example, you could optimise your website for a location like Dublin or London.
Technical SEO is working on the website’s backend, ensuring your website speed is fast, setting up redirects and schema markup, etc.
An SEO campaign includes all four areas. It also depends on what you want to achieve for your website.
If you just want to rank in your local area, you need local SEO.
If you just want to improve the quality of your website content, on-page SEO will help you with that.
Or, if you want to build more links and increase your website domain authority, you are talking about off-page SEO.
All four areas of SEO services are equally important.
Keyword research is researching words and phrases when people search for solicitors online.
If you know the word and phrases they use, you can create content and rank the words and phrases in the search results, and attract the right people to your site.
Keyword research is one of the most important first step in an SEO campaign.
Using keyword research tools will save you tons of time and get relevant data about the keywords, such as monthly search volume, keyword difficulty and the cost of pay for click, etc.
1. Google Keyword Planner is A free tool used for Google ads; the data is more accurate because it is directly come from Google.
2. Ubersuggest is a user-friendly tool suitable for all levels of users. The tool offers 7days free trial, after that, it gives you 3 options to pay monthly, annually or lifetime.
3. SEMrush is a more advanced tool with many other features; most SEO professionals use SEMrush for daily tasks. The SEMrush keyword magic tool is free and gives enough data about the keyword. There is a learning curve involved in using SEMrush, and it can be costly.
Understanding and using keyword intent in your SEO campaign will increase organic(unpaid) traffic and revenue. This means focusing on what people are searching for and why they are searching.
To better understand keyword intent, you must understand your client’s buying journey and needs at each sales funnel stage.
Keyword intent, also called search intent.
If you do marketing for your firm, you probably heard about the sales funnel before. What does a sales funnel have anything to do with keyword intent?
For example, Information keyword intent is at the top of the sales funnel; these types of content usually start with what. Who. Why. How to. Etc. People are at the top of the sales funnel; they are not ready to work with you yet, but they come to your website to search and learn about your services.
Commercial keyword intent is in the middle of the sales funnel. People who are already aware of your firm, come to your website to compare and investigate your services, they would consider to use your services.
Tractional keyword intent is at the bottom of the sales funnel; people are ready to work with you, have done all the research, are very well-informed, and know exactly what they want from your services. They are ready to contact you and talk to you about their problem, they believe you have the solution for their problem and you can help them.
Local keyword intent is people searching for local services. They are searching in multiple areas for the service they want. 97% of people searching for local services and local search on mobile have grown 500% in the last two years.
Long-tail keywords are short phrases with lower search volumes but higher intent and conversion.
For example,” criminal defence solicitors for drug charges in London” is a long-tail keyword that will attract a highly targeted audience of people searching for criminal defence solicitors who can help them with drug charges issues in London city.
Long tail keyword like this will have less search volume and probably will not bring you a lot of organic traffic to your website. But the keyword is highly transactional intent keyword, it will bring you high quality leads that are ready to convert to clients once they land on your website.
The keyword is often have less competition and can be particularly effective in niche markets.
Competitor analysis is a must-do part of an SEO campaign.
You need to study your competitors, study about what keywords they are ranking and not ranking, and gather all their keywords ranking metrics.
What services do they offer, and what are their strengths and weaknesses?
Finding out all about these will make it much easier to develop strategies to compete with them. You will be able to know which keywords you should target or should not target.
If you target the same keyword as one of your competitors who is already ranking in the top 5 on page one, it is going to be difficult for you to outrank them, it is not impossible, but it will take you a longer time and a lot more effort to create much better quality content to compete them.
That is one of the reasons why SEO takes a long time to see results; for instance, if a solicitor offers criminal law service, and another ten solicitors are offering the same service in your county and 100s of them in the country, it will take some time and effort to compete with so many competitors.
The bottom line is that the more competitive your niche is, the more time and effort you will need to see the results.
Google uses very complex ranking factors to decide which websites should or should not appear at the top of search results. There are more than 200 ranking factors, but we only need to focus on getting the most important ranking factors right.
Build a solid foundation and set your website to rank higher on Google search results. The fundamentals stay the same regardless of how much the SEO industry evolves.
I concluded that there are 12 ranking factors solicitors must have on their website to set their website up to rank on the first page of search results.
A well-organised, user-friendly website is critical for both SEO and user experience. Ensure your site has a clear hierarchy, with pages for key services, such as criminal law, family law, or personal injury.
Use headers and sub-headers to structure your content, and include meta descriptions for each page, which briefly summarise what the page is about.
Content is a massive part of an SEO campaign. Publish high-quality, informative content that answers your potential clients’ questions and demonstrates your expertise.
Blog posts, videos, case studies, and FAQs—any form of content that provides value to your audience can help attract visitors.
But ensure that your content is optimised with the relevant keywords.
Google recently announced that it will stop indexing websites that are not mobile accessible on July 5th, 2024.
So, make sure your website is mobile device friendly and loads fast—less than 2 seconds. Website speed is an important ranking factor.
Google recognises bounce rates, low engagement rates, and slow websites. If your website has all three problems, Google can acknowledge that it is low quality.
Google emphasises user experience more than ever and uses it as a primary signal to determine whether a website has a high or low user experience.
Find out more about what is on page SEO and how it can impact your website ranking on our on page SEO service.
Backlink is one of the most important ranking factors; without them, your website won’t be competitive in term of ranking.
If your competitors have more backlinks than your website, you must double down on your backlink profile to compete.
In most cases, you need more backlinks to rank higher on search results. However, if you have a lot of low-quality or spammy backlinks, you are hurting your rankings.
You can build good quality backlinks by guest blogging, partnerships, and creating high quality content that people want to link to, build relationships with reputable legal and industry sites to gain backlinks.
Publish content on social media channels seems to have nothing to do with SEO.
Social media helps you build authority outside your website, it is part of your branding.
Search engines consider your social media performance to recognise your authority and trustworthiness. If you have a large number of followers and high engagement on your social media channels, it shows your authority and trustworthiness to Google.
Your online reputation is crucial, especially in the legal field.
Build up as many positive reviews as possible on your Google Business Profile(GBP), and always ask your satisfied clients to write a review; respond to their reviews professionally and as soon as possible.
You can learn more about Google reviews in this article: Google reviews: a infinite guide for businesses.
If you have many positive reviews on your GBP, it will help you build trust and credibility with both Google and users and directly helps your ranking .
Website speed and core web vitality are critical for user experience and SEO.
Use Google PageSpeed Insights to test your website speed and performance. This free tool gives you all the metrics and tells you how to improve your website performance. Or find out more in this article: How to improve your website speed?
Structured data and schema markup are important if you want rich snippets in the search results like this one:
Use Goolge structured data markup helper tool to create rich snippets. It is a free tool from Google. You are guaranteed to have rich snippets if you use it correctly.
Create a structured data markup to help Google understand your content better and show more of your page details in the search results, such as attaching a rich snippet image.
SEO is not a set-it-and-forget-it process.
Audit your website often to identify and fix issues like broken links, duplicate content, or outdated information.
Continue maintaining your website to a high standard and perform well over time.
Local SEO is essential for solicitors who rely on clients within a specific geographic area.
Ranking your firm’s website to the top of local search results and appearing in the top of Google maps results should be your no 1 priority in your marketing effort. Especially if you have a few other competitors in the area, you really need to position your firm as a no 1 choice in your area.
Find out more about what is local search SEO and what it can do to help your firm to be the no 1 choice in your area in our SEO for local search service.
Optimising your Google Business Profile (GBP) is an effective local SEO strategy.
A local SEO campaign includes optimising your GBP. Ensure you have accurate and updated information, such as your firm’s name, address, phone number and your firm’s description, etc.
Your clients’ positive reviews on your GBP can significantly boost your local rankings. Uploading updates regularly on your GBP can help you build trust with Google and users and increase your GBP ranking and visibility.
Register your firm with local directories, such as legal directories and chambers of commerce listings.
Make sure your firm information, such as Name, Address, Phone number, and practice areas etc, are identical across all online directories.
The more consistent your information, the more trustworthy your law firm appears to search engines.
Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console are free tools to track your SEO campaign performance.
What you should track for is website organic traffic, impressions and click-through rate, plus, your target keyword rankings etc, on the Google search console.
Google Analytics 4 provides key performance indicators(KPIs), such as traffic sources, geographic locations, and behaviours.
SEO is a powerful organic lead generation tool for solicitors. Once your website ranks at the top of the first page, the ongoing cost to maintain that position is low to none.
This comprehensive guide gives you all the fundamentals you need to transform your website into a highly reputable law firm website that ranks at the top of search results and earns hundreds or thousands of organic traffic.
If you target keyword solicitors in Ireland or UK, you could potentially get 9,900 or 74,000 organic traffic to your website each month. However, your website must optimised for the keyword solicitors, contains highly relevant and high quality content on the page.
A full SEO optimised page will help you to rank higher and earn hundreds or thousands organic traffic at the end.
If you think this is what you are looking for to grow your law firm in a long run, contact Emma to get a free SEO proposal.
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