Want to attract more clients? Local SEO for law firms is the top strategy attorneys are using to generate more local traffic and leads. From Google Maps optimization to content creation to NAPW, localization is leading the charge in law firm SEO.
Learn more about what local SEO is, how it works, and how to implement it to start seeing results for your law firm.
What is Local SEO?
Local SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a digital marketing strategy that involves optimizing a business’s online presence to rank better in local search results. In a nutshell, local SEO makes it easier for potential clients to find your law firm when they are searching for legal services in your geographic area.
Local SEO activities may include:
- Claiming, verifying, and optimizing your Google Business Profile
- Optimizing your website’s content with local keywords
- Building and managing consistent NAPW (Name, Address, Phone number, Website) information across online directories
- Encouraging customers to leave reviews on platforms like Google, Yelp, and Avvo
- Ensuring that your website is mobile-friendly and loads quickly on mobile devices
- Monitoring your local SEO efforts with tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Semrush
Does Local SEO Work for Law Firms?
Yes! Local SEO is one of the most effective forms of marketing for law firms. Given that many potential clients search for legal services locally, local SEO allows law firms to capitalize on geo-specific searches and attract highly targeted traffic. Also, many people prefer to work with lawyers who are nearby and easily accessible, so local SEO makes it even easier for these people to discover your local firm.
Benefits of Local SEO for Lawyers
Local SEO is one of the go-to marketing strategies for any local business wanting to attract local customers. For law firms in particular, there are many more benefits that go beyond just geo-specific leads.
Competitive Advantage
If you’re a local law firm, you’re probably competing for the same “pool” of local leads, whether you realize it or not. Rather than have your competition outrank you (and out-earn you), you can deploy local SEO strategies to stand out in search and be the clear choice for potential clients.
Trust and Credibility
The process of local search engine optimization often involves generating positive client reviews, creating valuable content, and landing placement in reputable directories. All of these activities can help earn trust from potential clients and boost your law firm’s credibility.
Cost-Effective Marketing
Since local SEO targets users who are already searching for legal services, it proves to be a more cost-effective form of marketing compared to more traditional channels. For example, print ads, bus ads, and billboards bank on catching the attention of the general public, but local SEO draws in those already searching for “legal services near me”. This results in a more efficient use of your marketing budget.
Increased Visibility
Local SEO helps ensure that your website shows up in the local search results. This helps you avoid missing out on new leads – i.e. people who are searching for your services or firm but aren’t able to find you. This increased visibility can lead to more traffic, more reviews, more leads, and, ultimately, more revenue.
Better User Experience
Much of local SEO focuses on improving the content and experience on your website. For example, you’ll likely optimize your website to be faster, more interactive, and easier to navigate. Making sure users have a positive experience on your website is great for business!
Long-Term Results
The local SEO strategies you implement now can benefit your business for months or even years to come. Though you will need to keep up with regular maintenance, content, etc., a well-thought-out SEO strategy could result in traffic and leads far into the future.
Best Local SEO Strategies for Law Firms
Local SEO is less of a step-by-step formula and more of a collection of various strategies rolled into one. It requires ongoing management, optimization, and analysis to ensure you are achieving the best results and keeping up with the competition.
That said, it’s helpful to know the basics! Here are the most effective and commonly used local SEO strategies that law firms can use to drive more local traffic.
Conduct Geo-Specific Keyword Research
A great starting point for local SEO is to conduct research around what keywords people are using to find legal services in your area. This keyword research, as it’s called, will help you determine which keywords to target in your existing website content in order to attract relevant, geo-specific traffic.
First, brainstorm a list of topics related to the services you offer. For example, if you are a corporate law firm, these may be topics like “corporate law”, “business law”, “business litigation”, “mergers and acquisitions law”, and the like.
Next, use SEO keyword research tools like Semrush or Ahrefs to look up these “seed” words to see if there are any related keywords. You can also include geo-specific words for your target service area (e.g. “Los Angeles corporate law, “Denver business law”, etc.).
The SEO tools will then show you the organic search volume (SV) and keyword difficulty (KD) of the keywords and their variations.
Then, analyze the keywords based on SV and KD. SV tells you how many people are searching for that keyword on a monthly basis. KD tells you how difficult that keyword is to rank for, consider all the other domains that are already ranking for it. With this data, you can start to decide which keywords are a good fit for your website.
Once you have a solid keyword set, you will align these with related pages or posts on your website (or, they will become topics for future content). Below, we talk about how to incorporate keywords into your content using On-Page SEO best practices.
Check this out for a complete guide on How to Do Keyword Research for SEO.
Localize Your Law Firm’s Website Content
Many law firms make the mistake of optimizing for high-SV, high-KD keywords that are not specific enough for their business. For example, targeting “Business law” in general puts you up against EVERY business law firm trying to target that term. Instead, the best approach is to go after geo-specific keywords for your service area.
So, when you are doing your keyword research, look for keywords that contain your city (ideal), county, or state of interest. Try to identify geo-specific keywords for every legal service you offer, as well (if available).
Then, you can start to “localize” your website content according to the geographic area(s) you wish to target. So, instead of having a Business Law page that talks about business law in general, you can talk about the specific area you offer services in, where you have offices, and describe your firm as a “[location] business law” firm.
Implement On-Page SEO
So, how do you actually incorporate these keywords into your website? Well, this is where on-page SEO comes in!
On-page SEO refers to any activity that involves optimizing the on-site components of your website. This can include your page content, your URL structure, your navigation, etc.
Specifically, here are the most important components where you’ll want to incorporate your target keywords:
- Title Tags: Craft descriptive, keyword-rich titles (under 60 characters) that accurately describe the page’s content
- Meta Descriptions: Write compelling meta descriptions (under 160 characters) that summarize the page’s content and encourage people to click.
- Header Tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.): Use header tags to structure your content in a hierarchy. Place your main keyword in the H1 tag and incorporate related keywords in subheadings (H2, H3, etc.).
- Body Copy: Incorporate relevant keywords naturally throughout the content, including in the first paragraph, headings, and body text – but avoid keyword stuffing.
- Internal Links: Link to other pages within your website to improve user navigation and establish a content hierarchy.
- URL Structure: Create clean, readable URLs that include relevant keywords (1-2 max) and reflect the page’s content.
Check out the complete On-Page SEO Checklist for Lawyers here!
Optimize Your Google Business Profile
Your Google Business Profile is one of the best pieces of digital real estate you have when it comes to generating local traffic. Hosted by Google (and completely free), it is a simple directory listing that showcases your law firm’s name, address, phone number, website URL, and more.
If you have a Google Business Profile already, you’ll want to make sure that it contains accurate and complete information, including your law firm’s name, address, phone number, website URL, hours of operation, and practice categories.
If you haven’t yet created or claimed your Google Business Profile, you should do that instead. Google will send you a verification code via mail or phone call to confirm your ownership.
To fully optimize your Google Business Profile, you should:
- Write a compelling business description that includes relevant keywords and showcases your firm’s expertise
- Add high-quality images of your office, attorneys, and team members
- Add or update your business hours, especially if they vary
- Enable messaging to allow clients to reach you easily
- Add important details about your practice areas and any services you offer
- Ask past clients to leave you positive reviews
Be sure to keep your profile up-to-date with any changes to your business details, such as new office locations, phone numbers, or website URLs. You can even post updates, news, and articles to further improve your search ranking. Plus, Google considers user engagement to be a huge ranking factor!
Improve UX and Technical SEO
On-page SEO is just one piece of the larger SEO pie. Another piece is Technical SEO, which involves optimizing the infrastructure and technical components of your website.
Now, much of this may require the help of a skilled website developer because the components can be complex. We recommend working with a developer or agency if you don’t want to take the DIY approach.
Here are the key components of technical SEO:
- Website Speed
- Mobile-Friendly Design
- Crawlability
- Website Security
- Canonicalization
- XML Sitemaps
- Structured Data (Schema Markup)
- Page Speed Optimization
- AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)
- 404 Error Pages
- 301 Redirects
- Hreflang Tags
- Alt Text for Images
If you’re not sure whether your website has any issues with the components above, it might be helpful to conduct a comprehensive SEO audit. This will be able to identify many of the issues that might be hindering the performance of your website and can provide a blueprint for what to fix/optimize.
Submit Your Business to Online Directories
There are many reputable directories besides your Google Business Profile that can drive traffic to your website. Avvo, Lawyer.com, Yelp, Bing Places, and Yellow Pages are just a few of many directories that you can submit your business to.
If you have placement in some directories already, make sure that your information is consistent across all profiles. Inaccuracies in your business name, address, website URL, etc. can be confusing to Google and to clients.
Beyond that, look for industry-specific directories that allow you to showcase your law firm and generate more leads. Only submit to websites that appear to have a good reputation and credibility.
Build High-Quality Backlinks
Earning links from other websites to your website will boost your site’s authority and credibility in the eyes of Google. But “building” links is often easier said than done. You will need to make sure the domains you are earning links from are relevant, high-authority, and not spammy.
First, start by creating high-quality, informative, and shareable content that demonstrates your expertise in various legal areas. This content can include blog posts, legal guides, case studies, and legal news updates that would appeal to your audience and/or other professionals in your niche.
Then, reach out to authoritative legal websites, blogs, and publications to establish partnerships and contribute guest articles. In exchange, you can often request a backlink to your website within your content or in your author bio!
You can also consider joining legal directories and associations that provide backlinks to member profiles. Always ensure that your content is relevant and adds value to the linking website’s audience to increase the chances of successful backlink acquisition.
Measure Your Website Performance and Track Results
Implementing local SEO is a journey and you might not see results overnight. That said, it is important to track your progress and keep tabs on your website performance so you can improve your results over time.
Use tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and local SEO tools to track your organic traffic, clicks, conversions, form fills, etc. Take note of when you have implemented local SEO changes and when they start paying off. This will not only build your confidence but give you more direction in terms of what’s working for your site.
Keeping an eye on your data will help you see how well local SEO is working for you, what could be improved, and what sources of traffic are resulting in the most leads for your business.
Put Your Law Firm on the Map with Local SEO
Get more law firm clients from Google with local SEO! At Hennessey Digital, we help law firms and lawyers stand out in search, improve their local presence, and generate more leads with targeted local SEO strategies. Contact us to learn more about our local SEO services.
