As law firm marketing is increasingly challenged by significant competitor strategies, fast-paced technology development and evolving buyer behaviour, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has become an essential digital marketing tool to help drive new business for your firm.
SEO shapes elements of your firm’s website to ensure it ranks for significant keywords and search phrases as relevant to your primary services. As Google uses a couple of hundred factors used to rank a website, here’s a list of the most important to help direct your SEO strategy.
WebSite Factors (On-Site SEO)
- Your website must be built on a robust, responsive design platform, which means it will be optimised across devices. In may instances mobile content is given priority, and if your content isn’t optimised for mobile it won’t feature prominently.
- Preference is given to trusted domains. Trust can be built through factors like what sites yours links out to, a strong privacy policy (especially in light of recent data privacy and regulatory requirements), references and resources to show your content is authentic and accurate, and your website’s bounce rate.
- When you’re planning your web design project, make sure you’ve covered important components like your sitemap, H1 and title tags, meta data, keyword rich URLs, keyword optimised content, internal and outbound links and optimised imagery. Naturally these should be familiar to your web design team, but it’s good to gen up on the tech stuff so you’re always in the loop on the project.
- Your content should be well structured — we often see client websites where content is banded together with several practice areas on a page, but this is a nightmare for both SEO and PPC. It’s fine to group similar services, or secondary services of a primary service together, but different practice areas each need their own demarcated, unique content area (even of your website is a scrolling style content can still be properly segmented).
- Content must be fresh and updated. This doesn’t mean you constantly need to edit your content or post to your blog daily, but include what types of content will be updated when in your content strategy. Generally try not to duplicate content, keep what you publish on each of your law firm’s marketing channels unique.
Off Site Factors (Off-Site SEO)
Here are some of the key external factors Google looks at when ranking your law firm’s website.
- Inbound links are a primary influence on ranking. These are links from external websites linking to yours. Ideally these will be from other trusted website, and from various individual domains. Relevance is also important, as are the phrases used to link to your content — contextual and relevant is best.
- Getting your content out there, shared on other reputable sites, is also hugely beneficial to your law firm’s SEO. Some examples are content posting and sharing via social media, guest blogging, influencer marketing and brand mentions.
At a high level, improving the on- and off-site factors of your firm’s website helps boost the recognised legitimacy, trust and quality of your site, and so improves SEO ranking. This is a long-term process, and most effective as an integral component of your aw firm’s integrated marketing strategy.