9 Important SEO trends Law Firm Needs To Know

SEO was simple during the initial days of search engines. You would’ve ranked on the first page of Google if you stuffed your page with target keywords. But it’s not that simple today. Google now considers hundreds of factors to determine which pages to rank high on search engine results pages. 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is constantly evolving over the years, and it’s crucial for SEO experts to keep up-to-date with the recent SEO trends. Although most of the fundamentals remain the same, it’s essential to adhere to the latest SEO algorithm update rolled out by Google. We have accumulated a list of the latest SEO trends to help law firms make the most out of search engines and drive relevant organic traffic to the website.

1. User Experience On The Website – Experienced law firm marketers are aware of the importance of user experience to increase the conversions on the website irrespective of SEO. But these days, UX is considered one of the critical best practices of SEO. It is going to have a vital influence on SERP from now on. In fact, UX and SEO work together to help both users and search engines.

2. Mobile Friendliness – Google introduced mobile-first indexing lately. It means the mobile version of the website becomes a starting point for indexing the pages and is the baseline for how they determine rankings. It doesn’t matter how well your desktop version of the website is optimized if you don’t have a mobile version. According to the World Advertising Research Center (WARC) study, 72.6% of internet users access the internet solely via their smartphones by 2025. Therefore, A lack of mobile friendliness could negatively impact the website’s rankings on search engines and impact overall conversions.

3. Long-Form Content: Long-form content will significantly impact the page’s rank on the SERPs. What should be the typical content length for it to be considered long-form content? Some marketers say it’s more than 3,000 words and others say articles having an excess of 2,000 words as long-form. Let’s assume it as 2,400 words or longer for the sake of argument. According to the SerpIQ, the first result typically has 2,416 words. 

Here’s the graph.

4. Featured Snippets:  Featured snippets are those bits of information and links to websites that appear highest in search results. When someone plugs a question into Google, the first link and answer that comes up are known as the “zero position.” It’s this option that gets the most number of clicks and pageviews. Featured snippets are considered one of the main engines of business growth today. They give better visibility to your web pages and attract more organic traffic. Many marketers still struggle to leverage the benefits of featured snippets as they are somewhat challenging to implement for an inexperienced marketer. Take the help of expert partners who are proficient in implementing featured snippets for law firm websites.

5. Importance of Artificial Intelligence – Google’s RankBrain was a revolution in how a web page ranking is determined. It is a machine learning algorithm that helps Google to process and understand search queries. Before RankBrain, all of Google’s algorithms were hand-coded. But today, it is a combination of human engineers and RankBrain(in the background). Since then, it has evolved a lot and can rank pages based on “experience signals,” such as time spent on the web page by a user and click-through rates.

6. Voice Queries – With the growing usage of voice assistants like Alexa, Siri, and Ok Google, voice search has become more prevalent in the internet world. With innovations like enhanced mobile phone technology, voice search has come a long way. Using long-tail keywords and natural speech in the content is the best way to optimize voice queries as most users use a conversational tone when it comes to voice search. The usage of voice search is significantly going to increase in the coming years, and it’s vital to optimize the content for voice queries.

7. Importance Of Secondary Keywords – Sometimes, users struggle to articulate a search query properly. Search engines need to deal with such queries as most of these searches are unintentionally ambiguous. This is where secondary keywords(or semantic search) come to the rescue. Google will consider the intent and the context of search phrases when serving content to the end-users by analyzing the semantic keywords in the web pages. Therefore, it’s crucial to include secondary keywords along with the primary keywords to rank well for all the relevant keywords.

8. Local Search Listings – Eight out of ten users perform local searches on Google to find the right business that meets their needs. Law firms can also leverage the benefits of local search engine optimization(Local SEO) to promote their services to local prospects. A law firm needs to have a local SEO strategy, Google My Business page, and social proof such as testimonials and reviews. When a user searches for a local legal service online, Google will automatically show a map along with the organic search results. Map drastically improves the chances of clicking on the local listing as it occupies 30% of the screen space.

9. Social Media – Legal marketing is considered a reasonably “serious” niche with more inclinations towards B2B interactions. The legal industry has been slow in adopting social media marketing and practices. However, it’s essential for law firms to have a social media strategy in place as it is vital in building brand presence. Social media platforms like LinkedIn allow lawyers and law firms to establish thought leadership by publishing long-form content related to the legal industry. It is the best platform for posting and distributing content to your target demographic and helps to show your expertise in the legal space.

Conclusion:

SEO is becoming a more technical and complex process day by day for law firms. It’s no longer keyword stuffing and meta title optimization. It’s essential for law firms to have a solid online presence to drive business in the current age. Consider hiring expert SEO professionals like Oamii, who are specialized in optimizing law firm websites if you do not have experienced marketers at your disposal.