Why Law Firms Need to Invest in SEO?

SEO or search engine optimization has been a hot topic for the legal industry for over a decade now, and with good reason. According to the National Law Review, 96 percent of people research their legal issues online before hiring an attorney. This is why blogging about legal issues is a good idea– not only is it the content your prospective clients are looking for, it’s also a great way to increase your online visibility via search engine results ranking (SEO). 

Being on page one means a lot as the majority of people make big decisions based on online searches today. In fact, online word-of-mouth referrals have been quickly surpassing offline word-of-mouth referrals. As the prevalence of online “word of mouth” referrals increases, so should your digital marketing efforts with SEO at the top of your list. This article will walk you through why SEO is highly important for law firms today. 

1. Your Competitors Are Doing It

Don’t believe us? You can test this for yourself. Go to Google and type “[insert the case type for which you’d like more clients] + [insert your city/state].” For example, who shows up when you type “car accident attorney Florida?” If it is your law firm, congratulations. If it’s not your law firm, it’s likely a competitor who realized long ago that it was time to hire a Florida search engine optimization company . It’s not too late though; the quicker you begin your SEO strategy, the quicker you will have more visibility on Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

With the right SEO strategy in place, you can bring targeted, qualified traffic to your website. When prospective clients use a search engine to find out more about a legal issue, they likely already know what they are looking for. This means they qualify themselves for you. By optimizing your law firm’s website for the appropriate keywords and creating a content strategy with those keywords, you’ll slowly begin to show up where you need to show up, ultimately gaining more leads.

As stated above, many prospective clients research their legal issues before they hire an attorney, which means you already know what type of content to write. Coordinate this with the type of cases you want. Once you figure that out, do the keyword research and write good, informative content for your prospective clients. This content will bring potential clients to your website and educate them on their specific situation. Subsequently, the odds that they hire you will be in your favor. 

According to the US, Consumer Legal Needs Survey by FindLaw, 72 percent of people looking to hire an attorney only contact one attorney. Hiring a Florida search engine optimization firm can help you more often be that one attorney they contact.

While SEO takes longer to build at the beginning than fairly instant tactics like PPC ads for law firms , SEO will pay off big time in the long run. Legal keywords are usually quite expensive for PPC efforts; building your SEO means having high search rankings without paying high prices for website clicks.

Pro tip: If you want to maximize your ROI, especially in the beginning, have your SEO and PPC efforts work together. Your marketing agency can help you run complementary digital marketing campaigns to create multi-touchpoint strategies.

Having a good SEO strategy supports a more accessible experience for all potential clients. Some SEO elements that bring your website up to date with ADA compliance include implementing image alt tags that will describe images auditorily, posting accurate text transcripts with website videos, and creating title tags that allow all users to quickly and easily understand what a web page is about. Items that can increase both SEO and ADA compliance are:

1. Image alt tags
2. Video transcripts
3. Heading tags
4. Link anchor text
5. Accessible PDFs

The first step to getting your law firm in the top search results is hiring a Florida search engine optimization firm, like Oamii Digital Marketing Agency. Some key components of your SEO strategy will include the following:

1. On-page optimization – ensures items like headers, title tags, image alt tags, URLs, and meta attributions are correct so that search engines can index your web pages, helping searchers find it more easily.
2. Mobile website friendliness – A lot of website traffic comes from mobile phones today, so having a mobile-responsive website is essential to positive SEO.
3. Internal and external linking – Linking your internal web pages signifies good website structure to search engines, as it enhances user-friendliness (a top concern of Google, Bing and Yahoo). Search engines also favor websites that have other websites link to them; this is called backlinking; it gives your website more credibility when other credible sites vouch for it.
4. Website security – It’s vital that your website is hypertext transfer protocol secure, meaning that “HTTPs” is in front of your domain, instead of HTTP.
5. Content marketing – Your content marketing plays a large role in your SEO success. Your blogs, videos and other content should contain keywords and be written with your clients in mind.

A professional marketing firm will help you establish an SEO strategy that increases your visibility on Google over time. While SEO is a long-term strategy, it shouldn’t be overlooked. Hiring a dedicated marketing team will only accelerate the SEO process for your law firm. 

Oamii has helped many law firms establish search engine presence, helping them to gain more clients with fully optimized websites and quality content marketing that delivers results. With our marketing tools and experienced team, we’ll help you get the most out of your marketing dollars. Give us a call today at 561-228-4111 or fill out our contact form  to get started on your law firm search engine optimization.