Planning to Start Your Own Law Startup – What Are the Essential SEO Steps?

Planning to Start Your Own Law Startup - What Are the Essential SEO Steps

You have probably heard of SEO, but you may not know what it helps achieve. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your website so that it ranks higher in search results on websites like Google and Bing.

So why does a new law firm need search engine optimization? Well, to start, 91% of online searches end at the first page of Google. If you are not showing up on the first page for your service areas, you will lose out on potential clients who want representation for their legal needs.

Prevailing Approach of People

People do not tend to search for lawyers or criminal defense lawyers when they need representation because that is too vague, and many firms provide those services. Instead, people will look for something specific like a “DUI lawyer” or “personal injury lawyer.” It is where the real opportunity lies, but most law firms have not optimized their websites to rank in these searches.

Unless you can afford an in-house team, it’s a good idea to hire a professional agency specializing in SEO rather than trying to do everything yourself or delegating tasks to someone else in-house. You can consider Brooks Internet Marketing SEO while shortlisting such an agency for you.

Here are some things you can expect from such an agency:

Expertise – They have experience optimizing sites across multiple industries and know how to optimize your site effectively because they have already done it many times with other clients

Time – You may not have time to learn about SEO yourself if running your business takes priority over making sure your website has proper keywords, meta tags, etc.

It means outsourcing the task makes more sense. An agency can dedicate more resources to understanding how different algorithms work and test methods, and find what works best.

Additionally, you can use the following SEO techniques to grow your law firm business:

Create Your Google My Business Page

There are several ways to get your business verification done on Google, but the easiest option is through Google My Business. A Google My Business page allows you to list your business’s address, phone number, and website with Google. You can also add your business hours and respond to customer reviews that mention your firm on the platform.

Optimize Your Website

You can optimize your website’s structure, content, and linking strategy. It can help you:

  • Improve your website architecture.
  • Add more relevant content.
  • Use SEO-friendly URLs (e.g., lawstartup.com/benefits-of-creating-a-legal-contract is better than lawstartup.com/post=id12).
  • Improve your internal linking structure.
  • Improve the navigation menu structure of your website.
  • Improve your linking strategy as a whole, external and internal links should be well linked to each other to make the UX better for users, search engines, and crawlers alike.

Make Every Single Page Stand Out

Title tags and meta descriptions are not directly crucial for rankings and are extremely important to the end-users because they give them a reason to click on your site. A good title tag should:

  • Include primary keywords that users search for when looking for legal services online
  • Give searchers a reason to click on your ad or website from the search results (and not your competitor’s)
  • Include call-to-actions like “Free Consultation” or “Call Now,” as this will lead your potential clients right into the action. You may consider click generation, including promotions in your title tag.

Add Rich Snippets

To make all your structured data visible to search engines, you need to follow these steps:

  • Start with Schema.org, the most popular protocol for structured data.
  • Create a sitemap with structured data and submit it to the Google Search Console. To do this, use the Structured Data Markup Helper tool.
  • Use the Structured Data Testing Tool to check your structured data and see how Google will display it in SERPs.

Find Out Most Opted Keywords

You need to figure out what keywords people use when they search for a lawyer and then ensure that your site gets optimized for those keywords. To do this, you will want to build a list of keywords. It can happen in several ways:

Use Google’s Keyword Planner. By looking at the keyword planner, you can find which keywords are being used by people searching for things related to law firms or lawyers. You can see how many searches are performing for each keyword and how competitive the market is for each.

Look at your competitors’ sites. What keywords are they using? You want to find out what keywords they are targeting and offer alternative ones to drive more traffic to your website.

Look at your own site’s data. You can look at which pages of your site get the most traffic, which pages have the highest bounce rate (percentage of visitors who only look at one page before leaving), and which pages have had their content changed recently (this indicates a change in focus).

RelatedHow Do I Get a Copy of The Deed to My Property in Florida?

You may have heard that links are a big part of SEO, but did you know it is important to link only to the highest-quality websites? People who read your content will likely click on the links if it seems relevant and will take them away from your website. It is important to ensure that all sites you link to are relevant and have high domain authority.

You also want to make sure there are no broken links. Ensure you do not link to websites with low domain authority or “dead” websites abandoned by their owners.

To get started with link building, let us first learn a few basics:

Quality and context matter. Getting a link from an irrelevant site will not help you rank. The best backlinks come from sites that are relevant to your business. To do this, create content around a specific topic (like personal injury law) and then reach out to other websites that cover that same topic to see if they would be interested in including a link to your post in one of their articles.

It is better to have fewer quality links than many irrelevant ones. It is not the number of links but the quality of those links that matters most for SEO performance.

Conclusion

You need an excellent SEO strategy to start with and will help your website get found on Google. I recommend adding a blog to your website and writing regular content. It will help you with SEO, as well as engage your visitors. If you are overwhelmed by the idea of SEO, you could consider hiring a professional.