Search Engine Optimisation for Attorneys

As a lawyer, your priority is managing sensitive legal cases, important documents and working in your client’s best interest. However, with any business, building a successful law firm can be challenging. People typically find a solicitor or lawyer through word of mouth recommendations, social media or internet searches. Having a comprehensive, beautiful website is essential to attracting these potential clients, but first, they must be able to find your website online.

To maximise your law firm’s online presence, you may utilise PPC ads, social media marketing or SEO. While they all offer potential benefits, SEO is the best option for law firm marketing.

PPC and social media ads offer instantaneous traffic as they direct people to your website as soon as you start the campaign. However, these ads come at a cost. Not only are they expensive, but the traffic stops when you stop paying for the ads. 

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) provides a secure, long term solution. Attorney SEO is the process of improving a law firm’s website for a search engine, like Google. When an SEO expert optimises the site for a search engine, it increases the search rankings. Most people don’t go past the first page of Google, so it’s essential to optimise your firm’s site to improve ranking on search results and, therefore, increase site visits. It takes a few months for SEO methods to show results; however, investing in SEO for lawyers will significantly improve your website’s positions in search results over time. Even if you stop SEO measures in the future, you will continue attracting organic traffic for free. 

Why is Law Firm SEO Important?

Law firm SEO techniques are critical if you want to create a thriving business in this digital age, as potential clients need to be able to discover your services. As a business owner, you may be looking for the most cost-effective option. Investing in SEO is precisely that. We recommend SEO for lawyers because it offers longevity and better financial prospects as you won’t need to pay for PPC or social ads day after day. 

Finding a suitable lawyer is challenging, so law firms must stand out amongst the rest. Interestingly, people tend to trust your website more if they discover your legal services through an organic search result than an ad. 

When SEO is done right, you maximise your client leads by generating free, organic traffic. In short, the more traffic to your website, the more people discover your services.

Nevertheless, can law firms and lawyers benefit from using SEO? Yes! Let’s look at the data to verify this and review some law firm websites already generating excellent traffic thanks to their SEO efforts.

Search Demand for Lawyer on Google

The above photo shows Google search data for the keyword ‘lawyer’. The global volume refers to the average monthly searches for this term, also known as search volume (SV). As you can see, there is a global SV of 394 thousand, meaning people worldwide are searching the internet for ‘lawyer’ an average of 394 thousand times per month. Specifically, 126 thousand searches come from the United States, 53 thousand from India, 24 thousand from Canada and 19 thousand from the United Kingdom. The data indicates a vast amount of people searching for a lawyer in your country every month.

This next image displays data from Google Trends, emphasising how interest in the term ‘lawyer near me’ changed since 2016. Although there are some natural declines, the data shows a distinct upward trend, indicating that more people worldwide are searching for a local lawyer. To make the most of this incline, an SEO company can help optimise your law firm website, so more people find your legal services as interest peaks. With this increasing interest, PPC and social media ads become more competitive and, thus, more expensive. SEO implementation is the best way to get increasingly high ROIs yearly, without the rising cost of law firm marketing ads.

People Use Many Terms to Find Solicitors

Identifying appropriate search terms is a crucial step for SEO. Keyword research reveals your target audience’s interests and what they are specifically searching for when trying to find legal services. An SEO company will do in-depth research and use this information to tailor your website to relevant keywords. This is the key to appearing near the top of the search results, directly in front of your potential clients.

An SEO expert will know how to analyse the data, assess the search demand of different keywords and create pages that show up in Google to help you collect organic traffic. For instance, when someone is looking for solicitor services, they may use some of the following search queries:

• ‘Solicitor near me’.
• ‘Lawyer in…’ + location. For example, a Lawyer in North London.
• Lawyers specialising in specific areas of law. For example, divorce lawyers.
• Questions about lawyers, how to find an attorney and legal services.

Some people will search using the above phrases but may use synonyms, including solicitor, lawyer, attorney, or barrister. Even if these differ slightly from your services, an SEO expert will analyse the potential of these search terms and optimise your page to ensure the right clients are discovering your services.

The below data shows the average monthly search volume for some keywords related to attorneys, lawyers and legal services.

Some of these searches indicate that people are looking for specific types of legal services, including divorce lawyers, disability lawyers, and family lawyers. For instance, the above data from Google shows us that ‘lawyers near me’ has an average monthly search volume of 111 thousand. If your law firm ranks for thousands of keywords, your website can potentially reach millions of people.

Other Lawyers are Already Getting Results from SEO

When search engine optimisation is done properly, it boosts your website’s credibility, improves search result rankings and saves the website owner thousands of dollars in advertising each month. The following examples show you what’s possible when using law firm SEO for your site. We have reviewed current legal websites using law firm marketing strategies which already have a good return from their efforts.

Firstly, www.bestlawyers.com, a site that helps connect people with credible lawyers. The above Google data shows that Best Lawyers has an average of 127 thousand website visitors every month. This organic traffic indicates the number of people visiting the site after finding it in Google search results.

What’s more, they have an average monthly traffic value of $459,000; this is the amount the website owner would pay on advertising to buy the same amount of traffic they get from organic searches. However, this website has excellent positions in Google search results, meaning the website owner can save over $459,000 every month, which would otherwise be spent on paid marketing, like PPC ads.

The below image shows which pages attract the most traffic for this site specifically. In fact, having access to this type of data shows what pages your competitors are ranking for.

An SEO company will evaluate your and your competitors’ websites. They will assess where organic traffic is coming from, so they can optimise existing pages and create new ones on your website. A certified SEO consultant combines this data with keyword research to collect as much organic traffic as possible. 

The example above is from a larger legal website, so it’s realistic to see significant results. Next, we review a smaller law firm to understand how it benefits from investing in SEO for lawyers. The following example shows why SEO is still an excellent, cost-effective method for attracting clients to your legal services, no matter the size of your website.

Our next example is www.nationallegalservice.co.uk, a team of solicitors helping people navigate the challenges of family law and connecting them with suitable representatives. As you can see from the photo above, a smaller law firm can still see promising results using SEO. 

National Legal Service attracts an average of 8.8 thousand average monthly website visitors through organic Google searches and has an average traffic value of $16,200 every month.

National Legal Service ranks highly on Google for ‘common law partner’, ‘family solicitors’, ‘prohibited steps order’ and many more keywords that attract considerable traffic for this site. Interestingly, many of their high-performing pages also target general legal questions, like ‘what is a court order’. Looking at this data, an SEO expert may create new pages to target people looking for legal advice online. This company uses SEO for solicitors and covers various legal topics, attracting $16,200 worth of free Google traffic.

It’s important to understand that a site’s traffic value highlights the money one could save on PPC ads. In short, PPC ads allow website owners to buy traffic. However, when they stop paying for ads, they stop getting traffic. Comparably, SEO helps improve and sustain your search positions in Google, which boosts your website’s credibility and generates organic traffic even after you stop using SEO services. 

This data shows how many keywords you can target and, therefore, how many opportunities there are to generate free, organic traffic to your site. With the help of a qualified SEO agency to create, optimise and promote these pages, your website has the potential to generate free traffic and save you money on advertising.

Local SEO for Lawyers

Local SEO for attorneys is an excellent way to tap into your local client base, but more importantly, it’s essential if you provide in-person services. Law firms who use local SEO strategies will have their website shown to people searching for legal aid in their local area. Google My Business is a step in the right direction, but it isn’t enough to boost traffic to your website. Instead, targeting keywords such as ‘lawyers near me’ will help show your website to potential local clients as their search results will be tailored to their location.  

Getting local SEO to perform requires a lot of work, but it can bring in substantial amounts of organic traffic and improve search engine rankings when done right. 

What Does an SEO Company Do?

If you are a lawyer, solicitor or law firm, SEO is an excellent investment. However, it’s no secret that getting SEO right requires expertise, hard work and time to implement. There are many strands of law and various legal services available, which may impact your chances of getting seen on the first page of search results. 

Fortunately, our expert team at NUOPTIMA has worked with service providers, like yourselves, for years. With our collective experience and specialist SEO knowledge, we have helped various brands get on the first page of Google. We know how to tailor your site to implement SEO for lawyers and attract the right clients to your law firm. Here are just a few methods we use to improve the Google rankings for your website:

• Arrange links to be placed on reputable legal websites.
• Curate SEO-optimised content to help your website rank for more keywords in your niche.
• Evaluate and optimise existing pages to comply with Google’s regulations and best practices. 
• Create relevant pages to improve and increase the organic traffic your website collects. 

When an SEO specialist analyses, optimises and improves your site, search engine optimisation can provide outstanding results. Here at NUOPTIMA, our SEO team is well-versed in helping your website achieve exceptional results. Book a free discovery call to explore how SEO can achieve incredible results for your website and business.