There are some extraordinarily skilled lawyers out there who know how to paint veritable masterpieces in the courtroom. They might know how to convince a jury that someone is innocent when they are guilty, or vice versa. However, that same skilled lawyer might not necessarily know anything about SEO.
SEO, if you’ve never heard of it before, stands for search engine optimization. A search engine is an entity like Google or Bing that you use to find things online. Most people use search engines every day without thinking about it very much. They have become a necessary part of modern society.
Every law office needs a website since that’s where a potential client is likely to go if they want to hire this particular attorney or law practice. You need to optimize the website, meaning that it should have features that allow it to stay at the top of the SERPs, or search engine ranking positions.
Let’s talk about some of the best law office website optimization techniques. If you’re a lawyer and you’re attempting to get your site to rank higher, these strategies will help you do that.
Start A Website Blog
A blog is where you can write down all your thoughts about any issue or topic. Many people have their own websites and blogs, even if they don’t intend to monetize them. These blogs act sort of like live journals where the person relates to the public what they’re thinking and feeling.
A professional blog, like one that a law office or lawyer would have on their site, serves a different purpose. That blog should be about law-related topics. The reason why potential clients would read that blog is so they can understand that the lawyers at that firm are industry experts with valid things to say about topical legal issues.
Websites that have relevant blogs do better in the SERPs. Small businesses that feature blogs get 55% more traffic than those which do not, and that’s a huge difference.
Your law office is doing great SEO work if you start a blog and post there regularly. You can either write the blogs yourself, or if you don’t have time, you might hire someone who knows about the law and legal topics to write it for you.
Feature Videos
Human beings love visual content. If you hear about a product, that might not be enough to convince you to purchase it. If you see a picture or a video of that product, though, that may be what it takes to get you to buy it.
The same is true for law offices. If you can come up with some video ideas and shoot them professionally, you can then feature those videos on your site.
Doing so will get a potential client’s attention who visits your website for the first time. It’s one thing to have some interesting graphics or a logo on the site, but a video is much more compelling.
The real trick is figuring out what video topics pertain to a law office. You might brainstorm for a while and come up with some ideas, but there’s no denying that your site should rank higher if you feature interesting content like videos.
Feature Long-form Content
Long-form content means longer articles or opinion pieces. A 500-word blog entry would not be long-form, but a 4,000-word entry would be.
If you look objectively at search engine results and try to decode the Google algorithm and how it operates, you’ll see that sites do well when they feature long-form content. If you only have very brief articles or blogs on your site, those don’t do so well in getting the site to rank.
You can write long blog posts and feature them on your site. However, if those blog posts are rambling or nonsensical, that won’t help you.
You must come up with compelling topics about which to write. Think about topical legal matters, such as celebrity trials, for instance. Then, write long, fascinating blogs about them that should attract some attention to your site.
Hopefully, the individuals who read your long-form content will become convinced that you’re the legal entity to represent them. The initial part of that equation is getting them to spend time on your site in the first place, though, and the long-form content can be what gets them there.
Feature Images
We already mentioned that humans respond to visual stimulation as an advertising form. You might feel like you’re such a good lawyer that you don’t need to resort to gimmicks like videos or photos. Even if you’re the world’s greatest attorney, though, visual appeal can be what sets your website apart from your many competitors.
Just like coming up with video ideas, you’ll need to come up with picture ideas as well. If you have some dynamic shots of you or your fellow lawyers in the practice at work in the courtroom or striding up the courthouse steps, that will dress up the site considerably.
You might stage a photoshoot with all of your legal team in various settings. You may feel a little silly doing it, but this is advertising, and you need to do it for SEO purposes.
A legal website that has nothing but text blocks and no visual appeal is not going to hold anyone’s attention. Your legal reputation won’t matter if your site seems boring and dull, with no images of any kind.
These basic SEO techniques can make a remarkable difference if your site is not ending up where you want it on Google or other search engines. If you don’t think that search engine ranking position matters, think again.
Regardless of whether you’re a lawyer or you have any other kind of business entity, if your website doesn’t show up near the top of the search engine rankings, you won’t get as much traffic. Less traffic means fewer clients, and ultimately, that’s the pattern you have to break.
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