How To Avoid The Top 10 Business Limiting SEO Mistakes Made By Law Firms

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INTRODUCTION

Google’s engineers have said there are at least 200 ‘ranking signals’ which affect whether you can rank above your competitors or not. To make Search Engine Optimization (SEO) even more challenging, many of them change frequently in Google’s algorithm updates. So, it can be really tough knowing what matters in SEO and what doesn’t. To help give you focus, in this guide we will show you really common mistakes that we have seen again and again with our Law Firm clients. 

We do not believe SEO is just for SEO Specialists, but rather, we also believe your internal marketing and support staff should understand the main factors so they can ask the tough questions to whichever SEO Specialist or Digital Marketing Agency that currently manages your Law Firm’s website and digital properties. We hope this guide provides you the tools to have those conversations.

We believe that understanding the search terms your audience is using to search for your Law Firm’s services in Google is FAR too important to be overlooked. We have seen many cases where target keyword lists are incomplete and categorized around real world consumer search behaviour. For example, one client we were working with recently on an SEO project had just 10 keywords they were reporting on. Yet, there are many, many different types of potential search terms, they simply weren’t targeting the terms their competitors were – so they were missing out on website visits and sales. 

Marketing teams should have a solid understanding of the keywords and search terms used by their prospects, based around a gap analysis – a quantitative estimate of consumer search behaviours. This data can be used to inform keyword strategy and guide content development to ensure that the content being produced is relevant to the target audience. 

The Smart Insights RACE Planning Framework

This can be used to simplify and articulate measurement and reporting considering the key online marketing activities that need to be managed as part of a digital marketing strategy: As can be seen in the graphic below, RACE looks at metrics at each stage of the purchase funnel.

RACE is a useful way of thinking about your goals and measuring effectiveness for SEO since although it drives Visitor volume in the Reach phase, we also need to think about the Quality and Value of visits generated:

1. Reach – Building brand awareness & maximizing reach 

2. Act – Encouraging interactions to generate leads 

3. Convert – Conversion to sale 

4. Engage – Developing long-term relationships to build customer loyalty and referrals.

The features displayed on search engine results pages (SERPs) have changed dramatically over the last few years. 

Features such as the Knowledge Graph, Quick Answers, Featured snippets and reviews mean that Law Firms must know how to create the right types of content that search engines are looking to crawl, index and feature in their search results today. 

A good awareness of the SERPs will help you to identify new content opportunities and what’s required in order to build visibility within organic search. 

Although some of these options will be technical, it’s always better to at least have an understanding of the opportunities so that you can start a conversation with an SEO Specialist, Agency or Freelance Developer as to how to exploit these new opportunities.

Despite the hundreds of different ranking factors Google uses to determine what is and isn't featured within the SERPs, success is ultimately based on a handful of key on-site and off-site factors. It's important for teams to include content owner and editors who have a detailed working knowledge and understanding of the 'rules of SEO and how they influence performance. 

On-site ranking factors include having accurate page titles, headings and copy linking out to other websites, as well as the identification and removal of duplicate content. Off-site factors include earning links from other relevant, quality sites in order to build your own website's 'authority' around the subject you want to be known for.

This rating of ranking factors by experts how how important links from other sites still are in gaining visibility, with on-page factors just behind. So it's important to look at techniques for how content and outreach will attract natural organic links as part of your content marketing strategy. It's also important you know the difference between a good quality link and a bad quality link.

While advanced technical knowledge is not often realistic unless your marketing team has a dedicated SEO resource, it’s still important to have an understanding of how search engines crawl and categorize a website’s content.

Google provides the Google Search Console (GC, formerly Google Webmaster Tools) as a tool to help Law Firms minimize technical errors. While agencies should be responsible for this, in our experience, technical SEO is too important to rely on blindly on agencies or SEO Specialists. Instead, you should trust an agency who performs the necessary research and audits on your Law Firm’s website, in order to develop the best SEO Strategy to fully optimize your website for conversions, from a Technical SEO perspective.

The quality, rather than quantity, of content on your site is a major driver of success in SEO. While the on-page markup of content is important (e.g pages titles, meta descriptions, headings, etc.), the quality of the content itself and its potential to be ready, shared and linked to is what is really crucial in order to stand-out versus competitors. 

Gaining quality backlinks from other relevant sites remains the number one ranking factor for SEO success. There is no shortcut to success, and if you want to compete effectively with competitors in your local sector or niche, quality content is king.

Rand Fishkin of Moz talks about the shift from link building to link earning because gone are the days when links to websites could be easily acquired. If your Law Firm website does not include content worth linking to, you have to find a way to earn links in the right way. 

An effective outreach program should work collaboratively with PR, marketing, sales and SEO to create and promote content that adds genuine value for users in exchange for relevant links that will help create what’s referred to as a natural inbound link profile.

Key Techniques For Link-Building

These are the related techniques which we recommend as important for managing Link-Building effectively.

• Article Marketing
• Blended or Universal Search
• Directory Marketing
• Index Inclusion
• Internal Linking Strategy
• Local SEO
• Mobile SEO
• Multilingual SEO
• On-Page SEO
• SEO Content Strategy
• SEO Strategy

While many Legal Marketers are aware of external link-building, they often neglect to implement effective internal linking between or within their sites. 

Internal linking is a ranking factor that is within our control as content creators and is useful from an SEO and user experience perspective as it enables users to easily and efficiently navigate their way around a website.

The quality of our content and the editorial calendar to keep it fresh should be at the heart of making SEO competitive so that your Law Firm website attracts links and engages the right audiences to share the content.

As search engines have advanced, so has SEO as a discipline, and the tactics and strategies required to achieve success. 

Content marketing at its best is about creating content that specially targets searches, is part of an ongoing editorial calendar, takes into account a range of rich content formats, and integrates with PR, social media and influencer outreach, so not to operate in a silo. 

SEO is such a fast-moving area it’s not surprising that Law Firms with limited SEO resources struggle to keep up with the latest trends and changes. Since 2010 there have been over one hundred Google algorithm updates and in 2013 alone there were seventeen, all with various degrees of importance, just imagine how many more updates we’ve had since then. 

Law Firms should have a proper digital marketing agency that would put in place a simple structure or system for monitoring the trends and changes that will be most useful and relevant to them. While there are hundreds of specialist forums and logs, it’s advisable to start with the resources that cover all the main developments.

CONCLUSION

We hope you enjoyed this FREE Guide "How To Avoid The Top 10 Search Engine Optimization Mistakes Made By Law Firms", and that it has provided you with great tools, tips and strategies that you can begin applying to your Law Firm today!

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Thanks For Taking The Time To Go Through Our FREE Digital Marketing Guide

Thank you for going through our FREE Digital Marketing Guide. We hope that it has provided you with helpful information nuggets that you can behind applying to your Law Firm right away. 

I hope you and your colleagues will continue to remain safe and healthy during this COVID 19 Pandemic. 

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