You know you offer great legal services for your clients and that your expertise can have a profound impact on alleviating their struggles. You are ready to help people solve their legal problems. You just need the right people to be able to find you.
As a law firm, online marketing can have a huge impact on growing your case volume and sending targeted visitors to your website. Today, any type of business is severely missing out on profits if they don’t have an online marketing strategy implemented. Online marketing can not only direct targeted traffic to your law firm’s website, but it can also position you as an authority and build trust.
Here are five ways you can rank higher in Google organic search by creating a well-rounded strategy and online presence for your law firm:
- Using Targeted Keywords
- Creating Quality Videos
- Writing Blog Posts
- Social Media Sharing
- Implementing On-Page SEO
This 5 part strategy will build your business a natural link profile through content creation and organic sharing.
Using Targeted Keywords
The first step in ranking your law firm higher in Google rankings is to select specific keywords to target for your online marketing. All of your campaign efforts will revolve around the keywords you select, so it’s important to take this step seriously.
Your keyword research, which can be done with the Google Keyword Planner, will give you firsthand information about your target audience and the information they are searching for online. You can gain valuable insights into your audience with keyword research.
If you want people looking for a criminal defense attorney in your market to discover you, then you can target the specific keywords they search. For example, you might want to target something like “Atlanta criminal defense lawyer” for one of your main keyword search terms. If you rank for this search term in Google, then you will attract more relevant visitors in Atlanta who are looking for a criminal defense lawyer.
With keyword research, you can also discover specific legal problems that people are facing or questions they might have that they may want to ask a lawyer about. If you rank well for these keyword searches, it’s easier for potential clients to find you online.
Before moving on to implementing the next steps in our 5 part strategy, do some keyword research for your market first. Look for relevant keywords that have a decent amount of monthly search volume and low competition when possible.
Creating Quality Videos
“By 2017, online video will account for 74% of all online traffic.” – Insivia
Video is a very powerful way to present your law firm, build authority, and educate your target audience. It also converts much higher than written text and images alone. All of these things eventually lead to higher conversions and more cases for your firm. Learn how to use video to multiply your marketing ROI and bring in quality cases.
Another great thing about online video is that Google favors video when ranking content. By properly uploading and posting your videos, you can more easily gain top rankings and get higher click-through rates.
Once you’ve created a new video you should always upload it to Youtube. You need to make sure that you are implementing your targeted keywords in the video titles, tags, and descriptions. This will ensure that your video gets ranked in Google for the associated search terms.
Another search ranking tip is to include a link to your website in your Youtube video description. This link building technique will build authority to that linked page and help it rank higher in the search engines.
Writing Blog Posts
Writing blog posts is not only a great way to tell a story or present a case study to prospective clients, but it’s also a great way to repurpose and share your video content. Embedding video into your blog posts will help boost the rankings for your video and the blog post that it’s embedded into.
Whenever you embed a video into a blog post you should use Schema Markup instead of the default embed code provided by Youtube. By using Schema embed code, this allows your video’s thumbnail to appear in Google search results which will significantly increase click-through rates to your page.
Always optimize for search rankings by including your targeted keyword phrase in the title and meta description of your blog post. Just as with videos, Google will recognize your keywords and know to present your blog articles to that specific audience.
Social Media Sharing
Social media can be an excellent way to give your online videos and blog posts a positive boost in rankings. By sharing your content on social media sites you can increase online exposure and create buzz around your law firm. There are many social media sites that you can participate on, but one of the most beneficial ones for law firms to share their content on is Facebook.
One of the best features of Facebook for online video marketing is that you can natively (directly) upload your videos. A natively uploaded video will automatically play in a Facebook user’s newsfeed, which significantly increases engagement. If you just post a Youtube link to facebook, it will only display a thumbnail for users.
Facebook can help your law firm’s marketing efforts in other ways, too, by using their paid Facebook Ads services. If you want your videos and articles to get more shares than they do organically, then you can boost posts with Facebook ads.
Implementing On-Page SEO
On-page SEO (search engine optimization) factors are aspects of your website that influence Google search rankings. There are many on-page SEO factors that you can implement to help rank your website. Key factors include:
- Put your keyword in the title tag – It’s best to put your keyword as close to the beginning of your post’s title tag as possible. Google gives it more weight the closer it is to the beginning.
- Use SEO-optimized URLs – Avoid using any ugly default URLs (i.e., www.yourlawfirm.com/blog/128xQdV37s3R736. Instead use short, keyword-rich URLs for better rankings on your keywords (e.g., www.yourlawfirm.com/blog/atlanta-criminal-defense-lawyer).
- Include an <h1> tag around your title – This is your headline tag and should always be wrapped around your post title.
- Include your target keyword somewhere within the first 100 words of your blog post or article.
- Include external links to other relevant web pages to help Google figure out your article topic.
- Include a few internal links to other pages on your website.
- Optimize your images – Include your target keyword in the filename of your image and in the image ALT text.
There are many different strategies that can be used to increase your Google rankings and it can be overwhelming when you’re first trying to figure it all out. But by implementing this simple 5 step online marketing strategy you can successfully increase your law firm’s online presence and Google rankings. This will result in targeted online traffic being directed to you so that your law firm can gain more cases.
