As an attorney, you know the importance of getting more visitors to your website. One of the best ways to get unpaid visitors to go to your firm is by using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to create the best content possible. Unfortunately, not every law firm has the budget to hire a content marketer. If your firm has a website that’s not receiving as much traffic as you’d like, here are a few quick SEO tips you can use to make sure you direct as much traffic as possible to your website.
Tip #1: Update your site often
A site that’s updated frequently will be crawled often by Google. When Google crawls your site, it evaluates the content you’ve added and determines whether it’s valuable to web users. The more often you’re crawled, the better your odds of getting someone to visit you firm’s page.
If Google crawls your firm’s page and finds that no new content has been added, it will visit your site less frequently in the future. If you’re not sure how much content to add, a safe bet might be to incorporate around 3,000 words of fresh content every month. This could be three lengthy blog posts about the Social Security disability or personal injury application process, some additional pages about how to qualify for disability or VA benefits, or reasons why a claimant could should work with your firm.
Tip #2: Make sure your content is high quality
Although adding more content will help your site in Google’s search results, your firm won’t see any benefits if the content you add is “thin.” Thin content can mean that your content is either too short, or does not properly address a question a web visitor may have.
For example, if you write a page explaining the difference between SSDI and SSI, you would not want to briefly summarize the programs in a couple of sentences. Because the subject is complex, an exhaustive explanation of the two would be favorable to a one-paragraph summary. Most content you add should be over 500 words, but 800+ is a good goal to reach. Some exceptions to this rule include your “contact us” pages or other areas of your site that clearly do not warrant long text.
Tip #3: Find keywords relevant to your target audience
The phrase someone types in to a search engine like Yahoo or Google is called a keyword. If your content addresses the keywords a user searches, you will have a better chance of showing up on search engine results.
For example, if you’re a veterans’ disability attorney, you may want to use some of the following keywords in your content:
- apply for VA disability
- Veterans disability attorney
- VA attorney
- find veterans attorney
etc.
Keyword research is hard. You can visit competitor firms’ websites to see what keywords they use. Some software will suggest keywords you can target, but they typically require a monthly payment.
You can also simply search in Google for keywords you think may be on target and see how much volume the terms have. The higher the volume, the more potential your firm has for receiving web traffic. Keep in mind that higher volume also means it’s harder for your firm to show up in search results.
Tip #4: Utilize tools available for your firm
No marketing campaign is useful unless you can monitor your success. Fortunately, there are free tools you can use to track your success.
Google Analytics is the go-to tool for any search engine marketer. With Google Analytics, you can see how much your organic traffic has increased, which search engines your visitors are using, and which pages seem to receive the most traffic. With this knowledge, you can pinpoint a direction to focus on in the future. Google Webmaster Tools is another important free software: With Webmaster Tools, you can monitor your sites to see if your firm ever receives a penalty, which is a manual action Google takes against your site to remove it from search engine results for violating its guidelines. You could receive a penalty if you consistently upload a bunch of thin and useless content, stuffed with too many keywords to try to target potential claimants.
SEO is challenging, and your efforts may take a year or more to yield any fruit. Fortunately, you can supplement your marketing efforts with legal lead generation. If you wish to take on more cases while you build your own SEO campaigns, feel free to give us a call today at 617.800.0089. We’d love to help your firm increase its caseload.