Measurable SEM for Personal Injury Law Firms

However, by having an SEO expert by your side, you can beat even some of your fiercest competitors. Read on to learn how can SEO for lawyers help your visitors into prospective legal clients. As a legal practitioner, you should focus on the following four areas of SEO – local keyword targeting, user experience optimization, inclusion in local directories of major data aggregators and siloing by practice areas. Let’s take a closer look at each of these crucial areas.

Target Local Keywords

If you have just started out, be aware that you have a lot of competition online. To get started in the right way, you need to do everything you can to establish your firm as a brand and market to your immediate location. However, keep in mind that when starting from scratch you should set your expectations accordingly. You can’t rank for major keywords right away. Instead, you should start slow and think in terms of years, if you want to rank for a highly competitive keyword.

The right way to start optimizing your personal injury law firm is to set your sight on local traffic. Once you have successfully targeted and draw traffic from the internet users in your city, you can start targeting for more competitive regions. Targeting broader audience and ranking for highly competitive keywords should be a part of your long-term plan. SEO is a process that requires continuous work, a lot of effort, and the ability to find and optimize for keywords that create clients. Measuring your performance each and every month and refining your strategy will help you grow month after month.

Once you have secured traffic to your legal website and started to rank better for searches in and around your location, you can bring your digital marketing strategy to the next level.

Establishing a Local Listing Within Your Community

As an attorney specializing in negligence, it is vital to secure your inclusion among local directories such as Google My Business, Bing Places for Business, Yahoo! Local Listings and Yelp for Business Owners. You also want to be included in aggregation websites that share your name, address, and phone number around the web. Getting including in the local indexes for industry related terms makes information retrieval easier, and Google’s technology will begin to see your firm in more databases and view web pages with more trust. The more trusted a site, the less chance of being impacted by Penguin or Panda penalties which are often triggered by abnormal linking strategies and sparse content on your site.

Another easy way to establish a local presence and capture relevant backlinks is through Web 2.0 properties.  There are thousands of websites you are able to use to share your content and information, and have a relevant backlink to your firm’s site.  Sites such as Weebly, WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, Overblog, Google Sites, and Behance help you to improve communication with your audience, leverage off-site web technology and interactive media such as videos and electronic publishing, will help establish an entity or “brand” for your firm. Google’s semantic web and the goal of human-machine interaction with artificial intelligence will change the way we look at media technology. Manic Metrics will help guide you on that journey.

By establishing a local listing, your law firm will start appearing on the results page and within Google Maps. Focus your SEO strategy on ranking in Google Maps for your immediate area, and then look to move into surrounding cities and suburbs. By getting into maps, you will gain a significant source of traffic and the citations you build will help your listing rank better. When it comes to Internet optimization for lawyers, your easiest win is securing inclusion in Google Places.

Silo by Practice Areas

To properly silo the page of your website according to practice areas, you should devote a lot of content to your practice area, in your case, all the different types of law pertaining to unintentional or accidental injuries.  Your website should have supporting pages for each and every area of law you provide services such as car accidents, medical malpractice, consumer injuries, slip and fall claims, neck injury, motorcycle, product liability, premise liability cases, and much more.  Even if you have other attorneys in the firm that focus on divorce, DUI, real-estate law, or patent law, you want to keep each silo related to the top-level page of that niche. If you provide legal services for one particular niche related to PI, then dedicate a web page to the detailed information about that niche.  There are many attorneys out there, and you need to stand out in every way you can if you want to reach the top.

People are looking for honest, hard-working attorneys that are able to deliver results. You want to separate yourself from the competition. Far too many attorneys attempt to handle divorce, civil law, DUI law, bankruptcy, and PI. Without a clear direction of your website Try connecting with your audience on a more personal level to build trust and share the knowledge you have with them. If you are honest and open for giving legal advice, people will appreciate it. So, don’t be afraid of giving a little bit more information and insight about your practice and experience. By siloing by practice areas and working on your content, you will significantly improve the experience of your users.

Improving the User Experience

Directing traffic to your site should not be the ultimate goal of your digital media strategy. Drawing traffic is merely a small achievement that will help you reach your end goal. The final goal of your SEO strategy and campaign is to convert your visitors into new clients. Have in mind that this won’t happen if your site is not original, unique, professional and informative. Instead of focusing on capturing traffic, you should now concentrate on capturing the people who are vetting you. A high-quality law firm website should include the following:

• Professional design
• Lawyer biography
• Mobile-friendly features
• Case studies and case results
• Testimonials and reviews
• An informative blog
• Press coverage

We have mentioned that around 88% of people search for a lawyer through the internet. Besides them, around 30% of people will be referred to your firm by word of mouth. Logically, after the referral, they will go and visit your website. If your site doesn’t provide the information people are looking for or if it is simply, less than high-quality, you risk of losing a lot of new clients. Make sure your site speaks to its visitors and convince them to choose your law firm.