SEO For Legal Professionals

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What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization is the practice of optimizing your website and other online presences to improve your visibility in search engine results. Brands want their websites to rank near the top of search results for specific keywords — the higher you rank for keywords, the more organic website traffic you will get.

Why SEO Matters for Legal Professionals

Effective SEO is essential because:

68% of all trackable website visitors come from natural search (1)
75% of searches stop on the first page of results (2)
78% of clicks go to the top five search results on the first page (3)
The top result on Google gets 13X as many clicks as the tenth result (4)

What Drives Your Search Rank?

Many factors help determine how high your website appears in search results. These factors include:

The quality and depth of your content on the topic
The speed that your pages load
How much website traffic you receive
How many sites have content related to the topic
The number of sites linking to your content (link building)
How recently you posted/updated the content

Search engines like Google also favor websites that appear attractive and functional on mobile screens and have well-designed pages and sitemaps. Their goal is to make sure their users are having a site good experience, so the more mobile and user friendly your site is, the more Google will reward you with higher rankings.

Google and other search engines have very sophisticated technology to identify the best content on a particular topic. Many of the “tricks” that site developers used to leverage to drive higher site ranking are no longer effective. Some actually hurt your rank now! Google will aim to ensure that relevant and meaningful content for legal decision-makers exists on the pages they favor in their search results.

SEO Essentials For Massachusetts Legal Professionals

You want to rank highly on terms that will help you attract business opportunities. Sometimes those will be very popular terms, but those often are appealing to many businesses, which can make it harder to rank highly. Sometimes it is more beneficial to focus on specific “niche” terms that appeal specifically to your target audience. Keyword research will be essential here in determining the right mix of keywords.

Remember that you want to attract legal professionals, not necessarily everyone. Pinpoint the terms that will matter more specifically to legal decision-makers so you can focus your optimization efforts on the best opportunities.

How To Develop an SEO Plan

First, identify the best words for your effort. Find an SEO services expert who knows the legal industry. An SEO company is one approach to take; another is to work with a leading legal company like Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly. Once your legal expert has identified the right SEO keywords, you can work together to build a comprehensive on-site and content strategy that will result in high ranking for multiple keywords relevant to your business.

Note that writing quality content that indexes well is both science and art. SEO efforts can’t drive results overnight. Google and other search engines track billions of web pages, and changes in your rank will happen over weeks and months. There are many software tools to help you track your rank.

Get in Touch

At Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, our mission is to help companies and legal professionals do more business and grow the industry. If you’d like more ideas and insights on making SEO work for your business, get in touch with one of our legal marketing experts by filling out the form below.

(1) SearchEngineLand, 2019

(2) MOZ, 2019

(3) SmartInsights 2022

(4) SmartInsights 2023