Search engine optimization (SEO) is a law firm marketing necessity that barely existed twenty-five years ago, and now it’s one of the primary marketing elements for many successful online businesses. Being aggressive enough to reach the top while also being conservative with new trends so as not to be negatively affected by new algorithm updates from search engines like Google is a delicate balancing act, especially for your average law firm owner.
That’s why it’s ideal to join a MasterMind program like the one Brain Trust Legal runs. The diversity of opinion and strategy from attorneys across the United States provides you a unique look into what is working in multiple different geographic areas and firm sizes. Learning what to do is as valuable as what you should do, and the MasterMind encourages candid sharing that will get you those valuable insights. Read on for just a few of the many insights about SEO that you can get from the BTL MasterMind program.
When it comes to SEO ranking, there are many factors that Google takes into account when deciding what pages to recommend at what level. In fact, there are over 200 of them in total. However, time and testing have shown that there are three factors that have the most influence on where your website ranks. Let’s break down each one and discuss what that means for your website.
Location is a key factor in how Google ranks the likelihood of recommending your law firm. After all, they wouldn’t recommend a North Carolina firm to a California client, so it makes sense to have detailed geographic factors in place. However, this can affect your ability to compete with other attorneys on a local level as well.
If you and another attorney are closely ranked in all other ways, but the other attorney is geographically closer to the user than you are, they are more likely to be recommended higher than you. That means there are two solutions to that: be ranked higher than them in other important ranking factors, or be closer to the client. The first solution is self-explanatory, but the second one needs explaining; by opening satellite offices in other areas, you can expand your firm’s presence on Google and make it more likely to capture potential clients from areas further away from your law firm’s main office.
Relevance is another key factor in how effectively you rank on Google and other search engines. Relevance is about how clearly your business can address the issues that the user is asking for help solving. For instance, if a user asked for Italian food, a Chinese restaurant shouldn’t show up in a search even though they do have food; Google wants relevance as high and accurate as possible.
That’s why the keywords and content on your website need to be highly targeted and focused on your ideal clients. If you are a personal injury attorney who primarily does slip and fall or dog bite cases, you don’t want to try ranking for just ‘personal injury attorney’ keywords; you will get many potential clients who have been in car accidents asking for your help. So make sure that all the content on your website clearly and directly targets the types of clients and cases you want, and your relevance will be more impactful.
Authority is one of the most important but also most nebulous of ranking factors. When Google uses the word authority, what they are describing is a site which they consider to be trustworthy, with good traffic, and connected in some way to other reputable websites. In other words, Google wants to trust that if they send someone to your website for the answer to a question, they can trust that you are equipped to answer it knowledgeably and thoroughly.
To gain authority as a website, the first thing you can do is make sure to create genuinely helpful and thorough content on your website. The second thing you can do is to create a backlink strategy where your site connects to other reputable websites, thereby raising the authority of yours by association. When your website’s authority is high, Google will recommend your site more. That’s when the traffic starts to rise, and then you have the trifecta of elements that make your authority powerful and preferable to Google.
Getting a great ranking on Google and other search engines isn’t just about making sure you do all the right things. You also want to make sure you’re avoiding the wrong things. You don’t want to put all that effort into creating a great website, only to have something derail it all. There are three things you absolutely want to avoid while you’re working to build up a great SEO ranking.
You have to be VERY careful not to have the exact same or very similar content on multiple pages on your website. It may not seem like a big deal to you: what difference does it make if a potential client sees similar content on more than one page, they won’t even notice, right? But it’s not the potential client that’s looking closely, it’s Google.
Google considers duplicate content a strike because it shows that you haven’t put effort into creating original content for all your pages. To them, it means that you’re trying to create lots of content to get ranked, but you’re not making it good content. That means the pages with duplicate content will be a strike against you. The same goes for content that has been duplicated from other places on
Google’s entire reputation is built around recommending websites that do a great job of answering the query that their users present to them. That’s why Google prefers websites that provide high-quality content that will help their users. So you definitely want to avoid low-quality content.
What does that mean, exactly? There’s a few simple things to avoid. Don’t create pages that are less than 500 words, Google sees that as not enough content provided on a page. Don’t create pages that are sales-driven only and don’t provide any valuable or helpful information. Don’t create pages that don’t have any H1 or H2 headers (these are the headings and sub-headings for each section of the page). Don’t create content that repeats itself or is clearly padded to reach a word count. By avoiding things like this in your content, you will avoid the wrath of search engine punishment.
Keyword stuffing is a tactic that was used years ago by SEO experts who wanted pages to rank. They would create chunks of written content designed only to plug in as many keywords as possible, in the hope that the sheer number of mentions would cause the page to rank higher. For a time, it worked.
However, Google’s algorithms have become more sophisticated and intelligent, and they have learned what that looks like now. So when it finds a page that is clearly just throwing all the possible keywords out without providing good content elsewhere on the page, they are trained to rate that page lower, not higher. That’s why you don’t want to get caught trying to game the system using that old tactic.
You don’t have to know everything about SEO to choose the right SEO vendor, you just need to know a few key things that will tell you if you’ve found the right partner:
These are all fairly self-explanatory. Your vendor needs to have extensive knowledge of SEO best practices, and they should also know about the latest algorithm changes Google put into effect and how they changed website rankings. They should be flexible and able to move quickly to make changes and updates you want on your site. Most importantly, they need to openly share all information with you. You should be able to access everything for your account, see site performance stats whenever you want, and always be able to have an open and candid conversation about site performance.
There is no doubt that a solid SEO strategy is one of the central pieces of a successful and growing law firm, but that reality doesn’t come without its challenges. That’s why the Brain Trust Legal MasterMind program is an ideal place for law firms to strengthen and improve their SEO game.
From backlink strategies to vendor contacts to unique ways of creating consistent high-quality content, every SEO topic is explored in depth and candor by successful attorneys from all over the United States. And SEO is just one of the dozens of topics the MasterMind program covers in their monthly meetings and twice-yearly in-person events. To learn more about Brain Trust Legal MasterMind program opportunities, visit the page here on our website, or you can call (855)743-1636 to speak with a member of the BTL team.
