Local SEO for Lawyers: Best Ranking Strategies

Ranking a law firm on Google but also on other search engines, such as Bing and Yahoo, is highly competitive nowadays. Since the legal sector is highly competitive, small and mid-sized law firms suffer from getting very little chance of ranking on the search engine result pages (SERPs). 

Even though the second page of Google doesn’t exist anymore, you will likely end up above tenth place on the SERPs, which is no bueno and won’t bring you any leads for your law firm practice. That’s why understanding and learning more about local search engine optimization (SEO) is so crucial for law firm businesses. It isn’t just about gathering free traffic from search engines. 

It is more about ensuring you target proper local keywords to gather leads for your business. In fact, it’s more than that, and that’s why I will dive deep into the best local SEO tactics and strategies right after we explain what local SEO is and whether you should do it on your own or hire an agency instead.

What Is Local Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Lawyers?

Local search engine optimization (SEO) for lawyers is a practice that includes targeting a specific geographic area with the goal of ranking your law firm service higher on the search engine results page. 

While traditional SEO, especially SEO related to blogs and niche websites covering a very specific topic, includes ranking for more general terms that aren’t tied to a specific geographical location, local SEO aims to rank you higher only in certain geographical places. 

So, local SEO for lawyers usually includes tactics such as using location-based keywords to reach potential clients nearby and successfully gather leads for your business. However, you should also ensure consistency across different online platforms. This is often referred to as NAP, or your name, address, and phone number, which must be practically the same wherever your law firm is mentioned online. 

This is because Google tends to verify your location from multiple sources, and that’s why you must ensure your directories, entire website, and all your social media profiles have accurate NAP information. 

The goal of a well-rounded local SEO strategy for lawyers is to appear higher in search engine result pages for specific terms that are tied to, again, specific geographic areas. This is the only way you can successfully gather leads for your law firm service through local SEO efforts. There is more than just writing targeted content and ensuring consistent information across various online platforms, but we will focus more on that later in the article.

Should You Invest Your Time in Law Firm SEO?

Most people nowadays who are in need of legal services try to find solutions by searching for lawyers online. However, if you aren’t in the so-called “Google’s local pack,” which are the first three results, it is very unlikely you can stay competitive and gather leads for your business. Most of the law firm clients get in touch with a law firm within one day of discovering their legal business online on Google. 

However, that requires a lot of work and proper optimization of your Google Business Profile (GBP), which we will cover later. You must understand that people use very few but extremely specific searches to find your law firm business online. And if your website and GBP aren’t optimized for the same phrases, your competition will gather all the leads. 

Essentially, you are competing with all other law firms in your area when a user is searching for a lawyer in <your location>, meaning it isn’t just important to include those terms on your website but also to make your content stand out more, be more persuasive, while also ensuring your build a steady flow of backlinks that will help you rank easier on local search results. 

In a sense, if you want to be discovered in the Google SERP local pack, online business directories, and Google Maps, you must invest in quality local SEO services.

DIY Local SEO for Law Firms vs. Outsourcing to an SEO Agency

While DIY local SEO is doable and can be learned over time, outsourcing everything to an SEO agency is ten times easier and more effective if you manage to hire a good one. Don’t get me wrong, but learning about SEO is hard, and implementing what you learned and seeing results from your implementation is even harder. 

Most SEOs have a dozen failed projects and ranking attempts behind them before they manage to get traction from Google. But that’s how it is supposed to be because if SEO was easy, everybody would do it and rank higher on SERPs. My general advice is to leave SEO to people who do SEO every day. 

You don’t need to hire an entire agency to help you. Hiring an experienced SEO freelancer or even building an in-house team also works fine. It all boils down to picking a team or a person with a proven track record of local SEO success, preferably someone who was already in the law firm niche. 

15 Best Local SEO Tactics and Strategies to Rank Your Law Firm

Here are the best local SEO strategies and tactics that can help you rank higher on SERPs for your law firm services. You can use this list of tactics for both DIY approaches or as a reference to know what you can expect from experienced SEO professionals to work on when you hire them to rank your services higher on Google. 

Even better, you can gauge how knowledgeable these SEO professionals are by simply asking them what strategies they plan to implement and then ticking, preferably, all the boxes from the list below.

1 – Ensure Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T)

To rank high on Google, it is mandatory to ensure something called proper E-E-A-T. E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. The primary idea behind E-E-A-T is that Google only wants to serve users with reliable and relevant results. 

This is especially important for your law firm businesses since law falls under the Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) niche. This simply means that poor and inaccurate content can hurt users in real-time, which is why Google has some specific guidelines you must follow for those YMYL niches. 

To demonstrate proper E-E-A-T for your law firm business, you can do the following:

• Create an “Achievements” page that features different awards, case studies, and accolades.
• Provide detailed information about your attorneys so people know who they are hiring and whether they are competitive enough.
• Make sure to include contact details, photos, and qualifications of each attorney.
• Build backlinks across the web with the aim of building a positive reputation for your business.

2 – Incorporate Legal Directories Into Local SEO Strategies for Lawyers

Local directories are extremely useful for boosting your visibility online because they include specific information such as your law firm or a particular lawyer, badges, best practices, and, most importantly, qualifications. 

Local directories are a mandatory local SEO tactic that can help your law firm’s local SEO campaign be more effective by getting in front of more potential clients searching for specific legal services in your area. Another useful feature of local directories is that your past clients can leave reviews on them. 

Also, fellow lawyers are encouraged to leave peer reviews. You can leverage various online directories, some of which include Avvom Justia, FindLaw, and others. 

Here are a couple of considerations to keep in mind when listing your law firm business in legal and local directories:

• Accurately claim your listing and complete all the necessary business information.
• Add videos, photos, and other similar content that enables your clients to get a full picture of your services.

For instance, if your law firm is located in Texas and you’re looking to enhance your online visibility, consider working with a renowned SEO company in Sugar Land, TX. Partnering with local SEO experts can significantly boost your online presence in specific regions. Learn more about tailored SEO strategies at SEO Company in Sugar Land, TX.

3 – Improve Your Local SEO Efforts by Building Local Citations

Local citations are online mentions of your full business name, phone number, and address. This is also called the NAP, or name, address, and phone number. You must keep this essential information more or less the same across all the different places where your business is mentioned online. 

Local citations are extremely important because they include a link to your attorney’s website. This is what’s called a backlink, a link from another website to your website, and these are very important and among the top Google ranking factors, even though they keep denying it time and time again. 

A local citation will also help your future clients find your business easier when they go and search on Google:

• <City name + your law firm listing>
• <City name + your law firm>
• <City name + your legal directory>
• <State name + your directory>
• <State name + your law firm listings>
• <State name + chamber of commerce>

Additionally, for law firms specializing in mass torts in Florida, having consistent and accurate local citations can direct potential clients to your firm effectively. For a practical example of how a Mass Tort Attorney in Hallandale Beach, FL, leverages local SEO, visit Mass Tort Attorney in Hallandale Beach, FL. This showcases the importance of specialized local SEO in reaching the right demographic.

4 – Include Quality Backlink Campaigns

As defined earlier, backlinks are simply links from other places on the web that point back to your website. They have a substantial effect on search engine rankings, but not all the links are the same in terms of leverage. 

However, you should only know the following: The more quality backlinks your law firm business website has, the more authoritative it is perceived to be and will drive more traffic if not penalized due to some shady link-building tactics. 

Start by getting your legal practice listed on reputable online directories. Some of these include:

• Avvo
• Best Law Firms
• Justia

Also, you should pursue the unlinked brand mentions. You must find instances where your business is mentioned online without being linked back to your website. This is an excellent opportunity to get a contextual and highly relevant backlink to your website. 

Contact owners of those online places where your brand is mentioned without a link and ask them to link back to your website. You can also try to use online platforms such as Connectively, where you can respond to journalists’ requests for legal commentary and gain a backlink if chosen. 

The art of backlinking is an entire world in and of itself, and it exceeds the needs of this blog post, but the essentials are covered above.

5 – Ensure Credibility With Online Reviews and Local Search

Online reviews are excellent for building social proof. However, they are also good for helping you attract potential clients, and they represent a major ranking factor for your law firm. Why? Simply because most of your potential clients are first going to read reviews of your service to gauge how useful it is for them to hire your law firm. 

You must know that Google thoroughly considers most of the reviews, especially the positive ones, when ranking different law firms on the search engine results page. What does this mean for your business? 

The more positive reviews you have for your service, the more likely you will show up higher on a search engine result phase, assuming you didn’t fake those reviews, which Google can spot easily nowadays. 

Also, those reviews containing your target keywords and important locations will likely improve your rankings even more. They automatically appear in reviews, meaning a lawyer doesn’t need to ask his clients to add them to the original review manually.

6 – Build Local Landing Pages to Target Your Clients

If you want to offer your law firm service in multiple locations, it is wise to create separate landing pages for each geographic place you represent. This means finding the law-related keyword + geographic place you represent for all of those landing pages. 

Let’s assume you are primarily based in Chicago but also take clients in Evanston, Oak Park, Geneva, and Park Ridge. In that instance, you should create separate landing pages targeting specific keywords and phrases tied to each of those communities. Why? This simply allows Google to understand that you are local to all these different places. 

This tactic can dramatically improve your attorney’s local SEO efforts when people specifically search for those communities. Also, Google will perceive you as a more authoritative and established source since you offer services for all these different communities, boosting your overall authority and online presence for specific keywords. 

7 – Perform Keyword Research

Be aware that if you fail the keyword research phase of building your law firm business presence online, everything else isn’t important. Keyword research is a “simple” process of finding specific phrases your target audience enters when searching for something specific, such as a law firm service, on Google. 

By finding the right keyword opportunities, you can rank easier on Google and target specifically potential clients and not random Google surfers. This is why regular SEO and local SEO differ in a way. We aren’t trying just to build topical authority, but we are trying to find keyword opportunities that won’t just bring organic traffic but also potential leads for our business.

8 – Build Your Topical Map

While keyword research is important, it’s also important how you structure your website to cover specific topics your visitors and potential clients might be interested in. The goal is to create the most comprehensive resource on the web for your target audience. 

In the context of building a topical map for an online law firm business, this will include covering a wide array of law SEO topics while also targeting those specific location keywords where you convert leads into clients. 

Building a topical map is a complex process, but the proper one can definitely boost your online presence and allow you to convert your leads into customers much more easily since they will trust you more and perceive you as an authority in the field.

9 – Optimize Your Content With the Best SEO Practices

Optimizing your content with the best SEO practices requires a thorough understanding of On-Page SEO. There is a specific way you should write your SEO content so you have the best opportunity to both rank high on search engine results pages and satisfy users simultaneously. 

You must first perform proper keyword research and write the best possible web resource for the topic you are trying to cover. Here are some of the best SEO practices to follow when writing an SEO-optimized article:

• Include the primary keyword in the Title Tag, H1, URL Slug, meta description, the first paragraph of the article, and first H2.
• Search for your primary keyword on the SERP and identify what the top results cover. Don’t solely copy them. Instead, use them as a reference to guide your writing about the topics you should cover in your article.
• Structure your headings properly by including only a single H1 in your article and multiple H2, H3, and H4 if necessary.
• Include images, videos, links, and other useful resources throughout your article to make it more comprehensive.

A well-optimized SEO article aims to fully satisfy searchers’ intent, leaving them without questions or, ideally, not allowing them to go back to Google and open other web pages since yours failed to deliver what they searched for. 

These are just some basic On-Page SEO practices, but they should be enough to write a decent article with a chance of ranking, assuming you nail the search intent properly. 

10 – Maintain Your Google Business Profile (Gbp)

You should have a well-optimized and maintained Google Business Profile (GBP), assuming your legal practice caters to local clients. A well-optimized GBP can dramatically help you rank higher in the local pack, which is primarily the Google map section that appears when you search for services or products in the desired area. 

You should also know that your law firm business profile may also appear in some other contexts, such as when people explicitly search for your brand name on Google. This is why your GBP must make a good impression on your potential clients while also providing all the necessary information your clients may need to get in contact with you or similar. 

Here is what to do to optimize your GBP:

• Sign into Google Business Profile and enter your business name.
• Follow the steps to claim your business address and verify its location.
• Make sure to complete your profile with accurate information only.
• Keep the profile regularly updated so clients always get the right information.
• Ensure that you respond to your Google reviews as often as you can.
• Try generating more reviews by sending review request emails to your clients.
• Publish updates containing visual and text content to your Google Business Profile with Google posts.

11 – Make Sure to Participate in Local Events

Participating in local events can provide a unique supportive structure for your community and even give you a chance to network with other local businesses. The goal is to get your name out there more effectively. 

You can choose to participate in local events in various ways. Some of those include exhibiting at a trade show, sponsoring an event, or even hosting an entire workshop. Just make sure you are prepared, regardless of the type of event you choose to pursue. Make sure your material for law firm local SEO is ready. 

These include some basic law firm marketing materials such as business cards and flyers. Also, make sure you have a professional and even eye-catching display if you are exhibiting at a trade show. 

12 – Leverage Google’s Screened Results

Maybe you think that local SEO for lawyers and law businesses is similar to optimizing local SEO for just about any other business. In fact, you are completely right. However, one thing that sets local SEO for law firms apart from local SEO for other types of businesses is Google screened results. 

These represent a way for Google to make sure it provides direct results and reviews for attorneys by bypassing other services such as Justia and Avvo. In my experience, screened results are one of the most important tools for ranking higher and increasing your conversions and trustworthiness in a local SEO campaign for law firms. 

You should also know that you can still appear in organic results when searches click on “more lawyers” under the first screened results, opening a unique search vertical for your business, even though you don’t pay for Google advertising services.

13 – Incorporate Schema Markup to Improve Your Local SEO Efforts

Adding a proper schema markup can indeed boost your local presence. Essentially, schema markup is a code that helps search engines like Google better understand and categorize the content on your website. You can use Schema.org to help search engines better understand your website content. 

The most important type of schema markup you should be aware of is the LegalService schema type, which includes location-specific data, such as your address and hour, boosting the overall visibility in separate map results and even improving the accuracy of your search listing. This markup is essential for just about any serious law firm website since it gives your website priority in local search, further increasing prominence. 

Just add the markup code to the HTML code of your law firm website, and you are good to go. Also, to add schema markup effectively to your website, use Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper for code generation. After that, you can proceed with validating your implementation with the structured data testing tool.

14 – Fix Technical SEO Errors

Technical SEO errors can hurt your overall website’s performance and rankings. They usually result in a poor user experience, something Google highly prioritizes more than ever before. 

The type of technical SEO issues I am talking about include:

• Broken links
• Duplicate content
• Slow page speed
• Missing title tags
• Robots.txt error

You can use tools such as Ahrefs, Semrush, or even ScreamingFrog to detect these issues. 

15 – Make Sure to Monitor Your Results

Monitoring the results from your SEO efforts and campaigns is crucial if you want to see what’s working and what isn’t deliberately. 

This is the only way to improve and adapt your SEO strategy for a law firm over time and keep seeing results from search engine optimization efforts. To monitor your results, use tools such as Google Search Console, Google Analytics 4, or some external tools such as Semrush’s Position Tracking.

Wrapping Up

It doesn’t matter whether you decide to handle SEO internally or externally; law firm SEO must play an important role in your overall marketing strategy. 

Since SEO is a complex digital marketing field, you may want to outsource it to a highly competitive SEO agency such as Houston SEO Company, with a proven track record of ranking different lawyer firms in the area. Make sure to contact us or request a quote for more details regarding the overall process, pricing, strategy, and potential value you can get from a high-quality local SEO service.

Frequently Asked Questions