SEO for Criminal Defense Lawyers Guide

SEO for criminal defense lawyers requires a multi-faceted approach. To improve your law firm’s visibility and convert more visitors into paying clients, you must leverage different aspects of law firm SEO, such as local, on-page, off-page, and sometimes even more technical SEO.

Criminal defense lawyers indeed experience numerous challenges and even pressure, and allowing them to take care of legal marketing is a one-way street to disaster. You must pick the right professional or even hire a digital marketing agency to help you with your law firm marketing efforts. Search engine optimization is by far the best channel for gathering criminal defense lawyer leads and even converting them into paying clients and customers.

So, this guide is first going to cover some basic information about SEO in the context of criminal defense attorneys. Then, we will proceed with practical tips and strategies for improving the visibility of your legal business website. 

What Is SEO for Criminal Defense Lawyers?

SEO for criminal defense lawyers represents a digital marketing tactic called search engine optimization that boosts the organic visibility of your website, primarily on Google, the biggest search engine at the moment.

In addition to that, search engine optimization is also a process of optimizing the performance and content on your website with the goal of ranking higher on search engine result pages and popular search engines such as Bing and Google. The law firm SEO tactics you use will result in your pages and articles appearing higher or lower on SERPs for specific keywords or a group of them primarily related to your criminal defense law firm.

Some of the SEO strategies you must leverage to stay competitive include topical map creation, keyword research, content creation, content optimization, local SEO, and link building tactics. Utilizing these internet marketing techniques can drastically enhance your SEO efforts.

With a solid law firm search engine optimization strategy, you will successfully attract potential clients and customers to your legal business website, primarily through online search results and organic traffic.

What Are the Benefits of SEO for Criminal Defense Lawyers?

The benefits of SEO for criminal defense lawyers include gathering new leads for your law firm business through organic traffic channels. In addition to that, a proper SEO strategy will increase the visibility of your law firm website and convert visitors into paying clients. However, this process isn’t as simple as everyone thinks it is. 

Most of those businesses burn tens of thousands of dollars a month on pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, which isn’t cost-effective and sustainable long-term. Instead, focusing on law firm SEO and online marketing can yield better, more sustainable results.

On average, you must pay between $6 and even sometimes upwards of $1000 for a single click gathered through PPC advertising. This is why SEO is so much more affordable but also sustainable in the long term than paid advertising solutions.

Want more specific SEO strategies tailored for different types of law practices? Explore our guides on SEO for immigration lawyers and SEO for estate planning lawyers.

SEO for Criminal Defense Lawyers Guide – Best SEO Practices and Tips

Here are the best strategies for criminal defense lawyers SEO so you rank higher on Google, attract more leads, and convert those leads into paying customers.

Create a Google My Business Profile for Your Criminal Defense Law Firm

Google Business Profile, also formerly known as Google My Business, is one of the most important parts of SEO strategy for criminal defense lawyers. This is because your Google Business Profile is probably the first thing your clients will see when searching for relatable legal services online. The GBP will contain very specific information about your criminal law firm’s practice.

The essential information you can see here includes your location, business name, and usual contact information. Some additional things it contains include the area of your practice and keywords relevant to your specific audience. GBP is crucial for your legal business because clients can find your legal service through accurate listings on Google. 

Proper local SEO, specifically for GBP, includes limiting your competition to only other criminal defense lawyers in your area. Also, this approach will likely bring only appropriate clientele from the area of your service and not across the whole state, something that happens when you optimize your GBP wrongly from the start.

Sign up for Key Criminal Defense Directories

A solid criminal defense attorney SEO strategy will also require you to sign up to legal directories. It’s no secret that lawyer directories will provide additional layers of credibility to your online practice, which Google highly appreciates. 

This is because Google will notice that other legitimate websites list your criminal lawyer firm’s legal practice in their directories. This results in more overall website authority.

You also get a quality backlink to your website, further improving your domain’s authority in the eyes of Google. However, the reason why you need an SEO professional to do this is that you want to avoid scam directories that will result in a low-quality backlink to your website. 

The directories I personally recommend and know are of high quality, including Justia and Avvo. These directories are trusted sources in the realm of internet marketing for legal professionals.

They are free to sign up for, so feel free to check them out. Also, consider signing up to review sites and directories that are entirely related to the law niche. Think in terms of Better Business Bureau or Yellow Pages.

Implement Local SEO Tactics

As previously explained, GBP is just a small part of a more comprehensive local SEO strategy. The local SEO requires you to have a presence on citation websites, local directories, and review platforms, as well as to create targeted local pages for very specific criminal defense lawyer keywords. 

It would be useful to be present in places such as FindLaw, Trustpilot, and Avvo to boost your local SEO efforts. Make sure to complete the profile on each of these places and highlight your achievements and specific strengths compared to competitors, and don’t forget to list your areas. 

In addition to that, let potential clients searching these directors and sites know how to contact you and schedule an appointment.

For a deeper understanding of local SEO tactics for different legal practices, read our detailed article on local SEO for lawyers.

Develop a High-Quality Website for Criminal Defense Lawyers

To create a high-quality legal business website for your criminal defense lawyer business, you should do the following: 

• Buy and register a domain 
• Buy a hosting for your website 
• Install a theme and build your website’s pages 
• Publish high-quality content regularly 
• Invest in professional website design to ensure your site is user-friendly and visually appealing

These are just some of the basics. I would advise hiring a professional or a marketing agency for the website creation and development process because mistakes along the way can cost you a lot. 

If you want to do it on your own, make sure the web design is smooth and attractive to your potential clients, comes with fast loading times, and is mobile-friendly. These are just the basics, but they can allow your website to appear higher on Google and offer a unique and pleasant experience for your potential customers.

Make Sure Your Website Is Mobile-Friendly

Making sure your website is mobile-friendly is a must these days since over 60% of all internet traffic is coming solely from mobile devices. This is why it’s critical to ensure proper mobile optimization and user-friendly design. 

You must have a mobile responsive design that automatically adjusts to fit the user’s screen size of just about any device. Also, you must make sure the website loads quickly, preferably in under one second, and has easy navigation. 

Here are some of the bad things that can happen if your website isn’t mobile-friendly:

• Text that’s too tiny to read without zooming in
• Links are placed too closely, making it hard to click accurately
• Pages with excessively long load times
• Content that is difficult to scroll through easily

Design Impactful Landing Pages

You must create landing pages that at least outline the most important skills and expertise of your criminal defense lawyer firm. 

This is where you pitch your clients why they need your services and why they will benefit the most out of them compared to other competitors in your niche. Some of the things you want to include on these pages naturally include testimonials from your clients, the location of your business, and additional practice areas. 

Make it simple and make sure to link to other practice pages to allow visitors to get more specific information. Finally, make sure to include appropriate CTA buttons that speak directly to the concerns of your potential clients. 

Establish Practice Area Pages on Your Criminal Defense Website

The next step you must do is to create targeted landing pages for very specific criminal defense practice areas. 

Think in terms of:

• Fraud
• Drug crimes
• Assault and battery
• Felonies
• Theft crimes
• Domestic violence
• Gun crimes
• Expungement

These are just a few to get you started. The next thing you should do is perform keyword research for all these areas and select the primary keyword you would like to target on the page. 

After that, you are just left to create SEO-optimized content for each of these keywords while also making sure to write title tags, meta descriptions, URL slugs, and similar. We will cover writing and optimizing for high-quality content in the sections ahead.

Focus on Your Content Quality

After September’s Helpful Content Update and the March Core Update, it’s crucial to mention how important it is to write high-quality content for your website. You must understand the search intent behind every query you target. 

Then, you must write helpful and unique content for specific topics and keywords to even ensure your page or article gets crawled and indexed. Notice how we aren’t speaking of ranking yet at all. To ensure your content is high-quality, you should probably aim to hire writers who are experts in your niche and have credentials, proof of work, and experiences that will allow them to craft unique, high-quality content for your law firm website. 

The second part of writing high-quality requires certain on-page optimization tactics. Some of these include placing the primary keyword in your title tag, meta description, URL slug, H1, and the first paragraph of your article page, and including the primary keyword in your H2. 

You can also use on-page optimization tools such as SirferSEO, Marketmuse, or NeuronWriter to include relevant keywords, phrases, and entities throughout your page naturally, which boosts the relevance of the page to the specific set of queries.

Aim to Be Featured in Snippets

Featured snippets will help you capture more search engine results page “real estate.” They are the type of search results appearing primarily at the top of Google SERP. They usually represent short summaries of the most important and relevant information from a single web page. Also, they can be in the form of a list, table, or simple paragraph. 

Featured snippets represent an excellent way to get more traffic to your legal business website since they are the first thing people see when searching for a very specific topic. Sometimes, users are even more likely to click on the featured snippet results on a regular search result than to open all the links and websites below. 

Here are some things to keep in mind to optimize for Google featured snippet results:

• Make sure to answer questions directly and concisely in your content.
• Use short but information-rich sentences.
• Use numbered lists and bullet points when appropriate throughout your content.

This approach will improve your chances of appearing in a featured snippet, thus enhancing your criminal defense firm’s online visibility.

Generate Backlinks From Other Websites

Backlinks are still a huge ranking factor on Google, even though Google claims otherwise. A backlink is simply the link on the other website pointing to your website. Google uses these signals as either positive or negative factors, depending on the quality of a backlink, the website it comes from, and some other additional factors. 

There are three main categories of link building, including the white hat, black hat, and gray hat. Obviously, we would prefer to acquire links only through white hat methods, but that’s not always possible. 

Here is a list of the most popular link-building tactics you can use to boost the rankings of your law firm business website:

• Guest blogging: Write articles for reputable blogs and include a link back to your website.
• Content marketing: Create high-quality, shareable content such as infographics, e-books, and case studies that others will want to link to.
• Directory listings: Submit your law firm to legal directories and local business directories.
• Social media promotion: Share your content on social media marketing platforms to increase visibility and the chances of earning backlinks.
• Press releases: Distribute press releases about significant events or achievements related to your law firm.
• Client testimonials: Provide testimonials for other businesses and include a link back to your law firm’s website.
• Partnerships and sponsorships: Partner with or sponsor local events, organizations, or charities and get a link back to your site in return.
• Legal forums and Q&A sites: Participate in legal forums and Q&A sites like Avvo and Quora, providing valuable answers and linking back to your site where relevant.
• Link reclamation: Find and request corrections for broken or incorrect links pointing to your site.

Invest in Video Marketing for Criminal Defense Attorneys

Video format is highly popular these days, and that’s the primary reason why video marketing and modern search engine optimization tactics are compatible. Simply put, videos are much more engaging compared to the regular text-based content on your website. 

Also, videos are much easier to spread across social media platforms, ultimately leading to more links pointing to your website (backlinks we just talked about). In addition to that, videos also provide more exposure through platforms such as Instagram Reels and YouTube. 

Here are some examples of video content types that legal businesses can leverage for a more comprehensive SEO strategy:

• Instructional videos
• Question and answer sessions
• Customer reviews
• Success stories
• Event updates

Video is also highly successful at grabbing your prospects’ attention online. However, one reason most law firm businesses don’t implement video format and video marketing in their comprehensive SEO strategy is the higher costs of creating and editing videos.

Enhance Your Criminal Defense SEO Using Google E-E-A-T

E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Optimizing your website for each of these will yield better SEO results and will help Google categorize you as a real business and not just some content website. This is why it is crucial you naturally incorporate real-world experiences throughout your content. 

You don’t want your content to appear as if it could be written only with current AI models such as ChatGPT. You must offer something more than that to your readers and potential clients. To optimize for expertise, it would be useful to bring real-world experts from your field to write the content for your website. 

In the eyes of Google, you will look more trustworthy and even authoritative if the content on your website comes from a place of subject matter expertise. Next, we have to optimize for authority, which is mostly based on the topics you are covering on your website. Creating a highly specific and targeted topical map helps a lot to cover all the possible topics for a specific category, which makes you more authoritative in the eyes of Google. 

And lastly, to optimize for trustworthiness, you should focus on positive reviews, well-thought-out internal links, and frequent updates. Optimizing for trustworthiness also comes after you optimize your website for the first three criteria in the E-E-A-T concept.

Monitor and Track Performance 

Use tools such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Ahrefs, and Semrush to monitor and track the performance and success of your current SEO campaign. 

Based on that, you can decide what strategies bring the most value to your business and focus on them more. On the contrary, you can also see what’s now working and adapt your strategy to fix those SEO issues. 

Frequently Asked Questions

If you would like to work with SEO professionals, send us a request for a quote or contact us for more information about the potential collaboration between your law firm and our SEO company. Let’s rank higher for those expensive terms that would bring immense value to your law firm’s business.