SEO for lawyers and law firms can be complicated and difficult. There is a lot of competition between firms, especially in larger cities and more populated regions. It is therefore important to make sure that you get on top of all aspects of SEO for your law firm to make sure that your organic search ranking is as good as possible.
Local SEO is a huge part of law firm SEO in general. A lot of people don’t understand the difference between local and general SEO, and this negatively impacts their optimisation efforts.
What Is Local SEO?
Basically, local SEO refers to optimisation with location based searches in mind. Searches with a physical address or location allow people to find law firms and other services in their area. If you run a relatively small firm that works in a specific geographical area, then you need to make sure you put plenty of time and effort into your local SEO efforts.
Why Is Local SEO So Important?
A huge percentage of people use Google or another search engine to find local businesses offering the services that they want. It has been estimated that over 50% of local customers who search for a local business – such as a law firm in their area – will visit a store the same day. Surely you can see how boosting your organic ranking using local SEO could have a positive impact on your store.
Local SEO Is Effectively Free Advertising
Using local SEO lets you promote your firm and the services you offer without spending an absolute fortune. If you do it on your own, SEO is completely free. Even if you employ someone to help you boost your site’s ranking, it will still end up being a lot more cost effective than something like AdWords.
How Can Rank Highly In Local Searches?
There are a lot of different ways to improve your local search engine ranking. Most of these are relatively simple. Think about the following:
- Make sure that your firm’s citations are correct across the web. This means that you need to make sure that your correct address and contact details are listed everywhere.
- Use location based keywords in your content. You don’t have to use a lot, and they don’t have to be stuffed into your content, but using a few location based keywords here and there tells Google where you’re based.
- Do your best to encourage positive online reviews from your past clients. They do matter.
- Make sure that you use Google My Business. It’s arguably the biggest online directory out there, and it can have huge positive impacts on your local SEO score.
Final Word
As you can see, local SEO is extremely important for small, geographically confined law firms. Make sure that you invest a significant amount of time and money into improving your local search engine rankings – it’s worth it.