Why Lawyers Should Avoid these Local SEO Mistakes That Damage Their Rankings

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9 Local SEO Mistakes Lawyers Do That Damage Their Rankings

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The legal services industry, central to many other sectors, is ever-expanding. According to some reports, it is expected to grow to $900-plus billion by 2025. Of course, technology plays a huge role in its development.

For instance, lawyers can’t get by without a website. The good news is that 87% of firms reported having one, which helps in no small measure to engage with and attract potential clientele. 

But to get the maximum benefit of an online presence and be ranked high on search engine result pages, lawyers also need to invest resources in new-age digital marketing techniques, such as Local Search Engine Optimization or Local SEO. 

They often don't.

In this blog, let's look at nine common mistakes lawyers make with Local SEO that can impact their business's online discoverability and page rankings.

1. Improper Usage of Keywords

To ensure that your law firm (or one-person service) ranks consistently in local search results, you must use the right keywords. For instance, if you have a law firm based in Ohio, ensure you're integrating all possible variations of local keywords in all your content. 

Use the free Keyword Planner tool to exclude wider competition and find the keywords limited or trending in Ohio only.

A common error to avoid is to focus on only one keyword. Use many keywords, including longtail variations, to reduce the competition for particular local search queries. Identify lists of keywords based on your practice in specific areas of law. 

You also have to use specialized keywords. 

• Cover your bases on the niches, whether it's property, personal damage, or other liability and claim settlement areas that a potential client would be looking at. Get as specific as possible.
• Most importantly, never stuff your keywords, whether your website content or external sites, including social media.
• You can use tools and search features like WordStream, Ubersuggest, and Google Autocomplete to get started with your keyword research.

2. Unoptimized Blog Content

Many lawyers and law firms overlook the importance and efficacy of blogs in ranking for local search results. Blogs help you seed keywords and direct traffic to your website, but they also help you establish your legal service’s voice and authority.

An additional plus of a good blog page is establishing your website’s domain authority in the particular legal area you're operating in. 

The first step towards maintaining a credible and complete blog for Local SEO is tracking local news and industry updates. Additionally, it lets you connect with the audience on a personal level. This is why most law firms have separate sections for creating blog pages. 

The different kinds of blog content you can work on would include commentaries on the law areas you focus on, how-to guides, and Q&A formats.

• Always write for your clients. It would be a big mistake to use your blog site simply and explicitly as a promotional platform for your firm.
• Focus on specifics. Building content only around your practice areas will not help you outrank and stand out from competitors. Identify a niche (for example, ‘adoption’ legalities in family law), and establish your tone as a thought leader.
• Address as many audience segments as possible, and rank for queries based on your city or town.

Read: 10 SEO Tips for Your Blog Posts

3. Not Paying Heed to Reviews

Reviews are not just relevant to local restaurants or repair services. Lawyers and law firms must solicit and audit online reviews. This can also help you get more real estate for local search results, specifically Google reviews.

Of course, the starting point for this is offering a premium client-centered service. Then, seek reviews by writing to or otherwise contacting your clients. Email marketing with a streamlined message and links to dedicated landing pages is the simplest way to follow up.

We would advise you to focus on both quality and quantity in reviews. The higher your rating, the better you can find a spot in the local pack for users’ ‘top’ and ‘best’ queries for legal outfits. Here’s how they appear on the local 3-pack. 

• Do not ever get complacent about responding to reviews. This would help you underline the human aspect of your service, but it would also help you amplify your web presence. 
• With every response to reviews clients leave on a website or directory, you're creating more brand-focused content organically.

• It's important to focus on Google My Business reviews. They offer a specific brand-advancement avenue, as a reply to a review generates a notification to the user who left it.
• Some other sites that lawyers should track and seek out reviews are Yellow Pages, Yelp, Avvo, and Better Business Bureau.

4. Producing Low-Quality Website Content

The firm or your solo service’s website remains a key launchpad for your brand image. You will be well served by ensuring it’s professionally developed to present a unique identity and a one-stop for all information related to your practice.

Ensure you have specific landing pages for each location and area of your practice. This will ensure you turn up in local search queries and drive the cumulative traffic to your pages. 

For example, below is a law firm page with contact details of 3-locations. But it’s not optimized for multiple locations. Thus, the firm will miss a lot of prospective customers. 

You must populate every page of your website with LSI-rich content, meeting longtail queries. Include locality-based content on every page. For instance, if you have a family law practice in Denver, build your pages, including meta tags, around that.

You can choose to generate in-house content, including articles, or hire a professional content writer with experience in and knowledge of the legal industry.

• Cover an entire gamut of the web pages relevant to a law practice. Ideally, this should include a ‘meet the team’ page and individual pages for your marque lawyers, a complete ‘contact’ page, and a feedback/query form.
• Focus on internal linking, including your hidden or deepest pages, to boost page views and time on site.
• Populate and display testimonials. This will assure viewers of your firm’s relevance and bring down the bounce rate.

5. Not Targeting Directories for Listings

You may often discount legal directories that have multi-pronged benefits. 

Claiming citations on key directories, apart from Google My Business, amps up your legal service’s online reputation and visibility and helps score for Local SEO factors. Thus, try listing your firm niche relevant directories like Avvo meant to connect lawyers and audiences. 

How do you ask? A listing in a local lawyer directory will ensure you turn up more in queries like ‘best family lawyer in Colorado’ or ‘personal injury lawyer near me.’ Over and above that, directories help build backlinks and page authority. 

You need to identify and claim a listing on every relevant local legal directory based on two critical factors: average volume of traffic and high PageRank authority. 

• You should also focus on sites that have engagement features (answering questions, provision for client reviews) and allow you to populate your profile with content. 
• As a licensed attorney, claim the automatically created and freely available blank profiles on search engines like Bing and Yahoo. Several directories offer free listings. 

The flipside of this functionality is identifying and reporting spam and fake listings.

• Ensure your NAP (name, address, phone) and other details of your legal practice are consistently displayed and constantly updated.

6. Failing to Optimize for Mobile

Mobile optimization is a key element of ranking for local search and attracting more traffic to an attorney’s website. Your mobile search responsive website addresses elements like display, loading speed, hardware, and user agent differentiation. 

So, use free tools like Google or rank watch mobile-friendly testing tools that show whether a site is mobile-friendly or not. Here’s a screenshot example of the same. 

What is mobile responsiveness? 

It means adopting a set of website design techniques capable of identifying the local search query’s ‘user agent’ as a mobile device and streamlining and displaying your website content accordingly.

• Lay your content out such that all the critical information of your website is easily skimmable on a mobile screen. Font legibility is an important element of content display.
• You should align your contact options with mobile search. For instance, while email and contact forms are easily accessed on a PC, mobile devices afford more usability for call and chat options.
• You should ensure your mobile site also integrates features for prospective clients like directions to your firm and appointment booking.

7. Leaving Out Local Images and Videos 

A factor often discounted for SEO efficacy is using images and videos, though 86% of brands swear by video as a primary marketing tool. It is more important for a people-facing profession like legal practice to paint a thousand words and tell a story.

A locality-focused image or video can universally engage potential clients by conveying the human angle and the emotions behind the services you extend dynamically. 

Make sure you integrate visual content in all your informational and professional platforms, focusing on scripting and editing. This will help you increase your engagement numbers and conversion rate. 

The process of video marketing—whether it’s for your landing pages, social media, or YouTube—starts with keyword research to narrow down the kind of content your target clientele wants to see. For this, you can use tools like YTCockpit or vidIQ. 

Take a look at the below screenshot. A law firm produces content for the audience looking for solutions to their issues in life. 

• Publish videos of varying types and lengths. You can have short clips for brand and service ads and longer ones for explainer and testimonial videos. 
• You should also invest resources in video interviews with industry peers, experts, and vlogs addressing common issues.
• A few important elements to put in place while publishing your images and videos are a transcript, closed captions, keywords in captions, and calls to action. 

8. Poorly Optimized Website

You will not see much traction (read: page views) on your legal practice’s website if it’s not optimized correctly from the get-go. This means ensuring your technical SEO check is on-point and complete. 

To begin with, your website architecture must be crawler-friendly for exhaustive indexing. Run a site audit frequently to ensure the crawlability and indexability of your pages; focus on robot.txt and eliminate any ‘noindex’ tags to ensure your site is accessible to search engines.

Another key starting point is making the switch to HTTPS if you’re aren’t using it already. It sends a signal of trust and security to both search engines and users.

Apart from ensuring a boost in page rank, this will protect any information you collect from your clientele using a contact form or similar.

• A thorough site audit should also help identify page and site speed issues and fix duplicate content, broken page links, images, etc.
• Sitemaps are an important element to improve the crawlability and indexing factors of your firm/legal practice’s site. You can easily generate an XML sitemap using free services like SureOak and SmallSEOTools.
• Also, invest some time using local business schema markup to score a Google knowledge panel. Use relevant types like the ‘Legal Service’ category, review snippets, and structured data for your content.

Read: How to Optimize Your Website for DuckDuckGo Search Engine?

9. Not Creating Social Media Profiles

If you aim to get the word on your legal practice out to a wider local audience, you just can’t get around the functionality of social media accounts. Social media accounts can ramp up your trust and relevancy signals in no time.

They offer the easiest routes to networking with your potential clients. You can position yourself as an expert in a particular niche or legal area by posting and promoting relevant content. 

Join social media groups to ensure your law firm gets visibility and is cited as a top recommendation for a particular location or area of practice. Find groups with more members, as shown below screenshot to share your content and ideas with a large audience base.

These and other authentic engagement measures will ultimately help you rank higher for local SEO, especially when implemented with authenticity. 

• Interact with multiple generations of clientele by creating a Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter page. These will also help you cover different types of content.

Instagram, for instance, is useful for sharing visual content around legal questions and expert insights.

• Link to and promote your blog and other content frequently. Follow up and engage with your audience by answering comments and queries. 
• To stay on top of your post scheduling and analytics, you might consider investing in an automation and management tool like Hootsuite, Mentionlytics, or Sprout Social. All these nifty platforms offer free trials.

Key Takeaways

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• To see your legal firm’s website rank for Local SEO, start with complete keyword research to know what your audience is looking for in your niche legal practice area.
• Invest time, energy, and professional resources to optimize your legal practice’s website. It should be well-populated with local content, whether for a firm or a solo practice.
• Make sure you have claimed all possible legal directory listings. This will help with link building and generating more traffic to your site.
• Create social media pages, and engage with potential clientele by regularly posting helpful content. Do not forget to seek and track reviews from your fulfilled clients.
• Always ensure your website is mobile-responsive to align with the use of mobile devices for local searches; among other things, focus on the relevance signal, display, and page speed.