It is harder to gain an edge for your firm with SEO these days, as it seems every firm is doing it. If you have a law blog, optimize for one location, place your firm in all legal directories, and upload content to sites like YouTube, and you still aren’t seeing results, it can get very frustrating.
The thing is, simply having content on your site does not cut it anymore. Google is getting smarter every day, and they are constantly adjusting their algorithms to figure out what the user needs, not what websites claim to do. If you say that your site offers legal advice and legal articles, but the content is low-quality, people will leave your page and move onto another firm’s website. Google uses a metric called the “bounce rate” of your website to determine how many users click on your website and leave before clicking other links. If you have a high bounce rate, it means that you are making promises in your titles and meta descriptions that your content can’t fulfill. Google takes notice of this and penalizes the sites with high bounce rates, even if they are technically optimized correctly.
How do you reduce your bounce rate, keep people on your page, and eventually drive them to give your firm a call or submit a form on your website? The answer, as it often does with SEO, is to produce better content. If people are clicking on your website, they have a question they need answers. For your home page, you want to answer basic questions like, “What are your practice areas?,” “What number do I call?,” “How do I get in contact with these lawyers?,” or, “What is their track record?”
Once you get into different pages of your website, however, there are different questions you need to answer. Posting blogs with answers to questions surrounding your practice area is a great way to start. Adding an FAQ page is another good step, as it can establish you as a good source of information while saving you from having to explain basic legal questions in a consultation. At the end of all of your content, however, you need to always include links to your content pages or other pages in your website. Instead of clicking back to Google when they are done with the article, they might look around your website even more, which helps with both SEO and getting more conversions.
At the end of the day, your legal website exists to build trust with potential clients. If you answer their questions and give them a reason to call you, you will have a successful website. If you focus too much on getting people to your site, but your content is bad, you are not accessing your full potential as a law firm. Check out the following video for more tips on creating SEO content.