Search engine optimisation is one of the most powerful tools available to increase the amount of visitors to legal websites. In the past, it was sufficient for law firm websites to merely exist but as your competitors expand their own legal SEO activities, it has become necessary to pursue a strategic SEO policy and make sure your legal website stays high in the Google rankings and competes on a level playing field with its rivals. If your website is falling behind in Google rankings, this guide is for you.
1. Make your law firm website quick to load
The faster your legal website loads for a visitor, the better the ranking that Google will assign you. Eliminate unnecessary images, videos or buttons that take a long time to load and, if you currently operate from a remote or virtual private server (VPS), consider switching to a local server to help reduce page load times.
2. Include keywords in page titles
A page title is one of the most important factors that Google looks at to determine the content of a webpage. Therefore, make sure that the keywords you want to associate with your firm (identified during your keyword strategy phase) are well represented. Remember to keep page titles unique, however, to avoid confusing the search engines as well as the visitors to your legal website.
3. Add calls to action
A direction from you to your visitor inviting them to “Sign Up” to a newsletter or “Download” one of your publications provides an internal link to another page on your law firm website and another signal to Google that your legal website should be ranked highly.
4. Nurture links from other websites
When Google sees that lots of other websites are linking to your own, it tells them that the content on your site is valuable. By creating unique blog posts and videos you will find that others naturally link to you and push your website up the search engine results. To begin with, ask people you know to link to your law firm website for a few quick, safe inbound links to help with legal SEO.
5. Avoid “Black-Hat” SEO techniques
Offers to increase the number of links to legal websites through bought links or one-to-one link exchange deals should be treated with a lot of suspicion. Yes, “link farming” can help you with a short-term Google ranking boost but such actions are seen as highly unethical by Google and will quickly result in your website getting penalised or, even worse, blacklisted by the search engines. If you are outsourcing legal SEO to an agency, make sure that, like Quinn Wilson Associates, all their methods are ethical, rigorously tested and safe in the long-term.
Call Quinn Wilson Associates today on 0208 956 2242 to discuss your law firm website and how we can help or alternatively request a free website review by one of our experts.
