BY
Arpad Balogh
December 31, 2021

What is Lawyer SEO?

Traditionally, SEO means Search Engine Optimization which is the practice of optimizing your website and its content so you can rank higher in search engines.

Lawyer SEO means optimizing your website, content and some other factors for lawyers so you can rank higher in search engines.

In order to have a successful search engine optimization campaign, you need to understand certain factors. 


The following guide will help you understand how to optimize your website for the search engines.

Search Engine Optimization Ranking Factors for Lawyers

There are a variety of Google ranking factors that the search engines (we will be mostly talking about Google) use to rank websites. In order to rank higher and have a successful SEO strategy, you need to focus on all of them.

1. Content

One of the most important ranking factors is content. The search engines look for websites with high-quality, relevant and valuable content. You need to create content that is unique and will answer your clients' questions.

Writing content that the search engines like is not an easy job to do.

Writing high-quality content that will please your visitors is one thing, but at the same, you need to make it relevant for the search engines as well.

This means you will have to do SEO on your content.

SEOing your content can be done by including relevant queries, terms or phrases that visitors would use when searching for your services, products or information.

This can be done with a number of tools or done manually!

Read on for a full explanation!

2. Traffic

Traffic The search engines love websites with a lot of traffic because they think those websites have created a lot of value for their visitors and they think that those law firm's websites have some buzz.

3. Onpage SEO

Onpage SEO is the practice of optimizing your website so that the search engines can understand what your website is about and fixing any potential issues that might prevent you from ranking higher or make it harder for Google Bot to Crawl your website.

The most common issues we face on Law firm websites are:

  • Thin Content Pages
  • Meta Title Issues
  • Broken Links
  • Unoptimized Sitemaps
  • Technical Issues


A small website might have a few of this issues, while a big law firm's website could have ton, so it is very important to keep your websites On-Page SEO health in check!

The search engines use external links as one of the factors to rank websites. If your website has a lot of incoming links from trusted websites like other lawyers, law firms, law related blogs or podcasts, then you will rank higher than competitors that have zero.

Keyword Research for Lawyers: How to find SEO Keywords for Lawyers

Finding the best keywords for your Law firm website is not an easy task.

It is also the first part of the success to have a successful law firm SEO campaign.

It is very important to find keywords that your potential clients are searching on Google.

Finding Local SEO Keywords

immigration lawyer in ahrefs

We already have a very good guide on our keyword research process in one of our articles, but let's look at how you can find good local SEO keywords for lawyers.

Finding these are going to be the most important, since these are the ones that are actually going to get you more leads.

Step 1: Choose Niche

First, you will have to choose a niche. Whether it is personal injury, bankruptcy or immigration law, you need to choose a niche that you will be specialized in.

Step 2: Choose Areas

Then, you will need to choose in which physical locations would you like to show up in Google for. For example, if you choose immigration law as your niche, would you like to show up for immigration lawyer in New York or Los Angeles?

Step 3: Combine These Two into a Sheet

Your next step is going to be combining the niche and the areas that you want to rank for into a sheet, to make it easier to plug it into the keyword research tool of your choice.

You should end up with a list, looking something like this:

Step 4: Plug it into a Keyword Research Tool

The last step is taking all of these keywords and adding them into a paid or free keyword research tool.

This will allow you two things:

1.) Give you the monthly search volume, difficulty of the keywords

2.) Give you more ideas based on your keywords. You can even find keywords that are much easier to rank for!

You can use any tool of your liking, but our favourite is Ahrefs.

If you are looking for a free way of doing it, we recommend using Google Keyword Planner.

Finding Informational Keywords for Lawyers

Informational keywords are not only important since they can be a good source of leads through inbound marketing, but because they can bring you in relevant traffic and boost your relevance in Google.

Finding them is not as hard as you would think.

First of all, you need to sit down and think about the questions your potential clients might have regarding their legal issues.

Then, you can use Google Adwords' Keyword Tool, or any other tool to find popular keywords that people are searching on Google when they have these kinds of questions.

Look in the Peoples Also Ask section of Google. These are questions that Google thinks are related, so if they make sense, include in your article.

You can also write articles about the local laws, helping local communities.

Ultimate Tip: The easiest way of finding these informational queries is to see what your most performing competitors are doing.

You can plug these websites into Ahrefs and actually see what keywords they are ranking for and what you should be targeting.

If you go more advanced, you can even do something that is called Content Gap Analysis, which will show you every piece of content/query that your competitors are ranking for and you are not.

"Whatever Keyword you are researching, make sure the difficulty is not too high. The chances of you ranking for a keyword like personal injury lawyer new york with a brand new website or an unoptimized one is very slim."

arpad balogh slothio

Arpad Balogh

SEO Professional

Local SEO for Lawyers

local seo for lawyers

Now that we have looked at what indicates a good keyword and what not, let's look at Local Search Engine Optimization.

There are two ways you can rank in the local organic search results.

The first is raking in the Google Map pack.


This is a section in Google, shown on the front page, of all the business that are geographically nearby. This also shows in the Google Maps.

You need to have at least a Google My Business profile to be able to show up in this section, but in order for you to show up in the top three, you will need more than just a good profile.

Google My Business Ranking Signals for Lawyers are:


  • Reviews
  • Geo Tagged Photos
  • SEO Optimized Description
  • Local Business Posts
  • Questions and Answers


All of these have to be perfectly optimized on your Google My Business profile.

Ranking in the Map Pack alone with your GMB is great, but you need to have a strong website which has the perfect local structure for it to support your Google My Business Rankings.

The second way of ranking in the local searches is ranking with your website, with the help of Law Firm SEO.

Your website has to tick all of the boxes mentioned above in the signals section, plus it needs to have an optimized structure.

In order to rank in your local areas, you need to create local pages in a structure which is easy to understand for your users and for Google as well.

Long gone the days where you could just
put thousands of keywords on one page and you could rank.

Google is getting smarter and smarter every day, which means you will need to be smarter as well.

This is where the keyword research that you have done previously comes in.

You will use those and assign an individual page for each location.

This is how it should look like:

/injury-lawyer/dallas/

/injury-lawyer/plano/

The main category always comes first, like Injury Lawyer, then comes the location.

You will have to create pages like these for every location you would like to rank in.

When creating these pages, you will have to pay attention to the following:


  • Make sure the Meta Title and Description are Optimized for your Keywords
  • The length of your content should be similar to your competitors
  • Include entities, keywords that your competitors are using.
  • Use a tool like Surfer SEO to optimize the page
  • Make sure you have a clear Call to Action above the fold!
  • We recommend creating a page template that you have tested and converts well and creating unique content for each of these local pages.


Of course, if you are a solo lawyer, you will have a lot fewer pages to create, than a law firm website would need to have.

Do You Want More Customers?


If you are looking to generate more customers, check out this guide and learn how.

You'll find 5 steps that will help fix the most important things on your website today!

Content Marketing for Lawyers

The biggest mistake lawyers make on their website is not utilizing content marketing. 


You might have very useful blog posts, they might even be ranking and getting traffic, but are you utilizing them?

An informational blog post is for people who may not be ready to hire you yet, but they are actively looking for information about solving their problem.

With having clear call to actions and a lead magnet added to these blog posts, you can gather the email addresses of the users that are actively looking for a solution, which you can send email marketing campaigns later on.

This is how it should be done:

Let's say you have an informational blog post about personal injury claims in general. You can add your lead magnet to the sidebar of your blog post or at the end.

When people click your link, they will be brought to a landing page where you have an option to subscribe to your email list, in exchange for your lead magnet.

On informational blog posts you should grab every chance of a call to action you have!

This is a very standard way of utilizing your blog posts, but there are many more possibilities!

Tracking Law Firm SEO Success

One of the most important parts of search engine optimization and ranking in Google is tracking your success. Your website gets ranked, you are getting organic traffic to your website, but are you getting any new leads, business?

This is why you should always set up goal tracking for your website.

This can be done in Google Analytics. If you are not sure how to set up GA for your website, Google has a detailed guide you can follow.

If you have already implemented GA on your website, you can start setting up goals.

A goal can be anything that is trackable on a website, a click, a thank you page visit, a form submit.

There are a lot of guides on setting up Goal Tracking, so we won't go into details.

It is also important to track search engine rankings of your lawyer website, because it shows where you are currently standing on Google's search engine results pages for your wanted queries.

This can be done by any rank tracking tool, or if you are using a tool suite like Ahrefs, you can track there.

Hiring a Law Firm SEO Expert

Many lawyers are unsure if they should hire an SEO expert to help them rank their website, or just do it themselves.

Our advice is if you have the time, start out with your own SEO efforts, get some knowledge and later on you will be able to make a more educated choice on choosing an SEO Company or an Expert.

But, if you have the budget to invest, it is always best to hire an expert to do the work for you.

We hope this article was useful!

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is SEO important for lawyers?

SEO for lawyers is important because it is the best way to get your website in front of people who are looking for legal services.

People use search engines to find lawyers all the time. If you're not ranking at the top of the search engine results, you're missing out on potential clients.

Do Lawyers Need SEO?

Some lawyers may not need SEO because they have a lot of business coming in from referrals. However, for most lawyers, SEO is a necessary part of their marketing plan.

SEO also has the best ROI of any marketing strategy that you can use.

How to Choose the Best Law Firm SEO Agency?

To Choose The Best Law Firm SEO Agency, you will have to look at their portfolio, experience and how they communicate.

Do they explain everything thoroughly for your, do they have a roadmap or are they just looking to make a quick buck?

Take all of these things into account when choosing the best law firm to do your SEO.

How Much Does SEO for Lawyers Cost?

The cost of your SEO campaign matters on the difficulty of the keywords you want to rank for, the current state of your website and if you need a lot of backlinks or not.

SEO Companies might charge anywhere from $2,000 to $10,000 based on your requirements.

Do You Want More Customers?


If you are looking to generate more customers, check out this guide and learn how.

You'll find 5 steps that will help fix the most important things on your website today!

About the author

Arpad Balogh is a Hungarian SEO Expert and Strategist with more than 8 years of experience in the field. He loves dogs, he is afraid of empty pools (so weird, right?), loves vegan food and has a passion for telling very bad jokes.

Technical SEO, Structured Data and Keyword research are the areas he loves the most.

As a Founder of Slothio, His mission is to help 5,000 small business owners to grow their business in the next three years, help them be happier and enjoy life more.

Arpad Balogh


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