Outranking Your Legal Competitors
Gone are the days of relying on billboards and radio ads to attract new customers. In the legal realm, especially in niche areas (e.g., partition actions in California), gaining new clients by attending never-ending strings of networking events is no longer feasible. Don’t get us wrong, networking still plays a very important role in client-relationship building. But it shouldn’t be your only source of new clients.
Modern day boutique law firms specialize in a handful of legal practice areas, like immigration law or HOA law. This allows attorneys to understand the ins and outs of their practice areas and to better serve their clients. When done correctly, taking this knowledge and turning it into informative blog posts can turn into a near constant stream of new leads.
Even with all the knowledge and the expertise in your field of law, there is no guarantee that you’ll rank #1. Ranking highly for legal blog posts on a certain topic in which you have extensive knowledge takes more than dumb luck. Below, our digital marketers explain how you can get your website to outrank your competitors!
Content
We can’t stress enough how important it is for your top priority to be your legal content. Informative, well-written content will attract solid (and well-paying) leads. Google in particular has a set of highly-evolved algorithms to detect good content and match searcher intent with content. Of course content and optimal blog length alone isn’t all you need, but it’s a good start.
Law firms should focus on informing readers on legal developments, statutes, codes, or other aspects of your legal practice that may not be understood by the general public. It goes without saying that all legal content needs to be accurate and informative in order to be helpful to readers.
Backlinks
Since at least 1996, Google has considered the backlink profile of a page a major ranking factor. Having multiple, high quality backlinks to your site alerts search engines that your site is likely a high quality site. This is a strong indicator that your site will be ranked higher than your competitors’ sites that don’t have as large of a backlink profile. This can be tough for niche practices involving private litigants with limited public interest, meaning hard work is essential.
Keyword Research & Targeting
When constructing an effective legal blog post, it’s highly important to do keyword research beforehand. Tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, and SpyFu can help give you better insights into which keywords are particularly popular. Whether you choose to target short tail or long tail keywords, you should have a rough idea of the keywords you want to target and use these in your writing. Use this knowledge to your advantage and include them in your blog post. Reviewing the keywords used by similar niche practice areas can be helpful.
Page Speed
Page speed is one of the most important on page SEO factors, though it is perhaps the most invisible. Pages that load slowly or erratically will not be ranked as highly as pages that load quickly and seamlessly. Google uses page speed as a ranking factor, so having a fast side is imperative to ranking highly in the SERPs. Even if your practice areas lend themselves to extensive graphics of videos, ensuring that the site loads quickly is essential.
Analyze competitors
How are your competitors generating leads? What are their most profitable keywords? While this information won’t be handed to your on a silver platter, SEO tools and even simple Google searches can shed light on what your competitors are ranking for. This can help you to gain traction in these areas and eventually outrank them! If you check which law firms outrank your firm in your niche practice, you’ll end up with good ideas.
Make it easy to capture leads
Don’t make potential new clients work for your attention – make it obvious! Having a chatbot available 24/7, a prominently displayed phone number, and an easily accessible contact form are all ways that you can make your law firm accessible to your viewers. People are looking for simplicity and ease of us. If they find it’s too difficult to get in contact with you, they may abandon your site altogether and instead go to a competitor’s site.
The bottom line is that quality digital marketers are in short supply. If you’re looking for your law firm to rank higher, contact us today.