Why Quality Matters in Law Firm SEO

April 2017

Your law firm needs to establish a higher profile online, and one of the ways to achieve that goal is to start using search engine optimization strategies. But can your firm handle this process in-house? Or should you hire an outside team to help with your law firm SEO?

Related: Effective Online Marketing for Law Firms

In most cases, law firms don’t have professional content and copywriters on their teams. Instead, they have lawyers and paralegals, who already have their hands full with casework, client consultations, court appearances, and more. In other words, you probably don’t have the bandwidth internally to do your own SEO—unless you do it quickly, that is. After all, isn’t SEO all about keywords? How hard can it be to publish a few articles built around keywords, or to incorporate keywords into your firm’s existing webpages?

The Challenges of Search Engine Optimization
In reality, SEO is much more complicated than many businesses believe—both in the legal profession and other industries. For a search engine optimization campaign to be successful, you do need keywords, but keywords are not the be all and end all of successful SEO. On the contrary, you also need keyword research, quality content, and ongoing campaign management and tweaking. These essential components of search engine optimization explain why quality matters for law firm SEO—and why your firm won’t be able to implement successful SEO in a single afternoon.

Keyword research is a big part of any SEO campaign. You probably have a pretty good idea of some of the keywords for which you would like your firm to rank on Google and other SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). Keyword research can help to determine if those keywords are manageable or if they are too competitive. It can also highlight other keywords that could bring potential customers to your business. Ultimately, thorough keyword research can save you from wasting money on an ineffective SEO campaign and give you more traffic and conversions to boot.

Quality content is vital as well. Simply throwing your keywords into your existing website copy isn’t enough. Neither is publishing a keyword saturated blog or two. You need to plan and create content that brings value to your online visitors. You need to think about the questions or inquiries that might bring people to you online, and then create intellectual content that fulfills those needs. The keywords should be secondary to the actual content of what you are writing.

Low-quality SEO is also characterized by a “set it and forget it” attitude. If you think your law firm’s website is optimized because you’ve done SEO on a few pages or FAQ articles, you are sorely mistaken. Successful SEO is about monitoring your website’s traffic, assessing your rankings, figuring out where your site is performing well, and adjusting things (or creating new content) to continue improving your results.

These ongoing management tasks take a lot of work and are the reason that many law firms ultimately hire outside law firm online marketing teams to help with SEO, website design, and other facets of digital promotion. If your firm needs help creating a quality SEO campaign, get in touch with Inherent today.