Law Firm SEO Guide 2024: How to Rank Your Lawyer Website on the First Page of the Search Results

How Do I Use This Legal SEO Guide to Help My Law Firm?

Unless you have a background in digital marketing, you’ve likely heard of search engine optimization (SEO) but aren’t entirely sure what law firm SEO actually is.

In essence, SEO is the science of providing your website with the necessary ranking factors to rise to the top of the search engine results.

With the information provided in this guide, you’ll discover exactly what those ranking factors are and how to best implement them on your law firm’s website.

What’s Required for Successful Lawyer SEO?

SEO success requires properly implementing the three spheres of SEO on your law firm website:

• On-page SEO (relevance)
• Offsite SEO (authority)
• Technical SEO

If you follow this legal SEO guide, you’ll discover what each sphere consists of, why it’s important, and how to put it into action on your website.

The first step, however, is determining exactly what keywords your website needs to rank for organically in order to bring in relevant traffic that converts into leads and potential clients.

How Do I Find the Right Keywords?

SEO is a marathon and not a sprint. It requires a substantial upfront investment of both time and resources. This investment pays off later when your website starts to rank in the top organic search results for the keywords you’ve targeted.

This only pays off if you target the right keywords from the start, however. You don’t want to put all your time and effort into ranking for a keyword you thought was valuable only to later discover that no one ever searches for that term.

Keyword Search Volume

You need to make certain that the keywords you target all have regular monthly search volume. This is the number of times each month that search engine users search for that exact phrase. 

The best keywords for your law firm might have search volume that see thousands of monthly searches, while less valuable keywords might only be searched a handful of times each month. Still other keywords that at first seemed valuable to target might turn out to have no regular search volume at all!

What SEO Tools Measure Search Volume?

Finding search volume is simple with the right SEO tools. Google Keyword Planner, AHREFs, and SEMRush are just a few of the tools attorneys can use to identify keywords that get searched on a regular basis.

For example, imagine you are a personal injury attorney based out of Chicago and you want to increase the number of car accident cases your law firm takes in. At the beginning of your keyword research, you compile a list of potential keywords you think people might search while looking for a lawyer for their car accident case.

Running your keyword list though a tool like AHREFs’ Keyword Explorer, you discover that the following three keywords all have very different search volumes:

• Chicago car accident lawyer: 700 searches per month
• Waukegan car accident lawyer: 20 searches per month
• Windy City car accident lawyer: 0 searches per month

From this data, you can see that the bulk of your ranking efforts should be put toward ranking for “Chicago car accident lawyer,” as ranking high in the organic search results will yield the most cases for your law firm, while a smaller amount of resources can be applied toward ranking for “Waukegan car accident lawyer” and its 20 monthly searches. “Windy City car accident lawyer” can be skipped entirely, as no one seems to be searching for that phrase at all.

User Search Intent

Search volume isn’t the only factor to consider when it comes to identifying the best law firm keywords, however. You also need to consider the user’s search intent. 

With attorney keywords, user search intent can generally be broken down into informational keywords and intent-to-hire keywords.

Informational Keywords in Lawyer SEO

Users searching informational keywords are looking for just that: information. These users are looking for specific information that will help them decide what they want or need to do. They might be trying to determine if their car accident case is serious enough to justify hiring a lawyer, for example.

Informational keywords can be good keywords for a law firm to target if the purpose behind gathering the information ultimately leads to hiring a lawyer. If nothing goes beyond the information-gathering stage, however, it might be best to skip that keyword.

Intent-to-Hire Keywords in Attorney SEO

On the other hand, keywords with intent-to-hire are excellent keywords to target, especially when they see solid numbers of monthly search volume. For example, someone searching “Chicago car accident lawyer” is likely past the information-gathering stage and is now researching specific attorneys and law firms hoping to identify the best lawyer to hire.

What Is On-Page SEO?

On-page SEO consists of all the ranking factors that are visible to users on your website. Your content, its structure, images and videos on the page, internal links . . . these are all elements of on-page SEO. 

On-page SEO forms the foundation of all your other SEO efforts. It’s what makes your page relevant to the keywords you’re trying to rank for. It’s essentially what allows Google and other search engines to understand what your page is about and how thoroughly it covers its topic, and therefore, how likely it is to answer a user’s search query.

Why Is On-Page Search Engine Optimization Important?

This is the baseline requirement that needs to be met in order for your site to rank. If your site isn’t highly relevant for the search terms you want to rank for, it doesn’t matter how good the rest of your SEO work is.

It’s also important that your content be unique. Google wants to see content on your site that isn’t simply stolen from another site. Similarly, you don’t want to reuse large chunks of content over and over again throughout your site. The presence of duplicate content will make search engines trust your site less, even if the content is highly relevant.

Is Blogging Important to SEO?

The short answer is that blogging can be important to search engine optimization, but it’s actually very easy to do wrong from an SEO perspective. 

Regular blog posts keep the content on your site fresh, and these new pages keep the search engine crawl bots (also known as spiders) coming back to your site and checking for new posts. 

This is fantastic as long as what you’re blogging about is topically relevant to the keywords you want to rank for and in line with the purpose of your site. It’s easy to go wrong here, however, especially for law firms. 

For example, if you’re a personal injury law firm that wants to rank for car accident keywords, you might think it makes sense to blog about major car accidents that happen in your area. You’ll probably even see large spikes in website traffic as people Google the wreck looking for more information on what happened.

In many ways, this type of blogging is actually counterproductive. Yes, you’re getting lots of Google users on your law firm’s site, but the search intent of this audience is wrong for your site. These aren’t people looking for a lawyer; they’re people looking for information on a car accident in the news. 

Blogging and Attorney SEO: The Key Takeaway

The key to remember here is that a law firm site is essentially a local business site offering a service to potential clients. Post after post about random car accidents in your area might start to confuse search engines into viewing your site as a news site instead.

However, if you keep your site’s purpose and target audience in mind when you blog, then it can be a major boon for your law firm’s SEO strategy. Blogging about things like “how to prepare for car accident court,” “questions to ask a lawyer during a consultation,” and “laws that could impact an injury case” could all rank your law firm website for relevant keywords and bring in traffic that actually turns into leads for your attorneys.

Titles and Heading Tags in Legal SEO

How you structure your law firm’s website content is critical to your on-page SEO efforts. Think of your title and heading tags (also known as H-tags) as guideposts that allow search engines to quickly understand what your page is about at a glance. In short, they are essential to your page’s relevance to a given keyword.

You can also think of your title and heading structure as the outline for your