Best SEO Practices to Enhance Law Firms and Lawyers Personal Bios: Part 1

While lawyers understand the importance of maximizing their website using Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Too few lawyers know how to implement these tactics on their firm’s site. Appleton’s Jamie Kruger recently gave a presentation about best SEO practices to group of lawyers from the Orlando Dean Mead office. He discussed 10 ways to enhance SEO for Lawyers and the firm. Below, we’ve identified the first 5 tips. Next week we will post part two in the series.

5 Tips for Lawyers Looking to Boost their Online Presence:

 1.    Write for your target audience:

Peers, the general public, and policy stakeholders — your audience to determines how you write and film your video. When deciding who to target, have the following questions in mind:

• What topics appeal to your audience the most?
• How do you need to approach use of legal jargon?
• And most important of all, what action do you want your viewers to take after watching your video?

 2.    Drive readers to take action:

Your blog articles are often the primary source of entry for new visitors to your website – your article may be their first impression of you and your firm. Try to get readers to convert quickly via an action to:

• Call your office
• Fill out an embedded form
• Sign up for mailing list
• Download a PDF
• Share an article
• Leave a comment

3.    Create a writing schedule:

 A writing schedule makes it easier to regularly add quality, relevant traffic to the website:

• Sketch out rough topics, such as industry news, attorney spotlights, and current event commentary.
• Assign authoring, editing, and approval/review responsibilities and workflow within your office.
• Post articles on days when your audience is most likely to read your content and visit your website.
• Build a backlog of articles for busy times of year, vacations, etc.
• Write what you like to write and get good at it.
• Blogging should become as much as a routine as responding to emails, reading the paper, and checking VMs.

 4.    Mine your existing content and research habits:

 Many first-time bloggers fail because they don’t know what to say. Leverage your existing content and legal resources to create compelling, web-friendly articles; a few resources:

• Legal papers
• Other legal blogs
• Online & offline news channels
• Seminars
• Event recaps
• Internal training

Becoming a web “curator” of 3^rd party links and articles is also an effective way to bring value to your blog while focusing on topics you enjoy.

Tip: Use an RSS feed reader such as Google Reader (google.com/reader) to subscribe to and follow other legal blogs and online publications.

Tip: Use alerts.google.com to get email notifications when Google finds certain key phrases. These can be key phrases from your firm, attorney names, or legal topics you wish to track. 

5.    Write on specific and timely topics:

 Articles about very specific topics taps into the “long-tail” SEO phenomenon – the majority of your website’s best qualified traffic will come via an assortment of very specific key-phrases. Writing in response to, or in anticipation of, popular topics is an effective way to capture a market that is very interested in services your firm can provide.

It can also be a way to be “first to market” on popular Google search phrases. When developing your blogging schedule, be sure to include major seasonal topics, such as taxes and elections.

Tip: Use Google Adword’s keyword research tool to find keywords related to your topic that may be popular among consumers; however, don’t be too fixated on keywords as the Google “Panda” update rewards natural writing and penalizes articles that are too stuffed with keywords.

Appleton Creative is a award-winning, full-service advertising agency located in Orlando, Florida. Appleton works with local, national and international clients to provide marketing strategies through print, web, social media and video production – all in house. At Appleton, we want to learn about your business, empower your marketing team and be your creative resource. Your marketing goals are worth a conversation: contact us at 407-246-0092 or info@appletoncreative.com.

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