What is Local SEO for Lawyers?

Local search engine optimization (SEO) for law firms is the practice of improving your website’s visibility in local search results. If you serve a specific geographic area, local SEO will help you boost your brand awareness in the locality, before ultimately generating more legal leads.

Pay attention to the top three local search ranking factors below:

• Distance: The closer your law office is to the local searcher, the higher your chances of appearing in local search results.
• Authority: Google also looks at the trustworthiness of your law firm based on your website content, positive online reviews, and citations from other sites or business directories.
• Relevance: Lastly, Google’s algorithms inspect the relevance of your website and legal services to the user’s local search query/keywords.

Generate recurring organic traffic: Local SEO increases your firm’s visibility to 98% of potential clients who search the web to find nearby lawyers.

Build an authoritative presence. Appearing in local searches helps you establish your thought leadership and win the trust of potential clients.

Use a shortcut to the top of the search engine results page (SERPs). Reach the top of SERPs without spending a lot of time and money on organic SEO strategies.

Now that we’ve established how the strategy can help you dominate your local area, let’s look at how to implement local SEO to get new clients. We’ll start with:

• Basics of setting up your business information in Google’s business directory,
• Then we’ll cover how to integrate law firm local SEO for your firm’s website,
• Finally, we’ll learn how to get you multiple placements in Google for your firm: organic search results + paid ones.

Local SEO 101 For Attorneys

Ready to take a stab at local SEO for your law firm?

Let’s begin with the low hanging fruits that will immediately lead to an improvement of your law firm’s local visibility.

1. Create an Optimized Google Business Profile

An optimized Google Business Profile (earlier referred to as Google My Business or GMB) not only pins your law firm on Google Maps, it also improves your chances of appearing in local search results.

Enter business details: Share your business name with the specific practice areas and legal services your firm offers. Then, follow it up with specific details of your firm’s business hours, address, and phone number. You also need to add pictures to your listing as it can help you get more clicks to your website.

Choose relevant categories: To ensure your GBP’s relevance, start by setting the right “keywords” or business categories — a primary category and secondary categories.

Type in “law firm” as your primary category and click ‘Add another category’for your specific legal expertise. Some examples are “personal injury attorney,” “family law attorney,” and “tax attorney.”

Take note that Google doesn’t allow anyone to create new categories that they don’t already recognize. If you can’t find the specific secondary category for your law firm, try entering “attorney” or “lawyer” to find a broader category that still encompasses your practice area.

Add photos: Adding high-quality photos of yourself, your team, and your firm’s office makes your GBP snippet visually appealing. The images help potential clients know who they plan on working with, and if they like what they see, they will call you.

Add FAQ: Often overlooked, they add a nice touch to your GBP. You want to answer the most common questions your prospects ask about your law firm here.

2. Get More Client Reviews

When looking for law firms online, you can bet that prospects will read a handful of reviews before making a hiring decision. Positive reviews work like a charm to persuade prospects to get in touch with you.

How can you get those reviews?

Personal review requests get the best results, especially if it’s sprinkled with your appreciation for clients who chose to work with you. Take a look at the example below on how you can craft your message:

Also handle negative reviews professionally and timely. Your goal should be to minimize bad experiences and show prospective clients that you’re committed to their success.

3. Get Local Citations From Online Directories

Start with building citations from legal directories like Avvo and FindLaw. Then move on to local business listings such as Yelp, Apple Places, Yellow Pages, etc. Google pins down your law firm’s business details, including your office location and contact information by looking at the info on these directories.

Whitespark is a cool tool for analyzing the citations of competing law firms and finding local directories where you can submit a listing.

4. Optimize Your Website For Your Primary Location

Be sure to mention your law firm’s primary business location in key website elements.

For example, Hipskind & McAninch, LLC mentioned their primary business location (Belleville) in important website elements, including their website’s meta title.

The website also included their business location, as well as location-specific keywords (Belleville personal injury lawyer) in other elements, namely:

• Main website headline
• Page subheadings
• Main content body

Next, it’s important to create dedicated practice area landing pages for your location.

The plan is simple: understand the specific legal concerns of your local audience, create a page that outlines details of your legal services, and optimize it for a relevant practice area keyword.

Double Dip SERPs

In SEO, the term “double dipping” means appearing twice on SERPs. While Google does its best to avoid organically listing the same site twice, you can still double dip by appearing in Google Maps.

Here are four strategies to help you do this:

5. Identify Legal Keywords Relevant to Your Practice Area

Other than adding your location to your practice area keyword (i.e., “personal injury lawyer + New York”), there are two things you should do when conducting keyword research for local SEO.

First, since we want to “double dip” in SERPs, you need to target keywords that trigger the Local Pack feature. A tool like Ahrefs will help you do this with their “Keywords Explorer” tool, which tracks the search features (SF) triggered by keywords.

The next thing is to check which keywords the top law firms in your practice area are targeting.

Again, a tool like Ahrefs comes in handy for this. Using “Site Explorer,” enter your competitor’s website and head to the ‘Organic Keywords’ report to view relevant local keywords you can target.

When choosing local keywords, pay attention to the search volume and keyword difficulty (KD) metrics.

Ideally, aim for keywords with a KD of 30 or below. Targeting these keywords allows you to gain tangible results from local SEO without spending thousands on consistent link building and content creation.

You should also try to get enough keywords to run your SEO efforts for 3-6 months. To help you get more keyword ideas, check out the following tips:

• Try using different seed keywords as long as they’re relevant to your legal practice.
• Build “topic clusters” by identifying main keywords about main topics and listing down related, supporting keywords for subtopics.
• Diversify your keyword pool by looking at question-based, phrase match, and broad match keywords.

Don’t forget to save target keywords by selecting and exporting them for tracking purposes. On Ahrefs, select the checkbox of your target keywords and click ‘Export.’

From there, choose to export your keyword list as a CSV file or directly to Google Sheets. Your report can also group keywords by terms or include the top 10 results for each keyword — both are helpful for content research later.

6. Create Content on Local Topics

In addition to location-specific landing pages, law firm websites can utilize other types of local content to gain the attention of the local community.

Create content that covers the legal nuances in your location and optimize it using a on page SEO tool like Surfer. For example, Scott Jay Senf published a blog post that explains how Florida approaches car accident cases as a no-fault state.

You can also cover local events and case studies that affect how cases in your legal practice are handled in court. Here’s an example from law firm Greenbaum, Law, Smith, & Davis LLP, which covered what New Jersey locals need to know about a well-settled legal precedent on attorney-client privilege.

7. Build Local Backlinks

A local backlink is a link from an authoritative local website that points to your website.

To get local backlinks, you can either earn them or build them yourself.

One way to earn local backlinks is to do volunteer work and let the local media catch wind of your efforts. Sure, it takes work and commitment, but getting backlinks naturally through local media coverage is a great way to get local links as well as put your law firm in the spotlight.

For a more targeted press coverage, you can also submit press releases to local media networks — be it online or offline. Press releases will help you get the attention of not just your target audience, but also bloggers, journalists, influencers, and other media who will mention your law firm.

Be sure to prepare a well-formatted and straightforward press release that immediately highlights the story and why it matters. It also helps to know the channels local media outlets use to receive press releases so you can plan ahead of time.

You can also attract local backlinks by:

• Publishing statistics or other data-driven content that relates to the local community.
• Appearing in legal interviews or podcasts.
• Creating useful legal tools and resources, like spousal support calculators or legal document templates.

If you need to build local backlinks more consistently, your best bet is to build them yourself. All you have to do is look for local websites that accept guest posts, create your article, and link back to your law firm’s website.

To search for these websites, run a Google search with a query in this format: practice area + location + “write for us.”

8. Start Marketing on One Social Media Platform

Social signals indirectly benefit your local SEO.

They help expose your law firm to potential backlink sources and increase your discoverability to local social media users, particularly those who search for nearby attorneys via the built-in search engine. Social media is also a great place to engage your prospects and build your brand, which is proven to be a top-ranking factor according to a recent GitHub leak from Google’s internal Content API Warehouse.

According to the leaked documents, Google tracks several entities to determine a brand’s relevance and factoring it when determining rankings. As such, it’s important for your brand-building efforts to extend beyond just SEO.

Try focusing on one social media platform so as to not diffuse your effort.

For example, if you’re a business lawyer, you could prioritize LinkedIn as your primary social media channel because of their user demographics (primarily professionals, consultants, and business owners). Here’s an example from immigration lawyer Zach Ahlstrom, who regularly shares content to grow his social media presence.

But if you’re a family law attorney, you can tap into the audience base of platforms like TikTok or Instagram. Take inspiration from family lawyer Lauren McClain’s social media strategy, which focuses on posting TikTok posts to connect with her target audience and grow her influence.

Triple Dip SERPs With Local Advertising

How about you take your visibility in SERPs further by running Google ads?

Let’s face it: local SEO takes time before you start seeing substantial benefits in terms of lead generation and conversions. Paid advertising, on the other hand, can give your law firm instant exposure to your target audience.

9. Experiment with Local Services Ads

Local services ads can effectively promote your law firm to a local audience, particularly bottom-of-the-funnel leads who are ready to hire an attorney. Unlike PPC ads that charge per click, they use a “Pay Per Lead” pricing model that only charges you whenever you get a lead.

To start using Google Local Services Ads, you need to complete a three-step registration process. This includes verification and eligibility checks — both of which are free and can be completed through the guided onboarding process.

As you set up Local Services Ads, remember that it’s just a part of a holistic law firm marketing strategy. For now, it’s a great channel for promoting your law firm and generating leads for the short term.

10. Leverage Google Screened

Earning your “Google Screened” badge maximizes the lead generation potential of your Local Services Ads.

Being Google Screened means your law firm is thoroughly vetted, including each of your attorney’s law licenses. The badge also clearly appears in SERPs directly above your law firm’s business profile. As a result, local searchers will have an easier time trusting your firm and its legal services.

View the requirements page for the details of your law practice’s screening and verification process. You must then run LSAs to get into one of these prominent positions. However, even if you don’t run paid ads, local searchers tend to click the “More [your legal service vertical name] lawyers” button.

This opens up a dedicated page for your legal vertical. Your listing can still appear in organic search engine rankings on the page below the blue horizontal separator after a couple of weeks.

11. Sponsor Local Events

Events are extremely effective in generating buzz around your firm, especially with coverage from local media companies, influencers, and regular attendees via social media.

An easy way to leverage local events for SEO is through sponsorships. Basically, your firm pledges a set amount to the event organizers, which in turn provides your firm with varying degrees of exposure (e.g., website links, logo placements, and promotional materials on-site).

Here’s an example from personal injury lawyer Steve Caya, who sponsored a local fundraising event for Friends of Noah Animal Rescue:

In exchange for his sponsorship, Steve Caya’s website received a link and placement of his firm’s logo and contact information.

To quickly search for event sponsorship opportunities, check your state bar association’s website. You can also find similar opportunities in national legal associations and organizations, such as the National Employment Lawyers Association (NELA).

Scale Your Local Presence

To take your local SEO efforts to the next level, you want to promote your law firm through a mix of traditional and online marketing tactics.

12. Host Legal Workshops

Hosting local events requires the most work out of all the local SEO strategies on this list, but it can also fast-track the growth of your law firm’s local presence.

Legal workshops are among the most common events that law firms host to engage the community. You just need to pick a relevant topic that can benefit your attendees, like personal injury claims, estate planning, family laws, and other legal matters.

Aside from legal workshops, other event ideas you can explore are:

• Professional networking mixers
• Charity fundraisers
• Small social events with community members (including past clients, colleagues, and other lawyers)

13. Collaborate With Local Influencers

Local influencers pertain to bloggers, well-known experts, and social media personalities with an established online presence.

Your law firm can leverage their online reach through influencer marketing campaigns like content sponsorships, collaborative community events, webinars, and interviews.

Collabstr is an easy-to-use influencer search tool that makes it easy to search for relevant influencers. You can filter influencers based on platform, industry, and—of course—location.

A good alternative to online influencers would be local businesses who can increase your firm’s exposure to the local community.

To start, go to a local business directory for a list of potential businesses you can collaborate with. The most reliable option would be your local Chamber of Commerce website.

14. Pursue Multichannel Local Marketing

It’s no secret that legal marketing is an incredibly competitive space.

If you consider yourself an underdog in the competition, you can’t afford to be left out. You need to embrace a multichannel approach and grab every marketing or SEO opportunity you can get.

For budding law firms, focusing on three channels is a step in the right direction:

• Traditional marketing(event sponsorships, business collaborations, billboards, etc.)
• Local SEO
• PPC advertising

Advertising, in particular, is a necessity for firms that specialize in legal practices that don’t generate repeat clients.

“What happened is that personal injury lawyers who, in our view, and in the view of most other lawyers and judges, were not nearly as good as us, started spending millions of dollars on TV, radio, and billboard ads,” says personal injury attorney Michael Bersani.

“It was an “if-you-can’t-beat-them-join-them-moment. Either we advertised or we perished — we chose the former.”

The good news is, no one should have to twist your arm before you consider paid advertising.

Remember that, when executed properly, local advertising not only leads to instant website traffic. It can also expose your law firm to other content creators and publications — AKA, potential link sources that can elevate your local rankings.

Pro Tip: Add LegalService Schema

You can use LegalService schema markup to share context of your law firm’s business. It’s structured data that helps search engines understand your operating hours, ratings, directions, and the like.

With a better understanding of your website’s content, you increase the chances of generating rich results in SERPs.

You can use Schema.org LegalService Schema generator to generate a schema.

Small Law Firms in Metros Can Also Win Big With Local SEO!

Here’s the thing: Digital marketing is a competitive landscape for small law firms, including organic SEO.

With local SEO, you can essentially “niche down” and avoid competing against bigger law firms with hundreds of thousands of dollars in their marketing budgets. You also gain the advantage of targeting users with a strong intent to convert.

The effort revolved around two things: the creation of multiple city-focused landing pages and a well-optimized Google Business Profile. Both enabled Hipskind & McAninch to secure the largest client they had ever closed to date.

Want us to kick off your local SEO campaign? Then contact us.