SEO for Personal Injury and Car Accident Lawyers: DIY Guide
Article by Kristaps Brencans, CEO at On The Map Marketing
Our approach to SEO marketing for personal injury lawyers is holistic, covering all the bases—content, links, user experience, technical, and local.
The injury SEO guide below covers all of these elements, and will help you get more of your ideal clients. But you can also get an audit from us by clicking on the button below.
Table of Contents
What is Personal Injury Lawyer SEO?
Personal injury search engine optimization is the process of optimizing your injury website for keywords your prospective clients are searching. You want to show up at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) in your primary service area. Personal injury is one of the most competitive search engine markets—more so if you’re in a metropolitan neighborhood.
SEO is also slow to pick up. You’ll see traffic and leads from it for your injury practice only after 6 months or even more. Further injury lawyer SEO services can be super costly—running even upwards of $10k per month.
So you may doubt if it’s worthwhile to even pursue SEO?
How Does Personal Injury Attorney SEO Grow Your Law Firm: 3 Top Benefits
SEO for personal injury lawyers is one of the most cost effective and scalable attorney digital marketing tactics. Here are the top reasons you should pursue it:
Cheaper Than Referrals
Referrals from the courthouse are unreliable. TV advertising and other forms of injury marketing are generally expensive. A sound SEO strategy can help build a pipeline of high quality leads at an affordable budget.
Compounding Returns
Once your injury website ranks on the first page—and especially in the top three positions for keywords your clients are searching—the organic traffic and leads for your injury practice will soar.
Cheaper Than PPC
A quick way to show at the top of search results is starting a Google Ads campaign. But personal injury PPC is one of the most competitive lawyer niches and it can cost you up to $400 per click. SEO can deliver leads at the fraction of cost of PPC.
Now that you understand the top features, let’s look at how to do SEO DIY for your personal injury practice.
10 Proven Injury SEO Tactics (+ Bonus Website Audits)
Let’s look at a step-by-step guide to get your injury firm some of that good organic traffic. But first, you may wonder, how are we qualified to share advice.
Why Trust Our Injury SEO Advice?
Our personal injury clients rank for competitive keywords and get results. Let me show two quick examples. Tijerina Legal Group dominates the “Personal Injury Lawyer McAllen Tx” SERP: #1 organic and #2 on the 3-Pack
Hipskind & McAninch, LLC’s organic traffic has drastically improved and continues to grow. Oh, and SEO has helped them close them the largest case in their history. Now that we’ve established our expertise, below is the first tactic.
1. Claim Your Google Business Profile
Formerly referred to as Google My Business, Google Business Profile (GBP) is a free listing by the search giant. Optimizing your GBP, choosing a relevant category to optimize the online visibility in the Google 3-Pack. To do this, you must claim or add your personal injury business listing on your Google Business Profile Manager.
This is the easiest quick win to start your law firm SEO.
Watch the video for another quick primer on starting SEO for your firm by our CEO.
2. Use Local SEO Strategies to Improve Your Online Presence in Google 3-Pack
Next, observe the best practices to raise your Google Maps rankings and generate more leads. We helped Fasig|Brooks increase local and organic traffic by 152.39%, resulting in 46.06% more inquiries from potential clients. Here’s how we were able to do it:
Build Local Citations
First, we entered the law firm’s name, address, and phone number (NAP) in its GBP.
We then signed up for online directories to get the law firm listed on the website.
Doing this allowed us to maintain NAP consistency across multiple business listings, thus strengthening your online presence and trust with your audience.
3. Get More Online Reviews
Positive online reviews help convince your prospects to contact you for its legal services. It’s the online badge of approval and acts as a referral. That’s why encouraging your customers to share their experience working with you is crucial to help you attract more repeat and new clients. Just as important, we replied to reviews to show that the firm values their feedback and appreciates the time they took to write the review. You can check out our guide on getting more Google Reviews to learn some tactics.
4. Optimize Your Personal Injury Law Firm Website
Optimizing for local search is one thing—improving your search engine rankings is another. You’ll need an optimized injury website ready to rank for your target keywords.
Whether you’re looking for someone to create a brand-new website or restructure your old site, On The Map Marketing is at your service. But here are our battle tested tips for you if you prefer to design your site yourself.
Grab a Decent Domain Name
A keyword rich domain name isn’t as important but picking up a short and memorable one will ensure your website has a recall value within your prospects. It also helps build trust.
But don’t overcomplicate the process of finding a domain name either. Just pick one that exudes good confidence and move on.
Pay Attention to Your Design
Since people use their smartphones and tablets to visit websites, your site must have a web design that adapts to the device’s screen size.
It allows your website to rank higher on Google searches and provides a seamless user experience that could help increase sign-up forms and calls.
A good indicator of a well-optimized website is scoring high on Google PageSpeed Insights. But it should also look professional.
Check our list of few of the finest injury websites for inspiration.
Audit Technical SEO
You want to help search spiders find pages and crawl them efficiently. Start with checking if your website is indexable in Google by using the search operator “site:[YourInjuryWebsite].com,” and ensuring its pages are showing up in SERPs.
Next ensure your website isn’t plagued with duplicate content issues and slow loading times.
Link Internally
In relation to helping search engines crawl and index your site pages faster, you must develop a site structure that groups topically relevant pages. An example is interlinking your personal injury website’s different practice areas and case pages.
We did this for Roberts | Jeandron Law, where we grouped all potential cases under the personal injury category in the menu. It’s one of the things that helped the site achieve 175% more organic traffic and 160% business inquiries in seven months.
5. Keyword Research For Injury Firms
Achieving high search rankings is impossible without optimizing the right keywords for your legal services. Key to our research is listing search queries with the highest monthly search volume and lowest keyword difficulty (KD). From here, we refine our list by assigning keywords to optimize existing and new pages on your site.
What Are Some of The Best Keywords For Personal Injury Lawyers?
Here are ten examples of keywords related to personal injury that meet the requirements above:
- personal injury calculator
- is personal injury court real
- do you have to pay your medical bills from a personal injury settlement
- how much does a personal injury lawyer make
- personal injury demand letter policy limit
- types of personal injury cases
- what percentage do lawyers take for personal injury
- is a personal injury settlement taxable
- how long does a personal injury lawsuit take
From the researched keywords, we identify questions your potential clients may ask, such as:
- “What is personal injury protection coverage” and
- “How long do personal injury cases take to settle?”
These allow injury and car accident lawyers to create blog and social media posts that answer these questions and share them with your target audience.
6. Develop a Sound Content Marketing Strategy
When you build a sound content strategy, you get to establish authority and expertise online for your practice area. It’s all about showcasing your know-how about the injury practice area you specialize in. But before you begin, you need to nail down the pain points of your audience and try to find the best content formats to reach them.
Ideally you want a strategy that’s a mix of client case studies, practice area pages, blog posts, videos. Here’s our complete guide on content marketing for injury firms.
7. Create High Quality Legal Content
SEO marketing campaigns need high quality content that answers questions people are looking for about the topic. Your content also needs to be presented and written in an easy-to-read manner. Generally you want to optimize your content for search engines and ensure it reaps the benefit of long-term organic traffic.
Moreover with the competitiveness of injury SERPs, you want to go back to old content and refresh it, ensuring it remains relevant.
8. Build Links to Scale Your Injury Attorney SEO Campaign
Link building or off page SEO is a crucial part of your search campaign. It’s almost impossible not to rank on search results without backlinks from authoritative websites. Search engine algorithms count these links as votes for your practice’s website.
With years of SEO and marketing efforts, we secured high-quality links to Roberts | Jeandron Law, starting with its lawyer profile on usnews.com. This website attracts approximately 25.4 million organic visitors every month.
These backlinks allow Google to trust the law firm enough to improve its organic search rankings because authoritative websites link to it. A super way to scale your injury law firm’s authority is launching a digital PR campaign.
Watch the video podcast of our CEO breaking down the strategy with Fery Kaszoni, a digital PR expert.
9. Leverage YouTube Videos
As the second largest search engine in the world, YouTube helps boost your legal marketing efforts by providing your client base with a way to learn answers to personal injury questions they may have in video format.
The other great thing about YouTube videos is that they can also rank on Google search. This means you can rank your blog post and video for the same keyword on organic search, diversifying your online marketing strategy and increasing your visibility.
10. Track Results From Your Personal Injury Lawyer SEO Campaign
SEO doesn’t stop after launching a SEO campaign. You should monitor your site’s SEO performance by tracking its keyword rankings, organic traffic, and leads using tools like TrackRight. And of course, Google Analytics.
If you hire a marketing company to launch and observe your SEO strategy, it should provide you with a report containing the results and actionable items to help keep you in the loop. And that’s it! Keep reiterating and attacking more keywords for your SEO campaign to build your organic traffic pipeline.
Kristaps Brencans, CEO at On The Map Marketing Audits Personal Injury Websites
How about we make SEO a little practical? Here’s our CEO, Kristaps Brencans, an injury SEO expert, breaking down few injury websites: what they are good at in terms of their SEO and what they can do better.
Frequently Asked Questions about Personal Injury SEO
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SEO Vs. PPC for Personal Injury Lawyers: Which is Better?
Unlike SEO, pay-per-click (PPC) is a short-term strategy where you pay for ads to appear at the top of Google search’s first page. However, maintaining a high return on investment (ROI) requires ongoing management and optimization. For instance, we were able to help Nunez Law acquire 17 leads in two months, with each lead costing $400.
That said, SEO is best if you have the patience to run a cost-effective marketing campaign with a high ROI.
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How Much Do Personal Injury Lawyer SEO Services Cost?
Agencies charge upwards of $3,000 for their personal injury law firm SEO services. Some service providers may have a lower asking price, but that could also mean they don’t have the experience and resources that more established agencies have.
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How Long Does It Take To See Results From Personal Injury SEO?
Search engine optimization involves a lot of moving pieces. Let’s look at the combination of strategies you need to execute to achieve SEO success.
What Do Our Personal Injury SEO Clients Say About Us?
“…What made On The Map special was that we were given our own personal SEO Manager, Andrew. Andrew brought a great balance of professionalism
and
personability…”
“These folks are great! Very skilled, very conscientious, with a lot of follow through, and reasonable pricing. Always accessible and go the extra mile when needed. I strongly recommend this….”
“…They have put us on the first page of Google for a variety of important search terms. I now feel that my law firm is on equal footing with larger law firms in the very competitive sphere of digital marketing…”
Why Personal Injury Attorneys Should Hire On The Map Marketing?
When it comes to your law firm marketing needs, On The Map Marketing is a top SEO agency to take your personal injury practice to the top of SERPs.
Our SEO process combines the best design and content practices to help you produce a cohesive and well-thought-out strategy. How about we chat growing your personal injury leads through SEO?