SEO for Estate Planning Lawyers

Attorney SEO is a digital marketing tactic that involves optimizing and promoting a law firm’s website to increase its visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). When executed properly, it’s an effective strategy to get more targeted traffic from potential clients.

While there are many effective estate planning attorney marketing tactics, once SEO starts working, it can scale at a fractional cost. This is unlike pay per click marketing, such as Google ads, where you must keep increasing your budget. However, SEO requires you to keep up with Google’s constant changes to its algorithm.

Essentially SEO will ensure that people looking for legal help can find your attorney’s website and contact you. Here are its top benefits:

• Increased visibility in your service area:
  Today, when prospective clients need legal representation, they no longer turn to yellow pages — they conduct a Google search. SEO ensures you interject their research for estate planning services in your locality.
• Cost-effective lead generation channel:
  You can leverage numerous digital marketing tactics to get estate planning clients. PPC campaigns, for instance, can get you instant traction. Now, SEO takes time to get you qualified leads. But your cost per lead can decrease drastically in the long term.
• Earn a competitive advantage:
  Many law firms are still reliant on traditional law firm marketing tactics such as TV advertising. SEO offers a relatively level playing field against firms with millions of dollars.

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.

Local SEO

As a local business, estate planning attorneys can double dip in SERPs: appearing in both organic search results and the map pack. A sound local search strategy incorporates both of these.

Keyword Research

Is “estate planning legal services” the only right keyword to target on your website? Well, many people may search for something related to the criminal defense process. Content marketing calls for understanding your target audience and interjecting their journey at every stage to build trust.

Your prospects may search for something like, “How to protect your beneficiaries from future ex-spouses or creditors?” You want to appear in SERPs for all phrases your prospects search.

Keyword research using tools such as Ahrefs can help you find them.

Content Creation

Your homepage can only rank for one main keyword, such as “estate planning lawyer in your [primary service area].” The other relevant keywords you found in the last step will need individual pages. Depending on the keyword’s intent, you can craft blog posts or practice area landing pages for each one. 

Ultimately you want to create optimized content for all the keywords related to your services and establish your topical authority in the eyes of Google.

Link Building

To establish your site’s authority in Google’s eyes, you need “votes” from other websites. Called backlinks (clickable hyperlinks from other websites to yours), they are one of Google’s algorithm’s most prominent ranking factors.

The more competitive keywords you target, the more backlinks you need to rank on the first page of Google.

Technical Optimization

If your website isn’t crawlable and indexable by Google Bots, all of the above SEO efforts will go to waste. Further, you want your website’s design and user experience to reflect your law firm’s brand.

Measure Your SEO Performance

Are you getting any traffic, leads, and new clients via estate planninge SEO? You want to monitor your campaign’s progress and tweak your digital marketing strategy.

Google Analytics is an excellent tool for tracking your website’s visitors. You can set up goals and also get an overview of your conversions.