SEO for Personal Injury Lawyers

SEO for Personal Injury and Car Accident Lawyers: DIY Guide

Based on our decade of experience serving injury lawyers in the most competitive metropolitan markets of the country, here’s an SEO guide to start your campaign on the right foot. Just for the record, we’ll heavily focus on Google as it leads the search engine market by a huge margin. Let’s start with the basics.

What is Personal Injury Lawyer SEO?

Personal injury search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your injury website for keywords your prospective clients are searching online. You want to leverage it to show up at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) in your primary service area.

But hey injury lawyer SEO is a competitive market. In our experience, it can take months of efforts and multiple thousands of dollars worth of content and links to get your website to the top for keywords that your clients are searching in Google.

So you may wonder:

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:

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, let’s clear the air on why we’re 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.

And hey those are just two of our recent injury client successes. Contact us if you want us to share more such results of injury SEO case studies.

Now that we’ve established our expertise, below is the first tactic to start raking up your firm’s online visibility.

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 organic search engine rankings is another.

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 injured 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.

Ensure Your Website is Indexed

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.

If it isn’t, then sign up into the Google Search Console and submit a sitemap by using a tool like RankMath.

Get a Professional Design

First you need a professional injury website that represents your firm accurately, and makes a strong first impression. Honestly this is the number one thing that can significantly affect your conversion rate.

And hey the website should also be easy to browse and offer a seamless user experience to your visitors. If your design leaves people confused on how to call you or submit an enquiry form, then your SEO efforts will go waste.

Also since people use their smartphones and tablets to visit websites, your site must also have a responsive web design that adapts to different screen sizes.

Check our list of few of the finest injury websites for inspiration.

Technical SEO

I have a controversial opinion:

Effective SEO in terms of technical aspects for an injury website is just about bloody basics, yet most firms miss the mark.

Now, see Google doesn’t care as much about your usage of alt image tags or meta descriptions.

But to facilitate the search engines crawl and index your site pages faster:

• Develop a hierarchal site structure that groups topically relevant pages. Example: Interlink your personal injury website’s different practice area and case pages.
• Ensure your website isn’t plagued with duplicate content issues.
• It should load fast. If you’re using WordPress as the CMS, then a plugin like WP Rocket can help in caching files and ensuring quick load times.

5. Keyword Research For Injury Firms

Achieving high search rankings is impossible without optimizing your web pages for the right keywords related 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

Ideally you want your website content strategy to be a mix of:

• client case studies,
• practice area pages targeting relevant ,
• blog posts that answer the pertinent questions of your prospects,
• attorney bio pages,
• about your injury firm, contact us, and other related website pages

You can also consider posting regularly on other platforms and communities where your target audience is likely to hang out. Just pick one and stick with it.

Here’s our complete guide on content marketing for injury firms you can explore more ideas at.

7. Create High Quality 
Legal Content

SEO marketing campaigns need high quality legal content that answers questions your prospective clients are searching for about the topic—comprehensively but in as simple a language as possible. Legal jargon won’t help here.

At our agency, our content director, Chelsey Fox, collaborates with legal writers, and a SEO tech strategist.

Our content production process for creating high performing injury content involves the following steps. You can take inspiration from it to create yours.

1. Starts with understanding the intent behind a target keyword,
2. Creation of legal content by an expert,
3. Quality checks by a tool called as Surfer SEO to optimize the content for search engines,
4. Usage of Grammarly for basic proofreading alongside human editing to make every piece shine.
5. Publishing the piece and sending if off to off page SEO team for building links (if required).
   
   With the competitiveness of injury SERPs, you want to go back to old content and ensure it remains relevant. Depending on the ranking fluctuations involved, anywhere between 3 to 6 months to an year could work for the same.

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 great 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 metrics such as keyword rankings, organic traffic, and leads using tools like Ahrefs, TrackRight and Google Analytics.

If you hire an injury marketing company to launch and observe your SEO strategy, it should provide you with a performance report the lead count, organic traffic, and the progress of your campaign.

And that’s it!

Keep reiterating and attacking more keywords for your SEO campaign to build your organic traffic pipeline.

Bonus: 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.

Hiring an Injury SEO Service vs. DIY: A Quick Breakdown

Now that you understand how to do injury SEO DIY, a great question to ask is if you need to pursue it yourself or hire an agency?

Let’s talk about this from a financial standpoint. In a survey conducted from 2020 to 2023, the average adjusted hourly rate of a law firm in Washington D.C. was $392. Personal injury attorneys typically charge a few hundred dollars an hour in fees. SEO agencies, on the other hand, rarely touch upwards of $150 per hour.

Sam Burrett, who does legal optimization at MinterEllison, further emphasized the negative consequences of the “Switch Cost Effect.”

He elaborates, “Whenever we multitask, get interrupted, or change tasks, our brains have to work in overtime to focus and refocus. And that refocusing has a significant cost, including a drop in IQ, decreased memory capacity, and reduced productivity.

If you’re doing injury SEO yourself, ensure you aren’t accumulating so many tasks that you pay the Switch Cost Effect price.

Here are some mental models I would recommend you to contemplate on:

• If you’re an injury lawyer already billing upwards of $200 an hour, it would make sense to outsource activities like marketing and SEO to a specialist like On The Map Marketing. We get you leads. You increase your billable hours, And both of us make more money.
• At the beginning of your injury firm’s journey? It might help if you spend some time doing injury SEO DIY until you could spare at least a couple of thousand dollars for hiring an agency.
• If you want to build your own injury marketing team inhouse, that’s cool too. Consider how you’ll handle that transition and the resources required for pursuing SEO in your locality. If you’re in a metropolitan area, it might still make sense to hire link building specialists to get you desired results faster.

FAQs About Personal Injury SEO