We believe that Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) isn’t just about getting your law firm’s site to number one with a handful of keywords. It is in fact made up of a variety of different elements to drive those all-important enquiries via your website which takes time, skill, knowledge, and patience.
Using SEO to appear on page one in search engines can provide law firms with benefits including:
- An increase in organic traffic to your website
- Building trust and credibility
- Understanding your customers’ needs
- Improving your return on investment (ROI)
- Remaining competitive within the legal industry
Each of these benefits can be achieved through utilising different tools and software. In the following blog, we will go through each of the ways that we help law firms improve their SEO.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site's presence in the Google Search results for free. You don't have to sign up for Search Console to be included in Google Search results, but it helps you understand and improve how Google sees your site.
You can use Google Search Console to:
- Make sure Google can find and crawl your site.
- Fix indexing problems and request re-indexing of new or updated content.
- View Google Search traffic data for your site - how often your site appears in Google Search, which search queries show your site, how often searchers click through for those queries, and more.
- Receive alerts when Google finds indexing, spam, or other issues on your site.
- Show you which sites link to your website.
- Troubleshoot issues for accelerated mobile pages (AMPs), mobile usability, and other search features.
As a law firm, even if you won't be using Search Console yourself, it’s beneficial to become familiar with it and the basics of optimising your site for search engines.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a web analytics service that provides statistics and basic analytical tools for SEO and marketing purposes. Google Analytics is a free service for anyone with a Google account.
Google Analytics is used to see:
- Who is visiting a website
- Where users are coming from
- How long users are on the site for
- How users spend their time on the website
- Whether they drive enquires
The SEO data Google Analytics provides is detailed and accurate. This helps to provide invaluable insights into your user's and website’s data. This can then be used to make changes to your website to suit your user’s needs.
Google Trends
Google Trends is a service that shows how popular any search term is in Google. The data is found through how frequently the term is searched for compared to Google’s total search volume over a particular time period.
With Google Trends you can also find keywords related to your search term that is currently trending and help you avoid keywords that are losing popularity. These two features can help make sure your law firm is using the most effective keywords to attract new visitors to your site.
Another feature of Google Trends is the ability to provide geographical information about users, making the data more relevant to your law firm.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is an SEO software suite that contains tools for link building, keyword research, competitor analysis, rank tracking and site audits. Ahrefs is mainly used to analyse a website’s link profile, keyword rankings, SEO health and to conduct keyword research for Google and YouTube.
Ahrefs is known for its backlink checker as it has one of the largest databases of live links. The crawling software Ahrefs uses recreates your site similarly to how a search engine sees it. This can help you understand your site better giving you the knowledge on how to optimise it for search engines.
Ahrefs offers four different types of plans for your business: Lite, Standard, Advanced and Enterprise. The price is determined by your type of plan and whether you choose monthly or annual billing.
If you are unsure about whether Ahrefs is right for you, as a website owner you can sign up for Ahrefs Webmaster Tools to get free limited access to Site Explorer and Site Audit.
AnswerThePublic
AnswerThePublic is a clever consumer insight tool that combines the suggested search questions from Bing and Google and visualises them into a ‘search cloud’. The search clouds are organised into categories such as what, where and why, providing an overview of the questions people are typing into search engines.
It is full of consumer insight you can use to create relevant and effective content and services for your customers.
AnswerThePublic is great for adding insight and reason for SEO strategies, often finding surprising keywords and search terms you otherwise wouldn’t have thought of. This in turn can help increase the search potential of your website through organic search.
Moz Keyword Explorer
Moz Keyword Explorer is a keyword research tool, making it easier to discover and prioritise keywords, taking out the hassle of a once repetitive process.
The tool can predict keyword performance based on search volume estimates of 95% accuracy. This can help measure competitiveness and estimate click-through rates (CTR) on the search engine results page (SERPs).
You can access a free version of the Moz Pro SEO Suite (including the Keyword Explorer) by creating an account. However, with the free version you won’t be able to create multiple keyword lists.
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is a desktop program that you can use to crawl websites and collect data about them.
Screaming Frog is used to:
- Find broken links
- Find duplicate content
- Find missing title tags
- Generate XML sitemaps
- Audit redirects
- Visualise site architecture
- Connect with Google Analytics, Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights
Without using a tool such as Screaming Frog, the only other option is to manually check every page on your site. This results in a high chance of missing a redirect, duplicate content, meta refresh etc.
Screaming Frog is available for both Windows and Mac. With the free version you can crawl up to 500 URLs and the paid version gives you unlimited crawling. Whilst we mainly use it for SEO purposes, it can also be used for other needs such as website audits and competitor analysis.
Google Business Profile
Having a Google Business Profile account is the only way to claim ownership of your Business Profile, gain management rights to it, and access free features to increase your visibility on Google.
Data from a 2019 BrightLocal study showed on average, businesses receive 943 Search views, and 317 Maps views each month through Google Business profile. This data shows there is a massive opportunity to get more views, clicks, and enquiries through localised content. Regular posting to your firm’s Google Business Profile can earn you a spot in the local 3-pack, which is the top 3 business listings for relevant search terms.
PageSpeed Insights
Google PageSpeed Insights (PSI) is a popular tool for running speed tests on your site. PageSpeed Insights provides a complex basis on which you can make decisions to strengthen your website’s performance. Recommendations by the PageSpeed Insights are based on the latest industries’ best practices for mobile and desktop web performance.
The tool relies on metrics to calculate PSI scores. These include metrics such as Core Web Vitals, which are a part of Google’s ranking algorithm. PSI scores give you a good idea of whether your pages are meeting Google’s speed and performance standards. Higher scores and better keyword rankings have been proven to show a strong correlation.
If slow speed within your site is left unsolved, this can hinder any SEO strategy causing pages to not be fully optimised.
Does your law firm need support with its search engine optimisation?
Our Search Marketing team and in-house experts are all specialists in usability, technical marketing, insights, analytics, and website conversion. We deliver Search Marketing strategies which are bespoke to your law firm’s goals and are built on a detailed understanding of how your firm’s audience find your site, behaves, and converts.
Have a look at the core components of our SEO services:-
To find out more, call us on 0117 325 0200 or send us an email.