Whether your law practice is a few years old or if you’re in the process of putting it together, you will be familiar with the troubles a law firm has to face to get potential clients to sign with it. When you have an established law practice, you have to worry about an increased level of competition. And when you just laid down the foundation of your firm, the challenge of proving your mettle lingers.
This aspect means whether new or old, your law firm is always in need of marketing techniques, like good content, that not only surpasses the competition but also gives you a boost in terms of credibility that your potential clients can rely on.
Seeing that local TV spot or small advert in the local newspapers doesn’t have the same effect in audience outreach as it did a decade or so ago, it’s getting increasingly harder for law firms to maintain an audience outreach.
This doesn’t mean all hope is lost. On the contrary, modern marketing methods, such as search engine optimization (SEO) and user experience enhancement can get your clients to trust you with their legal matters in easy yet super effective ways.
That’s why more and more lawyers are turning to digital marketing and an seo company that understands Google My Business to attract more clients through law firm SEO.
Learn more about how digital marketing and other aspects such as social media, link building, and google analytics plays a large role in being visible to potential clients today. Don’t hesitate to tap into a larger strategy with seo services. Remember seo services can enhance your business visibility exponentially.
What is Google My Business?
Simply put, Google MyBusiness is a critical component of digital marketing for specific types of businesses. Google My Business is a profile creation and management tool that helps local businesses compile and present their business information to potential clients.
This aspect includes necessary information such as the business’ location and business hours, to advanced statistics such as customer reviews and star ratings. Google uses this information to represent the business across any searches via the world’s most popular search engine. Your business can define and express itself to potential clients who are actively looking for a law firm in your area, as well as your field of expertise.
How Can It Help Deploy SEO for Lawyer and Partner Practices?
A well-devised SEO campaign as part of a larger digital marketing strategy highlights your business presence to potential clients. At the same time, it can also help you establish your credibility in the legal field. Using local strategies for Google My Business goes a long way in building your online presence while keeping both of these aspects in mind.
This way, you can ensure that you’re not only waving the flag of your law firm to get new clients to notice your business but you’re also setting your practice apart from your competition.
Why Optimize Your Google My Business Listing?
Remember multiple options for any service are literally at our fingertips. Google My Business’ approach between outreach and brand management makes sure clients go beyond just seeing the name of your law firm, and take steps to contact you for their legal needs.
This aspect is not a walk in the park if you’re trying to do everything by yourself. As noted earlier this is just one aspect in an approach that includes link building, google analytics, holistic marketing strategy, and social media, in addition to google search optimization. SEO for attorneys will take time and consistent effort to pay off but remember this type of SEO for law firms is the only way to go.
The process becomes far more manageable when you know what you’re up against and what kind of steps you should take to get search engines and social media channels to highlight your practice through this type of digital marketing.
This component allows you to go a step further from organic search results and highlights your presence on local results that appear on top of the front page of Google. This way, through SEO marketing, your law firm gets noticed by more people and has a higher chance of capturing new clients through proper law firm SEO.
Seeing this is easier said than done, we completely understand how it might feel like another case of something that’s too good to be true. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you may get frustrated after using Google local optimization because you’re not getting any results.
Here’s what you need to understand, simply creating a Google My Business listing doesn’t guarantee you results. You must pay proper attention to its optimization to get the most out of your marketing strategy and activities.
The following six ways are tried and tested strategies to optimize your local business listing on Google, so you can go beyond the run of the mill lawyer SEO techniques and gain tangible results through your marketing activities.
Fill Out All the Required Details in Your Listing
Whether you’ve already created your Google My Business profile to begin your SEO journey or if you’re still in the process of getting one for your business, it’s crucial to remember that the more detailed your profile is, the more chances it has of ranking higher on local law SEO results.
Adding your website link and your business name is not enough. You also have to pay attention to your contact details, your law firm’s address, and your business hours. These small but essential details take your Google My Business account from being just a mere listing to a proper business profile that’s designed with law firm SEO in mind. These aspects help you get Google’s attention as a prominent business and allows you to rank higher on Maps searches.
Pro Tip: Don’t Forget to Add Your Service Area Details
When filling out the required details in your Google My Business profile, don’t forget to pay attention to the service area information. This aspect is what tells Google about the region you’re focusing on and helps you gain prominence in local keyword searches. The service area information pertains to businesses that entertain walk-ins at their business address. It can also apply to companies that serve customers through visitation. Since you do both as a law firm, make sure to set the service area accordingly. This information is simple to add through city names, area names, or postal codes.
Verify Your Listing
Even if your business already has a listing with its address information already created, you must verify it. This approach provides your listing with more credibility and helps it improve its rankings among local lawyer SEO results. The fact that claiming an existing listing or verifying a new listing is a straightforward process makes this step that much easier to follow.
Pro Tip: Provide an Accurate and Active Mailing Address
In some cases, Google provides you with more than one option for verification. But given that you are creating your Google My Business listing for a law firm, you will be required to provide a mailing address to receive the verification code and enhance your law firm SEO. Make sure that your address is accurate and one where you receive mail without any issues, as obtaining this code is crucial to verify your profile.
Focus on Reviews
It is a well-established fact that Google My Business reviews have an impact on your overall local keyword rankings. Any law firms that have more reviews on their profiles have a higher chance of ranking on the coveted top three results. This strategy is also influenced by the overall rating of your law firm since better-rated businesses stand apart from the average joe. This strategy is why it is essential that you focus on getting real, authentic reviews by your customers. Just make sure that you deliver stellar service to your clients, so you get nothing short of a 5-star review out of each of them for your law firm SEO.
Pro Tip: Actively Encourage Clients to Leave Reviews
Due to Google’s guidelines of ensuring transparency and authenticity, you can neither buy reviews or ask your online social circle to leave reviews on your Google My Business profile. The reviews have to come directly from real customers who have conducted business with your law firm. With this strategy in mind, make sure that you actively ask your clients to leave reviews on your profile. This task can be done through emails, texts, and even phone calls to clients you have served recently. Since leaving a review takes just under a minute and can be done by clicking on a short URL for your Google My Business, this is not a big ask for most clients as long as you don’t annoy them and keep it professional.
Add Photos
Thanks to social media, most online customers have gotten used to interacting through visual cues. That’s why mere text posts don’t gain as much online prominence as visual media does. This phenomenon is more prominent than ever in terms of your Google My Business profile. According to research, Google My Business profiles that have photos on them get more clicks, views, and direction requests than listings without any images. Since more interaction with your target online audience gains you more prominence over your rankings, this is an easy yet essential optimization aspect that you shouldn’t overlook in any case.
Pro Tip: High Quality Images of Your Practice Go a Long Way
Being a law firm, you have the opportunity of standing out from a slew of your competitors by merely posting high-quality photos of your offices. Presenting your organic target audience with the imagery of a highly professional environment gets more potential organic clients to trust your practice with their legal matters. This simple activity has a lot of impact on your law firm SEO and allows you to attract more online clients through search engines. With the availability of high-end cameras in phones, getting such pictures has never been easier. But if your seo companies want to go the extra mile, hire a professional photographer to capture the essence of your practice to help you appeal to your online social audience.
Add a Booking Button
It wasn’t so long ago that Google My Business added a booking feature for business listings to take direct appointments right from the search results. This feature helps customers to make appointments without having to leave their browser window or even contact your business beforehand. Since this feature is not dependent on business hours, it allows you to take bookings from new and also existing customers after hours. Most companies are currently not using this feature, which can make your law firm stand apart from the usual slew of competition.
Pro Tip: Check Your Search-to-Contact Ratio
While using this new booking feature, you, like proper seo companies, must pay attention to your links like Google My Business listing insights. Like most search engines and social media tools, you can use these insights to know exactly how your listing is performing on search results. By using various factors of assessment, you can learn about areas where your service excels and about aspects where you need significant improvement. All in all, it helps you take steps to enhance your firm listing and modify your outreach methods for maximum exposure to new clients.
Perform Relevant Activities to Improve Rankings
Apart from optimizing your Google My Business profile through these features, you can also perform other relevant activities that can help you improve your listing’s prominence over local search results. This organic traffic aspect includes the creation of listings that have your business’ name, address and phone number (NAP) profile, distribution of engaging content over the web, and development of high-quality link building with backlinks to relevant sources. When put together, these internet marketing tactics like link building, social media, and law firm SEO activities can have a prominent effect on your Google My Business listing and help improve its rankings noticeably.
Pro Tip: Focus on High Quality Content
One of the best ways to tackle online marketing and improve your rankings on Google and other search engines is by focusing on the development of high-quality content like blog posts for your business. This component also applies to local search results. By creating keyword-rich content and engaging social media posts that link back to your site, you can create a network of credible links that don’t exist for the sake of it but serves a purpose. In the long run, this network establishes your credibility to Google and helps you improve your local search rankings. Ultimately, it all comes together to help you attract more organic traffic clients through your Google My Business profile.
Contact Us Today to Improve Your Local Law SEO Rankings
At 51 Blocks, we specialize in performing law firm SEO to help law professionals get the most out of their marketing efforts. Whether you have just started your practice or if you are looking to improve your current marketing strategies, our white hat SEO and marketing strategies at 51 Blocks, an SEO company, can ensure to obtain the search engine optimization results that you want.
We understand that internet marketing or google analytics is not a walk in the park and user experience and a proper SEO campaign matters to building a business. That’s why we use up to date SEO strategy options and understand how legal directories and the right blog posts can make a difference. A proper SEO strategy, with the right keywords in an overall effective marketing campaign that is conducted by the right firm can yield organic traffic that is sure to increase your case load.
If you have any questions about SEO for law firms or need further information regarding blogs or the way our firm handles internet marketing, organic search, search engines, overall google search and our SEO strategy, do not hesitate to contact our firm at 51 Blocks today!
