Let’s face it: there is no shortcut to Lawyer SEO. You will not find a hack that will grow your traffic by 600% overnight. Most SEO experts even suggest that no significant increase in ROI can be achieved until months after you’ve started implementing new SEO strategies.

However, just because there is no one-way ticket to the top of the SERPs doesn’t mean there aren’t simple tricks that’ll help you gain small upticks in traffic and conversions. These small boosts can add up, steadily improving your Lawyer SEO and its effectiveness.

Tip #1: Address Negative SEO First

Just starting a Lawyer SEO strategy doesn’t guarantee ROI. When SEO experts say “it’s going to take a few months,” they mean it takes a few months to see significant ROI from Lawyer SEO done right.

Since Law Firm SEO has many moving parts, it’s almost likely for beginners to make mistakes in SEO. Some newbie mistakes you might be making include:

• Keyword stuffing. You might be stuffing too many or too irrelevant keywords on your pages. This could harm your pages instead of helping them rank high in the SERPs.
• Keywords with low search volumes. Using long-tail and local keywords is one thing, but it’s another issue to use keywords no one uses in the searches. You might rank higher for them, but you’ll get little to no traffic from them.
• Keyword cannibalization. This might result in your page competing with each other, making it even more challenging to climb up the SERP rankings.
• Bad backlinks. Not all backlinks are good for your law firm SEO. As such, backlinks from suspicious, low-quality, spam-filled, and recently hacked websites will pull you down. After all, backlinks are a way to associate sites with each other, so you want to avoid getting associated with these bad actors in general.
• Bad user experience. No matter how excellent your content and well-optimized your pages are, people will start clicking off or get frustrated with your site. You want to ensure you have fast loading speeds, good navigation, and excellent readability to keep people on your law firm website.

The whole point of addressing negative SEO is to ensure you’re starting on the right foot. Of course, you can always start implementing new strategies, but anything already pulling you down will significantly reduce the possible progress you might get from new tactics.

Not to mention, addressing all the negative SEO by itself is a great way to instantly bounce back from possible traffic drops and indexing problems.

Tip #2: Start Link Building

For the most part, a lot of high-authority websites get backlinks organically. Because they’re already established, many of their content and pages are linked to by other websites, blogs, and news sources. These backlinks are a crucial Lawyer SEO ranking factor, as it is associated with site authority and trust, ultimately affecting your place in the SERPs.

That said, this isn’t as easy for smaller and newer websites to do. You can publish high-quality legal content all day, but not many people might be discovering them just yet. And since backlinks are a huge ranking factor, small, unoptimized, and new websites might struggle to break through this backlink hurdle.

So, how do you get these backlinks despite all the associated challenges? There are a few ways to “hack” your backlink profile:

• Claim unlinked mentions. Ever given an interview? Was your law firm mentioned in a blog post or a news story? If they aren’t linked to your law firm website yet, you can contact the web host or the editors and request that your mentions be linked to your law firm website.
• Get on directory listings. People look up directory listings for nearby law firms all the time. Review sites like Yelp and Google Reviews also help. Any high-authority site that gives you visibility is a great way to go.
• Write guest posts. Writing guest posts is a great way to get exposure from other audiences. That said, you also have to make sure you’re submitting to relevant sites since you want an audience and an anchor text that will fit yours. After all, getting views from people who might not be interested in lawyers or the law, you’re not getting high-quality traffic.

Tip #3: Diversify Your Platforms

Law firm content marketing is a great way to attract high-quality traffic. Since you’re providing content that people are already seeking out, the traffic you’re getting is from people who are at least interested in what you do or what you have to offer.

That said, don’t just stick to your legal blog. While most strategies for content marketing for attorneys focus on optimizing your legal blog, content marketing itself can be implemented on other platforms like emails and social media.

Of course, a few content marketing tactics need to be adjusted once you start posting on other platforms. For example, Twitter has a limit of 280 characters. Although you can expand the content to a few more by creating a thread, a 2000-word Twitter thread isn’t optimal social media content.

While social shares may not be a direct ranking factor, the potential traffic from these social shares is. For example, if your post goes viral, you boost your visibility. In addition, the more people know about you and have access to your social media profile, the more likely they might find links to your website.

That said, a lot goes into diversifying your content marketing. First, you need to audit your performance, look through your content, and consider whether a platform is worth it or not. In reality, not all platforms will work, and some won’t generate leads or traffic despite the effort you put into them. So it’s good to run 5 or 4 fruitful ones instead of being on all platforms and spreading yourself too thin.

Bottom-line

Every Law Firm SEO expert will tell you there’s never a shortcut to ROI. However, there are basic strategies that eventually become the foundations of your law firm marketing strategy. For example, even if you managed to get a lot of good backlinks, your pages still wouldn’t rank well if you had negative SEO factors pulling you down.

So, make sure you aren’t helped back by bad SEO basics before delving into more advanced strategies.

Author’s Bio

JC Serrano is the founder of 1000Attorneys.com, one of the very few private enterprises certified to process lawyer referrals by the California State Bar. His marketing strategies have continuously evolved since 2005, incorporating ever-changing SEO strategies into lawyerleadmachine.com.