People have been using the internet as their primary source of information when looking for a lawyer for years. Now, almost everyone who needs legal advice will start their research on Google. Without a comprehensive SEO strategy, you won’t cut through the online noise and (sometimes bad) legal advice.
Data, too, confirms that businesses of all sizes need to make search engine optimization a top priority. Almost 70% of marketers noticed that SEO was more effective than PPC for driving sales.
If you want potential clients to find your law firm, you need to be where they’re looking: Google’s first page. Unfortunately, the number of positions on this page is limited, and you compete against hundreds or maybe thousands of companies like yours. So, you need to optimize your website for both potential clients and Google to make sure you rank among the top search results when people look for legal services in your niche.
Let’s see the top ten SEO strategies and SEO trends for 2022 to help your law firm’s website rank high on Google.
Top 10 SEO Strategies for 2022
1. Start with An SEO Audit
Staying on top of the latest news and trends in the SEO space is crucial, but it’s hard to make the right SEO decisions when you don’t know where your website is currently at. It’s especially true for companies that regularly publish content. It’s all too easy to forget about ongoing search engine optimization and continue to follow trends from past years without considering Google’s algorithm changes.
A quarterly SEO audit helps you find weaknesses and close the gap between your content marketing efforts and algorithm updates. It helps document your SEO strategy while also identifying immediate opportunities for improving user experience.
If you can’t remember the last time you’ve performed an SEO audit for your law firm’s website, this is the perfect time to analyze your site. You want to audit your content and links while also looking for technical problems that could keep crawlers from indexing and ranking your pages. Last but not least, you want to get an accurate view of your local SEO efforts and check on your competitors to make sure you’re not missing out on any ranking opportunities.
2. Identify The Best Terms to Rank for
Keyword research must become an essential element of your SEO marketing strategy in 2022. Start with making a list of the terms your website ranks for to see how many of them are still relevant to your niche and target audience.
It’s an excellent opportunity to find what words and phrases bring relevant traffic based on user intent. Simply put, you want to know what keywords get people who need your services and what terms attract website visitors interested in finding quick answers but with no buying intent.
Moving forward, you need to focus more on the keywords that are likely to attract potential clients and use these terms to identify long-tail keywords to rank for, as they’re fueling 91.8% of all search queries.
As a general rule, you want to go through at least two rounds of keyword research quarterly to identify the best terms to rank for in your area.
3. Prove Your Expertise with High-Quality Content
No matter how many algorithm updates Google goes through, one thing will remain unchanged: the search engine will always reward high-quality content. The last thing anyone wants is to click on a search result and get lousy advice or poorly written content, and Google knows it. So, it’ll continue to push better content on page one to increase user satisfaction.
Even if you are tempted to produce more content with fewer resources, it’s best if you don’t go down that rabbit hole.
Make top-quality content your priority, and both search engines and your website visitors will notice. Moreover, valuable content that provides straightforward answers and educates people will help you build an excellent online reputation for your law firm and establish you as an authority in your niche.
4. Increase Your Site’s Authority with Link-Building
Your valuable content needs to be shared online to increase your reach, and link-building plays an essential role in making your website more visible. For this to happen, links to your website should come from reputable, relevant sites — preferably in your niche and area of expertise for high-quality referral traffic.
Moreover, backlinks to your website are an excellent way to generate referral traffic and boost your domain authority.
Ideally, your content captures attention and organically wins links from other websites in time. However, we live in a less-than-perfect world, where thousands of articles and blog posts are being published daily, so cutting through the noise can’t always happen organically.
In this context, you need a link-building strategy that enables you to build a web of links from reputable sources back to your website. In plain English, you need to be proactive and continuously identify new, relevant sites that can link back to your law firm’s website, then contact them and find ways to get backlinks.
It’s a time-consuming task, but it pays off in the long run. You can assign someone in your marketing team to handle link-building or outsource it for increased efficiency. Either way, make sure you have clear rules about how websites qualify to become a source of referral traffic for your page. That’s because links from websites with poor reputations are likely to slow down your SEO marketing strategy and get your website penalized.
5. Display Social Proof to Build Trust with Your Audience
Reviews and testimonials can be a cost-effective way to highlight your professionalism and experience in your niche. Moreover, they’re highly effective for building trust with your audience and generating new business.
As much as 79% of consumers trust online reviews as much as recommendations from friends or family, so it’s in your best interest to display your most helpful testimonials on your homepage and landing pages.
Sure, you should still use testimonials in case studies and other downloadable resources, but make sure you also publish them directly on your website. Not everyone will want the extra content, so having social proof accessible with minimum effort enables you to share this content with more people faster.
6. Make Your Site Accessible with Optimized Visuals
SEO strategies in 2022 and accessibility go hand in hand. You want your content to be optimized for search and accessible for everyone who might need your services. Simple things like adding ALT text to images or enriching your video content with captions will make information accessible for people who don’t have immediate access to graphics or audio.
It’s a way to ensure everyone is included in the conversation, from people with blindness or hearing issues to users who use text-based browsers.
7. Improve Site Speed
It’s no secret that people like pages that load fast—preferably, in three seconds or less. Consequently, search engines favor websites that don’t keep users waiting. Google made it pretty clear that fast-loading websites are more likely to rank high in search results than slow pages.
So, your SEO strategy for 2022 must include a series of changes to improve site speed. Some of the quick ways to fix loading issues are:
- Resize and optimize images, so they load fast on all devices.
- Reduce the size of CSS and JavaScript text files.
- Use caching plugins to improve site performance.
- Make sure you have a reliable host for your website.
- Remove any unused files and media.
The list is long and includes a series of technical tips and tricks that can increase your website’s functionality and load speed. The trick here is to work with a professional team of web developers and marketers who know what needs to stay and what you can eliminate without sacrificing user experience for maximum efficiency.
8. Enhance Your Online Presence with Social Media
While your social media accounts don’t improve SEO directly, having an established online presence on two or three channels can help you consolidate your authority and credibility online. Plus, a well-curated Facebook or LinkedIn profile is very likely to rank high in search results and make it easy for potential clients to find you with a simple query.
Creating multiple touchpoints between your law firm and your audience shows you care enough about your clients to put your brand out there and learn to use platforms that people are most comfortable using. It closes the gap between your experienced lawyers and their audience, with a significant impact on lead generation and returns on marketing efforts.
9. Focus on Core Web Vitals for Better User Experience
Core Web Vitals could be one of the most important SEO trends in 2022. It’s about site speed on steroids to make sure you deliver a fast, excellent user experience. If you can improve mobile speed by as little as 0.1 seconds for an informational page, you can decrease your bounce rate by 8.3%.
What does that mean for your law firm? People spend more time on your page consuming content and learning about your services, and you’ll increase conversions and get more paying clients.
You need tech skills to nail Core Web Vitals and deliver a complete experience for your website visitors. So, make sure you work with a team of experts to make your site appealing to both search engines and potential clients.
10. Set up Your Google My Business Account
If you have a local law firm or several local branches, make sure each has a Google My Business account for increased visibility. Google is more likely to list your company at the top of local search results if you have an established presence in its directory.
Moreover, a Google My Business account is the perfect way to keep people updated about your contact information, working hours, type of services, and other essential information a potential client might find helpful.
Thanks to this Google feature, you can make everything available with just one click. It’s free and easy to use once you set up your account—the efforts are similar to managing any other social media account.
By adopting some or all of these strategies, you can stay on top of algorithm updates and ensure your website can be easily found by potential clients when they search for you or your service online.
Reminder: SEO is a long-term game, so every change you make today can impact performance for many months to come. At the same time, you need to permanently keep an eye on your rankings to consolidate your position and rank high in search results.