Getting your law practice found in local search results is becoming progressively more important. Almost 40% of all search requests carried out each month have some kind of local intent (for example: city or state name, zip code, town, and so forth.). There are specific strategies and factors that are influential in helping your law firm website perform well for local queries.
1. Categorize Your Practice Appropriately
Picking the correct categories for your firm in local listings is quite important. Quite a few firms do not spend adequate time thinking about which category labels to use. They discount this as an unimportant step. When your prospective clients are not looking up a particular firm by name, they will first seek out firms by category. If you don’t associate your law firm with the category they’re in search of, you won’t be found.
2. The Necessity of Backlinks and Citiations
Links From Other Sites: Backlinks are the currency of the web. A link to your site is like a vote for your site in the eyes of the search engines. All things being equal, a lawyer’s site that has additional hyperlinks from local and related websites will achieve more presence in local search results.
Citations: Citations are references to your law practice name, address, and telephone number on various other sites. These references do not need to include a link to your site. A good illustration of a citation would be an online attorney directory where your law practice is posted, but not linked to. Another would be a local yellow pages web site.
3. The Name Of Your Firm
Your firm title (ie: the name of your firm) is a particularly important component for ranking well in the local search engines. You need your title to be consistent throughout the listings along with having it contain relevant key phrases to your firm’s practice. Having uniformity helps your firm create confidence in the eyes of search engines. Incorporating relevant phrases in the title helps your firm get better positioning when individuals perform queries. As an example, The Law Offices of Joe Smith, located in Chicago, could create a title called Law Offices of Joe Smith | Chicago Personal Injury Attorney. Just keep the title consistent and uncomplicated. Do not try to stuff too many key words into your title.