Learn everything you need to know about doing SEO for solicitors in this step-by-step guide.
This SEO tutorial is broken down into the 5 core aspects of solicitor SEO. Feel free to skip to the part you need help with the most by clicking on the navigational links below.
- Google My Business (Rank in the local 3 pack)
- On-Page SEO (Rank in the SERPs)
- Location Targeted Pages (Rank in additional local towns)
- Local Business Schema (Increase Google’s confidence in your website)
- Content Marketing (Get more leads and backlinks by answering questions)
Correctly Setting Up Your Solicitors Google My Business
Most customers who are searching for a solicitor are looking for a local business that’s not too far away from them.
We can prove this to be true by searching for the broad seed keyword “solicitor”.
Whenever you see Google My Business listings appear above the organic SERP listings, you know people are looking for a local company.
Because of this, it is crucial that you properly set up your solicitors Google My Business account.
Google My Business Categories For Solicitors
Choosing the right business categories for your solicitors can make a large impact on your listings visibility.
The best way to decide which category to use is to look at what your top ranking competitors have used and copy that.
Taking a look at the local listings where I am in Colchester, I can see most companies use “Lawyer” as their primary category, and some other lower ranking solicitors use “Criminal justice attorney” and “Legal services”.
Because of this, we would be best to use “Lawyer” as our primary category and then select “Criminal justice attorney” and “Legal services” as our additional categories.
Set Up Tracking For Your GMB Performance
To properly measure the results of your Google My Business optimisations, we need to set up Google Analytics and Google Search Console tracking from Google My Business to the website.
To do this, simply add the following string to the end of your website address in the website field in Google My Business.
?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=gmbFor example https://website.com/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=gmb
This will now allow you to analyse how much traffic Google My Business has sent your website, which keywords you’ve been appearing for and how highly Google My Business traffic converts into new solicitor leads.
Your Businesses NAP Consistency
One of the most important Google My Business ranking factors is the consistency of your name, address and phone number (abbreviated as NAP) across the web.
Google uses references of your business name, address and phone number on other websites to gain trust that you are actually located where you’ve said you are.
It crawls the local web directories to check you have kept your NAP consistent across all verticals.
Many solicitors will have variations of their address or outdated information across the web, which harms their overall rankings in the “local 3 pack”.
And so you need to decide at the very beginning of your SEO project exactly what your business name, address and phone number will be across your online listings.
Online Citations (References To Your Solicitors NAP)
The next step is to build out citations that list your consistent NAP across all the major website directories.
This is a laborious process, but the results can pay off big over the long-term.
Some of the most important websites to get your solicitors listed on are:
- maps.apple.com
- thephonebook.bt.com
- facebook.com
- directory.independent.co.uk
- directory.mirror.co.uk
- directory.thesun.co.uk
- foursquare.com
- local.standard.co.uk
- directory.dailyrecord.co.uk
- yell.com
You must list your business NAP on those websites as an absolute minimum, but for best results make sure you list it everywhere you can.
We have a list of over 100 high quality citation websites we can add solicitors to.
Get Real Reviews For Your Solicitors
Another vitally important ranking factor for Google’s local results is the amount of reviews your business acquires.
Proximity (how close the customer is to your business) plays a huge role in how likely your listing is to appear, but you can increase your overall service area by getting more positive reviews.
Simply ask your previous happy customers to leave a review and send them the custom link to your Google my business page.
On-Page SEO For Solicitors
The next step is to make changes to your actual solicitor company’s website to increase the amount of keywords you rank for in the organic SERP listings.
Find The Keywords People Search When Looking For Local Solicitors
Before we can start optimising for solicitor keywords, we need to find out what it is people are actually searching for when they’re looking for your services.
For this I use ahrefs, which is an expensive (but well worth the money) SEO keyword research tool that allows you to see the average amount of searches each keyword gets per month.
Simply go into the ahrefs keyword explorer tool and type the seed keyword “solicitor”.
Then click on “phrase match” to see all the keywords that contain our seed keyword “solicitor”.
We then want to add an “include” filter of a major city in your country. For example “london”.
We do this to figure out exactly how people search for the solicitor industry as a whole. If we were to just use your local town, keyword research tools like ahrefs may not have enough data to give us useful insights.
For example, ahrefs says the keyword “employment solicitor london” gets 80 searches per month, whereas “employment solicitor colchester” gets 0 – 10 searches per month. Does that mean we shouldn’t bother doing SEO for Colchester?
Absolutely not! Building out an SEO optimised page targeting “employment solicitor” will rank for a variety of related keywords, help your GMB listing show up when people in Colchester search “employment solicitor” (notice how Google says “Their website mentions solicitors” in the 3 pack) and increase your overall relevance to other solicitor related keywords.
Mapping Keywords To Existing Pages & Planning New Landing Pages
Now that we have a list of keywords people search for when looking for solicitors online, we can now go through our existing website and map out which pages we can target these keywords with.
Again I use ahrefs for this as I can easily export all of the pages on my website into a spreadsheet, along with the most important on site SEO attributes outlined.
After you have your web pages exported into a Google sheet, add an extra column to the right titled “Keywords” and note down which page is best suited for each keyword you found in the previous step.
If you do not have an existing webpage that can target one of the newly found keywords, you want to add these to the bottom of your Google sheet so you can create them later.
On-Page SEO Implementations
We now have our list of pages and which keywords we intend to target them with, and so we now want to go through and make the implementations to target the keywords.
The three main on page SEO factors we need to consider are the title tag, h1 tag and URL.
Ideally, we want to include our chosen keyword in each of these elements on our web page.
However it is critically important you do not change the URL of a page that is currently getting a lot of traffic.
Before changing your URLs make sure you check them in Search Console and Google Analytics to see if they are currently bringing in organic or referral traffic.
If the page is not currently getting any traffic, you are usually safe to change the URL to include your chosen keyword. Just make sure you set up a 301 redirect from the old URL and update any internal links.
Then go through and update your h1 and title tag to better target the keyword.
You will also want to make sure the page is linked in your main menu if there is a good traffic potential, as that will show Google the page is important to your website and increase its URL rating.
Building Additional Solicitor Service Pages
After you’ve gone through and implemented all of the changes to your existing solicitor service pages, we now want to build out the additional services we found during the keyword research stage.
You again want to make sure that the keyword is in your URL, h1 and title tag. You also want to include the keyword a few times throughout your copy to increase the keyword density and overall relevancy.
These new pages should also be added to the main menu if there is a good traffic potential.
We should also internally link to these pages from your other existing service pages to increase their chances of ranking in Google.
Finally, we want to get the ball rolling as fast as possible by submitting the new pages to the Google Search Console. This will get them indexed in a matter of minutes, helping them to start building up authority in the rankings asap.
Location Targeted Landing Pages
Most solicitors will cover a fairly large service area that will include a variety of surrounding towns and villages.
And because we know people who search for solicitors are looking for a local company, we want to rank in Google for all of those local areas.
To do this we need to create unique location targeted landing pages for each of the major towns on your website.
You do not need to have a physical presence in the town, as long as you can serve the area, you can build out a landing page to target people who need solicitor services in that area.
You should include the town name in the URL, h1 and title tag (exactly the same as we did with the other pages in the previous step) and use these pages as a directory around your website.
Oftentimes locational targeted pages will be very similar to your website homepage, as you want to funnel people through to the service they are looking for.
This not only helps you rank in the area’s you’re targeting, it also increases the URL rating for your main service pages.
Make sure you have a minimum of 300 unique words on the page, and talk a little bit about some of the clients you have helped in the chosen area.
You should add footer links to your location pages to ensure they have a high amount of internal links (as these pages can often bring in more traffic than any other)!
See this post here for the exact best way to do that and free code to use.
Local Business Schema
We should also include local business schema on the homepage of your website to give Google more confidence in your website.
If you have multiple physical locations, you will want to list them all on your homepage’s schema markup, and also list them individually on their own web page.
This is not to be confused with the locational targeted pages I mentioned in the previous step (as these are real physical location pages, not locations served pages).
Your physical location pages can also work the same way as your location targeting pages, in terms of the keywords you target and way you funnel traffic through – but you don’t want to add schema markup to location targeting pages where you don’t have a physical location as it will look spammy to Google.
Content Marketing For Solicitor SEO
Even if you are a localised solicitor that doesn’t serve a very broad area, content marketing can seriously help grow your business.
There are two main objectives when content marketing for SEO: attracting backlinks and increasing the amount of in-market website visitors you receive.
Content Marketing For Lawyer/Solicitor/Legal Related Backlinks
By increasing the amount of relevant links you get to your website, you can achieve better rankings in Google, Bing and Yahoo.
And when you create helpful content that provides the answer to a particular query that’s relevant to your business, other people will commonly link to the article and share it online.
This powers up your overall domain rating, allowing your website to rank for more keywords.
Not all content marketing articles will naturally attract backlinks, and so you need to be smart when deciding what to write about.
Any time you can create a piece of content that supports the views of something commonly expressed, you’ll attract a lot of links – as people are more likely to share something that proves they are right about a particular topic then they are to link to something they benefited from.
Content Marketing For Solicitor Leads
Your potential customers won’t only search Google for a company using location or service type keywords – they also ask questions.
These informational queries can often be the highest converting pages on your website.
If the question indicates a clear problem that the potential customer is experiencing and your article can lead them down the route of a solution (by showing a clear call to action after explaining how you can help), you’ll find the page will generate a lot of new enquiries.
For a good example of how to do content marketing to attract new leads for your solicitors, pay close attention to what I have done in this article.
I found the keyword “seo for solicitors” in ahrefs when doing keyword research. The search term indicates that a large percentage of the people who search for this term are experiencing the problem of not ranking very well on Google.
I have explained everything you need to know about doing SEO for a solicitor business, giving my potential customers all the information they need to do it themselves.
And because I’ve explained exactly what to do to improve your SEO, the page meets the intent of the search term – making it rank high on Google for the relevant keywords.
By teaching all there is to know about SEO in the solicitors industry, my potential customers can very easily see how likely it is that I’ll be able to solve their problem – and so this page will generate leads for my business on an ongoing basis using free traffic from Google.
Meaning I didn’t have to pay to get you on my website, you’ve stuck around long enough to learn from me and you already know I’m an expert in my field.
And that’s exactly what you need to be doing in your content marketing too, if you want to be attracting new leads for your business.
Need Help Optimising Your Solicitors Website For Google?
If you were paying attention to the previous steps, you should have expected this pitch
I hope you found this SEO tutorial helpful in growing your solicitors business, if you would like any help performing SEO for your business, get in touch today for a free no obligation quote.
Get Free Quote
Thanks for reading. Have a question? Comment below