
Top SEO Strategies for Estate Planning & Probate Lawyers
Estate planning is a profitable service, but you need a steady flow of leads to generate meaningful revenue long-term. Like most businesses today, attorneys rely heavily on lawyer SEO to generate and convert leads into paying clients. While it’s still worth advertising in physical spaces, like magazines and journals, internet traffic will be responsible for the majority of your revenue. If you’re an estate planning attorney, you need a strong search engine optimization (SEO) game that employs strategies designed to increase targeted traffic, boost your website’s ranking in the search engines, and get more clicks. This article will explain how SEO can help you establish yourself as an authority in legal niche, garnering you more leads and ultimately more revenue. What is SEO for estate planning attorneys? Source Optimizing an estate planning attorney’s website for search involves the fundamental aspects of SEO: Keyword research Content optimization Technical SEO Backlink building Local SEO Tracking, monitoring, and adjusting All of these elements are the foundation of SEO in every niche, but get customized to catch the attention of people who are searching for estate planning services. Some elements – like technical SEO – don’t require constant work. However, building a backlink profile is an ongoing process. Here’s a more in-depth look at how each of these SEO elements apply to your business. Keyword research for estate planning attorneys Keyword research involves finding relevant keywords and phrases that your leads might type into a search engine while looking for estate planning services. For example, someone might search for “estate planning services in Denver.” However, there are a variety of phrases that get included in the final list of keywords to target. Most keywords reveal the user’s intent, which means you can target the phrases most likely to be searched for by your hottest leads. People who are looking for estate planning services immediately will be searching for different phrases than leads who are just trying to learn more about the process. You want to target both groups of people, but with different content. Content optimization for estate planning attorneys Optimizing the content on your website plays a critical role in optimizing your site for search. On a general level, you want your content to include keywords and phrases your leads are searching for, but it’s equally important for that content to contain valuable information that provides answers or solutions for readers. This can be educational content, answers to frequently asked questions, or pages that sell your services. For example, you might publish one article titled, What is Estate Planning and Why Do I Need it? Another article might be titled, How an Attorney Can Help You With Estate Planning. You can rank both of these articles in the search engines, but each one is likely to bring you a different type of lead. The former will bring you people who are curious about your estate planning practice, and the second will generate leads who are specifically searching for an estate planning firm. In addition to speaking to specific segments of your market, your content should be easy to read, unique, and authoritative. It should contain some kind of call to action (CTA) that asks the reader to contact you right away. Technical SEO for estate planning law firms The content published on your website will speak to your potential clients, while the technical aspect will speak to search engines. Technical SEO is all about optimizing the back end of your website to make it easy for search engine spiders to crawl and index properly. This includes optimizing the following elements: Page titles Meta descriptions (these are seen in search engine results and can influence people to click) Image alt tags Heading tags URL structure Link building for estate planning law firms Most websites need a strong backlink profile to get decent visibility in the search engines, but it’s important to be intentional about where you get your links. Backlinks have always been a ranking factor for Google, but your links need to come from good sources or they can hurt you. Estate planning lawyers benefit from link building on sites with content related to estate planning law firms, like probate, power of attorney, wills, death taxes, asset protection, trusts, life insurance, and beneficiary designations. However, good backlinks can also come from other types of websites that publish quality content, are in good standing with Google, and have a positive reputation and/or authority status. There are several main ways to get quality backlinks, including guest posting, manual outreach, broken link building, and other tried-and-true methods. It’s also beneficial to clean up your backlink profile if you have spammy links that can hurt your rankings. Local SEO for estate planning attorneys If you offer your services nationwide, there are an overwhelming number of estate planning lawyers who will be competing for the same leads. However, when you target local leads, the competition thins out and you have a better chance. Local SEO involves optimizing your content to reach people in the specific areas you serve. At a basic level, you might include your address, phone number, and all the cities and counties you serve in the footer of your website. The same information should be included in your Google business listing. If you don’t already have a Google Business Profile, that should be at the top of your list to create. Anytime people search for services, optimized business listings that rank get displayed at the top of all organic search results, and you want your business to be visible in that section. Tracking SEO performance Once all the initial work is done, you’ll need to monitor your website’s performance and rankings to find out which strategies are working and where there’s room for improvement. By tracking important metrics, you’ll have the data necessary to make better decisions about where to go with your SEO strategy. Now that we’ve covered the basics of SEO for estate planning attorneys, let’s explore some implementation strategies that will