As a criminal lawyer, you want to help your potential clients – and you also want to grow your client base.
To do that, you need more visibility.
And in today’s largely digital world, the best way to achieve more visibility is to earn higher rankings in search engines like Google.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the way to do it.
But how exactly does SEO for criminal lawyers work?
And how should you practice it?
Table of Contents
Why Choose SEO as a Criminal Defense Lawyer?
First, why would you choose SEO as your primary marketing strategy as a criminal lawyer?
SEO is a way of getting your name and your law firm’s website higher and more visible in search engine results pages (SERPs). These days, when people have criminal law problems, they often turn to the internet first. They search for things like “felony defense” and misdemeanor defense,” looking for criminal defense lawyers like you who can help them with information and consultations.
When you rank higher, you get more visibility and traffic. With more visibility and traffic, it’s only natural that you’ll attract more potential clients.
SEO is advantageous not only because It helps you generate more traffic and revenue, but also because it’s relatively inexpensive.
Building a solid lawyer SEO strategy does require investment and patience, but with the right strategy, it can pay off enormously.
The Big Picture: Your Criminal Defense Law SEO Strategy
SEO is a long-term strategy designed to help you gradually build authority and rise to the top of the rankings. Broadly speaking, you’ll need to focus on both the trustworthiness/authoritativeness of your website and the relevance of your website to your target demographics.
In pursuit of this, you’ll need to invest in and develop at least the following elements:
- Strategy. First, you need a direction for your marketing strategy for your criminal defense law firm. There are many criminal defense lawyers competing for the top slots of Google, so how are you going to stand apart? And how are you going to make sure you see a positive return on investment (ROI)? Keyword research and competitive research are critical for your success here.
- Technical onsite SEO. If you want to rise to the top of Google’s rankings, your website needs to be technically polished. Your website should be SEO friendly and user friendly, with excellent performance metrics.
- Onsite content development. Content has long been the heart of SEO, and it should still be the foundation of your criminal defense law SEO strategy. It’s an opportunity to not only optimize for specific keywords but also show off your authority and expertise.
- Offsite content and link building. You’ll also need to think about link building and, by extension, offsite content development. Links function as votes of confidence in the eyes of Google and other search engines; the more links you have and the more powerful those links are, the more authoritative you’ll be seen to be. However, you need to build links in natural ways that are valuable to users. To this end, one of the best strategies you can use is offsite content development.
- Analysis and adjustment. Finally, you’ll need to spend time analyzing your performance metrics and adjusting your approach. Tweaking pages, tweaking keyword choices, and iteratively advancing your strategy will lead you to better results in the future.
Criminal Defense Law Firm SEO Strategy: Keyword Research and Planning
Before you start developing content or building links, you need to spend some time doing research and planning your campaign. One of the most important elements here is to figure out which keywords are going to be most valuable to your criminal law practice.
Strong keywords are highly relevant to both your criminal defense lawyer practice and your target audience.
They also have relatively high search volume and low competition, as highly contested keywords can often be excessively expensive to pursue.
Examples of foundational “head” keywords for a criminal defense law firm SEO strategy include things like:
- Felony Defense
- Misdemeanor Defense
- Prosecution
- White-Collar Crime
- Drug Offenses
- Violent Crimes
However, it’s also a good idea to optimize for long tail keyword phrases, like “how to find a good criminal lawyer.”
Long tail phrases are longer, less commonly searched, and much less competitive when compared to head keywords.
In the most competitive niches, like SEO for personal injury law, the long tail is the way to go.
Ideally, you’ll have a list of at least a dozen target keywords with which you can begin your criminal defense marketing campaign.
Technical Onsite SEO for Criminal Defense Lawyers
Technical onsite SEO is a collection of tactics designed to make your website more functional, better for users, and more polished in the eyes of Google.
Technically optimized websites have a distinct advantage over their poorly optimized counterparts in criminal defense SEO.
These are some of the most important items to consider.
- Indexing/discoverability. Before your website can appear in Google Search results, it must be crawled (by Google’s web-crawling bots) and indexed. Accordingly, you need to make sure that your website is accessible and easy for Google to crawl. If there’s anything blocking Google from crawling or indexing your website, it’s not going to be able to rank.
- Navigation and page organization. You should pay close attention to your page organization and internal navigation, as Google prioritizes intuitively structured websites. For example, you might have a “Criminal Defense” section of your website with pages like “Felony Defense,” “Misdemeanor Defense,” “White-Collar Crime,” “Drug Offenses,” and “Violent Crimes” under it. You could have a separate section for “Prosecution,” with separate relevant pages underneath it.
- Page speed optimization. Faster websites tend to rank higher than slower websites, so you’ll need to spend at least some time on page speed optimization. Even little changes, like taking advantage of caching or deleting old materials, can make a big impact.
- URL optimization. Your URLs should be optimized for target keywords and for simplicity and brevity. If you have a page for white-collar crime, for example, the URL should be something like /white-collar-crime. Keep it short and straightforward so Google knows what each page of your website is about.
- Metadata optimization. A page focusing on violent crimes should have “Violent Crimes” somewhere in the title tag and/or meta description. You’ll also need to consider tags for multimedia like photos and videos. These pieces of metadata not only inform Google about the topic and context of your webpages, but they also dictate how those pages appear in search results.
Keep in mind that this is by no means a comprehensive list of technical onsite SEO considerations.
Onsite Content Development for Criminal Lawyers
Content allows you to establish your expertise and simultaneously optimize for important keywords and phrases.
These are some of the most important considerations for your onsite content development which will aid in SEO for criminal defense attorneys:
- Keyword focus. Each piece of content you develop should focus on one or more target keywords, allowing you to build relevance for those targets. For example, you could write articles like “How to Build a Felony Defense” or “X Things to Do If You’re Accused of Drug Offenses.” Keep in mind that while it is important to include target keywords in your content, it’s important not to go overboard; the practice of keyword stuffing is frowned upon in the SEO community and it could end up getting you penalized by Google. Your top priority is writing quality content that people benefit from reading.
- Expertise and accuracy. Google’s E-E-A-T criteria prioritize content that demonstrates experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. This is your opportunity to show your legal knowledge and expertise. Not only is it going to help you build your authority in an SEO context, but it’s also going to help you earn trust from potential clients and new prospects.
- Length/depth. You may not be able to cover everything there is to know about white-collar crime or prosecution in a single article, but you should be able to properly educate and inform readers with your work. There aren’t any hard rules for how long or how in-depth your articles need to be, but you should cover topics somewhat comprehensively – and preferably, in ways superior to your closest competitors.
- Newness/consistency. Google prefers new content to old content, and it prioritizes websites that publish relatively frequently and consistently. Ideally, you’ll publish at least a few new onsite posts every month, assuming you’re able to ensure the quality of those posts. It’s also a good idea to periodically refresh and update your older pieces of content, so Google still considers them relevant and worth ranking.
Offsite Content and Link Building for Criminal Defense Lawyers
It’s also important to practice link building so you can establish yourself as an authority in this space. There are many link building strategies to consider for your criminal law practice, but offsite content development is arguably the best, given its accessibility, its consistency, and its general compliance with Google’s terms of service.
The general idea is to write content for external publishers, including a link pointing back to your website. It’s a mutually beneficial exchange, assuming your content is good enough.
These are some of the most important considerations here:
- Referring domain authority. The higher the domain authority of the referring domain, the more valuable the link is going to be. This should make some intuitive sense; it’s much more prestigious to earn a link from, say, a prestigious university than it is some random person’s blog that doesn’t get any views. The trouble is, the higher the domain authority of the publisher, the harder it is to get published, at least generally speaking. Accordingly, you’ll need to be strategic about the referring domains you seek.
- Link context and value. You’ll also need to consider the context and value of your link. If you want to comply with Google’s terms of service, your links need to appear natural and provide at least some value to the people encountering them. Accordingly, you should choose to publish your work in publishers that are relevant to it. A publisher that consistently focuses on covering topics related to drug offenses or violent crimes, for example, is going to be more relevant than one covering news in the fast-food industry. You should also make sure your link has some kind of practical value, such as citing a fact or providing a link to further information on a given topic.
- Link diversity. Finally, you’ll need to think about the diversity of your backlink profile. If most of your links come from a single source, or a family of sources, it’s not going to be as valuable for you. Additionally, you need to take care not to build links too quickly or in easily identifiable patterns. Just as investors diversify the assets in their portfolio, you should diversify the referring domains in your backlink profile.
Local SEO for Criminal Defense Lawyers
It may also be a good idea for you to focus on local SEO.
Local SEO is very similar to general criminal defense SEO, and relies on nearly all the same tactics.
The only real difference is that local SEO requires attention to other variables, such as local citations and locally relevant keywords.
The advantages in pursuing SEO are limiting your competition and increasing your relevance to a local target audience. This is exceptionally valuable if you want to avoid some of your toughest big criminal defense law firm rivals while simultaneously making your criminal defense firm more appealing to local citizens.
There are many nuances to consider with local SEO, but you can get started with a Google Business Profile, some locally relevant content, and some locally relevant link building (e.g. legal directories).
Finding the Right Partner for Your Criminal Defense Law SEO Strategy
As a criminal lawyer, you should spend your time and energy helping people who have been arrested or accused of crimes. While it’s certainly possible for you to manage your own SEO strategy once you have the knowledge and experience, it’s typically much easier and more cost effective to work with an external partner.
At SEO.co, we have a robust team of thoroughly experienced criminal defense SEO professionals who can help you lift your criminal law practice to the top of Google’s search rankings. From initial planning to ongoing execution, we can help you with every step of the process.
If you’re ready to get started with one of the best SEO companies, or if you’re in the market for a free consultation, contact us today!
Tim holds expertise in building and scaling sales operations, helping companies increase revenue efficiency and drive growth from websites and sales teams.
When he's not working, Tim enjoys playing a few rounds of disc golf, running, and spending time with his wife and family on the beach...preferably in Hawaii.
Over the years he's written for publications like Forbes, Entrepreneur, Marketing Land, Search Engine Journal, ReadWrite and other highly respected online publications. Connect with Tim on Linkedin & Twitter.
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