As an intellectual property lawyer, you need a flow of hot leads to keep your law firm running. Chances are, you’re already using some kind of digital marketing strategy, like Pay Per Click (PPC) ads, but if you aren’t using search engine optimization (SEO), you’re missing out.
While paid advertising is an excellent way to generate leads, it stops working when you stop paying for ads.
SEO, on the other hand, will help you generate a natural flow of leads long-term with minimal maintenance.
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How SEO gets leads for intellectual property (IP) lawyers
There are always people looking for legal help with issues concerning patents, trademarks, and copyrights.
There are also thousands of IP attorneys out there, all competing for the same clients.
Since the market is highly competitive, it can be challenging to get your law firm seen.
However, law firm search engine optimization can get your law firm’s website in front of more people who need your legal assistance.
SEO is essential if you want leads who are searching for:
- Patent law firms
- Trademark law firms
- Copyright law firms
- Trade secrets law firms
- Licensing law firms
- And any other practice area involving intellectual property law firms
What is SEO for intellectual property lawyers?
SEO is the process of optimizing your IP law firm’s website for online search.
This involves optimizing your website to get search engines to start ranking your content better so it shows up in search engine results pages.
For example, after receiving a false copyright claim on a website like Etsy, a user might search Google for information on how to fight false copyright claims.
Chances are, your website isn’t one of the top search engine results, and may not even show up on the first 10 or even the first 100 pages.
The law firms that have the top spots have spent a lot of time and money getting there.
SEO is a requirement to get your website to show up for users searching for legal help concerning intellectual property.
If you’re not familiar with SEO, the basic components are:
- Keyword research and implementation. Keywords are words and phrases people type into the search engines to find what they’re looking for, as well as related words and phrases. For example, “trademark law” is a main keyword, while “fighting a trademark lawsuit” would be a related phrase. You want your website to contain the words and phrases people are searching for so that search engines know your content is relevant to their search query.
- Local search optimization. Search engines are flooded with content from millions of law firms, and that makes it nearly impossible to get a top search engine rankings. Local SEO is the key to getting seen in search results and avoid competing with millions of law firms nationwide. When you optimize your website for local SEO, you’re telling the search engines what geographical locations you serve. When someone from your area searches for an IP attorney, non-local law firms will be excluded from the results. This drastically narrows down your competition and makes it easier to rank.
- Technical SEO. These are all the technical aspects of your website, like your headings, URL structure, alt tags, and schema markup.
- On-page SEO. This involves the factors you have full control over on your website. For example, technical SEO is part of on-page SEO, as well as your site content quality, internal links, image optimization, and page speed.
- Link building. Although link building has been around forever, it’s still a key ingredient in search engine optimization. However, today, it’s about quality over quantity.
- Content creation and content marketing. To rank in the search engines, you need content on your own website and you need to get content published on other people’s blogs to get backlinks that will increase your ranking and generate organic traffic.
These are just several key components involved in search engine optimization that are a requirement for getting your IP law firm’s website visible in search results. Here’s a more detailed look at how law firm SEO can help you get leads.
Keywords lay the foundation
Keywords and phrases are the foundation of SEO because they play a central role in how search engines determine the topic and relevance of your website. For instance, there’s a difference between a site about trademark law and a trademark lawyer’s website. The former is informative, while the latter is offering actual legal services. The keywords you use throughout your website help search engines make this distinction.
You want search engines to know you aren’t just an informational site, and that you offer legal assistance because that’s how you’ll show up in search results when people search for legal help. If search engines think you’re just another informational website, you won’t show up when people search for an IP lawyer.
Local SEO reduces fierce competition
Normally, you’d be competing with millions of other law firms all over the nation for search phrases like, “trademark attorney near me” and “help with filing a patent.” Thankfully, search engines, like Google, narrow down the pool of potential results for some searches based on geographical data, like zip codes. This makes it easier to rank your content. However, to take advantage of this, you need to optimize your website so that search engines can know what areas you serve.
By adding a new page for every area you serve, and using zip codes along with the names of cities and counties, you can tell search engines exactly where you are locally.
Technical SEO tells search engines your site is legit
Technical SEO won’t do much to increase your ranking, but a poorly built site won’t rank because search engines will consider it low-quality. Unlike major Google ranking factors, like backlinks and content quality, technical SEO is more about getting the framework right. Some examples include:
- Proper use of title tags
- Good meta descriptions
- Adding alt tags to images
- Using featured snippets
- Adding schema markup
- Good page speed
Technical SEO is one of the easier aspects to implement and won’t need much maintenance.
On-page SEO influences how search engines see your site
In addition to the technical SEO listed above, on-page elements include:
- Quality, relevant content
- Proper external links
- Deep internal linking
- Keywords
- Optimized images
Although all of these elements are important, publishing quality, relevant content optimized for your target market is number one. Search engines use the content on your site to determine whether or not it’s relevant to queries related to intellectual property. Sites rank higher when a search engine thinks it’s more relevant than other options. Relevance can be achieved by creating valuable content that matches user intent. For example, if you specialize in trademark law, you can add a trademark law category to your blog where you discuss relevant topics. Each article you publish is one more opportunity to rank content and generate leads.
Link building helps your site rank
Although it’s not an official term, every website has a reputation within search engines, and building backlinks helps you establish your website’s reputation. Generally speaking, the more quality backlinks you have, the better your reputation. The significant word here is “quality.” A website with just 10 solid backlinks can outrank one that has 10,000 low-quality, spammy backlinks.
Link building helps you achieve a few goals:
- You’ll get leads from people reading the content that links to your law firm’s site.
- You’ll establish authority when your backlinks are used as an authoritative resource.
- You’ll get a bit of link equity from the pages that link to your website, which will increase your ranking power.
Overall, getting high-quality backlinks on websites relevant to intellectual property law is part of an effective SEO strategy. One of the best ways to generate backlinks is through content marketing.
Content marketing gets you seen
There are two broad forms of content marketing: publishing content to your own blog and promoting it, and publishing content to other people’s websites with a link back to your website. Both are equally important.
Publishing regular content to your blog means you’ll get more web pages indexed in the search engines, which will increase your ability to generate leads for a variety of search queries. For example, you can cover a handful of important topics designed to educate people who need legal advice. If they need a lawyer, they’ll be more likely to call you since they’ll already be on your site. For instance, sometimes competitors file false copyright and trademark claims to have listings taken down from online marketplaces. When this happens, people search online for help, and if you can get your content to rank, you’ll get some leads.
Getting content published on other people’s websites with a link to your law firm’s website will help boost your rankings in the search results.
This is a common link building strategy for intellectual property legal services because it works.
Looking for an IP lawyer SEO partner? We’d love to help!
If you’d like more leads that don’t rely on paid ads, contact us today for a free in-person site audit.
We are law firm SEO experts with decades of experience helping law firms rank better in major search engines.
In fact, about half of our work is never recognized because we act as the white label SEO back-office for other lawyer SEO agency partners.
If you’re ready to take your digital marketing strategy to the next level and finally get the leads you deserve, we’d love to help.
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