For real estate lawyers, there’s arguably no better digital marketing strategy than search engine optimization, or SEO.
Digital marketing, of course, is increasingly important in a world where people looking for real estate lawyers usually begin their search online. If you want to grow your real estate law practice, digital marketing is now a practical necessity.
Law firm SEO, when executed properly, can increase your rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs), ultimately increasing the visibility of your real estate law practice, generating more organic traffic, and ultimately resulting in more converted leads.
But how exactly do you practice SEO as a real estate lawyer?
And why is it so valuable?
Table of Contents
Real Estate Lawyers and SEO: What’s the Point?
Let’s start by addressing the high-level consideration: why should real estate lawyers practice SEO?
The benefits of law firm SEO can be incredibly powerful for your legal practice. Ranking highly in searches relevant to real estate law means more people will see your practice, more people will visit your website, and more people will ultimately work with you. If you can dominate the competition in SERPs, you’ll earn the majority of real estate law clients in your area.
SEO is also loved by real estate lawyers because of its inexpensiveness and accessibility, especially when compared to other digital marketing strategies. As you’ll see, the foundational elements of SEO are neither prohibitively complicated nor ridiculously expensive; simply creating content, building links, and occasionally auditing and tweaking things can be enough to help you rank higher in search engines.
That said, it is important to have a solid high-level strategy in place.
Some real estate lawyers also love SEO because of its long-term nature. It does take several months to get going, but once you have that momentum, it can continue paying off for years or even decades. Every asset you create for your SEO strategy will be functionally permanent, and as long as you keep executing a law firm SEO strategy, you can continue reaping the benefits.
The Core Elements of SEO for Real Estate Lawyers
The basic elements of SEO for real estate lawyers include:
- The SEO vision. First, you need a vision for the SEO strategy you’re going to build. Who are your top competitors? Who are your target demographics? What types of keywords and phrases are your real estate law clients searching for? Of those keywords and phrases, which are the most important and which are merely secondary considerations? Once you have the blueprints in place, executing your SEO strategy becomes much easier.
- Onsite technical SEO. You’ll also need to practice onsite technical SEO. Essentially, this means adjusting the code and presentation of your website so it’s more favorable to your brand in the eyes of Google and other search engines. Your website needs to function quickly and efficiently, and it should be organized and presented in a way that makes it easy for both search engine crawlers and users to understand.
- Onsite content writing. If you know anything about law firm SEO, you probably know that content is an important constituent element of it. That’s largely because onsite content serves a few different purposes simultaneously. It allows you to optimize for specific keywords. It allows you to build your authority and credibility. It even gives you anchors on which you can build inbound links.
- Link building and offsite content development. It’s technically possible to rank in search engines without aggressively building backlinks, but at the very least, backlinks should be a consideration in your SEO strategy. That’s because the more links you have pointed to your website, and the more authoritative those links are, the more authoritative your website will be seen to be. And of course, websites are ranked in large part based on authoritativeness.
- Metrics and analysis. Finally, you’ll need to routinely monitor your metrics and analyze your performance. This way, you can figure out which tactics are working, which ones need to be abandoned, and which future strategies are going to help you succeed the most.
To be fair, law firm SEO is a somewhat complicated strategy, so consider this list merely an introductory guide.
How Real Estate Lawyers Get Started With SEO (Keyword Research and Beyond)
How are you supposed to get started with SEO services for your real estate law firm?
There are literally hundreds of search engine ranking factors to consider and hundreds of little tweaks you can make to improve your website. On top of that, to preserve and continue building your SEO strategy, you’ll need to make an ongoing commitment to develop content and build new links.
But everything starts with an initial analysis. For most real estate lawyers, that means an exhaustive audit of your existing law firm’s website, detailing potential SEO problems so you can correct them one by one. This also includes a competitive analysis, so you know who the top real estate lawyers and law firms in your area are. Beyond that, you’ll heavily focus on keyword research, specifically tailored to real estate law firms.
Your law firm SEO strategy will be guided by a list of strategically valuable keywords and phrases; you’ll optimize your website and content for these keywords and phrases so you can rank for them when people issue them as search queries. The best keyword targets are ones that are highly relevant to real estate law, high in search volume, and relatively low in competition.
These are some example keywords and phrases law firms can target to help you start brainstorming:
- Residential and Commercial Transactions
- Landlord-Tenant Disputes
- Zoning and Land Use
- Property Development
- Eminent Domain
The Technical Side of SEO Services for Real Estate Lawyers
After you’re done with keyword research and selection, you can turn your attention to technical onsite SEO services. As you might imagine, there are hundreds, if not thousands of little things you can do to your website to make it better for users and search engines alike.
However, since we’re not doing a comprehensive guide on this, we’re going to leave you with a few examples of important considerations on this front:
- The indexation problem. Before Google can formulate search engine results pages (SERPs), it must index websites, and before it can index websites, it must crawl them with bots. If you want your website to be crawled, indexed, and presented properly, you need to make sure it’s consistently accessible to those bots. Your website should be efficiently and properly coded, and you should take care not to block off any relevant sections of your website.
- Navigation and organization. You should have pages covering topics like residential and commercial transactions, landlord-tenant disputes, zoning and land use, property development, eminent domain, and more; however, it’s important that these pages are effectively organized in your navigation. This way, Google can better understand the logical structure of your website – and users will have an easier time navigating it.
- Page loading speed. Google and other search engines now prioritize legal websites and pages that load quickly over those that don’t. If you want to maximize your ranking potential, it’s important to clean up any issues that might be limiting your page loading speed. Even if search engine rankings are a secondary consideration, you should know that faster page loading speed is associated with higher user satisfaction.
- URL tweaking. Good URLs for law firm SEO are extremely concise, straightforward, descriptive, and well organized. Ideally, there will also be at least one strategically valuable keyword in each URL. A page on eminent domain, as an example, should have a URL like /eminent-domain.
- Metadata. Your website is loaded with metadata. Metadata is any information on your website that isn’t explicitly presented to the user; while most users won’t even notice it, these pieces of text and information will be reviewed by search crawlers and potentially presented in SERPs. Fields like title tags, meta descriptions, header tags, and alt text are valuable opportunities to optimize for strategic keywords and accurately describe your content.
Onsite SEO Content for Real Estate Lawyers
Onsite content is arguably the heart of your SEO strategy, as it’s going to give you a platform for keyword optimization, an opportunity to build your expertise, and a locus for your link building efforts all at the same time.
Obviously, you need to write good content. But what does good content for law firm SEO (search engine optimization) look like?
This is a much bigger question than it seems, but these are some great points to get you started:
- Keyword optimization. Every new piece of content you produce for your website should target at least one valuable keyword. Your content should also be informative and valuable to end users searching for such terms. For example, you can write topics like “How to Resolve Landlord-Tenant Disputes Quickly” or “X Tips for Managing Residential and Commercial Transactions.”
- Demonstration of expertise. One of Google’s foundational guidelines for content quality is something known as E-E-A-T criteria. This acronym stands for expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. It’s important for your content to embody all of these qualities if you want it to be successful with both users and search engines. Make sure all of your onsite content writing adequately represents you as a professional.
- Length and depth. In line with this, your content should be sufficiently long and deep, such that it adequately educates users about the topic at hand. There are no formal requirements here, but try to write content superior to the content written by your competition.
- Approach to publishing. Google considers freshness and recency when formulating search rankings. Accordingly, it’s beneficial to publish new pieces of content on a regular basis and freshen up old pieces of content to make them more imminently relevant.
And, remember, today’s on-site legal content should be heavily guarded against the temptation to use the latest and greatest AI lawyer software to “scale it up.” Discretion is needed when it comes to the overuse of AI in SEO.
Real Estate Law Link Building
If you want to rank higher in search engines, you need more links. Each backlink pointed to your website lends authority to it, ultimately supporting it in ranking higher. The more backlinks you have, and the more powerful those backlinks are, the better.
There are many strategies you can use to build links, including working with journalists and finding and repairing broken links on the web. However, one of the most sustainable and consistent strategies is building links to your real estate law website through the publishing of offsite content. This way, your links will be valuable, natural, and much easier to publish.
You’ll need to consider at least the following:
- Referring domain power. The more authoritative the referring source is, the more authority the link will pass. This means that more authoritative sources are much more valuable targets, even if they’re harder to acquire. Always look up the domain authority of a referring source before attempting to build a link on it.
- The value and context of your links. Your links should also be built in places and ways relevant to your audience. Real estate publications are likely a good fit for articles on topics like zoning and land use and property development, for example. It’s also important to ensure that your link provides some value to users, such as referring them to original research or elaboration on an important point.
- Your overall backlink profile. Pay close attention to your overall backlink profile as well. It’s important to build links on a wide array of different sources and periodically get rid of any low-quality backlinks that could be harming your website authority.
Optimizing for Local Searches
We also need to mention local SEO. Local SEO for law firms is very similar to national SEO, but it focuses on a specific city, neighborhood, region, or state. To succeed in local SEO, you’ll need to follow all the best practices for national SEO; it’s also possible to pursue both national and local SEO simultaneously. Accordingly, you can think of local SEO as a kind of optional add-on to your broader SEO strategy.
Pursuing local SEO gives you an opportunity to show up in local search results and minimize the amount of competition you have to contend with. You can start by focusing on more locally relevant keywords, building links relevant to local audiences, and cleaning up local citations on the web. Start by creating and thoroughly filling out your Google Business Profile.
Finding an SEO Partner for Your Real Estate Law Firm
If you want to be successful in growing your real estate law firm with SEO, the best course of action is to hire a professional law firm SEO agency.
Lawyer SEO agencies have the expertise, knowledge, and resources necessary to help you research viable approaches and execute the work necessary to achieve your goals. They’re also much cheaper than hiring your own in-house team.
Trustworthy search engine optimization (SEO) partners can elevate your real estate law firm and get you the organic traffic and new leads you need to grow. If you’re ready to see a free proposal, or if you’re interested in a free introductory website or SEO audit, contact us today!
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