Working as a tax lawyer requires generating a steady stream of leads, and search engine optimization (SEO) for lawyers happens to be one of the best lead-generating methods around.
SEO will get your law firm’s website to show up in search results whenever people in your area search for legal help on sites like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
The goal is to get your website to appear as close to the first page of results as possible, and when you achieve that, you’ll get more traffic and ultimately more leads.
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How SEO gets leads for tax lawyers
Your best leads are people who need a tax attorney right away, and those people will be searching online for legal help. Optimizing your website to get discovered in the search engines gives you more opportunities to be found by those who are looking for a tax lawyer. Law firm SEO involves several components:
- Keyword research. As the foundation of SEO, keyword research will give you ideas regarding what keywords and phrases you should be targeting to get your content ranked high in the search engines.
- Local SEO. Nationally, law-related searches are highly competitive. If you don’t have a huge budget to compete with national law firms, local SEO will be extremely helpful. Local SEO only puts your content in front of users who are from your general area. This is determined by their IP address and/or zip code if they’re logged into a Google account. By narrowing down the audience and excluding non-local sites, your website has a better chance at showing up in search results.
- On-page SEO. When your web pages are optimized for the right keywords, you’ll rank better and generate relevant leads. Part of on-page SEO also involves making it easy for leads to contact you, like placing your phone number in large text at the top of every page.
- Backlinks. Backlinks are links that go to your website that are published on other people’s websites. Generating backlinks has always been an important component in SEO, and it’s how search engines originally determined rank. Today, it’s not the only ranking factor, but backlinks are still important.
- Content marketing. The more content you have, the more opportunities you have to rank that content and get found in the search engines. Content marketing is nuanced, but in general, it helps you generate backlinks and organic traffic by creating and distributing your content across the web.
Although this is not a complete list of what’s involved, all of these elements work together to make your law firm’s website more visible in the search engines, which helps you capture a steady stream of leads searching for your legal services. If you’re not currently getting a healthy flow of leads from search, SEO will help.
Let’s take a closer look at each of these elements.
Targeting the right keywords and phrases
Keywords are how your visitors find your website in the search engines. When a person needs legal help, they’re going to search online using keywords related to the type of help they need. The first and most obvious keywords and phrases to target are those relating to your practice areas.
For instance, you might choose to target the following:
- Income tax
- Corporate tax
- Estate tax
- Tax planning and compliance
- Tax disputes
If these are your main areas of practice or your specialties, you’ll want to target these specific keywords and phrases related to these main topics. Here’s an overview of how that looks:
- Individual pages for each area of practice. While your home page is ideal for providing an overview of what you do for your clients, including showcasing successful case outcomes, you also need individual pages dedicated to each area of tax law you practice. This gives your visitors a chance to read more about what you do, and it puts more content into the search engines, which increases your chances of ranking for various search terms.
- A dedicated category on your blog for each main practice area. These days, you can’t just have a static attorney website with a few services pages. You need a blog with solid, quality content, and it helps to continue adding content over time. With dedicated categories, you can publish plenty of detailed content to educate people on tax law, which can also help you generate leads.
- Using your chosen keywords and phrases throughout your website. Your target keywords should be used throughout your law firm website on all of your webpages. However, they need to be placed strategically and in context. For example, if one of your phrases is “tax planning and compliance,” you’d want to include that in a paragraph, perhaps in a section that explains what it is and why compliance is important. Although, not every keyword should be on every page. Your text needs to be natural and you should avoid “keyword stuffing.”
In addition to targeting main keywords associated with your practice areas, you’ll also want to target more long tail keywords, especially those which have more potential to bring you hot leads. These keywords are called “buying keywords.” In your case, since you’re aiming for leads, your money keywords will be what people type into the search engines when they need an attorney immediately. For example, “income tax lawyer in Dallas” or “estate tax lawyer near me.” The good news here is that you can optimize your site for these types of phrases with local SEO for law firms.
Local SEO for tax lawyers
Local SEO is one of the most important components in search engine optimization for tax lawyers. If you don’t target local counties, cities, and towns, you’ll only be able to compete nationally in the search engines with all the other million plus law firms doing the same thing. Local SEO eliminates a large amount of competition by excluding national results. Without optimizing your site for local SEO, search engines won’t have any reason to tag your law firm website as relevant to narrower markets determined by zip code.
When you implement local SEO, your content will have a better chance at showing up in the search results when users in your area search for legal help. For example, if you haven’t targeted local areas on your website, and a user searches for “corporate tax lawyer,” you’re not likely to come up in the results. However, the more local keywords and phrases you naturally include in your content (like city and county names and the zip codes you serve), the more likely you are to show up in search results for users who are located in or around your area.
On-page SEO
On-Page SEO consists of optimizing the content and technical structure of your law firm website.
There are many on-page SEO elements to cover, and that’s why it’s ideal to work with a law firm SEO agency to get your website up to speed. However, here are a handful of on-page SEO elements that can influence ranking and traffic.
- Optimized title tags
- Meta descriptions that get clicks
- SEO-friendly URLs
- Deep internal linking
- Schema markup
- Fast page loading
These elements won’t necessarily make your law firm rank better, but if they aren’t done right, it can hurt your ranking.
Backlinks and content marketing
Once you’ve covered your basic onsite SEO, this is where you’ll need content marketing and link building. These two elements don’t always have to go together, but they usually are intertwined. There are two general forms of content marketing: posting content to your blog, and posting articles on other websites. Blog content will help you rank better, while getting articles published on other law firm websites is how you’ll generate backlinks.
Posting to your own blog will enable you to target not just your main keywords, but all the related topics search engines use to determine the relevance and quality of your law firm website. Content published to your own blog gives you a chance to discuss subjects related to tax law, which will tell search engines your site is relevant to a variety of searches related to tax law. For example, some people might not search for a tax lawyer, but rather, “how to handle a tax audit.” If you have a blog article with advice on how to handle being audited, and you optimize it to get it ranking in the search results, that article can bring you leads.
Tax lawyers need SEO
To generate a steady flow of law firm leads, you need search engine optimization. Gone are the days of relying on the Yellow Pages and print ads for leads. While these marketing sources still work, you’ll generate the majority of hot leads online. In fact, statistics show that over one-third of people start their search for a lawyer online.
If you’re not using law firm SEO as part of your digital marketing strategy, you’re losing leads daily.
Get more leads with SEO.co
Search engines should be supplying you with a flow of tax leads. If that’s not happening, we can help you optimize your law firm website to rank higher in the search engines, get visibility, and generate more leads. At SEO.co, we are experts at getting law firms more leads and conversions through search engine optimization. Contact us today for a free in-person site audit – we’d love to help you get the leads you deserve.
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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