Personal injury lawyers face fierce competition in their local markets.
Search engine optimization or SEO is one of the sure-fire strategies for attorneys to increase their leads and clients.
How important is SEO for personal injury attorneys?
Consider that ⅓ of Internet searchers only click the first result on Google!
SEO matters a lot.
Personal injury lawyer SEO encompasses many activities, but the basics include:
- Optimizing your legal website to drive clicks, conversions and sales
- Writing informative content with the right long-tail keywords, so the site ranks higher on Google for commercially-relevant terms
- Analyzing which keywords are most important to drive site traffic to your personal injury firm
- Improving online social media profiles, so prospects engage more often with your website and brand
Personal injury attorney SEO is competitive. But if your law firm sticks with proven SEO strategies, you’ll enjoy more consultations and calls.
Let’s take a close look at how to boost your leads and conversions from legal SEO strategies.
Table of Contents
Create a National And Local SEO Plan
A personal injury attorney needs an SEO plan for local and national markets.
Marketing in the local SEO market appeals to prospective clients in your city.
However, a national SEO plan helps you find prospects nationwide and globally.
A client in your city may search Google for ‘car accident attorney Seattle.’
The local strategy establishes your physical location by focusing on the law firm’s name, address, and phone number.
Creating city-specific content is also critical.
Practical ways to build local SEO for your law firm are:
- First, optimize critical keywords in tags and titles.
- Insert important keywords naturally in blog and page content.
- Third, employ local SEO in videos and images.
- Finally, improve your local SEO by providing the newest business information, phone, and email.
Build local SEO link citations to your personal injury site
Citations will help you build trust with Google for your personal injury lawyer website.
Citations are one of the signals Google uses to determine the relevance of a web page after a user performs a search for a local business.
The more citations you have online, the more Google will favor your law firm’s website in search results.
According to Moz survey results, SEO professionals say citations are the 4th most important factor for ranking in a local map pack, and the 5th most important factor for local organic ranking.
So, what are citations? It’s very simple. A citation is when your business is mentioned on another website. That doesn’t need to be a link, although citations can certainly include a link. However, citations aren’t always backlinks. A proper citation – the kind that will help with your SEO – includes your law firm’s name and contact information, or other information about your business.
There are plenty of ways to generate more citations, and when you work with a professional SEO agency, you’ll get access to all of those methods.
Competitor analysis
Before diving into SEO for your law firm, you need to know what your competitors are doing.
Prioritize analyzing your competitors to see how they rank for relevant search terms and take a look at their backlink profile.
Law firm keywords and search terms are highly competitive, so it’s important to know what your competitors rank for and how difficult it is to rank for those particular search phrases.
For instance, you’ll want to analyze the keyword difficulty (KD) of popular search phrases to see what you’re up against.
You’ll also want to research the cost per click (CPC) for PPC ads related to your search terms.
Lawyer-related keywords are the most expensive keywords across PPC ad platforms, but the cost varies depending on location.
Optimize Your Personal Injury Law Firm’s Website
Google wants to offer searchers the best user experience. Therefore, the search giant gives a higher position to websites that provide a better user experience. You can improve the user experience on your website with these tips:
Focus on mobile device usability
Google offers search results that differ based on the searcher’s device. This means that Google shows different listings on mobile phones vs. desktops. Therefore, your IT staff should design the website for mobile first, and desktop second. This means making the site as fast as possible on mobile devices.
Boost page loading times
Page loading must happen as quickly as possible. Ideally, a page should load instantly. The faster the site loads, the higher your Google rank.
Build simple navigation
If a user needs five taps or clicks from the home page to find what they need, simply the experience. Forbes notes that law firms with multiple offices should put a ‘location’ tab on the menu bar so prospects can immediately find the correct city.
Focus on backlinks
In some industries, backlinking may not be as critical, but it’s essential in personal injury law. By creating high-quality personal injury content, your website will develop backlinks as websites link to your most informative pages.
High-quality backlink campaign
Also called inbound links, a backlink campaign is essential for every law firm performing SEO. Google was literally founded on ranking websites according to its backlinks, although the ranking algorithm is much more sophisticated today.
Today, you can’t rank better just by collecting a bunch of random inbound links, but you can rank better by generating numerous high-quality backlinks. The distinction is in the quality of your backlinks. You can’t just pay a fee and acquire a package of links. It takes hard work to generate the kind of backlinks you need to rank in the search engines.
What are quality backlinks?
Quality backlinks are links to your website that embody the following traits:
- Your links come from a reputable website that search engines don’t consider spam or part of a link farm.
- Your links come from a high authority website.
- Your anchor text appears natural and isn’t excessively keyword rich.
- You aren’t paying for your backlinks.
- You acquire your backlinks legitimately.
- Your backlinks are published on pages with high-quality content.
Do you already have some backlinks? Are you worried that you may have purchased some spammy links? Are you curious to see how your backlink profile stacks up against your competitors? Use our free backlink checker tool to get answers to these and other questions you may have about your existing backlink profile.
Mobile optimization
Now that Google has officially made page load speed and mobile-friendliness ranking factors, you’ll want to optimize your website for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.
Although Google launched its mobile-first indexing, there is only one index. When there are two versions of a webpage available, Google will favor the mobile-friendly version. If a web page isn’t considered mobile-friendly, it will be eliminated from the index.
Mobile optimization isn’t new, and hopefully you’re already using a website design that is responsive and mobile-optimized. If not, it’s time to redesign your site to ensure mobile users get the best experience possible. Your search rankings depend on it.
Other important factors to consider with mobile optimization include:
- Site loading speed. Use PageSpeed Insights to see your website’s loading speed and other important performance metrics. For example, look at your overall score and see how close you are to 100. The higher, the better, and you’ll want a score of at least 90.
- Core Web Vitals. There are three metrics that make up your Core Web Vitals: LCP, FID, and CLS.
Your Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) should be below 2.5 seconds.
Your First Input Delay (FID) should be 100 milliseconds or less.
Your Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) should be 0.1 or less.
Optimizing your law firm website’s user experience for mobile is the best thing you can do for your visitors, which also helps your SEO efforts.
Keyword optimization
Although you can’t rank using keywords alone, they are extremely important. Keyword optimization is a vital part of your personal injury lawyer SEO campaign and needs to be prioritized.
The biggest challenge is that Google no longer provides access to its keyword data as typed by real users. There used to be programs you could use to access this data, but that’s no longer an option since Google searches are encrypted using HTTPS. This is why you see “not provided” when looking for your keyword data.
Not being able to see your actual keyword data, or any data for that matter, makes it hard to come up with a list of keywords to target. You can try to guess what people type into the search engines when looking for a personal injury attorney, but there’s no guarantee it’s accurate.
You can’t afford to guess what your most valuable keywords are. The best way to get a good list of keywords to target is through working with a professional personal injury lawyer SEO agency experienced in working with law firms. An experienced agency will know, from experience and research, what kind of phrases your potential clients search for in Google and other search engines. This kind of expertise is invaluable to your law firm.
Content expansion & regular content updating
How many personal injury areas do you cover? First, you need individual pages on your website for each practice area. For example, you’ll want separate web pages for each of the following practice areas:
- Car accidents
- Truck accidents
- Medical malpractice
- Construction site accidents
- Bicycle accidents
- Motorcycle accidents
- Dog bites and dog attacks
- Head injuries
- Product liability
- Mass tort
- Premises liability accidents
- Nursing home negligence
This list is just an example. Your practice areas might be different, and if so, your list should reflect your practice.
You’ll want to create individual pages for each practice area that cover every possible search intent your prospects might have. For example, your content should answer questions people may have about each type of lawsuit, how to know if they qualify to file a lawsuit, but also provide information on how accident claims work in your state.
Most of your prospects won’t know anything about how the legal system works and they will have plenty of questions. The ideal format for these pages is to create a long FAQ section that answers every question prospects might have about their situation and the cases you take.
Generate client reviews
User reviews are the best way to market your law firm for SEO purposes. More than 90% of consumers trust family and friend recommendations when looking for a product or service.
Gaining positive reviews will increase your Google ranking and offer credibility that most users trust the most. Legal reviews also reveal your work ethic, dedication to customer service, and legal knowledge.
Google Reviews, in particular, will help your local SEO for personal injury leads. Get positive reviews by asking for reviews after every successful personal injury case. If your client is satisfied, there’s a great chance they’ll be happy to spread the good word.
Create fantastic content
Once your website is optimized, now you need to write content to drive prospects to the site. Use your blog and site pages to host informative, authoritative content that makes prospective clients trust you.
If your practice concentrates on tractor-trailer accidents in Seattle, look at the top-ranking law firms for that keyword in your area. Then, analyze the content and see the topics that drive users to their site.
For example, if the top Google result writes content about unusual tractor-trailer crashes in Seattle, write about that topic. But go into more detail about these odd accidents and provide more valuable information about how accident victims can respond to the incident.
Next, be sure you have at least two or three outbound links in your content to authoritative websites. For example, if you write a post about car accident laws in Seattle, link to the Washington state website that lists the state regulations about car accidents.
Building your legal website into an authoritative source of personal injury information takes time. But if you concentrate on making it the most informative website with the best navigation and site speed, your SEO results will soar.
Use several of these proven personal injury SEO methods for a higher Google rank and more clients.
Let SEO.co implement your personal injury law firm SEO
Unless you’re a seasoned personal injury SEO expert, the best way to implement SEO for your personal injury law firm is to hire a professional agency. That’s where we can help!
At SEO.co, we help law firms dominate first page rankings and generate leads that turn into clients. We know search engine optimization can be challenging, so we provide full-service SEO for law firms, including content creation and link building services that yield sustainable, organic results.
Search engine optimization (SEO) for personal injury law firms is highly competitive, but with the right strategies, we can get your law firm’s web pages to rank at the top of the SERPs. Contact us for more information about SEO for law firms and to learn more about our 100% money-back guarantee.
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