We don’t recommend you do anything for which you require the help of a law firm but what if you need the services of a lawyer either for your business or need to recommend one for your friend? You straight away head for Google and look for the best law firm or lawyers in your area. You are not alone as this is exactly what 35% of people do when looking for a lawyers in their area in addition to 44% consulting their corporate websites before approaching them. How much does law firm SEO rankings becomes important here?

One does have options of Yellow pages, Newspapers, or TV/Radio Ads to get help from but still over 44 Million users searched online when looking for lawyers last year. This presents a huge opportunity for law firms to embrace online marketing and more specifically Search engine promotion for their law business. Time to get cracking or prepare to be left behind!

Now that it’s been established that online marketing in general, and SEO in particular, is must for online success, the next question is how to go about it. You may be the best lawyer helping your clients win cases however implementing your law firm SEO strategies is a different game all together. Unless you are going to invest time and energy learning the SEO techniques and ever changing Google’s search algorithms yourself or even consider hiring an in-house team, its recommended you get help from an expert SEO agency.

It’s a fact that over 90% of online experience start with a search and that showing up on the 1st page of Google can be a deciding factor between a business that’s growing and generating leads/sign-ups and one that’s, struggling to generate traffic and business. So, an effective law firm Internet marketing campaign is required when you desire to show up in search results more often than your competitors and also ahead of them in the rankings.

Stay Local

To remain effective in your search engine pro motioning strategy, stay focused locally when you serve local clients. There is no point promoting yourself nationally if you only serve within one state or within a locality. It would be insane to target “divorce attorneys,”, “personal injury lawyer,” or “Workers Compensation Attorney” to start with but it would be comparatively easy to target “divorce attorneys Madison,”, “personal injury lawyer Newyork ,” or even “workers compensation attorney Columbus Ohio”. So focus on local positioning!

Stay Focused To Your Expertise

Most people are curious by nature. So they try to learn by researching as much as they can before they talk to experts for help. Be it doctors to cure their complications or lawyers specific to the trouble they are in. If you are a workers’ compensation lawyer, write on various topics related to workers compensations that will benefit your prospects and in turn establishing yourself as Content Leadership.

Content Leadership

It has been learned that most prospects are 60%-70% on the way through their decision process before they actually engage with companies. This present a huge opportunity for content marketing where publishing lot of quality and informative contents specific to the area you practice will help create a connection with your prospects. So, through content leadership stay ahead of your competition in the search results. One can publish contents on online publication websites, as guest blog post on high authority websites, as info articles on Wikipedia if applicable.

With content leadership comes lot of benefits such as it builds trust with your prospect clients and the contents keep your company in top of mind with them as a results you close more sales.

Visual Appeals and Sticks – Video Marketing

This isn’t rocket science! Having videos on the website increase not only the Avg. time spent by visitors but also helps with sticky contents. Thus, along with having a resourceful FAQs page on the website, it’s even beneficial to have lot of videos explaining the ifs and buts of your practice area. Additionally case studies in the form of videos will help increase prospect’s confidence level besides helping with rankings.

Further more with video optimisation and marketing, these resourceful videos provide additional platform that can help further amplify marketing reach. Having a YouTube channel will be a bonus and Vimeo is not far behind in popularity. It has been seen videos ranking higher or as part of the search results.

With Google acquiring Directr – a video making platform from your phone, it makes it lot simpler to make videos. It says “Directr unlocks the power of video for every business” – making videos for Facebook page, blog, Twitter feeds or websites. Making useful and education videos couldn’t have been simpler now.

Overall to achieve your goals in 2016, you need to be focused in your search engine marketing approach and avoid doing activities that do not matter any more. May be a 20/80 rule can be followed where focus on 20% of the activities that will bring 80% of the results in terms of keyword rankings, traffic, leads and finally lots of sales. Your happy and search engines are happy!

We would love to hear thoughts of our readers on activities they included in their 20% list and what results they achieved and how soon.