74% of prospects beginning a search online end up contacting the office via phone. You need to make it easy for potential clients to find your website, and that means you need to get to the top of the search results.

Many attorneys spend years carefully building a reputation so they stand out from their peers. Some personal injury attorneys win a few big cases, then invest the proceeds in massive personal injury marketing campaigns through billboards, television, and other forms of advertising. 

One way to build your reputation while still on a tight budget is through the internet. And, the most efficient way to advertise on the web is through search engine optimization (SEO). SEO for lawyers is one of the least expensive ways to advertise, and it has a much higher return on investment than many other forms of advertising.

We’ll look at the costs and benefits of reaching the top of the search rankings. Then, we’ll go into detail about the steps to take to reach the top of the search engine results page (SERP).

What is SEO?

There are a few ways to advertise on the internet. You can have advertisements where you pay every time someone clicks on the ad. This is called pay-per-click (PPC). PPC ads aren’t restricted to the SERP — they can appear anywhere on the internet. Or you can pay to have sponsored ads placed on the SERP. Of course, once you stop paying for PPC or sponsored ads, they stop attracting new clients. 

SEO is different. It brings in clients long after the initial optimization. And, the SERP rankings you get from SEO are free. These free SERP listings are called “organic listings.”

The best part about organic listings is that people searching the internet trust them more than paid listings. Internet searchers are far more likely to click on organic listings. This is especially true if you’re on the first page of the search engine results. Ideally, you want to be near the top of the first page. 

Benefits of SEO for law firms

SEO is one of the most cost-effective forms of advertising for attorneys. Unlike other types of advertising, it keeps bringing in clients even if you stop paying. Your only cash outlay is for hiring SEO professionals or purchasing subscriptions for SEO tools if you have the extra time to do it yourself. 

Return on Investment (ROI)

According to Forbes Magazine, SEO returns 748% on your investment, whereas PPC returns only 36%. You can look at conversion rates, click-through rates, and many other metrics. But ROI will always be your bottom line regarding marketing effectiveness.

Long-term returns

You can use the best personal injury lawyer SEO techniques or hire the top SEO experts, but it will still take from a few months to a couple of years to reach the top of the SERP. That’s because of the heavy SEO competition among lawyers to rank based on certain keywords. 

SEMrush calculates keyword difficulty (KD) percentages for keywords often appearing in searches. The higher the KD percent, the longer it will take to rank at the top for that keyword. For example, if “personal injury attorney in Boise, ID,” has a KD percent of 80, it will take much longer to reach the top of the SERP than a search phrase that has a KD percent of 50.

Once you reach the top of the SERP, you see that getting there is like flying a plane. It takes a lot more fuel to get to cruising altitude than it does to maintain cruising altitude. And most of the benefit (distance covered) of the trip occurs after reaching cruising altitude. 

Television, radio, and billboards are great forms of advertising, but they reach a lot of people who don’t need your services. SEO hits a much more narrow target. For the most part, only people looking for a PI lawyer will see your listing and click through to your SEO-optimized website. These are the people you want to reach. When this targeted audience needs an attorney, all they have to do is pull out their phone and enter the search term. Google will pull up the SERP, and hopefully, your listing will be near the top. And, of course, everyone always has their phone on them.

Easily trackable

With any form of advertising, you want to measure your results. With SEO, you have a variety of tools that allow you to track key metrics like click-through rates, bounce rates, client conversion rates, and more. The most well-known of these tools is Google Analytics.

Your guide to personal injury lawyer SEO

Keywords are usually the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about personal injury lawyer SEO. But how do you get the best keywords? You can use free tools like Ahrefs and Google Keyword Planner to “spy” on your competitors to learn what keywords they’re using. Then, put their keywords into your site. Another way is to use the paid versions of services like SEMrush to find the best keywords.

Now that you have your keywords, where will you put them?

Optimized website

You’ll want to have a well-organized site. That means using headers so readers can quickly find what they’re looking for. It also means adding a meta description and meta title, so the search engines find what they’re looking for. You’ll want keywords in these headers, meta, page titles, content, and the URL.

Beyond keywords, you’ll need to do the following if you want to reach the top:

• Add links and citations from reputable sources to increase credibility
• Make sure webpages load quickly
• Ensure responsiveness so your pages load correctly on all screens, from mobile to desktop
• Optimize for voice search
• Optimize for local search
• Add social proof through testimonials and great ratings
• Have a consistent name, address, and phone number (NAP) across the internet
• Comply with any local lawyer regulations that may apply to your SEO

Through its “Think with Google” site, Google says the probability of a visitor leaving your website (a bounce) increases 32% as page load times increase from one second to three seconds. Use PageSpeed Insights to test your load times.

Content marketing

Establish yourself as a legal authority. You can do this by including articles on your website. These blog entries should answer questions you know prospective clients have. If you don’t know these questions, you can usually find them in the “people also ask” section of a SERP. Google’s algorithm loves sites with great content when it ranks search results. 

Google guidelines 

Check out what Google has to say about SEO before investing your time and money in SEO. Google has a special SEO Starter Guide that will help you get up to speed.

Ethics

Do not do any of the following:

• Keyword stuffing
• Use scraped content from another website on your website
• Use AI-generated content unless it follows Google’s Guidelines on AI content

Violate these rules, and Google will penalize your website when determining rankings. 

SEO in a nutshell

SEO is a cost-effective way to narrowly target the people who need your services. And it’s easy to measure how effective your SEO is. It does take some time and effort for you to move up the SERP rankings. But it takes less effort to stay at the top. 

To reach the top of the SERP rankings, you’ll need to optimize your website and your search listing. The rest of the SEO work involves producing the best content without violating Google’s guidelines. 

Though attorneys can handle their own SEO, most PI attorneys prefer to focus on winning their cases. If doing it yourself isn’t the best use of your time, it’s best to hire a professional personal injury lawyer SEO services firm.