How best to optimize for a law firm that specializes in 3 different areas
-
I realize the importance of keyword research and finding keywords where there IS demand and not TONS of competition and optimizing your title and descriptions etc AND content on the different pages for those same specific keywords..........
But....
What do you suggest I do to BEST optimize a site for a law firm that handles family law (divorce), bankruptcy AND criminal. It's one firm with 3 attorneys who specialize in different areas.
I know SEO is challenging and ever changing and I read and study and have made significant, noticeable, improvements for some sites but I have to admit this is over my head.
Any advice would be GREATLY appreciated! Thank you in advance and have a GREAT weekend!
Matthew
-
Sorry Matthew, Just got this.
Make sure each attorney has his/her own listing in Places, Bing Business Portal, Yahoo Local. You can also set them up individually in major/local directories or review sites. -
Im sorry, this might sounds stupid - what do you mean when you say "set them each up in local?" - you mean local seo or in seomoz when setting up the campaign?
Thanks!
-
Good move Matthew on the campaign...you will hug yourself one day soon. PS: Make sure you set them each up in Local.
Let us know if we can help.
-
Kevin, Brandon, Josh, Robert - thank you VERY much for the excellent information. Truly superb points, thank you for being generous with your time. I made a list of everything and yes, Robert, I created a campaign for them the minute I got back to the office with a check for them and I haven't even started building their site yet. Thanks again guys!
-
Matthew,
Josh, Brandon, and Kevin all make great points and, I would write down each of their suggestions as a list.
Handling attorneys (notice I did not say Law Sites) is a horse of an odd color. First, you need to set up your GA and GWMT for the firm so that you have impeccable tracking. Now you are a pro member and you need to immediately go into Campaigns and set up a campaign for this firm. Matthew - Don't read anymore, go set up the campaign and come back and finish reading when that is done
Then you are going to want to consider two things: First, a click to call system that allows a searcher coming to the site to put a number in and be speaking with a lawyer/etc. immediately or very quickly and a system where in you have chat available that pops up on the screen. Both of these will help and most track everything as the companies want to keep the business.
Next, for where you are you need to go into the keyword tool while logged into an account (not external tool) and do keyword research on the three different areas. If you are unsure, just put keyword research in the search bar on SEOmoz and you will have a hundred resources. Personally, I do not believe you need anything other than the Keyword Tool in AdWords for this project. Get a good list of keywords and see where your competition is missing the boat. Brandon mentioned using a city locator and he is spot on. Be sure you look at how keywords are ordered: city-bk-atty vs bk-atty-city. Trust me, most of your competitors are not looking at this.
Now, use what the others have given you with your best 5 to 8 pages per atty. BK - Chap7,11,13, how to (do this), etc, Criminal (here I am not listing anything I have ever done....) DWI, theft, robbery, etc., Divorce - child custody, how to, etc.
Do not spend a lot of time on ego pages... about attorney smith who walks on water in between being an astronaut and playing first base on the local slow pitch team....
Control them now. Tell them what YOU need from THEM. Tell them what reports they will get and when. Show them the first report out of the campaign wherein they rank for nothing. Give them a report monthly on keyword rankings, etc.
Lastly, as to blogs, they will all tell you how they are great writers, etc. Say, "that is super, we need about a dozen blogs to start with. Nothing tomorrow, but one a day for the next few weeks." Then give them a list of potential titles. If one of the three follows through you have an asset. If not, don't push it as you have just put the blog page to bed unless they want to pay you to write (hire a copywriter) a blog a week for each, etc.
Hope this helps, control them, best.
-
I agree with Kevin and Josh in that you need a separate page for each type of legal service. The only thing I can add to this conversation is that I know from first hand experience that doing a legal advice forum is probably going to be a non-starter. I've had a handful of legal clients and the last thing they want to do is to provide legal advice on their website. In fact, all your web copy will usually have to be reviewed by them to make sure their site is not providing legal advice, so don't go changing their copy willy-nilly - always suggest changes and get them to review it first.
Most legal keywords are going to be fairly competitive, but if you add your client's location to those keywords, e.g. Cityname Bankruptcy Lawyer, then you will reduce your competition considerably. In my hometown the person that ranks #3 for one of these types of keywords scores a D on their on-page optimization and only has one keyword-rich link from an external website. Of course the larger your metropolitan area the more competition you will have.
-
Keywords related to these areas of law are very competitive, and technical SEO advice will only get you so far. Josh has got the right idea of publishing at least three separate pages that specify and detail each area of expertise. I wouldn't go too crazy with internal linking, but a similar format to squarespace dot com for each page will allow you to get quite a bit of important information to your potential clients. You can link each section title to more pages, but remember not to canalize link juice by trying to rank two or more pages for the same key words.
I'm going to go out on a limb here only because I've seen it work really well for another client. You're no doubt going to need to embark on major link building campaigns and advertising to direct as much traffic to your site as possible. Now, a legal advice forum might help you out in this department. Having users generate content and lawyers answer these questions will drive more legitimate traffic to your site. And this content will be rich with key words related to your firm, even some you haven't thought of yourself. Of course, you'll need to consult with someone on the best solution for your company, but the forum should be on your own domain and not hosted somewhere else unless that association will benefit your ranking. Start a blog as well with great content for potential clients.
Also get on HARO as there are always reporters looking for professional legal sources. Linkmosses is a great link building newsletter. Get on directories, social media, all that. I imagine you're busy, so you'd be best to find someone or some company to do this for you.
P.S. Remember that your goal is conversions, turning leads into paying clients. Make sure you web site has some sort of web-to-lead form and call to action.
Hope I helped a little.
-
Hi Matthew,
The key to good SEO is good and organised content.
If you've got three different fields, then ensure that you have on page for each of these sections. Under these pages should be more pages of information that link, relate and add more information on the topic.
On the home page you should have lots of links to all this content, and you should cover all three of the fields in a more general sense.
Keeping the site linked (internally, as well as externally) is crucially important.
If you pick one (or two if you're game) terms for each of these pages, you will be able to focus your SEO and target particular terms for each aspect of your site.
Start there and you should start to get some numbers
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Keyword before location: Do you notice a big difference in performance?
Frequently in Moz, I see that the keywords that use "KEYWORD LOCATION " have higher volume than "LOCATION KEYWORD." For example, "chinese food Austin" is 201-500, while "Austin chinese food" is 11-50. I'm interested in your experiences targeting one variation of this type of keyword over the other. Are you seeing that using the exact match matters? Even if the order of K+L versus L+K does matter, do you find that near matches, like "chinese food in Austin", work just as well? Concrete examples of performance would be fantastic.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kevin_P1 -
Best SEO Strategy
Hi fellow Mozers: I have a question about strategy. I have a client who is a major real estate developer in our region. They build and sell condominiums and also built and manage several major rental apartments. All rental properties have their own websites and there is also a corporate website, which has been around for many years and has decent domain authority (+/- 40). The original intent of the corporate website was to communicate central brand positioning points, attract investors and offer individual profiles of all major properties. My client is interested in developing an organic search strategy which will reach consumers looking to rent apartments. Typical search strings would include the family whose core string would be 'apartments in Baltimore.' (Currently, the client runs PPC for each one of their properties. This is expensive and highly competitive.) In doing research, we've found that there are two local competitors who are able to break on to Page 1 and appear beside the National 'apartment search guides' who dominate the Page 1 SERPS (like apartments.com). The two local competitors have websites of either the same or lower authority than our client's; one has a better link profile, the other is comparable. Here's our problem: our local competitors only build and manage apartments. So, then, the home pages and all the content of their sites ONLY talk about apartment rental related information. Our client's apartment business is actually larger in scope than either local competitor but is only one of their major real estate verticals. So my question is this: if we want to build out a bunch of content which will rank competitively with our local competition, are we better off creating a new area of the corporate site, creating targeted content and resources appropriate for apartment seekers OR would we be better off creating an entirely new site, just devoted to the same? I'm wondering if a new section will ever rank well against competitors whose root domains actually feature content which is only rental related? Likewise, I'm wondering whether we'd be giving up too much, in terms of authority, by creating an entirely new site? I've also only found examples in the industry where an entirely new site was created, so it makes me question the strategy of building out a rental-specific section of a site which also contains information about their condo business. For instance, the Related Companies are a huge builder in the East; they have a corporate site and a site called https//relatedrentals.com . Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daaveey0 -
Best SEO Practices for FAQ Page
Hi all, I'm looking for some tips on best practices for FAQ pages. In particular, is it better to have all questions and answers listed on one page, or should each question have its own page - given that there's enough content for it Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brian-madden0 -
What can we do to optimize / be mobile-friendly for PDFs?
I'm getting a "Your page is not mobile-friendly." notice in the SERPs for all of our PDFs. I check the pdf on the phone and it appears just fine. rFtLq
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | johnnybgunn0 -
Optimal URLs for SEO and UX
We are considering restructuring the URL scheme on one of the websites we maintain. We have a few options. Currently news article URLs are as follows:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter264
http://domain.com/news/1234/article-title-name/ Download section URLs are as follows:
http://domain.com/downloads/files/1234/file-title-of-download-here/ Forum URLS:
http://forum.domain.com/forum/topic/1234/title-of-forum-topic-here/ We feel that these are a bit too long for both SEO and user experience. We want to remove as many directories from the URLs as possible. From experience, what do you recommend changing for the example URLs above? We have some ideas below...and we need to keep the ID in the URLs...however I know this is a little frustrating. Some ideas we have for news articles:
http://domain.com/news/article-title-shorter-1234
http://domain.com/article-title-shorter-n1234 Some ideas for the download pages:
http://domain.com/downloads/file-title-shorter-d1234
http://domain.com/downloads/files/file-title-shorter-1234
http://domain.com/file-title-shorter-d1234 Some ideas for the forum URLs:
http://forum.domain.com/topic-title-shorter-t1234
http://forum.domain.com/topic/topic-title-shorter-1234 What do you think of these suggestions? Any other URL ideas? Recommended URL length? The purpose of is question was to find the perfect URLs for the site we are working on; your thoughts, suggestions and tips are very much appreciated.0 -
Please I need some optimism for this (not provided)
Does anyone see this getting any better. It is getting absolutely ridiculous and almost to the point where it looks like soon analytics will be pointless! Can Rand pull some connects and tell Google - Hey Camon! This is ridiculous, we need to see at least a little bit more of these! notprovided.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imageworks-2612900 -
What is the best way to run a blog?
Hi, I was wondering what is the best way to run a blog? The options I thought of are: Completely separate domain with many links to my main site. blog.domain.com www.domain.com/blog Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet1 -
Different Geographies - New Domain or Subdomain?
I have a site that is successful on the SERPs for a certain geography, let's call it City A (I'm sure you can't tell what it is from my username). I'm moving to a new city in another state so I will be building my business in this area (City B). Should I create a new domain for City B with CityBWebsiteDesign.com or should I create a sub-domain called CityB.BrandableCompanyName.com and just redirect CityBWebsiteDesign.com to the URL for offline marketing purposes only? My current website BrandableCompanyName.com has some authority with Google. Will it be better to building something on the sub-domain and get any sort of cross-benefits or are there really no benefits to be had between sub-domains? The benefit of going with CityBWebsiteDesign.com would be having a keyword rich URL but I would basically be starting from zero with building authority. Specific experience you've had with this or cited examples would be great for the discussion! Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JaredDetroit
Jared0