Top Traits of the Best Law Firm SEO Experts

With so much choice for SEO companies, consultants, agencies, and anything in between, your law firm has a lot of options for a law firm SEO provider. Regardless of what kind of provider you work with to get to the top of search results, there are some factors to look for when you’re comparing between options.

There are four top traits you should look for when searching for a lawyer SEO expert for your law firm: a personalized approach, a high level of customer service & ethics, a focus on local search, and a comprehensive view of law firm marketing. Each of these four traits are essential for your law firm’s success with an SEO expert.

Personalized Approach to Your Firm’s Goals

When you’re looking for an SEO expert to work with, you want to make sure that they take a personalized approach to your firm’s goals. Your firm isn’t like any other so your legal SEO pro shouldn’t treat your firm like a commodity.

In all of the years of running our marketing agency, there’s one thing we’ve heard time and time again: systemize how you work with clients to make your marketing firm more effective for clients and more profitable for agency owners. There’s a whole industry of folks who coach online marketing agency owners on how to do this—but sometimes it can go too far.

Systems are an essential tool for success, don’t get me wrong. A good system makes SEO work more predictable and effective. But when systems are taken too far, they can neglect to address the unique issues your firm faces and the unique goals you have for your firm.

Systems are great for things like keyword research, routine tasks, and acquiring links that every law firm needs. But SEO strategy keeps going well beyond the limitations of systems and requires more adept management for success.

Make sure that you’re not being treated like a cog in a wheel of an SEO machine that treats every law firm in the same practice area identically.

You should ask potential legal SEO pros about the systems they use and how they incorporate your firm’s unique strengths into how they’ll build your rankings. A great SEO professional will explain how systems support your firm’s goals but how they extend those systems to create a personalized approach that incorporates what makes your firm unique into content creation and link building efforts.

High Level of Customer Service & Ethics

As your law firm SEO consultant builds out a new SEO campaign for your law firm, it should come with a high level of customer service and communication about the work being done. Asking potential SEO providers about how they interact with clients, how much support they provide, and how much communication you can expect can give you a good gauge of the level of customer service is built into how they work with clients.

Why is customer service so important for law firm SEO experts? There’s more at stake with SEO for law firms than most other businesses.

Law firms have significantly more at risk because of the ethical implications of certain SEO strategies. Some SEO consultants who don’t understand the challenges lawyers face when marketing themselves may not approach law firm SEO with the appropriate steps to mitigate risks.

Communication is essential to making sure that your law firm is getting the best SEO service possible and that the service is in line with how you want your law firm to be perceived, both by potential clients and by those in the legal community.

A good lawyer SEO expert should have routine communication and reporting built in as part of their service, not merely as an afterthought.

Prioritizes Local Search Techniques

There are a lot of different ways of doing SEO that work for different needs. Above all else, local SEO is one of the most effective tactics for law firms to get to the top of search results. Your law firm SEO expert should prioritize this kind of SEO work, focusing on the techniques and strategies that work best for getting your law firm to the top of Local Pack results and localized organic rankings.

Most search engine result pages for legal specific searches show a Local Pack, or small Google Map above regular search results, as well as localized search results below with a mixture of national legal brands and lead generation websites. If you want to get in front of potential clients in search results, ranking well in Local Pack and localized results is your path towards success.

In practice, your legal SEO pro should prioritize local SEO techniques, including:

• Optimizing and actively managing your Google My Business profile
• Helping your law firm increase the number of positive reviews on Google
• Optimizing existing content for local search
• Creating localized content for your website
• Building links to your website from websites and organizations in your area

These five tactics are essential to a local SEO campaign for a law firm and are often the most important and effective tactics a law firm SEO expert should implement.

Approaches SEO as Part of Complete Marketing Strategy

Your attorney SEO expert should also approach SEO as part of an integrated marketing strategy, not a stand alone element in your overall marketing and law firm growth strategy. SEO strategy for law firms is much less about keyword research and optimization today and more about creating a holistic online presence that drives traffic to your website.

A large part of SEO is link building, or the process of building links back to your website from other sites. Effective SEO in today’s legal marketplace includes more holistic tactics to help your law firm gain prominence both in the legal community and the local community you serve.

A skilled law firm SEO professional will not only help you build links with tactics geared towards website owners but also help your firm use tools like press releases, PR, community events, and sponsorships to gain links from the right organizations that can have a positive impact on both your SEO and bottom line.

In addition to links, your SEO expert should be well versed in how web design affects your rankings. Technical SEO, or the focus on the technical aspects of a website that impact rankings, is essential in law firm SEO.

Because law firm rankings are more competitive than other industries, technical SEO impacts rankings more than in other industries. Optimizing your website for technical aspects should be something your SEO expert can help with, especially if you don’t have an ongoing relationship with a website developer.

Talk with Our Law Firm SEO Expert

Finding the best law firm SEO services comes down to asking open ended questions to potential providers and judging their answers based on what your law firm needs to succeed.

Many lawyers believe they need to be well versed in SEO to correctly pick someone to implement an SEO strategy for them. However, a basic knowledge of law firm SEO is enough to help you understand the benefits of different experts and agencies. It’s more important to ensure that the experts you choose have the traits of top performers and that you feel comfortable with them.

The best way to find out if an SEO expert is right for you is to get a free consultation with them and compare the conversations. Who did you feel comfortable with? Who did you feel was honest with you? Which expert do you feel explained what would be done in a meaningful way?

At the end of the day, your law firm needs to trust that your SEO professional will put your best interests first and execute your SEO strategy with integrity.

Want to find out what it’s like to work with us? Contact us for a free initial consultation to discover how we work with clients and get personalized recommendations for your firm’s growth goals.