What do you do these days when you have a question? You ask Google. And what do you do when you look for a local service? You ask Google too. That’s why lawyers, attorneys, and law firms have been using SEO to get more clients. And with this four-step guide, you can too.
But first, let’s answer an important question…
Why is SEO important for lawyers?
SEO (search engine optimization) is the practice of growing a website’s traffic from organic search results.
The end result of SEO is more visibility for your website on search engine results pages (SERPs) so that more people can get in touch with your business. That’s, in a nutshell, how searchers can turn into your visitors and how visitors can turn into your customers.
Moreover, the great thing about organic traffic is that it’s continuous as long as you rank and you don’t need to pay for each click you get (unlike digital advertising).
Speaking of advertising, law-related keywords can be quite expensive in the law niche. SEO allows you to take advantage of their popularity without an ad budget.
So basically, the reason why law firms, lawyers, and attorneys need SEO is the same as why they need a website: because people look for law services online. When your business doesn’t appear in Google, you simply leave money on the table.
Another way lawyers benefit from SEO is by earning potential clients’ trust with helpful content. When people look for solutions to their problems, they may find your content through Google and see that you know your stuff.
So without further ado, let’s see how lawyers can get the most out of SEO.
1. Optimize for Google Map Pack
The Google Map Pack (also called Google Local Pack and Google Snack Pack) is a so-called rich result that Google shows to searchers to help them find the best result based on location, among other things.
In most cases, the queries your potential clients whatsapp number list use to find businesses like yours will trigger Google’s map pack because Google “thinks” people want to find something related to a location.
Google Map Pack vs. regular organic results
As you can see, Google’s map pack is displayed on top of the organic results. And apart from the ads, it’s the first thing that searchers see. So getting your name out there dramatically increases your chances of being discovered.
No one and nothing can guarantee your place in the map pack. This is because your competition will do similar things to get there. Plus, nobody except for Google itself knows how exactly local ranking works. What we do know are the three principles Google uses fluidly to determine what goes into the local pack:
Relevance – How well a business profile matches the meaning of the query.
Distance – The distance between the search result and the location of the searcher or location specified in the query (e.g., “lawyer mountain view”).
Prominence – This counts in a number of things: popularity in the “offline” world, online reviews and rankings, links to the website and, interestingly enough, rankings in the organic search results.
Based on Google’s guidelines and known local ranking factors, here are three things you should do to increase your chances of showing up in Google’s map pack.