Our Legal Content Writer Shares Three Types of SEO for Lawyers

Personal injury law firms and personal injury lawyers, especially auto accident lawyers and trucking accident lawyers, need to have a strong website in order to retain new clients or a steady flow of new clients.  It simply does not matter what you may think about word-of-mouth marketing.  Important statistics show that 96% of people seeking legal advice use a search engine.  The same statistics show that almost two-thirds (2/3s) of these searches are non-branded, meaning they are not searching for a particular lawyer or law firm.  This means that lawyers who help their website get higher up on Google search results are more likely to get exposure and new clients.  To do this, lawyers need to know about search engine optimization, or SEO.  There are three types of SEO for lawyers which can help.  Our legal content writer shares the important differences to help your law firm get an edge.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.”  This is how all search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing organize and filter search results.  That is, search engines take the search terms and try to translate what the searcher was looking for by comparing it with your website’s content.  Thus, if you can speak the language of the search engine you are more likely to get connected with more relevant searchers.

But presenting this content to search engines requires a lot.  Google and other search engines use complex algorithms to assess the content as it relates to internet searches.  While Google gives out best practices, there are many algorithms that are not made public to prevent abuses.  There are also some algorithms that look for unethical or abusive conduct which could actually trigger Google to ban or blacklist your website.  Yikes!

Overall, our legal content writer knows that SEOs on the quality of your website’s traffic and the quantity of the website traffic which results in exposure of your website.  Search engines look for and hone-in on these factors to increase a website’s exposure.  Personal injury lawyers and law firms can use these tips to get better exposure on search engines.

Learn the Three General Types of SEO

Most lawyers do not know what SEO.  That is fine, because most SEO techs do not know what res ipsa loquitur is or how many days to calendar for a cross-motion.  Well, we know both because our legal content writer was on the defense side, a plaintiff’s personal injury, and now a court attorney in chambers to a New York State Supreme Court Justice.  So yes, we can do SEO and law.

Regardless, our personal injury legal content writer has been drafting content for personal injury law firms for a decade and knows how important SEO is for lawyers.  We know lawyers do not know both like we do.  It is important to understand more broadly the types of SEO so you can learn how to use them.  Generally, there are three types of SEO that lawyers need to know about.  It is important to know what these three types of SEO for lawyers are to get better results. The three general types of SEO are the following:

Content SEO or On-Page SEO: The optimization of the words you use in your blogs and website content.  This is the easiest way for lawyers to increase their website SEO in general because it just requires slight modifications to how lawyers write blogs

Technical SEO, also known as Behind-the-scenes SEO or off-page SEO: This is optimizing how your website identifies its content and shares it with Google or people searching on the internet.  Some of this information is easy for lawyers to do like tags, categories, slugs, meta-descriptions, and other details, whereas other information can be more complicated like how to set up caching, broken link checkers, and other website-health checks.

Off-website SEO: This is using backlinks and other websites to refer to your own website to improve its apparent authority to both Google, search engines, and potential clients.  This is very time-consuming and difficult to do because it requires using other resources to track links back to your own website.

How to Use the Three Types of SEO for Lawyers to Improve Your Website

Now that you have the information and tools how to improve your law firm website, how should lawyers use it?  Well the first suggestion I would make is a legal content writer.  But if you are here to learn from tricks, you probably want to try it on your own first.  This is great, because true SEO results can take months to generate and you should start as soon as you get your law firm website.  There are also many ways that lawyers can start with own SEO or handle their own SEO without expert help.

Here are some common ways to use each type of SEO to your advantage:

Content SEO Tips for Personal Injury Lawyers

Content SEO is the easiest type of SEO for personal injury lawyers to start with, but the hardest to master.  There are many moving parts with content SEO, but some very basic ones such as just hyperlinking to your own websites.  

• Use of a geographic identifier is a must.  You can focus on your state, such as New York auto accident lawyer.  But you will be competing with a lot of other New York lawyers.  A better search is Albany auto accident lawyer.  This means you are only competing against those lawyers in that city or area.  But an even tighter search is picking a small town or hamlet in that city or nearby, such as Bethlehem auto accident lawyer or Coeymans trucking accident lawyer.  Now you are only competing against lawyers advertising in that smaller geographical area.  Also using terms such as Albany County auto accident lawyer might be rarer, but when someone searches it, you are more likely to be a top hit because other lawyers may not be using this search term.
• Write long enough content.  Without saying as much, it has been determined that Google’s minimum length of content to get any content bonus is 300 words.  You should aim for all of your website content to be above 300 words.  However, 500 words is ideal for any personal injury lawyer.  Note though, many websites that are discussing major topics in competitive markets have pages over 1,000 words.  In fact, some of the most competitive fields on the first page of Google have over 2,000 words on their blogs or website pages.  That is huge!  You can never have too many words in a blog post for SEO purposes, so write it up!
• Simple English and words is better.  Okay, so lawyers are known for their legalese.  But Google does not like this.  In fact, it appears that Google will rank pages with simple sentence structure and a reading level higher than more complex pages.  Using shorter sentences and more common words (no pontificating please!) will generally get better search results.  In addition, real clients that see your page will be able to understand what you are saying better and may be more likely to hire you!
• Frequency is important.  Three blogs a week should be the minimum.  The best results are felt with five or more blogs a week.  Law firms having more than one blog a day is also a huge boost, but sometimes unnecessary for established websites.  However, if you are a newer website or in a really competitive market, having multiple blogs for seven days a week is useful.  The blogs do not need to be super long either.  Having one longer post and a shorter post each day could still only be an hour of work but produce important results.

Technical SEO Tips and Off-Page Tips for Personal Injury Lawyers

Most SEO websites consider technical SEO to be more, well, technical website functions.  However, we think that off-page SEO should be grouped in or also constitute technical SEO.  We are talking about tags, categories, slugs, and meta-descriptions too.  Here are some important technical SEO tips for personal injury lawyers:

• Use tags, which are short descriptive phrases or words that you can attach to your blog post or website pages on your dashboard.  Tags like “PI lawyer,” “auto accident,” “TBI,” or “driving too fast crash” are all useful for different reasons.  However, make sure that the tag is related to the content!
• Categories are also important to use.  This is a wider grouping of blog posts that you can identify as “auto accidents” or “trucking accidents,” or even something more specific such as “trucking accident injuries.”  Categories help users the most, but search engines will still be able to see that this content is marked as being relevant for trucking accidents and therefore it will help boost the post.
• Meta-descriptions are essential.  These are short blurbs that identify your content in a few sentences, usually only 160 characters.  This is also done on your dashboard of the post or page.  You can put related and important keywords there to help identify the content of the post or page which ads another layer for search engines and searches to find your post.
• Using a SSL, or secure sockets layer, is an important piece of security technology which makes your website encrypted and protected.  Google like websites like this.
• Mobile friendly websites!  Tablets and cell phones are mobile devices.  These interfaces are becoming more and more common for internet searches.  Having a fast and mobile friendly website will ensure that Google views your website favorably.
• Speed up your site with plugins that help cache information for faster access.
• Install an XML sitemap plugin for your website to help search engines scan, identify, and index your website.

Off-Website SEO Tips for Personal Injury Lawyers

This is a trickier and harder form of SEO for lawyers because it requires more computer knowledge, as well as more time, to achieve.  It also requires some luck, trial and error, and patience.  Here are some off-website SEO tips that lawyers can try.

• Building backlinks to your website is the main type off-website SEO.  You need to develop natural links.  This can include linking in your content to important products or sources that you like, such as linking to statutory sections on government websites.  You can also build your own links such as using other websites to hyperlink to your website and cite to your website.  Other ways are using other websites to link to your website, such as writing guest posts or free articles on magic websites that will point back to your website.
• Social media marketing also helps off-website SEO by driving traffic to your website.  Since you can hyperlink to your own website, however, it does not carry a lot of weight.
• Providing incentives for people to visit your website in person, such as handing out business cards and running a contest for people who go to your website and sign up.

Our Legal Content Writer’s Three Types of SEO for Lawyers Requires Continuous Effort

These three types of SEO for lawyers is not just a one time effort. You should also strive to continue to improve your website’s SEO.  It is important to note that not only can the SEO improve, but it can do down if you do not work on it.  Indeed, many of the forms of SEO include activity, frequently of new content, and updating.  If you have really great SEO today but do not do anything for your website for years, it can negatively affect your SEO.

This can be a challenge for lawyers.  Maybe they have a lot of time now to dedicate to improving their website.  However, lawyers can quickly get very busy.  This is especially true if a lawyer’s SEO efforts initially work great.  Lawyers and personal injury law firms could become very busy and focused on the legal practice aspect of the firm.  But then new cases will slowly stop coming in.  Then new cases may entirely stop.  It could take a big effort to bring back the law firm’s SEO to start getting new cases coming through the door.

That is why it is important to have an important plan.  That plan should be to have a personal injury legal content writer.  You may want to hire a legal content writer to help you get started and rolling in new clients.  Or you may want to hire a legal content writer to help you manage our website and SEO while you are focusing on all the new cases that come in through your website.  In either situation, having an auto accident legal content writer, trucking accident legal content writer, or any other type of personal injury legal content writer can help your law firm immensely. 

Get started today with our legal content writer to ensure that all of your law firm SEO and website needs are met.  We can help you get the results you deserve.  We are also only a fraction of a price as compared to other writers and legal marketing companies making us the easy choice for your law firm website needs.