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Why Local SEO Is Important for Law Firms

It’s essential to prioritize search engine optimization (SEO) to increase your Google rankings.

As a law firm, your target audience is local to the city or cities where you practice. If you hope to gain clients in your area, you must focus on localizing your legal SEO efforts. Without localization, you’ll have a hard time generating relevant leads.

There are various methods you can use to make your law firm visible on Google. The key is to make your firm visible for the right search terms and in local maps results. At ApricotLaw, we understand the importance of local SEO for law firms. We’ll work hard to increase both traffic and leads for your law firm by implementing a customized digital strategy.

Your Target Audience Is Local

Unlike some companies that target national or even international markets, law firms typically have a local audience. Your business structure depends on face-to-face communication. Even if you’re licensed to practice in the entire state, it’s effective to focus on local SEO. You can localize your SEO to multiple cities within your state. By focusing on local SEO, you’re more likely to capture leads who are ready to become clients.

Potential Clients May Use Maps Results to Find Your Law Firm

Internet users may search for legal terms statewide if their search intent is informational. For example, someone may search a statewide term if they want details about a state law but they aren’t looking to hire a lawyer. However, potential clients with a transactional search intent are more likely to find you in local search results.

If someone wants to speak with a lawyer immediately, they may look to the maps results in their area for suggestions. Local SEO is important if you want to capture warm leads like these.

Your Google My Business Page Can Increase Your Law Firm’s Rankings

Your Google My Business (GMB) page is the featured snippet that appears in Google’s maps results. When someone searches for law firms in your area on Google, your GMB page will appear. Your GMB page should include pictures of your firm, business hours, a phone number, Google reviews, and other relevant information about your services.

Some internet users won’t take the time to visit your website. It’s important to optimize your GMB page for conversion. Google also recognizes businesses with well-optimized GMB pages. By establishing a GMB page for every office location you have, Google may push you to the top of the maps results

Contact a Legal SEO Company

Knowing the importance of local search is one thing, but outranking competitors in your local market is another. It takes a consistent effort and a well-thought-out strategy to get localization right.

At ApricotLaw, we’re a team of skilled SEO analysts, developers, designers, and content creators. We can use our knowledge to drive traffic to your website and generate the leads you desire. If you’re ready to streamline your legal marketing efforts, call us at 877-203-0751. You can also fill out the contact form below to schedule a free consultation.

How Law Firm Social Media Can Help You Gain Clients

The internet has transformed over the past twenty years. Yahoo and Google were once the main sources for gathering information. Today, social media platforms have become search engines in their own right. When someone uses their computer or phone to find a local restaurant, they may reference both Google and Facebook, for example.

In some circumstances, a user may not know about a product until they scroll past a social ad on their feed. As a law firm, you have a unique target audience compared to other products and services out there. But you can still use social media to increase brand awareness and generate leads. At ApricotLaw, we understand law firm social media. Our team can create and manage your social media strategy.

law firm social media

Use Law Firm Social Media Content to Engage with Your Target Audience

One of the best ways to use social media for your law firm and gain clients is to engage with your target audience. Social platforms allow you to comment, post content, and share media from others in your niche. Creating a community will humanize your brand and show potential clients you’re approachable.

Make Viewers Aware of Your Law Firm’s Brand

marketing sales funnel

By posting on social media, you’ll become more visible to potential clients, which can increase brand awareness. You can also use relevant hashtags to spread your social media content to a wider audience. With a law firm social media strategy in place, your social pages can work as part of your marketing sales funnel. You can lead people from social media to your website for conversion.

Establish Authority in Your Law Niche

The key in using social media for your law firm is to post the right content. Whether you’re posting articles, videos, or infographics, you must have a consistent brand voice. That way, potential clients will respect you as a leader in your industry. Warm leads may read your content to gather information. But once you gain their trust, they can become a hot lead.

Improve SEO Efforts across the Internet with Law Firm Social Media

Optimizing your social media posts with relevant keywords can improve your legal search engine optimization (SEO) efforts across the internet. Google recognizes social media content as a positive SEO signal. Having a strong social presence can also increase your website traffic.

Work with an Experienced Legal Marketing Agency

You may hesitate to spend money on social media management if you think it’s an unnecessary cost. But it’s essential to get your law firm noticed on these platforms. Facebook and LinkedIn are search engines, not just social sites. You must create custom marketing strategies for social networks if you want to effectively target your audience.

At ApricotLaw, we can incorporate social media into your legal SEO campaign. To discuss your law firm marketing efforts with a member of our team, call 877-203-0751 or fill out the contact form below and schedule a free consultation.

Digital Marketing for New Law Firms: What Are the Options?

As a new law firm, one of the most overwhelming aspects of launching your business may be figuring out how to build a client base. Creating a comprehensive digital marketing strategy is an excellent way to generate leads from your target market. There are various digital marketing strategies you can use to get started, but some strategies will be more effective than others. 

If you aren’t sure what options you have or where to start, you can reach out to an experienced legal marketing agency. At ApricotLaw, we’ve successfully ranked both new and established law firms in Google. We can help you design your website, develop a focused brand message, and launch an online marketing campaign that will generate the leads you desire. 

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is one of the top digital marketing strategies law firms can use to generate leads and ultimately create a strong client base. With legal SEO, your firm can reach the top search results in Google even if you aren’t established in your market. Legal SEO requires research and the creation of a keyword campaign that’s both localized and focused on your services.  

Website Optimization

A key part of law firm SEO is having a well-optimized website. You can optimize your website by making sure your menu structure is functional, your content includes proper headings and internal links, and your website design is user-friendly. Two additional priorities you should consider when optimizing your website include making sure your website design translates to mobile devices and checking your load times. 

Relevant Content

Having relevant and original content on your website is essential if you want the visitors who land on your website to stick around. If your content isn’t interesting, informative, and related to the services you provide, then all the work you’ve done for legal SEO will be null and void.

The ultimate goal for your digital marketing campaign is to create traffic and transition that traffic into leads. Your content is the bread and butter of all other digital marketing strategies.

Google Reviews

Once you get your first clients in the door, you should encourage them to leave reviews about their experience on Google. Many potential clients will rely on Google reviews before feeling comfortable hiring your firm to represent them. The more genuine and positive reviews you can get, the better you’ll look.

Reach Out to a Skilled Legal Marketing Firm

Because so many factors go into building a strong digital presence, it will likely take a combination of all these digital marketing strategies and perhaps others to launch your law firm and gain the leads you need to succeed. With the help of an established legal marketing agency like ApricotLaw, you can focus on practicing law while we handle the logistics of your digital campaign.

Starting a business is complicated, but when you have the right team behind you, you can feel confident marching forward toward your goals. If you’re ready to schedule a free consultation with our team, call 877-203-0751 or fill out the contact form below.

Law Firm SEO Keywords: Building a Winning Legal Marketing Campaign 

You run a law firm. You know a lot about the law and getting justice for your clients. You might not know too much about internet marketing, or, more specifically, about building a winning legal marketing campaign. Building an SEO (search engine optimization) keyword campaign is challenging and requires a lot of SEO knowledge.

Technology moves fast, probably faster than the law moves. It requires constant trial and error, constant adjustments, and an ability to keep up with technology and internet changes, especially changes that companies like Google make to their algorithms. If you don’t keep up, your law firm website will be left behind.

How to Build a Winning Keyword Campaign

Do you know anything about SEO? It’s okay if you don’t. SEO can be confusing for many people. Because it’s always changing, it’s difficult to stay up to date. Building a keyword campaign for a law firm starts by identifying the important keywords you want to target to reach the market you’re looking to secure.

For example, if you are a family lawyer, what area of family law do you specialize in? Which cases are you most hoping to get? If it’s divorce cases you’re after and you’re an LA-based firm, here are a few examples of keywords you might want to target in your campaign:

  • Los Angeles divorce lawyer
  • Los Angeles divorce lawyer near me
  • Divorce attorney in Los Angeles
  • How do I find a divorce attorney in LA?

The above are just some examples. You need to find out the keywords that people in your area are searching for. There are many tools that can help you figure out what people are searching for. For example, you can use Google to help you discover which keywords people type in when looking for a divorce lawyer in Los Angeles.

You probably want to target the keywords with the most search volume. Search volume just means that those keywords are the ones people use most often to search for a particular thing. 

Once You’ve Selected Your Keywords

Once you’ve found the keywords you want to target, you need to start building your campaign. You start creating content that implements these keywords. The purpose of using these keywords in your content is to help Google identify your content as useful to those who are using those targeted keywords in searches.

A keyword campaign can be a long, difficult, and stressful process for some. That’s why a lot of people will work with an SEO marketing company.

Contact an SEO Marketing Company Near You

You don’t have to handle a keyword campaign and the content writing that goes with it on your own. You can work with a company that specializes in SEO and internet marketing. Your SEO company can take over your keyword campaign, leaving you free to focus on the leads that are coming through your door.

Get ahold of ApricotLaw by dialing 877-203-0751, or you can fill out the contact form on this page. Talk with an SEO specialist about your internet marketing goals.

What’s your law firm SEO company really worth?

Converting the people that contact your law firm from prospect into client, is really on you and how good your sales process is.

It doesn’t matter how they came in – via phone, website form submission or online chat. You should first know what your lead to client/case ratio is.

If you’ve spoken with 100 decent prospects and you don’t have any clients to show for it, no amount of traffic in the world is going to help you. After all, anything times zero is still zero.

After you know this ratio, and it’s not horrific, then you can look at the next set of numbers, which happen to be earlier in the sales process.

There are a few metrics your law firm SEO company could be accountable for. They are…

  1. Rankings – either the number of search phrases your website appears in the top 3 or top 10 (of Google) for and/or
  2. The number of leads (all types) that come in through your website – or through the campaign(s) the agency is responsible for
  3. Which they are accountable for is really up to you and the needs of your law firm.

Where to find these law firm SEO metrics, if they are not being provided to you.

The number of unique visitors can be found in your analytics software, Google Analytics being the most commonly used. In Google Analytics, this number is referred to as Users (not Sessions).

To start, don’t worry about calculating the Key Metrics for each traffic source. Let’s get the basics out of the way first, then you can move on to more granular figures. For now, just get the total number of unique visitors to your website for the past month.

The second Key Metric you’ll need to find is the number of leads you’ve received during the same period.

This one may take a bit more work, especially if you’re not set up properly.

There are usually 3 types of leads that come into most law firm websites.

  1. Form Submissions
  2. Phone Calls
  3. Chat Sessions

Form submissions are the easiest to tally because you can normally look in your website’s dashboard and see how many people filled out forms in the past month.

To count the number of phone calls that came in through your website, you’re going to need two things (well one thing and one criteria).

1. A tracking phone number, or a phone number that provides basic stats, like the number of incoming calls.

2. To make sure that the phone number you are using is unique and only used on that one website.

If you use the same vanity phone number across all platforms, it will be very hard to know where each call came from. Yes, you can ask each caller but that becomes tedious and is not as reliable as a single tracking number tied to each source you want to measure.

I have the Key Metrics, now what?

Now that you have the number of unique visitors and the number of leads that came in last month, we can get to the heart of our marketing, Cost Per Lead and Cost Per Visitor.

we can calculate your Cost Per Click, or how much each visitor is costing you. Just divide what you’re paying the marketing agency by the number of Unique Visitors for the same time period.

For example, if you’re paying the agency

From these numbers you can then easily calculate the Cost Per Click (or Cost Per Unique Visitor) and the Cost Per Lead by dividing what you’re paying the company each month by each.

How to Rank Your Law Firm in Google Maps 

Every law firm wants to rank well on Google and other search engine results pages (SERPs). You probably know that getting on the first page of Google will drive more traffic to your website and, hopefully, increase leads for your firm. Ranking on the first page is important, but so is ranking in the maps section at the top of the first page.

You’ve seen the map when you type in a local business into Google’s search bar. The map at the top of the page pops up dotted with businesses that Google thinks best matches your search criteria. Usually, there are also a few businesses in a list just below the map yet within the map’s borders. This is an area you want to rank in.

The maps section shows businesses that Google thinks most closely matches the searcher’s criteria. In addition, these firms probably have a lot of Google reviews, which tells Google that these are successful firms that others might want to connect with. If you want to rank your law firm in Google’s maps section, you should try the following suggestions.

Tips to Help You Rank in Google Maps

To get your firm into the prized real estate of the Google maps section on page one of Google’s SERPs, you can try these suggestions.

Claim Your GMB Listing

The first tip is to claim your Google My Business (GMB) listing on Google. Make sure you complete the profile as completely and accurately as possible. Google likes businesses that use Google’s products. It even says that claiming your listing helps give you a boost online.

Reviews

If Google likes businesses that have a GMB listing, it makes sense that Google will also favor those who obtain Google reviews. You can get reviews in other places, as well, but if you want to rank in Google maps, Google reviews will be best.

Do a little research by typing in local businesses in the Google search bar. Check out the reviews you see beside the businesses’ names. How many reviews do they have? Which business would you be more likely to click on? The one with the most reviews and the most positive reviews, right?

Embed Maps on Your Web Pages

Another way to help Google figure out where your business is located is to have maps embedded on your website and relevant web pages. This helps Google identify your firm’s location when it crawls (scans) your website and pages.

Finally, make sure that you use a local phone number in your GMB listing and in other listings. This helps Google identify the area that your firm serves. Area codes are tied to an area of the country, and including this number will help tie your firm to a certain area.

Contact a Law Firm SEO Company for Help with Maps Rankings

You can see that there are a number of things you can do to get your firm to rank in maps. For help with rankings, contact a law firm SEO specialist at ApricotLaw. Dial 877-203-0751 or complete the contact form below to reach us.

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