Thank You for Downloading the Lawyer SEO Cheat Sheet

If by some chance you landed on this page without having requested a Cheat Sheet, don’t worry. You can download your very own copy by clicking here.

Right now, I’d like to walk you through filling out the Cheat Sheet one step at a time so you can see how easy it is to perform a basic SEO analysis of your own website.

SEO is not as complicated as people have led you to believe. The cheat sheet boils everything down to a math equation.

There are a handful of metrics that give you a crystal-clear picture of the strength, health and authority of any website.

This way you can compare the metrics of your website against other websites in your market to uncover a gap between yours and the rest.

After completing this lawyer SEO analysis you will know exactly how far you have to go in order to compete and what to focus on to get there.

As you are probably aware, there are many people who claim to be Search Engine Optimization experts.

Before we get into the walk-through, we want you to know that you are in good hands. We’ve been doing this a long time and we’ve compiled a mountain of results for our clients and for our own websites.

The following sample of ApricotLaw’s results should help you feel as though you are in the best place to learn about SEO for lawyers and law firms.

 

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How to Fill Out Your LAWYER SEO CHEAT SHEET: A Step-by-Step Guide

STEP 1: Open http://moz.com/researchtools/ose in a new Internet browser window.

STEP 2: Enter your domain without the http:// or the www and click on the Search button. Also, put your law firm’s domain to the right of Website on the LAWYER SEO CHEAT SHEET.

STEP 3: Take the Domain Authority and the Page Authority and copy those numbers down into the first two boxes of the LAWYER SEO CHEAT SHEET.

STEP 4: Click on the drop-down menu under the word Target and choose “this root domain.” This will show us all the links pointing to your website, not just the links pointing to the homepage.

STEP 5: Look at the very first linking page on the list. To the right, find the PA of that webpage. Put that number into the Cheat Sheet box labeled “PA of strongest link.”

*Note: By default, the Inbound Links are sorted from highest to lowest PA. In this case, you will see the small down arrow to the right of the PA Column Title (see screenshot above). If you see that arrow next to DA instead, click on the word “PA” to sort the list appropriately. That way you’ll be sure to find the absolute strongest link pointing to the website.

STEP 6: Open http://majestic.com in a new Internet browser window.

STEP 7: Enter your domain without the http:// or the www. and click on the Magnifying Glass button.

STEP 8: Take the Trust Flow and Citation Flow and copy those numbers down into the appropriate boxes of the LAWYER SEO CHEAT SHEET.

STEP 9: Take the External Backlinks and the Referring Domains and copy those numbers down into the appropriate boxes of the LAWYER SEO CHEAT SHEET.

STEP 10: Scroll down a bit and find the number of Indexed URLs. Copy that number down onto its box on the LAWYER SEO CHEAT SHEET.

STEP 11: This step is the trickiest part of the job. Scroll down until you see the Anchor Text pie chart.

Hover over the chart to reveal keywords and the percentage of times the term was used in the site’s backlinks.

Ignore all variations of the law firm’s name, any person’s name, all URL’s and any generic phrases such as “click here,” “website,” and “learn more.”

Find the phrases a law firm would like to appear in Google for. Terms like “CITY Personal Injury Lawyer” or “Car Accident Lawyer in CITY.”

Of these, find the keyword-rich Anchor Text with the highest percentage.

That’s the number you want to put in the appropriate box on the LAWYER SEO CHEAT SHEET.

If you don’t see any keyword-rich Anchor Text, put a zero in that Cheat Sheet box.

 

Now Analyze Your Top 3 Competitors

After filling in the first column with your website’s metrics, choose 3 direct SEO competitors and do the same for them.

Pick firms that rank on the first page of Google for terms you’d like to rank for.

*NOTE: You may find that these other firms have inner pages that appear in Google instead of their homepage. In other words, you see something like this – www.COMPETINGFIRM.com/personal-injury-lawyer-our-city/ instead of something like this – COMPETINGFIRM.com.

For this initial SEO analysis, plug only the homepage/root domain (COMPETINGFIRM.com) into Moz’s Open Site Explorer and Majestic’s Site Explorer.

Follow the instructions exactly as you did for you own law firm’s website so we can compare apples to apples.

Later, you can go back and analyze how strong specific pages are. But for now, let’s keep it simple.

We just want to see how far behind the leaders you are and what specific metrics need work.