How best to optimize for a law firm that specializes in 3 different areas
-
I realize the importance of keyword research and finding keywords where there IS demand and not TONS of competition and optimizing your title and descriptions etc AND content on the different pages for those same specific keywords..........
But....
What do you suggest I do to BEST optimize a site for a law firm that handles family law (divorce), bankruptcy AND criminal. It's one firm with 3 attorneys who specialize in different areas.
I know SEO is challenging and ever changing and I read and study and have made significant, noticeable, improvements for some sites but I have to admit this is over my head.
Any advice would be GREATLY appreciated! Thank you in advance and have a GREAT weekend!
Matthew
-
Sorry Matthew, Just got this.
Make sure each attorney has his/her own listing in Places, Bing Business Portal, Yahoo Local. You can also set them up individually in major/local directories or review sites. -
Im sorry, this might sounds stupid - what do you mean when you say "set them each up in local?" - you mean local seo or in seomoz when setting up the campaign?
Thanks!
-
Good move Matthew on the campaign...you will hug yourself one day soon. PS: Make sure you set them each up in Local.
Let us know if we can help.
-
Kevin, Brandon, Josh, Robert - thank you VERY much for the excellent information. Truly superb points, thank you for being generous with your time. I made a list of everything and yes, Robert, I created a campaign for them the minute I got back to the office with a check for them and I haven't even started building their site yet. Thanks again guys!
-
Matthew,
Josh, Brandon, and Kevin all make great points and, I would write down each of their suggestions as a list.
Handling attorneys (notice I did not say Law Sites) is a horse of an odd color. First, you need to set up your GA and GWMT for the firm so that you have impeccable tracking. Now you are a pro member and you need to immediately go into Campaigns and set up a campaign for this firm. Matthew - Don't read anymore, go set up the campaign and come back and finish reading when that is done
Then you are going to want to consider two things: First, a click to call system that allows a searcher coming to the site to put a number in and be speaking with a lawyer/etc. immediately or very quickly and a system where in you have chat available that pops up on the screen. Both of these will help and most track everything as the companies want to keep the business.
Next, for where you are you need to go into the keyword tool while logged into an account (not external tool) and do keyword research on the three different areas. If you are unsure, just put keyword research in the search bar on SEOmoz and you will have a hundred resources. Personally, I do not believe you need anything other than the Keyword Tool in AdWords for this project. Get a good list of keywords and see where your competition is missing the boat. Brandon mentioned using a city locator and he is spot on. Be sure you look at how keywords are ordered: city-bk-atty vs bk-atty-city. Trust me, most of your competitors are not looking at this.
Now, use what the others have given you with your best 5 to 8 pages per atty. BK - Chap7,11,13, how to (do this), etc, Criminal (here I am not listing anything I have ever done....) DWI, theft, robbery, etc., Divorce - child custody, how to, etc.
Do not spend a lot of time on ego pages... about attorney smith who walks on water in between being an astronaut and playing first base on the local slow pitch team....
Control them now. Tell them what YOU need from THEM. Tell them what reports they will get and when. Show them the first report out of the campaign wherein they rank for nothing. Give them a report monthly on keyword rankings, etc.
Lastly, as to blogs, they will all tell you how they are great writers, etc. Say, "that is super, we need about a dozen blogs to start with. Nothing tomorrow, but one a day for the next few weeks." Then give them a list of potential titles. If one of the three follows through you have an asset. If not, don't push it as you have just put the blog page to bed unless they want to pay you to write (hire a copywriter) a blog a week for each, etc.
Hope this helps, control them, best.
-
I agree with Kevin and Josh in that you need a separate page for each type of legal service. The only thing I can add to this conversation is that I know from first hand experience that doing a legal advice forum is probably going to be a non-starter. I've had a handful of legal clients and the last thing they want to do is to provide legal advice on their website. In fact, all your web copy will usually have to be reviewed by them to make sure their site is not providing legal advice, so don't go changing their copy willy-nilly - always suggest changes and get them to review it first.
Most legal keywords are going to be fairly competitive, but if you add your client's location to those keywords, e.g. Cityname Bankruptcy Lawyer, then you will reduce your competition considerably. In my hometown the person that ranks #3 for one of these types of keywords scores a D on their on-page optimization and only has one keyword-rich link from an external website. Of course the larger your metropolitan area the more competition you will have.
-
Keywords related to these areas of law are very competitive, and technical SEO advice will only get you so far. Josh has got the right idea of publishing at least three separate pages that specify and detail each area of expertise. I wouldn't go too crazy with internal linking, but a similar format to squarespace dot com for each page will allow you to get quite a bit of important information to your potential clients. You can link each section title to more pages, but remember not to canalize link juice by trying to rank two or more pages for the same key words.
I'm going to go out on a limb here only because I've seen it work really well for another client. You're no doubt going to need to embark on major link building campaigns and advertising to direct as much traffic to your site as possible. Now, a legal advice forum might help you out in this department. Having users generate content and lawyers answer these questions will drive more legitimate traffic to your site. And this content will be rich with key words related to your firm, even some you haven't thought of yourself. Of course, you'll need to consult with someone on the best solution for your company, but the forum should be on your own domain and not hosted somewhere else unless that association will benefit your ranking. Start a blog as well with great content for potential clients.
Also get on HARO as there are always reporters looking for professional legal sources. Linkmosses is a great link building newsletter. Get on directories, social media, all that. I imagine you're busy, so you'd be best to find someone or some company to do this for you.
P.S. Remember that your goal is conversions, turning leads into paying clients. Make sure you web site has some sort of web-to-lead form and call to action.
Hope I helped a little.
-
Hi Matthew,
The key to good SEO is good and organised content.
If you've got three different fields, then ensure that you have on page for each of these sections. Under these pages should be more pages of information that link, relate and add more information on the topic.
On the home page you should have lots of links to all this content, and you should cover all three of the fields in a more general sense.
Keeping the site linked (internally, as well as externally) is crucially important.
If you pick one (or two if you're game) terms for each of these pages, you will be able to focus your SEO and target particular terms for each aspect of your site.
Start there and you should start to get some numbers
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to Avoid Improper Special Characters from Being Pulled into SERPs
If you Google "Progressive careers," for the Progressive.com result you'll see a result where Google pulls in content from the page outside of the meta description (not uncommon) and also pulls in an in-page carrot that indicates a link. This character displays as a square on desktop / Android devices. The site includes this character as an accessibility best practice to indicate a link from a heading for screen readers. On iPhones, that square shows up as a soccer ball emoji even though the entity code is different than our character's entity code (our entity code= , soccer ball entity code is ⚽). Clearly, not the best experience. I know we cannot control what piece of the page is pulled in as the meta description, but does anyone have any tips to hide or help avoid pulling in that special character?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | P-C-A0 -
SEO Best Practices for Customer Portals
We have a customer portal which is used to display customer's serial numbers, the knowledgebase, support ticketing information and forum. This information is behind a wall as a user must have support in order to view. The question is what are the best practices for SEO with the customer portal? Should we block these sections from bots? Is there a way to take advantage of the number of pages that are within the portal?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ASCI-Marketing0 -
Best approach to rank for this keyword?
Hi i want to rank for the keyword "white sandals" on Google Australia. Currently, the top 5 ranking pages are not optimised and specific to white sandals. See screenshot: https://image.prntscr.com/image/WenSRHqTTFSqYNg2MHvH1A.png To rank for this keyword, would you create a page dedicated to white sandals even though it looks like it doesn't matter and you could rank the broader sandals page (not colour specific). Any recommendations? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | crazy4seo780 -
Best SEO Practices for FAQ Page
Hi all, I'm looking for some tips on best practices for FAQ pages. In particular, is it better to have all questions and answers listed on one page, or should each question have its own page - given that there's enough content for it Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brian-madden0 -
Effect on SEO for e-commerce on a different domain?
We are engaging a vendor to host our LMS and the process for purchasing access to the LMS (product pages/checkout). The vendor can only accomplish this by domain masking (redirecting portal.ourdomain.com to a subdomain on their domain). Our concern is the SEO implication. Obviously we would prefer the content hosted in a subfolder on our domain for the best SEO outcome, but this isn't an option. The vendor's domain authority is considerably lower than our own, but they recommend moving our product pages, which are currently hosted on our primary domain, to their subdomain so the checkout process is fully integrated using their product. Several of our product pages rank in the top 10 on Google and we don't want to lose that. Does anyone have any experience with domain masking and maintaining page rank? My inclination is that moving these high-ranking pages will 1) Hurt our primary domain, and 2) Negatively effect the rank of our product pages. Thanks in advance, Beth
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bethkmac0 -
URL Rewriting Best Practices
Hey Moz! I’m getting ready to implement URL rewrites on my website to improve site structure/URL readability. More specifically I want to: Improve our website structure by removing redundant directories. Replace underscores with dashes and remove file extensions for our URLs. Please see my example below: Old structure: http://www.widgets.com/widgets/commercial-widgets/small_blue_widget.htm New structure: https://www.widgets.com/commercial-widgets/small-blue-widget I've read several URL rewriting guides online, all of which seem to provide similar but overall different methods to do this. I'm looking for what's considered best practices to implement these rewrites. From what I understand, the most common method is to implement rewrites in our .htaccess file using mod_rewrite (which will find the old URLs and rewrite them according to the rewrites I implement). One question I can't seem to find a definitive answer to is when I implement the rewrite to remove file extensions/replace underscores with dashes in our URLs, do the webpage file names need to be edited to the new format? From what I understand the webpage file names must remain the same for the rewrites in the .htaccess to work. However, our internal links (including canonical links) must be changed to the new URL format. Can anyone shed light on this? Also, I'm aware that implementing URL rewriting improperly could negatively affect our SERP rankings. If I redirect our old website directory structure to our new structure using this rewrite, are my bases covered in regards to having the proper 301 redirects in place to not affect our rankings negatively? Please offer any advice/reliable guides to handle this properly. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheDude0 -
Company Blog at a different URL
Ok, I have been doing a lot of work over the past 6 months, disavowing low quality links from spammy directories to our company website, etc. However, my efforts seem to have had a negative, not positive effect. This has brought me back to reconsidering what we are doing as we have lost a good amount of traction on the nationwide Google rankings specifically. Considering our company blog - platinumcctv(dot)net - we have used this blog for a long time to inform customers of new products, software developments and then to provide them links to purchase those components. Last week, I revamped the nearly default wordpress theme to another on a piece of advice. However, someone told me that all of our links should be nofollow, even though it is a company blog because we have many links coming from this domain, and it could be found as spammy. Potato/Potato - But before I start the tedious task of changing every link to no follow on a whim, i searched a lot, but have found no CLEAR substantiation of this. Any ideas? Other recommendations appreciated as well! Platinum-CCTV(dot)com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PTCCTV0 -
How to get better URL description when ranking #3
OK, last question of the week. I promise. I'm doing something right. I distribute for manufacturers. For some of my less known manufactuers I am #3 or #2 rank. For my main product the manufacturer is #1,2 with some numerical code as the discription. The manufacture will sell direct. To get the customers attention I need to PPC, and luckily it's inexpensive. Is there any way to control what the content is of the listing?. I would like to state in my #3 rank " 10-10-PP, In stock, same day shipping, best pricing." Does Google choose what to display and if so is there some where on my site I can influece this? For you experts, perhaps this is the joke of the week.? Please do not have a heart attack when laughing.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wales0