Gone are the days when people had to rely solely on a huge phonebook or billboard ads to find a lawyer. Now, all it takes is a simple Google search to give you access to whatever product or service you need.

According to research, 95 per cent of internet users never click past the first page of their search results, and this means businesses have to work hard to ensure they rank higher just to gain some visibility. With proper search engine optimization (SEO), your law firm can become more visible on search engines and attract many clients.

SEO is a marketing strategy not taught in law school. Yet it is very important when building an online marketing strategy for your law firm. The secret behind ranking high on search engines like Google is incorporating proper SEO techniques on your website. This can make all the difference in your search for new clients. By generating more traffic to your website, you can easily convert them into a consistent stream of paying clients.

Implementing an SEO strategy for your law firm is an effective way to quickly and consistently reach out to customers, plus it is a less expensive option when compared to traditional advertising. For this reason, many businesses spend years optimizing their website for SEO. While some have had significant success, others have struggled to make any visible progress, and this can be attributed to their level of expertise on the subject. If you're focussed on your career as a lawyer, you probably don't have the time to focus on learning how to properly optimize your website for search engines. If that's the case, you can consult certified SEO companies like dNOVO Group, which specializes in marketing law firms like yours to help you manage the entire process.

Stuart Rudner, a Toronto-based employment lawyer, told Canadian Lawyer Magazine that “Google is constantly changing its algorithm. And it would help if you worked with a good SEO organization that stays on top of these algorithm changes because they can drastically affect your rankings.”  

Optimizing your website takes some time to achieve, and it is important as a legal firm to not be distracted by such activity. An SEO company should be responsible for building and implementing your SEO strategy to attract more clients to your firm, leaving you to focus on winning cases.

In a recent report, almost 20 per cent of legal clients discovered their lawyers online through a simple search. That means if you’re not visible in search results, you’ll be losing out on multiple clients daily. Usually, people seeking legal services search using certain keywords like best divorce lawyer in Halifax or employment lawyers near me, and this is what SEO companies build their keyword strategy on.

Getting organic search traffic to your website is one of the most effective ways to generate more leads for your firm. So, these marketers focus on optimizing your website to rank for specific keywords that can increase your brand’s online visibility. Once a local SEO strategy has been incorporated, your firm will be easy to find by people looking for legal services in a specific region. With some time, a focussed SEO strategy can even make you the most trusted local legal advisor—especially if you have a 5-star rating on Google reviews.

Regularly updating the blog page of your law firm’s website can do wonders for your search engine rankings. In fact, you’re likely to generate more than 70 per cent more leads than websites without a blog. The way search engines work, your site is indexed every time you make a new blog post, and if you incorporate the right keywords into your blog content (in a non-spammy way), you’ll steadily increase your online visibility. Outsourcing your content strategy to a professional SEO company is the best way to create and post consistent legal information that will keep your visitors engaged, informed, and ready to convert.

The fantastic thing about SEO is that you can easily track and measure your performance with analytics. A data-driven approach is useful for understanding how much traffic you’re getting on your site, your conversion rate, and your page bounce rate. With this information, you can easily make changes to your website that will improve its overall performance without having to rely on guesses.

By simply implementing an SEO strategy that is tailored to lawyers and law firms, the number of leads your website generates will increase, invariably boosting your business revenue. However, your area of expertise is in legal matters and not keyword or website optimization. Therefore, outsourcing your SEO to professionals is a much more convenient investment, and you’ll quickly be seeing more leads than you can handle.