Law Firm SEO

Our digital marketing strategies focus on the four fundamentals of Search Engine Optimization for our clients – technical optimization, sophisticated content, authoritative link-building, and local optimization.

When these four cornerstones are effectively utilized, a website can gain trustworthiness and authority in the eyes of Google, move higher up the search engine results page (SERP), and produce quality results.

Just as Google wants to show sites that provide the best answer to a user’s search query, Google also places value on sites that are technically optimized. Ensuring that your site is technically sound keeps both Google and the user happy.

For example, a site that loads quickly and works across all digital platforms – computers, phones, and tablets – is important. Given that over 50% of Google searches come from mobile users, a lawyer who only creates a desktop version of their site is missing out on over half of their potential customer base. This is why all sites we build use a responsive design, which changes depending on the size of your screen.

Our team has dedicated website development specialists to create a site that will work for you, work for your users, and work for Google. At BluShark Digital, we look at each facet of your online presence to create a holistic site that can bring you valuable results

As a lawyer or business owner, it is imperative to be able to demonstrate to Google your authority through the written word. Google is extremely sophisticated in its ability to decipher the difference between high- and low-quality content. As such, providing sophisticated content is necessary to building a solid foundation for an optimized website that actually ranks and brings in leads.

Our approach to digital marketing for industry professionals encompasses original, informative, and topical content for your specific website. Given the nature of legal matters, for example, law firm marketing services must adapt to the legal sphere, specifying the applicable laws from a federal level all the way down to local jurisdictions.

To match this specificity, our SEO strategies and content can be tailored to any company, small or large, and cover any type of industry or law – from personal injury and criminal defense to estate planning and immigration law – in order to help your business rank well and withstand Google’s constant algorithm updates

Once you have built a foundation of optimized and informative content, Google needs to understand that your content is trustworthy enough to be endorsed by other websites – that other websites are raising their hand and citing your brand and your information – through backlinks. When a website links to your law firm or business, this is a signal to Google that another website trusts your content and believes you are an expert in your industry.
The more websites that point at your content through backlinking, the more likely Google is to understand your content is the best answer for its searcher. Our digital marketing helps create quality backlinks to your domain, so that your site and its content can develop and maintain the authority needed to rank well

Search Engine Optimization often focuses on ranking a company’s website in the top ten organic results. However, these results are steadily slipping lower and lower (scroll after scroll on a mobile device) on the first page of Google. Now, Google Ads often show at the very top of the SERP, showing above the organic top ten results. This is often followed by Google’s “Local 3-pack” or “Map Pack”.

To navigate this, the best SEO for lawyers and local industry professionals should have a healthy balance of content curation, Pay Per Click (PPC), and localized strategies to help a business make an impact in their area.

In a broad sense, Google and other search engines want to list “high-quality” results. They determine page quality based on factors like load time, content relevancy, and referrals to and from other authoritative websites. However, this is far from a complete picture of how search engines sort through millions of active domains and billions of individual pages to find exactly what they think a particular user is looking for. Understanding how that picture comes together can be vital to effectively using SEO marketing for law firms and other businesses.

Simply put, Google and other search platforms use “crawlers” to read through websites, scanning for specific features that indicate site relevance and quality. There are hundreds of factors that these algorithms take into consideration when “crawling” webpages, including backlinks and mobile friendliness, the presence of “keywords” that match a user’s query, the amount of unique information a site has across multiple pages, and even the average word count of content on individual pages.

Most importantly, your site must have a logical structure on the backend that both Google and users can navigate easily. Google crawls sites by following on-page links, not just by performing billions of keyword searches. It needs a path to follow to reach any individual pages past your homepage. BluShark Digital can help you build your web platform from the ground up to make those pathways easy for Google and other search engines to find.

No one knows exactly how the Google algorithm weighs different factors or even what specific factors it considers, and the formula often changes substantially with each update. That said, there are still some best practices for making individual pages more likely to rank highly in search engines. BluShark Digital could help you implement these practices at a pace and scale that suits your business.

One principle to keep in mind when it comes to effective on-page SEO is that keywords should appear in multiple places, not just in body text. Properly formatting page headings, section titles, and subsection titles (H1s, H2s, and H3s) so that they can be recognized as headings and then crawled for keywords can be vital to boosting your ranking in search results.

Additionally, the content you include within those page sections should prioritize two things: that you have relevant expertise in something a user may be searching for, and that you are an authoritative source worthy of a user’s trust. Put simply, this means your on-page content should be clear, concise, informative, and accurate based on the information provided in the page heading. For instance, a landing page for “car accident lawyer” should discuss topics like how civil liability works in car crash claims, what losses a plaintiff could seek compensation for, and what legal roadblocks an attorney could help that plaintiff navigate.

Of course, text is far from the only thing you should optimize for search engine readability. Provided that you format them correctly and complete a few extra steps, a relevant image or two embedded into your firm’s website can substantially boost its search ranking in standard search as well as Google Images.

If you have an image you want to include in a webpage, it should be uploaded with a short but descriptive file name—for example, car_accident.jpg rather than image1.jpg. Every image should also have alt text that includes relevant keywords to the page and the image itself. Images should be formatted in HTML so that they are recognized as a “picture” element on the page.

This is important because Google and other search engine bots crawl both the frontend and backend of all webpages they index. An individual page visitor may not see the filename or HTML formatting of an embedded image, but a search bot will, and it can factor that information into how it ranks the page overall and whether that image comes up in separate Google Images searches.

All that said, the same principles that apply to optimizing written on-page content also apply to embedded images. Just like the content in the main body of the page, filenames and alt text should not be overly long or stuffed with keywords. Support from the digital marketing team at BluShark Digital can be vital to building new pages and adjusting old ones with these practices in mind.

The information above is just a brief primer on how search engines work and how SEO principles help search algorithms recognize your site as authoritative, informative, and trustworthy. In practice, building out high-quality content within a functional site structure can take time and effort. If you’re wondering whether it’s really necessary to go through all that work when seemingly low-quality websites still rank highly for lots of searches, you certainly wouldn’t be the first person to do so.

“Black hat” SEO strategies like keyword spamming, hiding text in the background of pages, and building different pages for users and search engine bots have been effective in the past, if inconsistently. However, they will continually become less and less effective. Google and other search engine platforms are relentless in ferreting out non-user-friendly practices like these and lowering the ranking of sites that use them. They may even delist sites from search engine indexes altogether, and if that happens, your only option may be to rebuild an entirely new web domain from scratch.
Our dedication to sustainable “white hat” SEO practices is what sets BluShark Digital apart in this constantly changing and ever-growing field. We want to help you establish a platform that will satisfy your existing customers and supply you with new leads today, tomorrow, and for years to come. Give us a call today to learn how we can support you in boosting your online visibility, reaching your target audience, and ensuring your law firm or business achieves its maximum potential.