Speaker 1: 0:00

This episode of Legal Marketing 101 is brought to you by Thumbs Up Survey. Build better online surveys faster with Thumbs Up Survey Mention Legal Marketing 101 when you request access to the beta at thumbsupsurveycom to get access to features and discounts first. Thank you to our partners at thumbsupsurveycom. Welcome to Legal Marketing 101. I'm Toby Rosen and welcome back to episode two in our local SEO series, where we are talking about the basic components of great local SEO and, in particular, we're going to be talking about your website. If you missed episode one, make sure to go check that out. And if you haven't seen my local SEO webinars, remember to check out our YouTube channel at Rosen Advertising for two full-length SEO webinars Today. Since we're talking about the components of great local SEO, we need to start with the core component of all SEO keywords. At the end of the day, local SEO is really just a subset or sub-discipline of SEO, which is again search engine optimization, and understanding the nuances of local intent is really paramount to gaining visibility on the search engine results pages and attracting potential clients. This begins with identifying target keywords that are imbued with local relevance. This is a process that requires some finesse and a little bit of strategy. Keyword research really forms the bedrock of any successful SEO strategy and when it comes to local SEO for law firms, this approach has to be nuanced. Start by brainstorming some keywords that are not just relevant to your legal services the stuff that you're selling but that are also reflective of the geographic area that you serve. So, for instance, instead of targeting broad terms like divorce attorney, you can refine your focus to include location-specific modifiers, such as divorce attorney in your city or your city and then family law firm. So if we take a specific example, let's say Denver, that would be divorce attorney in Denver or Denver family law firm. So if we take a specific example, let's say Denver, that would be divorce attorney in Denver or Denver family law firm. Tools like Google's keyword planner, se ranking, semrush, ahrefs all these tools they can be really valuable for uncovering local keywords with significant search volume and then, what's really important for us, low competition. So you want to leverage these tools to identify popular search queries that are related to the legal services you're selling and are in your target area, and then pay attention to the variations in terminology and search behavior across the different regions you're targeting. But once you've compiled a list of target keywords with this local intent.

Speaker 1: 2:41

The next step is to start weaving them seamlessly into your website content, while still ensuring it remains engaging and informative. So start by conducting a comprehensive audit of your existing content and then identify the opportunities to integrate local keywords organically. We don't want to just stuff them in the articles and, when you're creating new content for your website, consider things like local news, events, community involvement. All of these things are things we can leverage to enrich the narrative of you being a member of the community and establish a deeper connection with your target audience. And, on top of all of that, it's good for Google. So we definitely want to do it. So, for example, let's say there's a change to the child support guidelines in a particular state and your clients need to know about it, so you could publish a blog post or an article that discusses that recent development and you can extrapolate what's going to happen next. But you could even participate in community outreach programs to showcase your expertise or do something for charity and write about it. All of these things demonstrate your firm's commitment to the local community and because they're local, they're supporting our local SEO strategy.

Speaker 1: 3:50

Incorporating these geo-specific keywords into your website content is a really important part of our local optimization, and you don't want to just be simply sprinkling these location-based keywords throughout your pages. You really do want to strive to create content that addresses the unique legal needs and the challenges that are faced by individuals in your target area. If you're thinking client story, that's exactly it. So whether this is highlighting state-specific laws or addressing common legal concerns that are prevalent in your locality. If everybody in your area owns boats, then maybe you can talk about how a boat is handled in a divorce, but you're really trying to tailor your content to resonate with your local audience, which is going to significantly enhance its relevance and appeal. And those are good for Google.

Speaker 1: 4:37

But before we go on, don't overlook the importance of multimedia content in your local SEO efforts. This is going to be something that we talk about when it comes to listings and citations, but it is also important on your website. Any regular SEO will tell you that's true. You want to be utilizing visual elements like photos and videos to showcase your location, your team members, your community involvement and reinforcing your local identity and fostering trust with potential clients. This is really just good SEO and good business in general.

Speaker 1: 5:07

Now we're going to move on from keywords a bit, but keep that list of keywords handy as your strategy develops. You're going to need to from keywords a bit, but keep that list of keywords handy as your strategy develops. You're going to need to track your rankings, improvements for those keywords to keep track of how you're progressing. Basically, now we're going to change gears a little bit and talk about what you're all thinking about when it comes to SEO, because, with the proliferation of AI, voice-enabled devices, virtual assistants, voice search, all of these types of tools this has become increasingly prevalent in how individuals seek information online, including, and probably especially, legal services. And to capitalize on this trend, both with AI and with voice search, which is something we've been talking about for years, we need to optimize our online presence to cater to voice search and AI queries, which have a more conversational and often localized nature. If you're not following or you think I'm talking about something that happened in 2015, think again. Voice search produces basically the same results we're now getting from AI searches. Sure, search engines are shifting towards AI for generating voice search results and things like featured snippets and all that integrated stuff you see on Google, but the data for that AI is still being created somewhere. It's not all neural nets. It's a lot of machine learning and we don't need to go too far down this rabbit hole, but we can assume that, for now, voice search tactics are still working for AI search, because well they are are still working for AI search because well they are.

Speaker 1: 6:36

So start by identifying your long tail keywords and phrases that mimic natural language queries commonly used in voice search. These could be questions like find a personal injury lawyer near me or what are the best estate planning attorneys in Raleigh. What you want to do is incorporate these conversational keywords strategically into your website content, like we talked about before, and start bringing out your whole bag of tricks for rankings. Sure, these are local keywords, or at least keywords with local intent, but standard SEO rules still apply most of the time. Good content, long content, multimedia content all of it is good, and it can't hurt to toss a few links towards the page or the location that you're trying to rank, but don't forget to prioritize concise and accurate answers to commonly asked legal questions over the lengthy and drawn-out answers, as these virtual assistants we're using tend to favor content that directly addresses user queries and is pretty concise. This means making the answer short but making the article long, which can be a little counterintuitive, but the reality is that by aligning your content with the conversational nature of voice search, you can actually enhance your firm's visibility online and you can make your firm more accessible to prospective clients that are seeking legal assistance through voice-enabled devices, and you'll help position your website for the increased proliferation of AI. That was a word salad Before I forget, though.

Speaker 1: 7:59

I also want to note that mobile usage has pretty much entirely surpassed desktop browsing, and because of that, google has transitioned to mobile-first indexing, which means they're prioritizing the mobile version of websites for search engine ranking and indexing. So for law firms like us, targeting these local audiences or really just targeting anybody optimizing for mobile is no longer optional. It's imperative, and you already know the basics of this. You know you need to ensure your website is responsible and mobile friendly and provides users with a seamless browsing experience across devices of all sizes. This includes things like optimizing your page load time, streamlining your navigation, your site map and ensuring that essential information like contact details, service offerings all of that is still easily accessible on mobile screens, and I'm not going to spend a lot of time here, because you know this is important. Your website needs to be fast and smooth, or your users are going to go somewhere else and they're going to become someone else's potential client, but it is really important. You need to be optimized for mobile. Google is mobile first, and you need to be too.

Speaker 1: 9:07

But finally, I want to talk about something that a huge number of websites forget. This is one of the last pieces you need to actually add to your website, and that is schema. Schema markup is a really powerful tool for enhancing local search visibility and providing search engines and social media sites with structured data about who your firm is, what your offerings are, your location, your contact information, and, by implementing schema markup on your website, law firms like yours can improve search engine understanding and increase the likelihood of appearing in relevant local search results. If you haven't heard of schema before, I've included a great link on the subject in the show notes. What you need to do, though, is start by identifying the relevant schema markup types for your services things like attorney or lawyer or legal service and then incorporate them into your website's HTML code, and, additionally, we can utilize schema markup for all of our local business information things like our firm's name, the address, the phone number, that critical NAP information we've talked about and operating hours. There are plenty of tools out there to help you structure your schema markup, and I highly highly recommend using a tool or a WordPress plugin for this. It's complicated, it breaks easily and, while it's not going to hurt you too bad to have some broken schema code on your site, it's so easy to use a tool and get something that will work that it's really just a waste of time to try and build this yourself Now, because this episode is already somewhat technical and boring.

Speaker 1: 10:39

Before we wrap up today's episode, let's talk about my favorite subject, which is a little bit more exciting in my opinion, and that's data and analytics, and I heard you all roll your eyes there. Yes and yes, this episode is called the basic components of local SEO, and you may have noticed that I haven't talked about something I talked in the last episode in this series, and that's citations or reviews, and don't worry, that's coming and it will be in this series. But we're talking about the basics first, like your website, because they are so, so important. If you move on right now to citations and reviews, etc, before your website is configured to rock the local SEO scene, you're going to face challenges both with performance and even just with getting your site listed on some of those citations in the first place. Okay, you get it. Let's go on to the data.

Speaker 1: 11:26

So, if you haven't already, start by implementing a robust analytics tool like Google Analytics or using something like Google Search Console to track the key metrics related to local search performance, including your website traffic, user engagement and conversion rates. You can use anything you like, but Google Analytics is kind of standard Tracking and measuring local search performance is really crucial for evaluating the effectiveness of your SEO efforts and then identifying the opportunities for optimization, which is ultimately the whole game. It's search engine optimization, after all. Beyond the data we're going to get from the local SEO platforms we list on, this data from our website is incredibly valuable when it comes to connecting the dots and turning all the numbers into actionable directives. So start by setting up some custom reports in Google Analytics and you can start tracking metrics like local searches, specifically the keywords that people are searching, or local organic traffic, or the geographic location of your visitors or conversion rates from those local search queries.

Speaker 1: 12:28

And yes, this data is being generated by users who actually visit your website and, with local SEO, we actually expect a pretty significant portion of searchers to never make it to your website. That's why we have tools like Google my Business Insights, directly within Google Business, that help us cover the gap. Gmb is already tracking all of the interactions with your profile, but it's still up to us, as business owners and marketers, to track how users are taking the next step. Over time, we'll start to see the effectiveness of our local SEO efforts and we can begin optimizing based on the search behaviors and patterns that we see, and then we'll start targeting more significant growth. Now we're going to come back to the data and we're going to talk more about where the data is coming from, but for today, that's it for Legal Marketing 101. Check out RosenAdvertisingcom for more. Thanks.