Local SEO:

In digital marketing, Local SEO is the practice of getting a business at the top of search engine results page (aka SERP) for a specific local service area. Why your Law Firm should care about it? Let’s clarify this with an example:

When looking for some general legal information, people all over the Country have probably searched for the generic keyword “Law Firm” or “Attorney”, but someone who’s located in Plano, Texas, in need of an Attorney right away, will likely type the location“Plano” beside the keyword Law Firm. Therefore, it would be really wise to try to rank for keywords such as “Plano Law Firm” or “Law Firms in Plano, Tx” instead of ranking for the generic keyword “Law Firm”. Choosing keywords that are specific to the location of your Law Firm will be most effective in attracting local customers.

If you want to appear on top of the SERP while a potential customer is looking for a Law Firm that matches with your Office location, the first important thing to do is to include in the Title Tag the name of the City in which your Law Firm Office is located (e.g.: Law Firm ABC, serving Plano Area).

Also, you can place your location in the Meta Description Tag so it will appear on the SERPS below the title of your page. Note that Google generally truncates descriptions over 300 characters so you may want to put the location as close as possible to the beginning of the title tag.

Local SEO, Kash Consulting

Google My Business and the Local three pack:

Google My Business is a free and easy-to-use tool for businesses to manage their online presence across Google, including Google Search and Google Maps. Yet many businesses have not claimed their local business on Google my Business, which is a gigantic missed opportunity. To claim your Google My Business page, just go to google.com/business. After claiming your Law Firm, the next important step is to go ahead with the optimization of your listing. You want to fully populate each and every relevant section so that your listing is complete and you can reach your local customers!

To do that, you will need to enter a consistent description of your Law Firm, the areas your Law Firm is specialized in (e.g.: Injury law), the business hours, the types of payments accepted and so on. You also want to make sure to upload your Law Firm logo and photos of your Office to make your customers getting familiar with your Office and staff.

Bing also has a comparable page for local businesses called Bing Places for Business. The process is very similar to Google My Business. 

Claiming your Law Firm on Google My Business will give an incredible exposure online, especially if you’re optimized enough to show up in Google’s local three-pack. The local 3 pack is the box of Google Map results in the search results page, under the paid ads and above the organic search results.

Kash Consulting in the Three Pack

Online Reviews play also an important role on Local SEO:

Th reviews online are the digital equivalent of “word-of-mouth recommendations”; therefore, they play an important role on Local SEO. The two most important places where your Law Firm should focus on getting reviews are Google My Business page and the Business’s Facebook page.

Google also notes that “high-quality, positive reviews from your customers will improve your business’s visibility,” which implies that reviews might also factor into rankings on the local three pack.

Online Directories

Another part of local SEO for Law Firms is finding relevant online directories and claiming your Law Firm listing. The top legal citation sources you can use to be found from local customers are:

• FindLaw
• Lawyers
• Best Lawyers.

You should consider also structured data markup for your Local SEO:

OK, wait a minute…What are these?

Google crawlers works hard to understand the content of a page before pulling up the results to the searcher. You can help Google by providing clues about the meaning of a web-page just including structured data on the page. Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a web-page and classifying the page content; for example, on a Law Firm home page, it could be the practice areas, service prices and so on.

Why it’s important for your Local SEO? Search engines use structured data to generate rich snippets, which are small pieces of information that will then appear in search results next to the website and meta description.

If your website is not using structured data as a part of local SEO strategy, then your Law Firm is missing out on an important opportunity to rank higher on the local SERP. Consider that nearly just one third of websites are using this feature and most are only using the basics. You can make your Law Firm stand out and possibly rank higher than your competitors if you add appropriate structured data markup to your website!

Do you need our experts taking care of your Local SEO? Please, CONTACT US!

[content_box style=”autumn” title=”Kash Data Consulting LLC”] Kash Data Consulting LLC is a Digital and a Search Marketing firm specialized in providing exceptional SEO site and social media marketing services in Dallas, TX. In addition, we also provide IT consulting services for small to medium sized companies in DFW Metroplex area. Our SEO experts have significant years of practical experience in Dallas Search Engine Optimization implementations. [/content_box]

Have you tried out some of the above mentioned tips? Let us know how on the comments below!

If you need further information about this subject you can consider the external links below:

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/intro-structured-data

https://moz.com/learn/seo/schema-structured-data

https://www.google.com/business/

https://moz.com/blog/category/local-seo