A Comprehensive Guide to SEO for Family Law & Personal Injury Lawyers

The legal sector is joining the ranks of other prominent industries as they eliminate old-school marketing tactics and trade them in for modern digital marketing and SEO practices. 

Still, mastering SEO for large family law and personal injury firms presents a unique challenge. Getting discovered in search rankings and building trust with compliant content and industry-specific vocabulary is an essential goal for firms, but it’s not always easy to achieve. 

Big Leap is a trusted partner to multiple law firms and we’re bringing that expertise to this article. Stick around as we dive into the challenges of SEO services for lawyers and solutions you can implement today.

Marketing is time-consuming, and it takes skill to dominate the online space. Law firms are often too busy to worry about advertising, yet need it for growth. There’s more to the process than having a website and hoping potential clients will come to you. 

Even if law firms apply themselves to the marketing initiative, significant roadblocks may arise.

• Getting found: Your website is only helpful if it’s driving organic or paid traffic. SEO is an integral part of attracting organic traffic, but it requires a bit of skill and patience to get it right. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising can be less time-consuming but requires more investment. These two ways of attracting new traffic and audiences have learning curves, and crafting an effective strategy demands attention.
• Winning trust: An online presence is critical in today’s digital age, but you must do more than occupy a domain. You want to use your platform to build audience trust and provide valuable information. Determining what information to share and how to get an audience to recognize your name can be challenging. 
• Building authority: It’s one thing to win the trust of your audience and another to build authority in your industry. Both are vital components of Google search results. Family law and personal injury law are competitive niches, so how will your firm stand out from the crowd?
• Ensuring content is accurate and compliant: The law is a unique industry because it demands higher accuracy and compliance than others. When your firm represents society’s rules and regulations, you must ensure your content is specific, accurate, and compliant according to legal standards, practices, and vocabulary. This level of accuracy can be difficult without dedicated marketing resources and individuals experienced in law-specific marketing campaigns. 
• Navigating strict advertising regulations: There are strict advertising regulations for law firms. The American Bar Association has specific advertising and marketing rules, including the representation of specialties, the consequences of false or misleading statements, and more.
• Facing steep competition: Large, full-service law firms have mighty competitors, but when your name outranks them, you’re exactly where you need to be.  
• Needing to emphasize niche-specific keywords: SEO can be challenging for any business, but law firms must focus on niche-specific keywords. That means they require more research and more expertise to create quality content. 

While it seems daunting, solving these challenges can lead to exciting results, more organic traffic, increased authority in your industry, and more.

What Does SEO Mean for Family Law and Personal Injury Lawyers?

The unique difficulties of SEO for large law firms can seem like roadblocks to are too large to overcome. However, the right SEO strategy can turn those challenges into advantages. 

Creating quality, insightful content and a solid campaign plan can launch your firm into new realms of revenue. 

The Basics of SEO for Full-Service Law Firms

Many businesses attempt a DIY approach to SEO but soon realize it involves much more than putting the right keywords in the right places. Content is vital, but it goes beyond that. You need to think about the user experience of your website. That includes elements such as: 

• Design
• Functionality
• Speed
• Readability
• Conversion paths
• And more

SEO creates valuable content and a positive experience—tailoring a site to the algorithms that determine the SERPs (search engine results pages). 

Key Components of a Successful SEO Strategy for Law Firms

Now it’s time to dive deeper. A great SEO strategy involves several moving parts working harmoniously to drive website traffic.

When discussing SEO for personal injury and family law firms, there are four critical components of a successful campaign.

1. Content

A staggering 97% of law firms don’t have unique and informative content on their sites.

Do you have a blog up and running? Is your internal marketing team keeping up with regular posting? Is the content relevant to your audience and their conversion journey? These are the fundamental questions to ask when assessing your current position. 

Family and personal injury law firms can create many types of content, including: 

• Landing page content 
• Short and long-form blog posts
• Thought leadership content
• eBooks
• Whitepapers
• Webinars
• Social media posts

One of your primary goals should be to create high-quality content that enriches the lives of your clientele. SEO content focuses on providing lots of long-term value for businesses, and much of that value comes from long-form content, which typically gets around 77.2% more links than short-form content.

2. Local SEO

If your law firm targets local clients, you must focus on local SEO efforts. Google is the most visited website in the world (89.3 billion times a month, to be precise), and over 8.5 billion searches are processed daily.

When someone needs to find a family law or personal injury lawyer, what’s the first thing they do? Likely, they pull up a Google tab on their device and search for the keywords “family law firm near me” or “best personal injury lawyer near me.” 

You can use local SEO to target those keywords and potential local clients. Building out your local SEO presence involves:

• Creating a Google Business Profile: If you haven’t listed your firm on Google Businesses, you’re invisible to potential clients searching for local law firms. Setting up a profile is free and the process is painless. Filling out your information takes a few minutes, and you can optimize that profile to reach tons of new searchers. 
• Reviews: The secondary piece to your Google Business profile is reviews. You can ask satisfied clients to leave reviews on your profile, which can help increase your authority and boost your reputation. 
• Local directories: This is especially relevant to law firms, as there are law-specific directories where you can get your firm listed. Some potential clients will use these directories to look for new lawyers, so ensure your name is on the list. Google uses this information to confirm business details which can result in improved local visibility.

Local SEO can be difficult to master, especially if your full-service law firm has several locations. So having a professional marketing team in your corner can be quite beneficial. 

3. Link Building

Proper link building can drive more traffic to your site, increase conversions, and foster deeper trust between your firm and potential clients. You can think of authoritative and relevant links to your site as “votes.” These links are vouching for your firm’s credibility, which can be a game changer for ranking purposes. 

There are a few different ways to acquire more links. Some of them are ethical and productive, whereas others are not. Marketers engaging in shady link-building practices might try to post links on third-party websites even when the link has little or nothing to do with a post’s subject matter. Buying or soliciting links, for example, can get you clicks in the short term but can significantly hurt your reputation and rankings in the long run. 

In December 2022, Google rolled out a link spam update targeting sites that buy or solicit links. This further cements the idea that engaging in such practices isn’t worth your time. 

However, that doesn’t mean all link-building efforts are invalid. You’ll be fine if you realize that quality is always better than quantity (a rule that applies to nearly everything in SEO strategy).

Some great opportunities to secure high-quality and relevant links for law firms can be from: 

• Lawyer listing sites or directories
• Guest posting
• Community events or charities 
• Testimonials or reviews
• Create extraordinary content that naturally attracts links

The most important takeaway here is to be genuine in your attempts to build quality backlinks to your website. You want to ensure all efforts are authentic and relevant to the appropriate audiences. 

4. PPC

While SEO efforts can be lucrative and beneficial in many ways, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising has a time and place in every successful marketing campaign. 

PPC focuses on clickable ads with short landing pages. The intention is to snag faster conversions for relevant content. PPC is great when marketing specific pages, events (such as webinars), and local SEO. 

The average PPC cost in the legal industry is anywhere from $0.72–$6.75 per click. This number can guide you in determining how much to spend on advertising.

PPC trends can vary from year to year, so keeping up to date on what’s working best will help you decide when to run a PPC campaign and when to focus on organic traffic.

The Results You Can Expect From SEO

While embarking on a new SEO journey can be exciting, you must learn patience. SEO is like planting seeds in a garden. You can’t expect them to grow overnight. They need time, nourishment, and attention to flourish. SEO functions the same way—it’s a long-term strategy. 

You can typically expect incredible results from SEO in about a year, though there will likely be many smaller wins to celebrate along the way. Here are five results you can expect from SEO. 

1. Increased Website Traffic

Website traffic is something every marketing team seeks, and SEO is a great way to boost those numbers. By creating valuable content that ranks for targeted keywords, you can expect more users to find your site based on a desire for relevant content. 

SEO also involves optimizing your site, which includes design, functionality, loading speed, and more. Those factors will bring more people to your site and keep them there longer.

2. Improved Search Engine Rankings

When more of your pages rank, it helps you gain a competitive edge because the less room that leaves on the search results page your competitors. 

People will view you as an experienced authority if your site ranks for multiple keywords (and even multiple times for the same keyword). That’s why boosting those rankings is so crucial.

3. Increased Lead Generation

The more people you drive to your site, the more leads you generate. 70% of law firms don’t have a call to action (CTA) on their site, and 68% don’t have a lead form on their landing page. These are both ample opportunities for optimizing a site and increasing lead generation. 

4. Enhanced Brand Awareness

Becoming a recognizable name to inquiring searchers can be the difference between acquiring a new client and losing them to a competitor. SEO creates additional content for your site, and the more quality content there is, the more recognizable your name.

5. Improved Conversion Rates

SEO can be a driving force in building better relationships with your clientele. When you create valuable content for them, you’re building trust and authority. That makes potential clients more likely to convert and increases the likelihood that you’ll retain existing clients. 

How Big Leap Creates Results for Law Firms

Big Leap is an SEO and marketing agency that believes in transparency, high-quality work, and sustainable results. We have extensive experience in the law space and know how to craft SEO marketing campaigns for law firms that help them become more authoritative, build better relationships, and rank higher on the SERPs. 

The Law Office of Eric Harron has worked with Big Leap to increase their organic sessions by 65%. These results came through a carefully crafted strategy around content and site optimization efforts. Beyond that, they’ve seen a 54% increase in contact form submissions, resulting in more leads for the firm and higher conversions. 

Ipson Law partnered with Big Leap in 2020, and from then to now, they’ve gained 5,277 positions on Google and 291 positions on Google Local. Of their targeted keywords, 60 rank on the first page. Their top-performing blog post (written by Big Leap) ranks for 344 keywords and owns three featured snippets. 

When choosing an SEO agency for your full-service firm, it’s essential to find one that understands the industry’s unique challenges. These exciting metrics show that Big Leap knows how to get results for law firms. 

Our team keeps vital things like advertising regulations, niche keywords, reputation management, and local SEO efforts at the forefront of our strategies to ensure maximum results. 

Take Control of Your Firm’s Online Presence With Big Leap’s SEO Strategies

As we’ve established, having a robust online presence is critical for law firms in today’s digital age. Optimizing your website for search engines can increase traffic, leads, and conversions while building solid relationships with your clientele. 

SEO is a complex and evolving field. While this article is an excellent starting point for family and personal injury law firms, you need an expert SEO team in your corner if you want the best results possible. 

Don’t wait any longer. Talk to a family and personal injury law SEO expert today and discover how Big Leap can transform your online presence.