As we approach 2019, more and more law firms flood the already crowded legal market. If you have decided to enter this busy arena, you’ll quickly realise that getting to the top of the SERPs can be nearly impossible.

However, no matter how hard outranking your competitors may seem, increasing your visibility online is crucial for you want to attract and convert new clients. Your average potential client spends around 8 hours a day online and 97% of them will head straight to Google if they need legal services. That’s why getting your website rank as high as possible should be your top marketing priority.

Let’s go over a few strategies that law firms can use to improve their website ranking in this competitive eco-system.

1. Make sure you’re mobile-friendly

During this year alone, over 50% of global online traffic has happened on mobile phones, clearly indicating that the world is ready to switch to mobile devices as their primary way to browse and purchase. Google has embraced this trend and incorporated it as the key SEO factor in its own search algorithm, making your mobile website version the primary one. What that means for your law firm is that you need to ensure that your website is not only updated perfectly, but it is mobile-friendly too.

Your website’s mobile version should be fast to load, easy to navigate and offer access to the same content your desktop users would have. Also, make sure that images and descriptions that follow them meet all mobile criteria to help you rank higher in the SERPs.

2. Register locally

When customers search for your business on Google, they’ll most likely use Google Search or Google Maps. That's why it's crucial to set up your Google My Business. Take your time to get your law firm details, such as your business name, phone number, address, working hours, as well as your website link to Google My Business.

You can go a step further and look for specific local directories that will bring far more valuable leads to your website and social media pages as well. The more transparent and consistent your business listings are (meaning that all the details need to match across all platforms), the more search engines will love you for it.

3. Use social media to your advantage

You’ve probably noticed by now that when you search for a particular service or a business, some of the very first results you get will lead you to social media pages. That fact alone shows you that your social activity is a crucial factor in how well your law firm ranks, and that social signals can affect your entire SEO strategy.

Setting up social media monitoring will help you stay on top of your mentions, respond every time your business is mentioned online, and spark engagement through ongoing conversations. This will, in turn, help you get positive reviews and improve your customer support efforts, which will directly impact your ranking in search engines. 

4. Understand the searched phrases

Everything you do in an effort to improve your ranking should be based on thorough research. Use tools that help you research keywords related to your service and the most common long tail forms you can incorporate into your content. The localization of keywords will be of tremendous help since you can easily stand out from competitors, but avoid keyword stuffing.

You can use keyword research tools to determine search volume of certain keywords, how many people are using them and find the least competitive ones so you can increase your chances of ranking for them. Google Trend can also be useful for determining which keywords are the most relevant at the moment or even predict up and coming keywords.

5. Customize your schema markups

Simply put, schema markup is a portion of your website code that helps Google understand your content better and thus rank you more appropriately for the users. These snippets of information help determine how useful you would be in the result pages for the given search query, so it’s vital to implement the right data into your code.

For a law firm, this means you can include your specific location into your schema markup, as well as your current Google ratings (those stars help make your website more appealing if you have collected some good reviews from your customers).

Finally, your law firm deserves taking your SEO efforts to the next level. Considering how competitive the legal market is and how digitally-oriented customers are, improving your website ranking is essential if you want to attract new clients. Make sure to step up to the SEO learning curve and always bring something new to the table in order to help your brand stand out.