Local SEO for Lawyers: A 2024 Guide to Win the Legal Market

As a competitive landscape, businesses in the legal sector must strive hard to win the market, especially small and medium enterprises. 

Law firms of all sizes must compete in the search engine to be visible to potential audiences. Moreover, if you are a lawyer targeting people in a certain area, you need a comprehensive strategy. 

In this case, you can utilise local search engine optimisation (SEO). Local SEO for lawyers is a complex but successful method of attracting new clients in a particular area.

In fact, when looking for businesses "near me," 76% of customers visit them within a day. In addition, 46% of Google queries are focused on a specific location.

Those data show that local SEO for lawyers is essential for law firms aiming to rank on search engines and boost online visibility.

To understand how local SEO for lawyers can help your business, read this guide until the end. 

What Is Local SEO for Lawyers?

Local SEO for law firms is the practice of optimising SEO for common searches, Google Business Profile listings, and local citations. 

Not only in search engines, by implementing local SEO, your business can also rank in Google Maps. 

Google can list the top three local law firms that are pertinent to the search query above the organic results. 

A local SEO for attorneys strategy also gives you the ability to use personalised content to carefully target particular geographic locations.

This strategy increases the possibility for local sources of leads by capturing the interest of residents.

Then, how to win the local search ranking? Google has released the top three local search ranking factors you can pay attention to, such as:

• Distance: The distance between your company to the user’s location.
• Relevance: How pertinent your content or listings are to the audiences’ needs.
• Prominence: Your company’s reputation. Google sees your offline authority, content, ratings, reviews, links, directories, and your rank in search results. 

Why Is Local SEO for Lawyers Necessary?

Most individuals in need of legal services these days look for attorneys online. As many as three out of four potential clients will contact you within a day of finding your profile on Google, demonstrating the effectiveness of search as a marketing tactic for lawyers.

In addition, you compete with all the other local law companies for online visibility when a user searches for "lawyer in [your area]". Therefore, if you skimp on local legal SEO, you can find it difficult to attract new clients.

In conclusion, to appear on search engine result pages (SERPs), online business directories, and Google Maps, your law firm needs local SEO for lawyers. 

How to Do Local SEO for Lawyers?

There are some local SEO for lawyers strategies you can do to improve your visibility on search engines, including:

1. Optimise Google Business Profile

Google Business Profile (GBP) has become one of the crucial elements for local SEO. GBP shows the NAP information (Name, Address, Phone Number), social media, websites, and opening hours. 

Listings in GBP are important for your business as it will be the first result that users see when they type the query. This can lead them to contact you afterward. 

Not only that, excellent profiles will be rewarded by Google with a spot on the map. Google also pays attention to the reviews and how you interact with them. 

Additionally, reviews can boost your reputation, especially users who can read the positive reviews to determine whether they use your service or not. 

To optimise GBP, you must complete your profile, input valid information, update it frequently, insert excellent visuals, and connect your GBP to your landing page. 

2. Employ Local Citations

Local citations help your business elevate brand recognition by mentioning your business’s NAP. Some local citations also utilise backlinks to your website, which is good for building authority in the attorney sector and enhancing brand awareness.

3. Be Part of Local Directories

Using local directories is a local SEO for lawyers strategy requiring you to add your business information, such as law firm name, lawyer name, qualification, etc. to online directories. 

Your former clients also can put reviews on your account, while you can also ask for peer ratings from fellow attorneys. 

4. Use Consistent Information

Aside from mentioning your NAP, you should ensure that the information is consistent on every online directory. This is because different versions of your NAP confuse search engines as well as potential customers.

Google won't know which version to display to customers when they search for your business if you have many NAP versions for your listings. 

Because of this, Google may present the incorrect NAP version to users, stopping them from getting in touch with you.

5. Gain Credibility with Positive Reviews

Reviews really matter to your business. This local SEO for lawyers strategy will build your credibility and brand awareness, attracting curious and in-need users to use your service. Not only that, reviews can improve your search engine ranking. 

The case is when users search for local attorneys on Google, people frequently peruse reviews to gain insight into the company.

Positive ratings are particularly important to Google and other search engines as they help determine the ranking of legal firms. 

Accordingly, you stand a better chance of appearing higher on a search result page if you have a lot of pleasant ratings.

Conclusion

There are still many local SEO for lawyers you can do aside from what is explained above. Yet, doing it by yourself might be challenging, especially for those operating businesses alone. 

In this case, utilising law firm SEO services can be an option. You can work with a trusted SEO agency for lawyers and focus on other business objectives. 

If you are looking for SEO services for your local attorney business, SEO Services by cmlabs is here for you. 

cmlabs is an SEO company for lawyers that can aid you in creating great content, employing on-page SEO, building links, and much more to increase the authority of your website, reach a wider audience, and improve its search engine ranking. Collaborate with our expert team now!