The Lawyer SEO Guide: What's Hot, What's Not

Law firm SEO has been changing as rapidly as the rest of the web in recent years. Today, with about 85 percent of legal clients doing research online before they decide on an attorney to hire, SEO for lawyers has become more than just a cool tech tool. Today, lawyer SEO is a necessity for any attorney who wants to stay economically viable. Keep reading this guide to find out the newest and best techniques for law firm SEO that can help you stay on top of the latest technological developments for attorney websites.

What's Hot: Social Networking SEO For Lawyers

If you think that LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are just something people use to waste time, you need to change the way you think about social networking websites. Far from just being entertainment, these websites present some of the best opportunities for law firm SEO.

First of all, you should make sure that your law firm has a LinkedIn profile, a Facebook profile, and a Twitter account to make it easier to set up SEO for lawyers on the sites. Then, you should complete your profiles on these websites including some keywords that might be used to find you.

This isn't the only time that you can use lawyer SEO on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. You can regularly link back to pages on your website with posts on any social networking site. These posts are also easy to share, garnering you more inbound links (another critical aspect of law firm SEO).

What's Not: Lawyer SEO That Looks Like Spam

Just because you're using SEO for lawyers doesn't mean that you should spam your Facebook and Twitter followers. If you use too much law firm SEO copy in your profile, or especially in your posts and status updates, you'll turn potential clients off in a hurry.

Make sure that your lawyer SEO links to genuinely informative articles and interesting content, and doesn't just link to your front page. If you keep linking repeatedly to your front page as part of your law firm SEO strategy, you'll soon find yourself losing most of the people you've worked so hard to bring to your Facebook or Twitter pages.

If you're ever in doubt as to whether something is lawyer SEO spam or whether it's genuinely good content, ask someone you trust. Remember that people don't usually like to read advertisements, and that your SEO for lawyers should be a lot more creative than just some basic ads.

What's Hot: Mobile Law Firm SEO

No, not a mobile law firm—mobile SEO, which optimizes your website for people who are accessing it through a browser on their iOS, Android, or other smartphone operating system. Mobile SEO for lawyers adds new layers of difficulty. Mobile visitors won't be able to scroll around as easily, or click as easily on small text. It also means that they won't be able to read small text without zooming.

Getting onboard with the new mobile lawyer SEO trend is a great idea no matter what kind of law firm you have. Studies show that by the end of 2014, most web traffic in the United States is likely to come from mobile devices, rather than desktop computers. If you're not using mobile law firm SEO, you'll actually be losing out on most of your potential internet traffic.

What's Not: “Article Marketing” Services

Don't believe anyone who tells you that article marketing is still a good idea for lawyer SEO. This was a method commonly used for SEO for lawyers in the 2000s, but in 2012, it won't work. Google's search indexing algorithms have become too sophisticated for these services, which worked by copying the same article onto hundreds of web pages.

Article marketing today won't just make you look bad if someone realizes you're doing it as part of your law firm SEO. If Google notices that this is the technique you're using for lawyer SEO, it can actually stop listing your websites.

All paid article links, as well as reciprocal link directories, are also likely to end up reducing your rankings. Avoid these forms of SEO for lawyers at all costs, even if a “behind the times” service tells you that they're still good law firm SEO methods.

What's Hot: Latent Semantic Indexing SEO For Lawyers

One of the newest methods of lawyer SEO is using many different keyword variations in the same page instead of a repeated keyword. This is called latent semantic indexing, and this is a strategy that should be learned by anyone who uses SEO for lawyers. While this may sound like a very technical concept, it's actually much easier to learn than you might think, and is at the very forefront of law firm SEO today.

Latent semantic indexing works for lawyer SEO because most search engines have become smart about looking not only for the exact word that you're searching for, but also that word's synonyms and variants. You can use this SEO for lawyers tactic whenever you want to make your copy sound more natural. The lack of repeated keywords makes it much easier to read, and you'll have better conversion rates from this type of lawyer SEO.

What's Not: Law Firm SEO With Keyword Stuffing

When you do any kind of lawyer SEO, you need to avoid stuffing the same keywords over and over into your copy. Google and other search engines will notice if your keyword density looks too high. While this has been the case for some time, recent changes to Google make it even harder to get the keyword density right when writing copy for SEO for lawyers.

That's because now, Google may even consider relatively low keyword densities spam, if you're not being careful to use different keyword terms for your links. If you use one keyword term repeatedly, linking it over and over, you'll be punished in search results even if the overall density of the keyword being used would normally be within acceptable parameters.