How competitive is the family lawyers sector that your law practice operates within? If it is in any way competitive, as it is in almost every location you care to think of, then you must find ways to place your family law practice before the eyes of those who are looking for legal representation for family law matters.
You could do this several ways offline such as local advertising in local newspapers or radio stations, but the problem with them, apart from the cost, is that they are not well targeted. Thousands of people will be seeing or hearing your ads who currently have no need for, nor interest in hiring, a family lawyer.
This is one of the reasons that online marketing is favoured by many businesses, including family lawyer businesses because it provides several means of targeting more effectively within your advertising and marketing strategies. One of those methods used by numerous businesses to generate lots of traffic and thus prospects is local SEO.
What Is Local SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, which is used by marketers and business owners to get their websites ranked well on Google, given that it is by far the largest search engine online. SEO is used to first make Google aware of which search terms a particular business is targeting, and then to convince Google’s algorithm that the website pages of that business deserve to rank at the top of search results.
The SEO industry is one that constantly has to alter its methodology because Google is also constantly seeking to improve its results and thus what might have helped rank a website last month, may suppress rankings this month. This can happen dramatically as over the years Google has introduced hugely significant changes to ranking criteria that have impacted websites overnight.
Where local SEO differs from generic SEO is that those trying to rank their websites are targeting a local audience, albeit an online one. It achieves this by creating content and then trying to rank for search terms that both include local locations such as towns, cities, and city areas, as well as the product or service being searched for.
How To Rank For Local Searches
What sets local businesses apart from businesses that are not location-dependent, is that their target audiences live or work within a defined geographical radius. An example to illustrate this would be a business that sells yoga video courses and someone who is a yoga teacher who sells classes for yoga students to attend.
The first business can sell their video courses to anyone online, regardless of where they are located as the product is downloadable. The yoga instructor only has those who can physically attend their yoga classes and thus their audience is limited to a local one. As such, how each of these businesses approach SEO will be different, as will yours compared to someone selling books and other content related to family law online.
As a family lawyer, you will almost certainly follow a similar path to the aforementioned yoga teacher who is targeting local audiences. So, when deciding what keywords and search terms you are going to target, in addition to generic keywords like “family lawyer” or “best family lawyer“, for example, you also add to them local keywords such as the towns, cities, and other identifiable local areas where you prospective clients are.
Those potential prospects, when needing a family lawyer, will want one local to them, and when searching online for one they will add their location to their search. For example, someone living in Peth, WA, might search for “best family lawyers Perth”, or if they are in one of Perth’s suburbs such as Nedlands search for “Nedlands family lawyers”. Follow this local SEO tactic, and you will rank for search terms that your competitors will not if they do not optimise for local searches.