How to Optimize Your Law Firm Website for Local Searches

Most people who hire lawyers find these lawyers through Google searches. Likewise, most people who search on Google for law firms are looking for a law firm in their own geographic area. There may be a few people searching for your law firm from out of state, but these are the exception rather than the rule. For example, someone in North Carolina might search for “Is Florida an equitable distribution state” when she sees on Facebook that her frenemy from high school, who has since moved to Florida, is getting a divorce. Likewise, someone who got injured in a car accident while visiting Florida from out of state might look for a personal injury lawyer in Florida, since the courts of the state where the accident occurred have jurisdiction in personal injury cases. Most searches will be from people in your area looking to hire you. Therefore, your legal blog content and everything else on your website should have your local community as a target audience.

Get Your NAP in Order

In the context of search engine optimization, NAP stands for Name, Address, and Phone Number. NAP is one of the things that search engine bots pay the most attention to when finding results related to businesses. Your NAP should display on every page of your website, to make it clear to Google that all of the pages belong to the same business. The best way to get your NAP on every page and to ensure that it is identical on each page is to display it in a footer. Consistency is important; you should either format your business name as “Bloggins and Associates” or “Bloggins & Associates.” Likewise, you should format your street address as “Pines Boulevard” or “Pines Blvd.,” but not both. If you change the name of your business, you should reach out to all the sites that list your business and ask them to update the name, so that your business is not competing with its former self for SEO rankings.

Write What You Know

Outsourcing blog content is fine; perhaps it is even ideal. When it comes to practice area pages on your website, though, the best person to write the content is someone at your law firm, or at least someone in your city. Someone who lives in South Florida knows which of the roads that lead to Pembroke Pines are the most annoying to drive on; they can write content that reflects this more quickly and effectively than the most skilled Internet researcher. They remember which multi-vehicle pileups and society page divorces remain in the local public consciousness, even though these never made national news.

NAP on Your Own Turf, but Leave the Blogging to the Professionals

No matter how accurate your NAP and how local your practice area pages, you will still need to update the blog on your law firm website regularly with new content. You can count on the professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers to deliver custom-written blog posts that add value to your site and enhance your SEO rankings.