Over 30 key factors directly affect the SEO ranking for a website, as well as each page within the site.

Law firms looking to get higher placement on Google search engine results pages (SERPs) in competitive practice areas like personal injury law, family law, and immigration will want to take a look at the “Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors” published by Search Engine Land, Column Five and Third Door Media.

Key factors in search engine optimization are broken into 3 primary categories:

1. On Page SEO Factors

Content: Quality, keyword usage, recency
HTML: Titles, descriptions, headers
Architecture: crawl access, speed, meaningful URLs

2. Off Page SEO Factors

Links: Quality, text, numbers
Social: Reputation and # of shares
Trust: Authority and history
Personal: Country, location, history

3. Violations and Blocking

Includes weak content, hidden text, paid links, and getting blocked by users from search results

Time for a Tune Up

Any time is a good time to audit your SEO factors. It is particularly important when you are building a new site or want to boost the performance of an existing website.

The chart also indicates the relative importance of each SEO factor. Quality content, targeted keywords used in the body of a page, and properly structured HTML tags and headlines are the most important SEO factors.

Of course, attorneys need to practice law and not necessarily become an expert on Google. A well informed webmaster and legal marketing consultant can help you build a law firm website with search engine optimization in mind.

SEO requires active management for best results. If you rely on a constant flow of traffic to your website to generate transactional clients, it’s worth investing some time and money in the effort.

Remember, never stop marketing!

 

Margaret Grisdela is the author of "Courting Your Clients: The Essential Guide to Legal Marketing," now in its 2nd edition. She founded the national legal marketing agency Legal Expert Connections, Inc., which helps attorneys and experts with new business development.