When talking about generating personal injury leads, attorney search engine optimization is one of the first items on most law firm’s checklist.

Everyone seems to agree that organic listings can provide the highest level of exposure among the different categories of legal lead generation. After all, your website is open all day, all year, without coffee breaks or holidays.

Ultimately, search engine optimization is the emperor in lead generation and conversion because it captures prospects when they are closer to the purchasing stage of the sales cycle.

From Personal Injury Lead Generation to Client Retention:
The Sales Cycle of a Prospective Claimant

The typical sales cycle in personal injury lead generation goes as follows:

• Awareness. This is when a consumer becomes cognizant of their desire for a product or service. As it relates to the mass tort leads, auto accident leads, and personal injury leads, awareness of a need could spring from an event, such as an auto accident or reading a news article about a defective drug or medical device.

• Research. Once an individual recognizes their interest in something, they normally do two things. Either they conduct research, which nowadays is heavily internet focused. Or, they become more cognizant of advertisements pertaining the product or service of interest. The two types of research are internal and external. Internal research originates from the current knowledge you possess. External research involves seeking sources that can provide solutions. Naturally, this type is where search engine optimization comes to play. 

• Evaluation: This stage involves the consumer’s narrowing the data collected from research, then developing preferences towards certain solutions. Essentially, a person is narrowing the field of options based upon their hot buttons. Price may be relevant, but in the personal injury lead generation business, law firms must consider highlighting their reputation and credibility to increase conversions.

• Purchase. After weighing all individualized important factors among the options, a person will proceed with a purchasing decision. 

Now, when consumers are searching online for attorneys, they’re initially moving from the research stage to the evaluation stage. In short order, they will make a purchase (i.e., retain a lawyer). You see, legal SEO works like honey when acting like a personal injury lead generation machine by attracting prospects to your website. The honey is in the form of keyword phrases that are ranked by search engines.

Regardless of the stage, your optimization expert can assist you with content aimed at targeting each stage. That will help improve your conversions. It comes down to having keywords that attach to the different stages in the cycle.

When determining how to make the most out of a legal SEO campaign, consider the typical stages involved. This is something all marketing coordinators should have a handle on, and provides a good set of tools to help keep track of what’s going on with your law firm’s website optimization.

1. In-Depth Keyword Research and Analysis

I’ve seen keyword research from a number of different companies that generate personal injury leads for sale, and the results truly vary. Some results include a list of options with ranges of monthly searches, while others include the pay-per-click rates, more specific estimates of monthly searches, and competitor keywords.

The general rule in keyword research is to use at least two tools. The starting point for your keyword analysis usually will begin with Google Adwords Planner. Other popular keyword tools include:

• WordStream Keyword Tool: This tool, like others, gets it results for data obtained from ISPs, browser toolbars, and search engines. The tool has a free version, but I haven’t found that it provides much more than Google’s Adwords Planner.

• WordTracker Keyword Tool: This tool provides similar results as WordStream and Google.

• SEMRush: This tool is growing in popularity, as it has a number of features in addition to keywords research and analysis. Nonetheless, it does a very good job of displaying competitors’ keywords that you might not get anywhere else for PPC and SEO.

• Ubbersuggest: If you’re a fan of Neil Patel, then you already may be familiar with this tool. It is a free tool that offers many features. For keywords suggestions, if provides head terms and long tail keyword ideas. It also provides blogging and related title ideas by displaying top ranked content pieces. Additionally, ideas on backlinks are displayed that allows you to see the content other sites are linking to. For a free tool, it’s pretty good!    

All those tools are okay to pretty good, but the king of free keyword tools in my opinion is Keyword Finder. If you’re aiming to improve your intake with personal injury leads, mass tort leads, and auto accident leads, this is where you need to start for keyword research and analysis . . . and probably finish. The results are truly impressive, as it allows you to drill down into the most important metrics, including simultaneously analyzing your competition on those same metrics. In one screen, you get the deepest information that allows you to see which keywords you should pursue initially.

2. On Page Attorney SEO and Legal SEO Analysis

Onsite optimization involves a number of tasks, but one of the most important includes implementation of your keyword phrases into the elements of your site. The second main aspect deals with optimizing the upload speed of your legal website.

First, we’ll cover the standard on page elements, which include:

• Content: This should be self-explanatory. But you need to be careful about over-optimizing your attorney web site by stuffing too many keywords. The Google Panda update had a focus on penalizing websites that were over-optimized with keywords.

• Meta Tag Description: these are the words that appear when you are viewing results from a search. They are below the displayed URL, and they provide content that describes the web page being displayed. This is your opportunity to tell searchers why they should go to your page. A meta tag description typically has up to 160 characters. Although not a direct ranking factor, many studies show that the number of users who click your page after results are displayed will impact ranking, and your description is the sales pitch that achieves that goal.

• Title Tag: This is an element that describes each page, so all pages should have them. Essentially, it is a brief, to-the-point depiction of what the page is about. Search engines put a lot of weight into each title tag. You can see it in your browser. Chrome browsers allow you to scroll over the tab to see it, while Mozilla Firefox browsers in the same place, but easier to see. Since search engines see them in search engine results pages (SERPs), web browsers, and social networks, that should give you an idea of their importance. Generally, they are 60 characters in length, and if too long the characters will not display.

• Alt Tags: These are referred to as alternative tags, alt image tags, alt text, or alt attributes. An example is when an image is tagged, which is referred to as an image alt tag, and they are designed to add more detail about the site. So naturally these are keyword driven. You can see them when you hover your mouse over an element. Visually impaired people or users who do not download images may use an alt tag because they will describe the element. It is another factor search engines heavily consider.

• Header Tags: These tags are used to describe the different sections of your website, and it is another important onsite factor that directly impacts ranking. Generally, the bold letters that begin a section of content will be your headers that have an associated tag. There should be some consistency with your headers and content. The header tag goes from H1 to H6, and the lower the number the more important it factors into your ranking.

In a nutshell, a good attorney SEO should make sure that each web page is narrowly tailored and specifically relevant to the subject. That will include putting the relevant topic in the URL, tags, and throughout the content. The page should link back to its category page or subcategory page, and the home page usually by way of the logo at the top left corner of most pages. A good place to start when reviewing many of these tags, and other important on page factors, can be found at SEOCentro. You can use free tool to gauge your metrics in this area.

The second important onsite factor is the upload speed of your website. SEOCentro will provide you with the time it takes to upload any of your pages. However, Pingdom will provide an even better viewpoint of all the elements on your website, including how long each takes to download.

Yet, if you want something quick and dirty and to the point, push the F12 key on your keyboard, the click the Network tab, then press the F5 key. That will show you all of the elements that a user would download and your upload speed will be at the bottom. Improving this aspect of your site is critical when improving visitor experience. Most SEO’s believe page speed to be an important philosophical part of Google’s ranking algorithm. In fact, it was 2010 when Google declared that page speed would qualify as a ranking signal.

An example of how page speed translates to higher conversions comes from Walmart. The big box retailer has a strong and growing online presence, and after it discovered its retail site was faster than competitors that include Amazon and eBay, it decided to be faster. The results of Walmart’s conversion study were:

• A 2% bump in conversions was correlated to every 1 second decrease in page speed.

• A 1% increase in conversions was due to every 100 millisecond decrease in page speed

If that doesn’t convince you, consider that Google discovered that decreasing impressions of search results lowers the amount of searches by 8 million every day. Imagine what impact that has on revenues. See Getelastic. Can you now see how important page speed is to the search engine giant?

If your page is slow, pick up the pace and get your website checked. You could be very, very surprised at the impact on page legal SEO can have on your position rankings. Likely, it is far more important than you think.

3. Off Page Attorney SEO and Legal SEO

Off page optimization is everything that is done away from the website, and is mostly about getting links from other websites that refer to pages on your website.

At first glance, this might not seem helpful when considering the relevance of your site. But what it tells search engines is that others think your website is important and relevant.

Hence, the more other sites reference yours via links, the more search engines will believe there is something important and authoritative about your site and its content.

According to Neil Patel, below are some of the most important factors when employing off-page ranking factors.

Take special note of these because Neil is considered by Forbes and Wall Street Journal to be one of the top 10 online in the world and among the most influential people on the web.

• Domain Links: The amount of links coming from different URLs plays a significant role. But it is not just about quantity. You should consider high domain authority links for quality, which can be the difference between ranking higher on page one.

• Page Links: The amount of links from a single domain is important, but getting more individual domains linking to your site is better.

• Domain Authority of Backlinks: Every site can be qualified by the domain authority (DA), which is a scale that estimates how well a domain could rank within Google search result. Page Rank (PR) is the former measurement. Domain authority is a metric from Moz.

• Relevancy of Link: Links from sites that have similar subject matter is considered by many to be an important factor.

• Homepage Links: The home page of a website is thought to be the strongest of page links. This is because all of the content and links ultimately push their juice to the top. This is why the concept of silo pages has become more important. Thus, links to your site from other home pages has shown to be very powerful, as often only a few home page links directed to your site can be the difference between page 1 and page 2 rankings.

• Nofollow and Dofollow Links: Although Google announced that no follow links do not have a ranking effect, do follow links could impact your ranking.

• Diverse Links: There are different ways links can be developed. Changing the types of links provides a more well-rounded approach, avoids spam indicators, and prevents penalties.

• Contextual Links: Many believe that links that originate from content rather than a sidebar holds more weight.

• Anchor Text: The words that are actually linking from another site to yours can be a ranking factor. A safe approach, such as using naked URL’s, will prevent spam indicators and negative ranking.

Now that you have a general guide about off page optimization, here are some tactics to consider.

• Find broken links: Sometimes a link goes to a page that doesn’t exist any longer. That’s an opportunity to take a 404 error page and make it yours.

• Create and disseminate infographics: Infographics have grown in popularity, and if you design one compelling enough, others will put it on their site and link back to yours. Many consider this strategy to have a solid pay off.

The Bottom Line:
SEO Services Can Generate a Steady Flow of Personal Injury Leads for Attorneys