Having a strong online presence is essential for personal injury law firms. And, for personal injury lawyers, the competition for establishing dominance online via digital marketing is fierce.
Even in large markets, there are only so many high-value personal injury cases, and since most personal injury law firms work on a contingency fee basis, securing these high-value leads creates ultra competitive markets. So, obtaining these target cases is one of the biggest challenges for attorneys practicing personal injury law.
In more competitive markets, personal injury lawyers will invest a decent chunk of their revenue into digital marketing efforts. This can include a lead-converting law firm website, law firm PPC advertising services, social media marketing, and search engine optimization services for lawyers.
Out of all the digital marketing services available to personal injury attorneys, search engine optimization, or SEO, strategy will provide the best return on investment for your marketing budget. However, personal injury lawyer SEO doesn’t work overnight. Instead, it’s a long-term marketing strategy.
At Digital Logic, we tailor our law firm SEO strategy to ensure our personal injury clients
get the best possible results on Google’s search engine results pages.
What is Personal Injury Lawyer SEO?
Search engine optimization, or SEO, refers to the combined efforts that are used to rank web pages higher on the search engine results pages when the target audience searches for specific keywords relevant to the profession.
Ranking higher on search engines, like Google, means that more potential clients will see your web pages in search rankings, visit your law firm’s website, and hopefully, contact your personal injury law firm for a free consultation.
Benefits of SEO for Personal Injury Lawyers
Clients typically only need to hire a personal injury lawyer once in a lifetime, so personal injury attorneys need to constantly secure new clients. This means that personal injury law firms need to make sure their brand is recognized in their local community.
A successful SEO strategy is the best way to attract new prospective clients who are not familiar with your legal brand. An investment into personal injury lawyer marketing will ensure that your website is a better representation of your personal injury law firm. It will also bring your law firm a steady stream of personal injury leads without having to pay an additional fee for each click.
Your only cost associated with these leads will be your monthly SEO package cost.
On the flip side, if your personal injury law firm buys your online leads through a pay-per-click advertising strategy or through pay-per-lead services, then your firm won’t get any more leads unless you allocate more of your firm’s budget to pay for more leads.
Generate More Leads with Personal Injury SEO
Generate More Leads with Personal Injury SEO
Personal injury lawyers only have so much marketing budget to allocate. If you compare a personal injury firm that invests its budget on personal injury lawyer SEO services with a firm that invests the same amount of money on law firm PPC, they’ll have drastically different outcomes in the long run.
Initially, the lawyer that heavily invests in personal injury lawyer PPC will see the best results. We’ll be honest-the PPC results will be exponentially better in the beginning. But, after the first 6 months to a year, you’ll start to see a shift in dynamics. The attorney who invested in personal injury lawyer SEO will start to see better results.
And, once the PPC budget is burned, that lawyer won’t continue to get any leads. This isn’t the same for law firms that invest in SEO services from a reputable personal injury lawyer marketing agency, like Digital Logic.
Your potential clients make at least 3 to 4 searches on Google every day.
Furthermore, it’s extremely common for your prospective clients to research their legal questions before contacting a personal injury law firm.
If your law firm’s SEO strategy includes:
- keyword research
- consistent law firm content marketing
- local SEO tactics
Then, your personal injury firm can generate a large amount of qualified leads.
In fact, most of our personal injury law firm clients generate more personal injury leads than their firm can handle in-house, so they establish another steady stream of income from case referrals.
Increased Organic Traffic
If your personal injury lawyer SEO strategy is successful, your law firm can get and stay in front of your competitors online. Your law firm will show up for local prospects who are searching for your services online. Ranking high on search engines, like Google, ensures that your firm will have the visibility, traffic, and therefore, the personal injury lead generation that it needs to maintain and grow, as a business.
On the flip side, if your law firm’s website doesn’t rank well on search engines, then the site is useless, as far as lead generation is concerned.
Accurately Measure Marketing Results
When compared to traditional forms of advertising, such as billboards or radio advertisements, SEO efforts are much easier to track and measure. Even with the use of vanity phone numbers, you can’t ever track your results using only one variable. You’ll always have to consider the message of your ad, as well as the placement, time, location, etc.
In contrast, SEO efforts offer highly advanced performance indicators. With the right Google analytics tools, you can easily determine your SEO strategy’s effectiveness.
You can measure the following from your personal injury SEO campaign:
- keyword rankings
- organic traffic
- conversion rate
- bounce rate
- return on investment
SEO reporting consists of more than simply tracking the number of visitors that land on your personal injury attorney website. Because SEO efforts can take several months to show results, SEO specialists will look at keyword trends early on. These analytics are very helpful in understanding how your website traffic’s activity affects your lead conversion metrics.
So, basically, if your leads aren’t converting in paying personal injury clients, there is enough data available to determine ‘why’.
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Personal Injury Website: The Foundation for Personal Injury Lawyer SEO
Legal Website User Experience
User experience, or UX, is a term that web designers use to describe how a website visitor feels while navigating your website. Is your website easy or difficult for users to figure out?
For competitive markets, such as the personal injury industry, a website’s user experience may be the difference between website visitors leaving your site and requesting a free consultation.
When you’re looking at your legal site, you not only need to consider how the website looks, but also how easy the website is to navigate through, the tone of your legal site, and how the site compares to other local injury attorneys.
Technical SEO for Personal Injury Attorneys
Technical SEO, or on-page SEO, is the way that your website is structured for Google and other search engines. It specifically refers to the tasks your SEO team performs, aside from content development, to help rank your website on Google, including:
- fixing 404 errors or broken links
- having a secure website (an HTTPS instead of HTTP domain)
- including meta tags and meta descriptions that include the target keyword
- maintaining a fast website speed on both mobile and desktop applications
- optimizing the website for mobile and tablet users
- adding optimized images and graphics
- including optimized headings and titles
Technical SEO issues can keep your personal injury attorney website from ranking well. So, it’s important to address any errors on your website as soon as possible. Any problem that causes Google’s search crawlers to throw a code, can eventually cause your web page to drop in rankings.
Optimized Personal Injury Content
Google’s algorithm is undeniably sophisticated. While a few fraudulent pages may slip through the cracks for a short period of time, users know that for the most part, Google only ranks the most valuable websites for every search query known to mankind.
Technical SEO is one of the best ways to prove to Google that your content is safe and valuable for its users.
Google’s Recommendations for Optimizing Legal Content
A few ways that SEO professionals ensure that web pages meet Google’s recommendations for online content include:
- using headings that include the target keywords
- optimizing images and graphics using HTML markup and alt attributes
- using appropriate meta descriptions that explain the intent behind the page
- including the target keyword in the URL
Avoid Black Hat SEO Techniques
While some may recommend black hat tactics, such as using automatically generated content, using scraped content, adding dishonest URL redirects, etc., for firms that choose to conduct SEO in house, at Digital Logic, we do not. The risk isn’t worth the reward. Put simply, these techniques will only provide organic traffic for a short period, before Google’s search crawlers find out.
Personal Injury Practice Area Pages that Rank
The content that you include on your practice area pages will play a major role in how those pages rank on the SERP. These pages should not only include valuable information for your prospective clients, but also to Google’s search crawlers.
Your practice area pages will not rank without supporting content, like blogs and articles. But, if your practice or service area pages aren’t optimized for search engines, then Google will have a hard time deciphering what your legal website is trying to say, as a whole.
The best way to help your main service pages rank is to also create sub-pages that target the long tail keywords associated with that main practice area.
So, for example, if you’re a car accident lawyer, then you’ll want a main category page for that service. But, then, you’ll also want to create ‘child pages’ for as many sub-areas as possible.
A few examples could include:
- rear-end collision claims
- DUI car accident claims
- texting-and-driving car accident claims
- commercial vehicle accident claims
You’ll want to write various content pieces to attract as many unique circumstances as you can.
Like we said, the personal injury industry is competitive. Having a page that specifically addresses rear-end collisions and how your firm handles them will give your law firm a leg up on other personal injury firms that only address car accident laws, as a whole.
SEO Helps Your Personal Injury Law Firm Understand Your Target Audience
Understanding your target audience is critical to having a successful law firm marketing campaign. While online campaigns can help your law firm narrow down and hone in on a specific group, age, or demographic, SEO specialists can target your niche even further using keyword research and search patterns.
Targeting an audience for personal injury legal services can be difficult because anyone, at any point in his or her life can be impacted by a car accident or medical malpractice incident.
Catastrophic accidents don't discriminate.
But, your prospective clients and therefore, target audience needs to reside within a certain geographic location. We know that. And, if you specialize in a specific niche, such as construction accidents, then you can target those who work in more industrial industries. If you specialize in motorcycle accidents, then you can target those who own or are interested in brands, like Harley Davidson.
In order to generate leads from search engine marketing, you won’t need to understand specific demographics. Instead, you’ll need to understand how an injured person searches for personal injury services online.
When, as a lawyer, you consider your prospective client’s questions and needs, you’re able to meet those prospects wherever they are on their quest to find the best personal injury lawyer. And, when you create web pages that address your potential client’s concerns, this starts to build trust between them and your law firm.
Competitor Analysis
Whether your law firm chooses to hire out personal injury lawyer SEO services or complete SEO practices with an in-house team, you need to take a good look at your local competition.
Personal injury lawyer SEO is super competitive, even in smaller markets. Personal injury law firms are willing to invest huge amounts in order to rank #1 for terms, such as “[Location] Personal Injury Attorney”. They’ll retain the top SEO specialists to help them meet their marketing goals and get the best personal injury victims in the area.
Evaluate the Competition’s Legal Marketing Strategy
When you’re analyzing the local competition, you should evaluate their legal marketing strategy for the following:
- Practice area pages or personal injury service pages
- Blogs
- Profile pages
- FAQ pages or FAQ sections
- On-site videos or YouTube videos
- Social media profiles
- Client reviews and testimonials
- Internal linking strategy
- Backlinks
The Best Keyword Research Tool for Competitive Analysis
At Digital Logic, our favorite SEO ranking report software is Ahrefs. It provides us with the ability to see:
- what our client’s competitors are ranking for
- what sites link to the competition but not to our clients
- the latest keyword trends
- the difficulty of ranking for specific keywords
Programs like Ahrefs can help personal injury firms discover legal directories or industry pages that you may not have previously considered. There are a ton of legal websites that will link to your legal content-all you have to do is ask.
Personal Injury Keyword Optimization Techniques
If you want to connect your personal injury practice to your target audience’s search queries, then you’ll need to understand the following factors:
Personal Injury Keyword Search Volume
When you’re developing your legal content marketing strategy, you must understand how the quantity of searches and search intent affects your website’s traffic.
In terms of legal marketing, you aren’t going to be able to rank for every query that you’d like. It’s just not possible. For example, no matter how impressive your law firm’s information is, you will never, ever rank number one for the term, ‘lawyer’ or ‘attorney’, on Google.
You will be wasting your marketing budget trying.
Local Keyword Competition
When you’re trying to grow your personal injury law firm, you really need to determine which keywords are worth pursuing.
It takes some time for Google to recognize your personal injury firm’s site as an authority on the subject matter. So, even the best legal SEO companies in the business can’t help your firm rank for certain keywords, right out of the gate.
When you look at your local competitors and what they’re ranking for, this can help you determine whether or not a particular keyword is worth pursuing (for now, at least).
For personal injury firms who are just starting the keyword optimization process, we recommend aiming to rank long-tail keywords first. This is because the competition for these keywords tends to be lower and therefore, your injury firm is more likely to rank higher on the search engine results pages.
Then, once your law firm marketing company starts helping your site become the local authority for easy-to-rank-for injury lawyer topics, you can link those pages that are already ranking to more difficult legal content pages, such as practice area pages.
Keyword Relevance for Personal Injury Claims
If your organic SEO content isn’t relevant to what your target audience is searching for, then you probably won’t convert those potential clients into new clients.
Google considers keyword relevance when determining not only where your web page will rank on the search engine results pages, but also how well your correlating PPC ads will perform.
One of the more technical aspects of personal injury lawyer SEO is determining keyword intent. Google is very sophisticated in categorizing search queries and showing the most relevant pages for those searches.
While most people think of Google as a search engine, it really is an advertising platform that provides free search data for its users. So, its end goal is to organize all of its information in a way that makes users happy.
Therefore, in order to rank well on search engine results pages, your firm not only needs to include the target keywords, but you need to make sure you’re matching the intent associated with those keywords.
Let the professionals handle your personal injury lawyer SEO.
Local SEO for Personal Injury Lawyers
Local SEO for personal injury attorneys is both one of the best and most often overlooked internet marketing strategies to date.
Most personal injury firms need to market their personal injury services locally, not nationally. So, it’s best to tailor your legal SEO campaign accordingly. The easiest way to improve your legal practice’s local SEO is to target your audience in a specific geographic location.
One of the biggest benefits of local SEO is that your legal content will be super relevant. This means that your audience will be much more likely to convert into existing clients.
For example, if you created content for the keyword “Fort Worth Medical Malpractice Lawyers,” your web page would be much more likely to rank on the search engine result pages than if you’d created content for “Malpractice Lawyers,” or even “Malpractice Attorneys in Texas.”
Here’s more information on local SEO pricing.
Personal Injury Lawyer SEO Services
Most personal injury lawyers don’t fully grasp how many options they have for personal injury marketing and lead generation.
When you’re working on a big case, we’re sure that your firm consults with experts on every major issue in the case. You want to make sure that you’re not missing an important detail, as it could be detrimental to the outcome of the case.
So, why is it that so many personal injury firms hire out their internet marketing service to big box marketing agencies without conducting research first? A quick review search on some of the biggest law firm marketing agencies will show that the vast majority of their clients are extremely unhappy.
We urge personal injury lawyers who are hoping to grow their personal injury firms to research various law firm marketing companies, including Digital Logic.
At Digital Logic, all of our on and off-page SEO is done by SEO professionals in-house, from our written content to our law firm local service ads management services. We use a targeted, data-driven approach to increase the quality and quality of our client’s personal injury leads.
We provide free SEO audit services, SEO competitive analysis, and SEO strategy for those who are interested in our services. So, you really have nothing to lose by calling.
We’re excited to help you grow your firm!