Are you utilising Local Directories & SEO

Brand awareness and a strong local reputation, resulting in capturing a target audience looking for your services, is an important part of any marketing strategy. Law firms and the legal industry are no different, and your website and how it performs in the search engines plays an important role in staying ahead of the competition.

Several factors will determine how well a law firm’s website performs in the search engines, this goes for any industry. Vying for top local and organic rankings is an ongoing strategic process that takes time and effort, especially in the legal industry, which is highly competitive.

There are two main areas you should target in your SEO strategy:

• Local law firm or solicitors SEO – competing for high rankings in the map listings that appear when people are searching for law firms and solicitors in your local area.
• Organic law firm or solicitors SEO – competing with other solicitors and law firms to appear in the organic search engine results pages (SERP).

Why should you care about relevant online local listings and local SEO?

In this blog we are concentrating on some of the factors that will help you rank locally, ensuring that your law firm is found for local, relevant searches.

Most of us are aware that more searches are being conducted on mobile phones than desktop computers today, and Google my business / Google Local takes up a large proportion of the first page results.

• Have you optimised your website for mobile and is your site responsive?
• Does your business appear on authoritative legal directories?
• Do you have a Google My Business Page?
• Have you included local SEO as part of your ongoing optimisation strategy?

Including these tasks as part of your ongoing SEO efforts, is an important part of ensuring your success in the search engine rankings and out performing your competitors locally and organically.

Online Local Listings

Google looks for various indicators to verify that you are a respectable business, and in turn list you at the top of the search results. Maintaining a strong, cohesive brand presence across various platforms, including profiles in relevant authoritative directories are just one of the ways Google will use to determine your relevance.

Ensuring your profiles are up to date on relevant databases or directories is vital for example:

The Law Society

You can also list your law firm in other legal directories such as:

The Legal 500

There are countless other relevant business directories that you should also consider, some of which include:

• Bing
• Yell
• Yelp
• Thompson Local
• Scoot

Whilst including your law firm in legal directories and maintaining your Google Business page are a worthwhile task in marketing your law firm and improving your SEO efforts, they are just some of the factors you should consider to ensure you are competitive in the local search results.

Maintaining a strong local presence and achieving good rankings for competitive legal keywords and phrases, requires a considerable amount continued effort to build and maintain authority for your website.

 FireTap Marketing are able to take on the tasks for you, developing effective SEO strategies that are tailored to your law firm and budget that will move you up the rankings. Enquire online about our technical review service here, call us on 0203 911 9715 or email us on hello@firetap.co.uk for a chat about how we can help you and your firm.