SEO Basics Divorce Law Firms Need to Know

We have entered the SEO era of the internet. To stay competitive in an increasingly global market, learning the language of SEO keeps you in the game by opening you up to the widest audience possible: anyone with the ability to Google search.

What is SEO?

“SEO” stands for “Search Engine Optimization” and refers to the process of growing and optimizing a website’s traffic from organic search results. This relies primarily on factors like content creation and readability, keywords, technical audits, and link building.

Search engines like Google rely on keywords associated with your article or blog post to bring relevant material to inquirers. This is why it is so important to find the right keywords to associate with your content—if your material isn’t relevant to someone searching for a specific topic, they’re going to move on to the next platform.

In essence, technical audits assess the overall health of your website’s SEO and uncover potential ways to improve it. This typically includes factors such as outside links within your content, hosting, page loading speed, target keywords, and more.

Link building is the process of encouraging outside platforms and websites to link to your website. The more links to a page the better it fares in search engine rankings, because links indicate to Google that your content is worth sharing.

Benefits of SEO for Divorce Lawyers in Buffalo, New York

There are several benefits of optimizing your website content for search engines. Here are six huge benefits of working with SEO:

• Choose your clients. By carefully selecting keywords for your content, you can hand select the demographic you wish to reach. For this to be most effective, you must be very clear with who you wish to attract. Who will be looking for divorce lawyers in Buffalo, New York?

• Optimize your platform. To keep current in the world of SEO, it behooves your firm to cultivate the best user experience possible when using your website. This includes factors like page loading speed, mobile friendliness, image compression, and more. Optimizing your platform in this way helps shuffle you to the top Google rankings for divorce attorneys in your area and brings you into the forefront of the industry with real-time interest.

• Build your online presence. By crafting a digital footprint or dossier, you are effectively building trustworthiness with your target demographic. Think of it like a building an extensive portfolio! The more content you produce, the better.

• Trace the efficacy of your marketing. With analytics tools, it’s possible to associate successes with your SEO outreach to keywords that bring you the best results. This makes for great marketing analysis, and even better, there are a wide array of free analytics tools available today. Google Analytics is one example.

• Low cost of marketing. SEM, or Search Engine Marketing, is a lower-cost way of reaching your customers. If you do enough digging on SEO optimization, you will encounter the phrase “content is king.” This means that volume of quality content—versus paying for airtime, for example—yields the best results for customer outreach. The good news? The more you build your online dossier, the easier it will be for customers to find you.

• Boost efficacy of customer outreach and connect with a wider audience.  SEM relies primarily on inbound marketing versus outbound marketing. This is beneficial because outbound marketing relies on interrupting a customer’s day with tactics like cold calls, cold emails or spam, and interruptive ads. These are seen as marketer-centric and don’t always leave the best impression on your customers. Inbound marketing, in comparison, relies on SEO, blogging, and attraction to bring your clients to you organically. These methods are considered customer-centric and tend to generate genuine interest in your services: a win-win.

Know Your Clients

If you are relying on SEO to bring in most of your clients versus other forms of advertising (or word of mouth), producing plenty of content should be the main strategy for your SEM. Invest in customer analytics and get to know the folks who arrive at your firm. Looking at factors like geographical data, time of day the content was accessed, how long the average user was on your website, etc, gives you crucial information about when to post, how to write, and how to format your website for maximum user-friendliness.

A basic first step into consumer analytics would be keyword research. This is the process of discovering what folks typed into Google in order to arrive at your website. Keyword research allows you to come up with stronger keywords to call in your new clientele.

One great resource for keyword research is Answer the Public. One could type “divorce lawyer” into their search bar, for example, and would be met with a map of commonly searched phrases which connected readers to divorce lawyer content. Best of all? This website offers users two free searches a day with the option to upgrade to their premium model.

Beyond SEO for Divorce Law Firms

SEO-based marketing is a low cost, user-friendly approach to connecting with your audience; however, rising to the top of search engine optimization for divorce lawyers in Buffalo, New York is just part of the battle. In addition to keyword optimization, it’s important to make your tone palatable to your target demographic and your content well-formatted and easy to read. Putting your readers at ease makes them more likely to stay curious about your services and to poke around your website!

While it’s not a bad idea to cast a wide net with your keywords, remember to list any qualifications or specialties that might set your firm apart from the others. Writing to your strengths this way will make you sound like an authority online as well as in the court room. This may prove to be the difference between an inbound lead and a lifelong client!

Low-Cost SEO Optimization Tools

Because cultivating your SEO rankings requires maintenance like customer research and content production, it is often beneficial to employ the use of SEO optimization software. This takes the guesswork out of your SEM strategy and gives you the confidence to know you’ve produced the best possible content.

Here are a few examples of free or low-cost SEO optimization tools:

• Yoast SEO or Yoast Local SEO (for Buffalo-based clients), two resources for one-stop SEO optimization
• SEMrush Writing Assistant, for SEO optimization as you write
• WebSite Auditor’s Content Editor, for writing, editing, and optimizing content
• KWFinder, for keyword research
• Grammarly, an AI-powered writing aid
• Hemingway App, for tone, grammar, and readability

Choosing a writing editor that optimizes your content as you go helps you to become a more capable content producer. With a litany of different tools and platforms available to do just that, it really is as simple as setting your budget.

Next Steps

Now that you know some SEO basics, it’s time to get started! Whether you want to dive right in by searching for keywords or begin by optimizing your platform, here are a few first steps to get you headed in the right direction:

• Analyze your website speed. Let’s face it: if your website takes forever to load, a user could easily lose interest. Keeping your website trim and up to speed boosts your chances of keeping your readers’ attention. Here are some tools to help with this:

1. 1. 1. Google’s Lighthouse, for website performance, SEO, reader accessibility, and more. This tool can be run as an extention of your Google Chrome browser.
      2. Optimizilla, for image compressing. This free resource converts large JPEG and PNG images to the smallest possible size without sacrificing quality.

• Make your website mobile-friendly. Even if your website looks amazing from a desktop, it’s important to have a mobile version of comparable quality in order to put your best foot forward at all times. Here is a resource on how to make your WordPress mobile-ready.

• Create regular content. There really is no substitute for volume of content. Whether you want to hire a freelance writer or use software services designed to help you produce SEO-ranking content, it’s beneficial to have posts queued in your schedule and lined up to post. Posting regularly helps to establish your credibility in addition to wrangling a higher volume of readers. Don’t forget to publish internal links!

Don’t have the time or expertise?

Graphic Lux can get you to the top of Google search rankings/results when it comes to people searching for divorce law firms. We have a search engine optimization team ready to start making your return on investment. Click the button below to schedule an appointment to review your SEO needs. We look forward to hearing from you.

Conclusion

In the wide world of internet content, you need SEO knowledge to throw your hat in the ring. Climbing your way to the top google rankings for divorce law firms in Buffalo requires customer analytics, constant content output, and a little bit of optimization software to keep you competitive.

Whether you are interested in building your online brand or making new lifelong clients, creating a streamlined user process helps to set your platform apart in a sea of white noise. By taking a few simple steps, such as compressing your photo files or creating a mobile version of your website, you can increase your engagement with your viewers and make the lasting impression that you want.

This is the magic of SEO: harnessing the crowd-sourced power of Google.