Last Updated on March 2, 2024
The personal injury sector is highly competitive, and while there’s a lot of demand for personal injury law services, today’s firms can only thrive if clients can find your company amongst thousands of online listings. But how do you cut through the noise and outperform the competition? It’s all about your SEO strategy.
All SEO ultimately relies on the same principles – those rules are set by the search engines, particularly by Google – but that doesn’t mean you can’t get ahead through top-notch execution. Particularly for personal injury firms, these 3 strategies can be transformative.
Stay Local
Law is an inherently local business. Sure, there are some big-name, national firms, but when dealing with personal injury cases, most people prefer to work with a local firm. Based on that, it’s important that your firm shows up in conjunction with searches for your location.
Specifically, you want to show up in Google’s 3-pack, those three businesses that appear under the first search map.
To get into the 3-pack, the first thing you should do is make sure you’ve registered and verified your Google My Business listing. You’ll also want to make sure all your online listings – your website and any social media accounts, for example – include an up to date location and phone number for your business. No one wants to search for that information, especially when they’re under a lot of stress due to something like a serious injury.
Use Your Keywords
In addition to finding a local lawyer, another thing that potential clients look for when searching for a personal injury lawyer is someone who has experience with their particular circumstances. To that end, you’ll want to make sure your website makes liberal but judicious use of keywords. For example, the personal injury firm Ward & Barnes highlights key terms like “premise liability,” “asbestos,” and “medical malpractice” on their site, rather than just personal injury, as people are more likely to search for their specific need or complaint.
Content Is Key
Placing a few keywords on your website will help potential clients identify firms they might be interested in, but your keyword strategy is incomplete if you’re not also building longer content. That’s because law firms that use content marketing are more visible, and they’re also more competitive. Longer content is a chance for your firm to demonstrate your specialized knowledge, give examples of past cases you’ve worked, and create a more substantive connection with readers.
SEO Is Changing
SEO is central to web design, but it’s important that your firm recognizes that it isn’t a fixed concept or practice. Rather, the field, and the underlying technology, is constantly changing, and what worked a few years ago – or even a few months ago – may not work now. For example, in November 2019, Google launched a new algorithm.
It threw SEO professionals into chaos, skewing the old local results and scrambling business rankings. That’s because Google was suddenly using new machine learning technology that seeks to read the subtext of a search, not just the literal terms.
The use of machine learning is still evolving, and improvements in machine learning will continue to shake up SEO, but it should also provide users with more accurate tools. Accuracy isn’t the same as predictability, though, which means personal injury firms, like other businesses, will need to pay close attention to changes in the algorithm and work to perfect those SEO elements they can control. If you put quality information out into the world, clients will find their way to you.