I know from my PR work with lawyers that they tend to scoop up more work by targeting so-called ‘long tail keyword searches’ performed by Google users. Some research recently indicated that law firms are more likely to attract and convert clients searching for niche phrases than generic searches.
When the conversion rates of for law firms were tracked it was found that niche keywords converted more clients compared to the generic keywords.
Too many law firms in Manchester focus on being found for the wrong keywords. Being number one in Google for ‘Manchester law firm’ doesn’t convert as many clients as being number one for something more niche like ‘dispute with fellow directors’ if you’re a business lawyer.
Manchester solicitors can gain a lot by being placed higher up the Google rankings. As well as the reputational advantage, the commercial advantage is that clients are being more specific with the phrases they search for. The commercial intent of a client is higher with long tail keywords. Concentrating on niche terms brings gets faster results than more competitive generic terms.
To give a simple analogy, someone searching for ‘shoes’ is going to be less likely to be in buying mode than someone searching for ‘size ten tennis shoes’. Law firms need to get to grips with the habits of internet users and ensure their services are easily found through SEO tactics.
Here’s my top ten PR and SEO tips for lawyers and solicitors in Manchester:
- Generate fresh content for your website on a daily basis
- Focus on getting links back to your site from a diversity of different sites and blogs
- Use social media to ‘seed’ your content across the web
- Use keyword rich URLs for each page of your site
- Have unique page descriptions and titles for each page of your site
- Register your firm with Google Places so you can be found on map searches
- Create a blog and link back to your main site
- Encourage happy clients to link back to your own website by giving them useful content
- Create short videos relevant to your work and ensure they are tagged with target keywords to benefit from Google’s blended search results
- Ensure an analytics package is installed so you can track all the visitors to your site
