Attorneys have understood the importance of having an attractive website that describes their practice areas well. But having a website is not enough if users cannot find it while searching with a relevant term (terms that relate to / describe your law business). The implicit meaning of “web presence” is a website that makes its presence felt in both search engines and human search engines. For that, lawyers must optimize their websites for the major search engines, such as Google and Bing.

However, a lawyer with a busy schedule is not expected to handle search engine optimization tasks himself. But knowing the basics of SEO would definitely help.

The first and most important step to successful SEO for lawyers is choosing your keywords correctly. You need to choose the right and effective keywords for your law firm marketing. Keywords are the terms that tell search engines what you want your website to rank for. Thus, you establish a solid platform on which your law firm’s marketing campaign can grow online.

For a small business like law firms targeting the local market with the place name at the beginning / end of the keyword / keyphrase, this will be a wise decision initially. For example, Miami personal injury attorney or Miami personal injury attorney guarantee highly targeted traffic. These keywords not only focus on your practice areas, but also point to the region where your business is physically located. If your law firm has branches located in several cities in the state of Florida, such as Orlando, Plantation or others, you can choose keywords such as:

• Orlando personal injury attorney
• Plantation personal injury attorney

The above keywords will target visitors from the respective nearby cities and areas only. If you want it on a larger scale, you can increase your area with a Florida criminal attorney and so on as your business grows.

Another point is to be specific in your practice areas. That is, let people know where you specialize. For example, there are several specializations in the practice of personal injury law. Some SEOs for attorneys focus on medical malpractice, while others specialize in accident injuries or workplace injuries. So when you use the term ‘personal injury’ the scope may be larger than if you use the more descriptive ones like accident injury attorney, workplace injury attorney, or medical malpractice attorneys, but descriptive ones promise a higher conversion rate.

But again, you can’t just rely on long-tail keywords as they don’t guarantee a good return on investment. Descriptive or long-tail keywords are not popular search terms. So, prepare your final keyword list as a combination of popular 2-3 word keywords along with some long tail keywords based on specific locations to increase effectiveness.