5 Off-Page SEO Techniques for Law Firms

There is no secret to good SEO other than making a solid effort across all aspects to deliver the best legal and related business content that meets Google’s current (and likely future) guidelines to get good search placement and page rankings. An often overlooked part of the equation, especially among busy legal teams is delivering strong off-page SEO alongside the typical focus on your on-page efforts. Follow these techniques to bring balance to your SEO and improve your results.

Off-page SEO refers to anything that you do beyond your own business website. The aim here is to generate cumulative results with the greatest reward for a small amount of effort. So, you might take part in an interview on the latest in compliance/biz-law/class action or another relevant area for another site.

You would expect to get a link from that article to your practice site. And you can then use the piece to do some social media sharing. And if it was a video interview, use a few clips over time for regular promotion, or share the whole thing on your own social video pages to generate interest – all from one interview.

There are so many other aspects of off-page SEO and there are several strategies and techniques you can use to boost them. Here are the key stages of off-page SEO for law firms:

Brand building in law

Every case you take, any event you go to, and each conference you participate in or sponsor is part of any law firm’s overall brand-building effort. Every interview or thought piece for a law site adds to the overall image of your company and its place in the legal profession.

For lawyers, the brand is typically the company name, or any unique products or services it sells. The key with off-page SEO is to maximize the brand impact it has on your site, helping to build its authority and improve its status in a Google-search-dominated world. That means:

Ensure your company brand names are spelled correctly in their wider use around the internet
That they link back to your site as much as possible.
That they appear on high authority legal sites to improve your own authority.

This will help your own brand appear high up in searches for it, rather than being swamped by adverts and rivals who have a higher authority or are playing advanced SEO strategies to appear ahead of your own brand.

If branding, content marketing, and search engine optimization seem like too many marketing aspects to juggle, you might want to consider outsourcing digital marketing services for law firms. There are several good agencies with experts in all niches that can help you get powerful results.

Strong content marketing

As well as taking part in law industry/trade events, being part of local associations, whether it be for private practice, corporate or criminal law is key to improving your standing in the legal profession and among search engines.

As part of that effort, you need a strong content calendar that produces a regular cadence of articles, stories, legal infographics, your own interviews, videos, ebooks, and other content. The primary aim is not to use these on your sites, but to get them published on high-authority legal sites, and news services as guest posts.

Focus on timely, cyclical, or seasonal topics and keep pushing them to help both build your brand and to improve your search authority and performance. With plenty of competition for stories and links, come up with unique stories through cases or events, or clever angles on newsworthy issues to help stand out from the crowd.

Podcasts are another subjective and useful area of content effort. Especially if someone on your team or among your paralegals, has strong opinions and a good media voice. A series of podcasts about key issues of the day, their experience working in the law, or big-law concepts or small-law reality. Whatever the content, they are great for sharing on social media and building a reputation, and finding high-profile guests to talk to who will share your content further afield.

Another tip specific to education and legal professions is appearing in citations of high authority articles that link to many sources, any high profile cases or projects you have worked on will help with this.

The topics you cover in these articles can range from tips on using electronic signature creators to following rules writing proposals and contracts to divorces to land grab cases.

Link building for legal success

Both brand and content marketing should help with your link-building efforts to improve your SEO and search performance. The way Google works, you need to earn backlinks as a key part of your off-page strategy. Backlinks from high-authority law sites are like gold dust for your own authority rating.

Focus on the key legal sites, like law.com and Law Gazette, but also think about local legal sites which will help build your local authority. There is plenty of competition for articles and links, but even so, you should focus on winning quality backlinks over spamming the legal world and only winning a few low-quality ones.

A key tip here is to look at competitors and see what they are doing for links, if they are very successful in search results, then mimic their approach with your own links and articles, and any USP features you can add to stand out.

Finally, do not rely solely on third-party efforts to link to your legal sites and services. You can hammer them home through link sharing and social media efforts as below.

Using social media to build buzz

Even a small legal firm or sole practitioner should spend some time on their social media to help improve their SEO. Social media is a great point of discovery for law firms, it can act as a customer service or query portal, and is the primary method of sharing your own content and third-party content that mentions your company or brand. A strong presence on LinkedIn and Twitter is vital for even the smallest of firms, while larger law firms should have a strong presence on YouTube or even Instagram to promote their business and improve their SEO and search value.

For lawyers, forums also remain a popular place to share content and generate authority and identify content that you should be involved in. Legal forums tend to be well managed and business-focused, so rate higher than typical social forums, and are a useful place to have conversations with other lawyers trying to improve their SEO or business efforts.

To make a maximum brand impact on social media and forums make sure you take branding seriously and add your logo, tagline, signature, website address, etc.

Getting good reviews for your service

Finally, clients may be less willing to rate your service than they do for holidays or restaurants, but pushing them for reviews when you know you have delivered a strong service can result in some positive reviews that help with your off-page profile and can help build your reputation, especially locally.

Overall, as a legal business, once your site is established and doing well for search, much of your effort will be on off-page SEO to build your profile and boost your authority and rating further.

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