SEO for Law Firms

If this is not your firm's first attempt at using SEO to generate new business then you are likely already familiar with just how competitive it is to gain top rankings in Google's organic search result pages especially for law firms.

You have probably even hired and fired a few different SEO agencies already with varying levels of success and failure. Now you are probably trying to make sure you find the right agency this time, an agency that can produce the SEO results you need on a more consistent basis allowing your firm to grow and reach new levels of financial success.

So, how can you increase your odds of choosing the right agency this time around while reducing the risk of making another costly mistake?

You can start by choosing an agency that:

• Works 100% exclusively with lawyers
• Has lots of great and verifiable client reviews
• Has a great portfolio with examples of past work
• Can show you proof of excellent SEO rankings

Nextlevel.com is an agency with a proven ability to execute successful SEO strategies in the legal vertical. Let us take over your firms SEO campaigns so you can focus on what you do best: advocating for your clients, managing your firm, and, well, practicing law.

What Is SEO?

Let's start with the basics. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the strategic practice of increasing the number of people who find your website through organic, or non-paid, online search activity. In law firm SEO, this means that you get more new clients and earn more revenue without paying Google for clicks, views, impressions, or website traffic.

In a nutshell, here's how it works:

• A searcher types a term into Google, Bing, or another search engine.
• The search engine quickly returns pages of results, listing what it considers to be the best and most relevant results first.
• The person looking for information clicks on a promising result - and, if the website contains the information the searcher needs, it may earn that individual's business.

A single search query can pull up hundreds of millions of results. If your website isn't near the top, you can bet that most searchers won't scroll through dozens of pages of results just to find your site.

In fact, research shows that 75 percent of searchers won't get past the first page of results. The higher up your website appears on that first page, the more likely it is that hurried searchers will choose you over the competition.

There's just one problem: only one site can rank number-one. For it to be your site, you need to persuade the demanding, and sometimes fickle, search engines that you are exactly what searchers are looking for. Proving that your website deserves number-one status isn't easy, but with NextLevel's expertise in law firm SEO, this dream can become your lucrative new reality.

Winning at SEO for Lawyers

SEO for legal firms is notoriously competitive. Every attorney wants the success that comes with claiming the coveted top spots in search engine results.

You can't hope to stumble into a successful SEO strategy. Instead, you will need a custom-designed SEO plan that highlights your strengths, appeals to your ideal client, and builds out your websites' weakest points to turn obstacles into opportunities. NextLevel's lawyer SEO service provides you with just the personalized SEO plan your firm needs to succeed.

What Can a Successful SEO Campaign Do for Your Law Firm?

Your clients are the lifeblood of your practice. Without a steady stream of new clients to represent, you'd have no business.

The old ways of attracting clients are no longer working the as well as they used to. Online searches have replaced a significant portion of word-of-mouth referrals as the way today's plaintiffs and defendants look for legal help. Almost no one reads the ads in the phone book anymore. Billboards and print ads can be costly, and a clever slogan isn't enough to convince savvy shoppers to hire you. Modern consumers expect more - and a winning SEO strategy, in conjunction with NextLevel's other unparalleled digital marketing services, can give your prospective clients exactly what they're looking for.

Imagine, for a moment, that you never again have to worry about finding clients. The phone is ringing. Online contact forms are filling up your inbox. Every day, you're bringing in new cases and new sources of revenue.

No more worries about whether you can afford the overhead costs of running your law firm. Lawyer burnout is a real and dangerous phenomenon - but strip away the stresses of acquiring new cases, and watch how soon you'll start feeling like your old self again.

Suddenly, you're breaking out of the constant administrative crises that made you dread coming to work.

Instead, you get to focus on the passion that brought you to this career in the first place: the practice of law. You have time, now, to get to know your clients - to get excited over strategizing - and to remember that enthusiasm you had for the legal field when you first graduated from law school.

Can SEO really give you back that love of the legal profession? There's only one way to find out.

Why Should You Hire a Company Instead of Doing SEO on Your Own?

You'd never advise someone in legal trouble to forgo professional legal help and try to represent themselves. Whether they've never been in a courtroom before or have watched hundreds of episodes of courtroom drama shows on television is irrelevant. The right way to handle a legal issue is with a lawyer protecting their rights. The stakes are too high. If they're not an attorney, trying to represent themselves is a dangerous choice.

Similarly, when you represent a client, you don't just rely on your own general knowledge of subjects outside the legal arena. You bring in experts on matters like medicine, construction codes, and intellectual property. You do this because you don't have the most up-to-date training and experience in these other fields, or the time to acquire it - and because you want professional reassurance that the information you're basing legal arguments on is accurate.

The same is true of SEO and other digital marketing services. Too many attorneys make the mistake of dabbling in digital marketing themselves - to the detriment of their firm.

It takes years to learn all there is to know about SEO and digital marketing, and the field is constantly evolving. The result is that you divide your time or your workforce between the thing you're best at - law - and the tricky, technical, strategic work of search engine optimization.

The result? You become bogged down by marketing matters, your work suffers, and you still aren't seeing the SEO improvements you're trying so hard to attain. It's wasted money, wasted time, and wasted energy.

You're a lawyer, a leader of your firm, and you're far too busy to become an SEO expert. No amount of expensive "boot camp" workshops by self-proclaimed "gurus" will change that. The best choice you can make, after deciding to incorporate SEO into your law firm's client acquisitions, is to trust your SEO to a company with the experience and expertise to truly give you the best possible results.

How to Choose a Law Firm SEO Service

There's no shortage of SEO companies to choose from - so how do you even begin to find best SEO companies for law firms?

SEO - 100% Exclusively for Law Firms

First of all, you want to choose an agency that specializes in law firm SEO. The legal industry is like no other industry in the world. It's much more challenging to market legal services than consumer products or general services. You don't want to leave the fate of your law firm's future in the hands of a company whose only experience is selling yoga mats, appliances, or household services.

NextLevel has seven years of experience working exclusively with law firms, and our senior legal marketing consultants have on average over 10 years of experience. We have marketed for all legal practice areas and have a proven track record of successfully generating leads for our clients. If anyone can get your firm great SEO results, it's us!

Full-Service Marketing Capabilities

Search engine optimization is great - but it doesn't exist in a vacuum. The very best results come from a full-service digital marketing campaign that incorporates SEO along with:

• Intuitive and user-friendly website design
• Superior written website content
• First-class video and multimedia assets
• A local SEO strategy that brings you the most relevant leads in your area
• A multi-channel social media strategy using the most cutting-edge features
• A comprehensive branding strategy that makes your firm's name one of the most recognizable names in the business

At NextLevel, we provide all of this and so much more. Our experienced lawyer SEO team handles your on-site and off-site SEO. You don't have to waste a moment of your precious time worrying about keywords or backlinks - we've got everything covered. We integrate search engine optimization into a fully customized marketing campaign.

Not Too Big, Not Too Small

When searching for the best lawyer SEO service, you're looking for an agency that's just right. Why?

The massive national marketing agencies are mills. They use cookie-cutter templates and strategies to push out as many attorney websites as possible in the shortest amount of time. Quality matters far less than quantity, because they've got massive overhead costs to keep up with. Good luck getting unique content, personal recommendations, or valuable insights from these guys. If you want your website and SEO strategy to look just like every other lawyer's in town, these overpriced but abundant services are for you - but that'll make it awfully difficult to rise through the rankings and earn a top spot in search results.

On the other hand, a small agency simply doesn't have the capacity or the skills you need to see success. No one person is an expert on keywords and social media and content writing and creative website design and technical website design and videography - and every other aspect of digital marketing that matters. Anyone who claims this expertise is, unfortunately, probably not an expert at any of those things.

NextLevel is a mid-size agency that offers the best of both worlds.

Like a single consultant, we're not a faceless company that sees every firm as the same and uses the same one-size-fits-all templates over and over again. We'll work with you to truly understand your vision, your strengths, and your needs - and then we'll create a unique, custom product that fits your firm exactly.

Because we bring together a team of skilled legal marketing specialists, we've got the capacity to meet all of your marketing needs and the expertise to make every strategy and its implementation the best it can be. You won't have to spend time finding other professionals to execute our ideas or worry that it's not being done the right way, by someone with credible experience.

Speaking of Doing Things the "Right Way"

What makes it so important that your SEO company never takes shortcuts? Over the years since the birth of search engines, there have been many different strategies for search engine optimization. Some were simple, some contrived and convoluted - but many of these strategies left law firms in worse conditions than when they started.

The best SEO practices focus on optimizing your online presence, not manipulation or deception. Google and other search engines profit from their ability to serve up the results searchers want. When they discover websites using underhanded tactics to try to trick their way into better spots in the search results, search engines change the algorithms that determine rankings. Google has even been known to penalize sites that are caught "cheating" to gain an advantage in search rankings.

If you make the wrong choice and hire an attorney SEO agency that engages in these shady tactics, you won't see the long-term benefits you would from the best search engine optimization practices. You also won't get back the investment you made in these untrustworthy agencies.

At NextLevel, we're careful to follow current best practices when it comes to devising and carrying out SEO strategies. We're constantly vigilant about the changes Google and other search engines make several times a year to their guidelines. Our work produces long-term results for our clients - which is why we're able to provide as many references as you need to feel reassured that you're putting your firm's future in the right hands by choosing us.

Lawyer SEO FAQs

Whether you're hearing about SEO for the first time or have already gone through dozens of campaigns, consultants, and agencies in your quest for the perfect SEO results, you're bound to have some questions. Below you'll find the answers to some of the biggest concerns attorneys have.

Don't see your question listed? Whether you're wondering about legal SEO in general or NextLevel services specifically, we're an open book. Give us a call or fill out a quick form to receive prompt answers to all of your questions.

How Long Does SEO Take?

The truth is that upward mobility through organic search results doesn't happen overnight. No credible company can promise this. What we can promise is that, from the time you hire NextLevel to handle your law firm SEO, we begin working hard on the on-site and off-site aspects of your online presence that will make the biggest impact in your rankings.

While you may begin seeing improvements quickly, you should expect it to take months to see the full results of our SEO services. Remember, you didn't wake up one day and become a lawyer. It took years of hard work for you to graduate law school and pass the Bar Exam so that you could finally be an attorney. The cases you handle may sometimes take years to resolve. You're no stranger to the long haul or to putting in the hard work needed to make great things happen. Neither are we.

Another thing you should know about lawyer SEO is that it's not a one-and-done situation. Search engines are continually tweaking the algorithms they use to decide how to rank websites. Consumer preferences and technical capabilities are continually shifting. And, in this aggressively competitive field of digital marketing, competing law firms are constantly trying to outdo one another.

Once your site is optimized and the traffic increases, you're going to want to keep the site optimized to avoid losing all of the ground we have gained for you. Otherwise, each temperamental change of Google's mind and each new campaign by a competitor has the potential to derail your progress and knock you off of that coveted page-one ranking. Fortunately, our work doesn't end with an initial SEO campaign. We've got great ideas for maintaining your site's optimization over time, and we're always alert for the next new challenge - or should we say, opportunity?

What Happens If I Have Questions or Concerns?

It's the blight of every law firm owner: you hire an outside marketing company or consultant, and it feels like you just wrote a blank check to a stranger. You're not sure who is actually managing your account or what they're doing. When you have a question, you can spend days tracking down the right person to give you an answer. Calls and emails go ignored. You wonder why you bothered hiring this company to begin with.

NextLevel is different. We know that not only do you not have time for the runaround, but you deserve better. We pride ourselves on promptly responding to our clients' questions with straight answers and helpful insights - seven days a week.

How Involved Do I Have to Be?

Your extent of involvement in the SEO services NextLevel provides is totally up to you.

• Some attorneys love that they can hand over the challenge of optimizing their website to us and never have to worry about it again.
• Others want more input into their strategy andmore insights from us. Maybe you've always dreamed of opening up your marketing efforts to a new type of case, but you don't know how to start. In this case, being more involved by sharing your long-term goals can help us help you!

Simply put, we work for you. We'll never waste your valuable time, but we also want you to know that you're getting a real return on your investment into SEO.

When we take on a new client, it's not just a number to us. A new account is a relationship that we intend to keep building and to maintain. It's personal - so go ahead and tell us how involved you want to be.

If SEO Is So Effective, Why Do I Need to Do Paid Campaigns?

You don't have to do paid campaigns, often called pay-per-click (PPC) ads, if you don't want to. These paid ads can achieve results faster than you will see changes in organic search result rankings through SEO, but they come at a high price. For smaller firms, long-term PPC campaigns can be prohibitively expensive due to the strong competition for lawyer-related search terms.

However, you should know that even though organic results are non-paid search results, ranking well organically is not "free." It's not an outcome you can hope to achieve on your own, without putting the necessary work and expertise into it.

Although PPC ad campaigns do not affect your organic SEO, there are a number of paid services and campaigns that can. For example, having high-quality professionally crafted content on your website is crucial to optimizing your site for both search engines and human searchers looking for information. Through both regular posting and paid advertising campaigns, social media engagement can send important signals to search engines that your site deserves a high ranking.

We have years of experience in this legal marketing industry, and we've seen what works and what doesn't. We can help you decide which services make the most sense for your budget and your marketing goals. Unlike the big law firm SEO agencies that offer only cookie-cutter packages at standard pricing, we'll give you a custom quote for the services you want and need.

How Much Does SEO for Law Firms Cost? (And Can You Afford Not to Do It?)

SEO sounds great - but it also sounds expensive. We won't deny that you need to make a meaningful investment in your SEO efforts to see the success you want. What we will say is that NextLevel's SEO and other marketing services can add more value for less cost than you might think.

Many of our clients who previously worked with a large SEO agency have expressed surprise at how much less our services cost and at how much more value we add to their firm. As a midsize agency, we don't have huge overhead costs that we have to pass on to our clients. If you're already dabbling in SEO with another agency, switching to NextLevel could possibly get you better results while saving money. That's a win-win.

If you haven't yet invested in SEO, you might worry that it will simply cost too much. Here's the thing: the results of a successful, professionally-managed SEO campaign will more than pay for themselves. The added value that a steady stream of incoming cases will bring to your firm will far surpass the cost.

If you avoid SEO, then your competitors are the ones getting the cases that should have been yours. And it will only get worse, because the use of online searches for finding legal help is only going to grow.

Still think you can't afford SEO services? Try us! We offer flexible pricing and custom quotes, so that you can stick to a budget you're comfortable with and still get the services you need the most.

It's time to revolutionize the way your law firm attracts clients with NextLevel's outstanding lawyer SEO services. Call or submit a contact form today to start your conversation with our legal marketing experts.