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How to Write Law Firm Title Tags that Render Results

Services: Law Firm Website Design . SEO . Internet Marketing . Law Firm Marketing Guide . Content Marketing . PPC

When launching your website, the title tags for each page are a fundamental aspect of your website. While a title tag is not something that is a highly visible element of your law firm’s website, it is the primary text that a person sees when conducting a search. You could rank #1 for a particular practice area or claim, but if your title tag isn’t crafted correctly, your law firm’s website may not achieve any clicks from potential clients.

Even if you are not engaging in a specific search engine optimization plan, having title tags is a good practice for attorney marketing campaigns and are pretty easy to set-up.

When you’re writing your title tag, what do you need to know? This post outlines the fundamentals of title tag creation and how lawyers can create tags that lead to clicks.

What is a Title Tag?

As the name suggests, your title tag is a form of title for your web content. Though it is often the same wording as a page or blog title, they can (and likely should) be different. A title tag reflects what you are telling Google and other search engines what your page is about. As mentioned above, your title tag is what appears on the search engine results page. Thus, if a potential client searches for a term or practice area connected to your law firm, the title tag explains how you can help them.

title tag result

Key Elements for Crafting a Title Tag for Your Legal Website

Search engines do not typically display pages without title tags — especially not on page one of the search engine rankings page. Simply creating one or using an auto-generator, however, also won’t assist with the performance of your law firm’s website. The information below is all of the elements that need to be considered when creating your title tags.

Character Count:

Title tags should be a maximum of 65 characters long (including spaces and special characters) with the goal of 60 characters. While too long of a title tag can result in the title being cut off, creating a title tag that is too short isn’t making the most of this free marketing option. Use this counter tool to make sure you are hitting the optimal length without going over.

Keep in mind that there are tricks to keeping the character count down. For example, using ALL CAPS will take up more space. Also to save space, you can remove the word “and” from the tag and use the ampersand (&) instead.

Unique Content:

The title tags themselves should be pertinent to the page in question. For example, a law firm’s page on car accidents should say ‘car accidents’ in the tag.

That said, it is very important to not repeat your title tags. For example, not all of your divorce subpages should have “Divorce Lawyer” as your title tag. Instead, be more descriptive as to what the page is about. (i.e. Contested Divorce Lawyer, The California Divorce Process, etc.  Do whatever is necessary to make the tags differentiated, as non-unique title tags can be detrimental to the overall rankings of your law firm’s website.

Keyword Placement:

Though it is an SEO best practice to only target one keyword phrase, if there is more than one keyword, place the more important keywords at the front of the title tag and the less important keyword and the firm name (if at all) at the end.

Keyword Punctuation:

Your title tag shouldn’t just be a string of phrases. The different sections should be eye-catching. Use pipes ( | ) and short dashes and commas to break-up keyword phrases and the remaining text.

Law Firm Name:

For branding reasons, it’s often a good idea to keep your law firm within the title of your title tag. Name recognition could generate clicks and it helps identify to potential clients that you are a legal authority as opposed to a directory.

That said, it’s important to remember that you are limited by characters and you need your keyphrase to appear. Thus, listing only the primary partner or shortening the name as best you can with an abbreviation or site name is very important.

The “Others”:

All of the above are important considerations when writing your title tag. That said, you may try other marketing tactics to see what’s most effective for your targeted audience. For example, you may want to advertise a bilingual staff as opposed to your firm’s name. Perhaps you want to advertise an hour response time or a lower contingency fee. These details could be what clinches the decision to call your firm as opposed to the other law firms listed.

Though the keyword portion of the title tag is most important as a ranking factor, feel free to adjust and change the “other” aspects of the text in order to see what details earn more clicks.

Title Tag Templates

When you have your text complete, you can preview what it will look like live using the title tag preview tool from Moz. Below are some examples of web pages that have proper title tags. You can use this format to create your own title tags, just beware of the character count. Depending on the length of the most important text, such as your keyword phrase or attorney’s name,  you might have to make adjustments.

Homepage:

  • Format: Keyword Phrase | Firm Name
  • Example: Florida Personal Injury Lawyers | PaperStreet Law

Practice Area Page

  • Format: Geographic Area (can be a state or city, whichever the firm prefers) + Practice Area + Base Term | Firm Name
  • Example: Florida Medical Malpractice Lawyers | PaperStreet Law

Attorney Bios:

  • Format: Attorney name | Area of Law | Firm Name
  • Pete Boyd | Insurance Defense | PaperStreet Law

Title Tags for Blog Posts:

  • Many law firms simply use their blog title as the title tag without adjusting for length. Condense your blog post title in order to provide enough of a snippet to entice a site visitor to click.
  • It may actually be best to leave your law firm’s name off of the blog title in order to not present the content as an advertisement for your law firm. For example, let a blog such as “How to Stay Safe When Driving in the Snow” simply be seen as a helpful resource. If a person clicks on the article, they will still see that your law firm wrote it.

Additional Pages:

  • Not every page of your website needs an SEO-friendly title tag. For example, it’s not likely that a potential client would turn to Google to see your case results page. They would simply click on the link within your website itself.
  • As these pages still need a title tag for your site’s overall optimization, simply using the page title and your law firm name is all you really need to create. You could add some additional material to fill the characters, but don’t let the page conflict with other keywords.
    • Example: About Us | PaperStreet Law | Top Rated Firm for Insurance Defense

A Note About Choosing the Right Keyword Phrase

The “keyword phrase” would encompass the firm’s PRIMARY geographic location (can be a state or city, whichever the firm prefers), PRIMARY practice area and a base term (attorney, attorneys, lawyer, lawyers or law firm).

You can use tools such as Google keyword planner tool to find out which keyword phrase returns the most monthly searches and go in that direction. If choosing among the following, for example:

  • Florida Personal Injury Attorneys – 50 monthly searches
  • Florida Personal Injury Lawyers – 70 monthly searches
  • Florida Personal Injury Law Firm – 20 monthly searches

Based on the number of monthly searches “Florida personal injury lawyers” would be the most prudent keyword phrase to use in the title tag.

How PaperSteet Can Help

We have a dedicated team of writers and SEO gurus who can help you launch an SEO campaign or be hired to re-work your title tags. Want more information? Contact us online, or give us a call: 954-523-2181.


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2 Responses to How to Write Law Firm Title Tags that Render Results

  1. Web Design Tips from the Experts | Lifeopedia.com
    12:53 pm on December 2nd, 2015

    […] usability and (2) search engine rankings. Not sure what title tags or meta descriptions are? Learn how to write a title tag and review basic SEO optimization […]

  2. Kirill
    4:24 pm on December 26th, 2015

    Hi, I would recommend countwordsfree.com as free tool to symbols and characters calculation where you can skip stop words to make the statistics more clear and trustable.

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