Navigating Common SEO Challenges for Law Firms

Common SEO challenges faced by law firms include content duplication issues, managing multiple locations, and optimizing for legal-specific keywords.

Attorneys have plenty on their plate when it comes to running a law firm. They have several cases to handle at any given time, clients to meet with, and an office to maintain. Creating and posting content on a website and checking SEO progress is often the last thing on a lawyer’s list, if it’s on the list at all. 

At PaperStreet, we excel at law firm SEO, and we’re here to help attorneys in all types of practice areas navigate the common challenges that SEO can present, including duplicate content, managing content for multiple office locations, and optimizing for legal-specific keywords.

Dealing With Duplicate Content

If you have practice areas that are similar, such as personal injury and slip and fall cases, you might run into the challenge of having duplicate content on these pages. While “slip and fall” can be categorized under personal injury, you’ll want to be sure that you’re not repeating the same information about slip and fall cases on both the personal injury page and the slip and fall page.

While there isn’t actually a “duplicate content penalty,” it’s not great for your site’s SEO to have the same content on multiple pages. Google and other search engines have a hard time deciding which content is more important, since there are multiple options to choose from when ranking content based on topic, keyword focus, and user intent.

You also want to stay away from duplicating content from another site. Whether or not you own the other domain, if search engines see the same content across multiple domains, they have to decide which one is more authoritative and rank that content, with the other domain getting left behind in terms of rankings and search results.

How to Remove Duplicate Content

If you find, through an SEO analysis or content audit, that your site has duplicate content, it’s important to remove it as soon as possible. This can be as simple as deleting a page, but it’s often more involved than that. The best way to remove duplicate content is to create original content for an existing page, updating that page and making it more relevant for both users and search engines.

You can also set up redirects from older pages that might have duplicate content, connecting them to newer pages that you want to rank for specific content or keywords. There’s also the option of canonical tags and attributes that let search engines know a certain page needs to be treated as a copy of a specified URL, with all of the links, content metrics, and other factors to be credited to the specified URL.

Another way to deal with duplicate content is to let search engines know not to index certain pages by using “noindex” or “nofollow” tags in your site’s HTML. These tags let the search engine meta robots know that they should exclude a certain page (or pages) from the search engine’s index. 

If you have any questions about duplicate content and how it can affect your SEO rankings, please get in touch with our experienced team right away.

Managing Multiple Office Locations

It’s common for larger law firms to have multiple locations within a city or state or even across several states. When it comes to SEO and multiple office locations, there are a few challenges that can pop up when building and maintaining your firm’s website.

Keyword Research for Each Location

Keyword research is always the first thing to be done for any new SEO campaign. When targeting multiple locations, it’s important to focus the keyword research on the desired areas, such as “Fort Lauderdale criminal defense lawyer.” This focused research will help you decide which keywords to target for your campaigns, as well as which office locations you want to rank for certain keywords. For example, if your main office handles personal injury and wrongful death cases, you’ll want to target those keywords for that location. If a location in another city or state handles medical malpractice or premise liability cases, you’ll want to find keywords that match those practice areas.

Setting Up Location Pages

If your firm has several locations across a certain geographic area, it’s important to set up a specific location page for each office. This will help potential clients find you more easily, and they’ll know that your firm has a location near them. 

For example, if you serve the greater Los Angeles area but you have offices in Pasadena, Beverly Hills, and Torrance, you’ll want to build a page for each location instead of just one general page for Los Angeles. This means that if someone in Long Beach or Redondo Beach searches for a practice your firm offers, they’ll get results for the Torrance location instead of your other offices. This makes meeting with clients much easier, as they’ll know you’re nearby.

Diversifying Your Blog Posts

Blogging is an integral part of SEO, as it’s often the best (and fastest) way to get new content onto your site. Your core landing pages are key to the foundation of SEO, but blogging lets you build on that foundation through diversified topics.

You can focus your blog posts on certain practice areas that each location offers by setting up blog categories for each target keyword. For example, you can have a blog category that’s titled, “criminal defense Fort Lauderdale,” and each blog post under that topic goes into that category. You can do this for each keyword/practice area and location, and your content will be better suited for search and user experience.

Optimizing for Legal-Specific Keywords

We’ve already covered keyword research in this post, but for lawyers and attorneys, it’s important to understand how to optimize your site for legal-specific keywords. Your home page can have a broader keyword, such as “Criminal Defense Attorney in Atlanta,” but for your core landing pages, you’ll want to be sure each page has a specific keyword to match its topic.

For example, if you are a criminal defense attorney in Atlanta, you likely handle many different types of cases, from assault and battery to burglary and drug charges. It’s important to build out pages for each of these case types, and all of them should include a specific keyword to match. More specifically, your assault and battery page should have “Assault and Battery Attorney in Atlanta” or “Atlanta Assault and Battery attorney,” while your drug charges page should include “Drug Charge Defense Attorney Atlanta” or a variation of that keyword target.

Choosing Your Target Keywords

As a lawyer with a specific practice area, you likely already know what keywords you want to focus on for your SEO campaign. However, there may be certain practice areas you want to focus on more than others, so it can be beneficial to choose several keywords, including variations, that match those focus areas.

For example, you may take on all types of criminal defense cases, but you want to focus more on assault and battery cases. With this information, you can build out keyword research around that practice area with keywords such as:

• Atlanta assault and battery attorney
• Assault and battery attorney Georgia
• Assault and battery lawyer Atlanta
• Cobb County assault and battery attorney
• Atlanta assault and battery lawyers

It’s important to refine your keyword research to your target practice areas so you can tailor your content to match those keywords and know what pages need to be built in order to make it easier for potential clients to find your firm.

Get Started On Your Law Firm SEO Journey

If you’re looking to build a new website or update the SEO focus for your law firm, it’s important to know how duplicate content can affect your site and rankings, how to manage content for multiple office locations, and what keywords you should target to get the best return on investment.

At PaperStreet, our highly-skilled internet marketing, SEO, and content teams can help you discover the best approach for your firm’s website. We’ve created hundreds of SEO campaigns that have helped firms rank for target keywords, boost visibility, and connect with new clients. If you’d like to learn more about SEO for lawyers and our philosophy towards SEO, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We’d love the opportunity to work with you.