SEO for Bankruptcy Attorneys
One of the most critical factors in whether people can find you online is SEO for bankruptcy attorneys. It’s at the very core of successful online marketing. And it’s essential regardless of whether you’re trying to refine your firm’s digital presence or if that presence remains in its infancy.
Fortunately, your SEO knowledge doesn’t have to be on par with your legal expertise. But if you hope to grow your legal practice, understanding a few critical points ensures you’ll know what it takes to strengthen your firm’s ability to attract new clientele.
Let’s review what good SEO for bankruptcy lawyers is, ensure you’re implementing best practices, and toss in a few new tactics for good measure.
Foundational SEO For Bankruptcy Attorneys
These are the basics of lawyer SEO. The underlying foundation for crafting a website that prospective clients enjoy using and Google can easily search for and rank.
If you can perfect the areas of keywords, technical SEO, content, and mobile optimization, you’re well on your way to attracting the audience that will increase your client roster.
Keywords
The most critical of SEO attributes is keywords. Keywords are essential as they help shape your SEO for bankruptcy attorneys strategy. Capture the right keywords and you attract new clients. Miss the mark, and you’re left with a dwindling caseload. Not good when your livelihood is contingent upon a steady stream of individuals seeking help with bankruptcy proceedings.
To build that list, you need to start with at least a baseline of keywords relevant to your legal expertise.
Consider some of the more popular searches for those seeking bankruptcy attorneys:
- bankruptcy
- liquidation
- debt
- exemptions
- chapter 7 bankruptcy
- chapter 11 bankruptcy
- chapter 13 bankruptcy
- bankruptcy attorney
- bankruptcy lawyer
- filing for bankruptcy
One of the more common misunderstandings regarding keywords is how they’re used. To ensure Google’s search algorithm takes notice of your keyword efforts, it’s less about volume and more about how they’re utilized. When it comes to SEO for bankruptcy lawyers, context is critical to ranking, and managing it well is a big difference-maker.
Research keywords clients use to find Bankruptcy services to craft your content strategy. Thoughtfully include them in your content. Optimize them further by using keywords in a handful of critical spots, including:
- Page Titles
- Headers and Subheaders
- Meta Descriptions
- Content (use keywords or phrases contextually, don’t repeat them over and over)
- URLs
- Images (use in file names, image titles, or the image description aka. alt-text)
Your organic traffic will increase as you zero in on the right keywords.
Technical SEO
What ultimately amounts to your digital infrastructure, technical SEO supports your site and its overall performance. Poorly crafted or neglected infrastructure diminishes the user experience.
Google won’t be a huge fan either, as they weigh it heavily within their search algorithm. Considering Google’s job is to deliver relevant, user-friendly sites to their customers (everyone conducting a search), it makes perfect sense.
You’ll want to work with your web developer and an SEO pro to maintain your website’s technical SEO integrity. Four of the most important factors are listed below.
- Speed: Vital not just for your search ranking but your site’s overall user-friendliness; the rate your site loads is a small Google ranking factor and huge for the user experience
- Security: Secure sites equate to trustworthiness. Another small Google ranking factor that provides your user base considerable peace of mind.
- Structure: A site with a structured hierarchy and detailed site map is easy to navigate and even easier for Google to find.
- Duplicate content: Review your content periodically to ensure you’re not repeating yourself and want your post to be relevant and up to date. When bankruptcy laws change or news warrants additional insights, it’s a great time to freshen your site’s content.
Content
Content marketing is the key to unlocking everything beneficial about SEO for bankruptcy lawyers. For a bankruptcy practice, it can be a major difference-maker for the success of your firm.
Users seek you out because they require your knowledge and legal expertise. So give it to them via the E-A-T concept for quality content. Effectively, your goal is to produce unique, high-quality materials that provide value to your audience. Take care with your content, so when your audience does engage with it, they’re rewarded with your expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.
The bonus to your audience receiving it well is the increased likelihood that Google will too. As the search engine prizes original, unique, and valuable content above practically everything else, its importance is evident.
If you’re already excelling at producing well-developed, professionally written articles regarding the finer points of bankruptcy law, then you’re ahead of the game. Maintaining consistent quality is central to keeping users engaged and your ranking high. If you’re not, this should be your main priority – above everything on this list.
Beyond the content itself, ensure you’re also following a handful of best practices to further enhance your SEO, such as:
- Posting regular and relevant high-value content
- Optimizing images
- Adding header tags
- Fixing broken links within your content
- Using outbound links to other authoritative and well-respect Bankruptcy sources
- Employing more than just words in your content with video (with a page on YouTube, as well), infographics, FAQs, or even producing a podcast
- Social media engagement
Remember, great content is arguably the single most crucial aspect of successful SEO. The more time and effort you can extend to the endeavor, the better positioned you’ll be to capture a ledger audience.
Mobile Optimization
Google puts a high premium on mobile pages. It’s essential that mobile sites get priority indexing and ranking over desktop versions. It’s been this way for over a year and a half.
With mobile computing only growing in both need and want, it’s more important than even that your website is a mobile-based powerhouse.
If your firm has an established website, make sure it’s optimized for mobile – fast, responsive, and looks just as good on a small screen as it does a larger display. If you are in the midst of creating or upgrading your site, think mobile-first, everything else second
Local SEO and Google My Business
Regardless of your bankruptcy firm’s location or the territory you cover, the service you provide is inherently local. That’s how most people seeking counsel will search for you too. More than ever, in fact, location informs a user’s search as they pursue products and services that are convenient.
Instead of searching for “bankruptcy attorney,” a user search will appear like this:
- Orlando bankruptcy lawyer
- chapter 11 bankruptcy attorneys in Dallas
- filing for bankruptcy in Texas
- bankruptcy attorney near me
The last search triggers location service, which shows the attorneys closest to where the user originated the search.
Local SEO is more prevalent now than it’s ever been, thanks to the combination of smartphones with mapping apps from Google or Apple. To ensure you’re showing up on local search results, your content and SEO efforts must reflect the area or areas where you practice.
To further solidify your local presence, claim your Google My Business (GMB) page if you haven’t already done so.
What amounts to a free web listing from Google, GMB plays a vital part in your overall SEO strategy. The more information you add and the more engaging you can make it, the greater the payoff.
To fully optimize the listing, ensure you:
- Complete every section within your GMB page
- Include accurate and up to date contact information
- Describe your firm’s primary legal focus, but include a detailed listing of everything your firm specializes in
- Put thought into the “from the business” description
- Keep it fresh with frequent posts and photos
- Engage users by answering questions, allowing comments or Google reviews, and then responding to them
Your GMB is a free website your Bankruptcy practice can use – at no cost to you – to connect with clients. If you want to get the most from the service, take the time to fully invest in it.
Advanced SEO strategies
Now that we’ve covered some baseline SEO strategies let’s look at some more that take your SEO efforts up a few notches. The more robust your strategy, the broader reach and better search results you’ll eventually see.
Consider these next step SEO tactics:
Create content hubs
Perfect for a bankruptcy practice with multiple points of focus, content hubs turn a single keyword or phrase into a de facto wiki page that sits on your website. It benefits you by elevating your SEO user keywords in a feature-rich piece of content that generates internal links and provides content that increases user engagement.
Consider comparison keywords
Expand beyond primary keywords, and target the audience seeking services as soon as possible or who’s searching for specific services. For example, “bankruptcy attorney” is a basic keyword. “Difference between Chapter 7 and Chapter 11 bankruptcy,” on the other hand, reflects someone in more immediate need of attorney services. Create content that centers around the difference between similarly related services to capture this user group.
Find content partners
Speaking of similar content, build relationships with other attorneys or legal experts to share content and put your roster of services in front of a new audience. For example, bankruptcy and estate planning share some commonalities, but they are distinct areas of the law. A guest blog post of you discussing how bankruptcy could impact a trust or will would prove highly valuable to the estate planner’s audience. Reciprocate the exchange to strengthen the network.
Include supplementary content
Extra features such as bulleted lists, charts, pros and cons lists, service comparisons, or summaries enhance your content with additional context or information. You don’t necessarily want to overburden your content with these (Google frowns upon over-engineering as it usually interferes with usability). However, applying these “extras” when appropriate add a nice little boost for your SEO.
Optimize for a new year
Provide users fresh content and score points for authority and relevance by creating content that captures the current year as a keyword (2022, for example).
Final Thoughts
SEO is vital to the growth of your Bankruptcy practice. With a basic understanding of the dos and don’ts, and consistency in producing relevant, high-quality content, your bankruptcy practice will be well rewarded with an expanding client base.