The document discusses search engine optimization (SEO) strategies for legal websites. It covers technical SEO topics like site architecture, metadata, duplicate content, and website speed. It also discusses ongoing SEO efforts like keyword targeting, content strategy, and link building. The document provides guidance on hiring an SEO company and recommends they have experience in the legal field and can provide a detailed strategic plan.

1. Understanding Legal SEO
Eric Diamond, CEO
Gurwinder Singh, Marketing Manager

2. What We’ll Be Covering
In today’s Webinar we will be covering the following:
 Technical SEO
 Ongoing SEO
 Finding the Right SEO Company

3. Technical SEO
Technical SEO is focused on ensuring your website meets search engine
guidelines so it can be crawled and indexed properly. Elements of Technical
SEO include:
 Site Architecture
 Meta Data
 Duplicate Content
 Responsive Websites
 Website Speed
 404 Pages
 Semantic Markup

4. Site Architecture
The structure of your website plays an important part in SEO.
 Make sure you have a user-friendly, clear and consistent URL structure.
 The organization and structure of content on your site will determine how
easily users can navigate the site and find what they need.

5. Site Architecture

6. Site Architecture

7. Site Architecture
Redirects: Limit redirects to two or fewer.
Robots.txt: This file is used to tell search engines not to index certain
pages or sections of a website.
XML Sitemaps: XML sitemaps are a great discovery tool for search engine’s
and their crawlers. An XML sitemap will help Google find your pages when it
crawls your website so all your pages can be ranked.

8. Site Architecture
HTTPS VS HTTP
HTTPS is a secure version of the Hypertext transfer protocol. It encrypts the data that
passes that across your website. Generally it was only used if you had client login systems
to secure the data. However with Google now considering this to be a ranking signal, it’s a
good idea to make your entire website secure.
• Configure any hard internal links within your website, from HTTP to HTTPS.
• Redirect any external links you control to HTTPS, such as directory listings.
• Update any links you use in marketing automation tools, such as email links.
• Update any landing pages and paid search links.
• Set up an HTTPS site in Google Search Console.

9. Responsive

10. Responsive
Responsive design has become a major ranking factor for search engines. The
days of a separate mobile site are gone. Today search engines are going to favor
sites that can seamlessly adapt across devices and screen sizes.
Having a responsive website provides the following advantages:
 Usability: Responsive sites are more efficient for displaying the right content
you website visitors.
 Your site will load faster on mobile devices.
 Duplication: Reducing the amount of duplicating content and management of
that content.
 You’ll have only one URL to benefit from any external ranking factors
(external links, citations, etc.)
 Makes it easier for users to share and link to your content with a single URL.

11. Metadata
Your website’s metadata provides specific information to website crawlers. They
help search engines understand the content of the page. The Metadata that are
considered important for search engine rankings are:
 Titles: The Title tag is the main title of the page. This is the most important
of all the meta tags on a page.
 Meta descriptions: The Meta Description provides a summary of the page.
This is the description people see in the search results.
 H1: Headings tags help break down the page into logical sections and make
certain words stand out.

12. Duplicate Content
Having duplicate content on your site is a serious technical SEO issue. With
duplicate content search engines don’t know which version of a page to index
and rank.
 301 Redirects: If you remove any duplicate content using 301 redirects will
direct people to the correct page.
 Canonicals: If you plan to keep duplicate content, using canonical links tell
serge engines which version of the page is the true version.
 rel prev-next: Using these tags help search engines recognize a paginated
series of content.

13. Duplicate Content
A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect which passes between 90-99% of link
juice (ranking power) to the redirected page.
301 refers to the HTTP status code for this type of redirect. In most instances,
the 301 redirect is the best method for implementing redirects on a website.

14. Duplicate Content
The rel=canonical element, often called the “canonical link,” is an HTML
element that helps webmasters prevent duplicate content issues. It does this by
specifying the “canonical URL”, the “preferred” version of a web page.

15. Duplicate Content
Paginated Pages (rel=”prev” or “next”): A very common use case for pagination
attributes are category pages on FAQ’s, Forums, Category, and Archive pages.
Usually these pages are split across multiple pages, each page showing a subset
of the category.

16. Website Speed
“[Google is] announcing that starting in July 2018, page speed will be a ranking
factor for mobile searches. The “Speed Update,” as we’re calling it, will only
affect pages that deliver the slowest experience to users and will only affect a
small percentage of queries. It applies the same standard to all pages, regardless
of the technology used to build the page. The intent of the search query is still a
very strong signal, so a slow page may still rank highly if it has great, relevant
content.”
Did you know:
 47% of consumers expect a site to load under 2 seconds!
 40% abandon a site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load.

17. 404 Pages
Bad 404 Page
When you encounter a 404 page it means the page that the browser is requesting
wasn’t found by the server. When your site visitors encounter this it is important to
give your them the best experience possible by creating a custom 404 page.
The goal of a good custom 404 page is to keep a visitor on your site when they hit a
page that doesn’t exist.

18. 404 Pages

19. Semantic Markup
Semantic markup is code that you put on your website to help the search
engines return more informative results for users
https://www.w3schools.com/html/html5_semantic_elements.asp
http://schema.org/attorney

20. Semantic Markup

21. Ongoing SEO
 Keyword Targeting
 Content Strategy
 Link Building

22. Keyword Targeting

23. Keyword Targeting
 Create a list of core services that you want to rank for.
 Ask yourself some basic questions and create a list:
 How you would you search for the services your firm offers?
 Ask your coworkers, how would you search for the services you provide?
 Pull data from Google Search Console
 Look at Google Analytics
 Research the keywords used by your competitors.
 Use tools such as Google Keyword Planner, Open Site Explorer, or
SEMRush.com
 After you have determined what keywords you want to rank for, be sure to
add them to relevant content/metadata on your site. If that content does not
exist, then it’s time to create it.

24. Content Strategy
Content strategy is about making sure that your content is valuable, findable, and
meaningful. The goal is to ensure the content you provide satisfies users as well as
search engines.
Ask yourself:
 Who is the target audience for your content?
 What is the goal of the content?
Then, you should:
 Create compelling, relevant content.
 Use your targeted keywords in your content.
 Continually produce fresh content.
 Publish content to multiple channels (e.g., website, blog, microsite, social, etc.)

25. Content Strategy
Content strategy suggestions for law firms:
 Create an Editorial Calendar.
 Get lawyers to write on specific topic areas you want to rank for.
 Create a detailed FAQ for your website.
 Write content with local in mind (e.g., New York law allows for x).
 Build out microsites off the main site for topics you want to rank for (e.g.,
bitcoin, tax law, immigration, etc.).
 Write content for targeted users not other attorneys.
 Use buzzwords people would use when searching.

26. Link Building
Link building is the process of acquiring links from other websites to your
own. When ranking pages the search engines do not just look at the content of
the page; they also look at the number of links pointing to that page from
external websites and the quality of those external websites.
Ways to build links:
 Directories
 Avvo, Lawyers.com, etc.
 Press releases
 Guest writing on blogs
 Social posting
 HARO (Help a Reporter Out)

27. Hiring the Right SEO Firm
When seeking an SEO firm here are some of the things you should consider:
 Do they know the legal space at all? You don’t need them learning on your
dime (do they know that a lawyer is called solicitor in the UK, etc.).
 What type of SEO are they experienced in (Technical, On-page, Off-page).
 Are they willing to layout a detailed plan (what will the next 6 months look
like).
 What are the steps they will take to hit SEO goals.
 Are they willing to put in the time to do a competitive analysis and see what
your competition is doing well.
 Anyone telling you they can get you #1 ranking in three months - run from!
 Ask about their link building practices; this can have a negative impact if
done in a shady way.

28. Thank you for joining us!
If you have any additional questions or you need help with your SEO efforts
please contact:
Eric Diamond: eric@legalpublish.com
Gurwinder Singh: gee@legalpublish.com