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I’m not going to lie to you – we want you as a client.

With that said, I’m not going to cold call you or spam you like other SEO companies do. I’m going to win you over by showing you the exact blueprint to ranking your law firm’s website.

This is the same step-by-step guide we have used to rank the websites of other solicitors and law firms.

Now I know you’re probably not going to read all of this post due to the fact that I know that our other clients that are solicitors barely have time to read emails, never mind an SEO guide for solicitors.

So you might ask yourself why I’ve spent tens of hours writing it, as I could’ve written a lesser quality post like every other “SEO Expert” in an hour or so.

Well, we’re not like every other SEO services provider and the only way to prove that is to actually show you.

I’m making this post our sales pitch!

1. How to Track the ROI of SEO

This section is normally at the end of guides but it is so important that it needs to be put first.

We’ve said it before – marketing efforts are completely lost without proper analytics. To get this you need to use two tools:

• Google Webmaster Tools
• Google Analytics

If you don’t have these set up already, do it now. There are plenty of resources available online for doing this.

In this section of the guide I’m going to show you 3 reports you can use to gauge the ROI of your SEO campaign.

1.1 Analysing Organic Traffic

Tool Used: Google Analytics

‍How to find the report: Go to Audience > Mobile > Overview and select the Organic Traffic segment.‍

What this tells you: This kills two birds with one stone as it tells you the amount of visitors you are getting via organic search and also what type of device they are using. It also tells you bounce rate, time on site and goal completion.‍

Why you need it: If your organic traffic isn’t increasing then your SEO campaign isn’t working!

1.2 Analysing Organic Impressions and Queries

Tool Used: Google Search Console

How to find the report: Go to Search Traffic > Search Analytics

What this tells you: Every time your website shows up in a search on Google (this shows up as an Impression) and the keywords (Queries) that your website is showing up for.

Why you need it: This allows you to check that your website is showing up for the right keywords and also allows you to make sure your impressions (and clicks) are increasing.

1.3 Analysing the Value of your SEO

To truly analyse the value of your SEO you need to be tracking goals.

In the steps below we’re going to set it up to track form submissions and will assume that the contact form on your website takes visitors to a “Thank You” page.

1. Click on the “Admin” tab in Google Analytics.
2. Under “View” click “Goals”.
3. Click “New Goal”.
4. Give the goal a name – you can just use “Contact Form”.
5. Under “Type” select “Destination”.
6. Click "Continue".
7. In “Destination” select “Equal to”.
8. In the space available enter the exact URL of your “Thank You” page (i.e if your site is www.example.com/thank-you/ you should just type /thank-you/)
9. Click ‘Verify Goal” and if you have set this up correctly it should show a conversion %.
10. Click “Save”.

This will now allow you to see how many form-fills you get on your website and where they are coming from (organic search, social media, PPC, etc)

2. Selecting Keywords of High Value

Great keyword research enables you to really take control of your rankings, traffic and leads. Without great keyword research you’re operating in the dark.

I always find it’s easier to illustrate this by example. For example, let’s imagine I’m doing research for a Manchester based solicitor.

Step One:

Come up with a list of initial keywords based on the business. For example:

1. Manchester Solicitor
2. Solicitor Manchester
3. Divorce Solicitor Manchester
4. Manchester Divorce Solicitor

Step Two:

Google has a tool that’s available for free that shows the average monthly search volume for keywords that you enter.

To access this, you have to sign in to Google Ads (if you don’t have a Google Ads account you can create one for free – https://ads.google.com/) and select “Tools” and then “Keyword Planner”.

When you’re on the Keyword Planner you then have to select “Search for new keywords using a phrase, website or category”, input your keywords and then click “Get ideas”.

Step Three:

The resulting screen will bring up hundreds of keywords ideas that can be used and how many times per month on average they are searched. Click the “Download” button.

Step Four:

Open the data you have just downloaded in Excel (or any other software you have that can open CSV files) and remove columns A, C, E, G, H, I, J, K and L.

You should now have a file that looks like this:

Because the keyword planner has given us hundreds of keyword ideas, we’re going to filter them to find only the most relevant ones. For this example we’re going to use a divorce solicitor, so I’m going to filter column A to only show me keyword ideas with “divorce” in them.

Step Five:

We now need to organise the keywords by what the person’s intent is that is searching. Let’s take a look at the first 8 keywords in the table that I have:

1. divorce solicitor manchester
2. manchester divorce solicitor
3. divorce lawyers manchester
4. divorce lawyer manchester
5. divorce manchester
6. divorce solicitors in manchester
7. divorce lawyers in manchester
8. divorce law

While all of these keywords are potential valuable to the website, some queries are informational and some have purchase intent.

You now need to separate the keywords that drive traffic from the ones that drive leads.

We do this by adding another column in the spreadsheet labelled “Intent” and tag each keyword with either “Purchase” or “Info”.

You now need to sort your keyword list by the number of monthly searches from high to low. The most relevant keyword with the highest search volume is going to be your main keyword. Later in this guide I’ll show you how to leverage it.

NOTE: Just for fun I totalled up how much it would cost to drive traffic to your site with these keywords using Google pay per click ads and found that it would cost £66,674.08 per month! An SEO campaign with us won’t cost anywhere near that.

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