lawyer-seo - Made with Clipchamp
.===
.
[00:00:00] Olga Zarr: Today I want to talk about Lawyer SEO, SEOSLY Pro, SEO Game Changer. SEOSLY Pro is the premium membership where you can get thousands of dollars worth of SEO knowledge for less than two dollars per day. SEOSLY Pro It's a smart investment for savvy SEO professionals who want to become better, who want to take their SEO career to the next level.
[00:00:38] Olga Zarr: You can try SEOSLYPro for 30 days. for just one dollar and see if it is right for you. No risk, just go to seoslide. com slash pro and sign up for the trial. I'm Olga Zarr, an SEO consultant in SEO since 2012. SEOSLY Pro and this channel are two mediums where I share my experience and my knowledge with you.
[00:01:06] Olga Zarr: I invite you to subscribe and to check SEOSLY Pro and become a better SEO with me every day. Now let's get into the show. This video is kind of the extension to the very huge lawyer SEO guide that I published on my blog. You can see it here. This blog post is very, very long and it touches upon different aspects of lawyer SEO.
[00:01:35] Olga Zarr: And in this video, I am walking you through that guide and also like adding some extra rants, extra commentary as I go through the guide. Who am I to talk about Lawyer SEO? Why Lawyer SEO? So this is a very competitive niche in SEO and as the name suggests, Lawyer SEO is about doing SEO for law firms. I have been working with lawyer websites for about four years now, three, four years.
[00:02:08] Olga Zarr: And, uh, I worked as the director of SEO at a US based lawyer, SEO agency. So during that year, basically, all I was doing was doing lawyer SEO. And then I went solo, became a solo SEO consultant. Now I have a variety of clients, not only lawyers, lawyers, but other clients as well. But lawyer SEO is still the area of SEO, which I know very well.
[00:02:38] Olga Zarr: So with that said, let me walk you through lawyer SEO, what it is, what to do, the basic techniques that are involved, and hopefully at the end of this video you will really know a lot about LawyerSEO and you will be able to either help your LawyerSEO, you will be either able to help your LawyerSEO client, Or if you are a lawyer watching this, you may be able to better understand the value of SEO.
[00:03:14] Olga Zarr: You may be able to better screen your current SEO agency, or maybe you will know how to better optimize your site if you are doing it yourself. I also know lawyers who do SEO for themselves. I even have one, one lawyer who is my mentee. I do SEO mentoring for him and he's doing SEO on his own. own and he's having very nice results.
[00:03:44] Olga Zarr: So let's get started. I will be showing you the guide and if there is like something more specific I will also be showing that in the screen I am sharing here. So a note about this guide. So I have seen a ton of very weird, crazy lawyer SEO mistakes and I. I'm short tempered, I have ADHD, I like to get into this hyper focus mode, and this kind of personality, being this type of person, makes me very often get irritated, frustrated at some of the mistakes that I see, especially if they are being made by me.
[00:04:28] Olga Zarr: time and time again. That's why in this guide and probably in this video you are going to see a lot of sarcasm. The goal is not to offend you in any way or not to offend anyone. This is kind of my style. I know that you are all doing your best and I hope that with this sarcasm I can maybe better motivate you to do better lawyer SEO.
[00:04:57] Olga Zarr: Uh, as I mentioned, uh, I have in total like more than 12 years of experience in SEO. I also like talk at SEO conferences. My kind of, um, specialty within SEO is in depth SEO auditing, like the approach where I spend 40, 60 hours doing an audit on a site. And this audit very often forms the strategy for the entire site.
[00:05:23] Olga Zarr: And most of the clients I have, they came to me for, for an audit. I created this type of audit, this very long one, like, like a very huge Google doc, document with a lot of explanations, screenshots, whatnot, and, uh, proposition of an SEO strategy. And, uh, in most, in like 99%. percent of cases, they get the audit and they said, okay, so now Olga, we have the strategy, now you have to help us implement it, oversee the implementation, because very often what I find in the audit can be fixed, improved over many months, sometimes it's even years, depending on the state of the site, not.
[00:06:09] Olga Zarr: Not always there are like quick fixes that you fix and your traffic skyrockets in most cases. This is not the case. Are you wondering why lawyers need SEO? So I don't have like exact stats, but even though we have AI overviews, we have chatbot, it is mostly SEOs who are using those tools. Most people still use Google to find the services they are looking for.
[00:06:34] Olga Zarr: And the case isn't different for lawyers. So when someone is looking for a lawyer, They type it into Google, and whatever comes up at the top or in Google Maps, this is the lawyer they reach out to. That's why it is important to be shown highly, to be shown in Maps, to occupy as much real estate of a search results page as possible, because the more real estate you have, the better, the higher the chances someone will reach out to you.
[00:07:06] Olga Zarr: There are many. Nuances to that, like whether you are shown, for example, in Google Maps, when you are open, when you aren't open, what opening hours you have, like a ton of things I can think of right away, but I have to divide this guide into a lot of smaller guides, which will happen. So let me, let's not go into too much detail.
[00:07:32] Olga Zarr: Lawyers need it because this is the best medium for people to find, to look for lawyers, and very often they look for a lawyer because they have been in an accident, they are in a hurry, they are emotional, they are just taking their phone out and looking for, I don't know, personal car accident lawyer near me.
[00:07:54] Olga Zarr: And if you are there, you will get the lead, you will get the case. As I said, Lawyer SEO does not differ too much from like SEO, Search Engine Optimization, in its most basic definition. This is still making sure the lawyer website ranks highly in SEO. In Google, other search engines is well optimized and gets as much attention as possible.
[00:08:24] Olga Zarr: There are, of course, nuances. There are, of course, some aspects of SEO for lawyers, which are different from, like, we can say standard normal SEO, e commerce SEO, or any other type of SEO. One of such things is local SEO, which plays a huge role for lawyers. So ranking in maps, but also the proximity area within which you rank.
[00:08:50] Olga Zarr: Is it like, I don't know, 50 meters from your office? Or is it like five, five miles? Is it 50 miles? So, local SEO is an important part of lawyer SEO. Other things which are also important for lawyers is the fact that this is, this is a very competitive niche. There are a lot of ads displayed, which automatically makes your chances for a click, even with high rankings, way smaller.
[00:09:23] Olga Zarr: So you have to always take that into account when you are doing lawyer SEO, when you are doing. keyword research for lawyers. There are a ton of other things like technical SEO is probably treated differently. Keyword research is treated a little bit differently. Content creation is treated differ differently.
[00:09:44] Olga Zarr: Link building. So I will be talking about those specific things in just a second, but generally I think this is the biggest nuance when it comes to lawyer SEO. So this is normal SEO, standard SEO. Usually this is a small site. So a lot of things we do for e commerce will never apply to lawyer SEO. And there is the local SEO component.
[00:10:08] Olga Zarr: Unless your law firm client is only like accepting global cases from like the entire U. S. If they work online, I know such cases, then maybe the local component is not that important, but in most cases it is. Here is a call to action. I invite you to subscribe, uh, to my SEO newsletter because I send a lot of tips in my newsletter.
[00:10:34] Olga Zarr: I send weekly news. So if you want to stay up to date with lawyer SEO and other types of SEO, make sure to subscribe to my newsletter and with my newsletter also you will receive free tips. gifts, three templates, which I will talk about in just a second. So another thing, tools for lawyer SEO. So in most cases, lawyer SEO tools will be the same tools you use for other types of SEO, but here are my kind of favorite favorites.
[00:11:09] Olga Zarr: Of course, everyone may have a different list, and this list is by no means complete. And some of the tools I am an affiliate of, and it does not mean that I just want to earn affiliate commission from it, but I genuinely recommend those tools. I use them on a daily basis and I think they're doing great.
[00:11:31] Olga Zarr: And I share a lot of the knowledge for free. So if you decide to buy this tool, you will kind of help me pay my bills. Because writing this guide took me, I don't know, a few months. Of course, I wasn't, like, working on it for a few months, like, non stop, but I created the first version, then the second version, then I added changes, so then this, then that, and in total, I don't know how many hours, but 100?
[00:12:03] Olga Zarr: 150? maybe even more hours I spend doing that. That's why there is this affiliate SEO kind of plug. So the tools I recommend for lawyer SEO, number one tool is Quora SEO tool. This is the tool I use for all types of SEO, including lawyer SEO, local SEO. This tool allows you to analyze basically any keyword.
[00:12:31] Olga Zarr: and get the results of all the 100 pages that are ranking together with like statistically relevant, statistically meaningful ranking factors and this tool will let you know how exactly what you are missing your site compared to top ranking pages, where you are not missing out. I will show you an example Cori report in just a second.
[00:12:59] Olga Zarr: And another tool is JetOctopus. This is, this tool is best for huge sites, but I also like it because for lawyer SEO, it is great in showing cannibalization issues. So I use it in the case of lawyer sites for cannibalization issues. SEMrush. one of the biggest SEO tools, if not the biggest. For me, SEMrush is the best for keyword tracking, keyword research, and it also has an inbuilt local SEO module, which is also super useful.
[00:13:31] Olga Zarr: SEO crawl, it allows you to make sense of Google Search Console data. It has a ton of nice built in reports, and it really shows you This shows a ton of useful stuff as the ranking. This is my number one tool for tracking rankings. Strongly recommended. It also has other features as well. A very nice tool.
[00:13:56] Olga Zarr: Ahrefs as well. I use it in the same way I use SEMrush except for local SEO, which I think SEMrush is the best. Of course, Screaming Frog. For lawyers, they usually have small sites. Crawler like Screaming Frog or SideBulb, SideBulb will be enough. Of course, Google Search Console, this is the treasure of data, SEO data.
[00:14:20] Olga Zarr: For lawyer, SEO, a must have. I should also add here Bing Webmaster Tools, because this tool is also super important for Bing users. And in the case of lawyers, Bing usually is a bit more important. And Users in Bing usually are older, have more money, and ads in Bing are a little bit, uh, cheaper, and it is easier to rank in Bing.
[00:14:49] Olga Zarr: So generally, if you are, if you have a lawyer site, I recommend getting interested in Bing and at least getting Bing Webmaster Tools set up. Google Analytics, uh, for kind of obvious. Of course, we can add a ton of other tools, but these are kind of my, my top choices. When talking about lawyer SEO, uh, something we have to always think about at the start of any of any SEO campaign, any article, anything is the law firm target audience.
[00:15:22] Olga Zarr: Even Google in its Google Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines, it talks a great deal about users and their needs and whether a given website satisfies user needs, user's needs. And this is something that you have to take into account in your lawyer application. website. And because there are different like types of lawyers, right?
[00:15:47] Olga Zarr: We have like personal injury lawyer, workers compensation lawyer, family lawyer, and stuff like that. And the audience of each of those lawyers can be slightly different. They have, they may have a different education level. And for example, if you are writing at for a workers compensation lawyer target audience, If you use like a highly academic, complicated style of writing, you may not really, those people may not really understand you.
[00:16:21] Olga Zarr: In such cases, you need clear, clear language, like short sentences, easy to understand language, clear calls to action, like clear message. So whenever you are doing SEO, starting SEO, starting an SEO campaign, whatever, You always need to know what is the target audience of that lawyer. Some lawyers, of course, have like different kind of types of practice areas and the pages for each practice area support, supporting blog posts for each practice area.
[00:16:55] Olga Zarr: They should always keep the target audience in mind and have the writing, the calls to action, everything adjusted to that audience because It will satisfy their needs, and as we know from the latest leak, Google is tracking users. We knew that before. Google is tracking users behavior and if a user just comes in, bounces, and a lot of users do that, then probably Google may think that you are not satisfying those users needs and may rank you lower.
[00:17:31] Olga Zarr: So this is an important consideration and this is important for like, any type of SEO, any type of website, but there is a nuance in lawyer SEO, because as I said, we have different types of practice areas and different, potentially different clients in each. Now something I like very much, which is keywords, keyword phrases, whatever we want to call them.
[00:17:54] Olga Zarr: I know that keywords is kind of an old term, but I still like keywords. talking about keywords and because this is basically still what people type into Google when they're looking for anything. And the keywords are still kind of the basis of the, of any SEO optimization. And, uh, Proper optimization for keywords should always be like the foundation of any SEO strategy.
[00:18:22] Olga Zarr: Of course, keyword research and then keyword optimization. And here are the main kind of elements of keywords, keyword phrases in lawyer. Keyword research, obviously, you always need to do keyword research before, at the start of any SEO campaign, at the start of any. SEO optimization, adding new content, rewriting content, whatever.
[00:18:48] Olga Zarr: It always has to be like the first thing you do. And the tools to use are, as I mentioned, SEMrush is a very nice one for that. Ahrefs, SE Ranking, you're free to use any tool you want. And of course, when looking for keywords, there are also a lot of nuances. You should check what's ranking, like how competitive is the keyword, what SERP features are actually present in, in a given SERP.
[00:19:15] Olga Zarr: Let me show you, this is, this is SEMrush. Let me type like seed keyword I may potentially use for my lawyer clients. So personal injury, that's it.
[00:19:29] Olga Zarr: And now I can see that this is like the main keyword, personal injury and keywords variations. Let's see all other keywords. And from those keywords, I can look for potential keywords I can map to my website, to pages, to practice area pages, maybe to some blog posts. Kind of, it all depends on how you structure the lawyer sites and It is all up to you how you are just doing that.
[00:19:57] Olga Zarr: For example, here you can have questions and the tool will only show you question keywords around personal injury. So if you want to nail down personal injury topic, you can create like, you can have like the entire silo all about personal injury. Of course, personal injury practice area page. And a ton of supporting articles in the form of blog or in the form of pages.
[00:20:22] Olga Zarr: It doesn't really matter answering personal injury questions. And of course, you have to like go through through the list and decide whether it makes sense for the client. What's the What's the, the target audience, the keyword intent and stuff like that, stuff like that. Let me like open one. How long does a personal injury lawsuit take?
[00:20:48] Olga Zarr: And now I can see the volume. I can see other variations. And here I can see the pages that are currently ranking. And I can see the authority of those pages, number of links they have. And I can see that 1, so probably this shouldn't be so difficult. Of course, I still need to type that keyword into Google and see what the SERP really looks like.
[00:21:14] Olga Zarr: Of course, I need to make sure I have US based results. And I can see that, okay, there is a featured snippet, there are people also ask, there are also discussion forums. So you have to do this type of analysis for any keyword you choose. Okay, enough, this is not going to be about keyword research only.
[00:21:33] Olga Zarr: Keyword metrics. So something I already discussed. Always look at keyword metrics. Always look at search intent. The three main search intents are informational, navigational, transactional. informational is usually those question keywords. People are looking for information. Those keywords usually are easier to rank for, and they are great to target at the start of the SEO campaign, because you can build up your Topical authority by starting from those keywords.
[00:22:03] Olga Zarr: Transactional are when people are ready to buy something. Navigational, when they're looking for a specific website or someone typing Olgazar SEOSLY. This is navigational. They're definitely looking for my website. SEMrush is showing you keyword intent with every keyword, as you can see here. Long take keywords, something related to question keywords.
[00:22:29] Olga Zarr: These are usually question keywords, keywords that have a lot of words in them, usually easier to rank. Now we can see this trend of people typing the entire questions into, into Google and this is usually a very nice strategy as well, create articles that answer a specific question. But of course, You need to tie that long tail keyword question into keyword tool and see if actually there is like any demand, any search volume, because in some cases, it doesn't make sense to, to target a very broad question, which, because you also have to see what's ranking for that question, if there is a given question, and if everything that is ranking is about something like more general, general.
[00:23:17] Olga Zarr: and none of the pages ranking is specifically about that question. You should think whether it makes sense to target it. It is possible that if you target this question you will be the first and you will actually rank, but it is also possible that those questions kind of belong to this broader parent topic and you should create something about that parent topic that will have that question as like section.
[00:23:43] Olga Zarr: And then you will rank. So always look at SERPs, look at what the keyword tool is actually telling you. Competitive analysis. So you should always do that as part of choosing keywords. Of course, as I said, what's currently ranking, what's the optimization. Quora tool is probably the best tool when it comes to competitive analysis of your competitors.
[00:24:12] Olga Zarr: I will talk about that in just a second. And keyword placement. So in most cases, all you need to do is put your target keyword and its variation in SEO places, which are meta elements like body, introduction, alt text, headings. stuff like that. Maybe add a video that talks about it. Usually, that's all you need to do, and you will rank if the article is in depth enough, high quality, original, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, in most cases.
[00:24:49] Olga Zarr: But sometimes when the keyword is highly competitive, you have to, like, go deeper. You have to look for other kind of specific cues, and this is where Quora becomes very useful. I will talk about that in just a second. Another thing, local keywords. Lawyers usually need local focus as well, so you need to be aware of local keywords, but you also need to know how to use them, because if you overuse a local keyword, a modifier, like Chicago personal injury lawyer, and in your Chicago personal injury lawyer, The entire site page is about Chicago.
[00:25:29] Olga Zarr: Google may think that you are about Chicago, not really a lawyer. So there is a fine line between being relevant for the topic and location becoming a topic. A lot of nuance here, but you have to be careful. And of course, keyword cannibalization. If you start with keyword research and if you do it right from day one, or if you prune all the bad pages at the start of SEO campaign, you will be fine, but Keyword cannibalization happens a lot.
[00:25:59] Olga Zarr: This is when your internal pages compete with one another. JetOctopus is a great tool that shows you cannibalization issues, and I think SEO Crawl is also good at that. Let me try to show you this. in SEO crawl. This is the report we are interested in. And here we can see the keywords for which multiple pages rank.
[00:26:23] Olga Zarr: So, in my case, this isn't like too bad. So, Olgazar, for Olgazar, we have those pages ranking for Olgazar. This isn't like a huge problem for me. This is my branded keyword. But if you have, for example, personal injury lawyer, and for personal injury lawyer, you have 15 pages ranking and none of them is ranking highly, you have a problem.
[00:26:47] Olga Zarr: Keyword mapping, so something I am, I've been talking about forever. You have to have a spreadsheet with all the URLs and each URL, canonical URLs, should have a keyword mapped to it. Period. And keyword tracking. You, of course, should use a keyword tracker. I like SE ranking the most, but there is also Quora volatility tool, which is super useful, because it shows you what percentage of time you are ranking for a given query and how stable your rankings are.
[00:27:20] Olga Zarr: I'm not sure if I managed to show you it right away. I will try. Let me run the report. Website optimization. I will try to be brief here. You should know, you probably know about Google Helpful Content System, Google liking helpful pages, being helpful, Google page experience, EEAT. We have to be aware of that and try to make sure that the lawyer site actually kind of is helpful, provides good user experience.
[00:27:51] Olga Zarr: and so on. For lawyers, a very important aspect is conversion rate optimization, because it is the leads that will bring cases. So if the site is not optimized for conversions, it won't get leads and you will be fired. Uh, you have to remember that CRO is not SEO, and this is not necessarily your job. to, uh, to do that, uh, but you have to be aware of that, aware of that, you have to kind of highlight this.
[00:28:24] Olga Zarr: Uh, UX, the same story. There are some rules of UX that will make the site help, more helpful, more useful, that will improve, uh, Conversion rate, something you should also know about and inform your lawyer SEO client. EAT, YMYL, of course, lawyers, um, are within YMYL, your money, your life territory. EAT is very important to them, so you also have to, like, keep that in mind.
[00:28:51] Olga Zarr: that they are under specific scrutiny. So, uh, maybe I will show you quickly the template I have. You will get this template for free if you subscribe to my newsletter. The template is simply like the diagnostic, uh, audit regarding EEAT. So if you land a lawyer as your client, you may want to check it out.
[00:29:12] Olga Zarr: Use that template and kind of go through those questions because it may give you some clues about how to improve EAT quality, helpful content of your lawyer site. Those questions mostly come from all the cues Google has given all the documentation. And I kind of put it all together and maybe change slightly some questions.
[00:29:34] Olga Zarr: Does the content provide original information? Are authors qualifications and experience clearly stated in the content? So, your lawyers have to be like, well, presented all their credentials, education, blah, blah, blah. So, there are like 76 questions here, so I strongly recommend you check that. It may help you a lot.
[00:29:57] Olga Zarr: Before I move on, here is the Cora Volatility Tool report and for personal injury lawyer in Chicago, and as you can see, this is the first result. 100 percent of time, this is number one. I ran 10 consecutive searches. It is number one all the time, so this is very stable ranking. Here, number two is one, one time out of those ten, it was on position four.
[00:30:22] Olga Zarr: And as we go lower, the rankings may become less and less stable. Here we have the number five, this is actually Instagram. Uh, number five. So 60%, 100 percent it is displayed, 60 percent it is displayed on the better position than the worst. So kind of Google is not sure, 100%. And this is what I strongly recommend you do.
[00:30:46] Olga Zarr: Like for example, this result from 10 searches, it was on position 29 just once, very unstable result. And this is what, what can make a huge difference. You may be number one, but if you are number one 10 percent of the time, you may actually benefit more from being number three. 100 percent of the time, but I will create a separate video about that.
[00:31:12] Olga Zarr: Uh, site speed in context of lawyer SEO. Uh, I, I warn you against a lawyer agencies, agencies that tell you that speed is what matters, Core Web Vitals. I was, I also made that mistake. And when Core Web Vitals were so popular. Google announced that they will become a ranking factor. I was also the person screaming that you should make sure your Core Web Vitals are all in green, but Tons of tests prove that they do not really change anything and especially those artificial scores you get in PageSpeed Insights, they have nothing to do with SEO reality.
[00:31:52] Olga Zarr: In terms of speed, you have to make sure that the site on mobile is usable, it is easy to contact, it does not load 10 seconds. If it is relatively okay to use, you are okay. It isn't something you should like spend months on or invest a lot of money in. Most lawyer websites, at least the ones I worked with, were on WordPress.
[00:32:17] Olga Zarr: And without being a developer, I was able to improve their speed to the levels that were totally enough using WP Rocket plugin. Accessibility, this is also an important part, uh, of lawyer SEO. There are specific like requirements. A lawyer website should always take that into account because it is, they can be, you can be sued if you are not accessible.
[00:32:46] Olga Zarr: Lighthouse, Google Lighthouse has a accessibility audit that will Like measure your sites in terms of accessibility. There are like specific requirements. So this is something to keep in mind. A word about CMSs. I recommend WordPress for lawyer sites because it gives you like the biggest potential in terms of SEO optimization, the biggest freedom.
[00:33:10] Olga Zarr: Of course, there are different types of setups. The issue I encounter very often is there is a WordPress website, a lawyer website with a ton of custom fields, custom coding, which makes it difficult to really like edit the site, customize anything, because we have those custom fields. Those custom fields can be, can potentially be vulnerabilities.
[00:33:35] Olga Zarr: So there can be issues with that. You can mess up a WordPress site. I also, I have also seen WordPress sites with 50 or more active plugins and they weren't actively used. So. That's about it. On page is by far my favorite part of SEO and you can achieve 90 or even more percent of your SEO success with just doing, nailing on page.
[00:33:59] Olga Zarr: Of course, I know back things are a ranking factor, they are important, but I believe that you can only think about buying back things once you are 100 percent sure that your on page is nailed. And you have like completely realized the entire potential on on page SEO. And for example, for weeks, months, you have been stuck on position, I don't know, 11.
[00:34:23] Olga Zarr: And there is no way you could move up. Everything has been done well. And if you analyze, uh, the, the pages ranking above you, you see that all of them have more backlinks than you. Then clearly you need backlinks, but this is not always the case. So whenever. choosing to buy backlinks and whatever. You always need to know for what pages you want to buy them, earn them, whatever, and check whether you actually need those backlinks.
[00:34:50] Olga Zarr: Because in most cases you don't. Meta elements, another fundamental SEO rule that can really help you a lot with, with ranking, especially if you do it like the right way, your skewered variations, LSIs, entities, the stuff you have in Quora, I will show you that in just a second. Heading structure. So maybe I will, I will show you briefly the CORA report.
[00:35:15] Olga Zarr: So this is the report I ran for personal injury lawyer. This is in my client. I randomly chose this, this URL as my target URL. So roadmap in CORA, it shows you like the basic things you should do to take the lead for a personal injury lawyer in, I think it was run in Chicago. Here are keyword variations you should have in your content, in strategic places, and here is like the basics.
[00:35:43] Olga Zarr: So title and headings. What you should improve in headings. So you should have more variations in headings. You should have more variations, yeah, in different types of headings. You should have entities. Exact matches, blah, blah, blah. In content, more exact matches, more words, more variations, and so on.
[00:36:01] Olga Zarr: Authority, here it shows you that you definitely need more backlinks. Diversity, which is about whether you, you are overusing one factor versus other ranking factors. Quick thing, basic tunings, this shows you how well those meta elements are optimized. This is great to show your clients and kind of convince them that, No, no, no.
[00:36:23] Olga Zarr: You are not really doing that. Well, there are a lot of things you could improve. One thing I can also quickly show you, overview report. This is the overview of all the factors that statistically correlate for that phrase. Sorted by correlation and here are the results. So number one, number two, and this is my track domain.
[00:36:46] Olga Zarr: And here I can see those factors. So these are the most correlating factors. LSI words, entities, entities, entities, variation, blah, blah, blah. And here I can see number one and my page. And any, anything that is in red could be improved. So I can see that clearly a lot could be improved, and anything that has a zero definitely should be improved.
[00:37:09] Olga Zarr: Sometimes by just fixing one zero you can move rankings up. A very quick overview, uh, Entities. You probably know what entities are. Here you can see what entities are used in top ranking pages. You can also, like, sort them by, by the highest number. And here I can see that the entities that are used the most often are those.
[00:37:32] Olga Zarr: And do I have those entities on my page? If I don't, I should definitely, definitely add them. LSI words, similar story, And a ton of other things, but that's enough. This is not about Quora. Headings. Headings is something I am very passionate about, because I always see pages that mess this up. And I am like, I think, known for checking headings very often.
[00:37:56] Olga Zarr: My favorite tool to, to check headings is Chrome Web Developer. Any other, like, tool also allows you to see them, like, details, SEO. And here is an example of a heading structure on like a random page I just googled, and these are, these are the headings. Headings, as we all know, are, should be like titles of a section.
[00:38:19] Olga Zarr: They should have semantic meaning. Of course, Google is getting more intelligent. There was this passage indexing, which was supposed to make Google better understand unoptimized content. But still, time and time again, I can see that if you have headings right, if you have a lot of headings, and if in the, in those headings you have variations, that Quora gives you entities, LSIs, you are ranking.
[00:38:44] Olga Zarr: So I don't see any reason why you shouldn't, uh, work on headings. Of course, I'm not saying that headings are number one ranking factor. You do headings, you rank number one. There are a lot of pages that rank well and have headings mess up because there are a lot of factors in play, but if you can make it well.
[00:39:04] Olga Zarr: I should, I think you should because this is an important on page SEO element. If you want to see a relatively good structure of headings, you can use my website. Here is an example, let me, number one result from a personal injury lawyer. This is a funny result because this site has a ton of authority and they don't have headings right and they rank well, but still I would recommend.
[00:39:29] Olga Zarr: improving those headings. Because as you can see, the structure is off. They also use those millions as, as headings. But let me look at a different one. Maybe this one. I think this one probably has a better structure of headings. Yeah, this one is pretty okay. Structure is okay. I'm not sure about like keyword optimization, personal injury.
[00:39:54] Olga Zarr: Yeah, they have it in many instances. So this is a better example. Enough about headings. Keyword research, keyword mapping, I, I think I already talked about it. Strategic placement of keywords. Yes. A word about keyword stuffing, keyword penalty, keyword density. I also was afraid of stuffing too many keywords, but in Quora, there is the keyword density reports, keywords.
[00:40:19] Olga Zarr: It shows you the clean density, difference like variations of density of top ranking pages. And as you can see, position number one has eight percent density. I think in SEO, we usually hear about two percent density. Look at them! Eight, eight, nine, ten, ten, ten, ten, ten. So really, you shouldn't be afraid of that too much.
[00:40:46] Olga Zarr: We don't want to be like stuffing keywords like crazy, but If you use them enough of times, Google will better understand what you are about. You have to, Google has to be crystal clear about what you are talking about. And this is, and the way to do that is adding those keywords. Questions. Quora, for example, also shows you questions from those search results.
[00:41:10] Olga Zarr: Questions that contain a lot of entities, and you can use those questions on your site. Of course, you have to rewrite them, make sure they are unique, but this is like also inspiration sentences that are highly optimized for those entities, LSIs that can move you up. Okay, image optimization, like image SEO rules apply to lawyer SEO as well.
[00:41:33] Olga Zarr: I don't recommend using stock images. If you do use them, add your logo on them or maybe flip them so that the, like, control thumb of those images is unique and Google doesn't treat them like stock images. Ideally, you want to use real images from the lawyer, their team. Of course, alt text, captions if you can.
[00:41:54] Olga Zarr: Alt text is also a great place to add relevant keywords. I'm not talking about stuffing, but you can add that sentence Simply contains the keyword, easy way to check if a page has old text is you can use, of course you can do it. If you crawl the site or screen trunk, you will see like all the pages, all the images you can use Chrome web developer in Chrome web developer, you have tab images and in images you have display old attributes.
[00:42:20] Olga Zarr: And if you click on that, you will see all the old attributes. on a given page. So for a quick manual review of a client or a potential lawyer client, this is something very useful. Internal linking. The lawyer sites usually have a lot of authority, a lot of external backlinks, and the best way to kind of use that juice coming from outside is to use your internal links in an intelligent way, because internal links are totally within your control.
[00:42:52] Olga Zarr: So if you want to rank a specific practice area page, You should probably add a link, internal link to that page from the page that has a lot of nice things. Usually this will be homepage depends. I strongly recommend creating silos for a lawyer website. Usually the best way is to create silo silos around specific practice area.
[00:43:15] Olga Zarr: So let's say you have personal injury and workers' compensation. So we have practice area page about personal injury. practice page about workers compensation, you have similar blog categories. Of course, you can canonicalize those blog categories to those practice area pages to kind of help them, but within those blog categories, you publish articles around those two topics and those blogs link internally to one another.
[00:43:43] Olga Zarr: They link back to the practice area page. On practice area page, you can also have links to those blog posts. And you can really kill it when it comes to like a specific practice area kind of topic. And of course, blogs can be a wonderful SEO strategy for growth. Strongly recommend blogging, but I don't recommend blogging about Like, whatever your writer comes up with, topics for blogs always have to be based on keyword research done in the proper way.
[00:44:15] Olga Zarr: I don't think, like, posting blog posts about news with accidents like we can have here make any sense. I wouldn't recommend that. Those won't rank. And there is a risk that Google will think that you are about accidents, you are a news site, you're not a lawyer site. Don't do that. Uh, optimal anchor text.
[00:44:38] Olga Zarr: So, uh, I lose my shit when I see read more links. Uh, in my lawyer SEO career, I have seen a ton of websites, lawyer websites, which had like the blog and, uh, in the blog, let me show you like any lawyer websites. This one is done. Okay. It is acceptable. So they have a blog. This is the blog post and the title of the blog post is the link.
[00:45:02] Olga Zarr: Ideally, this should be a keyword, but I think it is. I think they know what they're doing. But the way I saw it many times was that they have a blog list. They have this and view posts, read more, whatever, or just an arrow is the, is the link to the post. And this isn't a link. And this is like, Tragic. Don't do this, please.
[00:45:26] Olga Zarr: And schema, schema, schema is a very advanced topic. The entire book can be written about it. A person that is well known for schema is Terry Samuels. I am not, I am nowhere near as good as he is, but generally schema is a great way to add more relevant descriptions, to help Google better understand you, because Google understands entities.
[00:45:51] Olga Zarr: Google understands those connections, so you help Google understand what you are about. And if, for example, your lawyer client doesn't want to add a lot of, um, new content to the page, you can add that content schema to description. implement up there those LSIs, variations, whatnot. There are tons of types of schema you could add, so I wouldn't recommend just going with what Yoast SEO, which I don't recommend for WordPress, or RankMath SEO kind of comes in out of the box, because every site has it.
[00:46:29] Olga Zarr: I would recommend taking your own time and writing personalized schema. ChatGPT 4. 0 is quite good at that, but of course, you always need to. Uh, make sure the schema is valid, makes sense, uh, so you can use it in schema, uh, validator. Types of schema you could add, local, business, attorney schema, review schema.
[00:46:50] Olga Zarr: This is a great area because you're not a review site, but you can get those stars. FAQ schema, but you probably won't be displayed in SERPs or just maybe just two questions because SEOs have been overusing that. About schema is a great one. You can add a link to Wikipedia, like a link to personal injury, so that Google is 100 percent sure that your personal injury practice area is about personal injury.
[00:47:17] Olga Zarr: Mentions as well. If you are talking about specific things, you can also add them to schema. Article schema. I recommend adding these to blog posts. Of course, you can connect it with other types of schema, like in the article. You can also add mentions about In the lawyer about page, you can also add same as and link to other profiles of the lawyer and stuff like that.
[00:47:42] Olga Zarr: And Quora has a schema report, which shows you what types of schema your competitors have, what entities, blah, blah, blah, so you can mimic what they're doing. As you can see here, they have same as schema and they're adding links to their LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and so on and so, and so forth. Even some of them I can see have TikTok.
[00:48:09] Olga Zarr: A local SEO, uh, this is a can of worms. Google business profile, kind of the basic, the obvious one. There are like the most important basic things like completing information, choosing the right category, adding photos, videos. description, making sure hours are updated. There is a dispute whether you should be open 24 hours because when someone is looking at night, your, your business may not show, may not show up if it is not open.
[00:48:41] Olga Zarr: This is kind of, um, something to debate. Uh, of course, reviews, you should encourage reviews, you should answer reviews. These are like, I think, basics I don't really have to talk about. Something very important is when you are tracking, you should of course track map rankings. There are a lot of tools that allows you to do that.
[00:49:00] Olga Zarr: I like SEMrush. It allows me to track rankings in maps. around a specific area, if your lawyer is in a specific building. And in that building, they rank number one. But outside of that building, one kilometer proximity, they are like 10, 15, 20. You're not doing local SEO well, so you have to, you should aim at something like that.
[00:49:27] Olga Zarr: There are a lot of ways to achieve that proximity. more advanced tactics, probably. But I will save that for another video. An important thing of local, an important aspect of local SEO is NAP consistency. So making sure your name, address, phone number are consistent. As I mentioned, for local SEO, I recommend SEMrush.
[00:49:50] Olga Zarr: It also has a map rank tracker. It also allows you to manage reviews, to manage listings. It can also help you with making sure your NAP is consistent. It can also automatically submit you to some local directories and make sure everything there is okay. The local citations, kind of obvious. Final thing, something you may not know, I didn't know that some time ago.
[00:50:14] Olga Zarr: If you want to rank highly in maps, in Google Business Profile, your website should be optimized and what you have on your website, how well it is optimized, can influence your Google Business Profile rankings, your rankings in Maps. They are not like separate, they work together. And there are a lot of nuances to that.
[00:50:32] Olga Zarr: One, I already mentioned that Personal injury lawyer Chicago is not necessarily a local search, and if you overdo with Chicago, you may not be relevant. There is also something called manipulated URLs, which I also recommend using. There will be a separate, separate video about it, which also helps in local SEO.
[00:50:55] Olga Zarr: And a ton of other things, if you want to learn more. I recommend you sign up for SEOFly Pro now for 1, you can test it for 30 days. Then it costs 88 per month, but there is a 50 percent discount, so we can get it for 44 per month. And this is where I share those most advanced tactics that I don't share publicly.
[00:51:21] Olga Zarr: Technical SEO for lawyers is a bit different. These are not huge sites. Something I have come across a lot is that lawyer website was hacked and in Google Search Console crawled currently not indexed or discovered currently not indexed. There were millions of Japanese types of, or e commerce types of URLs that, that are not, that were, that didn't exist on the page.
[00:51:45] Olga Zarr: The site was simply hacked. Sometimes it was so serious that even Ahrefs was showing Japanese keywords for a lawyer site. This is really a shame. And of course, uh, a lawyer has to always have, always should look into crawls currently not indexed, because if there are quality issues, pages will be there.
[00:52:07] Olga Zarr: Other things, uh, regarding technical SEO, design. If the designer has no clue about SEO, it can lead to serious issues. serious technical SEO issues. I have also seen no index tag where it shouldn't be. If you want to learn more about my approach and using Google Search Console, I recommend you watch those two clips from my presentation in Saigon.
[00:52:35] Olga Zarr: or reach out to me and I will tell you more. And there will be a separate video and guide about technical SEO for lawyers. Content marketing, something I already touched upon. Content is king. Blog is important. A good way to add more contents, to add those LSIs, to add more headings, to add those entities, blah, blah, blah, is by adding FAQs to your specific practice area pages.
[00:53:04] Olga Zarr: or blog posts. Of course, you want to make sure that those FAQs are unique per page, and they always relate to the page. So if your practice area page for personal injury has FAQs, this should be the only page that has those FAQs, and they should be all about the same. personal injury and all those variations.
[00:53:25] Olga Zarr: So here we have personal injury lawyer, so probably in those FAQs you should use those variations, those entities, at least the ones that make sense, that are the most often used. probably similarly with LSIs, but of course you have to choose the ones that make sense. Client testimonials, case studies, uh, for lawyers usually you have to, you should have a page that is dedicated to that, or you can have a banner on every page with like some testimonials, some case study, or linking to something.
[00:53:59] Olga Zarr: I have seen a tragic case of that where there was like a single page, uh, with. client testimonials. The page was very long. It had, I don't know, a couple of hundreds of testimonials, one sentence, a couple of sentences. Each of those testimonials was a separate page, empty page that had nothing but a testimonial.
[00:54:20] Olga Zarr: And this testimonial page linked to those couple of hundred thin pages with one single testimonial. And this was like diluting the entire uh, topical relevance, uh, and when those were removed, rankings really improved. Video, like, video is becoming very important now for any niche, for lawyers especially, so I strongly recommend having video testimonials, or at least having videos shot by the lawyer answering FAQs may be talking about specific commonly asked question.
[00:54:59] Olga Zarr: This video can be an addition to a guide, which is the case in this case. So I have a video, this video, and there is this guide. And of course, video then can be repurposed into a blog, into a podcast. The podcast can link back to the video or to the guide to the website. You can easily create this kind of a legal PBN of content.
[00:55:21] Olga Zarr: helping each piece of content. And with video, with some keywords, there is a chance that both your page and your video will rank. Here's an example of a, of a keyword Cora SEO review where my page ranks and my video ranks. So I have a lot of real estate. off page. I don't want to talk about this too much.
[00:55:42] Olga Zarr: This is not something I do. As I said, be strategic about it. Don't burn money because it is easy to burn money. Press releases, like Magic PR, usually that's all you have to do to take the lead for a specific keyword. Sometimes you need a bunch of press releases. Sometimes you need those backlinks. But sometimes you don't.
[00:56:01] Olga Zarr: In many cases, you don't. But of course, you have to know if you need them. You can use that using SEMrush. You can check whether a specific keyword needs backlinks using SEMrush, Ahrefs. Quora also has that functionality. So for personal injury lawyer, there is this report basic old page, and it shows me this is my target page.
[00:56:21] Olga Zarr: This is not my client, just, just a random page. And I can see that number one, two, three, all of them have a lot of backlinks. So I, to even be competitive, For those positions, I should probably have at least a couple hundred of backlinks. And with one press release, like Magic PR press release, you can get usually five, six, 700 backlinks.
[00:56:47] Olga Zarr: When writing a press release, you have to make sure this is, it is also well optimized for SEO. You should use Quora. to make sure the right keywords are in the press release so that this topical relevance authority is transferred to your, back to your page. Parasite SEO. Of course we have Google site reputation abuse but still I think LinkedIn is doing a great job and your lawyer client can use their LinkedIn to publish articles and they will usually rank number one and those articles can also rank back to the site.
[00:57:22] Olga Zarr: A ton of other possibilities and like other well known tactics, link magnets, local backlinks newsletter. If you send a newsletter, you have a big number of subscribers and a lot of people visit a link, you can get, you will get a boost in rankings. Analytics. When doing that, make sure you are tracking the right metrics.
[00:57:45] Olga Zarr: It is easy to kind of track the wrong things or to overwhelm the client with a ton of data. But you have to remember that at the end of the day, for a lawyer, what, what is important for them is cases. So Cases and well paid cases. And to get cases, they have to be contacted, so phone calls, contact form submissions, maybe chat, because a lot of lawyers have those chat functionalities, so messages in chats.
[00:58:14] Olga Zarr: And there are other metrics that at the start of the campaign, if you are starting with a dead site, you have to, you need something to be able to tell if the SEO is going in the right direction. So, of course, it will be new keywords, organic traffic, rankings, but with rankings, as I mentioned, you have to be careful because position number one is not always what you need.
[00:58:36] Olga Zarr: unit stable positions. For some keywords, it is not worth trying to rank because instead of trying to rank for that one competitive keywords, you can rank for 50 less competitive and have 500 times more traffic. Here, uh, I recommend, uh, subscribing to my SEO newsletter and you will get two dashboards for tracking, uh, website performance.
[00:59:00] Olga Zarr: Um, You can set this up for your lawyer client. One, uh, is Google Looker Studio. Uh, you have to connect it to Google Search Console, Google Analytics. Uh, you can also connect it to SE Ranking so that you have data about, um, conversions, uh, data about traffic, keywords. So this is what this report looks like.
[00:59:21] Olga Zarr: So here's the data from GA4, like data from the blog, number of conversions. Here you have data from GSC, so overview from Google Search Console, generic keywords, branded keywords, question keywords, question keywords. So how often do pigeons poop? So one of the questions that my pigeon blog ranks for highly.
[00:59:47] Olga Zarr: And SE ranking overview, so overview of the positions I track in SE ranking. So I strongly recommend downloading this template. The other one is for Core Web Vitals, so field data, lab data, field data is what matters. and if field data is very, very poor and you can really see that on mobile the site is doing badly, poorly, you can think about fixing that.
[01:00:14] Olga Zarr: This template requires JetOctopus account, you can get a free trial, you have a free demo where they will show you what JetOctopus looks like, how it works, and if you connect it to GSC you can easily track Corel Vitals over time, field data. lab data for mobile and for desktop. The only thing you are actually interested in is like build data for mobile, right?
[01:00:40] Olga Zarr: False to avoid. So one thing I have seen too many times in when GA4 or GA Universal at the time was set up incorrectly and everything was a conversion. The site was dead. It has like a few clicks per day. It has, I don't know, hundreds of conversions and the client was shown, look how many conversions, but there was no business, right?
[01:01:07] Olga Zarr: So here is this sarcastic question. Who cares about reality when you can live in a fantasy world where, where your website is a conversion machine? Okay, final thoughts. Hiring a lawyer agency, SEO agency versus an SEO consultant. Both have pros and cons. I'm not saying that all lawyer SEO agencies or SEO agencies are bad.
[01:01:36] Olga Zarr: That's not true. You can find a good SEO lawyer agency, a good SEO consultant, you can find a bad lawyer SEO agency and a bad SEO consultant. The thing you should always take into account is who will SEO. In agencies, I can see it very often that they have a lot of clients, and one SEO specialist may have 50 or more clients to work on and they only work on those that that pay the most or or where something is happening and those that are doing relatively okay and not paying much are kind of pushed down.
[01:02:13] Olga Zarr: Um, so always you have to have that clarity. There is a video where I talk about red flags for in both SEO consultants and agencies. The pros of an SEO consultant is you know who is working. When people hire me, they know that it will be me working on the site or my business partner who has 15 years of experience in SEO.
[01:02:35] Olga Zarr: We don't have any junior SEOs. It will be just us. And they have direct contact with us. They have our WhatsApp. So we are very fast to respond. And of course we are laser focused on the client because we don't have 100 clients usually. With an SEO consultant, there are just a few, five, maybe 10 clients at most.
[01:02:57] Olga Zarr: And the cons are, SEO way more expensive because the expertise and experience has to cost. They may not be able to scale in the case of a huge site, and they may have to like outsource some things like link building. An SEO lawyer agency, they are cheaper. They may have different teams like a PPC team, web design team.
[01:03:23] Olga Zarr: But it is important that all those teams understand SEO and they usually are cheaper. The biggest cons of an SEO agency is that you may not know who is working. You will have an account manager contacting you and there may be an offshore low wage working who is paid one dollar per hour working on your site while you pay 20k per month.
[01:03:49] Olga Zarr: This is an extreme example, but it happens, so you have to be sure who is working on your site. And the agencies have a lot of clients, they may take longer to respond, they will not be laser focused on your site. Common lawyer SEO mistakes. I think I will save that for another video, because this video already is quite long, but the biggest ones are Headings, not doing keyword research, neglecting internal linking.
[01:04:20] Olga Zarr: and forgetting about local SEO, uh, and not using Quora. So my question to you is, is your lawyer SEO done right? If you are not sure if it is done right, reach out to me. I will review your site. Usually I can tell within like 10 seconds, 30 seconds of reviewing a site, whether the SEO agency has a clue about SEO.
[01:04:46] Olga Zarr: or whether they don't. Uh, I have a wait list, I have a lot of things to work on, so I'm not accepting like everyone, because I cannot have 100 clients. Feel free to reach out to me if you want to learn more from me. I invite you to subscribe to SEOSLY Pro, seosly. com slash pro, and you can then enjoy a lot of the more advanced tactics.
[01:05:13] Olga Zarr: And you can ask me questions and I can help you there. And there will be other videos continuing this topic, other guides, so stay tuned. If you have any questions about LawyerSEO, ask them in the comments. And that's all. Good luck with your LawyerSEO and talk to you soon in the next video. Bye bye.