Creating Geo-Specific Practice Area Pages for Your Law Firm
Geo-Targeted Content – The Difference Between 1st Page Rankings And Irrelevancy
The most important online content for law firms is the area of practice (AOP) page. These pages help give your website a strong foundation that you can build on with consistent monthly content. Practice area pages serve two primary purposes; to explain in detail what areas of law you practice, and to let legal consumers know which geographic locations you serve.
An attorney or firm should produce AOP pages for each area of specialty, starting with the most general and drilling down from there. For example, if you are a personal injury lawyer who does mostly traffic-related accident cases, you would want to produce pages for:
- Personal Injury
- Car Accidents
- Truck Accidents
- Bus Accidents
- Motorcycle Accidents
- Bicycle Accidents
- Pedestrian Accidents
This is just a starting list. Over time, you might want to add pages for more subtopics, like “serious/catastrophic injuries” for example. In addition, will want to add several specific types of injuries that fall into this category, such as “traumatic brain injuries” and “spinal cord injuries”.
Once you know which area of practice pages you need to produce, it is time to decide which geographic locations to target. Creating geo-specific practice area pages for your law firm is extremely important, because consumers tend to prefer locally focused content, and search engines reward geo-targeted AOP pages with better search results. Ultimately, this means more prospects landing on your page, which in turn means more clients from your website.
Building Geo-Specific Attorney Practice Area Pages
The keys to an effective geo-targeted practice area page are to create pages that will be highly relevant to a local consumer search along with text and design that shows authority and professionalism and optimizes client conversions. The headline should include the keyword phrase you are targeting along with the local area in which you are marketing.
Continuing with the personal injury firm example, let’s say you are in the Chicago area. In this case, you will want pages with titles like “Personal Injury Attorneys in Chicago” or “Chicago Motorcycle Accident Lawyers”.
As you might guess, in an area like Chicago, there is going to be heavy competition for keywords such as “Chicago personal injury lawyer”. This is why it is a good idea to drill down to areas of personal injury law that you specialize in, like “motorcycle accidents” or “nursing home abuse”. Create the personal injury page as the “parent” page and create the more specialized pages as the “child pages” in your linking structure.
If you are in a medium to large sized metro area, another thing you should strongly consider is creating geo-pages that are targeted toward nearby localities that you practice in. For example, let’s say your office is in the northwest side of Chicago near O’Hare International. In this case, you would want to target nearby suburbs like Arlington Heights, Schaumburg, and Elmhurst. Making geo-targeted pages for these suburbs creates more potential doorways through which prospective clients can find your website.
Best Practices for Geo-Specific Practice Area Pages
There are a lot of variables that go into creating geo-targeted area of practice pages that drive results. Here are some of the most important guidelines to follow:
- Develop a Consistent Message: It is critical that your message remains consistent across all of your web properties with regards to the name of your firm, the focus of your practice, your location, and similar information. When you are building an online brand, there needs to be congruency with the design, the images you display, and the messages that you convey.
- Distinguish Yourself and Your Firm: Your geo-specific practice area pages should highlight why you are different from the hundreds or perhaps thousands of other lawyers in your area with the same or similar areas of specialty. Is it your extensive trial experience? Your success with high-profile cases? Recognition by reputable legal organizations? Large verdicts and settlements you have secured for clients? Highlight the things that distinguish your practice and set you apart from your competition.
- Write with Authority: One way you can show that you are a good choice for legal consumers is by creating authoritative content that showcases your expertise. So, if you are a DUI defense attorney, for example, tell readers the important points about the DUI laws in your state, when they Are likely to face jail time, what they have to do to keep their driver’s license, and some of the most effective defenses. Content like this helps establish you as a thought leader in your area of practice.
- Make Your Content Readable and Useful: Along with authoritative content, your content should be readable and include useful information. Use short paragraphs with lots of subheadings and bullet points to make it easier for your readers to scan the content quickly if they want to. Also give them information that will be helpful to them and make them feel like it was worth their time to read your page. For example, you could include a section like “What to Say and What Not to Say When You Speak to an Insurance Adjuster.”
- Be Careful About Overusing Keywords: Focus on creating quality content and don’t worry as much about integrating keywords. Keyword stuffing is a disgraced practice that Google no longer rewards, and in fact, the overuse of keywords could actually hurt your rankings in some cases. As a general rule, if you write authoritatively about your area of practice, your targeted keywords and related keywords will show up often enough for Google to recognize your page as a relevant search result.
- Make it Easy for Your Prospects to Engage: Your geo-targeted area of practice pages should include a call to action and a chat box in case the reader would like to engage with your firm right away. With these features in place, you will convert more targeted visitors into clients.
Don’t Have Time to Create Geo-Specific Practice Area Pages? Sundown Legal Marketing is Here to Help
Maybe you are saying to yourself, “all of this makes sense, but who has time to create area of practice pages?” We get it. A lot of lawyers are simply too busy practicing law to worry about building their online presence, and that’s where we come in. At Sundown Legal Marketing, we specialize in helping law firms by reviewing their current online footprint, developing a comprehensive internet marketing plan and implementing every aspect of that plan.
We work with attorneys and legal practices in whatever capacity they need us. For some, we just build a professional attorney website and host it for them while they do their own blogging and other online marketing activities. For others, we implement their entire marketing strategy – from website construction to SEO to content marketing to social media, paid advertising and beyond.
To find out how we can help your firm, call us today at (800) 864-1764 or message us online for a free website evaluation and internet marketing assessment. We look forward to serving you!
