Building a search engine optimization (SEO) campaign as a bankruptcy attorney involves a lot of work. Numerous things go into SEO (e.g., blog posts, landing pages, link building). All of these things can add up fast. Then when you try to keep up with the ever-changing nature of everything, it can become messy. However, if you take the time to understand SEO, you’ll find that it isn’t as difficult as you might think. There are simply numerous factors you must account for.
Your Google My Business (GMB) Account
One of the first things you should do as a bankruptcy attorney is create a free GMB account because it’s vital for local SEO. Doing so gives you control over how Google displays your website’s information. However, you need to follow Google’s guidelines so that you don’t trigger Google penalties.
Optimize Your Content
Your next step when working with bankruptcy attorney SEO is to build content that answers your searcher’s questions. This is vital since your audience is looking for answers to specific questions.
Spend Time Doing Keyword Research
This is how you’ll find the topics that your audience is searching for. There are tools available to help you identify these things. Once you’ve found them, you’ll want to create blog posts and specific service or location pages for them.
Build Your E-A-T
As a bankruptcy attorney, your website is creating Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) content. To do well with this content, you must demonstrate a high level of E-A-T (expertise, authority, trustworthiness). This plays a significant role in ranking well as it measures the quality of your website.
Although you only have a certain amount of control over E-A-T, it’s important to do the best you can here. This means including your credentials on your site (e.g., awards, cases handled) alongside past client testimonials for social proof. You should also make sure that your site is encrypted and secured with an SSL certificate. These things help put users at ease.
A Word About Client Reviews
You’ll want to ensure that you have good client reviews. If you don’t, you’ll want to reach out to your clients to see what you can do to better serve them. Social proof is vital here because it shows how trustworthy you are. While you can manage your reviews with GMB, you should also find other review sites that your clients frequent and answer any negative reviews that are there as well.
It doesn’t hurt to respond to positive reviews too. Doing so shows that you pay attention to your clients, thus demonstrating approachability.
This is a small part of what’s known as “reputation management.” It’ll also help improve your local SEO efforts because regardless of how well you rank if nobody trusts you as a bankruptcy attorney, you won’t generate any leads.
Obtain Backlinks
It’s vital to build and manage local citations. These are backlinks you get from the various online directories (e.g., Yelp, FindLaw). These are somewhat different from other types of backlinks because you can manage these to ensure their accuracy. Therefore try to get as many of them as possible from high-quality directories. Once you’re listed there, you’ll want to continually follow up to ensure that you don’t have any duplicate or inaccurate listings.
Utilize Schema Markup on Your Pages
While this may sound difficult, it’s just a fancy way of saying that your page needs to be plain enough for web crawlers to understand. Taking the time to do this will remove a lot of the guesswork bots would otherwise need to do. It also means that you’ll see organic results faster.
It’s important to understand that schema isn’t a direct ranking factor, but it does play a role in creating Google’s Knowledge Panel. It can also help clarify your pages’ context so that you do rank better. As a bankruptcy attorney, you need to clearly state that you aren’t a bank, federal, or state entity. You’ll want to state that you offer legal services for people interested in filing for bankruptcy.
One Final Note
As a bankruptcy attorney, you’re already working long, grueling hours. There’s no need to work even more. Instead, contact us at the Local SEO Tampa Company in Tampa, FL, and let us take care of your SEO needs.
