SEO for criminal law attorneys
When you look at enough SEO agency websites you will see lots of examples of their work increasing website visitors by 300% or whatever. Kudos to them. Sometimes though you don’t get to see all the details and maybe that site went from 10 visitors to 40. Yup, that’s 300%.
In this example, I will show you step by step how my criminal law firm’s website increased in traffic from 400 to more than 800 visitors per month.
And it didn’t happen overnight or in a few weeks. It took 1.5+ years. What’s exciting here though is that the criminal law attorney got more visitors every few months for the entire time!
Let’s take a look just how this happened.
Content for criminal lawyer websites
One of the mistakes most law firms make with their websites is that they fall short on content. A typical criminal lawyer website might include pages for:
- Criminal Defense
- Assault
- Domestic Violence
- Theft
- Fraud
- DUI
- Drug Crimes
- Traffic Violations
- Expungements
When you are located in a very small town and there are only 1-2 other criminal law attorneys the website could likely rank well with content like this.
Law firms that are located in a bit more competitive area will need to step it up more to get in the top few spots.
Take a look at the menu for this website on the topic of DUI defense. This criminal lawyer clearly wants to be the best attorney for driving under the influence charges.
The website does an excellent job going into depth on each of these topics. As a result, their site is listed first when searching for a DUI defense attorney in their city which is fairly large.
Very few criminal law firms in the country will have this much content for DUI defense.
The crimes attorney in this same city in the 4th position of Google local results has one solid page on DUI defense. Unfortunately that is not enough to get their profile into the 3-pack next to the map which typically gets the most clicks.
The website in the 5th spot only includes the term “DUI” 3 times on the website. Many of the lawyer websites further down the list don’t even have the term on their website at all. It is going to be very difficult to rank, get visitors and turn them into clients if the words they are searching for are not even on your website.
There are many factors that are used to determine a website’s position in Google’s search results. The firm’s location, inbound links, and the optimization of their Google Business Profile are a few important pieces that impact rankings.
So just adding more pages alone is not necessarily going to get you into the #1 spot. You should have a strategy for every page that includes all the things you believe are needed to make it the best piece of content on the internet for that topic.
After you build the page and it gets indexed by Google it is time to let it rest to see where it will settle in the search results. Then periodically test updates to that page in an effort to push it up to the top position. Now that is what SEO is all about!
Let’s take a look at what I did to optimize the website for my criminal law firm client.
Website marketing for criminal law firms
One of the first things I looked at was to make sure every page on the website was properly optimized. This includes steps such as:
- Optimized headers and titles
- Included keywords on the page
- Linked pages to other core topics
- Offsite marketing (link building)
While this is very basic SEO for a website, it still requires a level of skill to get the best results. Copying what some other attorney uses on a website won’t get you into the top spot. Although if I feel I can get the first position, there is no need to back off the best keywords.
For example, I may decide to optimize a page for the city, county, region or the whole state. I’ve ranked a divorce attorney for statewide terms because nobody else did and watched the website visitors skyrocket.
As I mentioned earlier, if the keywords you want to rank for are not included on the page your odds of ranking well are very small. For this client I used a variety of search terms such as
- Criminal Defense Attorney
- Criminal Lawyer
- Criminal Law Attorney
Each page used a different set of keywords. One of the biggest mistakes I see is when a page does not contain the exact keywords it was intended to rank for. Yes it takes time to incorporate them in your text but the process is well worth it.
Then I made sure to interlink all of the similar content on the site. Internal linking helps Google to see which pages you value the most.
My final task was to collect a few links from other websites into my site. Honestly most SEO experts out there make way too much of this. Very few criminal lawyer websites are going to attract lots of high quality natural links to the core practice area pages.
I suppose for a high-profile case there may be lots of media attention and those attorneys will certainly generate some good links. But most law firms don’t get those. The truth is, unless you are in a highly competitive area, you don’t need them.
For my client I just reviewed which pages had the most potential but were not ranking that well. Then found some local directories and other sites to add a link.
While links are important, I find the next step to be what Google really wants.
Added content to niche practice area
While my client handles all types of criminal law cases, the website was lacking complete coverage of every area they practice.
For example, the attorneys take cases for juvenile crimes but that wasn’t mentioned anywhere on the website.
While Google may know that a juvenile crime requires a criminal defense attorney, it has to compare every page on the internet to see which will provide the best result to match the search. So when another law firm has a page (or multiple pages!) on a topic, it is likely to get the first position over another website that only mentions the topic once or not at all.
Similar to the way the DUI attorney above thoroughly covered one topic, I recommended that the law firm add more content on a variety of criminal topics. This included areas of practice such as juvenile law, criminal theft, guns & weapons charges, sexual assault and more.
We also added a page on understanding misdemeanors, as an old blog post was performing well and we hoped adding more information on the topic would attract even more clicks.
While each of these topics individually is not going to bring in loads of visitors, collectively we were able to see some impressive results.
More importantly, as time went on, each of these pages moved up into the top position in Google’s search results. Mostly because few other firms had quality content on the subjects. But the big win occurred because the attorney’s website now has a thorough collection of content around the broader topic of criminal law.
Google Business Profile insights reveals the site started showing up for terms such as:
- Criminal defense attorney
- Criminal lawyers
- Best criminal defense attorney
- Best criminal lawyer
- Criminal lawyers near me
And many, many more!
But there is one last step employed that made a big difference.
Continuously optimized the law firm’s content
Okay, I’ve shared how I got the pages to rank well. But how does the website continue to attract even more visitors each month?
The trick is a more advanced SEO tactic. While not very difficult, it does take time and some practice to get right.
By setting up Google Search Console and viewing the performance tab, you can see some of the terms people are searching for and how often your law firm’s website shows up in the results.
When there are few or no clicks, that term is likely not well optimized on the website.
For example when I check Google Search Console for this client the following terms are used in a variety of searches but our site gets zero clicks.
- What is a pretrial felon
- Misdemeanor codes
- Theft by deception
- Malicious assault
- Can you go to jail for a misdemeanor
- Is assault a felony
- Misdemeanor assault
- Difference between parole and probation
- Domestic battery charges
- Supervised probation rules
By incorporating these better into the site it improves those pages and there is a better chance my criminal law attorney website will show up near the top of the search results.
If we take a look at the analytics for the existing page on assault, you can see the number of visitors increased from about 35 per month to more than 70 per month. That’s double!
Here is another example for student expulsions where website traffic went from less than 10 visits per month to more than 20.
This is why the number of visitors continues to grow nearly every month.
Now let’s see some of the results for the newer pages.
Results of criminal lawyer SEO
The criminal law firm website that I am working on is located in a city with a population of more than 50,000. So it is no small town.
Yet, for all of the criminal topics that were added (as well as most of the existing pages), the site shows up in the #1, not just for the city, but many on a statewide level!
Our site was getting no visitors for guns and weapons charges. Now some months there are more than 30 people checking the page.
Guns and Weapons Charges
A juvenile criminal lawyer may not be the most sought after attorney, but when someone needs help the search terms are highly convertible into cases.
Juvenile Crime
And our growing handful of clicks are turning into cases!
For our criminal theft page we went from no visitors to a steady stream of traffic.
Criminal Theft
The impressive time on site for each session of nearly 1.5 minutes shows these visitors are very interested in the content.
What we are seeing here is highly targeted leads. These are not informational queries but bottom of the funnel searches. These are folks looking for an attorney to help them.
The very basic video we added about misdemeanors was included to satisfy informational searches. These are people who want to learn more about the law, but may need an attorney in the near future.
Video page about misdemeanors
The results you see here are very normal for any properly optimized attorney website. Potential law firm clients are searching for something specific. When your criminal lawyer website satisfies that searcher’s needs, you earn the chance for a lead and future client.
Here is how the updates to our criminal attorney website turned into leads.
Criminal law attorney leads
Getting more visitors to your website is great. But what criminal law attorneys really want is cases. And the only way that is going to happen is when a potential client calls, emails or chats.
If a law firm can pick up one new case per month, that should more than cover the cost of their marketing efforts. This is particularly true for the cost of a criminal defense attorney.
For this client, you can see the results below of just the call volume from the firm’s Google Business Profile. The number of leads went from about 50 per month to more than 90 calls. And this is only one source.
The client has a call tracking number, email, and chat, which all showed an increase over the same period.
To help improve conversions I make sure the website has a clickable phone number in the upper right hand corner so mobile phones can connect quickly. I restructured the content into a logical flow to funnel visitors to the contact page. A map, along with the firm’s address and phone number are included on every page. This also can help with “near me” searches.
When you add 50 or more high-quality leads per month you can be rest assured the law firm is getting at least 5-6 new very profitable cases. Cha-Ching!
