Digital marketing has created many new opportunities for immigration attorneys and law firms. Among the different online strategies, search engine optimization has proven to be an excellent marketing activity with strong returns for immigration lawyers. If you have your own firm and are interested in generating more business from your immigration website’s organic traffic, then the tips and tactics below are for you.
In this article, we’re going to look at some of our best SEO tips for immigration lawyers. You can use these to implement and direct your search optimization efforts towards activities that should generate valuable rankings and handsome results.
1. Find Local SEO Immigration Keywords to Attract Clients Quickly
Unlike other practice areas, immigration clients can come from a multitude of places and countries. Typically, the less competitive keywords to focus on and target when starting off with your search engine optimization strategy are one related to your local vicinity.
If your firm is based in or near a large metropolitan hub, there’s a good chance that you will be able to target and rank for city and state-specific keywords.
By default, there’s less competition for these keywords than for national or international search terms, so you’re more likely to start benefiting from local SEO strategy quicker than a broader strategy.
For small immigration law firms, ranking for local keywords may drive enough new business and clients to stay busy in the long haul. Investigate the difference in competition for local keywords versus broader, national and international keywords to see which makes for a better strategy for your firm’s growth.
2. Optimize Google My Business and Local Profiles
For law firms that choose to target local keywords for their immigration SEO strategy, there are some essential components to ranking on the first page organically for these local terms.
Your Google My Business (aka GMB) profile is a critical part of this optimization process. In fact, the only way to rank in the local “Map Pack” for your business’s primary local keywords is by having a well-optimized GMB profile. Make sure to complete your Google listing with comprehensive detail and hi-res, up-to-date photos of your firm and attorneys.
Your GMB profile’s ranking also depends on external signals, including other online profiles in directories like Yelp and YellowPages, to name several. Make sure to optimize these as well to give your Google My Business profile more authority over your competitors, which will boost its visibility.
3. Use Content Marketing & Blogging to Generate Massive Traffic
When it comes to content marketing and blogging for lawyers, often this marketing strategy can be a good fit for law firms. When it comes to immigration lawyers, it’s often a great fit. There are so many potential clients living near and abroad that are looking to immigrate and need an attorney or consultant at some point along the way.
Before hiring a lawyer, they’re likely to conduct research on the process, the types of Visas available and the best approach to apply based on their situation and circumstances.
Because many immigration attorneys don’t know where their next clients are going to come from, casting a wide net can help drive a lot of organic traffic, many leads and new clients. Your immigration website’s content should still be carefully planned of course, but there are a vast number of topics and articles that you can write about to attract clients.
Suppose you specialized in a particular type of immigration, such as workers Visas. There is still an abundance of questions people and potential leads are searching for regarding specific types of VISAs and the immigration process for them.
4. Focus on UX and Site Speed
Your website’s User Experience and Speed should be top priorities in 2021 and beyond. With Google’s rollout of Core Web Vitals update in May 2021, focusing on a well-optimized code base for your website is essential to your SEO strategy’s future success.
Use advanced image compression techniques to keep the file size of images small and in the new formats (WebP, JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, etc.) that provide for better compression.
When measuring your site’s speed, pay particular attention to your mobile site speed scores. Websites tend to load slower on mobile devices and Google is placing emphasis on mobile-first indexing. This means that search results on mobile are different from the equivalent search results displayed on desktop.
To ensure that you appear in both, you want to prioritize providing a good, clean user experience on mobile and desktop devices as well as exceptional site speed scores, especially on mobile.
5. Build High-Quality & Authoritative Backlinks
Link building is one of the most challenging and important components to a strong SEO campaign strategy. However, they are also a key component of search engine algorithms and how they decide to rank sites and web pages for particular keywords and queries.
Links are like votes for websites. All else being equal, the more links it has, the more popular the website and thus the more trustworthy and authoritative the website is believed to be.
However, not all links are equal.
Acquiring and earning backlinks for lawyers is a particularly competitive and difficult space for a number of reasons. SEOs for years have used link building techniques that google has deemed to be black hat and against their policies, including building sketchy links on spammy websites in order to trick algorithms and rank. They’ve made a number of algorithm updates designed to detect these black hat methods and either ignore or penalize them.
The law firm link building techniques that you depend on have to be clean, focus on high-quality and authoritative websites and ultimately, be beneficial to site visitors.
6. Optimize Site Structure for Maximum SEO Results
Because of the plethora of content you could publish on your immigration law firm’s website, you have to be careful about how you organize that content through your website’s structure.
Structure can either bleed your site’s authority into the wrong links and pages, making your relevance and link authority drop, or it can be used to properly channel your valuable link authority and relevance towards the correct pages that will assist in ranking for more difficult keywords.
Take a look at 4 key components of your website’s internal linking in order to optimize the essentials of your site structure:
- Main menu navigation
- Sidebar navigation
- Footer Navigation
- Internal links within each page’s main content body
Here are several rules to follow when determining whether links belong on a page or one of those 4 site components:
- Links should be structured and organized in a logical way that make it easy for users to navigate
- Make sure that the links in your menus, footers and inside the body content are strongly related to each other
- All content being linked to should be helpful, thorough and relevant
7. Include Helpful Images & Graphics in Content
One of the best ways to enhance your content and the user experience for your pages is by adding helpful graphics and images.
Consider using tables and graphics like flowcharts as visual aids to describe scenarios and immigration processes that support the written content and make the information easier to digest.
Your site visitors will stop and look at images that illustrate a process or lend aid to technical concepts. This actually improves on-page metrics that Google uses to determine whether a page should rank in a top position for that given keyword.
8. Link to Related Articles and Pages
If your website contains a number of pages and articles on immigration, link them together in a sidebar or at the bottom of each page. Make sure that the articles or pages you link to are topically relevant to the current page and encourage your visitors to click on to learn more on the subject.
Also link to them throughout each page’s content when appropriate. This is known as internal linking.
Immigration law firms can generate more results, both in terms of leads and organic search traffic by doing this correctly. The longer that users stay on your website, the more likely they are to convert at some point.
Additionally, because visitors stay on your site for longer and visit multiple pages, this provides a good user experience. This tells Google that your site and the initial page they landed on provided satisfactory information given the search they performed and your site should continue to rank well for that particular keyword.
Need Professional Law Firm SEO?
Some immigration lawyers may think they can just publish content, build their website and expect it to rank and the clients will follow. Many immigrants think that they can handle their own immigration process themselves, but would you recommend that?
If you’re looking for a law firm marketing agency that specializes in search engine optimization and knows how to get you the results that will transform your practice into the law firm you envision, then get in touch with us at Zahavian Legal Marketing to see if and how we can help you. We’ll bring in the traffic and results, so you can focus on running your firm and helping people achieve their dreams through your immigration practice.
