Effective SEO is critical for mass tort lawyers seeking new clients through search engines.
One in three people looking for legal advice start their search on Google, and that includes people with mass tort claims. Standing out in these searches is crucial but challenging. This guide provides the essentials for crafting a successful SEO strategy.
Here's what you need to know to get started with SEO as a mass tort lawyer.
What is Mass Tort SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of optimizing your mass tort law firm’s website to increase the number of people who visit it. It’s also the practice of improving your online presence so that your site shows up on Google when your ideal clients search for terms related to your mass tort services.
SEO for lawyers boils down to two major elements:
- Optimizing your existing site so it shows up in Google’s search results
- Creating new authoritative content that addresses your ideal client’s needs and search habits
These overarching ideas break down further into the core components of a mass tort SEO campaign.
“SEO” is also used as a job title for the person you hire to handle your SEO campaign. This person will help you identify valuable keywords and site optimizations so that your site starts to rank on Google. They’ll help you create practice area pages, landing pages, and blog content designed to showcase your expertise and experience with mass tort claims and drive potential leads to you.
Core Components of Mass Tort SEO
SEO is not a one-and-done website audit and tuneup. It's a comprehensive process that you must return to and evaluate over time, just like any other mass tort marketing tactic.
Here are the core practices of SEO:
- Keyword research: The process of finding the terms and phrases your target clients use in search engines.
- Content creation: Developing a calendar and editorial plan based on your keyword research to create new material, such as blog posts and landing pages.
- On-page optimization: Updating and modifying pages to make them easier for Google and readers to understand.
- Technical SEO: The process of ensuring your website follows web development best practices and eliminating technical errors that hurt your ability to rank.
- Link building: Increasing your website's authority by attracting links to your site from other relevant and authoritative websites.
- Local SEO: Optimizing your site and search engine presence so that your site shows up in local search results.
Not all mass tort lawyers need the last item on the list of core practices. Local SEO is something that’s essential for any lawyer handling cases in their local area. Most mass tort lawyers practice at a national level, so they don’t need to focus as much on ranking in Google Maps.
All of the other core practices are necessary for getting an ROI on your SEO campaign.
Each of them builds on one another. On-page optimization and technical SEO ensure your site is in good health. Keyword research and content creation let you make the right content to reach the right people. And link building shows Google that your site is an authoritative resource.
The Benefits of SEO for Mass Tort Lawyers
SEO offers something to mass tort lawyers that no other form of digital marketing does: compounding growth.
The content on your website drives you results long after you've created it. And each new, relevant piece you create builds on the last as Google sees you building a web of topical authority for your site. That means it becomes easier to rank for high-value keywords over time.
Comparing SEO content marketing to digital advertising makes this advantage clear.
Investing in digital advertising is great, but you only reach your target audience as long as you continue paying. The minute you stop adding dollars to this machine, the minute your lead generation dries up.
Imagine you want to get cases from claimants who drank contaminated water at Camp LeJeune. These veterans served long ago, and they and their affected family members may be all over the country. Many of them may not even know if they qualify or their legal rights and next steps.
Yet thousands of people every month search for terms like camp lejeune lawsuit, camp lejeune payout per person, and who qualifies for the camp lejeune lawsuit.
Creating a service page targeting key terms lets you tap into that traffic once you rank for the page. Creating blog posts that support that service page helps Google build a contextual understanding of who you are and the services you offer. This speeds up the potential for your site to rank faster for other related terms.
When and Why Do Mass Tort Lawyers Need SEO?
Any lawyer who wants to get mass tort cases from people searching on Google needs SEO.
Mass tort law is a competitive practice area. You have to outshine big players with household names in order to get new cases. And these players invest in SEO. That means that your site will not rank for the most lucrative keywords if you don’t invest in optimizing your site.
Investing in SEO helps you get a slice of that pie to tap into compounding, scalable traffic growth.
That doesn’t mean that SEO should be the only law firm marketing tactic you invest in, though.
It takes time for your SEO efforts to pay off. Combining it with pay-per-click (PPC) Google ads and social media ads is a common choice. Social media ads make people aware of your services, and PPC ad campaigns capture people's attention in the short term so you're firing on all cylinders to attract new claimants.
The Fundamentals of Successful Mass Tort SEO Campaigns
The core components and goals of SEO are straightforward. It’s the actual actions you need to take for success where things get complicated. Getting the best results out of your legal marketing efforts is a long to-do list, but it’s critical for growing the number of new mass tort clients that reach out to you.
Here's what you must know if you want to succeed with mass tort SEO.
Build a Modern Website and Focus on Client Experience
Your website is the foundation of your SEO marketing campaign.
Your pages should all follow SEO best practices to get the best result out of your efforts. That includes things like:
- Using a logical site structure planned in advance
- Using an SSL certificate to ensure your website is secure
- Verifying that your website is indexable (added to Google and Bing’s search index)
- Optimizing for page loading speed
- Using people-first copy and web design
Your site copy and web design are crucial.
Your web developer is not a copywriter, and vice versa. Hire a copywriter to craft your messaging and copy so it positions you as a market leader and the ideal guide to support someone facing a difficult legal issue.
Choose a designer who knows the legal industry and also creates fresh, modern, and easy-to-navigate website designs. People-first web design includes concepts like:
- Choosing readable fonts and sizes
- Making the site optimized for mobile viewing
- Avoiding pop-ups
- Creating navigation that makes it easy for people to find what they're looking for
Finding an experienced law firm SEO expert will help you with all these aspects. The best SEO teams have designers and copywriters working together. And their SEO specialists know what it takes for you to rank, even if that means bringing an old website up to date or creating an entirely new site that meets the needs of the modern website.
Your SEO expert will also help you by running regular website and technical audits to gauge the site’s health. That lets them develop a list of action items for improvement.
Create Content That Connects with Visitors and Builds Your Authority
A healthy and modern website sets you up to start creating new content targeting valuable keywords.
The first thing to do here is gather in-depth keyword research. This involves using SEO tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush to look for high-volume, relevant terms that your site should rank for. The goal here is to discover the terms that people search for most often related to the cases you handle.
Collecting keyword research shows you which unique pages and posts you should create to reach those potential clients.
Every blog post and service page you make needs to meet the readers where they’re at. Creating content that’s full of jargon or avoids answering visitors’ questions will only turn them away from you.
Good content involves:
- Writing for readability so that the average person can understand the concepts
- Considering important follow-up and frequently asked questions
- Using subheadings and bullet points to break up content
- Thinking about your end reader with every piece you write
Here’s the upside: each piece of optimized content you make builds on the last.
Publishing a single service page about a particular mass tort lawsuit isn’t going to do you a ton of good at first. Google doesn’t have enough context to know whether or not you’re an authoritative source on that topic. But when you start creating more content around the same topic, Google begins to build context and trust that you know what you’re talking about.
Building up topical authority like this lets you rank faster with each new piece you publish.
Measure the Results of Your Campaign
You need a way to determine if your SEO efforts are paying off. That comes down to measuring SEO campaign results. The key metrics to follow are:
- Organic traffic compounding monthly growth rate: Measures the rate at which your website’s traffic grows over time.
- Target keyword rankings: Measures the total number of ranking keywords you have for each page on your site and their average positions in Google's search results.
- Total search visibility: Measures your coverage and share of keywords across your market.
- Share of branded search: Measures the number of people searching for you or your firm by name.
- Quality leads and signed cases: Measures the number of new mass tort leads and cases that came to your firm through organic search.
The last one is one of the most important and often overlooked.
Traffic is great, but your main goal is to get more clients and cases. Tying your conversions to your SEO efforts will show you your real return on investment. Knowing what pages and keywords are performing well for you will let you make fine-tuned adjustments to improve your results.
You’ll need a few tools to track and measure your results.
The first ones set up are Google Search Console and Google Analytics. These free tools will let you track the number of visitors to your site and how they got there. They’ll also give you some insight into your search visibility and conversions.
The next thing you’ll need is a keyword rank tracker.
Tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush will show you all of the keywords the pages on your site rank for. They’ll also show you keyword growth over time and the average position of your pages for each keyword you rank for.
Build On Your Results with Ongoing Optimization and Link Building
SEO is an ongoing process, and the optimizations you make will boost your performance (that means more new cases).
There are two common methods SEOs use to improve your site’s rankings:
- On-page optimizations
- Link building
Pages that are out of date or no longer match the searcher’s intent start to slip further down Google’s results pages.
Making optimizations to these pages will help you improve and maintain your rankings. On-page optimizations are sometimes as simple as tweaking a page’s title. And sometimes, a page requires an in-depth overhaul of its content to match what searchers want when they look for a topic.
Creating high-quality content and optimizing existing pages isn’t always enough to make your site rank, though.
That’s where link building comes in. A link building campaign involves reaching out to high-authority sites to earn links to your own pages. Think of it like an endorsement. For example, Google sees a link from a national news site to one of your mass tort service pages as evidence that you have expertise in that case.
The more evidence of expertise you build up, the easier it will be for you to rank in that topic area.
Earn More Cases for Your Mass Tort Practice with SEO
SEO is a valuable tool for mass tort lawyers. Maintaining an optimized website with content that helps your audience allows you to stay competitive. It lets you get a piece of the pie when your ideal clients search for solutions.
But tackling all of the items on an SEO to-do list isn’t easy.
Mass tort lawyers have a lot of work on their hands. You have to juggle multiple cases, fact patterns, and the management of your firm. Adding something technical like SEO on top of that is just one more thing to distract you.
That’s why the most successful mass tort attorneys work with an SEO expert who can handle everything for them.
Rankings.io only works with lawyers, and we have deep experience with attorney SEO. We understand how your firm works and how to grow your caseload. Contact us today to see how our mass tort marketing services will transform the way you get new clients.
