SEO is a moving target, and this post explains how to keep your law firm on the right SEO track.

SMX 2019 took place in Seattle at the beginning of June. For those who are not familiar with SMX, it is a yearly gathering of the who’s who of the Digital Marketing world, where the most significant trends and innovations in organic and paid search marketing are discussed. In this blog post, we will focus on SEO trends and the three factors that will help you improve your law firm’s ranking.

Insight #1: Be a Content Authority

Google has long talked about Content Authority and Trust as major ranking factors. The good thing is that authoritative and trustworthy content has nothing to do with the size of your law firm; instead, it’s based on writing smart and original content using language that authorities on the topic would use.

Tip: Review what the highest-ranking law firms in your market are saying, and write about those topics but go more in-depth. Look at what your competitors are saying to position themselves as authorities, who they are referencing and what terminology they’re using. Basing your content calendar off of this research will help improve the authority of your next blog post. 

Insight #2: Optimize for Voice

We all have heard the stats that suggest that by 2020, 50 percent of all search queries across the internet will be voice-based. And while users may not be ready to give the command, “Google, call the best personal injury attorney near me,” they may already be asking, “Google, what I should do if I’ve been involved in a car accident?” Now, it’s your job to get Alexa, Siri or Google Assistant to source your law firm’s answer. 

Currently, the answers delivered by the Google Assistant come from the three top results in the search engine’s results pages. However, the factors that determine which answer will be played are based off of backlinks. In other words, how many other pages are referring to this site? This is tied to the value of their content and the speed at which the page loads.

Tip: Optimizing for Google Search shares the same principles with optimizing for the Google Assistant Bot. Furthermore, you need to ensure your website speed is consistently performing high; you can check your website speed for desktop and mobile by visiting Google Developers’ PageSpeed Insights site.

Insight #3: Write Search-engine-friendly Code

One of the most consistent messages that we heard at this year’s SMX Advanced is that those creating quality content will prevail and succeed in SEO. However, every time that statement was made, a footnote was added that your developer’s execution in writing search-engine-friendly code is as critical as the content itself.

Tip: Use html5 semantic elements to define the structure of your web page. These elements should cascade in the correct order. This means that your heading tags (h1, h2, h3, etc.) in descending order should visually match what they look like on the page. In other words, your website’s code should read precisely the same way it looks.

This year’s SMX Advanced not only reminded us of the importance that SEO plays in the success of a brand, but that SEO is evolving and that it is our job to keep our sites current and relevant to what users want. 

As Barry Schwartz stated, your goal is “to make a website that Google is embarrassed not to rank.” The only way to achieve this is by having a skilled team of content writers, SEOs, and developers working in harmony toward the same goal.