Of all the types of industries and markets that have contacted me for SEO services over the last decade plus, personal injury lawyers have been at the top of that list in terms of quantity and quality.
The most competitive type of legal SEO is for Personal Injury Law Firms.
Fortunately, the value of ranking highly is, well, very high. Many law firms make millions of dollars per year just from Search Engine Optimization.
Why Is Personal Injury SEO So Competitive?
There are several reasons why the competition is so high…
First of all, the value of the traffic is very high. Getting a trucking accident client can be worth $1 million+ to a law firm.
Second of all, and perhaps most importantly, SEO is excellent at capturing potential clients at the perfect moment in their lives.
Think about it…someone is in a car accident and they want to find a law firm to represent their case. Do they go to Facebook and look at ads until a law firm presents an ad to them? No, that would be absurd.
They search Google for a lawyer that meets their specific situation!
Virtually all other times in their life they have no need for a lawyer of any type. Your law firm needs to catch them in a tiny window of their life where they are looking for a legal services like you and your firm provide…or else miss out entirely.
This situation makes SEO incredibly valuable to a law firm.
See also: Criminal Defense SEO, On Site SEO for Law Firms, Backlink building for lawyers, Law Firm Digital Marketing
Top 3 Personal Injury Law Firm SEO Tips:
(1) Local SEO is Where The Lion’s Share of the Traffic is:
While there are some national markets (hello Mesothelioma Lawyers), virtually every legal market’s keywords have Google My Business Listings at the top of the organic search results…
…Personal Injury Keywords definitely have a high amount of localization because someone in Dallas is not going to hire a law firm in New York.
The, classic, non-maps organic search result sitting at the “#1” spot is really at spot 5 or 6 because the Maps listings take up so much space…in the VIP line of GMB rankings.
Check out the following image:
You have to scroll down quite a bit to get to the non-maps organic results.
(2) Identify the FULL SET of Personal Injury Keywords and Related Topics
One of the biggest mistakes that low quality Lawyer SEO Companies make is to only target the highest volume searches with their SEO.
This leaves a lot of ranking power and lower competition potential client targeting opportunity on the table.
There are many different types of injuries that a potential client could be looking for legal help with. You want to have content and specific pages for ALL of the ones you would like to receive an inquiry about.
Creating content for specific types of injuries helps you rank for those types of injury law searches AND for the big searches like “Personal Injury Law Firm Dallas.”
Furthermore, to make your website even more powerful in Google’s eyes, you want to even have content on closely related topics that are not “money” keywords. “Money” keywords are searches that you can obviously turn into a potential client. For example, “trucking accident lawyer Dallas” is a money keyword.
“Trucking regulations Texas,” for example, is not a money keyword, but it does give your website and brand more topical relevance to trucking and, therefore, more ranking power for “trucking accident lawyer Dallas” and related searches.
(3) Optimize Your Domain Name..but Not Too Much
Your domain name is the single biggest lever you can pull for SEO.
Before you balk at thinking it is a big deal to move to a different domain — it is NOT! (99.7% of the time)
Changing your domain doesn’t mean changing the design of your website or even changing hosting companies.
In fact, your hosting company will support a domain name change.
In most cases a domain name change only takes about 1-3 weeks.
By having keywords or parts of keywords in your domain name, you need much less of everything else to rank your website well.
Now, I’m not a big fan of EMD’s (exact match domains), so I’m not saying try to buy personalinjurylawyerdallas.com.
That domain can definitely rank, but there are several issues with it.
What I’m saying is that if your domain is, for example, your name or the last names of all the partners smashed together, then you’re missing out.
hoodstevenssmith.com can definitely rank well, but it is going to cost a lot more.
I suggest something in between that includes some parts of keywords but also some “branded” words.
For example, hoodstevenssmithlawfirm.com is better. Or hsspersonalinjurylaw.com is even better.
Finding a Good Personal Injury SEO Expert
Fortunately, you’ve already found one…Me! 🙂
I have been doing SEO for lawyers since 2014.