Are you an immigration lawyer that wants to expand your client base? In today’s ever-changing digital age, one of the most effective ways to grow your practice is to optimize your website for search engines. This technique is search engine optimization (SEO) – the method of increasing traffic website through web search. SEO is essential because 68 percent of online interactions start with a search engine.
As an immigration lawyer, you might not have time to launch a full-scale SEO campaign. However, following a few tips and tricks can dramatically increase your website’s SEO.
Let’s take a look at the best SEO tips for immigration lawyers:
SEO Tips for Immigration Lawyers
1.Perform Keyword Research
Using certain words in your website content can drive organic and increase leads. Let’s imagine that you own an immigration practice in Orlando, Florida. A prospective client might find your website by searching for the long-tail keyword “affordable immigration lawyer in Orlando.” Thus, you would want to incorporate this long-tail keyword into your website’s copy. However, you don’t want to pick a keyword that’s difficult to rank, and that’s why strategic keyword research is so essential.
How Do You Perform Effective Keyword Research?
Many SEO professionals perform keyword research using a platform such as SEMrush or KWFinder. These robust websites feature a collection of tools that enable you to pinpoint the best keywords, perform competitor analysis, build backlinks, and track your website’s ranking. Since keyword research tools cost between $50 and $500 per month and come with a learning curve, sometimes hiring a professional SEO firm is the best approach. However, if you want to do keyword research on your own, you should consider the following:
Intent
The user behind the screen has either navigational, informational, or transactional intent. Someone with navigational intent merely wants to reach a particular website. They might use a search phrase like “YouTube” or “Wells Fargo log in.” Someone with information informational intent wants to learn something (i.e., “how much does an immigration attorney cost?”). Lastly, transactional intent describes when an individual wants to purchase a good or service. As an immigration lawyer in the first stages of an SEO strategy, you’ll probably want to focus on keywords associated with informational or transactional intent.
Search Volume
Focusing on a keyword that no one is searching for won’t bring organic traffic to your website. On the other hand, keywords with high monthly search volume are often challenging to rank. There’s no “magic number” when it comes to search volume. If you’re in a small market, keywords will inherently have low search volume. As you implement an SEO strategy, you’ll begin to see how much traffic a keyword brings to your website and what percentage of each visit leads to a conversion.
Competition
SEMrush, KWFinder, and other SEO tools typically quantify a keyword’s competitiveness. A keyword will have a lot of competition if it has a high search volume and many authoritative websites target the keyword. An effective way to gauge a keyword’s competition is to review the first two pages of websites that show up on a Google search. Suppose you find that these are well-established and highly authoritative websites (i.e., The New York Times). In that case, you probably don’t want to target the keyword.
Trends
Google Trends is a free tool that enables you to gain a deeper insight into particular keywords. For example, you could enter “immigration attorney in Boston” and see the search interest by location and time of year. Not only that, but you can also compare two keywords to see how the trends differ.
2.Add Keywords to Your Website
Once you find a set of keywords that will boost traffic, you’ll need to add them to your website. The following website elements should contain your keywords:
Page Titles
If you want to rank your website, it’s critical to place your target keyword in the page title. The page title appears in the search results – right above the URL and meta description. Your page’s heading one tag (H1) isn’t necessarily what visitors see in the search results. You can change the page title (also called the “title tag”) using a plugin like Yoast.
Subheadings
You can optimize a website page by adding keywords to the subheadings (H2 and H3 tags). Include the keywords a couple of times in the subheadings, but don’t stuff the page. Having too many instances of a particular keyword can counterintuitively lower your website’s ranking.
Web Content
After ensuring to include your keyword in the page title and subheadings, you’ll want to add your keywords to the web content (or “copy”) beneath the headings. In other words, place your keywords throughout the body of the text. It’s best to incorporate the keywords naturally – try not to force them (which could hinder your website’s authority). Most SEO experts recommend using a keyword no more than five times, with two to three times being the ideal middle ground.
Meta Description
The meta description is what appears below your page title and URL in search results. This short piece of text enables you to provide a summary of the page and lure visitors to your website. You must keep the meta description short – you only have 155 characters to use. Using your primary keyword in the meta description is a vital SEO strategy that can help drive organic traffic to your website.
3.Create a Blog
Creating a blog is an excellent way to boost your website’s organic traffic and keep it fresh (a critical component of SEO). You can effortlessly add a blog page without any development work if you use WordPress. In short, you’ll want to create blog posts that are relevant to your immigration law practice. For example, you should write posts about new immigration laws or how to obtain an H1B visa. Be sure to incorporate keywords into each post – the main point of a blog is to drive traffic that could turn into leads.
How Often Should You Write Blog Posts?
You should aim to publish at least one blog post per week. In the world of SEO, quality trumps quantity. Nevertheless, if you can write more than one post per week, it will only benefit your website.
How Many Words Should Blog Posts Contain?
Blog posts that contain at least 1,000 words will rank higher on search engines. However, don’t write copy with fluff that doesn’t provide value to your audience. Poorly-written articles can hurt your website’s SEO.
4.Ensure That Your Website is Responsive
Responsive websites adjust to the visitor’s screen size and ensure that the site’s pages and features are accessible to everyone, no matter what device they’re using. A responsive layout doesn’t just enhance user experience; it also boosts SEO and decreases your website’s bounce rate. Moreover, Google has recently emphasized mobile indexing, which considers a website’s responsiveness. Fortunately, many free and paid WordPress themes are responsive and suited for laptops, tablets, and cellphones. We highly recommend hiring a web designer to modify your website if it isn’t responsive.
5.Monitor Your Website’s Analytics
It’s imperative to monitor your website’s traffic and performance after optimizing it for search engines. Google Analytics is undoubtedly one of the most popular web analytics platforms and provides valuable insights. However, you need to set up a property in Google Analytics before seeing any website data.
Google Analytics enables you to:
- Track website goals
- Quantify the value your website brings users
- View the demographics of your visitors
- See your traffic sources
- View key metrics, such as average user duration
- Receive custom alerts when you’re not using the Analytics platform
How Often Should You Check Google Analytics?
You should check Google Analytics at least once per week. Depending on your website’s complexity, it might be best to view your site’s analytics once per day. It’s also essential to note that many SEO agencies will monitor Google Analytics for you.
6.Promote Your Website
Implementing an SEO strategy is merely one way to promote your website, drive traffic, and increase your client base. The most notable difference between SEO and other promotion methods is that SEO drives organic traffic, whereas other promotion techniques drive inorganic traffic.
Facebook Ads
Using Facebook ads is a surefire way to promote your website and find clients. The process of creating an ad is seamless: set an objective, choose your target market, and tell Facebook where in the country it should run your ad. You can also set a daily or lifetime budget – perfect for testing the waters and figuring out what works and what doesn’t. Facebook has 2.8 billion actively monthly users, so there’s massive potential when it comes to promoting your practice.
Email Marketing Campaigns
Sending carefully-curated emails to a targeted list is another effective way to promote your website. How do you get email addresses? Perhaps the best way is to have a field on your website where visitors can sign up for a newsletter. You can also buy email lists; however, purchasing leads can be pretty expensive, and it’s also hard to gauge the quality of the leads. We recommend emails that boost engagement and provide helpful information to prompt the recipients to open the message. If you’re too pushy or spammy with your strategy, the emails will end up in the trash folder.
Use Online Forums
Online forums, including Quora and Reddit, are excellent to drive traffic to your website. Many people say that advertising on forums is free, but that isn’t the case. Writing alluring posts takes time, and as they say, time is money. Unless you have extra capacity outside of business hours to write posts, you’ll need to hire a copywriter. It’s also essential to be mindful of forum rules – some platforms might suspend you if they feel that you’re spamming the forum.
7.Hire an SEO Agency
SEO is often a time-consuming process that takes a lot of trial and error. If you’re busy running an immigration law practice, you likely don’t have the spare time to create an SEO strategy. Fortunately, hundreds of agencies specialize in data-driven SEO techniques that yield profitable results. Most agencies cover all facts of SEO – keyword research, content writing, link building, and on-page optimization, to name a few. If your website is relatively new, you should hire a full-cycle agency that implements a robust SEO plan from the ground up.
How Much Does It Cost to Hire an SEO Agency?
Since there’s so much demand for SEO services, you can find agencies in virtually every country on the globe. Generally, full-scale SEO services range from $500 to $3,000 per month. If you have a newly created website, agencies may charge a one-time fee of up to $20,000 to create an SEO framework and potentially make modifications to your website.
Not every immigration law practice needs all-encompassing SEO services, especially if they have already optimized their website. However, search engines constantly change their ranking algorithms, which means SEO is ongoing.
Lawyers can hire SEO consultants for $50 to $300 per hour, depending on their experience and agency location. These consultants are often best-suited for ad-hoc work, such as performing an SEO audit.
Is Hiring an Agency Better than DIY SEO?
Deciding to hire an agency versus doing your own SEO boils down to two factors: time and experience. If you’re new to SEO, you’ll need to spend a significant amount of time learning the basics. However, once you have a solid grasp of SEO, you can implement a long-term strategy to drive website traffic.
On the other hand, hiring an agency is the best route if you don’t have much time outside of your day-to-day work. Regardless of your budget, you should be able to find an agency that meets your needs.
Conclusion
Search engine optimization is an ongoing strategy that can increase your client base and, ultimately, profitability. As an immigration lawyer, you have two options – implement SEO techniques on your own or hire an SEO agency.
If you decide to do your own SEO, we highly recommend starting with the tips listed above. After optimizing your website, you can always hire a consultant to complete an SEO audit to identify gaps.