How can a law firm build more local citations through directories to boost local SEO? To help your law firm build more local citations through directories, we asked SEO experts and business leaders this question for their best tips. From securing one citation a week to date aggregators, there are several tips that may help you build more local citations and boost local SEO.
Here are eight ways you can build more local citations through directories to boost local SEO:
- Secure One Citation a Week
- Include Your Various Specialties And Practice Areas
- Share Your Expertise
- Provide Accurate And Complete Information
- Remember To Optimize The Lawyers Too
- Employ Data Aggregators
- Leverage Authoritative Lawyer Directories
- Do A Monthly Citation Audit
Secure One Citation a Week
Citations are online references to legal practices. If a law firm has citations from relevant sources, the firm may be viewed as “prominent” by search engines. That’s why securing citations is one of the key tactics of local SEO services. Citations can include the name, address, and phone number (NAP) of a law firm. But, some citations may include reviews, links, and more information about a firm. There’s no shortage of citation options for lawyers. The legal industry has hundreds of industry-specific directories for attorneys. Just start with the goal of collecting one citation a week until you build up a good base.
Hunter Garnett, Warren and Simpson
Include Your Various Specialties And Practice Areas
Local SEO is so important for law firms! If you want to generate high-quality leads from potential clients in your area, you need to show up in map packs and at the top of Google for a variety of target keywords that relate to your various practice areas. To do so, you must have a great bunch of local citations pointing your way. I recommend using Moz Local to streamline and efficiently submit your site to a number of directories at once.
Court Will, Will & Will
Share Your Expertise
Attorneys can share their expertise on Terkel or HARO and secure valuable local citations in articles. The way Terkel or HARO works is to review questions or queries, provide insights and answers, and get published on articles relevant to your geographic area or industry. Citations are an online reference of a business that helps build the prominence of a company. By sharing expertise, attorneys can build these citations in articles where their competitors may not be.
Brett Farmiloe, Markitors
Provide Accurate And Complete Information
The best way for a law firm to build more local citations through directories to boost local SEO is to ensure that the firm’s information in their local citations is optimized, accurate, and complete. The reason for having accurate and complete information in your citation is that the search engines use them to rank and send traffic to your website. While it is good for a law firm to have more local citations, it is even better to have an accurate and complete citation. For a law firm, the quality of the local citations is always better than the quantity. A law firm’s citation can only boost local SEO when it provides referral traffic to the website or helps it to rank.
Nonyerem Ibiam, Law Truly
Remember To Optimize The Lawyers Too
The easiest way to boost local citations for a law firm is to treat each lawyer as an individual business on directories. If your law firm has three lawyers, you can quadruple your citations simply by creating listings for each individual in addition to the business itself. Google’s terms actually exclusively allow this for certain industries. This helps boost citations to your site and gives you the potential to show up multiple times in someone’s search.
Cole Torres, Local Eye Media
Employ Data Aggregators
Rather than using Yelp, BBB, and Yellow pages, you can more effectively build citations by signing up for companies that will submit your business information to various data aggregators directly, such as Moz. A data aggregator is a large data company that collects business data and resells it to smaller directories. In addition, if you want your law firm to appear for local results, you may want to take note of specialized law firm directories like Justia Lawyers or LawGuru. They offer citations free of charge. The more citations you can build, the more trust and authority you create back for your law firm’s location.
John Berry, Berry Law
Leverage Authoritative Lawyer Directories
Lawyer directories are useful for a number of reasons. They also serve as a citation distribution source for your law firm’s local business records. The more citations you can get, the more authority and confidence you can give your law firm’s location. Backlinks can also be found in lawyer directories. While not all of them are do-follow, a large number of them are. Regardless, only having backlinks from these High DA legal directories will boost your law firm’s Google rankings significantly.
Sylvia Kang, Mira
Do A Monthly Citation Audit
Subscribe to a good local SEO tool that has a citation tracking feature, such as BrightLocal or Whitespark. This will help you identify the citations you already have and generate new lists of citations that your top competitors have. You can then pass the list off to a virtual assistant and have them create the citations for you to save time. Once a month, audit your citations to ensure that you’re staying on top of new opportunities.
Chloe Brittain, Opal Transcription Services
