When it comes to SEO, there are three main things that Google looks at. Sure, everything on your website is important, but these three will make the biggest difference to your law firm SEO and where your website is going to rank.
1. H1 Headline
The H1 Headline is extremely important as it’s the text that Google considers the most important on the whole page.
It’s the highest priority and google looks at what the H1 headline says and what keywords are in it in order to figure out what the webpage is really about, and then Google ranks it accordingly.
Every page needs to have a unique H1 headline, don’t have the same H1 headline across multiple pages. This will hurt your SEO.
You need to make sure that the H1 headline contains all the keywords that you want that page to rank for, as well as to convince the person to keep reading.
Another thing with H1 headline that you need to remember is that real people actually read it, meaning it needs to be readable and actually says something useful so that the people want to keep reading the rest of the page.
It’s a bit of a balancing act.
Keep that in mind when you’re writing it – You don’t want it sound like keyword “stuffing” because google knows that as well. Their algorithm is very smart and can recognize if you’re just stuffing keywords there, so it won’t work just like that.
Keep all that in mind when you’re doing the H1 headline, and pay close attention to it because it is crucial.
2. URL
SEOs used to stuff a whole bunch of keywords in the URL to try and make it as relevant for as many words as possible, but Google has since put a stop to that. That means now, Google actually prefers a shorter URL.
Yes, while it contains less keywords, a shorter URL looks nicer and will actually perform better in the search results.
SEO experts have actually compared shorter URLs vs longer URLs that had more keywords and concluded that the shorter URLs tend to work better for SEO, despite the fact that they have less keywords.
When writing your URL, pick the keyword that you think is the most important and use that as the URL.
3. Meta Titles
Also known as the page title, this is the title that shows up in the tab when you open the website and it’s also the headline that shows up on Google.
If you go and do a Google search, you’ll see the big blue text at the top of each search result – That’s the “Meta Title”.
With this title, you usually get around 60 characters, sometimes its a bit more, sometimes less. But you need to make sure to keep it around the 60 character limit.
If create too long of a title, you’ll end up with ellipses and the end of it will be cut off. This will make everything after the cut off irrelevant, and it won’t look as good in the search results.
When writing meta titles, one trick you can use is if you try to rank the page for two keywords that are very, very similar, you can put one of those keywords in H1 headline, and the other in the page title.
For example, if you are trying to rank for “Property Lawyer” and “Property Solicitor”, you could have Property Lawyer in the H1 Headline and Property Solicitor in the meta title.
The use of alternating keywords can use that to make the page relevant for both of the keywords as long as they are both about the same topic.
But again, keep in mind it needs to look real and be readable. Don’t just stuff a bunch of keywords in there. You still need to convince real people to click on it in the search results.
Conclusion
These 3 things are going to make a big difference to your SEO. So if you optimize those 3 things on every single page of the website, including the home page, you’re going to have a much easier time ranking the website.
If you don’t optimize these 3 things, it’s going to be extremely difficult to get your website to rank. That’s why I refer to them as “the 3 pillars of SEO”.