The main aim of constructing a website of just about each and every law firm in the USA is to acquire highly quality leads from the more popular search engines. If your SEO (search engine optimization) has been conducted correctly, the odds are that your firm will be bombarded with calls from potential clients.

High ranking on Google and other search engines is very important because is has been estimated that search engines handle well over 10 billion searches per month, all over the world. Let us see some of the key methods that law firms can utilize to increase their visibility online and by extension increase their market share.

The importance of differentiation

In simple words, you have to stand out from the crowd. Granted it may not be the easiest task to accomplish on any given day, but the efforts are worth it. Your portfolio should stand out so that once the prospective client is on your site, not only should he stay there, but actually start considering the retainers he would need to ensure that your law firm is working for him.

SEO is the key

All the hard work you put on your portfolio and your site will be wasted if the clients are not able to find you amongst all that clutter. As a matter of fact, more and more people are turning to the internet to find what they want and legal firms are no exception. This is where a sound law firm marketing strategy comes to the rescue. If you sprinkle your webpages and blogs with the right key words they will be picked up by the mainstream search engines and your local clients will be able to find you in a whole lot easier way.

The ‘case’ for local citations (why they matter, what they are)

A local ‘citation’ may be defined as a “mention of your business name and address on other webpages”. Here it is not really all that necessary for the citation to have a discernable link to your business at all.
Some examples can include referrals on the pages of the local chamber of commerce website or for that matter any other business development organizations in a specific area, without any direct links to the business’s own website itself.

Local citations and the ranking factor

Citations also play a crucial role in the ranking algorithms of the most frequently used and by extension really powerful search engines such as Bing, Yahoo, and Google. In fact, such citations also help in making sure that your firm’s website climbs steadily up the rankings of most of these search engines. This is why you should aim for as many local citations as you possibly can.

Different kinds of citations

A typical citation from a well-known portal that is already well indexed actually does help with collecting all the relevant information of your firm from all over the net.

Why you should aim to use local citations

Here, information directories are also major factors in generating leads. This is due to the fact that they tend to be a clear and present validation of the fact that the business is part of that particular community which is covered by the creators of the directory. This would mean that the prospective client would not only be able to utilize the information present on these directories such as telephone numbers and email addresses but he can also get his queries addressed.

In fact, local citations are all the more important because it is very difficult to fake credentials when a firm’s antecedents are available on the local chamber of commerce site or if it has been mentioned in the local press of the area’s business index. A good example would be https://www.brightlocal.com/local-citation-sites-for-attorneys/.

The importance of blogs and local news feeds

Apart from the above, being featured in a prominent local blog or newspaper or also an excellent source of local citations since journalists and bloggers people would not write about a business that does not even exist. This is why even a cursory search for a particular service can easily generate links towards your firm’s site as well so as to increase your overall ratings on the search engine.