Lawyers reading this who yearn for their website to be ranked higher on Google, and who may have tried SEO but not seen hugely positive results, we have some good news for you. That is, regardless of what you have tried, it is always possible to attain better rankings, especially within a local market which we assume most lawyers reading this will be in.

We say that, because generic legal websites providing general legal information, have a more difficult, though not impossible task of outranking similar websites. You are competing with some very high authority legal websites from across the world, rather than local competition in the form of other lawyers’ websites.

What we often find when lawyer websites are not ranking well, is that they may have used a couple of the well-known tactics, but not sustained them. Nor will they have appreciated that a couple of hundred ranking factors are used by Google within its algorithm. So, the more of them you optimise for using SEO tactics, the more chance your website has of ranking higher than your competition. Here are ten of those SEO tactics you should focus on.

SEO Tactic #1 – Get Better Backlinks: Whilst having lots of backlinks helps, it is even more effective for better rankings to acquire links from well-respected, high-authority websites whereby some of their high-ranking power passes to your website via those backlinks.

SEO Tactic #2 – Optimise Internal Links: You want the power from incoming backlinks and relevance to flow through your website as this gives Google a clearer indication that it should rank for specific keywords. This is why you must link internally effectively and logically.

SEO Tactic #3 – Repair Broken Links: Google hates broken links whether they are external backlinks or internal links. Use an SEO  tool that can identify broken links and either remove them, fix them, or disavow them, so they do not negatively impact your ranking score.

SEO Tactic #4 – Establish Content Hubs: Content hubs are created by structuring the content within your website so that a content page is linked to from the home page, and then links from them go to further pages and do so in a way that Google crawler bots can follow so that keyword relevancy is strengthened.

SEO Tactic #5 – Use More Long-Tail Keywords: We see far too many lawyers trying to rank for single words or two words. This makes your task more difficult because most people searching for lawyers locally will enter long-tail keywords in the search box such as “best criminal lawyer in Bunbury WA“.

SEO Tactic #6 – Refresh Older Content: Just because content created a year ago ranked at the time, it does not mean it will still rank today. This means you should return to it, refresh it, and bring it up to date so that Google recognises it as fresh content, which its ranking algorithm loves.

SEO Tactic #7 – Focus On Low-Competition Keywords: Instead of trying for an immediate home run by ranking for the most competitive keywords, start at the other end by optimising and ranking for lower competition keywords. This will gain you greater credit with Google when trying to rank for more difficult keywords.

SEO Tactic #8 – Improve Your Page Titles And Meta Descriptions: You will get more clicks from search results, and thus more ranking points from Google, if your page titles and meta descriptions (which is what searchers see) are optimised, enticing, and encourage them to click.

SEO Tactic #9 – Aim To Win Featured Snippets: This is a great shortcut to a page one ranking which you can achieve by having content that includes answers to the most common questions related to your legal niche that are likely to be typed into Google.

SEO Tactic #10 – Analyse Your Competition: To gain enormous insight into what it takes to rank on Google, analyse your local competition who already do so. Some excellent SEO research tools can break down how websites are optimised for each keyword which you can then emulate.