Are you a Tenant Attorney? Do you offer legal services specialized to Tenant Law and Evictions? If so then this post is meant for you. The purpose of this post is to:
- Bring to your attention the unprecedented surge in search traffic for eviction protection services
- Show you how you can begin capturing these inbound leads for the services you offer.
First, let’s cover the basics.
What is SEO
If you already know what SEO is click here. For those that don’t Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is simply the process of ranking a website at the top of Google for keywords relevant to it. To do this, SEOs (the people who do SEO) optimize your website to maximize your performance the 200 ranking signals considered by Google’s PageRank search algorithm. Doing so increases your website’s Search Engine Friendliness, thus increasing your rankings for keywords relevant to you.
How Can SEO Help Eviction Attorneys
Success in life entails many things but one of them is the ability to recognize, understand, and seize opportunities when they arise. SEO is no different.
Recognize the Opportunity
COVID is driving an unprecedented surge in search traffic for keywords relevant to eviction protection. SEO is a data-driven digital strategy. Below is a graph from Google Trends showing search interest for eviction keywords over the last 5 years. As you can see, search interest is up 200% compared to this time last year.
Never before has demand been higher for the eviction protection services you provide.
Understanding the Opportunity
Prolonged unemployment, insufficient savings, and uncertainty on how to best proceed are driving the increase in search volume for eviction-related keywords. These factors have created a crisis for roughly 37 million Americans and this crisis will likely remain until unemployment levels return to pre-COVID levels
Seizing the Opportunity
If you are reading this then it is likely that your website isn’t showing up at the top of Google for keywords relevant to these services. Therefore you are missing out on exposure to incredibly qualified inbound search traffic for the eviction protection services you provide. SEO can change that.
Conducting Keyword Research
Your website won’t show on Google for a keyword until you’ve been indexed (appear) for the keyword. In order to be indexed for a keyword you need to optimize your website for the keyword and before you can optimize for a keyword you must first identify what keywords to optimize for. Enter Keyword Research. Keyword Research is the process of identifying and segmenting keywords relevant to your business and the products and/or services it provides so that you can then optimize your website for them.
Identify Keywords
Keyword research is an integral component to SEO that cannot be overlooked if you plan to succeed on Google. All Keyword Research starts with Google’s Keyword Planner Tool which allows you to discover keywords relevant to you and analyze their search volume and competitiveness to rank for. To use Google’s Keyword Planner Tool you must first active a free AdWords Account (step-by-step guide). Once you’ve activated your AdWords Account you will be able to access the Keyword Planner Tool.
Now that you have access to the Keyword Planner Tool you can insert up to 10 Seed Keywords. Your Seed Keywords should be keywords relevant to your business, your location, and the services you offer. Good Seed Keywords for law firms specializing in eviction protection include:
- Eviction
- Eviction Lawyer
- Eviction Attorney
- Eviction Law Firm
- Eviction Protection
- Tenant Lawyers
- Tenant Attorneys
- Tenant’s Rights Law Firms
- Landlord Harassment Protection
Once you’ve input your Seed Keywords Google will reference them to deliver a comprehensive list of relevant keywords. Usually this list is anywhere from 100-1,000 keywords.
Segment Keywords
Now that you have a list of keywords relevant to the legal services you provide and export these keywords into a spreadsheet. This spreadsheet will become your Keyword Planner. From here, you’ll want to segment keywords by the following:
- Avg. Monthly Search Volume
- Competitiveness
- Micro-Moment / Intent Category
When finished, you’ll want to begin creating Keyword Packs – groups of keywords likely to drive similar traffic that you plan to optimize specific pages within your website for. A typical Keyword Pack includes 5-15 keywords.
Once you’ve created several Keyword Packs you’ll want to then assign them to the internal pages of your website most relevant to the kind of traffic you’ll generate.
Optimize For Keywords
Now that you’ve assembled a Keyword Planner and created Keyword Packs the next step is to begin optimizing your website for these keywords so that it can become indexed (appear) for them. Keywords can be placed in several locations on your website. The most important locations are in the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) elements of your website:
- Title Tags
- Meta Descriptions
- ALT Text
- Header Tags
- Body Paragraphs
The aforementioned areas are read by Google’s GoogleBots – web crawlers that crawl websites in order to find information to be stored in Google’s index. When you search Google you aren’t seeing the live version of the internet, but rather, the most recent index created by the GoogleBots. Therefore it is important to ensure that you are optimizing your website’s HTML elements for the keywords outlined within your Keyword Planner.
