Preparing Your Site for Local Search
I’ve mentioned in the past that capitalizing on local search is of the utmost importance to law firms that want to get a foothold in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Yes, rising to #1 in the natural results among the thousands of web pages competing for your locality’s top search phrase is still one of the ultimate goals of law firm SEO, but wouldn’t it be great to “cut in line” and get to the top of the listings via supplemental, local listings most search engines now include?
So what are some of the ways to prepare your website to take advantage of local search? We’ve already discussed the importance of submitting your firm name and address to the top local search databases, but there are also a few checklist items you should take care of.
- List your primary office location’s physical address in real text somewhere on every page - usually in the site footer. I can’t tell you how many times I see websites with absolutely no physical address listed or where the physical address is in an image (unreadable to search engine spiders). Even though you’ve (hopefully) submitted your address to the top local database publishers, firms still should make sure their address is available for potential clients and search engine spiders to index.
- List your primary office’s local phone number in real text somewhere on every page - usually in the site footer. Yes, it’s great if you have a toll free number, but there are services that crawl the web gathering local phone numbers and using that information to geo-target results accordingly. (Consider putting your toll free telephone number “above the fold” for easy reference and placing your local phone number in the footer with your address line.)
- Make sure that you mention your target geography in your site’s copy… and include variations. In other words, if you’re a lawyer located in Tampa, make sure you talk about cases in the Tampa area you’ve handled. Talk about how your practice serves the Tampa community. Make sure you mention Tampa Florida and include “FL” in addition to “Florida” in your copy. Consider adding a note to the bottom of your copy that says, “…also serving the communities of City A, Town B, City C and the entire state of Florida.”
I’m sure that I’ll add more to this list in the future but these simple items are often forgotten in a site’s design. Make sure your site complies with these basics and you’ll be well on your way to getting your firm in front of interested local clients.
Technorati Tags: capitalizing on local search, search engine results pages, law firm SEO, local listings, search engines, local search, local phone number, above the fold, local clients, seo for law firms, lawyer seo, attorney seo
