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The era of technology is here, and the choice of a digital transformation is no longer an ‘if’, but a ‘when’. As the highstreet declines and the online market booms, the fear of being left behind in this new competitive market space is ripe.

With ‘83% of consumers preferring to deal with law firms online and 55% preferring to communicate with their lawyers online compared with face to face contact (29%)’—reported in —ensuring your online presence stands out above the pack is key.

In previous Future of Law articles: Digital marketing for law firms – What’s the hype?, The Future of Digital Marketing in the Legal Sector and Is social media the secret weapon your firm has been missing?, it was discussed how you can help transition your business into the online world and take advantage of new online marketing opportunities.

This article gets down to business, outlining how you can utilise social media, SEO and ranking higher to enhance your law firm's online presence.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimisations (SEO) brings in organic (unpaid) traffic to your website, therefore once you have the skill it’s a free way to boost your marketing. It helps to increase the quality and volume of traffic to your website by increasing how visible your website or web page is to those on a search engine such as Google or Bing.

By considering what people are searching for and a search engines algorithm, you can use a combination of keywords (these can be identified using tools such as GoogleAdWords), back links and other digital tricks to help you rank higher on the engines main page.

10 essentials for Google SEO ranking

For many of us when we don’t know the answer to something we Google it. With the Google search engine holding 87.46% of the market share in the UK (), understanding the SEO essentials to rank highly on this engine are key to any digital strategy.

Ten key Google SEO ranking factors to consider for your website include:

• A Secure and Accessible Website
• Page Speed (Including Mobile Page Speed)
• Mobile Friendliness
• Domain Age, URL, and Authority
• Optimised Content
• Technical SEO
• User Experience
• Links
• Social Signals
• Real Business Information

Social media

Social media is said not to be a direct SEO ranking factor. However, some statistics and evidence suggests social signals such as shares, engagement and likes are related to your ranking.

Google’s Matt Cutts noted:

Facebook and Twitter pages are treated like any other pages in our web index so if something occurs on Twitter, or occurs on Facebook and we’re able to crawl it, then we can return that in our search results. But as far as doing special specific work to sort of say “you have this many followers on Twitter or this many likes on Facebook”, to the best of my knowledge we don’t currently have any signals like that in our web search ranking algorithms.”

With this in mind, social media still does play a vital part on your search rankings—even if we don’t know by how much. Despite this, by considering social media, you could impact your search engine optimisation efforts by:

• Increasing online visibility and traffic to your website
• Increasing online authority and brand recognition
• Broadening content distribution and longer content lifespan (see image below)
• Improving local SEO (oh, if you don’t have Google My Business…you should)

For a more in-depth guide on utilising social media, SEO and search engine rankings see guest writer Elaine Pasini, Director at Pickled Ginger Marketing’s article: Legal Firms…Social Media, SEO & Ranking Higher…