SEO for Immigration Lawyers & Law Firms: What Works!

SEO for Immigration Attorneys

SEO for immigration lawyers is probably the most competitive, expensive, and frustrating digital marketing strategy for law firms.

However, when done right, SEO can drive more clients to your firm every month.

SEO for lawyers varies slightly across the different practices. This article will cover the exact strategies for ranking an immigration law firm’s website.

Let’s dive in.

The Practical SEO for Immigration Lawyers Process

As a case study, we’ll use Deane & Bolton, an Immigration Law practice in Bolton, UK.

Our Immigration SEO strategy covers three core areas:

Technical SEO
On-Page SEO
Link Building

We start every SEO campaign by defining the goals and key metrics.

Immigration Law Firm SEO Goals

The priority of any lawyer is to sign up new clients and increase revenue. These priorities guide our SEO goals which include the following:

Increase organic ranking for top-of-the-funnel keywords. Content created around these keywords helps generate warm inbound leads – people actively searching for your services. In our case, How to choose an immigration solicitor and related queries.
Increase organic ranking for bottom-of-the-funnel keywords. Content created around these keywords drives hot inbound leads most likely to convert. In this case, Immigration lawyers near me and other related phrases.
Increase brand authority and awareness in the target market. Improve your law firm’s visibility and trustworthiness within your audience. (You can achieve this through content, links, and other tactics we’ll cover in the article.)
Increase ranking for local queries on Google’s local pack. Google’s local pack is made of Google Business profile and Google maps. The local pack appears at the top of the results page when you conduct location-based queries.

We’ll show how you can improve your immigration firm’s local SEO, boost traffic, and drive more leads.

You can implement these independently or work with a specialized immigration law firm marketing agency to drive better results.

Our SEO company offers a free 30-minute SEO expert consultation for lawyers. Check out our great SEO case studies.

Let’s start with the Technical side of things.

Identify & Fix Technical Issues on the Website

Our legal SEO services start with a technical review.

The technical review helps check your website against Google’s Search Essentials to ensure it meets Google’s guidelines.

If there are any technical errors, they need to be fixed before implementing any SEO strategy.

There are different SEO tools that you can use to identify these issues, such as Site Bulb or Screaming Frog. We use Screaming Frog.

Screaming frog helps us understand how Google and other search engines view a website.

In this case, we want to see whether the Deane and Bolton Immigration Lawyers’ website meets the following conditions:

Google can crawl and index web pages.
There are no broken links.
There are no unnecessary 301 redirects.
Proper usage of canonical tags, no index directives, and robots.txt.

In our experience, most legal websites are smaller and have few technical errors.

Deane and Bolton’s website is no different, except that it doesn’t redirect to a secure version – HTTPS.

Let’s now check the website’s on-page optimization. It could be why the website isn’t getting enough traffic.

Find & Correct On-Page Errors on the Firm’s Website

On-page SEO is optimizing your web pages to improve organic SEO rankings and traffic.

The areas to check for possible errors include

Titles & meta descriptions. (Title tags help search engines understand the content of your web page.)
Poorly or overly optimized content
Images without Alt-text
Schema/Structured Markup
Analytics Installation
Internal linking
User experience (Mobile responsiveness, page loading speed, core web vitals, etc.)

Our on-page audit of Deane and Bolton’s website found on-page issues that might hold the law firm’s website back.

Deane and Bolton’s Immigration lawyers need to:

Install an analytics tool to measure performance. We recommend Google Analytics.
Create a Google Search Console account, and submit and verify the website.
Redirect to a secure version of the website.
Rewrite the titles and meta description.
Create a blog section and create content that will drive traffic and provide value to users.
Improve the website’s page speed.

Add descriptive alt-text to the images on the website. This helps Google understand the purpose of your image.
Implement relevant schema markup on the website. In this case, one of the structured markups to implement can be the location schema.
Add a favicon to the website. This doesn’t affect SEO but strengthens the law firm’s branding. It helps you earn the trust of users.

Optimize the site structure to maximize SEO results

Google recommends structuring your website to adhere to its Search Essentials.

If you adhere to Google’s guidelines, you’d expect to have a law firm’s website that is structured similarly to this:

Deane & Bolton have a top navigation with a dropdown that lists their practice areas.

We recommend creating attorneys’ pages and adding them to the website’s navigation.

This will earn the law firm more credibility and help drive more leads.

We also recommend the immigration law firm organize the website using a folder structure such as

This structure will allow Deane and Bolton immigration lawyers to add content to the website, including attorney and testimonial pages.

After fixing the on-page issues, let’s dive into another important part of on-page SEO that deserves to be a topic on its own – content.

Create high-quality content to drive traffic.

Content is the backbone of success in attorney SEO.

As an immigration solicitor, you’re trying to pull traffic from search engines by answering questions such as:

Immigration lawyer in Bolton
How to apply for a UK visa from Italy
How long does it take to get a UK visa?
How to apply for a US green card?
Do I qualify for a US green card?

Most legal clients are from referrals. Friends and family might search for immigration attorneys to help their relatives and friends.

Create content that drives those referrals to your law firm.

High-quality content can help your firm showcase EXPERTISE and AUTHORITY and earn users’ and Google’s TRUST. EAT is a concept that lawyers should familiarise themselves with.

Your content needs to satisfy two goals:

Provide context and authority to rank higher on Google.
Convince web visitors to hire your law firm.

The practice pages on Deane and Bolton’s website are thin and fuzzy.

These pages need more in-depth content to rank well on Google.

In addition to rewriting content for the practice pages, we recommend creating a blog section and publishing high-quality, in-depth content.

How to generate content ideas for legal websites.

While most digital marketing companies will recommend creating in-depth content, it shouldn’t be any content.

Your content needs to be helpful for your web visitors.

How do you generate helpful content ideas for your website?

Start by creating content that answers common questions your existing customers ask.
List the online places your target audience frequents, such as specific niche forums and social media groups. Research the common questions on these platforms and create content around them. Examples are how do I get Visa for the UK? what are the types of visas? How long does it take to get a UK visa?
Check your competitor’s website to find the content they haven’t covered comprehensively. Create in-depth content that covers the topic better.

For your content to rank well on search engines, use specific phrases that users type on Google. These are known as SEO keywords.

Here’s a guide to keyword research for immigration law firms.

Build high-quality links to the law firm’s website

How does Google determine which law firm’s website to rank over another when the content is similar? You guessed it right – backlinks.

Backlinks act as an endorsement of your content by other authoritative websites. A link from a website such as Justia.com to Deane and Bolton’s website can signify the law firm’s credibility in Bolton. This endorsement can help the immigration law firm to rank better on Google.

Building backlinks for immigration lawyers isn’t the easiest, but here are some ways to go about it:

Create a profile on industry forums and directories. Find quality forums and legal directories and fill out your profile. These will give your law firm foundational links to drive leads to your law firm and improve your website’s organic rank.

Replicate your competitor’s backlinks. Create better content than your competitor and request websites linking to them to link to yours. You’ll have to give reasons why they should. The reasons could be that your competitor’s content is outdated or the page is broken or deleted.
Guest posting. This is another popular strategy for building links to your immigration law firm’s website—pitch article ideas to other legal websites and law firms that aren’t competitors. You’ll create a high-quality article for their website in exchange for a link to your law firm’s site. Focus on quality and aim for at least 2 – 3 high-quality monthly links.
PR/HARO. An Immigration attorney can benefit from creating a profile on Help A Reporter Out. Reporters will contact you when they need information from an Immigration lawyer. However, it’s not as simple as it sounds. We recommend outsourcing.

Bonus: Optimize Google Business Profile for Local Search

Deane and Bolton are based in Bolton. Creating content focused on locally-driven queries, such as local immigration lawyers and personal injury lawyers near me, can help more people looking for their services in the area find them.

Local SEO for lawyers differs from the core search algorithm. Local results appear on Google profile and Google Maps.

To rank on local search results, you can:

Create or claim a Google Business profile.
Fill out the details.
List your name, address, and phone number (NAP).
Select your category and list your services.
Upload photos related to your law firm. It could be your team or office images. Google recommends at least 20.
Request reviews from previous clients.

Positive reviews play a crucial role in ranking on the local pack. They show Google that your business is active and customers are happy with your services.

Check out our comprehensive local SEO guide for immigration attorneys.

That’s it. If you’re an immigration lawyer looking to drive more leads to your law firm using search engine optimization (SEO), We hope you found this guide valuable.

If the work sounds too much for you, our legal marketing company experts offer an SEO for immigration solicitors free consultation. Schedule a quick call, and let’s drive more customers to your firm.

Bonus Read: Law Firm SEO: Ultimate Guide to SEO for Lawyers

SEO for Immigration Lawyers: Key Takeaways

SEO for immigration lawyers is not just a random digital marketing strategy; when complemented with other strategies, such as social media digital marketing services, it’s one of the most effective lead generation tactics using your firm’s website.

Ensure your immigration law firm’s website is technically sound.
Create in-depth content to earn prospective clients’ trust and drive more conversions.
Conduct adequate research to discover hidden questions and keywords.
Promote your practice online through outreach and guest posting to build authority through links from industry websites.
Optimize your Google business profile for local searches.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does SEO work for lawyers?

Yes, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can work for lawyers. Effective SEO strategies can help attorneys improve their online visibility and attract potential clients through organic search engine results. Lawyers can improve their search engine rankings and drive more website traffic by optimizing their website for relevant keywords, creating high-quality content, building high-quality backlinks, and using other SEO techniques. However, it’s important to note that SEO is a long-term lawyer marketing tactic that requires ongoing effort and investment to see sustained results.

What is immigration lawyer SEO?

This refers to optimizing an immigration law firm’s website and online presence to improve its visibility and rankings on Google. This combines on-page and off-page optimization techniques, such as keyword research, website architecture optimization, content creation, link building, and local SEO tactics. It aims at attracting more targeted organic traffic to a firm’s website and increasing its visibility to potential clients searching for legal services online.

How do I get more immigration clients?

Improve your online presence: Create a professional website, optimize it for search, and use social media to promote your services.
Attend immigration conferences and events focusing on immigration law to network with other attorneys and potential clients.
Provide excellent customer service: Satisfied clients are more likely to refer others to your services, so prioritize providing exceptional service to your existing clients.
Offer free resources: Create informative blog posts, white papers, and other resources that offer helpful information to potential clients.
Partner with other professionals: Partner with real estate agents, financial advisors, and human resources professionals, who may refer clients to you for immigration-related services.

SEO For Immigration Lawyers – Drive More Clients