If you want to get more clients, your law firm needs to rank higher on Google Maps, as you know that most of your prospects are searching for a lawyer on Google. The question is, what are the elements required for your law firm to achieve number one Google Maps rankings?
Let us go over the important aspects that you need to know in order to rank higher on Google Maps.
Understand the Three Categories You Need to Focus On
You should know that there are three categories of items that are required to rank higher on the map. The first one is relevancy. The second category is distance, and the third category is prominence. On that note, you might wonder what each of these categories actually mean.
There are a lot of different things that you can actually do to increase the following three aspects:
- Relevancy
- Distance
- Prominence
The easiest thing that you can do is to select the right category for your Google Business Profile listing. Now, there are loads of different categories that you can select and if you make a mistake in selecting the categories, it will affect your ranking and the prospect of getting ideal clients.
Search for the Main Keyword
The first thing you should do in your GBP listing is to make a search for your main keyword and look up all of the potential competitors that are coming up in the search and what their primary category is because this shows you what Google wants to see.
Typically, what you can do is you can choose your correct category, which in turn will increase some rankings. Subsequently, you can select secondary categories, and to do that, you can type “attorney” or “lawyer” and see what populates. Proceed to select all categories that apply to your law firm.
Satisfy the Searcher’s Intent
The next thing to focus on is satisfying the searcher’s intent. Now, this aspect means that you want to have content on your website that tells Google that your website is what the searcher intends to look for. On that note, it is in your best interest to check out these stunning site designs for law firms and see how you can actually improve the layout of your website so that your searcher will see everything related to their search.
The design of your website is important for boosting website traffic and landing more clients. Nonetheless, regarding the searcher’s intent – if you are a personal injury lawyer and someone searches for a personal injury lawyer, then Google knows that someone is looking for a personal injury attorney.
So, to increase intent, do a search for your practice area and scroll all the way down to the bottom. You will see a section of “People Also Ask” that you can add to your website. At the top, there are also sometimes questions that people ask.
Suppose you can include all of that information, such as answers to the questions and topics on your website. In that case, you are going to satisfy Google searcher’s intent much more because Google is telling you all the potential questions that people have when they search for your law firm.
Optimize Your Listing
Another easy way to make your law firm rank higher on Google is by optimizing your Google Business Profile listing. The reason why this is simple is because, basically, what you do is to fill out your entire Google Business Profile completely. There are countless law firms out there that have missing descriptions, and they don’t complete their profile.
Optimizing your profile is incredibly important. If you can actually complete your profile and optimize it by putting relevant keywords in your profile without keyword stuffing the profile – your law firm will start to rank on Google Maps.
Whatever your practice area is – make sure you have all the information on your Google Business Profile.
Focus on Niche Relevancy
Niche relevancy is quite close to the searcher’s intent, which is about how relevant you are to the niche that your potential client searches for. For instance, if a user searches for a family law attorney and you have a lot of content on divorce on your website, then Google will make that relevant, and they will tie the user’s search to your website content.
So, you want to ensure you have relevant and informative content on your website so that Google can make you much more relevant for the actual niche of your law firm. Anything that you can think of that is relevant to your niche – you want to include on your website as it will make Google increase the amount of niche relevancy that you have.
Build Citations to Boost Prominence
Another aspect to focus on is prominence. Ask yourself the question of how prominent your law firm is on the internet. This aspect highlights the importance of citations, as these are good for building brand awareness and authority, which includes all sorts of listings, such as FindLaw and Yelp.
You should focus on getting on as many high-quality brand listings as possible. You want to ensure that all these brand listings are linking out to you and that Google can actually crawl it. When you are building these citations, you want to ensure that you have the same address, law firm name, and number written the same way on all of the listings.
By doing so, you will improve your prominence and your brand authority, which will ensure you rank higher in Google Maps.
Expand Your Geographical Area
When it comes to distance, you cannot really influence where someone is searching for a lawyer. The only thing that you can do is to expand your reach in the area that you appear in. Suppose you get all aspects of the relevancy category correct. In that case, you can probably expand your reach so that you are more accessible to the potential searchers looking for your law services.
On that note, if you can get local links from local businesses, organizations, and directories that are local to your area – or – if you can get your business in the local news – all of these things can make you geographically relevant, which will improve your Google Maps ranking.
