If you are serious about marketing for your law firm and you wish to be found by more people that are searching for legal services online, then you should invest some time in to learning about business citations.
Business citations should form an essential part of your law firm’s local SEO (search engine optimisation) strategy. This is because they can have a big impact on your law firm’s rankings within Google’s search results.
What are citations?
A business citation is a reference to your law firm that contains your office address and contact information. Citations are important because search engines such as Google can check these references to help them to determine if a business is genuine and also if the information they have about your business is accurate. For example, if Google is able to check the address and contact information across multiple directories and this information is consistent across all of them, then the chances are far more likely that the firm is genuine and the contact information is accurate. If Google perceives the business as being genuine and the contact details as being accurate then it is safer for them to show the business in their results. This is why citations are essential for a law firm’s SEO efforts, as they can help your law firm to rank higher in search engines.
Do the citations need to come from legal directories?
Whilst it is easy to get a business listing on many websites, not all citations are equal in terms of their SEO value. Getting listings from highly relevant and natural sources is important if you want to be more successful with your local SEO optimisations. For this reason, legal directories are the most suitable for solicitors as they are highly relevant and it is also natural for a legal directory to list information about a law firm.
There are many other advantages that come with listing your law firm in multiple legal directories, so we have created a detailed article here: Why your law firm needs to be listed in legal directories.
How many citations do we need for our law firm and where can we get them?
Rather than focusing on the number of citations, you should instead focus on the relevancy of the citations. Having a citation from a general business website that lists all types of businesses is nowhere near as relevant as a legal directory is for a law firm. Search engines such as Google use relevancy within their complex algorithms, so obtaining citations from highly relevant sources is usually much better.
You should aim for a minimum of 10 legal directories and also ensure that your law firm’s address, telephone number and website url are consistent across all of them. LawFirms.co.uk provides a service that can sync your law firm’s details across 11 legal directories so this is a great way to ensure that your firm’s details are correct across multiple legal directories as you only need to enter the details on one website and the information will automatically be synced across multiple legal directories.
You should also ensure that your law firm’s details are accurately listed with the SRA and the Law Society which will also provide links to your firm’s website as they will naturally link to your website as part of the service they provide.
Should we get citations for all of our offices?
You should only get citations for actual offices where you are able to provide a service. So any virtual offices, mail forwarding services or post boxes should not be used.
You should get citations for all offices that you are able to provide a service from if you wish for all of your offices to be found by more people that are searching online for solicitors in their local area.
LawFirms.co.uk also allows firm’s to upgrade their membership to include more offices so that you can have all of your firm’s offices synced across the 11 legal directories.
What is a business NAP and how are these related to citations?
A business NAP is a term in the SEO industry to reference a firm’s name, address and phone number. A business NAP is the same as a citation so you might have seen both terms mentioned if you have read any online articles related to the topic. It is important to know that a citation or business NAP also includes your firm’s website url so this should also be included even though a website url is not referenced in the NAP abbreviation.
Is there anything else we can do to improve our law firm’s SEO?
There are many factors that will influence your law firm’s positions within search engines, so we have created a resource specifically on this topic which you can read here.
If the main goal of optimising your law firm’s SEO is to generate more business for your firm, then we would also recommend reading this article: How to generate more legal enquires for your law firm, as this article includes lots more information on the various ways that you can market your law firm online.