SEO Competitor Analysis for Lawyers and Law Firms

Getting insights on how well your competitors are performing on search engine results pages can be extremely beneficial when developing an SEO strategy for your law firm.

SEO competitor analysis for lawyers and law firms include identifying and analyzing the keywords other law firms are ranking for, their link profile, website structure, number of service pages and blogs, content quality and more.

This guide will help you perform a complete analysis on your competitors, so that you can learn the strategy they employ to beat them with SEO.

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Why SEO competitor analysis is Important for your law firm

There are several reasons why SEO competitor analysis is vital if you want to attract potential clients to your law firm website.

Here are a few of them:

Understand who you’re competing against: the first step to analyze competition is to find out who you’re up against. The easiest way to do this is by entering the keyword you want to rank for and seeing what pops up. So for example if you want to rank for the keyword “sports law firm in indiana”, put this phrase in the search bar and see the results. Because there is a location included in the query, Google will present mix results consisting of GMB listings and qualifying websites. Some websites will be other law firms who offer exactly the same service as you do. This makes them your direct competitor. Others may be legal service directories like lawyers.com or lawinfo.com. In a situation like this, just optimizing your site for “sports law firm in indiana” may not be enough. To increase your chances of getting found by potential clients you’ll want to have a well optimized GMB profile and also make an account in directories like lawyer.com.
Find out potential keywords you can rank for: so you’ve entered your main keyword (in this case “sports law firms in indiana”) and identified who you’re competing against. Next you’ll want to optimize your current pages (or create a new one if you haven’t) with the main and LSI keywords to help with rankings. A sneaky but good way to find relevant LSI keywords is by analyzing your competitors’ pages. For this you’ll need to use a tool like Semrush. Simply put in one of your competitors URL in the tool and go to “organic research”. Semrush will show you all the keywords that page is ranking for. Chances are you’ll find a couple of keywords that you never thought to include. Collect the ones that are relevant and use it within your copy.
Reverse engineer competitors strategy: when it comes to search results, there are generally few predictable factors that help law firm websites rank. They include page speed, silo structure, content quality, keyword density, backlinks, etc. it is considered good SEO practice to take inspiration from the best performing sites, reverse engineer their strategy, and create an SEO strategy that is better than the competition. To do this first go through your top competitors’ sites. Take note of their web design, service pages, types of articles they publish. Then you can put the URLs in a tool like Semrush and analyze theri traffic sources, pages that get them the most traffic, whether they’re investing in paid ads or not, ranking keywords by intent. Doing this will give you a clear picture of where your competitors are deploying their energy. Your job then is to use this data to develop a strategy that is 10X better.

4 parts of Law Firm Competitor Analysis for SEO

Domain analysis: domain analysis will give you a general idea of how well your competitor’s site is performing. Here you’ll be able to see the organic and paid traffic the site gets each month, total number of backlinks, the countries it gets most its traffic from, whether it qualifies for SERP features or not. You can also take a look at the competitive positioning mapping section to see how it stacks up against its competitors.
Backlink analysis: despite what some people might say, backlinks are still an important ranking factor for law firm SEO. The better a site’s link profile, the better it will do in SERPs. Backlink analytics in Semrush will show you the sites your competitors have received backlinks from. This can be useful if you’d want to outreach manually for a link building campaign. It also shows you other data like total number of referring domains and percentage of “follow” and “nofollow” links.
Keyword analysis: analyzing keywords that competitors are ranking for is one of the most crucial aspects of law firm SEO. you need to know the set of keywords other law firms offering the same services are ranking for in order to incorporate them in your strategy. If you use a tool like Semrush you can go into organic research and fetch a few keywords that competitors are ranking for. Also you can use the Keyword Gap feature to find the exact keywords that your competitor law firm is ranking for and your aren’t. You can see keywords that you and your competitors are ranking for. Go to the missing and untapped tab to discover keywords your law firm website isn’t ranking for. Here you’ll find relevant keywords that potential clients may be searching for. Export the list to a sheet, pick the ones you think will be a good fit and include them in your articles or service pages.
Technical analysis: if you want to go deeper, and wish to beat your competitors on all fronts, you should be doing technical analysis on their sites. Technical analysis encompasses many different things. Some of them are the number of indexed pages your competitor’s website has, how fast the website loads up, the CMS it’s built on, whether it’s optimized for mobile or not and the list goes on and on. Again you can use a tool like Semrush or Ahrefs to find the technical issues in your competitors site, to further refine and fine tune your site. Other tools like Google’s pagespeed insights, Hubspot’s website grader can all help to understand the internal issues of your competitors’ websites.

How a law firm SEO expert can help you with Competitor Analysis

SEO is an ongoing process. It’s a long term investment and if done right can help you build authority and a loyal audience.

Though this guide could be a good starting point for you to conduct competitor analysis on your own, taking the help of an SEO expert who specializes and has experience in law firm SEO can prove to be fruitful.

That way you could focus solely on running the core areas of your business and leave the website work for your SEO team.

We have worked with and helped law firms gain top rankings for strategically important keywords. We also help you with conversion rate optimization, so that you can convert the incoming traffic into paying clients.

Get in touch to learn how we can help your legal practice grow.

FAQs

How do you analyze a competitor if you’re a law firm?

If your a law firm and want to analyze your competitors you need to follow these steps:

Put in the keyword you wish to rank for in Google search.
See the websites and GMB listings that come up.
Take a competitor’s URL and put it through a tool like Semrush
Analyze your competitors traffic sources, top performing pages, keywords
Use the found data to create an SEO strategy plan for your law firm

Why is competitor analysis crucial for law firm and lawyer SEO?

Competitor analysis is crucial because it gives you insights to what your competitors are doing to rank in SERPs. You need this data to develop your own SEO strategy, without which attracting potential clients to your law firm website can be difficult.