Employment Lawyer SEO: The Ultimate Guide
The “Great Resignation” is well underway. The US saw more than 46 million people leave their jobs in 2022.
It’s not a healthy sign for employers. They want to retain as much talent as possible while protecting their interests with a strong employment law strategy.
It’s no picnic for employees, either. Around 46% of workers who raise discrimination cases never see any action taken. They need you.
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So how do you keep yourself visible to agencies and staff who need your expertise?
Up to a third of people needing legal advice find it through online searches. A strategy for professional employment lawyer search engine optimization (SEO) can help promote your firm to the masses and take advantage of Google’s algorithms.
Using more than a decade of law firm marketing experience online, we’ve put together a clear, concise guide to help you attract new clients through evergreen SEO.
Ready to learn more? Skip ahead.
What Is SEO for Employment Lawyers?
SEO for employment lawyers helps you rank highly on a search engine results page. It’s a set of techniques that show search engines that your content is helpful and relevant to specific search queries.
Employment law SEO fundamentals include:
- Content creation (writing guides, producing videos and podcasts, etc.)
- Technical SEO (behind-the-scenes editing that appeals to Google’s algorithms)
- Website optimization (ensuring your pages load quickly and are easy to navigate)
- Keyword research (ensuring your content uses relevant, competitive search terms)
Highly effective legal SEO helps you scale the top entries of Google’s rankings. Searchers can find you at the top of the first results page for phrases relevant to their concerns.
Typical SEO strategies for employment attorneys include:
- Keeping your website optimized for mobile devices
- Optimizing the most relevant employment law keywords
- Producing useful and insightful content
- Linking out to authoritative sources
- Ensuring visitors can easily contact you
- Providing a user-friendly experience
- Adjusting your website to load fast (ideally within three seconds of visiting)
SEO is more effective than paid advertising for up to 70% of website owners. It’s a process that operates in the background, regularly brings organic visitors, and removes the need to keep targeting specific keywords to “bid” on.
Why does an employment lawyer’s SEO matter?
SEO is one of the most effective tools for tapping into the employment law market.
At least 96% of people searching for law firms prioritize search engines, and 68% of all online experiences start with a search engine.
In employment law, you can use multiple channels to attract clients and stand apart from rival firms – like Google Ads and social media – however, SEO is the best investment for fostering long-term traffic growth and development.
SEO is downright superb at helping promote trust and establish authority over time. These results compound, too, as you can simply optimize elements of your online presence.mm,
The byproduct of this is a workable strategy you can repurpose for multiple channels. From a single SEO-friendly blog post, you can generate:
- Five or more social media posts
- One or two launch points for an explainer video
- A topic to discuss with guests via podcast
It’s exceptional value for your firm – SEO keeps making you money over time.
The Pivotal Elements of SEO for Employment Law Firms
A good employment lawyer SEO strategy has a few key working parts.
Here’s what you need to focus on:
| Element | Effect |
| SEO auditing | Shows you how your website performs on several SEO factors (How is it competing against rivals, and how can you improve?) |
| Keyword research | Helps you reach specific people through niche phrases and terms they’re likely to search for |
| Website optimization | Boosts loading speed and user-friendliness, reducing click-backs (or “bounces”) and keeping your visitors in the sales funnel |
| Content creation | Shows readers you know what you’re talking about, keeps visitors engaged, and lets Google know you’re an authority |
| Internal and external link building | Helps keep your site well-connected, so visitors can easily find the resources they need and you attract traffic from authority resources elsewhere on the web |
| Local SEO and Google Business | Targets searchers in your area when they use location-specific keywords to increase relevant traffic and establish trust, building searchers’ confidence before they call you |
| Tracking performance and committing to improvement | Fine-tunes your content, keywords, ad campaigns, and audience metrics to drive additional traffic and increase sales conversions |
SEO auditing
All SEO strategies start with an audit, which shows you how your website’s already performing in search rankings before you make any changes.
An SEO audit reveals how you rank online before you start creating and implementing your strategy. It also indicates what you may need to do to rank better and build more authority.
A specialist agency helps you run the perfect audit by:
- Prioritizing actions in line with your budget and desired impacts
- Ensuring nothing obvious is missed
- Targeting areas with long-term impact in mind
An SEO audit tool such as Moz Pro can “crawl” through your online content and report immediate issues needing attention. Here’s what their “Crawl Overview” page looks like:
SEO audits focus on and help improve:
- Your competitive edge through rival analysis
- Website security
- Content concerns
- Structuring and internal linking
- On-page performance and user experience
Keyword research
Keywords are terms prospective clients search for when they want to find a solution to a problem. For example, someone who believes they’ve been fired for unjust reasons may search for “unfair dismissal lawyers.”
Keyword research involves finding relevant phrases that are easy to compete on and frequently searched for. The right keywords that tick these boxes can help you rank higher in relevant search results.
You need to consider the keywords for employment lawyers that your competitors use and how to balance high search competition with equally high traffic volumes. An experienced SEO agency can help you “bid” for the most useful phrases to target.
You should target specific keywords that are hyper-related to what you offer. You can niche down into precise keywords that are “long-tail” or more descriptive, such as “Toronto discrimination lawyers.”
Long-tail keywords drive less traffic but are used by warmer leads. These are searchers who have already researched and know what they want. They just need you to help them take that next step.
Here’s an example of some keywords you may find during research:
Website optimization
Your website needs to be lean, fast, and easy to use. Websites with complex layouts, slow loading times, and zero responsiveness for mobile users frustrates visitors. You’re wasting all the hard work you spent promoting your website in the first place.
What’s more, Google prioritizes user experience (UX) when ranking search results. Website optimization techniques improve UX and appeal to Google’s ranking algorithm.
Your “core web vitals” for optimization include:
- How fast your website loads
- How quickly your website responds to user actions (input delays)
- How much your website “moves” as it loads (cumulative layout shift)
An SEO expert may optimize your website by:
- Improving mobile-friendliness
- Ensuring your website loads in fewer than three seconds
- Checking which pages drop visitors the quickest
- Ensuring your content is relevant and uses appropriate keywords
- Altering your website design so it’s cleaner and easier to navigate
Users navigating through employment law websites don’t like waiting. Would you keep your clients hanging unnecessarily for an in-person meeting?
More than half of your visitors leave your website if it takes longer than three seconds to load. You can boost page load speed in many ways, including scaling back on images and unnecessary elements.
Google also prioritizes mobile users because almost 60% of all searchers prefer mobile devices over desktops. This means your website needs to adapt to whatever device your client is using – and make handheld browsing easy.
Here’s how our client, Gertsoyg & Company, presents their employment law page on mobile browsers. It’s clean and actionable:
Good web design principles also apply here – you should build an intuitive, attractive website that people feel confident and comfortable browsing through for solutions.
Simplicity and purpose are critical facets of a high-quality web design. Keep things simple and establish what you do as early as possible, so your clients feel confident enough to call you with a complex case without wasting unnecessary time.
Here’s an example of a clean site design we produced for our client, Stacey R. Ball.
Content creation
Content accounts for media as diverse as infographics, videos, podcasts, and social media posts. If you publish it, it’s content.
Google values helpful content. An update to their search algorithm in 2022 established that websites paying attention to search intent and journey (hyper-focusing on specific queries and concerns of the average searcher) will rank higher than those that don’t.
Periodic, high-quality, actionable, and engaging content shows your visitors that you have the relevant knowledge and experience to support their cases. It also doesn’t hurt to show searchers that you’re passionate about what you do – it drives confidence that you’re “the one.”
Content available on an employment law website needs to be highly relevant to the everyday concerns of your clients and backed up by a legitimate legal authority.
Regular content for employment lawyers may revolve around topics such as:
- “What are my basic rights as a retail worker?”
- Employment contracts
- Other employee rights
- Insights into labor law practices at high-profile companies
- A checklist for businesses considering suing employees over a breach of NDA
Content needs to be regularly updated and reviewed, especially if it’s legal advice. Otherwise, you risk falling down the rankings and losing potential clients.
Here’s an example of helpful, actionable advice from our client, the Walter Law Group:
The topic drills down into a question that an employment law firm is qualified to answer. It targets a specific search query and quickly answers the questions posed. It uses straightforward language and backs up its advice with a legal expert review.
Internal and external link building
Internal linking helps keep your firm website coherent and prevents the risk of “island” pages (those left adrift with no connections). Google can then see how your site is connected, and this improves site navigation.
Internal links signpost where visitors can find more relevant information from elsewhere on your website.
External linking helps you connect to authorities in your niche. By linking to relevant authorities elsewhere, you show Google and your visitors that you’re knowledgeable and reliable.
External linking strategies lead to other authorities linking back to you. This helps boost Google’s confidence in your expertise.
You can get external links from other websites once you have built authority and presence online. There are several ways to achieve this, such as:
- Strategic external linking to other authorities
- Listings in online legal directories and associations
- Guest posting on authoritative content sites, such as Legal Reader
Link building can be lengthy, but it’s highly effective at ensuring regular traffic. We talk more about this a little further down.
Local SEO and Google Business
Local SEO targets potential clients searching in your surrounding area.
You can expect to reach up to 70% of online searchers with organic, local SEO for employment lawyers.
To target local SEO, you could use keyword-driven content that targets specific local areas (such as “Calgary employment law”).
Use long-tail keywords to appeal to local phrases and search intent. For example, you might use “discrimination lawyers in Ontario” to attract relevant searchers from that area.
If you haven’t already, setting up a Google Business profile is essential. Google My Business enables you to create an official business profile, building a sense of legitimacy. Your clients find this profile immediately accessible as it appears in their search results.
Always include your name, a photo of your premises, logo, contact details, and customer reviews. Here’s an example from our client, Costa Law Firm:
Keeping these business profiles updated is crucial for the ongoing health of your local SEO. Update opening hours, respond to reviews, and keep current with contact information wherever possible.
Tracking performance and committing to improvement
Tracking your employment law SEO performance helps you see how well your strategies appeal to prospective clients.
Are you reaching the right people? Are you inspiring them enough to let you represent them?
You can track keywords and campaigns with services such as Google Analytics 4 (GA4) or Moz to better inform your future strategy.
By tracking your SEO performance, you can:
- Evaluate traffic quantity and quality
- Monitor external links to track the different channels your traffic is coming from
- Monitor landing pages for incoming traffic and sales conversions (are they both enticing potential clients and convincing them to work with you?)
6 Proven Employment Law SEO Tips
Now that you understand the basics of employment law SEO, let’s consider six ways you can fine-tune your strategies to rank higher for your chosen keywords.
| Proven Tip | The Benefit to You |
| Maximize your channel opportunities | Reach more people through a combination of channels than Google alone |
| Create landing pages to appeal to different clients and practice areas | Filter traffic with informed expectations while appealing to warm leads already engaged and ready to reach out |
| Make it easy for people to contact you | Capitalize on your audience’s need for immediate answers by being highly accessible – thus boosting conversion rates |
| Create genuinely insightful content | Establish yourself as an industry authority to inspire trust and confidence in your clients over competing firms |
| Get backlinks from a variety of authorities in your niche | Enhance your profile with Google and find engaged leads from trusted resources in your industry |
| Capitalize on long-tail keywords | Get warmed-up visitors who are searching for specialized lawyers in your local area, and boost your chances of conversion |
1. Maximize your channel opportunities
It’s a common misconception that all your web visitors go through Google alone. Try to target multiple channels to attract a wider pool of potential clients.
A good start is to move beyond plain text. More than 244 million people watch video content in the US, and over half of online consumers demand more video content from brands and businesses they interact with.
Consider creating video and audio content that explains complex matters of employment law. For example, a quick five-minute guide to maternity rights could work well as an explainer video or podcast episode.
It’s important to also go beyond your website. Use YouTube to create a company video channel and playlists. Use podcasting services like Stitcher, Spotify, and Apple to host and promote your content further.
Of course, you don’t have to handle all the video production yourself. An online marketing team (such as the experts at dNOVO) can help you produce engaging video content as part of your SEO strategy.
Here’s an example of a popular employment law YouTube channel, Employment Law After Hours:
2. Create landing pages to appeal to different clients and practice areas
The best employment lawyers have multiple practice areas. It’s wise to create optimized landing pages for the specific areas of employment law you handle. You can create pages for contract claims, unfair dismissals, and pay disputes.
Landing pages are areas on your website where visitors can land by clicking on search results, ads, and other content you publish online, such as through social media. Landing pages act as “funnel openings” for all the above traffic.
Consider creating different landing pages for the services and practices you work in. For example, create pages for discrimination cases, contract breaches, harassment, and wrongful termination.
Here’s how our client, Stacey R. Ball, presents three clear practice landing pages to attract prospective clients – with a little help from our web design team.
3. Make it easy for people to contact you
Your prospective clients need you urgently. They’re handling stressful situations (such as harassment claims or wage theft) and don’t have time to waste looking for buried contact details.
Even if you’re yet to build their confidence through your copy, you should display your contact details as clearly as possible to make your services more accessible.
Make sure to establish your point of contact as quickly as possible during their journey on-page.
Include clear email or phone details in headers or above the fold. Or, create a quick web form through which visitors can send a short query without having to scroll.
Here’s what our client, The Walter Law Group, offers above the fold as part of their employment lawyer landing page. There’s an acknowledgment of visitor needs and a clear call to action. There’s also a free consultation box right at the point of visitation.
Ultimately, clients click away and look elsewhere if you make it hard for them to reach out.
4. Create genuinely insightful content
We established above that genuinely insightful content is a significant driver for SEO.
Many refer to this content as “thought leadership style.” It’s a buzzword to describe content that elicits discussion and establishes writers as trailblazers in their sphere. In other words, it means being original.
Ultimately, creating “disruptive” or “unique” content can help build your authority online. Are there any employment law insights you can bring to the table that the competition isn’t picking up on?
Show an understanding of complex employment law topics, such as common red flags in non-disclosure agreements or contracts for part-time hires.
As with video content, consider outsourcing your copy. Specialized creators can manage content marketing for you while you handle cases.
Before clients contact you, they want to know that you’re an expert in your field. You need to create content that talks the talk and walks the walk.
“Disruptive” content that thoroughly explores complex topics and from a viewpoint that others may have missed can encourage external linking. In turn, this boosts your visibility on Google’s search pages.
Coming back to Walter Law, here’s an example of a direct visitor question answered with insightful, authoritative support:
The above subject has ample coverage online, but not necessarily from this perspective. Could it always occur to people on disability leave to request accommodating support on return to work? Do they necessarily understand their rights?
By targeting relevant keywords, you can provide a single source of information to disabled workers and establish yourself as a reliable authority.
Again, outsourcing this content to experts means you have more time to litigate.
5. Get backlinks from a variety of authorities in your niche
Backlinks from other law resources help Google index your site more confidently in search listings, establishing your importance relative to keywords and phrases. They can also help potential clients using external sites find you without having to search at all.
It’s good to get backlinks from various authoritative sources. However, backlink quality trumps quantity every time. Building links with irrelevant or low-authority websites negatively affects how Google perceives your own, thus affecting your visibility.
Tools such as Ahrefs’ Website Authority Checker can help determine the authority of a website you’d like to work with:
Beyond detailed checks, reaching out to relevant, quality content providers is key. Network with other lawyers and firms to find opportunities for guest posts to link back to content on your website.
Look for law directories such as LegalZoom, Avvo, and HG.org, which can help promote you and build your online presence.
Other ways to drive backlinks from relevant authorities may include producing highly shareable infographics. A graphic designer could create bar graphs or pie charts to show interesting, unique data relevant to your litigation experience.
6. Capitalize on long-tail keywords
Long-tail keywords, typically three to five words in length, get lower competition compared to generic search terms.
They’re worth optimizing for – they account for more than 70% of searches.
Using long-tail keywords is advantageous when focusing on specific search intent. Bidding on broad terms such as “employment lawyers” won’t always deliver a strong ROI as you’re competing against literally everyone offering that service.
Here’s an example of long-tail keywords that are easier to compete for:
The further benefit here is that you’re targeting searchers who are warmed up and further down the sales funnel.
A searcher looking for “sexual harassment lawyers in Toronto” is more likely to click through and book a call than someone looking for a generic “Toronto lawyer.”
3 Ways To Get Started With Employment Lawyer SEO
Now that you know some of the most effective tricks of the SEO trade, how do you implement them? You can:
- Go at it alone (DIY)
- Employ a team (in-house)
- Work with an agency (outsource)
These differ in cost, effort, and success. SEO can be expensive – but at the same time, you want to spend more time litigating and less time learning how to manage your marketing strategy.
Ultimately, you need an option that provides the best ROI and efficient, measurable growth.
Let’s look at your three main routes in more detail.
1. The DIY approach
It is possible to set up and manage an SEO campaign independently. Many employment law firms try it, and some succeed. However, it is long, arduous, and costly.
To get certified by Google in their SEO Fundamentals, you need to spend an average of around 13-20 hours poring through written and visual media. You’ll likely need to spread this across several weeks to digest it properly.
Not only is that time you could spend practicing law, but it doesn’t even account for the time it’ll take for you to implement the strategies you learn.
Tackling SEO on your own may cut costs, but it could make matters even worse:
- Time spent managing SEO can extend case timescales, frustrating clients and impacting revenue
- Mishandling SEO as a non-expert could lead to Google blacklisting your site, losing traffic, and defeating the purpose of the exercise
- Time spent handling cases and building client relationships takes away from maintaining your SEO, harming your long-term appeal
Of the three options, DIY SEO is the least likely to provide high ROI, despite how convenient it may seem.
2. The in-house approach
Many law firms may choose to set up a marketing team of their own. They can delegate the finer points of SEO to in-house specialists. You take care of the equipment, the office space, and the employee benefits.
This approach gives you direct oversight regarding managing projects with qualified experts on hand to help out. You don’t have to learn a thing.
The immediate downside is cost. SEO specialists in Canada demand between $40k and $79k in base pay.
That’s before taking into account bonus and sick pay, training costs, employee benefits, and taxation along the way.
A team of five SEO specialists might give you some peace of mind while you handle cases, but you’re down a minimum of $200k a year before you even start.
Then, there’s scaling. One SEO specialist can only do so much – SEO, as you’ve seen, has many complex working parts. You’ll need to add more staff over time to cope with demand.
That’s adding web developers, content specialists, marketers, and at least one manager.
You can hire specialists ready to go off the bat, but you’ll need to spend more time training them on the specifics of your campaigns and working as a cohesive team. That means you could be waiting even longer to start reaching new clients.
3. The agency approach
Going with an SEO agency gives you access to a scalable team of experts who can drive results at a fraction of the time and cost of in-house recruitment.
Monthly agency SEO costs in Canada vary between $1000 and $8,000+ per month.
Even at the high end, you’re still looking at a minimum saving of circa $100k per year compared to an in-house team of five professionals.
You also benefit from:
- Years of expertise with zero need for training
- Access to tactics that drive proven results
- Ease of scalability around budget and business goals
- Plain-speaking, honest advice
Here’s a quick breakdown of the difference dNOVO makes to employment lawyer SEO:
Employment Law SEO Is the Key to Growth
Employment law is intensely competitive; you don’t need us to tell you that.
Given the competition you’re up against, you need to find an organic, evergreen way to keep clients coming back.
Employment law SEO is the answer because it’s ideal for:
- Driving long-term traffic on niche searches
- Establishing your firm as a leading name in the industry
- Attracting more clients
Working with a specialist agency is the best choice for scaling your employment law firm, so reach out to dNOVO, and one of our SEO experts will help you grow your practice!
If you’d like to know more about employment lawyer SEO or digital marketing in general, check our social content or spend some more time on our blog.