In today’s digital world, several people use online platforms to search for information about anything, including legal services. However, given the competition in the legal industry, building an online lead-generation strategy for your website can become a challenging process. Also, if people can’t easily find you online, you’ll likely lose many valuable clients. This is where a law firm search engine optimization (SEO) enters the picture.   

Essentially, law firm SEO involves a combination of tactics unique to the legal industry. It’s an effective way for law firms to obtain a solid online presence, leading to more clients and revenue. It’s not also different from the SEO practices used by other industries, as its primary objective is to get the website to appear on the first page of the search engine results page.  

Hence, law firms and attorneys doing well in the digital landscape are topically relevant. Generally, topical authority isn’t a new concept in SEO. But for attorneys and law firms that aren’t yet familiar with this term, keep reading this ultimate guide to learn more about topical authority for legal professionals.  

What Is Topical Authority? 

A topical authority is the measure of authority a business or entity can earn through quality content. It means that the more high-quality, engaging, and informative articles attorneys and law firms have for their websites, the more people will trust their platforms as authoritative resources for the legal industry. For example, website content written by legal professionals will have more weight than a post about the same subject matter from someone who isn’t even an attorney.   

So, attorneys and law firms wanting to be topically authoritative should use their websites to serve their web users effectively. This can be done by answering all their queries and providing high-quality content.  

Why Is Topical Authority Important? 

Like other aspects of Law firm SEO, topical authority is an essential consideration for attorneys and law firms looking to rank highly on the search engine results page. When the site is topically authoritative and relevant, the prospective clients will be drawn to the attorney or law firm’s expertise and offerings.  

Moreover, when the legal website has good topical authority, Google and other major search engines will recognize it as knowledgeable and trustworthy. Consequently, the website gets high search engine rankings in no time.

How Can Attorneys And Law Firms Build Topical Authority? 

To take advantage of SEO’s benefits to law firms and attorneys, it’s vital to build topical authority on an attorney or a law firm’s website. While there are no easy and quick ways to become topically authoritative, some effective strategies are in place to help establish topical authority. These include: 

• Developing A Content Strategy

Developing a content strategy is essential for an attorney or a law firm website wanting to be topically authoritative and relevant. It generally includes a plan to ensure the creation and publication of high-quality content for the site’s prospective readers.

Hence, to help legal professionals with content strategy development, the following must be considered:  

1. Know people’s thoughts or perspectives about the legal industry. 
2. Use legal topics to open up further discussions about some essential leading topics in the legal industry.  
3. Conduct thorough research on the questions users may be asking about specific legal topics and utilize them as inspiration to create informative content pieces. 

You can also seek a digital marketing company to help you utilize and maximize these content strategies.

• Creating Topic Clusters  

Creating topic clusters should also be necessary when building topical authority for attorneys and law firms. Basically, topic clusters are content assets that can help answer the audience’s questions about a particular legal subject matter. When these assets are used properly, the attorneys and law firms can show that their content is more topically authoritative and relevant than the competitors and that there’s valuable content on specific topics for search engines to recognize.   

• Writing High-Quality Content 

To write high-quality and well-researched content pieces for an attorney or a law firm’s website, you should take some tips into account. For example, it’s essential to write in-depth long-form articles instead of many short-form articles and add crucial keywords in the content, including in the title, headings, and meta description. Moreover, when writing high-quality content for a legal website, it’s crucial to consider the ‘Do, Know, Go’ approach. The content pieces should be able to answer ‘do,’ ‘know,’ and ‘go’ questions. A ‘do’ question is looking for an answer that would result in a call to action. A ‘know’ question is intended to know something about a certain topic. A ‘go’ question is provided to determine whether a user searches for a particular website.  

• Sharing The Content

This is the final strategy for developing topical authority. By sharing the content pieces with the target audience, an attorney or a law firm’s site will begin to rank highly on the search engine results page and become topically authoritative in no time. Email marketing and social media platforms can be the perfect mediums to share content.  

Conclusion  

As for any attorney or law firm, topical authority plays a crucial role in the success of their SEO practices. When the site is topically authoritative, it gains high search engine rankings, resulting in more conversion rates and revenue.  

Hence, for legal professionals or firms wanting to build strong topical authority, keeping this ultimate guide may be the best thing to do.  

On The Map Marketing is a digital marketing agency located in downtown Miami. The team is constantly growing to meet the needs of our clients, with over 50 people filling the conference rooms, offices, and sales floors. Each person is important to us because we wouldn’t be here without our clients. Each business is important because it’s the passion of business owners that gives us motivation and direction when building their online presence. Finally, each dollar is important because we know that John Wanamaker nailed it when he said: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”