Overview of SEO Competition in the Personal Injury Lawyer Industry
Are you looking for an SEO strategist who has a proven track record and experience in ranking websites for “Personal Injury Lawyers”?
Or you’re looking for a step-by-step SEO strategy to rank your “Personal Injury Lawyer” client yourself?
No matter where you stand, to rank in this industry, you should be well aware of every bit of information we are going to share in this detailed SEO guide for personal injury lawyers:
First things thing: How many personal injury lawyers are you competing with?
How many of those have websites indexed in Google?
How many pages are created targeting this keyword every 24 hours?
Unless you know how competitive your industry is, you might not consider SEO to be a significant tool to generate online leads in the longer run.
Step-by-Step SEO Roadmap for a Personal Injury Law Firm
Here, we’ll take you through easy-to-follow SEO steps without complicated SEO jargon.
1. Make Google believe you’re a trustable brand in the law sector!
Gone are the days when we used to rank a bundle of keywords for thin websites (of 2-3 pages) created on EMD (Exact Match Domains). We all need to understand that “Small brands” can compete with “big brands” , but “Non-brands” competing with even “Small Brands”? is a hell of a task!
So, get ready to brand your website first!Important Observation!
The minimum period taken by Google to start considering you even a “Smaller Brand” is no less than 1 year.
Foolproof Steps for Every Personal Injury Law Firm to Become a Brand in Sight of Google
a) Create your domain name on your brand
Make sure your brand sounds unique
b) Include your brand name across all the pages/posts on your website
c) Ensure your law firm’s brand is at least visible on the following authoritative sources:
- Google GMB with Reviews
- Facebook Page with Reviews
- Lawyer Business Directories (Like LegalZoom, Nolo, Justia, FindLaw, Yelp, etc.) with Reviews
- Lawyer Review Websites (Martindale-Hubbell, Avvo, Better Business Bureau, etc.) with Reviews
- Top General Review Sites like (Trustpilot, ScamJabber, ScamAdvisor, etc.) with Reviews
- Job Portals (LinkedIn, Indeed.com, etc.) with some Job ads
- Glassdoor Profile (With reviews from your Employees)
Branding Opportunities on News/Blogs that Google will more likely pick as a Branding Source
That could be a story, case study, or a review about your law firm mentioning your brand name in the title of the post. Here is how to do that:
Here is the live example of such branding sources outlined in red color
d. Frequently Update your Social Media Channels
According to Neil Patel, who is considered one of the top hundred entrepreneurs by Obama:
We also believe that frequent social media updates contribute to ranking improvement! This is one of the apparent traits of reputable brands. If you currently don’t have a dedicated team to manage it, you can use plugins like this to schedule posts on automation.
Is page optimization of your law firm’s website that important? Here is the answer:
2. Make Your Website Fast Enough!
We recommend using Fiverr’s services for this.
3. Make sure you cover every possible keyword idea and term related to “personal injury lawyer” on your website (keeping the search intent into consideration)
When you cover all possible topics and keywords people search in your industry, it will eventually make Google believe that you’re an authority in your Niche. One of the techniques to achieve that is to look for “Question” based keywords and post an article against each of those keywords on your blog (1-2 blog posts per week):
Finally, Make an Effective Link Building Strategy
For competitive analysis, always consider domains that fall below High Authority Slab
Why? Because Giant authority domains can even rank without a considerable amount of backlinks. Following their backlink stats won’t be fruitful for you. Here follows the authority slab based on metrics and the domain’s SEO age (which starts from the day when you acquire your first backlink):
– Giant Authority (DR:70+, Age: 8+ years)
– High Authority (DR:60+, Age: 6+ years)
– Medium Authority (DR:40+, Age: 5+ years)
– Low Authority (DR:39 or less, Age: Less than 5 years)
3 Most Important Factors to Analyze in Your Competitors’ Backlink Profile
To create an effective link-building strategy in the personal injury lawyer industry, we need to closely analyze the backlink acquisition behavior of the top 10 SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Positions). We need the answers to the following questions:
1. When did they acquire their first backlink?
2. What’s the average number of referring domains per month?
Considering the total of 1K referring domains, we have to divide that figure by the number of months from July 2017 to September 2022, which is 62 months in this case. That’s around 16 Referring Domains a month! If we brace up to compete with them in at least two years (recommended for a new website), we’ll have to create backlinks from 40 RDs/month.
3. How many of those domains offer backlinks within the content (possibly offering blogger outreach opportunities)?
The best way to this out is to look through the backlink analysis profile of your competitor keeping the following highlighted filters in the AHREFS tool:
Secret Revealed!
This is how you’re going to steal your competitors’ backlinks acquired by blogger outreach!
414? 40% of their total RDs? Considering the above monthly requirement, you’d need only 10 months to cross that number on domains with better metrics and traffic.
This calculation is based on only one law firm for the case study. To have a more effective calculation, consider at least 3 competitors on SERP and get the mean values from the data discussed above.
Get Blogger Outreach Opportunities BETTER than Your Competitors on SERP!
Not all the websites linking your competitors are worthy enough as far as SEO is concerned. As a matter of fact, more than 40% of the backlinks are organically created due to the vast syndication of content all over the web. As a possible result, some backlinks (organically or purposefully created by rivals) are toxic in nature. You must identify and disavow those toxic backlinks periodically to prevent your website from getting sandboxed.
BETTER* Outreach Opportunities Outside your Competitors’ Backlink Profile
Indeed, you can compete with personal injury lawyers with better backlinks outside their backlink profile. You do that easily using Ahref’s Content Explorer Tool.
What does “Better” mean here? In simple words, it means:
– Backlink from Domains with Organic Traffic of at least 1000+, DR:20+, Semrush AS:25+
– Backlink from Domains / Pages already ranking in Google on the top 5 pages against “lawyer” related keywords.
– Backlink from Post that includes any law-related keyword in the title of the Post.
– Backlink from the Domain that has the majority of the organic traffic from the country you’re targeting to rank in.
Steps to Find Out Better Backlinks Opportunities in the Personal Injury Attorney Industry:
1. Put your Primary Keyword in the Content Explorer search field with the following filters:
20 Second-Video Illustration for the Filters and Settings.
Why using Page Traffic: 1 in filters?
If the page has at least 1 organic traffic it is more likely to be ranked in Google top 50 spots.
2. Export the results and pass these URLs to the Batch Analysis tool by Ahrefs
We’ve to split the list into 200 because the batch analysis tool only accepts 200 URLs at a time.
Once you get the batch analysis in the 200 batch for all URLs, you should merge them using an online tool like merge-csv.com. You can also work on individual files and merge them manually one by one.
We delete URLs that have “Linked Domains” less than 200. The more a website has linked domains, the more they are likely to be a potential backlink prospect. If they’re linking others, they can link us too. We also prefer to delete very high DR sites, such as those above 60, mostly because of their non-responsive behavior in the past.
3. Now Outreach All of the Remaining Filtered URLs!
Hire a VA from Upwork or Fiverr or use tools like Buzzstream or Responda for the outreach task. Ask them to include your link in their existing post. They may ask you for some administrative fee for that, which you can negotiate through email or chat.
Relevancy at its Peak ! (Keyword in Title + Keyword in SERPs)
These would be the highly relevant backlinks already ranking in Google carrying your primary keyword (personal injury lawyer) in the most important part of SEO, i.e. Title.
