SEO for Car Accident Lawyers: The Ultimate Guide

Key Takeaways

hey so in today's video i'm going to show you my complete step-by-step seo audit checklist in fact this is the exact seo audit checklist i've used to grow this client's organic search traffic by 1 337 and this client's traffic by 93 keep watching [Music] so i'm actually going to perform an seo audit live for you i randomly selected a local business for the target key word personal injury lawyer chicago and the lucky business is de salvo law so the first item you need to audit is your backlink quality okay so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to audit the link profile to see if there's solid link quality and we're just going to look at the links in general so all you have to do is go to ahrefs then click on the site explorer option then enter the target url so all you need to do is go under the backlink profile section and click on backlinks so in this section what we're looking for are a few things first of all we're looking for unnatural link patterns and we're also looking for low quality artificial links so as we scroll down we start to see you know maybe a couple artificial links here and there so we have a wix link here and this is just your classic web 2.0 links linking with chicago car accidents which is actually a really bad anchor text to use because this isn't something that a lawyer would probably even want to rank for because this isn't actually doesn't actually have good intent so using this anchor text is actually not going to be effective and more importantly it's a huge footprint when you use geo-targeted anchors so this is also pretty bad but beside that this is just your classic web 2.0 link and this isn't going to do much and in fact i've had to pull some clients out of penalties for these types of link you can always tell it's a web 2.0 link because this will be on a sub domain so you see it's wix site it has this sub domain and then it has a bunch of folders so it's so deep into wix's site architecture that it's practically worthless to even get and not only that if you just look at it it's very unnatural it's it's not going to add any value and it's clearly built just to place this link so if we go through we'll continue to look for some other similar types of links and it looks like here's another one this is going to be a web 2.0 link placement yeah so once again same same type of thing scroll down looks like more wix site looks like we have an article directory here some more web 2.0s more web 2.0s and you're starting to see a trend here that a lot of these are web 2.0s and it you know they're really easy to spot and the truth is you know if i can spot them this quickly uh google's algorithm can spot them even faster than i can um so it's not it's just not a good thing to be doing in general so we look at these uh once again article city you know these websites are just built just to uh drive links to websites they're not actually built to add value in any way and you you can tell right away so these are not the links you'd want to be getting overall and once again another web 2.0 link um same type of situation you know they're trying to send some generic anchor text to this page to try to dilute it just not a good idea in general here's another web 2.0 link same situation and then one more for good measure just so you can see what these look like these are these are not great links and i would avoid these all together but you can tell just this link profile is filled with all these different web 2.0 links so this was clearly a strategy for whatever company was doing seo for this law firm and it's not ideal but it does look like there has been an effort to try to dilute some of these bad links with some more editorial links which is good so that's one way to offset these lower quality links is to get more high quality links to decrease the total percentage of those in the link profile as a whole that's kind of the way that i go about looking at link quality and of course you know i've been doing this for a long time so it takes me a few seconds to just see you know identify these links but you can almost always identify web 2.0 by the sub domain and the unnatural linking practices the second item you need to audit is your anchor text distribution okay so the next thing we want to analyze is the anchor text profile so all you need to do is go back to ahrefs then click on the anchor section and then right away we can see some good stuff here so we can see that the majority of the top anchor text here are branded anchor text and so that's really really good but it's only good on the surface and so on on the surface level this looks great but if we go ahead and examine the links that are sending these branded anchor texts to the site we'll probably see that they're not high quality links based on our previous analysis with the link profile so and we can tell right away it looks like the top links that they are getting are from web 2.0 websites so we can just go and click this and you can see right away that these are coming from the classic web 2.0 that we talked about earlier in the link profile section so yes branded anchor texts are good but they don't mean much if they're coming from websites that are totally artificial and low quality and so this is the right thing to do but it's the wrong execution so it's better to get a branded anchor text from a real website not a artificially built website so if we go through the link profile here you know we're going to see more and more of these it looks like there are some other ones sprinkled in but for the most part you know there's a lot of web 2.0 links that are sending these branded anchor texts so as we scroll down we can start to see some keyword rich anchor texts like personal injury lawyer in chicago illinois and it's not that keyword rich anchor text is always bad in fact you need to use keyword rich anchor texts sometimes to be able to perform well but you can look at this anchor text profile and see that it does look a little unnatural you know we're seeing if we just go ahead and do a search for chicago you know we can start to see it's really starting to look pretty bad because this is just not a normal way for people to be linking to websites and so you know when you see with the same anchor text repeated over and over it's typically not great especially when it's for a transactional keyword it makes it look even more unnatural it's more natural for an informational keyword to get a high volume of exact match anchor text but for a transactional keyword it looks extremely unnatural so so one thing you can do on ahrefs that's kind of nice is you can actually just do something like this once you know what the target keywords are and then you can just see all of the anchor texts they're using geo targeted modifiers like this so as you can tell it's not looking too good here this is very over optimized and so this is something that you just do not want to do this just doesn't look good you can tell like look at this strip of anchor text this is this is not ideal um and so let's look at the types of links that are sending these anchor texts so if we look go to the details section again it looks like some of these links are coming from directories like this one and this is really not good you should never and i mean literally never link with an exact match anchor text or keyword rich anchor text from a website like this in directory link and the reason is because these are not editorial links and these are not high quality links because anyone can go here and click and submit a link and then also your link is surrounded by a bunch of other websites that are also spamming keyword rich anchors and using a natural link so you know your website is now being associated with all these other websites that are also spamming and so general rule of thumb just don't even get these links in the first place but if you decide to use a branded anchor text um just do not use keyword rich anchor text with any of these link types just not a good idea let's go ahead and look through some more it looks like we know once again another directory type of link and the problem with these types of directory links is that they're they're not even relevant to the client they're just general web directory links and these this is a very old school practice so maybe these links were built a long time ago this stuff just doesn't work anymore this isn't really something that anyone should be doing um i don't even know how these web directories are still around they're showing pagerank as if google updates it but we know google has an updated page rank in several years so yeah so these are links you just shouldn't get in general but if you do get them for some odd reason just make sure you use a branded anchor text but like i said just avoid them because they're probably not going to help you they may actually hurt you more than help you in most cases now there are some cases where getting directory links is a good idea number one if it's a actually high quality directory with editorial standards that's legitimate or if it's a business directory like yelp or the yellow pages or something like that that's very trusted that's fine and then one other actually two other types of directory links that are worth getting are going to be niche relevant directories and then also geo-targeted directories so those are worth getting but if you do get any type of directory based link just make sure you use a branded anchor text if we go through this entire link profile we would see pretty much the same types of linking patterns it's going to be you know artificial links keyword rich anchor text all the stuff that you really shouldn't be doing anymore this stuff just needs to be avoided the third item you need to audit is keyword cannibalization so now we want to look for instances of keyword cannibalization so my favorite way to find that particular issue which means two pages are targeting the same keyword phrase is to use screaming frog so just put it the target url in the screaming frog and then start the analysis so the quickest way to find keyword cannibalization is just to go to the page title section and then all you need to do is just search a word that you're seeing frequently in here so in this case i'm going to do accident and i'll see right away that you know there's some there's some keyword cannibalization issues going on right away so we can see chicago accident lawyers and then we have chicago car accident lawyer which is a little more specific than this one but we're starting to get into some of the keyword cannibalization areas but then as we go down now we're starting to see the issues car accident lawyer chicago car accident lawyer and then we have a car accident attorney and then you see this repeated over and over and over and over and these all have their own unique urls so this is just your classic case of keyword cannibalization and so we would want to go through and consolidate or delete some of these pages so that only one page on the website targets car accident lawyer which is a transactional keyword so it should have transactional intent so a lot of this stuff is probably not in fact it's not going to rank at all and it's definitely not helping and so typically some seo companies will build out these pages because they think it's going to help with topical relevance but it actually doesn't it actually just causes keyword cannibalization and it doesn't help at all it actually detracts from the primary page that you're trying to rank so it'd be much more effective to take some of the content on these pages and add it to the transactional page and make that page way more deep and way more authoritative that's a much better strategy so you can use screaming frog to quickly find all kinds of key recantabilization issues you see how quickly i was able to do it so just look for common words that you're seeing and then search in here and then find pages that are targeting the same exact keyword phrases and then go through the process of fixing them and focusing one page on the site for that primary keyword phrase the fourth item you need to audit are low hanging fruits trying to improve the rankings for your most important keywords is should be the priority but it's also good to find keywords where there's opportunity to rank for them and typically what i'm trying to do is i'm trying to find keywords that have low competition and we'd be able to rank for them very quickly with just a few changes to the page or architecture or other optimization techniques so what you need to do is go back to ahrefs and then go to the keywords organic keywords section so then what you want to do is sort this by position so we're going to go 2 15 and then we're going to do from 5. so now this is going to show us our keywords that they are in positions 5 through 15 and so that's typically what i would call a low hanging fruit because to 15 you have a few keywords that are right off the first page so with just a little more optimization maybe a little more links you might be able to push those to the first page and then also the ones that are in positions five you can push those up into the top three possibly which is going to dramatically increase the organic ctr so it gets substantially more once you get into those top three positions now of course one thing you want to look for here if if this was our client i would of course want to look at these informational keywords and see if we can improve for them but in reality a lot of these informational keywords aren't going to drive sales and are not going to drive leads so what we want to do is we want to actually look for the transactional keywords and see if there's opportunities to improve with the transactional keywords so we know that this client in particular is targeting chicago for personal injury and and keywords related to that we'll just search chicago and see if there's any low-hanging fruits that we can go after so based on what we see here there there is definitely some opportunity now you may see this volume here and think that this isn't important or isn't isn't good to target but it actually is because i've said this many many times but not all keywords are created equally so when we look at this one chicago slip and fall lawyers it only gets 30 searches per month but all it takes is one client to be a massive massive return on their investment so and that's why companies are willing to pay 25 per click or 65 per click or even 75 dollars per click because they know that getting just one client for one of these keyword phrases is a substantial amount of money so the getting the return is huge and so now you got to be careful not to chase volume because it's completely dependent on the keywords and the industry as well so in this case it looks like you know there is some opportunity here to to improve these pages and get them higher up so he's sitting in position seven and so getting him to the top three for this target keyword phrase would be huge for him because that would immediately increase the amount of clicks going to his site and of course possibly increase the amount of leads that he's getting now looking at this page we'll of course have to see if it's built well for conversions but getting more clicks of the site gets him more opportunities to get leads so i always recommend when you start a new campaign look for these low hanging fruits because if this is your client and you can get them some quick wins right out of the gate they're gonna love you so much more and then while you've already gotten those quick wins you can then start to go after those really competitive keywords that have more search volume and kind of the keywords that probably all of his competitors are focusing on putting all their resources into so one workaround to do that is is to go after these low-hanging fruits the fifth item you need to audit is the site architecture so while you're in screaming frog you can also examine the site architecture so there are many ways you can go about doing this you can of course do a manual analysis which is usually necessary but you can get an overview of the site architecture pretty quickly just by using this tool alone so while you're in the internal tab just scroll over and we're going to look for a column called crawl depth this is how many clicks it takes to get to whatever the target page is this one for example this is extremely deep into the architecture so it's probably an older article so it would make sense if this was a really important article for the website you would want to push this further up the architecture because nine clicks deep is really really low in the architecture which means it's a low priority for the crawlers and so if you want a page to be a high priority to the crawlers it needs to be higher up in the site architecture and as a general rule of thumb you really don't want to go beyond three to four clicks deep and so one other thing you can do is get to get an overview is look at the site architecture section or the site structure section here and you'll actually see overview of the crawled depth and so ideally you know these bars should kind of be between one and four this should be the bulk of your pages now in this case they have a lot of pages where they're four five six seven seven even nine clicks deep so that's way too deep uh for an architecture so you wanna push these all forward if they're important pages if they're not important pages then that's a different discussion because you need to talk about you know whether those pages should even exist in the first place if they're such a low priority in the architecture you can also see here too you know how many urls have this level of depth looking at this there are a lot of urls that are really deep in the architecture so definitely a lot of work that can be done here and screaming frog is just amazing for giving you this high level overview that you can then go deeper on and start to see you know why are these pages so deep in the architecture and then you can decide what to do with them the sixth item you need to audit are linkable assets okay so the next thing we want to look for is to see if this client has any linkable assets that we can use for our link building and promotion for this website so if you've been following me for a long time you know that the best way to promote a website in my opinion the safest way to grow a website's authority is through creating linkable assets and so whenever i start a new campaign the first thing i look for is does this client have anything that's worth linking to and a lot of the times they don't so we have to go through and create these linkable assets but in this case we're going to see if maybe there are some linkable assets that we can leverage in our link building so just looking at the site you know we can see a few things here we can see their transactional pages we can see an faq section which could be useful for link acquisition see testimonials which aren't usually good for links and then we see an injury blog and then guides and courses so these all might be interesting linkable assets um but typically for a linkable asset i do want to target a keyword phrase so we'll look at the blog and see if there's anything worth linking to so it looks like this might be something interesting what to do after a car crash and what not to do and so that's a really interesting topic and i think something like this could be link worthy this does look like something we could use for link acquisition and so what you want to do is just go through whatever the site you're working on just find these different linkable assets you don't need a ton you only need you know one to five and then just go use these as your catalyst for growing the website's authority and it'll make your life so much easier because then you don't have to build links in an unnatural way and use a bunch of geotarget anchor text like i showed you earlier so this is the most natural way to build any website's authority including local national or ecom it's all the same strategy and the seventh item you need to audit is your page level optimization so we literally want to go page by page and make sure that each of his most important keyword targeted pages are optimized well and so this is definitely the the longest and most time consuming process because you have to go through each transactional page that they want to rank and then we also want to go through all the informational pages that they want to rank as well make sure that those are optimizable and once we've figured out if they're optimized then we have to actually go through that process of optimizing them but for now let's just go through an audit of one of his transactional pages in this case so his home page is the primary target for the most important transactional phrase he's trying to rank for which is chicago personal injury attorney or variations of that could be of course personal injury attorney in chicago or anything that's closely related and so um and a few things i noticed right away if you want to rank for a target keyword phrase it should be the very first heading that shows up on the page and so this is all great here for sales purposes and lead gen purposes but it's not great for seo purposes and in fact if you're trying to drive organic search traffic it needs to be very very clear what this page is about right out of the gate and so basically what you're trying to do is you're trying to instruct google's crawlers about what this page is about and it needs to be abundantly clear there needs to be no ambiguity and so right here google may be able to deduce what this page is about but if if you're competing against other people google's going to prefer a page that is more clear than the ones that are not and so in this case you know there are probably competitors who have placed their primary keyword targets above the fold in the right locations and so more than likely this is a h1 tag um and it actually isn't okay yeah so this is not an h1 tag and the first heading on a page should always be an h1 tag and so right here this isn't an h1 tag so this is not ideal and i don't actually know we'll go actually look at the page source we'll see if we can find an h1 and there's actually not an h1 on this page at all and so that that's a problem right there so every page should have an h1 tag it's it's the most critical tag on a page so that's the first issue is that there is an h1 tag the second issue is that the primary keyword target isn't in the primary heading which would be the h1 so if we scroll down we'll see that you know his primary keyword target here is in a heading tag and i believe this is an h2 so if we go and look yeah so there is an h2 tag here which is good it has the primary keyword in it but if we were going to structure this page the right way we would move this heading up here and it would become the h1 tag and then you can use some of this other copy around it but this needs to be the very first thing that shows up on this page above the fold pretty basic there but it's really really important now there is something that i like here that's great i like that there's a contact form here right away that they can fill out i like that there's a phone number here that makes it very easy to call on mobile so there's a lot of good stuff going on here that's great the only thing i would say about and this is purely from a conversion rate optimization standpoint this lead form is blending in with the background so it doesn't really stand out a lead form should really stand out when someone is on this page because you want their eyes to be drawn to it but when you look at this page everything's kind of blending in and more importantly you don't want your headings to be the same color as your call to action and although it changes up upon hovering there's still a lot of the same colors here and the problem is that you're not creating contrast and the key to making a form really pop and really making people want to fill it out is creating contrast on the page so this is the most critical element of the page so it should really have a lot of contrast and this actually will apply to the phone number as well which is also the same color as everything else so you know your two primary conversion points above the fold need to really have a lot of contrast so you can get drive more conversions so not an seo thing but it is a part of seo because there is maybe some possibility that google can track goal completions and it's hard to really know if it's true or not but um you know google is analyzing how people interact websites all the time so if they're looking at 10 pages competing for the same keyword and five of those pages never get any conversions then they may say you know maybe this page isn't the best for the searchers so it's probably likely hard to prove like i said but it's likely that they can see if goal completions are happening so therefore conversion rate optimization may actually impact seo so something to think about there but anyway that's the first part of this and then as we scroll down this is probably not ideal for readability um you know just having these huge blocks of text um and then also the headings are the same color as the call to actions not ideal so a way the way to fix this is to fix the design so instead of making it these huge blocks of text you could do a left right format which would have you know text here and then an image and then text here and then an image and that helps break it up and make it easier to read and then another part of this is if you're going to have these sections here on the home page you need to make each section needs to have its own call to action because when you look at these these are actually linked to other pages and these links you don't even know that there are links in the first place and so this isn't really built for users this is built to try to manipulate google's rankings and uh it's not ideal and this stuff just it doesn't work it's much better to build a page that's built for users instead of building a page that's built to manipulate google's algorithms so this needs to be restructured the internal linking strategies need to be changed and plus you know linking with these keyword rich internal anchors isn't really going to do much because they're already in the navigation with pretty much the same anchor text so you're not really getting any benefit by doing this so just something to think about there and then as we scroll down you know once again hard with the readability here it's everything's all blended together the phone number here isn't linked so that would force someone to actually have to type the phone number into their phone um which isn't ideal so and then as we scroll down you know the one thing i do like is that there's a lot of content which is good because that's going to be really a big deciding factor between you know multiple people competing but there's a lot of room for improvement here as far as design and user experience so and then right here we have some testimonials which is great i love putting testimonials on transactional pages so this is excellent once again you know maybe formatting could be improved a little bit and also when you have testimonials it's best to try to get pictures of the individuals people buy from people so we want to have a lot of faces here that's that's important looks like we have some sort of lead magnet or something of that nature but then we have two of them so if we really want to probably improve the conversion rates on one or the other we'd probably want to focus on one instead of having both because now we're creating some decision fatigue here and i like this a section that where you can basically explain why they should work with this attorney i it's something that i do recommend with a lot of transactional pages to add more content so it's definitely a good thing so yeah this this is good for the most part i think the formatting can be improved for readability reasons we always want to focus on that left right format or using sections to break up the content so it's easier to read because people when they read online they skim they don't read word for word and typically what they'll do is they'll read headlines and then they'll go back and read the rest but that's only if it's readable and it seems like it's worth reading now when you look at this it's so there's so many different formats going on so many so much bolding and underlining and different colors it needs to be refined a little bit more and once again you know some contrast issues here you have you have headlines that are orange and then you have call to actions that are also orange so the contrast is going to create issues um and then these this is not linked again and this is not linked down here as well so yeah those are some things that you know this this page has a lot of room for improvement uh but it definitely has you know a good foundation uh for good on-page optimization now we can look at some other things like um we'll go down here in the footer and it looks like the address is in the footer which is good so this will help certainly with keeping the nap or name address and phone number information consistent but once again the phone number is not linked here in the footer so i'm assuming what happened here is that you know they assumed because this was linked here in the in the navigation that you know they wouldn't need to do the others but if you're gonna have a phone number on the page then it should be linked and then you know one other thing we can look for is if we examine this we can see if they have schema markup and it doesn't look like this has any schema markup i mean i could of course run this through a schema markup tool and see if they have it but it doesn't look like they do so one other thing to take this page to another level is to add some schema markup to this some structured data i would consider adding a video to this page um you could put it above the fold which would then help you increase dwell time help you build a relationship quicker with prospects and it helps you differentiate yourself from other attorneys because most of them are probably not going to have videos so having a really high quality video that explains your unique value proposition and the results that you've gotten for your clients is a pretty big deal so i mean it helps from an seo perspective too so that's one thing and then if we look at just the general keyword placement and density uh we'll look at chicago there are some challenges here so first of all um putting chicago car accident lawyer and then putting chicago fall down lawyer you're starting to cannibalize the primary keyword target of this page which is just personal injury so you want to keep this very very structured and very specific to whatever that primary target is so i would avoid talking about these other things especially using a geo-targeted modifier like that so you'd want to use chicago fall down lawyer or chicago car accident lawyer on those pages instead of starting to place them here because now we're starting to get into some uh murky water with that so we want to keep everything extremely targeted that's really important and then this is just kind of it's just stuffing keywords really and it's not necessary you really only need to have your primary keyword target in the h1 tag maybe in the first you know h2 tag and then just sprinkle it a couple times but you don't you don't need to beat this over optimized to rank and instead what you want to do is focus on building an incredible user experience on this page everything else will work out and then of course you need to acquire links the right way so yeah just making a really great page for users and then placing your keywords in the most important positions is far more important than just stuffing the same keyword multiple times on the page so those are just a few things that i noticed right off the bat now of course you'd want to go page by page and go through the same analysis of every single one but as you can tell you know on-page optimization is much more than just placing keywords in fact a lot of good on-page optimization is actually restructuring pages and making them better for users and most importantly making them better for conversions so those are the seven high impact seo audit items you need to tackle if you want better rankings and more traffic for your company's website or your clients websites so if you enjoyed this video please like it hit the bell notification and subscribe to my channel because you'll get first access when i publish a new video just like this one and also if you have any questions whatsoever please leave it below thank you so much for watching and i'll see you in the next video