Whether it’s for help with their injury legal matters or advice on estate planning issues, people are turning to the web to find local law firms. When people begin searching for local businesses in their area, they tend to do multiple searches. They might search for a list of law firms and then search for specific information about each. For example, they might try to identify which one has experience handling legal matters like theirs.
Last month, Google introduced Place Search, a new type of localized search result that sorts information around local places.
These new results are marked with red pins, and contain relevant information and links from across the web. Now, local legal services searchers can see location and contact information right from the results page. In addition, searchers can see place information gathered from a variety of other sources all in one place.
In the above example, users can see that this lawyer serves injury victims, and they can click yelp.com, to read reviews. Before this new update, the same search would return links with information about this law firm in different areas of the results page Now information is grouped conveniently to make it easier to digest and compare.
With Place Search, Google is dynamically connecting websites from all over the web with their corresponding real-world locations.
In short, local search marketing strategies are even more important than they were before. Law firms that have focused on traditional search engine optimization strategies, and ignored their local presence, may find themselves in much lower positions than they previously held. On the other hand, firms that focused on both traditional and local search strategies are likely to enjoy much greater search engine visibility for local searches.
As part of our continuing commitment to provide the most up-to-date information on law firm web strategy, we’re offering U.S. law firms a FREE Local Legal Web Audit. Let us show you the most important strategies necessary to remain competitive after Google’s Place Search update.