Optimizing URLs for your law firm is one of the most basic and essential initial steps when you’re optimizing your website. This usually pertains to URLs outside of your home page (practice area pages, service pages, and blog posts).
Search engines like Google take URLs in their ranking consideration and are high on the list of prioritizations (like titles, link building, content optimization and schema among others).
As with page titles, URLs help describe a web page to search engines and potential visitors, meaning they should make sense.
If you have a single location personal injury firm based in Portland, your URL should be something like this:
yourwebsite.com/portland-personal-injury
Here are some of the main factors to take into consideration when optimizing your URLs for your law firm:
Include Keywords
The first step is to think about what keywords you want to add to your URL. I’m assuming you’ve already done keyword research and based on that you’re going to build your titles, URLs, and meta descriptions (aka the structure of your website).
That means you know what keywords will be the perfect fit for what you are offering and what your potential clients search for.
In the case of this image, it’ll make the most sense to add a keyword that is:
yourdomain.com/portland-personal-injury-attorney
However, if your law firm only focuses on personal injury, you may use your home page to target these keywords, even if the name of your firm doesn’t include “personal injury” in the name of the firm.
If your firm has multiple practice areas, the best option is to create single keyword and location based URLs, that usually resembles the title.
Multilocation Law Firm URLs
If your firm has multiple cities and one practice area (let’s stick with personal injury for now), then the previous suggestion still applies but you’ll need to create one of these per location.
There are multiple ways to do this. One is a folder structure and the other one is the closest to the root domain strategy.
Folder URL structure
This URL optimization structure is organized. And if you have or plan to have a large website with multiple locations and one or more practice areas this may be the best option.
The idea is to add a city folder and then the practice areas following it.
- yourwebsite.com/portland/personal-injury-attorney
- yourwebsite.com/salem/personal-injury-attorney
- yourwebsite.com/houston/personal-injury-attorney
I’m assuming “Salem personal injury attorney” and “Houston personal injury attorney” are the best keywords to target, but they may be:
Salem personal injury law firm
Houston personal injury lawyer
But this is more of a “keyword research” strategy that will allow to build the URLs.
Close to the domain URL structure
This is another structure you may have seen ranking on Google. Instead of creating folders, the idea is to create a descriptive URL that is only one level after the URL instead of two levels like the ones previously built.
Think of folders as levels
level0.com/level1/level2/….
The format is like this:
- yoruwebsite.com/portland-personal-injury-attorney
- yourwebsite.com/salem-personal-injury-attorney
- yourwebsite.com/houston-personal-injury-attorney
While this works and can rank well, it can get messy when building large websites, but if you only have one practice area, but multiple cities, this could be a good strategy for your law firm.
As a general rule, don’t include location in blog posts
Unless you’re talking about specific laws pertaining to a city, or something that is city specific (or State specific), the best idea to tackle this is creating the url structure focusing on the keyword and then adding schema markup for the URL.
For example, if you write a blog post about what to do after a car accident (something that people usually search for), instead of creating a URL:
- yourwebsite.com/what-to-do-after-a-car-accident-in-portland
- yourwebsite.com/what-to-do-after-a-car-accident-in-salem
- yourwebsite.com/what-to-do-after-a-car-accident-in-houston
Create a page that is:
yourwebsite.com/what-to-do-after-a-car-accident
And then add schema for all the locations you target (this is a bit more advanced, so I’m adding a short snippet of the whole schema).
“address”: {
“@type”: “PostalAddress”,
“addressLocality”: “Mexico Beach”,
“addressRegion”: “FL”,
“streetAddress”: “3102 Highway 98”
}
The best way to add this schema to the content is to define who wrote the content (person or business) and then have the multiple locations where this business or person does business.
Again, this is pretty advanced and not many law firm SEO agencies out there are doing this (we’re the first ones writing about it – if you read someone else doing this it’s likely a copy-cat 😉 ).
Also in general, if you have good schema across the website, this will be built in and you don’t need to do it for every single article.
Adding Location specific schema to all your blog posts will do.
Keep URLs Short
The URL of a web page should be as descriptive and brief as possible. A short URL is quicker to type and read. Also, the fewer the words the more value each word receives from a search engine spider. Too many similar words in a URL can be viewed as keyword stuffing and could result in a drop in search rankings.
For the most part this is the best approach.
So if your Title contains a differentiator or call to action:
Portland Personal Injury Attorney: 50 years of combined experience.
keep the URL short as explained before:
✅ yourwebsite.com/portland-personal-injury-attorney
instead of
❌ yourwebsite.com/portland-personal-injury-attorney-50-years-of-combined-experience
And that’s pretty much it.
Interested in building an SEO strategy that grows your practice?