The Complete SEO Strategy That Gets PI Attorneys More High-Value Cases
We work with hundreds of clients across many verticals, and when it comes to SEO competitiveness, personal injury is in the Top 5% of most competitive based on keyword difficulty and cost per click.
If you rank well on Google, this will be your PI firm’s most profitable way to get more cases.
This guide will help you understand the most important aspects of SEO, what to focus on, and why your competitors may be outranking you. After reading this, you’ll have a clear strategy to rank better on Google search.
Competitiveness of Personal Injury Law SEO
According to SEMRush, Keyword Difficulty (KD) shows how hard it would be for a website to rank organically in the top 10 Google for the keyword in question. The higher the KD percentage, the harder it will be to rank.
In the example below, you’ll see that the keyword difficulty for a personal injury lawyer in Houston is in the 70s, which is very high. The CPC (cost per click) is $126.78, which is exceptionally high!
On the other end of the spectrum, for a nail salon in Houston, the keyword difficulty is 12, and the average cost per click is $0.80. Let’s dive into why personal injury law is so competitive.
Why Personal Injury Lawyers Are Willing to Pay So Much For First Page Exposure
Exposure on the top of Google is very lucrative for PI attorneys. An average settlement is $52,900 (Martindale-Nolo Research) and standard contingency fees between 33% and 40%. This means each new client can generate an average of $17,000-$21,000 in revenue. Nail salons charge $25 for a manicure and $45 for a pedicure, which is why the average cost per click is so much lower.
It makes sense that personal injury law firms are willing to spend $127 per click on Google Ads when each case can generate thousands.
SEO dramatically improves profitability because if you rank organically, you pay $0 when someone clicks to your page vs. $127 with your paid ad.
An understanding of authority score is needed to determine if your personal injury firm has a chance of ranking well.
For personal injury lawyers we work with, 20-30 is usually the authority score needed to rank on page one. This can vary depending on the competitiveness of your local market, but this is a good benchmark.
Elk & Elk is one of Ohio’s most well-known personal injury law firms. They have an authority score of 34, which is strong for a local business.
**Note: This data comes from SEMRush
It’s not surprising that Elk & Elk populates at the top of Google for Columbus Personal Injury Lawyer.
Elk & Elk has some great backlinks pointing to its site, which are a huge factor in overall authority score.
- They inked an NIL deal with the Ohio State Women’s basketball team, which generated strong PR
- They are a sponsor of the Blue Jackets, Columbus’ NHL team. This has led to features on the team’s website about its military partnership.
I bring this up because these credible sites link back to Elk & Elk, helping with their authority score. Below is what their backlink profile looks like:
Later on, we’ll talk about how to boost your authority score (one of our most common questions from PI attorneys).
Getting Into the Strategy:
Defining Your Markets
Most PI firms should target city-level keywords (ex: Columbus Personal Injury Lawyer, Houston Car Accident Attorney) because people search at the city level, not the suburb level for a service like this.
Think about a lawyer vs. a convenience-based business. If you want a great personal injury lawyer, you’d likely be willing to travel to get the best representation. You don’t need to find a PI attorney in your direct suburb. For a dry cleaner, you’d likely want something very close to your home. I’d search for an attorney in Columbus but a dry cleaner in Westerville, for example.
Quick Tip: If you’re aiming to rank in multiple cities across your state (Columbus, Dayton, Toledo, Akron, etc.), our advice is to focus on dominating your primary location first. If you’re located in Columbus, focus on Columbus. Build the foundation and then think about expansion. For firms with multiple physical locations, that’s a different strategy, which we’ll get into later.
Structuring Your Site
Think of your website like a ladder (my favorite analogy!). At the top is the over-arching term for your business. In this case, “Personal Injury Lawyer.” All the steps leading up the ladder are your practice areas. The most profitable services (truck accidents, auto accidents) should go near the top.
For a single location, the goal is to optimize each rung of the ladder. The homepage should target your primary business term: “Personal Injury Lawyer in [Your City].” Each practice area needs its own dedicated page, optimized for the service in [Your City]. Each page should focus on your main location.
For law firms with multiple physical offices, your approach should be different:
- Make your homepage focus on the whole state or keep it general
- Create a dedicated page for each city where you have an office (example: “Akron Personal Injury Lawyer”)
- For each city, create separate pages for each practice area
- Yes, this creates many pages, but it’s worth it when done properly
Let’s look at Elk & Elk to see how a firm with seven locations structured their site for SEO success.
Service Area Pages
Service area pages are great for personal injury lawyers to expand their reach. If a firm in Nashville wants to attract Knoxville clients, they can create a dedicated Knoxville page on the website. In order to create service area pages, you want to make sure you can create unique content for this page. For example, you can highlight cases you’ve completed in the area to showcase your work in that city.
Tips for Optimizing Practice Area Pages
When creating practice area pages for car accidents, truck accidents, medical malpractice, etc., your content and user experience need to stand out from competitors. You want to show your expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. Here are tips that have worked well for our personal injury clients
- Make sure the content comes from your attorneys since Google values expert-written content. They are the content matter experts.
- Include a video of your attorney talking about the specific practice area.
- List out the different case results your firm has received from this specific practice area (for example, one of our PI attorney clients reached a $6 million verdict on a car accident case and we immediately added this to the car accident page on the site).
- List out the process for getting started with your firm and what a client should expect. This helps answer any questions up front.
- Include bios on the page of your lawyers who specialize in this area.
- Include a section about what makes your firm unique. For Donahey Law Firm’s car accident page, we mentioned their attorneys with prior experience representing insurers and corporations, which shows their expertise on the defense side against injury claims.
- Include an FAQ where you list out some of the most frequently asked questions from clients.
- Include local information. On a page about motorcycle accidents, talk about the most dangerous roads and intersections in your area.
- Include reviews and testimonials specific to the practice area.
Quick tip: If you’re building car accident pages for different markets, avoid duplicate content issues and make sure content on each page is unique. You can do this by adding location-specific information, stats, and case studies for each area.
Google Business Profile Optimization
The 3-pack is the area at the top of Google that shows reviews and address (with the map). The 3-Pack results get 44% of actual clicks on Google’s results page [source], which is why placement there is so important! Here are some tips for the 3-pack:
- Get consistent reviews
- Quantity of reviews and positive sentiment are both important.
- Pick a prime location
- The location of your business matters. If you office is in a suburb of Columbus, like Westerville, your chances of ranking for “Columbus Personal Injury Lawyer” drop. I’m not saying you should move locations to rank better but it helps. Learn more about the importance of proximity for Google Business Profile.
- Picking the right primary category
- Your primary category is a top ranking factor for the Google Business Profile. For personal injury lawyers, this choice is straightforward: your primary category should be “Personal Injury Attorney.” Secondary categories can be “Law Firm,” “Trial Attorney,” or “Legal Services.” Surprisingly, many personal injury attorneys pick the wrong primary category. This is some serious low-hanging fruit.
- Other Optimization Techniques
- Add professional photos and videos to your GBP
- If you have multiple locations, each location should have a unique phone number
- If you have multiple locations, each Google Business Profile should link to the location page, not the homepage.
We created a Google Business Profile checklist you can follow for many other optimization tips.
Measuring Success
Measuring success with SEO is critical to make sure you’re on the right track. An uptick in ranking often results in more organic traffic and new cases. We check rankings weekly for our clients.
- Use an SEO keyword tracking software like SEMRush to monitor your keyword rankings versus competitors.
- This will give you a benchmark of where you started and allow you to hopefully see improvement as you’re making changes.
- You can add tags to your keywords based to help with organization and to check visibility in different practice areas.
Generating Backlinks
Blogging Strategy
Create “link-worthy” blog content that serves two strategic purposes:
- Building Authority: If you write great content from an expert, this could attract natural backlinks from credible sources. For example, an article talking about the most dangerous freeways in Arizona based on crash data could be used by news outlets reporting on accidents in those areas.
- Capturing Early Research: Target long-tail queries that clients may search for while doing research. For example, “how to deal with a truck company’s insurance in Ohio after an accident.” This content is extremely useful to help answer questions and can establish your firm as a helpful resource.
- Have your team record common questions, which are great topics for blogs and can also be used as resources to send to prospective clients.
Case Study: One of our clients wrote an in-depth analysis of safety implications after a ride malfunction at the Ohio State Fair resulted in fatalities. This content received backlinks from several news stations.
Directory Exposure
Overview of Directories:
- A directory is a list of businesses in a specific market or industry. In the legal sector, think Super Lawyers, FindLaw, Justia, etc.
- Directories serve as a valuable source of local information, which Google likes [source].
- When you’re listed on directories, this can help you generate referral traffic and even help you populate in AI search results.
Tactics to Deploy:
- Create free profiles on many directory sites. This provides credible information about your firm in your local market.
- HERE is an example of what a profile looks like.
- In order to get top placement, you must pay, but this can make sense and be advantageous.
- Do a Google search in your local market for queries like “Cleveland Personal Injury Lawyer” and “Cleveland Car Accident Lawyer.”
- Find the directories that show at the top of Google and consider advertising on these directories.
- In the example below, Super Lawyers ranks well for “Cleveland Personal Injury Lawyer.”
- HERE is an example of what this directory page looks like
- Getting on this list could yield a better ROI than $500 or $1,000 allocated towards PPC and also has SEO benefits.
Related Article: How Directories Can Help You Rank in AI Search Results
Final Thoughts
Personal injury law SEO is super competitive. In order to rank well, you need the right strategy and execution. You can’t be throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks.
The purpose of this extensive SEO guide was to help you understand what it takes to rank well on Google and beat the competition. This gives you the framework you need to succeed.
Of course, there are other SEO tactics, such as technical improvements, page load speed, title tags, and meta descriptions (to name a few). These would be the same for any client, but make sure to include them as part of your SEO strategy.
Rather than paying $100 per click, you can hopefully take nuggets from this article, rank well, and drive more business to your personal injury law firm.
If you would like to schedule a free consultation, contact us today!