Introduction to SEO for Personal Injury Lawyers
Personal injury law is one of the most competitive sectors for SEO. We work with hundreds of clients across diverse verticals, and 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 marketing endeavor and fuel growth.
This guide aims to 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 for deploying these tactics 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 a listed keyword. The higher the KD percentage, the harder it will be to achieve strong rankings.
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!
In comparison, if you were seeking 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
Personal injury lawyers compete aggressively for SEO rankings because there is significant financial incentive. With average settlements at $52,900 (Martindale-Nolo Research) and standard contingency fees between 33% and 40%, each client represents approximately $17,000-$21,000 in revenue. Nail salons, on the other hand, charge $25 for a manicure and $45 for a pedicure, which is why the cost per click is so much lower.
This is why personal injury law firms are willing to spend $127 per click. Converting significant cases can yield a positive ROI. However, this profitability depends entirely on maintaining strong conversion rates and bringing in strong cases.
The advantage of SEO is that when you rank organically, it eliminates the cost per click entirely, drastically improving profitability. You can then take this excess profit, invest it into PPC, and be patient for the big case.
Personal injury attorneys are often discouraged when they don’t rank on page one of Google. Many don’t understand authority score, which is critical in determining whether they have a realistic chance of ranking well.
Authority score is determined by how many credible sites link to your site. For personal injury lawyers we work with, 20-30 is usually the authority score needed to rank on page one, but this can vary depending on the competitiveness of your local market.
Elk & Elk is one of Ohio’s largest and oldest personal injury law firms. Its authority score of 34 is strong for a local business.
**Note: This data comes from SEMRush
It’s no coincidence that when you do a Google search for Columbus Personal Injury Lawyer, Elk & Elk populates in top positioning.
Elk & Elk has some seriously strong backlinks pointing to its site.
- 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 bolster their authority score. Below is what their backlink profile looks like, where you can see news publications and highly authoritative sites linking back:
Later in this blog, we will discuss how to boost your authority score, one of the most common questions we receive from PI attorneys.
Defining Your Desired Markets
Personal injury law is a localized business. Most firms target city-level keywords (e.g., Columbus Personal Injury Lawyer, Houston Car Accident Attorney, etc.) because people search at the city level, not the suburb, for professional service businesses like attorneys.
The search behavior for lawyers differs from convenience-based businesses. If you want a personal injury lawyer, you’re willing to travel once for your consultation, even to the opposite side of town, to get the best representation. For a dry cleaner, however, you need a place that’s convenient since you’re dropping off clothes weekly.
Things get tricky for attorneys with regional ambitions. Many want to rank in multiple cities across their state (Columbus, Dayton, Toledo, Akron, etc.). Our advice: focus on dominating rankings in your primary location before expanding your SEO efforts. This builds authority and creates a strong foundation for expansion. For multi-location firms, the strategy differs significantly from single-location practices, as we’ll demonstrate below.
Structuring Your Site Properly
Think of your website as a ladder. At the top is your primary business descriptor—in this case, “Personal Injury Lawyer.” All the steps leading up are your practice areas, with the most profitable ones (truck accidents, auto accidents) near the top and lower-revenue services (like dog bites) toward the bottom.
For a single location, your goal is to optimize each rung of this ladder. The homepage should target your primary descriptor term: “Personal Injury Lawyer in [Your City].” Each practice area needs its own dedicated page, properly optimized for those specific services. For single-location law firms, every page should consistently reinforce your primary location. Below is an illustration to showcase this:
For law firms with multiple 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 essential for personal injury lawyers looking to expand their reach. For example, a Nashville law firm seeking to attract Knoxville clients would create a dedicated Knoxville page on its website. Many firms establish satellite offices (often using services like Regus) to secure a Google Business Profile in these additional locations.
However, it’s important to note that Google requires physical locations to be staffed during business hours. While service area pages can help your expansion strategy, I recommend focusing first on dominating rankings in your primary market.
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 to earn better rankings. Google rewards pages that demonstrate expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. Here are proven tips that have worked well for our personal injury clients
- Make sure the content comes from your attorneys since Google values expert-written content.
- Include a video of your attorney sharing their expertise on this 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 site after the settlement).
- List out the steps and timeline a client should expect when contacting your firm. It’s important to set realistic expectations.
- Include bios on the page of your personal injury lawyers who specialize in this practice.
- Include a section that differentiates your firm within this practice area. For Donahey Law Firm, we outlined on their car accident page how they have attorneys with prior experience representing insurers and corporations, which provides valuable insight into how the defense side works against injury claims.
- Include an FAQ where you list out some of the most frequently asked questions from clients.
- Include local information. If you’re discussing motorcycle accidents, talk about the most dangerous roads and intersections in your local market.
- Include reviews and testimonials specific to the practice area.
Ensure content is unique across multiple locations. If you’re building car accident pages for different markets, avoid duplicate content issues by incorporating location-specific information, statistics, and case studies for each area.
Google Business Profile Optimization
The 3-pack is the prominent placement at the top of Google where reviews and address are prominently featured. The 3-Pack results get 44% of actual clicks on Google’s results page [source], which is why it’s so coveted amongst PI attorneys.
- Get consistent reviews
- You’ll notice that business that rank in the local pack have a large number of reviews and there’s positive sentiment about the firm.
- Pick a prime location
- The location of your business matters. If you’re in a suburb of Columbus, like Westerville, your chances of ranking for “Columbus Personal Injury Lawyer” drop exponentially. This isn’t to say 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 one of the most important ranking factors for Google Business Profile. For personal injury lawyers, this choice is straightforward: your primary category should be “Personal Injury Attorney.” Secondary categories can include “Law Firm,” “Trial Attorney,” or “Legal Services.” While these secondary categories are broad and won’t provide significant additional benefit, they do help round out your profile. Surprisingly, many personal injury attorneys select the wrong primary category, which significantly hinders their local search visibility. Getting this fundamental element right is an easy win for your local SEO strategy.
- Other Optimization Techniques
- Represent your law firm strongly with professional photos and videos.
- If you have multiple locations, each location should have a unique 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
If you’re investing time and financial resources into SEO, measuring success is crucial. When you’re seeing an improvement in SEO keyword ranking, this often results in more organic traffic and new cases. We check these rankings for our clients on a weekly basis, but you can set up alerts to email you for big increases or decreases in rank and visibility.
- Use an SEO keyword tracking software like SEMRush to monitor your keyword rankings versus competitors
- This will allow your firm to have a benchmark of where you started and hopefully see improvement over time once SEO changes have been implemented
- You can add tags to your keywords based on the different practice areas to gauge your visibility for auto accident versus medical malpractice, which we recommend doing.
Generating Backlinks
Blogging Strategy
We advise personal injury law firms to focus on creating “link-worthy” blog content that serves two strategic purposes:
- Building Authority: Write compelling, data-driven content that attracts natural backlinks from credible sources. For example, an article analyzing the most dangerous freeways in Arizona based on crash data could become a reference point for news outlets reporting on accidents in those areas.
- Capturing Early Research: Target long-tail queries that potential clients search during the early stages of their research process. For example, “how to deal with a truck company’s insurance in Ohio after an accident.” These informational posts can establish your firm as a helpful resource before prospects are ready to hire an attorney.
Case Study: After a tragic ride malfunction at the Ohio State Fair resulted in fatalities, one of our clients published an in-depth analysis of the incident and safety implications. This timely, authoritative content earned backlinks from several news stations, significantly boosting the firm’s domain authority.
A diversified blogging strategy should balance these approaches, creating both linkable assets that strengthen your site’s authority and informational content that captures potential clients earlier in their journey.
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 can serve as a valuable source of local information, which Google likes [source].
- When you have strong directory exposure, this can help you generate quality referral traffic and even help you populate in AI search results.
Tactics to Deploy:
- We recommend creating free profiles on many directory sites. As we alluded to earlier, 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 be fruitful.
- We recommend doing a Google search in your local market for queries like “Cleveland Personal Injury Lawyer” and “Cleveland Car Accident Lawyer.”
- Find the directories that have high exposure on Google and determine if it’s within your budget to advertise 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
In Closing
Personal injury law SEO is ultra-competitive. To rank well in this sector, you must have the right framework and execute flawlessly. You can’t be throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks.
Our hope with this extensive SEO guide was to help you understand what it takes to surpass the competition on Google.
Of course, there are other SEO tactics, such as technical improvements, page load speed, title tags, and meta descriptions (to name a few). These are more general and will be the same for any client, but should not be overlooked.
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!