Personal Injury Attorney SEO (Search engine optimization) is the process of increasing rankings and traffic for a law firm’s website in organic search engine results, giving exposure to potential clients who are actively searching for a lawyer or answers to their injury related questions.

If you were referred here by an existing client and wish to skip reading, contact Len here.

About Telapost: Telapost is a boutique SEO agency for personal injury lawyers owned by Len and his lean team of employees and contractors. We work with the most highly trafficked personal injury law firm websites in the world. We have clients in several of the largest cities in the USA and our clients include solo operations to law firms with several attorneys in multiple states. I currently monitor over 10,000 legal pages in search results and understand who, how, what, why and when people read personal injury content.

Chances are I already know your city and competitors like the back of my hand. If I don’t, I’ll be happy to provide you with a full breakdown of precisely who is doing what, how and why. If you’d like to speak about your law firm’s Internet presence, contact me today for a free and confidential consultation.

A comprehensive guide to Personal Injury SEO

Most people find this page after getting jerked around by the “other” agencies for years or even decades on end, so let me be clear. I offer the opposite. My only contract with you is one of exclusivity. And as of 2018, I am positioning myself with the top rated firms in every major city in the US. If you have received lackluster results from past Internet marketing efforts, are sick of being lied to, rank on page 3, are throwing money away one click at a time with PPC, have suffered an algorithmic penalty or a manual action, need content, are a marketing manager looking for SEO, have gotten your feet wet in SEO or simply don’t know where to begin, this page is for you.

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Telapost’s Existing Personal Injury Attorney Clients and Experience

My name is Len and you can read more about me below. I work directly with my clients and have a team of both contractors and employees.

Telapost (Latin for “the Future of the Web”) works with:

  • The most highly trafficked personal injury lawyer website in America.
  • Larger / VC backed law firms seeking product liability and mass tort cases.
  • “Regular” firms, including solos, seeking automobile accidents and premises liability cases.

As of 2017 the business has mostly involved into working exclusively with one highly rated attorney per city. We have clients in California, Washington, Idaho, Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Kentucky, Indiana, Brisbane and the UK.

I’ve started nearly every trend related to e-cig explosions and Uber injuries, so you’ve probably either seen my content or even borrowed ideas from it. We’ve obtained links from government organizations, local bars, newspapers, local colleges and more. Some of my clients are law firms who also practice workers’ compensation, criminal defense or bankruptcy law, and others focus on one specific thing such as bicycle accidents.

We clean up the mess left behind form other SEO companies, work with local SEO, Google My Business, can claim business listings, create content, build new websites, perform a migration from an old site to WordPress, have experience with Spanish and Russian multilingual sites and have seen everything under the sun when it comes to the unique niche of personal injury lawyer SEO.

SEO for Personal Injury Attorneys and Law Firms

Personal Injury Law Firm SEO is fun, enjoyable, rewarding and competitive. In very few niches can you find so many different tactics at work. Some people follow Google’s best practices; others cheat.

I personally specialize in White Hat SEO and as a consultant in some extremely competitive niches I can provide risk assessments. I built web presences for people holistically in a way that they will last people a lifetime. If you want someone to cheat and rank you in 90 days, I am not your guy. I understand how that is done, I just don’t personally do it. I have also helped lawyers recover from penalties, and usually have to clean up the mess their previous SEO firm left behind. Yes, sometimes I have to undo the work people have just had done.

There are 3 major aspects to search engine optimization for personal injury attorneys.

  1. Technical SEO. In a nutshell, this is having an easy to navigate site with unique titles, meta descriptions, that is responsive / works on cell phones, is fast, easy to use, etc. If you’re running WordPress, about 95% of this is already done for you. In the vast majority of cases, any problems with on-site SEO I can easily correct in month #1.
  2. Authority. The authority of your site determines how well its content is going to display and where it will rank. There are many, many signals determining a site’s authority, with links (aka backlinks) being, hands down, the most important factor here. I avoid linkbuilding whenever possible, although, it is mandatory in the world of personal injury attorneys. I have the backlink portfolio here from personal injury attorney websites all over the United States and Australia. As a writer, I also have access to a lot of injury related websites. As someone who works in the legal arena, the places I have to obtain links for law firm sites grows daily. The problem most people have with links is where they get them from. Links can be useless or even cause great harm. 90% of the time, when I take on a personal injury client, their previous SEO company has either done nothing or just listed the law firm with tons of useless directories. This hasn’t helped in over a decade; most SEO agencies do this just to show they’ve been “working on it”.
  3. Content and topical relevance. With no content you can’t rank, with good content you can rank in combination with authority & technical SEO. With great content everything is better, as described above.

If you have questions about SEO feel free to ask me.

Content Marketing and SEO Copywriting for Personal Injury Websites

Good content results in cases.

If you use Google search often, you have already read content created by me or my team on multiple occasions. Over the years, we’ve been first to cover everything from e-cig explosions, Ridesharing, Snapchat accidents and drone injuries. I’ve even discovered problems in vehicles before recalls. I also started the “fad” of huge, comprehensive pages of content which is now copied by attorneys worldwide. Thanks to being ahead of the curve, our content has been referenced by media outlets such as ABC, CNN and Yahoo.

The biggest problem people have with content is they hear a handful of “experts” say that “you need content”, then they hire a random legal copywriting service which puts total junk on their blog about how cigarettes cause cancer or that Honda has an airbag recall. This is lazy, useless, and the people creating this content know they are providing a disservice yet they continue to do so. Now if you’re in Louisville Kentucky, better content ideas would be covering TARC accidents or “Pedestrian injuries on Second Street and Broadway”. If you’re in Seattle, content should cover I90 crashes, carpool injuries and Uber liability.

Done correctly, content will kill 3 birds with 1 stone:

  • Show up in search results and answer questions potential clients are asking Google
  • Increase rankings of internal pages (see my case study on how this works)
  • Potentially be linked to, increasing the overall power, authority and search rankings of your site for its topic.

As you can see, the bottom line is the goal of content is to obtain cases, not just to “have content”. Nobody is ever going to just grab a cup of coffee and browse your website and go read your blog. In fact, most people landing on an article spend about 19 seconds on it before making contact, and about 65% of those people browse via their cell phone.

We are able to assist with:

  • Out of the box content (needed in the most competitive niches to potentially obtain backlinks for SEO)
  • Breaking News content: Need someone to monitor the news in your area and get content up just after major accidents occur? We are available.
  • Legal information content: We create larger pieces and landing pages such as automobile accident pages, and can cover more complicated medical content such as pages on hypoxia.
  • Hyper-local content
  • Blog content: Covering any of the above
  • Data visualizations
  • Infographics
  • YouTube video content ideas

Additional SEO & Exposure for Websites which already rank

Perhaps the biggest missed opportunity I see in the world of Internet marketing is high ranking websites.

Huh?

Yes, that is right. Sometimes, a website that performs well and is the envy of all the competition is leaving money on the table.

For example, in the world of personal injury attorneys, in each city, there is often 1 law firm which ranks higher than the others for a variety of “keywords”. This is usually because they have some powerful links to their nicely optimized site. They rank for the big money keywords such as “personal injury attorney Cityname” and then they kick back and wait for the phone to ring.

This is a huge mistake.  Don’t get me wrong, being at the top for one good term is valuable. But I’d rather rank for 1,000 random search terms than 1 “good” term. Once you have a site that performs well, the most important thing you can possibly do is start adding content to it on a consistent basis. It is great to rank for “personal injury attorney”, but why not rank for other key phrases which people near you are searching for? Examples of this are:

  • accidents with drivers with no insurance
  • accidents with DUI drivers
  • 18 wheeler accidents

In addition, high ranking pages can be drastically improved.

Let’s say you have a page which performs well, and it is the “bus accident attorney” page. If you improve and expand on this high ranking page with additional content, such as the names of bus lines, your page will then rank for “Greyhound accident attorney”, etc.

A page which performs well for “truck accidents” can be expanded upon to also rank for “18 wheeler accidents” or “big rig accidents”.

These are just a few of the invaluable opportunities that a content expert brings to the table. I have done this myself in my last 3 businesses. As a very brief (not so great) example, this site- the home page is read about 18 times each month, yet, annual traffic is 1.2million views. If I relied on the home page for web traffic, I would get 216 views instead of 1,200,000. Finding someone with this experience is rare; I craft content that ranks on page 1 of Google on a daily basis and have been creating content since 1992.

Personal Injury Web Site Designs

WordPress is hands down the best content management system that any personal injury attorney can use. That said, I do work with FindLaw and Justia websites. Adding a blog to them is tough or impossible, but, if you absolutely insist on staying with one of these sites, I can indeed work with it.

Migrations: We do provide WordPress web design and migrations. If you were with an SEO agency that put you on a proprietary content management system, you’re not alone. They may have told you that you needed this because it is safe or converts well, but their true intention was make leaving them difficult. We are able to convert the site to WordPress without reinventing the wheel. We then set you up with your own web hosting account with automatic backups for as little as $4/month.

Social Media for PI Attorneys

In the vast majority of cases, we advise against the use of Social Media unless you are a special case and can handle it in house. There are a few ways it helps and does not help.

  • Social media does not improve SEO. That’s right, likes on Facebook and shares on Instagram drive almost no traffic and they most definitely do not impact where you rank on Google (proof).
  • Social media can be used to network with other attorneys and professionals. If you have a whole bunch of free time to find other attorneys who tweet as much as the President, go for it! Who knows what could become of that relationship.

Graphics, Infographics, Video, and Reputation Marketing

I have solutions for creating Vimeo and YouTube videos for personal injury attorneys, infographics for SEO value, and shareable images.

I am also experimenting with ways to reach previous clients and encourage positive reviews. More on this soon.

Clients not accepted

Telapost works with exclusively with one personal injury attorney per city. Unless you tell me “hey Len, my buddy down the street needs the same thing I’m getting”, I will turn away their business. I can keep your inquiry confidential- it is no secret that at any moment most personal injury attorneys are contemplating how they will acquire their next case. For example, I hear from attorneys in Los Angeles weekly.

We also work very well with trial attorneys who already have a good reputation. That said we are totally happy working with brand new solo operations as long as they’re obtaining cases through a variety of sources. While everything we do here is cost effective, nothing we do here happens overnight and SEO is much more of a supplement than a single source of leads.

A brief story on how I became the Personal Injury Attorney SEO

In the late 1980s, around the age of 10, I jumped online using a 300baud modem. By 13 I was hosting some of the first Internet services. I went on to be a network engineer and then set my sights on laptop repair. I built out a business and over 13 years build a web presence that once outranked IBM for “thinkpad repair”. People from all over the planet sent my business things to fix. I sold the business in 2012. I have a similar story for my next 2 businesses. Over the years, after serving approximately 37,000 clients, hundreds of business owners approached me and told me 2 things of great importance.

  1. “I found you in Google Search, so you must be good.” I didn’t realize how much people trust Google, but, when you think about it, people have spent over a decade asking Google for stock quotes, where to get pizza, how to get home, and what to do when they’ve been in a car accident. People trust search results (more than they should).
  2. “Len, I need this for MY business”. Upon entering my office, they would see hundreds of machines around, FedEx coming in and out, people walking around with headsets, phones ringing, credit cards being processed, and they asked me how I advertise. The truth is I spent well over $100,000 on AdWords until I realized the value of content and SEO myself. I’ve experimented with search since before Google existed and watched their entire journey. I have used phone books, been on radio shows, done radio advertising, phone book ads, print ads, direct mail, and more. For a service like personal injury, one of the best places to be is in search. Nobody wants a personal injury attorney. Sure, getting handed a million bucks is cool and all but I bet most people would rather keep their hand. Well, at least I would.

I began Telapost to assist other business owners. After working with people selling rock salt, plumbing, roofing, optometrists, veterinarians and more, a personal injury attorney asked me if I could help him market his site. I did. It worked. I couldn’t find a GOOD content writer and began writing. That worked too. Then he referred me to attorney #2 and the rest is history. Lots of injury lawyers love studying SEO and when they being digging, usually after getting no results with their previous firm, they stumble across my site or one of my case studies and make contact.