SEO for Personal Injury Attorneys

Los Angeles Personal Injury SEO Rankings – January 2017 Edition

I have spoken to dozens of attorneys throughout Los Angeles County over the last 2 years. There are so many lawyers in the area I have them on standby. Last week an attorney told me he may relocate to San Diego as the competition is so freaking tough in LA. And that is true – two of the attorneys on the front page for major key phrases were put there by me.

A lot has changed since I first did an SEO analysis of LA injury firms in 2015. Here is the good and bad news.

  • Getting to the front page takes time. The rules of SEO do not apply here. Simply adding HTTPS to your site or structuring it a certain way means squat. You need links. You need new links. You need old links. The best links in the world do not work unless they’re aged.
  • You need links. Lots and lots of links. Your SEO company sucks and can’t build them for you. You need real outreach at this point – think luck and/or public relations. Just running a blog with some creativity and building a quantity of mediocre links is not going to cut it any more. You need links from high ranking sites, used in context. Think Forbes, CNN, KTLA, CA.GOV, California State University. If you do not have content on your site their journalists and organizations can reference, you have no chance.
  • You may need to cheat. I do not advise it but unless you are exceptional, you may have to bend the rules a little. Some law firms blatantly disregard the guidelines of the search engines and openly manipulate them. Others are more on the fine line of SEO.
  • Rankings change often. In saturated markets like this, you can’t “be number one” permanently. You can be #3 one day and #9 the next. I personally think it is because even Google knows it can’t just “pick a winner”. Then again the algorithm changes hundreds of times each year so who knows. But I DO know that rankings fluctuate once a week here while remaining stagnant in towns 50 miles away. Interesting.

Attorneys in smaller cities have it pretty good. If you are in Lexington Kentucky where most of the lawyers are still advertising in phone books (lol) you can blast your website with links and content and get cases. They are fewer and far between in Los Angeles. The websites I work with – if we add a page about “exploding iPhones”, 4 other attorneys will copy it in the next week.

Who is Number One?

If you are familiar with my normal personal injury coverage, you know that I usually list the top ranking sites. For example, see my article on San Deigo personal injury rankings. I am not going to cover it in today’s rant.

I will say the top players still own the “personal injury” keyword, which is highly correlated with ranking in local search, aka the 3 Pack. These attorneys are Wilshire, Ehline, Reeves Law Group, Panish Shea & Boyle LLP, and Normandie. I know how all of these sites got to be on page #1 as I have seen their every move for the last 5 years. If you’d like to know how just schedule a private consultation with me.

Here is a screenshot of the local pack for "Los Angeles Personal Injury Lawyer" as of January 26, 2017.

Here is a screenshot of the local pack for “Los Angeles Personal Injury Lawyer” as of January 26, 2017.

As for other keywords, it is all over. “personal injury” is just one keyword. There are thousands of great terms to rank for which can result in cases. “Car accident lawyer” is another tough one. I know from first hand experience this term doesn’t result in the traffic most people would think. In addition to the other firms, other winners here are The Law Offices of Steers and Associates, Cellino & Barnes, and Farar & Lewis.

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This site exists to inform personal injury attorneys on how to do search engine optimization (SEO). My name is Len and my telephone number is 919-475-1883

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