If you are an in-house legal digital marketer or search engine optimization (SEO) manager for a law firm, you know how much work it can be managing SEO strategy for just one client. Well, at 9Sail, we manage SEO for several dozen law firm clients and have gone through the trial and error process of evaluating (and using) a number of tools that help make our workload more manageable and scalable. So we’ve put together this handy list of the seven best tools for the in-house law firm SEO professional, drawn from our own experiences working with them.
Google Analytics and Search Console
Google Analytics and Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) are two free online tools provided by Google to track performance metrics for websites and other digital properties. These should be added and claimed as soon as possible in order to get an accurate understanding of your website.
Google Analytics
Beyond some of the standard SEO performance indicators like organic traffic, keyword position in search engine results pages (SERPs), impressions, and click-through rate (CTR), Google Analytics allows you to drill down to some very revealing data about how users interact with the pages on your website.
You can get data on:
Google Search Console
On the surface, Google Search Console seems like little more than a simplified tool for viewing your site’s organic traffic, CTR, and impressions for URLs and keywords, based on search results from Google’s own indexing.
But Search Console also reports on ranking factors like page speed and mobile usability, important metrics in this era of ever-increasing use of mobile devices to access the internet. The tool also reports errors which may prevent your site’s pages from being fully ranked or indexed by Google, among a wide variety of other useful data.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is an all-in-one SEO tool, providing a straightforward interface for tracking the SEO metrics which matter most. Besides reporting on organic traffic and keywords for both SEO and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, Ahrefs also provides its own algorithmic assessment of your site’s domain rating (DR).
Other standout tools which Ahrefs features include:
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Site Explorer - Discover ranking keywords and content from your site and competitors
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Keyword Explorer - Research keyword ideas and set up performance tracking
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Site Audit - Visualizations and checklists for improving technical SEO, fixing broken links, etc.
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Content Explorer - Explore the most popular content for any topic; see why those pages rank higher and leverage their strategies
SEMRush
SEMrush is another all-in-one SEO tool which exceeds Ahrefs in depth and complexity. This is tempered by the site’s simple-to-use interface, and the ease of getting started with researching any site, URL, or keyword simply by typing it into the dashboard search bar. You can set up projects for monitoring any website, tracking keyword performance, and much more.
Some of the great features of SEMrush include:
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Content marketing analysis
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Competitor analysis tool
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Keyword research
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PPC ads tracking
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Social media posting and tracking
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Local SEO monitoring
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Custom reports for any domain, URL, or keyword
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And more…
Moz
Moz offers many of the same features mentioned above, and is certainly a contender for one of the best SEO tools on the market. However, it also lacks many features offered by platforms like Ahrefs and SEMrush. That doesn’t mean Moz Pro doesn’t have the tools you need to achieve SEO success!
The platform’s top features include:
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Easy-to-use keyword research tool
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Complete site audit tool
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Tips on optimization for on-page SEO
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Backlink monitoring
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Download automatic reports or create custom reports
BrightEdge
BrightEdge is an “enterprise-level” SEO tool. In terms of sheer complexity of data sources and reporting, BrightEdge comes with an incredible array of resources for monitoring, improving, and strategizing around your site’s SEO. It also features integrations with other analytics platforms like Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics, and is the sole Facebook-approved vendor for “content performance technology.” However, BrightEdge comes with high costs and a learning curve that are far too steep for most firms, and its feature set can be overkill for smaller companies.
Screaming Frog
Last, but certainly not least, is Screaming Frog. SEO software for the more technically-savvy, Screaming Frog is a standalone desktop application which can be used to crawl any website just like search engines do for indexing. It can let you know which of your pages are missing meta descriptions, which of your pages are returning errors, and more.
Screaming Frog works much the same way that the SEO auditing tools on other platforms do, just without any rich visual representation of data on the frontend. The tradeoff is the depth of insight into a site’s structure and SEO features that you gain from a complete scan.
With some combination of these seven SEO resources in their toolkit, in-house legal marketers are sure to be that much better-equipped when positioning their firms for success online.
