7 Ways To Improve Your Attorney Biography Page SEO

Having a well written and search engine optimized biography online is an essential part of success. When people are looking for you, it is not only crucial that you’re easy to find, but that the information they find shows you in a positive light.

Following are some suggestions to help you put together an online attorney biography page that will give your audience the information they are looking for as well as help you to stand out in the search engines as your own personal brand.

Be Ready To Write Multiple Biographies

You will, of course, have complete control of your biography if it is to be posted on your own website. That won’t always be the case, though. You will undoubtedly find other places where you’ll want to post your professional biography.

First, other websites will surely have their own restrictions on exactly what you can include in your biography. Some might allow links while others won’t. You’ll run into varying restrictions based on character or word counts. Others, still, might have very specific formatting guidelines. The bottom line is that you’ll need to be prepared to create different versions of your biography depending on where you want to post it.

Also, from a strictly SEO perspective, the search engines feed on original content. Even if you can post your entire biography on two or three sites, it’s a good idea to mix things up and rewrite it in order to avoid the appearance of duplicate content. Posting the exact same thing on multiple sites will drag all of those pages down in search results. (This goes for posting your biography on two or more sites that you own yourself, too.)

Write From The Third Person Perspective

Writing about themselves in the third person is something many people struggle with. It’s not very often that we talk about ourselves like we’re not even in the room. Writing your biography from the third person perspective is not just about sounding professional, though, it also provides some very good SEO benefits.

When you write in the third person, it gives you the opportunity to use your name instead of saying “I.” This obviously helps greatly with getting your bio to rank well for your own name. It also attaches your name to your work and accomplishments. This can help your name to pop up in search results when people are searching for terms related to your work.

Writing in the third person also makes the information in your biography more shareable. If someone needs to talk about you for a publication, a news story, or something else, it’s much easier for them to pull information they can use if it’s already written from the third person perspective.

Introduce Yourself First

The opening paragraph should establish who you are right now. In many cases, your name should be the first words on the page. State who you are and a bit about your professional self.

This is where you want to give people the opportunity to see who you are before getting into your work and accomplishments. You might state where you got your degree(s) from and what brought you to your current position. It should have a professional tone but show that you are human.

Putting this information up front, again, helps associate your name with your current position. This gives the search engines more information about you and also sets up some good SEO clues to tell the engines what this page is going to be about.

Write A Story, Not A Resume

It’s important to keep in mind that your biography is meant to tell the story of you, not just present a list of what you’ve done. It may be difficult at first, but try to structure your bio like a story that will help you engage with your readers. Again, this will help you with SEO by giving you plenty of natural places to talk about the work you’ve done and the things you’ve accomplished. Start with your WHY.

Word Count Counts

As far as the technical side of SEO, the same goes for your biography page as any other page on your website. Search engines tend to take pages more seriously if they contain at least 500 to 600 words. You should consider this the minimum for your biography.

Many SEO experts will argue that pages with word counts even higher, like 1000 to 2000 words, command much higher authority and better results with the search engines. So if you have a lot that you can write about, don’t be afraid to go long. Just don’t go overboard. You don’t want to fill the page with useless fluff just to reach a certain word count.

Edit And Update

One of the things that the search engine crawlers love most is to see a page that is updated regularly. A page that has a history of regular updates is considered more relevant because it obviously has fresh information.

When you’ve got new bits of information about yourself, go back to your biography page and work those updates in. The result will be a good SEO boost for your bio page and all you’ll have to do is add a few new sentences or paragraphs.

Link To Your Work

It can help your bio as well as other pages in the search engines if you include links to your work. You can link out to things like the main page of your law firm, published papers that you’ve written, or articles about one of your cases, for example. You don’t want to go overboard and turn things into a thinly veiled advertisement, but you shouldn’t be afraid to highlight and give examples of your accomplishments either. (Be aware of the model rules on attorney advertising)

Nothing here is too complicated, but by following these suggestions you can achieve great SEO results for your personal biography page. Not only will it make it easier for people to find information about you and the work that you’ve done, but by taking steps to properly optimize your bio, you increase the chance that the first information people find will be information that you have complete control over. That ultimately gives you a much higher likelihood of turning those people into new contacts and clients.

Check out the Legal Writers Bureau for help with crafting a great attorney biography for your website.