K&L Gates Earns Top SEO Ranking in the 2018 Social Law Firm Index

The 2018 Social Law Firm Index takes a comprehensive look at the top 200 law firms in the country (as ranked by The American Lawyer) and analyzes, measures, and ranks each firm’s reach and engagement across a variety of social media channels and content platforms.

We asked the top firms in each category to describe their experience and efforts in achieving success.

Many firms in 2018 placed an increased focus on search engine optimization. Creating consistent, quality thought leadership content is important for attracting new clients, but ensuring that that content can easily be found is essential.

As the top thought leadership firm in our 2017 Social Law Firm Index, it’s no surprise that K&L Gates soared to the No. 1 position in our SEO category this year.

“The legal industry is very competitive; authoring quality content is not enough.”

While the firm does not have a formally written search engine optimization strategy in place, K&L Gates CMO Jeff Berardi says, “SEO is an important element of our firmwide marketing strategy. It is our priority to effectively inject our thought leadership into the marketplace, and utilizing techniques that increase our SEO rate to enable people to find our material is critical to our success.”

The goal of search engine optimization for K&L Gates is to attract visitors who are interested in the services they offer and to position the firm so that the visitors become clients of the firm. Therefore, they utilize an array of tactics to bolster their SEO. For instance, when they publish content, they always utilize title tags to improve SEO results.

“We make every attempt to ensure that our material prominently appears when people use search engines to seek information,” says Berardi.

At K&L Gates, SEO strategy is one and the same with their overall digital marketing strategy.

Associate director of marketing services Eileen Kinney-Mallin says, “We leverage digital technologies to promote the services we offer and enhance the relationships we have with our clients. Being active across the digital landscape is extremely important; many business decisions are culminated through research conducted online. Therefore, it’s imperative that we have effective SEO tactics in place so that clients and prospects can easily find our material and recognize our ability to help them solve their business needs.”

The firm understands the benefit of utilizing social media to bolster their marketing program. SEO is tightly correlated to their social strategy; publishing content socially helps them strengthen their SEO rate. And, until recently, they published all of their thought leadership on Google+ as a means to strengthen their search results on Google.

The content marketing strategy at K&L Gates evolves around their target audience. Kinney-Mallin explains, “Each industry that we serve has its own unique needs; we work to identify the commonalities across our target audience and tailor our content strategy to align with those business needs. Through this development process, we effectively use keywords to impact our SEO results.”

K&L Gates utilizes analytics to assess their traffic patterns and has seen a measurable impact on the firm’s success related to SEO. Year-to-date, over 65 percent of their traffic comes from organic search.

For complete rankings, case studies, and legal marketing insights, download your copy of The 2018 Social Law Firm Index.