[Author: Noreen Fishman]
For law firms, having a website online is very important. Any organization may have goals of having a strong web presence and being easily found on the Internet. Local discoverability is even more important for companies that operate within a particular geographic region, such as law firms. Legal marketers should make local visibility a top priority, and a local business schema can be a powerful tool in their arsenal.
What is a law firm’s local business schema? 
A local business schema is essentially a type of structured data markup code that you can add to your company’s website so that search engines can easily identify something specific, such as the organization to which your site belongs or the services it offers. to
Schema markup was first created by search engines as a way to better understand and display data using common groups of tags. Your company can take advantage of schema markup to optimize your website for local SEO. This is because local schema markup is one of the factors that determines how content is ranked and displayed on search engine result pages.
Including your local business schema in your website’s code helps search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo understand your business better, which increases your chances of ranking higher in search results.
But how do you add a local business schema to your website?
Add a local business schema to your site
Here’s a great guide for adding a local business schema. Simply put, you can follow these steps:
1. Identify company categories
Hopefully you have optimized your website for a specific niche audience and this is what you are looking for. There’s probably a “legal services” category that you might want to choose from, and you should be able to narrow it down further from there.
2. Create an “about” page
The “About” page should be populated with information about your company and should contain your own “AboutPage” schema item. Make sure all content on your pages is readable for your visitors, and if necessary, take the time to add relevant schema properties to properly inform search engines about your company.
3. Test your code
There are several tools you can use to preview how your results will look in search results. Enter your code into the Rich Results Test to see which Google Rich Results are generated by your page’s structured data. Alternatively, if you want to test your structured data without Google feature-specific warnings, enter your code into the Schema Markup Validator.
4. Publish the local business schema markup to your site
You can do this by adding your schema directly in your HTML code, or by using a managed user interface, schema app, or plugin.
5. Use Google Search Console to crawl and test your local business schema markup
We need to see if there are any issues or elements that need improvement. First, enter a domain or URL prefix to measure your website’s search traffic performance. Then continue to monitor the schema results so you can optimize if necessary. It’s important to remember that this is an ongoing process. Especially since Google is changing its approach to formulas and schemas. If your listing changes, be sure to adjust your local business schema as well.
Or, for a better overview of your website’s performance, sign up for a free SEO audit.
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Optimizing a law firm’s local business schema may seem complicated. That doesn’t mean it’s something you can skip. Law firms need to do everything they can to improve their ranking and discoverability in local search results, and a local business schema can help. If you don’t know how to incorporate the right code into your website, ask an expert.
