Lawyer marketing is highly competitive and can be difficult but criminal defense advertising for law firms can bring its own issues. Unlike marketing legal services such as estate planning or personal injury, criminal defense advertising must address the inherent mistrust that many potential criminal defense clients may have.
In order to overcome this basic mistrust you have to educate the potential clients on the reasons they should trust your law firm and the unique things that make you stand out from your competition. If you are a smaller firm, you have to be a lot more creative and strategic in your law firm marketing in order to compete with the big mega-firms with virtually unlimited budgets.
Armed with this basic knowledge you can begin to put together a lawyer marketing strategy for advertising your criminal defense law firm that encompasses all of the following:
Let’s now delve into each one of these areas one by one and discuss how each component works together in your criminal defense advertising and marketing strategy.
If you have recently updated your law firm’s website this portion may not apply to you, but if your website is more than a few years old or wasn’t built for mobile you need to consider a new one. One of the tools that we offer free at FORWARD Lawyer Marketing is our free site audit tool.
In addition, we want to use tools offered by Google in the Google Search Console that will tell us how your website performs on all devices. These tools will tell us how fast your site loads which is crucial in this day and age of short attention spans.
We also use tools from AHREFs to assist us in discovering new keywords that you can rank for as well as linking opportunities. AHREFS is also great for monitoring all of your posts and pages and keeping track of any broken links so they can be fixed immediately.
Your custom web design for your law firm should be easy to navigate with the fewest steps to get to where the client needs to go. Some must-haves include:
PPC advertising began with Google Adwords over two decades ago and is now known simply as Google Ads. The platform is probably the most popular and commonly known worldwide, in addition to Bing and Yahoo. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok have their own advertising programs as well. It’s best to research your demographics and determine the best platforms for you. Facebook tends to work for almost all ages and genders while TikTok and Instagram tend to trend younger and more female.
The great thing about PPC for criminal defense lawyers is that it is very scaleable. You can start as small as you like and scale up as you are successful. We always recommend at least some PPC budget even when focused on SEO because you can see nearly instant results.
A relatively newer form of online advertising, with Pay Per Lead, just as it sounds, you pay for leads only. This is more expensive than PPC but also gives you more control on your lead acquisition process.
Pay-per-call services for lawyers have some advantages over other types of lead generation techniques. Here are some situations when you should consider adding them to your business development plan:
There are many other reasons why you might use pay-per-call services, but most of those reasons have to do with your firm’s current processes and your vision for the future. We would suggest scheduling a free consultation with us to see if pay-per-call could work for your firm’s marketing mix. That’s usually the best way to understand how buying calls could help advance your unique business goals.
SEO is the engine that drives online marketing in general but the competitiveness in the legal industry makes SEO for lawyers even more crucial. SEO has evolved with the internet and the A.I. algorithms that determine website rankings. In the early days one could simply SPAM a page with the keywords you want to be found for and it would drive you to the top of the search results. Those days are long gone and nowadays you can get penalized or even have your site de-indexed for implementing such a practice.
SEO experts today are focused more on “white-hat” marketing tactics that include writing quality content, linking to relevant content with the website, and external linking to relevant authority websites. In addition, specific focus is put on optimizing the title and META information as mentioned before and monitoring all of this with analytics.
If your business has a website online you are in the content publishing business, even as a law firm. Content marketing includes writing the content for the static pages of your website such as your practice pages and local geographic specific pages. It also includes writing and posting relevant blog posts on a regular and consistent basis. The content must be of higher quality and thoroughly cover the subject written about in order to get the highest rankings. At FORWARD Lawyer Marketing we write hundreds of blog posts and web pages monthly for our nationwide attorney clients.
Many law firms consider social media marketing to be an afterthought but that is a mistake. Doing social media marketing correctly can drastically increase the exposure of your law firm. We take the content created from things like blog posts and Facebook videos and then syndicate them across other platforms. Many people will look you up on social media and see what others think of you by checking reviews and comments. It is vital that you encourage good reviews and respond to the reviews and comments, good or bad.
Review management involves encouraging good reviews on sites like Google and Facebook. Many people seeking an attorney are looking for high review ratings of at least 4.5 to 5 stars. While there isn’t a lot that can be done to get rid of bad reviews, especially with Google, it is essential that you reply so it doesn’t appear that you ignore problems.
At FORWARD Lawyer Marketing we believe in taking a “leave no stone unturned” approach when it comes to our legal clients. With that in mind, we employ extremely experienced people in the industry. Our SEO Director has been marketing online for well over two decades and oversees all SEO tasks including editing content and performing on-page optimization as well as internal and external linking. Our specialty is law firm marketing and SEO for lawyers, call us at (888) 501-2647 to discuss how we can increase the revenue of your law firm.
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