Criminal defense marketing is extremely competitive and also contains issues that other areas of lawyer marketing do not. Unlike cases such as personal injury, wrongful death, and others that are taken on a contingency basis, criminal defense cases require some type of payment upfront. In addition, it is often difficult to get reviews from these clients due to the client wanting to remain private. At FORWARD Lawyer Marketing, we have worked with law firms across the country in a variety of specialties including:
From our extensive experience providing marketing and SEO for law firms across the United States, we have been able to develop strategies for any area of legal practice. Let’s delve into more specifics on how to market criminal defense law firms successfully.
When we bring on a new criminal defense law firm we do an extensive audit of the firm’s website, web traffic, social media, blog posting, Google Business Profile, PPC, and more.
In a majority of cases that we have worked with one of the first issues we have to address is an outdated website. In today’s online world, a mobile-friendly website isn’t just “nice to have”, it is a must. With organic mobile searches accounting for well over 60% of all searches a mobile-first philosophy must be employed. We have built dozens upon dozens of responsive custom websites for law firms in virtually all areas of practice.
In addition, quality content is a must. The majority of the top-ranked pages for virtually any keyword search contain over 1,500 words and many are over 2,000. Google’s algorithm has advanced to the point of not only being able to identify spammy keyword stuffing but also the number of words. From experience over two decades, the search giant knows that short content tends to be written poorly, often by outsourced foreign writers. We use English writers that are very familiar with the legal landscape such as law students.
One of the most surprising things we run into when doing audits is the lack of tracking analytics or analytics set up improperly. Data is important in every aspect of online marketing and if not set up properly can give you misleading information or no information at all. At FORWARD Lawyer Marketing, we make it a priority to ensure that proper tracking analytics, goals, and conversions are set up so we know what is working and what isn’t. We also make sure that foreign bots aren’t causing traffic reporting that is misleading and inconsequential.
Social Media is an often overlooked area of lawyer marketing that can be utilized in multiple ways to help bring in more traffic to your website and more potential clients. I don’t know of many attorneys that have the time, much less the inclination to perform social media posting or management. We set up regular posting on our law firm clients’ social media platforms to help spread their presence among those that follow them as well as seek new followers that could become clients. One of the most successful strategies that we are using is broadcasting and posting FaceBook Live videos. One of our criminal defense attorneys was actually contacted by his local prosecutor’s office that expressed interest in working with him on content to inform the public of their rights.
As someone that has been blogging since it started, it is kind of mind-boggling that so many people do not realize the benefits that can be had with regular blogging. Search engines are all about fresh content, all search engine spiders do is continually search for new content. Think of a spider in the real world, the more it shows up and finds new food, the more often it comes back. Search engine spiders are the same. This is why frequent blogging results in more pages indexed, higher rankings, and more traffic. We have found that for our clients that actively participate in regular blog posting, their highest traffic pages tend to be the blog posts that lead to other pages they are wanting to feature.
Your Google Business Profile, previously known as Google My Business, is crucial to the success of your business. You may think that is a strong statement but with Google being the 800-pound gorilla in the room this is a fact. While there are other search engines like Bing, Yahoo, and Duck, Duck, Go – Google has over 91% of the search market. For this reason, we really don’t focus too much on the other search engines as they will pick up a lot from what we optimize for Google.
Because your GBP is a Google-owned property it is given preference by the search engine IF you optimize it properly and avoid doing things against the Google terms of service. One such offense that can get you dinged by Google was recently reported in Search Engine Journal – Duplicate Content In Google Business Profile Posts.
A properly optimized Google Business Profile can get you tons of calls and leads for potential clients. Some of the law firms we work with are getting hundreds of calls per month just from their GBP pages.
I am not going to go into a long drawn-out explanation of Google Business Profile optimization here because we have written extensively on the subject, including in our post, How To Optimize Your Google Business Profile For Your Law Firm.
PPC or Pay-Per-Click is familiar to most people and has been around as an online advertising method since 2002. The majority of law firm clients we work with have at least a small budget for PPC and some invest thousands of dollars per month on their PPC campaigns. When we begin working with a new client we recommend at least a modest PPC budget because when done properly it can bring you in immediate potential client leads.
Pay-Per-Click is best left to experienced professionals. Someone that doesn’t know what they are doing can burn through a monthly budget in a matter of hours. Hire law firm PPC professionals like FORWARD Lawyer Marketing that will keep track of your analytics and conversions and get you the biggest bang for your buck.
Another service that law firms should consider is Pay Per Call. Just like it sounds, Pay Per Call only charges you when you receive a phone call from a pre-screened, qualified lead. Obviously, these will more more expensive than PPC but the benefit is that you are only paying for people that reach out to you, not clicks.
This is the current apex of online advertising in my opinion. With Pay Per Lead you only pay for people that want a lawyer that specializes in your specific practice and in your specific geographic area. Unlike PPC where someone may actually see your ad and click it but not be in your area, Pay Per Lead is designed to deliver ONLY leads that have a strong potential to convert to paying clients. Our Sister Company, Legal Locator specializes in this as well as Pay Per Call.
This case study shows how a single-attorney family law practice started attracting more high-asset, financially complex divorce cases.
Click here to read about a family law firm that increased caseload five-fold in a few months.
Texas Criminal Defense Law Firm Doubles Revenue In One Year
Personal Injury Law Firm Sees 99% Increase In Organic Traffic
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 at FORWARD Lawyer Marketing, call us at (888) 590-9687 to discuss how we can increase the revenue of your law firm.
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