If you’re an old school attorney that’s been involved in lawyer marketing for more than 30 years, you started before internet marketing was in existence. In the old days of law firm marketing you placed ads in the Yellow Pages and paid for however many billboards your budget could afford.
Most younger people don’t even know what “Yellow Pages” are today. Attorneys and law firms that could afford it placed ads on TV and radio, which they still do today. The problem with all of these methods is that their effectiveness is difficult to measure due to lack of tracking and conversion data. Enter the evolution of lawyer marketing!
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With the birth of the internet came a whole new advertising platform and a big learning curve. When it became possible to advertise online many lawyers and law firms dove into the deep end and quickly learned how quickly a budget can be burned through. Lawyer marketing online is lucrative but it can be costly if you don’t know what you are doing.
Much like you wouldn’t trust a novice to defend you in a serious criminal case, you want experienced professionals managing your law firm marketing and advertising as well. At FORWARD Lawyer Marketing all we do is lawyer marketing!
There are numerous ways to market online, here are some of the top methods and components needed:
Everything begins with your website. If you have an outdated website that isn’t mobile-friendly you are losing many potential visitors and potential clients. This is where we start when we take on a new client.
We do a site audit and analyze the site not just for the look of the design, but the functionality as well. Many neglect on-page SEO issues such as title and META tags, internal linking, external linking, length of content, and more.
Before spending money on bringing traffic to a website we want to make sure that it is built properly and has the appropriate tracking codes to collect data. We then use the analytics data to tweak and improve conversions so that we know the website is performing well.
SEO is the acronym for Search Engine Optimization, the profession that works to optimize websites so that they rank the best possible in the search results. SEO is a field that covers many other aspects of website optimization including:
Each of the above are crucial components of a thorough SEO plan. For the vast majority of law firm clients we work with Local SEO is extremely important because they do business in specific geographic regions. Local SEO focuses on writing content that is local-centric and written to show that the law firm is in a particular city or community.
Local SEO also leans heavily on Google Business Profiles, formerly known as Google My Business, and local ranking and traffic can be increased just by properly optimizing the law firm’s Google Business Profile.
The process of optimizing webpages and blog posts on a given website is known as on-page optimization. This is done not only for SEO but also to provide the best visitor experience and includes correcting spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors.
Off-page optimization refers to all the measures that can be taken outside of the actual website in order to improve its position in search rankings. These are measures that help create as many high-quality backlinks as possible. For example, one of the tasks that we do is writing articles that are posted on other websites linking back to a client’s website with appropriate anchor text such as “Chicago divorce lawyers.”
Internal linking is linking to other pages and posts within the same website. This is done not only to help visitors to find other similar and relevant content but also to help the search engine spiders to crawl a website easier.
External links are those that link to an external website. These are links such as links to resources and references that help to support the authority of a given page or post.
Backlinks refer to the links coming from an external website that is linking back to another. Generally, the more quality backlinks a website has the better it usually ranks.
Our law firm clients that heed our advice on regular blog posting have excellent results. Blog posting is not only good for keeping visitors informed but it is crucial for SEO. When a blog is posted a network of ping services is notified and this in turn alerts the search engine spiders to come check out the new content. When you do this on a regular basis the spiders come back more often resulting in getting more of your content indexed by the search engines.
We use legal scholars to write the content for our law firm clients so that we know that it is accurate and well-written. When we receive the content from our writers, our SEO Director goes over every single one personally. Putting up a website without continually adding new content is virtually like erecting a billboard in the desert.
Google ads, previously known as Adwords, are probably the most familiar form of online advertising since they have been around since October of 2000. These are probably some of the most prevalent ads online including their relatively new Local Services Ads. Some people avoid them though because they know that they are ads and are averse to clicking on them.
For lawyers with smaller budgets Google Ads can be cost prohibitive as the ads can be very expensive due to the bids for legal terms, best mesothelioma lawyer, for example, can cost over $900 a click! See the top 25 most expensive keywords 2022. This is another reason to have Google Ads experts like ours that are Google Certified.
Facebook advertising is one of our favorite platforms because of lower cost, targeting ability, and the flexibility of ad creation. Advertising on Facebook also allows you to run your ads on Instagram which tends to be an entirely different demographic. With Facebook ads you can target by a variety of categories including age, gender, interests, followers, website visitors, geographic area and more. This is why it is important to be sure that you have the Facebook pixel installed so that the data can be collected and used for your ads.
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.
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There are many other tasks that we perform at FORWARD Lawyer Marketing such as PPC management, social media, Google Business, and more. 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.
