Law firm marketing covers a wide range of both online and offline methods for promoting a law firm, in this post, we will concentrate on online marketing methods to increase your law firm’s exposure. Some of the methods vary a bit contingent upon whether a law firm is nationwide or local but overall the methods are essentially the same. The main difference is that ranking nationwide for legal terms is a much more difficult endeavor than ranking in a small geographically specific area or town.
I am going to break this article down into sections of the main areas that we concentrate on for our own law firm clients at FORWARD Lawyer Marketing, a well-established lawyer marketing agency located outside of Chicago. Although our main office is based in Illinois, we have clients all over the country and employees from Arizona to Florida. Let’s have a look at the steps we take when taking on a new client.
One of the first things we will do when taking on a new client is to identify whether or not they need a new website design for the law firm. There are many factors that go into this determination including aesthetics, platform, performance, responsiveness, and more. Part of this process includes doing a site audit in AHREFs that will identify potential technical issues, competitors, organic keywords, backlinks, etc. If it is agreed that a new website is needed then we will have our team create mock-ups so that the client can see what the end product would like.
We build our law firm websites on WordPress because not only has the CMS platform been around for almost 20 years but it is SEO friendly “out of the box.” When we build websites for lawyers we ensure that they all have the following components:
Another part of the early planning for new clients is identifying the correct keywords and phrases that we want to target to increase ranking for and up to 20 local areas that the law firm wants to target within a conservative radius around the main office. We use this information to create geotargeted practice pages as well as for optimizing Google My Business.
This is an area overlooked by many businesses but with the emphasis Google puts on GMB it simply cannot be overlooked. GMB pages must be properly optimized and updated constantly with new geotagged photos and content. The relatively new Google Local Services Ads rely heavily on the information on your Google My Business page being accurate.
Another important aspect of a comprehensive online marketing plan for law firms is including pay-per-click or PPC to generate clicks, calls, and leads while working on the longer-term things like SEO and backlinks. When creating our marketing plans, PPC for lawyers we represent is managed by our team of experienced Google certified PPC experts to get the absolute best CTR and ROI possible for your law firm. Utilizing PPC will enable your law firm to generate revenue immediately while working on the more evergreen and ongoing SEO.
Blog marketing for lawyers consists of writing relevant, informational content that is useful to visitors to your website and also focuses on specific topics that we are trying to rank your website for. We also syndicate the content across your social media accounts and post to your Google My Business page. Blogging is one of the most productive activities that can be done as part of an overall law firm marketing plan. Consistent blogging not only grows your website and potential backlinks but also alerts the search engine spiders that you update your content on a regular basis.
Many may not consider this as part of marketing but reputation management for lawyers is a crucial component of your marketing plan that cannot be overlooked. I can tell you from experience that all things being equal, a law firm with a rating of 4.6 stars on Google versus one with a 3.5-star rating will get more click-throughs.
Reputation management covers all sites that allow reviews including Google My Business, Facebook, Yelp, Avvo, etc. It is also important that reviews are responded to in a timely basis, regardless of whether it is positive or negative. We should thank clients for positive reviews and ask those that leave a negative review what we can do to resolve the issue.
As a law firm digital marketing agency much of what we do revolves around SEO for lawyers. SEO or search engine optimization covers several aspects including the following:
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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