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Lawyer marketing is best left to professionals with expertise in the wide range of components necessary to effectively market a law firm. Most lawyers barely have time to keep up with the daily grind of their own law practice much less devote time to marketing. FORWARD Lawyer Marketing has been marketing for lawyers since 2013 and our experts have experience in every aspect of law firm marketing. In this post, we will cover all of the various components that must be included in a comprehensive law firm marketing plan.
Unlike general SEO that isn’t geographically focused, local SEO focuses on specific geographic areas, usually a specific city or town. While it is possible to rank for multiple locations, this is best done by having specific pages written for each location. One such example can be found on our family law client’s website here that takes you to the page written and optimized for the term Naperville divorce lawyers.
Local SEO requires attention to a number of details including building citations, local backlinks, optimized “city pages” for the areas you want your law firm to rank in, Google My Business optimization and posting, and more. We use a company called Bright Local to build local citations to known directories including directories specific to law firms.
Writing the city pages entails writing high-quality geo-targeted local-centric content that mentions local areas of interest and links to local non-competitive websites, they should be at least 1,500-2,000 words. If optimized properly your website should rank well in the immediate area around your office due to Google showing results by closest proximity on mobile devices. To rank in desired nearby areas we will write city pages for those specific areas and for particular areas of practice like the example given above.
Some businesses fail to claim their Google My Business pages and lawyers are guilty of this. Your Google My Business is provided free from Google. The first step is to claim your Google My Business page through Google via a phone call or postcard. Once you have the page for your law firm claimed, you then must optimize it properly. This post goes into detail on what you need to do to optimize your GMB page.
Custom web design is usually where we begin when working with new law firm clients. While many law firms already have a contemporary, mobile-friendly website, may do not. Google has a mobile-first policy when it comes to indexing and ranking websites so it is crucial to have a responsive website that loads fast and displays properly on all devices. Your website is usually your first opportunity to show your law firm to potential clients. In order to rank above your local competition, you must have well-written content that is optimized for specific local areas.
On-Page SEO is a very important component that must be done properly in order to rank highly in the search results. Regardless of whether we have built the website or not, this is one of the first things we do for new clients. We will optimize each page so that it will rank as high as possible for the keyword phrases we are targeting. It is important to note that it is a mistake to try to rank for multiple terms on one page. Each page should be written for a specific phrase, for example, Chicago Divorce Lawyer. On-Page SEO also includes writing optimal title tags and META descriptions for each page.
Blogging is an area that is often overlooked by many businesses and it is a huge mistake. Google is all about content and its spiders are constantly looking for new stuff. I like to use the analogy of a real-world spider looking for food. If the spider finds fresh food every time it comes it will come back more frequently to check. Fresh content helps increase rankings and traffic and is also a way to bring attention to your money pages like your practice area pages. Our clients that get the best results have us write 2-4 blogs per month for them with over 1,000 words each.
PPC or Pay-Per-Click is something that almost all of our clients utilize to bring in leads for their law firms. Because SEO is more of a long-term play, we use PPC ads to help bring in instant revenue for our clients. This includes Google Local Services ads as well. Pay-Per-Click can also be incredibly expensive if you don’t know what you are doing. An amateur at paid ads can burn through an entire monthly budget in a day. FORWARD Lawyer Marketing has dedicated professionals that are Google Certified with well over a decade of PPC experience.
This is another area that we find is often overlooked. Most people today consider reviews when deciding on a business that they will visit, this is very true for potential clients looking for a lawyer. If you have three stars or below or have bad reviews that have been ignored and not responded to most people will just pass by you. We manage our clients’ GMB pages as well as their reviews so that they have the best ratings possible. We also have a system to help our clients get more good reviews.
Like blogging, regular social media posting helps to establish credibility and exposure online. We take care of posting to our client’s social media accounts for them on a regular basis. Because different social media platforms work better for particular genders and age groups we recommend using multiple platforms. Facebook and Twitter are more generic, but Instagram trends to a younger demographic, and Pinterest is predominantly female.
Lawyer marketing should be done by professionals and it is best done by those that specialize in marketing for law firms. Call us at FORWARD Lawyer Marketing today at (888) 590-9687.
