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Lawyer marketing these days is extremely competitive, especially in larger metropolitan areas like Chicago, Dallas, etc. If you want your law firm to rank near the top of the search results there are several areas of law firm marketing that need to be addressed. If done properly it can result in nearly immediate leads and increased revenue for your law firm. We have some firms that have doubled their revenue in the first year! Below are some case studies of law firm clients.
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
To ensure that your law firm marketing plan is as thorough and comprehensive these are the areas that must be covered, some are long term, some can give you immediate results.
The days of being able to survive as a business without a website are long gone. Not only that but with Google announcing the move to mobile-first indexing it is also crucial that your law firm’s website be responsive. Responsive means that it displays well on any device. Outdated websites are not only dropping in rankings but in some cases being de-indexed entirely.
You cannot rely on some do-it-yourself website builder and hope to rank your law firm website at the top of the search results. Lawyers must invest in custom website design for law firms by an agency that specializes in lawyer marketing. FORWARD Lawyer Marketing has been working with law firms across the country since 2013. We have a team of dedicated and experienced law firm marketers, some with decades of experience in online marketing.
Search engine optimization is a very complex field encompassing both creative and technical aspects. Your law firm needs an agency specializing in SEO for lawyers. It is a field that is constantly changing and evolving as Google evolves its artificial intelligence to deliver the best possible results for users of its search engine. Search Engine Journal has compiled a complete history of Google’s algorithm updates here.
Within the field of SEO, there are different specialties that require creative and technical expertise. This generally requires different mindsets for each. It is best understood by looking at the long-held science behind left brain vs right brain thinkers. The theory is that people are either left-brained or right-brained, meaning that one side of their brain is dominant. If you’re mostly analytical and methodical in your thinking, you’re said to be left-brained. If you tend to be more creative or artistic, you’re thought to be right-brained.
This theory is based on the fact that the brain’s two hemispheres function differently. It first came to light in the 1960s, thanks to the research of psychobiologist and Nobel Prize winner Roger W. Sperry. The left brain is more verbal, analytical, and orderly than the right brain. It’s sometimes called the digital brain. It’s better at things like reading, writing, and computations. There are few people that have a balanced or integrated brain, the vast majority of people are dominant on one side or the other.
Why am I explaining this? Because it is important to understand the need for both types in search engine optimization. Things like content writing and on-page optimization require a person that is right-brain dominant as it requires creativity. Technical aspects such as building backlinks, correcting technical issues, coding, etc are best done by a left-brain person that is more mathematically minded. Luckily for us, we actually have one of those rare people that can do both in our SEO Director who has well over 20 years of SEO experience.
For more details see our page, SEO for Lawyers.
Google My Business is a free service offered by Google where they create pages for all businesses that have a physical location automatically. The company requires the Google My Business page to be verified either by phone call to the business number listed or via a postcard sent to the business address. Once verified you can optimize the page with your areas of practice, services offered, amenities, a customized description, and more.
You can also disclose if your business is woman-led, Black-owned, or Hispanic-owned. Google also allows you to post to the page much like you would on social media platforms. It is also important to upload high-quality photos of the interior and exterior of your firm as well as photos of your team. When we manage the GMB listing in addition to following Google best practices for GMB. We also geotag the photos prior to uploading for the slight local SEO impact it delivers.
Pay per click began with Google Adwords in 2000 and is now known as Google Ads. Other companies such as Bing, Yahoo, and even Facebook have their own pay-per-click platforms. Also known as PPC, the great thing about it is that you can control your budget and scale it as you become more successful.
It also allows you to drive traffic to your website, bring in leads, and increase revenue while working on SEO, which is a more long-term endeavor. FORWARD Lawyer Marketing has a devoted PPC team that is Google Ads certified and experienced in performing PPC for lawyers across the country.
Google Local Services Ads are a relatively new offering from Google that offer local ads for business that have been vetted by Google. These types of ads are high converting because the public tends to trust them more than regular ads. They work well but they can be expensive for lawyers in competitive markets. It is always a good idea to experiment and see if they are cost-effective in your particular area.
Social media is another very important aspect of a successful lawyer marketing plan. This encompasses all social media accounts that you utilize for your law firm including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and more. FORWARD Lawyer Marketing has a devoted team experienced in social media for lawyers. This team will syndicate your website content across the various social media platforms with regularly scheduled posts. They will also respond to your followers on your behalf if you so desire.
We strongly believe in blog marketing for lawyers because we have seen HUGE increases in traffic and rankings from the practice. Our clients that have larger budgets have us write quality content and post it weekly. One of our criminal defense clients has seen a tenfold increase in web traffic in under a year!
We’ve also had tremendous success for our criminal defense and personal injury lawyers by utilizing very targeted RSS feeds. These feeds deliver enormous traffic to their websites. In case you aren’t familiar with the term, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. This is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format.
RSS feed data is presented to users using software called a news aggregator and the passing of content is called web syndication. For more details on our law firm blog marketing services go to our Blog Marketing For Lawyers page.
Quality content is one of the most important ranking factors according to Google’s in-house SEO experts. In general, longer content performs better as long as the content is high quality and informative. SEO researchers have seen that for most keyword phrases it is best to write 1500-2000 words or more. Websites that follow this advice tend to rank higher than their competition with shorter less informative content. We have seen our law firm clients move up in rankings rapidly when we increase the content of their pages.
The most important pages for any law firm are the practice area pages and your “About Us” page. Due to the legal requirements of law firm websites to be accurate it is crucial to hire a firm that uses experienced legal writers. They should also have years of experience in content writing for lawyers.
This is an often overlooked area that shouldn’t be. Today potential clients utilize review websites when choosing a law firm to hire. Most people will not even bother calling you if you have a rating under 4 Stars on a 5 Star scale. At FORWARD Lawyer Marketing our team is very experienced with reputation management for lawyers. We will manage all of your review sites including responding to reviews if you ask us to.
Call tracking is another area that is often overlooked. If you don’t track your calls how do you know what is working? We utilize a company called Call Tracking Metrics that specializes in call tracking for lawyers. This is so that you not only know that your marketing is working but also that your calls are being answered properly.
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. This includes 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) 590-9687 to discuss how we can increase the revenue of your law firm.
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