When it comes to online marketing, lawyers have their work cut out for them. If you’re in the legal profession, you face fierce territoriality, tight competition within practice areas, and the highest online advertising keyword costs of any business.
That’s where search engine optimization comes in. For what you spend on an inefficient pay-per-click ad campaign for a law firm, you could pay for a lot of rank improvement via SEO. Sidenote: There are ways to make PPC work for lawyers, but that’s outside the scope of this article.
SEO also makes sense on a very basic level. Namely that there are plenty of people who look online to find lawyers.
Your potential clients are out there, ready to make a decision about hiring an attorney. At FORWARD Lawyer Marketing, our job is to help increase the chance that they choose you.
The cornerstone of any law firm marketing campaign is a solid website. You probably already know you need something that looks professional. However, the true benefits of a good website go well beyond making a good first impression.
The best lawyer websites these days are highly interactive. That means they have elements your potential clients can use, such as chatbots, social links, contact forms, and more.
A good website will also be independently active. It will track visitor behavior so you can integrate other services, make business decisions and get a detailed view of how effective your website is in holding and generating attention.
Overall, your website has a lot of important roles. Here are some of the things it needs to do in order for you to grow your business online:
Maybe “cornerstone” isn’t the right term. Your website is more of an activity center than it is an architectural element.
A good website is the hub of your business development strategy online. The aim is to create an active, engaged network of new visitors and people who share your content, helping you expand your influence and grow your clientele.
Of course, online marketing goes well beyond just what’s on your website. You might decide to run advertising campaigns, develop a social media presence, and link call tracking into your overall marketing strategy.
Your website is just the center of activity. Even though it’s the single most important element, it can’t succeed by itself.
Most of the things we do at FORWARD Lawyer Marketing involve establishing and enhancing website content. However, we also offer a variety of other services that make the most of the hard work and resources you commit to building a great site. Here are a few examples:
So, what’s next after you have a website and you’ve up some external traffic generation sources (like video accounts and social media pages)? Well, it’s time to show some of that content off, and improve the pages that perform well.
By far, one of the best ways to expose your message online is through search engines. These ubiquitous, familiar technologies index the public web (including your law firm website) in order to match websites with words that people enter. Of course, it’s a little more complicated than that these days.
Search engines depend on complex algorithms to match content with searches. Then, the best matches rise to the top of the page.
Long gone are the days of the yellow pages, when having a name that started with a high alphabetical order gave you an advantage. Now, climbing the list is somewhat more involved.
Enter: search engine optimization. SEO is the practice of:
The end goal of SEO is to get you as high up in the search rank as organically possible. Technology has changed since the yellow pages, but people still tend to give more attention to the businesses that appear at the top of the list. Of course, it doesn’t hurt when to rank high when everyone knows Google’s primary objective: to quickly connect people with the information they’re looking for.
As we mentioned briefly above, the legal profession is unique when it comes to online marketing and advertising. The business is highly competitive and highly territorial. To top it off, a single good lead could make a huge difference for the future of your business.
There are plenty of examples of this. For example, it is not unheard of for estate planning practices to get multi-generational business from a single referral or lead. A personal injury practice that attracts someone with a multi-million dollar case could enjoy decades of ensuing success.
The stakes are high, and the rewards are high. However, there’s another side to marketing that lawyers have to consider: ethics.
Different jurisdictions have various different rules about marketing and advertising in the legal profession. For example, it is typically not acceptable to imply that your services are better than another firm. Many jurisdictions also have limitations on who can call themselves specialists, or even restrictions on law firms claiming specific focus areas.
In short, as a lawyer marketing online, you have tight competition. You also strict regulations. To top it off, your competitors might even be keeping an eye on how well you follow those regulations.
At FORWARD Lawyer Marketing, we work with law firms from across the country. We understand the needs of different practice areas and the constraints of different codes of ethics. It’s our job to worry about these things so you can focus on your clients.
There is a lot to think about when it comes to planning the online marketing strategy for a law firm. It also takes a wide range of skills to do it correctly, such as:
Even after you have everything set up, you have to keep track of your performance, test new strategies, make changes when necessary, and keep adding new content on a regular schedule. So, the question becomes: How do you simplify this process?
There are quite a few services that offer SEO and marketing tools for lawyers. However, for the results you really need to grow your business, the best way is simply to hire an expert.
At FORWARD Lawyer Marketing, we focus on efficiently getting our clients the rank that they deserve for their website. We’re also able to scale effortlessly. No project is too large or too small. Just contact us, and we’ll figure out how we can help — it doesn’t get any simpler than that.
We’ve covered a lot of information so far. To sum up, here are some of the key ideas that apply to lawyer SEO:
At FORWARD Lawyer Marketing, we have experience with a wide range of different law firms: personal injury, family law, criminal defense, estate planning, and more. We also work with law firms from all across the country.
Make sure that and the design and marketing companies you work with have experience specifically with attorneys and ideally with firms in your specific practice area. When the marketplace is this competitive, every detail and every edge matters.
We can help. We understand the needs of the profession, and we are looking forward to learning the unique needs of your business.
We base our website marketing strategies on ongoing analysis and observation. Just like when you meet with a client for the first time, we will want to sit down and have a brief conversation about your goals and your needs. After that, we will keep you informed about progress as often as you’d like, and present any new opportunities that might arise.
We are available to help with your marketing plan in any capacity. Whether you need bespoke blog content, strategic guidance, or a comprehensive website overhaul, please contact us through our online contact form or call us today at (888) 590-9687
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