Attorney internet marketing is among the most competitive of all online marketing niches. Depending upon the type of practice and the geographic area your law firm is located in it can be a very difficult task to break into the top of the search results. This is why it is necessary to employ the services of an experienced attorney digital marketing agency that specializes in online marketing for law firms.
FORWARD Lawyer Marketing is one of the best law firm internet marketing agencies with satisfied clients across the United States. We know law firm marketing and we know what it takes to get your law firm new clients from your website and your Google My Business page. Let’s take a look at all of the areas of marketing that need to be covered in order to get the best results for your law firm.
Search Engine Optimization is where the magic starts in order to get your law firm ranked at the top of search results. SEO consists of many different aspects, all of which require expertise and continual learning as new methods and algorithms are released. Don’t trust this to just anyone. Our SEO Director has been marketing online since Steve Case of America Online, aka AOL, was shipping CDs from his garage! Here are the different areas of SEO that must be covered in order to be effective.
Effective law firm SEO begins with extensive keyword research because keywords drive search rankings and traffic. Utilizing the wrong keywords will keep you from ranking where you want organically. Choosing the wrong keywords for PPC will burn through your budget, but we will discuss that later. There are many tools that can be used to do keyword research including Google’s own free tool.
We prefer using AHREFs because it gives us far more information than other tools out there. It also includes things like link analysis, analyzing websites for problems such as broken links, comparing the competition, and much more.
We also use a tool that gives us the majority of the keywords that Google hides in Google Analytics designated as “keyword not provided.” This gives us actual keywords that potential clients are using to find your website.
Of course, if you don’t have a website yet we just use our experience in the legal field to choose keywords to begin with. We create local optimized long-tail keywords for your geographic area to be used in creating geospecific pages for your law practice.
Long-tail keywords are also desirable to use for PPC as the longer the keyword phrase the more likely the person is close to making a decision. A good example would be the difference between “lawyer” and “child custody lawyer in Dallas.” This is all part of Local SEO, which is what the majority of law firms need to focus on unless they are a large national firm.
Extensive keyword research gives us the building blocks we need to write new content as well as optimize your current content to rank better. It will also tell us what to write as title tags and META descriptions for SEO and for anchor text for backlinks, which we will cover next.
Backlinks are one of the most important aspects of ranking websites. Google looks at the quality and number of backlinks to your site and also evaluates the relevance. A backlink from a highly ranked website in your local area will help local rankings and one from a legal website will have a positive impact as well. An irrelevant backlink for a law firm would be something like a link from a nightclub or a plumber.
Obtaining backlinks is another aspect of SEO that is highly specialized and requires experts in that field. FORWARD Lawyer Marketing has a team of experts overseen by our SEO Director to ensure that the backlinks are from quality websites and that the optimal anchor text is used.
On-page optimization consists of writing keyword-optimized content as well as identifying and fixing technical issues and proper internal and external linking to relevant pages. This would also include image optimization and geotagging of images to help local rankings.
More on search engine optimization
Website design for lawyers is one of the most crucial aspects of a law firm’s online marketing strategy. From creating a logo and proper branding that conveys the way your firm wants to be seen to copywriting that is both accurate and informative. Your website is often the first opportunity you have to make an impression on a potential client. As the old saying goes, “You never get a second chance to make a first impression” so you cannot afford to leave it to amateurs. See some of our recent attorney web designs.
PPC or Pay-Per-Click mostly refers to Google Ads although we also manage Bing and Social Media advertising for our law firm clients as well. Again, creating and managing online advertising isn’t something to be entrusted to inexperienced people. Someone that is not an expert in PPC can burn through a monthly budget in a day.
Our PPC Director has over 20 years of experience in online advertising and oversees every campaign. PPC for lawyers can be expensive as the keywords that are being bid on are some of the most competitive in existence. That said, done properly they can also be very lucrative and are recommended while building long-term traffic through SEO.
Local Services Ads, also known as LSAs, are a relatively new offering from Google and because they are highly trusted by consumers they have high conversion rates. We recommend every client we have to invest at least a portion of their overall budget to running LSAs.
These ads appear at the top of the search results. After applying and being accepted by Google they actually guarantee your law firm to be reputable in the ad. This is why they convert so well and bring more clients than some other advertising methods.
By now all business owners should know that Google gives legitimate businesses their own free Google My Business page, for short, a GMB page. In our experience, these properly optimized GMB pages not only drive a substantial amount of traffic to our clients’ websites but also generate a large percentage of the phone calls that the law firms receive.
So what do we mean by properly optimized? Well, for starters you need to have a well-written business description, accurate hours, payment methods, contact information, accessibility information such as handicapped access, COVID info, etc. You should also have all of the allowable images including logo, cover, outside shots of your building, inside photos, and photos of you and your team. All of the images of your location should be geotagged. We have put together a GMB optimization guide to make it easy.
Google My Business pages are often poorly managed at best. Most consumers look for online reviews before engaging any business and looking for legal representation is no different. If they have the choice between a law firm with 3-star reviews and one with 4.5-star reviews which one do you think they will choose?
It is also important to respond to reviews in a timely manner, regardless of whether they are good or bad. FORWARD Lawyer Marketing does this for you with our reputation management for lawyers.
Social media is another area that many law firms think of as only an afterthought when it really should be given as much priority as other marketing channels. Having a presence on social media is highly important as many consumers will look for your law firm there as part of their research. How many different social media platforms you choose to establish your firm on depends upon your demographics.
ALL law firms should at the least have their GMB, Facebook, LinkedIn, and probably Twitter. Instagram may be optional, but if your firm has a younger demographic you definitely want to include it. You also want to make sure that you have the Facebook tracking pixel set up properly to track events on your website so that you can remarket to website visitors.
It is highly unlikely that someone will do business with you on their first visit and proper setup of the tracking pixel will allow you to continue reaching out to them.
Blogging is your opportunity to show off expertise in your practice areas with well-written content updated and posted on a frequent basis. Fortunately for you, we have legal scholars to write the blog posts for you so that you don’t have to. I know few attorneys that have the time or the inclination to do this themselves. Not only are regular blog posts a good idea from the standpoint of educating and informing potential clients they are crucial for search rankings.
Google and other search engines constantly search the web for new content, the more often you post the more often they come back. It is also important that the posts be longer rather than shorter. The majority of top rankings average around 2,000 words so it is imperative that blog posts, as well as important pages such as practice pages, be at least 1500-2000 words for the best results.
As mentioned above, solid content is very important in ranking your website, driving traffic, and attracting your optimal clients. As part of our content writing services, we perform copywriting for your website, blog posts, social media, paid ads, and more. The content we provide is well researched and written by experts in the area of law that is being written about.
Content must not only be written for the end-user, but also written in such a way that the search engine spiders recognize the content as valuable. Well-written content is the key to ranking higher in the search results which will bring you the new clients you are looking for.
Reputation management covers many areas including your GMB page, Facebook, Yelp, and others including directories in the legal field such as Avvo, FindLaw, Justia, and others. As part of our service, we perform directory submissions to get you listed with the appropriate directories, correct any errors, and reply to reviews or notify you so that you can respond yourself.
Consumers today perform research before they do business with you. They will look at your GMB reviews, Facebook reviews, posts, and more to learn more about you and your law firm. FORWARD Lawyer Marketing does this for you to help you improve your online reputation. For more details read our page on reputation management for lawyers.
As I am sure you know, the cost of acquisition for getting a new client can be very expensive because of the advertising costs it takes to get someone to call you or email you. PPC ads for lawyers can cost $50 per click or more. What we do is we run ads to attract the type of client that you are seeking whether it be for divorce, personal injury, etc. Because we have many years of experience in running these types of ads we are able to keep our ad costs down and pass those savings on to you.
Call tracking is imperative so that you can keep track of calls coming into your law firm, how they are being handled, closing percentages, and more. The program we use is a service that specializes in tracking calls for law firms and includes the following:
The younger clients you’re seeing now in divorce, estate planning, and personal injury don’t always want to pick up the phone right away and call an attorney. People who went to high school in the early 2000s grew up with these instant messaging services — it’s just what they’re used to.
Love it or hate it, texting is now a major point of initial context between attorneys and clients. Getting live chat for your law firm’s website just makes sense.
We provide live chat services for lawyers through a service that caters specifically to attorneys. Further, we use our experience working with law firms across the country to customize our clients’ chat experiences.
Whether you are a lawyer running your own practice or a large nationwide law firm we can help you increase the revenue of your legal practice just as we have for law firms across the country. Read some of the testimonials of our satisfied attorney clients and give us a call at (888) 590-9687 to learn how we can help you.
