Law Firm Marketing: Best Strategies to Get More Legal Clients Online
In today’s competitive marketplace, acquiring new clients is tough. That’s why internet marketing is a necessity for any business and law firms are no exception.
Digital law firm marketing involves using different techniques that can help make your potential clients hire your law firm to perform certain law services. Regardless of your firm’s practice area, it’s important to use the best practices of online marketing for lawyers to attract quality customers to your business and outperform your competitors.
In this article we are going to discuss how to market a law firm and develop successful marketing campaigns to reach more potential clients and lead them through the buyer’s funnel to contact and hire you.
Law Firm Marketing Strategies to Improve Your Online Presence
Your marketing efforts should begin with building a brand and a well-optimized website which is actually your biggest marketing asset. Then, you should concentrate on developing ongoing strategies to educate your visitors and hopefully turn them into loyal clients. According to statistics, 96% of people who need legal advice search for it online and 71% of internet users never click search engine results beyond the first page. So it’s important to be visible to your potential clients when they need you most.
There are 4 effective legal marketing strategies you need to implement to attract visitors to your law firm website, convert new clients as well as outperform and outrank new competitors:
- Turn your website into your 24/7 sales representative
- Create SEO and content marketing strategy
- Expand your online footprint with law firm advertising, social media marketing, and local SEO
- Track and analyze your website metrics with Google Analytics
Read on to learn how each of these tactics work. We'll be happy to consult you further or take the execution burden off your shoulders. Let's talk today.
Optimize Your Law Firm Website
These days, when people need something, they search for it online. That’s why you need a professional website that will “wow” your visitors and can serve you a tool to convert them into customers. What does it mean? Your website needs to be more than just a home page, contact us page, and about page. Your law firm website needs to have certain features:
- be fast to load
- be mobile-friendly
- be easy to navigate on any device
- appealing and authoritative
- have clear branding
- convey a message
Consider this. Most of the internet users expect a website to load in less than 3 seconds and they will quit if a website is slow to load. Your visitors are looking for important information and they don’t want to waste their precious time. Except your website speed, you should ensure that your website looks great and functions properly on screens of all size and as 80% of internet users have a smartphone and often search for services and products on the go, your website should be mobile-friendly. Besides, “mobile first” is a Google’s ranking factor that impacts your website visibility.
Your website should be designed with user experience in mind (the layout, colors, functionality) and all visual aspects should encourage trust and authority on the subconscious level. Your website should convey a message about the value of your services and include vital calls to action. Remember that people who visit your website are in trouble and are looking for a reliable solution to their problem so you should do your best to ensure that your law firm website provides such solution.
Best Law Firm Websites Examples
A well-designed website is vital for success of any business but in the competitive world of layers and attorneys, this importance is even greater. The best law firm websites differ in layouts, colors, and designs but still, they have something in common – they focus on usability which is critical to any website and should never be overlooked. They are also based on the best practices to create an engaging user experience for website’s visitors – attractive design, responsive layout, user-friendly CMS, well-written and valuable content that helps in marketing law services. Let’s take a look at 2 of the best law firm websites, taking into account essential features that ensure perfect user experience.
Fasken is a full-service law firm which works with clients around the globe. The company’s website
- Is easy to navigate
- Supports multiple languages based on geographical location
- Has a perfect contrasting color scheme
- Shows real faces behind the firm
- Has a great blog section which is regularly updated
- Has decent content length
YLaw Group specializes in family law. The company’s website
- Features innovative design with simple color scheme
- Is optimized for mobile and desktop
- Has an excellent menu system and easy navigation
- Comes with a consistently updated blog with useful and well-written content
- Has personal images of their lawyers and their bios to improve credibility
Keep in mind that it’s not enough to make your website look beautiful. Your websites has to be built around the needs of your clients – be quick to load, look great on all types of devices and all screen sizes, and be easy to navigate to allow your visitors to find what they are looking for fast.
Invest in SEO and Content Marketing
You need SEO to make your law firm website appear higher in Google search results. It’s important to be on the first page when people are searching for services you offer because the first three organic search results get 55% of all clicks.
You should focus on different aspects of SEO:
- Use relevant keywords in title, heading, and image alt tags
- Optimize images and create keyword-rich descriptions
- Optimize the content of your landing pages for the specific keywords
- Use internal links
- Try to get authoritative backlinks to your website’s content
Create a content marketing strategy. According to statistics, content marketing can bring law firms 55% more visitors to their websites and 67% more leads. It’s important to add pages which describe your main services and start a blog. By building a blog, you will establish yourself as authority in your industry and improve your SEO. When choosing topics for your blog articles, you can just answer the most frequent questions you get from new clients. It’s important to update your blog on a regular basis because in this way, you will have better chances to engage your website visitors. You should position yourself as an expert and create a useful resource of legal information. Make sure you use relevant keywords in your blog articles to stay relevant in search engines.
Make sure your content marketing investment pays off. See our case studies how we increased traffic for our customers x10 times.
You can also add videos – animated video explanations or Q&A with lawyers on your team. Video content is a great way to engage your visitors and lower the bounce rate. Besides, you can offer free downloadable content – guides, e-books, and checklists. A good idea is to contribute content to other websites to reach more prospects and drive traffic to your law firm website. You should provide useful information to your target audience and build trust with prospective clients.
Use SMM, Local SEO and Advertisement for Your Law firm to Increase Visibility
Typically, law firms are local businesses so you need to optimize your website for local search results. You should use local SEO practices to get your law firm at the top of search results for a local area. Local pack is a great way to generate local traffic to your website. Here is what you can do to increase your chances to get into those initial three results:
- Create Google My Business account, optimize it for the local pack, and always keep all the information updated. Add images of your office and the staff to increase credibility.
- Create separate pages for all your locations
- Encourage your clients to leave reviews of your services on Google and other third-party review sites
- Make sure your business information is consistent with your law firm website, Google My Business listing, and other listings you have online
PPC advertising is extremely effective for lawyers because you can reach people when they need an attorney. PPC ads are shown at the tops of the search result but the problem is that they are extremely competitive for lawyers. So, it’s important to target the right keywords in Google AdWords. You can also use PPC remarketing when your ads are shown to people who have visited your website or have provided you with their contact information.
Grow your online presence using social media. LinkedIn and Facebook are the key channels that every law firm needs to have a presence on. It’s important to take advantage of paid social media ads and share different types of content: social media reviews, your own blog posts and article from other credible sources, and your company’s volunteer experiences. Besides, you can use social media to provide answers related to your practice area.
Analyze Data to Refine Strategies
Using digital marketing analytics is the key to success of your online marketing strategy. You should use Google analytics to measure the success of your online marketing campaign and determine what works. You can get invaluable insights about your organic and paid search campaigns. Analyzing data can help you make sound decisions to refine your law firm marketing strategies and make improvements to reach your business goals. You can repeat approaches that bring the best results and stop those that won’t work to maximize your marketing budget and improve ROI.
Online Marketing for Lawyers
Every law practice is different and, as a result, every law firm’s marketing campaign should be unique. To be a success, it should be tailored to meet the specific needs of your law firm and its size, your marketing budget, target clients, practice areas, and geographic location. You need to assess your law firm’s marketing performance in the previous years and analyze marketing efforts of your competitors in order to develop an online marketing strategy that will bring results.
Of course, building an effective law firm marketing strategy takes time and effort and it may be really overwhelming, so a good idea is to hire an experienced marketing consultant from an agency that specializes in online marketing for law firms. Extrabrains has an extensive experience in developing successful online marketing campaigns for small and medium-sized firms. Contact us to learn how we can help you increase your website visibility and convert more clicks into paying customers. Let us help you develop and implement a strategic online marketing plan to grow your practice.
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