13 Insanely Effective Law Firm Marketing Strategies for 2020

If you are a solo attorney or partner within your law firm, that has goals of achieving growth through digital marketing efforts, this is the only comprehensive law firm marketing guide that you will ever need. 

In this definitive guide, we’re going to cover 13 effective marketing strategies that highly successful law firms use to reach their business objectives; which are usually to acquire higher-quality clients, build their online presence, and/or simply to grow their practice to new heights!

We have discovered that your law firm may be struggling with having an inadequate online presence, the inability to attract quality clients, and an overall poor marketing strategy. – Source

Additionally, we understand that as a dedicated leader of your law firm, you don’t have the time nor passion to stay updated on the constantly changing world of online marketing. 

Soooo we are here to do all of the hard work for you, so you can focus on delivering client satisfaction. Let’s dive straight in!

1. Transform Your Website into a 24/7 Client Producing Machine

Everyone understands the importance of first impressions when a potential client walks through your office’s front doors or calls in to request information, so your website should present itself to them no differently.

There are important elements that make up the foundation of building a standout website, and they all add up to help really differentiate your law firm from surrounding competitors. 

Here’s how you can optimize your law firm’s website to convert eager visitors into happy clients!

A High-Converting Homepage

Your homepage is typically the initial point of contact for website visitors. When crafting a high-converting homepage, you should build it with the end-user in mind. This begins with having a well-designed user interface and user experience. 

Many authorities in the SEO space, such as Search Engine Journal, OptinMonster, Quicksprout, & Ahrefs have all given the nod that UX/UI is a top 10 ranking factor for SEO in 2020.

It takes users 1/20th of a second, or 50ms, to form an opinion of your law firm based on the website’s appearance. No, seriously. Google’s Human Interaction & Visualization study  deeply analyzed how humans rely on their “gut feeling” to determine when they will stay or leave a website based on its aesthetic appearance.

The goal for your homepage is to effectively position your law firm’s brand messaging, explain how you can solve their problems, and give them flexible ways to get in touch with you. 

What should your homepage include?

1. A visible logo – Not only to represent your brand but also as a link back to your homepage.
2. Easy to use navigation – Dropdown menu, search box, back to top button, breadcrumbs, etc.
3. Social proof – Show off your testimonials, awards, attorney experience, etc.
4. A strong call to action – Make it dead simple for interested visitors to ask questions via a Chatbot, reach out to you through a contact form, or find their concerns/questions on a frequently asked questions section.
5. Broken down content – The major problem we see many law firms make is filling up their website with legal jargon that the average Joe does not understand. Keep it simple, Sally.

Your website is your first impression, so you’ll want to keep it cleaned up, organized, straight to the point, and easy to understand. Having this process in place will make generating consultations much smoother if it is built with the end-user in mind. 

If you need help with designing a cohesive, aesthetically appealing layout for your homepage, feel free to give us a shout!

Introduce Your Team | About Our Attorneys Page

Are you a one-lawyer-does-all firm or do you have a superhero squad that teams up to deliver impactful results? The world may never know if you don’t showcase your team on your website!

Introduce your legal team that will be assisting clients with their legal situations and describe how each member of the team will be specifically useful for a potential client’s case. 

For each attorney or associate page, be sure to include:

1. Their full name
2. A professional headshot
3. Short descriptions of their career experience, personal life, and goals
4. Education background & achievements
5. Accurate representation of their role within your law firm
6. An easy way to get into contact with them

Adding a dedicated page to your website that puts your team on full display, brings your law firm one step closer to earning a potential client’s trust and establishing credibility of who your law firm is. 

Flowing Practice Area Pages That Are Well-Defined

All too often law firms fill their practice areas with a whole bunch of black and white text that a non-legal person would simply not comprehend. 

Your goal should be to give website visitors ease of mind that you understand their pain points and that you have tools, knowledge, and resources to help solve them.

Here are a few key factors you should keep in mind when building out these practice area pages:

1. Cohesive Practice Area Page Layout: Your page’s layout should be in-line with the branding guidelines you have created as well as your other inner pages. Furthermore, your page should be mobile-friendly, easily readable, and intuitive to navigate.
2. Table of Contents or a Menu of Sub-Practice Areas: Avoid cramming everything you know about a subject matter onto one page. Create multiple pages that are dedicated specifically to a particular topic within your practice area.
3. Visible Contact Forms With Minimal Fields: Make your process smooth by adding a contact form to your page’s sidebar or after the concluding paragraph. Make sure your contact form is only showing fields that are absolutely necessary, such as their name, email address, phone number, and a short message for them to send you.
4. Frequently Asked Questions Section: Each practice area page should have a respective section dedicated to answering questions that most prospective clients are calling or searching for. This gives you the chance to show that you understand their concerns upfront without them even having to ask you.
5. Strong Call to Actions: After summarizing the main topic within your practice area page, you should typically end it with a CTA that is relevant to what you were just discussing. The call to action can lead to another practice area, a blog post, your Contact Us page, or can even be an anchor link that scrolls to another section within the page.
6. Sectioned Content: Remember – You want to build your website with the end-user in mind first. Keep your reader engaged by sectioning up your content that is divided by images, separators, headings, and call to actions.

Breadcrumb Navigation to Improve Navigability & SEO

If you have ever heard of the child’s tale “Hansel and Gretel,” then you would know that Hansel dropped breadcrumbs along their path so that he and Gretel could find their way home. Essentially, this story encompasses the concept of breadcrumb navigation. 

Breadcrumbs enhance the user experience by illustrating their click pattern and showing users just how they ended up on their current page.

Why does breadcrumb navigation work?

1. When Google crawls your website, it can better understand the hierarchy and internal structure of your website.
2. Provides a user-friendly experience, which will be critical once you start adding more pages over time.
3. Decreases your bounce rate by offering visitors an alternative way to browse your site.

Your website needs to make it easy for visitors to return to your homepage, or to the previous page they just visited. If your website isn’t easy to navigate, your visitors will simply return to Google where they could visit the next law firm.

Compelling Case Studies That Tell a Story

Win the trust and confidence of your visitors by displaying a story about your most recent cases which resulted in your client’s desired outcome.

These are similar to client reviews and testimonials. The difference is that it tells the journey of the case from the beginning until the final outcome. Case studies can come in the form of a short post, a detailed case study page, or even a video where you conduct a client interview.

For optimal SEO results, you should add a case study archive page to your site’s main navigation. This archive page will interlink with the individual case studies, resulting in a healthy URL structure and user-interface.

New to writing case studies? No problem! Here is the basic outline that you can use to write your next industry leading case study:

1. Create an introduction that draws attention 
2. State the difficulties and challenges your client had with this particular case
3. What were the case challenges and how did your team come up with the solutions?
4. State the benefits your client gained and how they can be applied to future cases
5. What were the end results, how did this particular case make your firm better?
6. Finish with a strong call to action and in-depth contact form

Frequently Asked Questions

Search engines have become the haven for eager consumers to find immediate solutions for their current problems. To save you time and deter low-quality leads, create a FAQ page that lays out all the answers to the questions you get asked the most, short of legal advice. For an SEO bonus, make the questions H4 or H5 tags and include relevant target keywords.  

Consistently updating your FAQ page with useful, transparent information will improve your online reputation, search engine optimization, and increase social shares!

For example, you can answer common questions like:

• “What do you charge for consultations?”
• “What is your firm’s hourly rate?”
• “What is your process?” – 70% of legal consumers want a clear understanding of the legal process and what to expect.
• “What should I do about ___ ?”

Doing this will show potential and current clients that you understand their perspective. The point of this is to provide upfront value and instill confidence within them that you are the best fit for their needs. Additionally, this will lead to healthy engagement metrics such as:

• High conversion rate
• Time spent on site
• More pages per session
• Lower bounce rate

2. Improve Your Website’s Overall Performance and Speed Optimization

What do consumers looking for law services and Google’s algorithm have in common? They both have vocalized their desire for a user-friendly experience. 

47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less, and 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. – Source

If someone is looking to hire an attorney for a stressful situation, chances are, they may not be the most patient person at the moment. They have to spend hours of their time determining who they want to work with and find immediate solutions to their problems. This being said, they don’t have the patience to wait around for your website to load when they could be spending their time going to the competitor’s website that’s already been thoughtfully optimized. 

Using free analytic tools like Google Page Speed Insights, GT Metrix. Pingdom, and Google Chrome’s Developer tool, Lighthouse, you can combine their data to conclude your website’s overall performance and identify the areas where you need the most improvement.

How Speed & Performance Affects Your Google Search Results

At the end of the day, Google only cares about the end-user experience! So let’s take a look at things from their perspective…

Google can only determine a website’s relevancy, authoritativeness, and credibility based on how users are reacting and behaving with your site. Here are some important performance metrics that play an important role, and what they mean:

1. Bounce Rate: This metric is a percentage that represents the number of visitors who are landing on a page and exiting without taking any further interaction. Page loading speed is one of the top factors for why your website experiences a high bounce rate, users don’t want to wait.
2. Organic Traffic: If your website is bringing in consistent traffic from your target keywords, you will start to build up higher domain authority and be seen as contextually relevant in your practice area.
3. Click-Through Rate: CTR is a percentage of clicks you receive from the total amount of impressions, people who saw your organic listing but decided to not click it. Having a higher CTR shows that your content is much more relevant than surround competitors. 
4. Exit Pages: Unlike a landing page, an exit page is the last page a website visitor was on before they exited the website. This is important to track how visitors are interacting with your website, and why they are not converting into leads.
5. Dwell Time: This metric is the amount of time that passes between a user clicking on your organic search result listing and then returning back to the search engine results page. 
6. Repeat Traffic: Just as it sounds, repeat traffic measures the frequency of how often users return to your website.

When your website is optimized for high-performance, not only will you provide amazing user experience, but Google will take notice & increase your relevant search rankings. It’s a never-ending cycle if you keep your website maintained and optimized.

Optimize Your Website for Mobile Users

Back in 2010, Google added website loading speed, for desktop search ranking, to their list of important ranking factors for SEO. They updated it in July 2018 to include mobile-specific page speed. 

With more than 52% of all global website traffic coming from mobile users, it makes sense to have a website that is fully accessible and functional across all devices. 

Aside from testing it on your own mobile devices, you can use Google’s mobile-friendly test as a general tool.

When auditing and analyzing the mobile-friendliness of your website, you should look at these common factors:

1. Loading speed on mobile devices
2. Easily readable font style and text size
3. Clearly laid out call-to-actions
4. Easy to use navigation – Sidebars, Main Menu, Submenus, etc.
5. Content that fits within the screen size
6. Compact forms with conditional formatting
7. Simple search functionality
8. Keep pop-ups minimal
9. Respectively sized images & videos

Keep User Experience in Mind When Designing

We mentioned earlier that it only takes humans 1/20th of a second to judge the look of your website to determine whether they want to stay or not. 

When designing your law firm’s website, you should make sure that the user-interface and page layouts are cohesive. Using your brand guidelines, you should be able to stay consistent with the right colors, font styles, and brand messaging that you present to website visitors.

3. Build a Foundational SEO Strategy That Dominates

By now, you should understand the importance of having your law firm be found online. Search engine optimization helps you do just that, by putting your services in front of the people who are actively searching for it.

Perhaps you’ve searched for SEO services for law firms before, but couldn’t decide whether SEO was right for you or where you should even start. 

We have compiled list just for you on what we suggest you include in your comprehensive SEO strategy.

Construct an In-Depth Keyword Strategy

One of the most important steps, if not number 1, is to build out your keyword strategy. You should start this off by utilizing advanced SEO tools such as Ahrefs, SEMRush, UberSuggest, and Google’s Keyword Planner to conduct an extensive keyword research. If you want to get more advanced and hands on, you can find LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords that are typically found on Google’s suggested search & related search results.

When starting out in your quest for ranking on Google, always look for “long-tail keywords”, key phrases that have low volume , which have less dominant competition and have a higher chance of converting.

A few examples of long tail keywords are:

• “Chapter 13 Bankruptcy Attorneys in South Miami, Florida”
• “How Can I Beat a Speeding Ticket That I Received in Atlanta?” 
• “Immigration Attorney in Texas Near Me Free Consultation”
• “What Kind of Lawyer Do I Need for Wrongful Termination?”

Don’t forget that there are many other law firms out there who are trying to rank on search engines as well, so it’s suggested to focus on your “practice area + problem + city”, before expanding to broader terms.

Perform a Thorough Competitive Analysis

Once you have a clear understanding of all the keywords that you want to rank for, it’s time to start narrowing down which ones will create the most impact for your law firm.

By conducting a thorough competitor analysis, you will discover the keyword gaps, strengths & weaknesses, popular pages, and backlink profiles of competitors who are already ranking for your desired keywords.

Depending on your choice of SEO tools, you should also be able to see keyword statistics, website traffic estimates, and the difficulty of ranking for each keyword.

This helps you eliminate the guesswork of what keywords you will have the best shot of ranking for and steps you need to take in order to get your website ranking higher for select keywords.

On-Page SEO Optimization

The purpose of improving your website’s on-page factors is to provide a better overall user experience and help search engines gain a better understanding of what your website is all about. Here’s a breakdown of what this consists of:

• Site Speed Optimization
• Heading Tags
• Internal Linking
• URL Structure
• User Experience / User-Interface Design
• Image Optimization
• Meta Descriptions & Title Tags
• Schema Markup
• Robots TXT
• Site Mapping
• Breadcrumbs
• Navigability
• Mobile Friendliness

This all-inclusive website optimization gives you a very much needed competitive advantage. On-page search engine optimization is essentially the foundation of your website’s overall performance on search engines. When combined with a strong content marketing strategy, your website will be almost unstoppable!

Off-Page SEO Optimization

Once you have the foundation of your website laid down, you can start driving traffic through means of off-page search engine optimization. Off-page optimization typically mainly revolves around your content marketing game plan, outreach strategy, and social referrals. 

The main goal for this is to increase your website’s domain rating, link authority, and contextual relevance. This is accomplished by getting authoritative websites in your niche to link back to your website and content.

When you create high-quality content that can’t be found anywhere else (like this 8,000-word blog😉), you’re almost certainly going to rank high for niche keywords and accumulate organic backlinks.

However, when your law firm is first starting out, outreach and relationship building will have to be your bread and butter. There are many ways you can generate more backlinks to your website, but our personal favorite here at Imagen Media is to use the “Skyscraper Technique”.

Local Search Engine Optimization 

If you are a small law firm serving members of your city, county, and/or state, then you MUST make sure you have a strong local SEO presence. This starts by claiming your online real estate – Google My Business, Yelp, Bing, etc.

If I were to type in “New York Immigration Attorneys”, Google would provide me with two types of organic searches:

1. Regular organic search results
2. Google’s “Local 3 Pack” index, which is the list of businesses that appear in the box at the top of your first page search results, under paid listings.. You have seen it before, I am sure, when you are hungry and ask Siri to find “Restaurants Near Me”

Don’t miss out on your chance to receive a lot of meaningful, local traffic to your firm’s website by setting up your Google My Business, local listings, and legal directory listings so you don’t miss the opportunity of attracting clients that simply type into Google “[Your Practice Area] Attorneys in [Your City]”

4. Invest Into an Evergreen Content Marketing Game Plan

Many law firms have no problem spending thousands of dollars to bid on keywords for Google Ads. However, only a handful of them actually invests in providing value to what potential clients are searching for LITERALLY.

Content marketing for law firms generates over three times as many leads as outbound marketing and costs 62% less🤯 - Source

Defining a solid content strategy, creating an editorial calendar, and staying consistent is one of the strongest marketing strategies your law firm can use to:

• Attract new clients and highly sought-after talent.
• Increase organic traffic to your website.
• Develop a loyal brand following.
• Improve your organic search results.
• Acquire more backlinks from relevant authorities. 

But, content is so general, what should you pursue? There are many types of content marketing that a law firm can use, let’s go over a few of the most effective choices that you can implement today.

Pumping Out Valuable Blogs Consistently

Ah, yes, blogs… the forever fashionable marketing technique we all love. Blogging is the dance between creative, strategy, and design. 

Always create content that is truly solving a challenge that many others are facing. For example, you can cover various topics such as :

• “The Complete Guide to Getting the Most Out of Your Workplace Injury Lawsuit”
• “6 Crucial Steps to Take After a Car Accident in [ Your City ]”
• “Start Planning for Your Sober Ride Home Before It’s Too Late”

If your law firm is considering starting a blog, here are a few things to keep in mind: 

• Ask yourself “Why am I writing this and how can it help my industry, peers, and potential clients?”
• Research what blogs are ranking for your top keywords and what blogs are generating the most traffic to your competitors’ websites to get a better idea of what you should be writing about.
• Create an editorial schedule for your blogs and remember the more frequently you post, the more traffic you receive. Around 11 post per month is the sweet spot – Source
• Publish content that is fully developed and continue to repurpose it – consumers want fewer blogs with more valuable information.
• Truthfulness, honesty, back-checking, and fact-checking is an absolute must.
• Professional level copy each time you post, always!
• Give the readers eyes a break by adding images and graphics that help drive your point.

Become an online leader in your practice area by consistently generating fresh content that shows recent/upcoming changes, limitations, or updates in your industry.

Not only will this help you rank higher for target keywords, but you can also gain strong backlinks from members of your industry who are drawn to your content for inspiration in their writing. 

Make sure your team is staying up-to-date with your industry, and don’t be afraid to adjust your editorial calendar to write a piece of content that draws on a new piece of relevant information in your area of law.

Focus on Creating Long-form Content

Long-form content is content produced for your website that is longer than 2000+ words. This is information-rich content, not blogs that are long solely to check off a word count. 

Creating long-form content provides:

• Demonstrated expertise in a particular area
• A clear focus to readers
• Promote more return traffic
• Results in brand searches
• Ranks for multiple keywords under an umbrella keyword

Forget the days of writing several 500 word blogs about similar subjects and instead, create one badass definitive guide that answers all of your readers’ questions. It’s almost like the one you’re reading right now… Imagen that!🤔

Readers don’t want to read 5 or 6 different blogs when the information could have been condensed and tailored into one sectioned post. The least path of resistance is always the best route to go when aiming for a great user-experience!

Content that is rich can also be more favorable for Google, so if you are in the 2100 – 2400 word zone, you have a better chance of showing up at higher positions!🚀 – Source

Gain Authority Through Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is the process of having your writing and work featured on various high authority websites.

What guest blogging can do for your firm is:

• Generate referral traffic to your website
• Improves online visibility
• Promotes a better reputation of your law firm
• Helps you be seen as a though leader in your practice area
• Increase your credibility as an attorney by sharing your expertise 
• Improves relationships with colleagues and peers in your industry 

Perform a Content Inventory Audit & Repurpose

If you perform a content inventory audit, you are sure to find content that is:

• Not up-to-date for the industry standard
• Not ranking for any keywords
• Filled with fluff content which provides no real value to anyone
• Receiving little to no page views

Your law firm should be seen as leaders in your specialized area, so if the industry shifts, make sure your content is being updated as well.

Remember that not all content is good content, and oftentimes, meaningless content can hinder your rankings. 

When your content is credible and rich with information, you are more likely to score backlinks from high authority sites, which will, in turn, bring the traffic you want to your website. 

5. Create a Distinguishable Branding Guide

As a law firm, it’s important to distance yourself from all of the many competitors who claim to offer the same services that you do. In order to position yourself effectively, you have to create a standout brand!

This starts with identifying your brand’s message, why you do what you do, what your purpose is, and how you can provide the best solutions to your target audience.

Your brand’s color palette, logo design, and website design should all follow suit with how you are wanting to express your law firm’s core values.

For example, an Estate Planning law firm should use a light shade of blue, which calls to mind feelings of calmness or serenity.  The color psychology of blue explains how blue is viewed as a non-threatening color, is seen as a sign of reliability, and is often described as peaceful, tranquil, and secure. These are all critical traits that a family looks for when deciding what estate planning, probate, or family law firm they should work with.

Be Clear About Who You Are

Your homepage, or wherever leads first land, should be optimized for conversion by defining what your value proposition is. You can define this by answering one important question: “What type of law do you practice and how does it truly create an impact on your clients’ lives?”

Once you can firmly answer this question, you have begun defining your branding strategy. 

For example, our client Connecticut Bankruptcy LLC welcomes visitors to their website with a simple solution, “We Help Our Clients Find Financial Freedom Through Bankruptcy”

Your area of expertise must be attached to your brand. Take your core principles and create an identity as a law firm that resonates with your target audience. Define your why!

Always remember this – Clean, crisp, and straight to the point branding is best. 

Need help with differentiating yourself from a heavily competitive market? Consult with our digital marketing ninjas who specialize in helping law firms take their branding to the next level. 

Develop Your Ideal Audience Personas 

Having a deep understanding of who your ideal clients are will make your entire digital marketing strategy a lot smoother from A-Z!

What is a persona and why is it important?

Also referred to as a “Buyer Persona”, an audience persona is a fictitious character that represents supported commonalities and characteristics, not opinions, of whom your ideal client is. 

You can create personas by combining what you already know with market research, insights, analytics, and surveys! 

This allows you to personalize your content marketing, social media strategy, and brand messaging around your target audience, instead of generalizing it based on your own perceptions.

When building out your personas, whether it be 1, 2, or 10 of them, you want to make sure you cover these important areas:

1. Demographics
2. Pain Points / Challenges
3. Objectives / Goals
4. What solutions can you offer to them?
5. How are the decisions influenced?
6. What does their day to day life look like?
7. Where do they go for information?

Here are a couple of law firm persona examples!

When building out your complete marketing strategy, including audience personas will save you time and headaches! Prospective clients will start to tell you that they felt like your messaging was tailored to their exact needs, and little do they know….

6. Rely on Your AI-Powered 24/7 Client Advocate: Live Chatbots

I am sure, like any business, your firm receives messages around the clock, gets asked the same repetitive questions, and loses potential business from eager visitors who are looking for immediate gratification. As an attorney, this could pull you away from your billable hours and further hinder your existing problems with time management.

Well, there is an implementable solution for this problem – an artificially intelligent representative that works for you day in and day out. That solution is:

Live chatbots!

Chatbots serve a purpose as your dedicated, 24/7 client success agents. They can immediately answer those common questions, help you generate leads, and greatly increase your website’s conversion rates.

These lead generating soldiers are on the front line, eagerly waiting to serve your customers’ needs. Even if you are snuggled up in bed, or utilizing your time to focus on keeping profitable realization rates, your chatbot will be working tirelessly to provide the best customer service!

7. Maximize Your Marketing Dollars with a Powerful Google Ads Strategy

When integrated with a foundational SEO strategy, Google Ads (PPC) can provide you with instant results, fresh data, and even higher organic search rankings. Targeting law-related keywords on Google Ads can be very expensive, in fact, the cost per click is higher than any other industry!

How You Can Run Successful Ad Campaigns

In order to reach warm, bottom of the funnel prospects and keep costs low, you need to bid on long-tail keywords. This could be key phrases such as:

• “The best slip and fall attorney in [Your City]”
• “What do I need to do after an accident in [Your State]?”
• “Do I Actually Need to Hire a [Your Practice Area] Attorney?”

Google’s Keyword Planner is a free tool that allows you to find the most relevant keywords to your law firm. It’s as simple as entering your URL and letting Google’s algorithm determine the most relevant keywords.

There are a few things that you need to remember:

1. Avoid running ads on weekends and after hours when nobody is available to answer the phone.
2. Make sure to use negative keywords to filter out people searching for “Cheap”, “ [irrelevant practice area] Lawyers Near Me, etc. 
3. Don’t waste your money on bidding too high for competitive keywords

Every attorney in America will agree that it is not in your best interest to represent yourself in court if you have no legal knowledge. Just as this is true, so is hiring a Google Ads expert who understands how to properly manage your campaigns to maximize your ROAS (return on ad spend).

Your PPC & SEO strategy should coincide together to maximize your law firm’s search engine visibility! With a perfectly executed and synchronized strategy, you’re able to appear, not one, but three times:

1. On the paid results, at the top of the SERP.
2. In the Local 3 Pack, from your local SEO campaign
3. In the organic search results

If your firm focuses on both a well researched and thorough strategy, you will be able to build trust with prospective clients, increase your visibility as a reputable law firm, and increase website conversions.

How to Craft a Killer Google Ads Campaign?

1. Begin your PPC strategy with tons of research, most importantly, research about what your audience wants and how they are searching for it with Google. Your firm will need to get inside the minds of your clients and find out what words they search for when trying to find a law firm. This can be accomplished by developing audience personas, building empathy mapping, and understanding the customer journey.
2. Once you have your list of keywords, you need to validate these keywords. You can use tools, such as the Google Ad Keyword Planner which can provide you with information about each keyword, such as search volume, trends, and the average cost-per-click. – Source

8. Fully Optimize Your Google My Business & Directory Listings

Keeping your Google My Business page updated and consistent will do wonders for your current marketing struggles. Get rid of those stock photos, or professional photoshoots that you did back in 2017! Your photo gallery should showcase photos with happy clients, photos of the office, team of attorneys, etc.

Optimize your description with relevant keywords! Focus on using buyer-intent, transactional phrases such as “Best [your practice area] attorney in [your city].” Utilize Google Analytics & Google Search Console to see what keywords and phrases customers are searching to find your law firm.

82% of consumers read online reviews of local businesses. Amongst this group, 97% will read the responses that are made to these reviews! – Source

People want to do businesses with attorneys that they know will truly care about them, and not look at them as just another case. Keep in mind to ask for genuine reviews from your clients, once their case is closed. The key is to make it all about them as if they have an important story to tell the world!

Use Directories to Leverage Your Online Presence

Get your name on all possible, relevant directories that have a domain rating of over 50+ and aren’t charging an outrageous fee. The point of this is to get “do-follow” backlinks to your website from already authoritative and contextual websites.

The more directories like this that point towards your website, the greater your chances of showing up higher in SERPs. This is in addition to the traffic you will also be receiving directly fro the directories themselves.

If you do not know where to start, here’s a list of the Best Legal Directories of 2020 to get your law firm in front of buyer-intent consumers searching for legal counsel! Most offer free and paid subscriptions, so you can test the waters and find which ones are providing you the best results.

On top of this, don’t forget to get your NAP listed on all of the local business directories to improve your local citations!

9. Building Credibility & Social Proof to Improve Your Online Visibility

“Oh, you’re the #1 ranked law firm in my city? Wow okay😮…” 

Yeah, we wish it was that easy too. 😆

According to Clio’s 2019 Legal Trend Reports, it’s no surprise that 59% of consumers seek out a referral from family, friends, and other attorneys. However, the report goes on to state that 57% of consumers will do their own research using online search engines!  

Just last year, in 2019, 7 out of 10 consumers said that they want:

• To get a clear understanding of your legal process
• See your lawyers’ experience and credentials
• Know what types of cases you handle
• Read & see what past clients have said about you.

So, what steps can you take to achieve this?

Collect Noble Client Reviews & Testimonials

I am sure you have read reviews for a certain doctor, restaurant, or hair salon before you decided who to visit. Well, attorneys are no different than any other B2C service provider. 

In fact, 82% of consumers read online reviews for local businesses before deciding who they want to give their business to.

If your clients are consistently happy with your service, ask them to give you a testimonial so you can share their story with others who are in the same position that they were in.

Send them your unique Google My Business review link, and if they contacted you through a legal directory, ask them to leave a review there as well about their experience. From here you can take their review off of these platforms and add it to your website’s dedicated reviews section.

Showcase Your Awards & Affiliations

Why do these work?

• Instilling credibility – These show potential clients that you are a leader in your industry and they will be confident in your professionalism.
• SEO Boost – If your directory or affiliate organization allows for do-follow backlinks, your firm’s website will be listed on their website which will help boost your ranking on Google. Even a no-follow backlink will still help you drive traffic as well, it just won’t be seen as a connection when Google crawls their website.
• Better User-experience – Too often, law firms pile their websites with text, which makes it unpleasant for users to navigate through. Adding logos, awards, and reviews create a much better visual experience for users!

If you or your law firm have received any awards, such as the AVVO Rating or Best Law Firms, then make sure the awards are listed visibly on your website’s homepage and footer area! 

If your law firm is a part of the local chamber of commerce, any legal directories, charity partnerships, or any other relevant affiliations, ask them to send you an unique badge to display on your website as well! In the event they don’t have one of these, then using their logo will be just fine.

Your webmaster should have the know-how to do this for you with ease. If not, contact our team to help you create your showcase!

10. Reach Your Target Audience Through Social Media

After determining your target audience, buyer personas, and empathy mapping, you should have a clear understanding of the social media channels your ideal clients are using. 

Don’t do social media just to do it. Take the time to create quality posts that contain links back to your blog posts, case studies, client testimonials, and Youtube videos. These are all the perfect digital assets to share with your community that helps provide credibility for your law firm and establish trust with your audience.

Facebook, Instagram, and Linkedin particularly allow you to create a business page dedicated to your law firm. 

What Platforms Should Your Attorneys Be Using?

You probably use a lot of these social media platforms in your private life, but your professional life should not be neglected! 

As an attorney, you can attract quality clients by creating a personal brand on these platforms:

1. Facebook – If you are an estate planning law firm for example, then you should know that you have a better chance of reaching family members who have recently lost a loved one or the 55+ audience who are looking to set up a plan for handling their generational wealth. There are over 2.5 billion monthly users, so surely at least a few of them are looking for your law firm.
2. LinkedIn – If you are looking to connect with your peers or industry professionals that could be potential referral partners for your firm, then LinkedIn is a great networking tool to do so.
3. YouTube – Create short, valuable videos that address your clients’ frequently asked questions and concerns. These videos can then be repurposed into blog posts, social media content, etc. You should also take the opportunity to interview your clients, employees, and peers to get raw, authentic conversations related to your practice.
4. Twitter – You can use twitter as a chance to post your newest blog or case study and inform your audience about changes in your industry in 280 characters.
5. Quora – How often do you find yourself landing on Quora when you’re searching for a very specific question? This platform is perfect for lawyers to provide eager searchers with immediate gratification for their problems. You don’t have to wait for people to call, email, or fill out your contact forms. There’s plenty of people out there who need help, but don’t want to reach out to every attorney in their city.
6. Reddit – This platform can be utilized to search for users who are asking questions that pertain to your practice area, which gives you the chance to be seen as a Subject Matter Expert. From here, you can make new connections, get referrals, and may even come across some potential clients.
7. Instagram – The general audience is younger on Instagram but if your law firm typically serves younger clients, then your firm should maintain an active Instagram account. A perfect example of this is CEO Lawyer who uses his platform to provide consistent value that you can’t find anywhere else about Personal Injury in Atlanta.

Is your law firm active on these social media platforms? If not, integrate them into your content marketing strategy and relish in the opportunity to connect deeper with potential clients, referral partners, and unforeseen relationships. 

Facebook and Instagram ads 

Just like a PPC strategy, your firm should begin to invest in creating Instagram and Facebook ads. In fact, law firms have the highest click-through rate than any other industry when it comes to Facebook Ads.

By generating Facebook and Instagram ads, your firm will have the opportunity to continue to build trust with the public by creating social proof as you engage with your audience. Eventually, you can become an industry thought leader after demonstrating your successful case studies and exhibiting your expertise. 

Your law firm can use Facebook and Instagram ads to differentiate yourself from competing law firms and attract the right type of clients.

Create Winning Lookalike Audiences for Your Ads

If your firm has previously implemented Facebook and Instagram ads but you did not receive high conversion rates or steady ROI, you may want to take a look into using lookalike audiences to improve your results for the next round of ads.

A lookalike audience can help your firm examine who your best existing customers are and promote ads to a new group of people that are similar to your existing clientele. You can upload your data from:

• Your list of customers in your CRM, spreadsheet, etc.
• An email list that you have built up over time
• Website visitors from certain periods of time
• Audiences from Facebook & Instagram who have engaged with your content

Creating a lookalike audience will help your firm advertise to a whole new pool of potential clients, that otherwise might not have learned about your firm without coming across the ad.

11. Establishing a Loyal Client Base with Email Marketing

Email marketing is a cost-effective and easily traceable marketing strategy that your law firm can implement to:

• Ignite brand loyalty
• Increase referral traffic
• Convert warm leads into a client
• Provide continuous value to individuals in masses

Whenever you create a new piece of content, come across valuable information, or just want to share a story with your client base, email marketing is the most effective way to do so at scale. Unlike social media, there’s not an algorithm that limits you to a percentage of how many people will see what you share. 

Pro Tip: Use this to send valuable follow-ups with warm prospects, and for reconnecting with past clients to say thank you and wish a happy holiday! The goal of this is to always stay in front of people’s minds. 

Starting Up a Powerful Email Campaign

When initially creating your email marketing strategy, your firm needs to create an email list from your current client database. Typically this is from your CRM database or spreadsheet of contact information.

Not enough data to create an email list? Don’t be afraid to add a ‘subscribe’ or ‘sign up’ button on your website to aid in growing your database. 

Once you have created your email list, let’s talk about your email content. 

The best pieces of content you could provide your contact list are:

• Weekly or biweekly newsletters
• An article your firm has written or finds engaging 
• Videos from your firm
• Small pieces of free legal advice 
• Legal updates specific to your area of practice

Keep the email body short and sweet, just as if you were sending a text to family and friends, but dress it up a bit! The ideal length of your email should be around 200 words.

Add graphics, statistics, or other valuable information, photos, and really embrace your brand when creating your newsletter. 

For a more personable touch, add a funny GIF, or a personal video of yourself to show that you are a human too. In fact, adding a video to your emails can boost click-through rates by a whopping 65%!

Keep Your Audience In the Loop

Email marketing is the best method that your law firm can use to nurture potential, current, and past clients.

Remember to tailor your content to fit with each client’s needs. You should craft your emails as if they were being written to one specific audience persona. If you offer multiple practice areas, you will need to segment your list into groups so that they receive the most important, relevant information to their inbox.

Some groups you could generate could be: 

• Previous Clients 
• Current or Recent Clients
• [ Practice Area #1 ]
• Recent Website Visitors

The end goal for your firm’s email marketing campaign is to simply provide the most valuable information, catering to one’s needs, straight to their inbox. 

This helps to show your past, current, and potential clients just why they chose or should choose to work with you over many other competitors.

12. Get Engaged Through Community Management

Why should your law firm begin to practice community management? Well, as Krystal Wu, the Social Media Community Manager for HubSpot put it:

“Brands need community managers because they’re the tone, voice, and human element behind your brand.” – Source

How Can Community Management Benefit Your Law Firm?

Having a community manager or practicing strong community management internally can help your law firm with the following:

• Be on the frontline for receiving customer feedback and sparking real client conversation
• Support brand awareness by educating your community on the area(s) of law your firm practices 
• Gain a deeper understanding of the needs, wants, and expectations that your potential clients expect out of a lawyer and law firm
• Acts as a relationship-building guru for your brand and your target audience
• Aids in converting leads to happy clients by providing support and excellent customer service for potential clients that are on the fence about choosing a law firm 

Building an Effective Community Management Strategy

Before you begin to grow your community, it is important to create your strategy on how to build genuine and positive rapport with your audience.

1. Typically, community management will happen via social channels, so plan your social media strategy, know your target demographic, and begin to build a plan based on the social channels your firm selects. 
2. Evaluate what your firm can offer the public, then structure the target audience you want to interact with on social media channels.
3. Determine successful KPIs for community management, such as amount of shares/likes, conversions, or overall engagement.
4. Create weekly, monthly, and quarterly goals and evaluate them at each step of the way to see what is working and what should be adjusted.
5. Watch your editorial calendars, know when your firm is planning on posting, and ensure you are engaging with each new post.

Maintain Your Reputation Through Review Management

There’s no denying that people trust reviews just as much as, if not more than, referrals from family and friends. To back this up, proven studies show that for 76% of people this is true. As an attorney, you know just how crucial it is for you to get referrals.

We mentioned earlier about keeping your Google My Business listing updated, which is where you can handle the Google Reviews you receive. Furthermore, you’ll want to keep an eye on all of your local listings, legal directory listings, and Facebook reviews so that you can immediately reply to your reviews, good or bad. This is only important if you care that 97% of people read your responses to reviews…

13. Stay on Track of Your Goals & Optimize with Analytics

As you begin to craft your personalized marketing plan, you’ll certainly have established goals and objectives for what your desired outcome looks like. 

As a partner in a law firm, you don’t have the time to build ineffective marketing strategies. So, in order to effectively measure your marketing progress, you’ll need to have key performance indicators and tracked metrics in place.

Our favorite tool to do this is the all-mighty, powerful Google Analytics. We shed light on important metrics earlier in this post, but here’s a breakdown of what you should look out for when tracking your goals:

• Amount of New Clients
• Leads / Opportunities
• Return on Marketing Investment
• Gross Revenue
• Profitability
• Lead to Client Conversion Rate
• Website Traffic
• Search Engine Ranking
• Top Performing Content

If you have decided that social media is a route you would like to take, you can use platforms like Hootsuite or Buffer to track all of your channels in one place. Most social media platforms also have their own built-in analytic tracking as well.

Overall Summary

Acquiring new clients for your law firm is never the root of your problem. The problem is typically not having a sustainable system in place that can funnel eager searchers into happy clients.

Our reason for putting together this ultimate guide is so that we can take information from the people who have it, to the people who need it. Here at Imagen Media, we are very passionate about helping small B2C law firms overcome their challenges by implementing custom solutions that fit their needs and align with their business goals.

If you have found any value from this blog, all we ask is that you please share this with your inner network of friends, colleagues, and acquaintances! 😁