Growing your law firm online can be difficult.
Competition, lack of time, lack of resources, lack of expertise — it all adds up.
But an online presence is essential. And, more than that, if done well, online marketing can drive immense growth.
Regardless if you belong to a major law firm or a small local one, the key to any successful law firm lies with how you market your services and expertise. Let’s be real, brainstorming law firm marketing ideas for your practice is filled with the challenges of managing a number of digital marketing efforts.
Gaining the awareness and trust of your clients is key to gaining their business, so we want to give you 5 powerful law firm marketing ideas and strategies that will give your firm more visibility, and quality leads ready to hire an lawyer from your law firm.
1. Optimize Your Website
It’s 2020, and 87% of shoppers now begin their product search online. It is no different for services like carpentry, shopping, or of course, legal counsel.
Your website is how you make your first impression, and it’s no longer enough to be usable on desktops alone. 94% of smartphone owners (most people) search for local information on their phones. So your website needs to work correctly and load fast regardless of device.
You can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to see if your site meets usability standards.
You also want to test your website on your smartphone. (Ideally, you should test its usability on multiple models, which you can do with Device Mode in Google Chrome Dev Tools.)
2. Invest in Good SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of utilizing specific goal-oriented strategies to get your site ranking higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). If you don’t have the time to learn the technical side of things, hire an SEO expert or a copywriter specializing in SEO writing to give your site an overhaul.
If you’re choosing to optimize your site yourself, the following best practices are a good place to start:
- Try to get more backlinks organically by creating great content and placing CTAs for readers to share
- Link to other high-quality sites in your own content
- Do careful keyword research, and place relevant keywords in your copy and alt-text tags in your images
- Use plugins like Yoast SEO to evaluate each page’s SEO potential
If you’re unsure of where your site stands in terms of current SEO rankings, you can use a tool like SEMrush’s Site Audit. This will provide you with a detailed analysis of your site’s current SEO health. It can even flag areas that could use some improvement.
3. Provide Valuable Content
Value is always good, because it keeps people coming back to you. Creating extra content can not only offer more information that your clients are desperately looking for, but it can also give you more room to rank for keywords and draw in relevant traffic. Users searching for “how much does divorce cost” are likely looking for a lawyer, after all.
Valuable content can take several forms. A common one would be an FAQ placed in a designated page on your site. This FAQ could contain questions and answers to the inquiries that you hear most often. If you’re able to write answers succinctly, you may even end up having your answer show up in a featured snippet and get you high up in the SERPs.
Image source: Baumgartner Laweryers
You can also use content marketing (e.g. blogging) to accomplish the same goal. Blogging gives you a way to create on-going content to stay relevant in search engines while generating new content for relevant keywords. Having a blog that fits in with your branding can also help you earn trust early on if potential clients stick around to check it out.
4. Create Educational Videos That Targets Common Questions
If you’re focused on niching down, you should create educational videos that target common questions prospective clients have in your branch of law.
YouTube is the second largest search engine on the internet, with over 3 billion searches per month.
People head to YouTube for advice and guidance on how to solve problems they are facing in real life. For some, this can be how to change a tire. For others, it can be trying to figure out how long an appeal process takes or how does Nari- O- Shishu nirjaton suit work?
If you focus on terms, phrases, and problems that your clients face, you can reach more people like them, for free, on YouTube.
That is the essence of creating educational legal videos for YouTube.
5. Invest in PPC Advertising
Organic marketing and brand building are great (and should never be ignored at any cost), but sometimes it’s not enough to go skyrocketing to the top of the SERPs. Because of this, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is one of the fastest law firm marketing ideas you can try.
Google AdWords in particular is an excellent platform for law firms. You can create ads that will be shown to users searching for specific queries, allowing you to appear at the top of search results when potential clients are actively looking for you.
Since hiring a lawyer typically only occurs when there is already a need for one (and doesn’t happen just because someone saw an ad on TV), AdWords is the best PPC platform for law firms to invest in. You can even improve your results by running campaigns with tight-knit ad groups, creating relevant copy, and offers for specific niches of your audience.
If you want to run Facebook Ads, retargeting is the way to go. Set up Facebook’s tracking pixel, and then run campaigns targeting users who have visited your site recently but didn’t reach out to contact you. This can give them the push they need to get back in touch.
Conclusion
A combination of strong branding, search engine optimization, and trust-building content will help your law firm stand out from your competitors. Use these seven marketing tips to not only get more traffic to your site but to be more persuasive once they actually get there.
Need a little help coming up with law firm marketing ideas? We’ve got you covered there. Shoot us a message and learn more about what we can do for you.
