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Most often times, attorneys will need to attract new clientele from a certain geographic area. As a result local search engines such as Superpages, Yellowpages, Yelp, Google Places, Yahoo Local, and others are excellent spots to get relevant, targeted traffic. Below I discuss three strategies you can utilize to help improve your firm’s visibility in local search results.
1. Get Citations – Local search engines will frequently check with one another to come across citations of your firm which will validate or adjust the company listing in their own indexes. Simply by registering with various local search engines, and keeping consistency with your law firm’s name, address, and contact info, you will help verify your firm and get additional visibility as a result. Making use of a service like www.universalbusinesslisting.com may help as well.
2. Get Reviews – Some local search engines display businesses that have received quite a few reviews more prominently in search results. More significantly, reviews are a good way to encourage someone who discovers your firm in the search results to contact you. It really is a great idea to persuade clientele to leave a review for your law firm in Google Places or a different local search engine of your choosing.
3. Inbound links – As is the case with any Law Firm SEO campaign, back links are the foundation your visibility is built on. Getting legally relevant web sites to link to yours will help make your website more authoritative and trusted. As your firm’s website becomes more trusted, you will notice your position in local search results rise.
Being a great lawyer and having success running your own practice do not always correlate. The skill set required to handle the business aspect of a law firm is different than that of practicing law.
I believe a critical skill for lawyers is the art of the sale. Often times sales is thought of in a negative light but the reality is that we are all in sales. If you don’t sell a product you sell an idea, a service, or yourself. Your law practice will suffer if you don’t consistently bring new clients in the door.
These are 5 sales basics that I think every lawyer should know:
1. Clients Don’t Walk In the Door Check In Hand – It would be great if potential clients walked in ready to pay you for the services they know they need. However, the reality is that they often aren’t sure what to do when it comes to their legal situation. Many will have questions, others are shopping with different attorneys, some won’t have the money, and so on. You need to be prepared to convince these people how you can benefit them and improve their situation. You need to explain what the consequences of NOT hiring an attorney may be.
2. Open Your Ears, Not Your Mouth – I think there is a false impression that the best sales people are the best talkers. In fact, the best sales people are the ones that learn to ask good questions and listen. It is impossible to sell someone without providing value. The best way to provide value is to understand what is valuable to your prospect. The only way to understand that is to listen to what they are telling you.
3. What Are You Going To Do For Them – A potential client is interested in one thing…what are you going to do for them. They aren’t really concerned about your law firm or even you. Their focus is how you will solve their legal issue. Learning how to effectively communicate this to a client is critical.
4. Network, Network, Network – The key to sales, especially in the legal field, is networking. Building contacts, relationships, and networks will lead to a successful practice. Ignore this at your own peril.
5. Refine Your Sales Systems – You need to develop systems at your firm for each aspect of the sales process. Think about how you want to handle incoming prospect, intake interviews, follow ups with potential clients, etc. Much of your success rests on your ability to be organized, persistent, and have good follow through. You can’t afford to be disorganized when handling your potential contacts and clients.
Marketing your law firm through search engines will increase the number of people that “see” your law firm. As people continue to migrate to the web for locating local professional services, using the web for lawyer marketing campaigns just makes sense. For the consumer, finding a lawyer online can be more effective than using traditional methods (like yellow book, or directory listings).
The Net market is growing at an astonishing rate. The sooner you accept search engine marketing for your law firm, the better results you will see from your web marketing campaigns. Once your page appears in the first three results for a particular high volume key phrase, you will see amazing traffic, lead, and new client increases for your firm. Lawyer search engine marketing is the is the future of tapping into the vast number of people online. Successful online lawyer marketing involves demonstrating your professional credentials through articles, analysis and other forms of content. Additionally, using video in your internet lawyer marketing has proven one of the most effective ways to demonstrate expertise. Producing a successful video can be expensive, but if professionally done, it can be well-worth the investment.
As previously state, people are using the internet to do just about anything. Even initial legal consultations can be performed almost completely online. More information is available about a lawyer or law firm than ever before. Once you build and maintain a strong online presence, you will begin to access the overwhelming number of people in need of legal services on the web.
There are probably as many online lawyer marketing companies as there are lawyers. It should come as no surprise that, depending on the key phrase, your law firm is competing with thousands of other websites. If you don’t take advantage of search engine optimization techniques, you will not survive. Many law firms target the most competitive keywords in a particular field and area. While this is an important piece to an online lawyer marketing campaign, it is not the only way to have success.
There are many techniques involved in executing a successful lawyer internet marketing campaign. Each strategy has a special part to play in contributing to your law firm’s website’s ranking profile. Some of these core concepts include keyword discovery and targeting, technical components of your site’s structure, and the nature, quality, and quantity of the content on the site. Once these core concepts are working in harmony, you will see more traffic, leads, and new clients from your website. A website is an integral part of your lawyer marketing strategy and will achieve better success if it includes a blog and other social media tools.
Using the web to perform lawyer marketing strategies may be the best investment for your law firm. However, if executed improperly, it may be the worst. One of the keys to getting new clients from the internet is finding a web consultant who has interests aligned with your law firm. Structuring the proper relationship is the first part of finding success with lawyer internet marketing.
The internet provides several channels for conducting a lawyer marketing campaign. Perhaps one of the most successful ways to market a law firm online is with search engine optimization. Law firm SEO involves many techniques. However, not all techniques are created equally. Some will produce much better results than others. Further, some may actually be counter-productive.
Lawyer search engine marketing includes many techniques. The goal of each is to increase your firm’s site’s visibility in the major search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. When properly implemented, these techniques will generate more targeted web traffic to your site. From that point, your site needs to be optimized to convert this traffic into actionable leads for your law firm.
Lawyer search engine optimization involves getting your lawyer website to rank in the natural results of a search engine results page. There is an important difference between natural results and paid results. For example, for every ten clicks on a search engine result page, 7 clicks will go to the natural listings and only 3 to the paid listings. Obviously, ranking naturally opens up far-more traffic opportunities.
Obviously, the biggest distinction between natural listings and paid listings, is that your pay for clicks on paid listings while you pay nothing for clicks on organic listings. In terms of return on investment, ranking in the natural results opens the possibility for much higher returns on investment as your cost for traffic acquisition remains fixed. In paid search, your acquisition will grow depending on your conversion rate (a topic for a different article).
Successful lawyer marketing campaigns need to be built on a strong law firm SEO foundation. From this foundation, you can build out other lawyer internet marketing campaigns including social media marketing and press releases. However, each of these additional efforts will be more effective if they are based on a solid law firm search engine optimization foundation.
When considering hiring a third party to perform your law firm search engine optimization, it is critical to consider the unique requirements and regulations of lawyer marketing in your state. Make sure that any search firm that you are considering employing is familiar with the regulations in your state.
