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May, 2022
SEO and content marketing for law firms are two critical components of successful online marketing campaigns.
We’ll admit, digital marketing can be confusing. There are so many channels, tactics, strategies, methods, platforms, and opinions to consider. With all these options, it’s easy for your efforts to become divided and ineffective.
However, any agency worth their salt will tell you that SEO and content marketing are the foundations of an effective law firm marketing campaign.
Luckily for you, OppGen Marketing is that agency. Don’t believe us? Schedule a free consultation with us today.
Content marketing is the process of creating and sharing relevant, valuable, and engaging content on your website and other digital channels (social media, YouTube, features on other websites, etc.).
Content marketing includes all types of media:
Great. But why is content marketing for law firms so valuable?
The goals of content marketing are simple and straightforward:
What does it take to create great content?
Quality, strategic content should provide answers to your target audiences’ questions and solutions to their problems.
Content assets should…
Content marketing is a fairly simple concept but is far more complex in execution. In fact, law firm content marketing happens to be particularly competitive. It takes skilled SEO technicians, writers, marketers, and creators to put your law firm on the map.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of optimizing various assets on and off of your website to rank higher on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), for searches related to your practice.
This can include…
You can begin to see why SEO and content marketing are critical for the digital success of your law firm.
SEO and content marketing for law firms should be synergistic. Not mutually exclusive.
SEO guides, informs, and enhances your content. SEO knowledge and tools give us the ability to research, analyze, and strategically incorporate valuable information and keywords into your content.
These are the exact keywords, questions, and phrases your target audience is using to look for your firm on Google and other search engines.
Content marketing works to boost your SEO and SERP (search engine results page) standings. Creating strategic, search-oriented content can increase your ranking on SERPs — producing more visibility, traffic, leads, and clients for your firm.
Using one without the other doesn’t really work.
Consider this: If you have superb website content but a slow, underperforming website — visitors won’t stay on your site. Additionally, Google will see your site has performance deficiencies and penalize you because of it.
Conversely, if you have a high-performing, user-friendly, easy-to-navigate website but inadequate website content, it may be impossible to rank.
Great content can’t compensate for bad SEO.
The best SEO strategy can’t make up for poor or subpar content.
Your SEO and law firm content marketing should be used concurrently. When they are, they can produce results greater than the sum of their parts.
Here is a quick breakdown and some highlights of the collaborative relationship between SEO and content marketing:
Content marketing for law firms and an informed SEO strategy are key to your firm’s digital success. What about the other aspects of digital marketing?
As with SEO and content, every aspect of your digital marketing efforts can work synergistically to grow your firm’s business.
There’s a good chance that the majority of your firm’s new, non-referral leads come from Google and other search engines. However, that’s not the online place they’re studying your online presence.
Your ideal clients are also searching for and validating your firm in other areas of the web, like:
Bottom line: The best way to get discovered by new clients online is by consistently and strategically expanding your digital presence, across platforms.
Results-driven content marketing strategies utilize a mix of different channels and types of media to get in front of your target audience, on the digital platforms they use the most.
Our team at OppGen uses industry-leading SEO tools, marketing best practices, and personalized, high-caliber content to produce winning law firm content marketing and SEO campaigns
If your business needs an SEO and content marketing strategy to put your law firm on the map and get you more visibility with your target audience, contact our team at OppGen today for a complimentary strategy session.
Law firms that aren’t using search engine optimization (SEO) as part of their digital marketing strategy are missing out.
SEO helps your law firm’s website rank higher on search engines, increases your visibility with your target audience, and brings your firm more clients through organic searches.
Our law firm SEO checklist will help your firm get started with optimizing your website and kick off your SEO strategy to help increase your organic visibility and traffic from Google and other search engines.
For even more SEO optimization advice for your law firm, contact us today.
SEO is the strategic work done on, off, and behind the scenes of your website to help you rank higher on Google. The goal of SEO is to increase the quality and quantity of organic traffic your firm brings to your website.
SEO involves everything from improving the speed, responsiveness, and user-friendliness of your website to targeting the keywords and phrases your ideal clients are searching for on Google, and more.
Why is this so important for law firms?
Because when your potential clients need an attorney, they go to Google first.
Let’s say run a personal injury firm in your area. When potential clients need an attorney, they’ll go to Google first, even before they’ll reach out for personal recommendations.
They’ll look for attorneys by searching for terms and phrases like “personal injury attorney near me” or “car accident lawyer in my area.”
The better your SEO, the higher you’re going to rank for searches like these and others related to your practice area and services. The better you rank, the greater the odds that these clients will come to your website, vs. your competitors.
Your law firm SEO strategy needs to cover the three key pillars of SEO in order to be successful.
Is your website fast and user-friendly? Does it work well on mobile devices? Is it easy for Google to crawl and index?
If SEO work was described as a car, your technical SEO would be everything under the hood that makes your car fast, smooth, efficient, responsive, and fun to drive.
Your law firm’s on-page SEO addresses the visible content on your website.
On-page SEO involves optimizing your practice’s website content for relevant keywords that your target audience is searching for. Effective on-page SEO strategies naturally incorporate keywords and phrases your target audience is searching for to find an attorney, directly into your website copy and text.
Quality on-page SEO content starts with…
This aspect of SEO addresses other websites on the internet that link to or reference your firm’s site. The more authoritative and relevant websites you have linking back to your website, the more credibility you build with Google and your audience.
You can build your own off-page links by creating business profiles on helpful directories such as:
Now that we have the pillars of SEO covered, let’s jump into setting up with your law firm SEO checklist…
This section focuses on getting the most important tools, accounts, and profiles you’ll need for analyzing and improving your SEO.
We’ll be covering how to…
The set up of a solid SEO strategy can be complicated and overwhelming. Especially if you haven’t done this before.
If you need professional assistance and support with your law firm’s SEO strategy, schedule a strategy call with our SEO team at OppGen today.
Google Analytics gives your firm the ability to track key data that’s tied to your SEO and website performance. These tools help us track valuable data like:
To track this valuable data, you need to have a Google Analytics account.
Start by going to google.com/analytics and either create an account by clicking “Start for free” or sign in to your Google account by clicking “Sign in to Analytics.”
Once you’ve finished setting up your law firm’s Google Analytics account, it’s time to set up Google Search Console.
Google Search Console is another free Google service that allows you to monitor and troubleshoot your website’s appearance and performance. You can use it to find and fix technical errors, submit sitemaps, see backlinks, view queries people are using to search for your law firm, and much more.
After setting it up, be sure to link your Google Search Console and Google Analytics account for advanced tracking and deeper insights into your law firm’s website data and performance.
Another quick, easy, and free SEO win for your law firm is installing an SEO plugin on your website.
Our preferred website creation platform is WordPress, which powers around 40% of all websites on the web. They have some of the industry’s best free and paid SEO plugins for websites.
The most popular, widely-used, and highest-rated SEO plugins on WordPress include:
Only download and activate one of these plugins to use on your law firm’s website. There are tons of great training resources for each of them you can find online so that you can start improving your law firm’s SEO.
As we mentioned, technical SEO focuses on the technical aspects of your website, like site speed, design, responsiveness, user-friendliness, and mobile performance. These are all ranking factors search engines consider when ranking websites.
Two core aspects of technical SEO are:
Your ideal clients use search engines on their phones more than any other device.
In fact, 54.4% of all website traffic in Q4 of 2021 came from mobile.
Your law firm’s website has to be mobile-friendly. This is one of the first things Google takes into consideration when crawling your website and configuring how to rank it.
A mobile-friendly site is one that loads quickly and is easy to navigate on any mobile device. Keeping a simple, uncluttered, straightforward website design makes a huge difference in increasing site speed and creating a better user experience on mobile devices.
How can you see if your website is mobile responsive?
Start with running your website through Google’s Test My Site Tool. This will give you direct feedback from Google on how your website is performing on mobile, and what you can improve.
Next, you can use Google Chrome’s free inspection tool to see what your website looks like on a variety of mobile devices.
All you need to do is…
Google will reload the page in its Inspect view.
At the top of the page, you’ll see a thin white bar that says “Dimensions” along with the name of a mobile device that your browser is simulating (such as an iPhone X). This means you are looking at your website as it would appear on the mobile device you’ve selected.
Next to the name of the mobile device, there is a small triangle. Click it for a dropdown list of other mobile devices. You can test different types of mobile devices and their different dimensions (your website will look different on an iPad Pro vs a Galaxy Fold phone).
The Inspect tool makes it easy for you to see what your website looks like on mobile devices and if there are any issues with your website’s mobile version.
Speed is another critical website ranking factor for Google. Your law firm needs to be fast and load quickly to rank. The slower your website, the bigger of a detriment it is to your SEO.
In fact, mobile responsiveness and speed alone can be the difference between ranking on page one for your target keywords and phrases, to not ranking at all.
To check your site’s speed, go to Google’s Page Speed Insights tool and enter your website’s URL and click “Analyze.”
Google’s Page Speed Insights tool will rate your website’s speed, and give you detailed notes and steps on how to improve it.
Keep in mind that the Page Speed Insights tool inspects a single page at a time, so you will want to eventually run speed tests on all pages on your website.
Pro Tip: Use your Google Analytics to uncover what pages on your website generate the most traffic. Run a speed test on those first to see what you can improve to help them rank better.
Need help improving your law firm’s site speed and mobile-friendliness?
Contact our SEO team at OppGen today for a free SEO audit of your law firm’s website.
Google (and your website visitors) need to see that your website is secure.
If your website URLs are still using HTTP, you need to make the switch to HTTPS.
HTTP URLs are a sign to Google and your audience that your site pages are not secure.
This puts your firm at a major disadvantage for ranking. It also makes your website more hackable, so it’s a security breach waiting to happen. If your law firm’s website may contain highly sensitive firm or client information, you need to secure your website.
If you’ve made the switch over to HTTPS from an HTTP site, be sure that you set up 301 redirects that forward your website visitors from your HTTP pages, to the HTTPS address.
Like we mentioned earlier, on-page SEO is all about your website’s content. Out of all of the different pieces of SEO, you have the most control over on-page SEO.
On-page SEO encompasses the content and pages you create and publish to your law firm’s website.
It involves optimizing the pages of your website by strategically incorporating keywords and phrases your target audience is using to search for your law firm on Google.
These are the exact terms your target audience is using when searching for a law firm or attorney in their area. This is why keyword strategy is a critical piece of law firm SEO.
Thankfully, there are a plethora of tools you can use to aid you in keyword research. We recommend investing in an industry-leading SEO and keyword tool like ahrefs or SEMrush.
These pieces of software not only help you identify what keywords your target audience is searching for, but also have a full suite of tools for helping your firm with on-page, off-page, and technical SEO as well.
Off-page SEO has a few major components:
These steps work to increase your firm’s online visibility and reputation, both of which are critical to ranking on search engines.
Some important steps for getting started with off-page SEO for law firms are:
A Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) is a must for any business. These free listings allow you to respond to client reviews, post updates, and put your law firm’s location on the (Google) map.
Google has some simple steps you can follow to set up or claim your law firm’s Google Business profile.
One important off-page SEO ranking factor is link building. Link building is when other websites have links that send users to your website.
Google and other search engines delineate between trusted websites and resources vs. ones lacking credibility. You want sites with credibility and authority to link back to your website.
The more credible sites you have linking back to your law firm’s website, the greater credibility you build with search engines.
The challenging part is that it’s difficult to ensure high-domain authority sites will link to you.
That’s where legal directories come in.
Many online legal directories have established domain authority and credibility, which is why it’s important to create a business profile for your firm on these directories (Avvo, Findlaw, etc.). Plus it makes your law firm easier for prospective clients to find.
Along with creating listings on legal directories, you can also start building up more backlinks by posting content to your law firm’s social media pages on a regular basis.
Now that your law firm has a Google Business Profile, legal directory listings, and social media pages ready to go, all that’s left for you to do is ask your happy clients for reviews.
Getting as many glowing 5-star reviews as possible tells search engines your firm does great work. In turn, they’ll reward you with better visibility on search engines results pages, and in the maps section of local search results.
Law firm SEO is an ongoing process and a full-time job. It requires staying up-to-date on the latest Google algorithm updates and SEO best practices. It’s a responsibility that requires the expertise of a skilled law firm marketing partner.
At OppGen Marketing, we have a dedicated SEO team with years of experience in law firm SEO.
Schedule a strategy call with our team today so we can help you improve the digital footprint and online visibility of your firm.
If you want your personal injury law firm to succeed as a business, you need to have a marketing plan in place. Without clients, you won’t have a personal injury law firm for long. Having a personal injury law firm marketing plan can prevent stagnation and keep a healthy influx of clients coming through your doors.
Not all personal injury law firm marketing plans are created equally. The best marketing plans are holistic and cover multiple channels, like OppGen Marketing’s personal injury law firm marketing plans and packages. Contact us for more information about our marketing plans.
Traditional marketing channels can be successful, especially when done at a local level. Here are a few traditional marketing channels you may want to consider as part of a marketing plan — of course, you don’t have to go with all of them. Pick a couple you think would be most effective for your personal injury law firm marketing plan or consult with a marketing agency for expert advice.
Billboards can be found in several places: highways, small towns, and big cities. They’re meant to grab the attention of people driving past them, and for a personal injury lawyer, that can be a good thing! If you know of a busy street or intersection where accidents tend to occur more often than others and there’s advertising space nearby, try putting out a billboard with your personal injury law firm’s contact information. Should someone find themselves in a car accident nearby, they’ll have a better shot at contacting you for assistance.
Print isn’t dead, and newspapers and local magazines run print advertisements. With newspapers, you may even be able to get a press release published by contacting the newspaper editor. Smaller papers can’t always fill the local newspaper up with local news due to budget constraints and smaller staff, so many smaller newspapers take press releases and publish them. However, it’s important to send the press release over in a timely fashion. Some news days are busier than others, which means the press release might not make it if it’s not planned for publication for days (and in some cases, weeks) in advance.
Mailers and fliers are yet another form of print advertising. While some people tend to see mailers as junk mail, it’s still something that can grab their attention. Sometimes the first thing people need is the name of a business and making sure they at least see it can give your law firm visibility.
Local TV and radio ads are channels you may want to consider for advertising your personal injury law firm. Partnering with a small local production studio to create a TV ad or television spot may be more reasonable and more effective than you think.
Sponsoring a local event or volunteering or fundraising is a great way to get your personal injury law firm’s name out into the public. It also shows you care about supporting the community and various causes. Do be careful about which causes you decide to raise funds for or sponsor, especially if it’s potentially divisive. But for the most part, showing your law firm cares about the community does more good for your business than bad.
While traditional marketing channels are still relevant, it’s more important than ever to go digital. The technology available makes targeting the right audience at the right time so much easier than it’s ever been.
Search engines like Google and Bing have advertising space on search engine result pages (SERPs) with ads that look similar to the organic (meaning unpaid) search results for various keyword searches. These ads are known as search ads, or sometimes are referred to as pay-per-click (PPC) ads due to how the costs for these ads are incurred (that is, you only pay when someone clicks on the ad).
Search ads are only displayed to prospects under certain parameters, such as prospects’ location
Unfortunately for the personal injury area of law, it’s much harder to run a successful campaign unless you have a large marketing budget. Depending on your location, it can cost over $930 per click for personal injury PPC ads.
But you shouldn’t give up on PPC entirely. There are other strategies you can attempt with PPC search ads. One such strategy? Creating high-quality ads and bidding well can result in lower costs per click (CPC).
Despite the high CPC Google search ads have for this industry, you shouldn’t give up on Google Ads as a whole. More recently, Google has started offering local services ads. These ads are not open for all businesses, but luckily personal injury law firms are among the growing number of businesses that can utilize these ads.
Local services ads are similar to search ads in that they only appear when prospects in certain locations search for a specific keyword (or in this case, a relevant service). Unlike search ads, they don’t charge on a per-click basis; instead, local services ad charge per lead. One extra perk of local services ads is that if a lead is no good, you can request a refund from Google.
Paid social media ads can also be of use to your personal injury law firm and certainly should be considered when creating a good marketing plan. Facebook in particular is a great digital marketing platform since you can use users’ data for targeting highly specific audiences. You can target who sees your ad based on location, age range, sex, interests, and groups, among other things. The types of ads and ad placements are also flexible and affordable, being less costly than paid search ads.
In the industry of personal injury law, you can pay nearly $1,000 for a single click on a Google search ad. For many smaller personal injury law firms, those kinds of numbers aren’t sustainable for their marketing budgets. That’s why we encourage personal injury law firms to consider a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy with a local or regional focus. Even though it is a digital marketing channel, we’ve decided to include it as a separate section because we firmly believe an SEO strategy is a must for personal injury law firms.
The goal of SEO is to have your law firm’s website rank higher on SERPs for certain keywords.
If your law firm is the first result on the first page of Google for a relevant search, prospects are far more likely to click the link to your firm’s website. For example, let’s say a prospective client who was recently in a car crash doesn’t know what they need to do. So they might search using a keyword or phrase like “what to do after a car crash.” Google takes prospects’ locations into account when they search, so if your law firm is located within a certain radius of this prospect’s physical location and happens to have a blog on a relevant topic, it’s more likely the prospect will find your law firm and contact you for legal assistance.
This can be done through creating robust, in-depth content focused on specific keywords; having a fast and well-organized website; creating listings on Google My Business and other relevant directories; by sharing links to your site on social media and encouraging reviews from clients. The combination of these items can boost your SERPs position and bring in more clients over the long-term. Though SEO takes longer than a paid search campaign does to bring in leads, it’s well worth the investment of your time.
For personal injury law firms in particular, SEO can be lucrative — and it’s also a strategy that doesn’t necessarily require any payments to Google or Bing.
Proper lead attribution is a must. Failing to track leads puts your personal injury law firm at a greater disadvantage than you’d think. Tracking leads gives you valuable data on where the leads came from, which can help you decide where you should be investing more of your time and marketing budget.
For example: GBM Law, one of our personal injury law clients, had worked with a marketing agency that did not track leads, and was struggling with its marketing campaign. OppGen had no problem making sure lead attribution and lead tracking was put in place.
As a result of OppGen’s personal injury law firm marketing plan, GBM Law experienced an influx of clients while also seeing a 54% decrease in cost per lead.
If you need help formulating a marketing plan for your personal injury law firm, look no further than OppGen. We’ve been able to change the game for personal injury law firms, such as our client GBM Law, a Columbus, Ohio-based personal injury law firm, and we know we can do the same for you.
Contact us now for more information about our personal injury law firm marketing plans and packages.