If you want your law firm to continue to grow and succeed, it needs to succeed in marketing itself digitally. This means your law firm needs to look as professional online as it does in person. Any disconnect between your law firm’s branding, design, and messaging at any level will deter prospective clients, so it’s important that your digital presence is just as professional and consistent as it is in your law firm’s physical office space.
To ensure that your law firm’s digital marketing strategy is helping it succeed, consider the following tips — or contacting OppGen for a free consultation.
1. Keep Your Law Firm’s Website Optimized
If your website is slow and doesn’t work smoothly on mobile devices, search engines will recognize that and push you down on the search engine results pages (SERPs) for keywords related to your law firm. Not only that, but slow, non-mobile-friendly websites hurt your overall accessibility with prospects, as do sites that are difficult to navigate.
Your website should have a simple design with a navigation bar featuring the following items:
- Home page
- Practice areas
- Testimonials
- Blog
- About
- Contact and location information
Depending on what your law firm specializes in, the practice areas page may have a drop-down list. These items keep your site organized and easy to navigate. If it’s easy for prospects to navigate, it’s going to be even easier for search engines to crawl when reviewing your law firm’s website and determining its SERPs rank.
2. Write, Record, and Share Legal Advice on Your Website’s Blog
A large part of lawyers’ job is to give legal advice — and good legal advice at that. Rather than charge a prospective client for asking for advice, consider writing a blog for prospects about your areas of practice. This can be a wide variety of things, like how to prepare for a small claims court case (even though most lawyers are not involved in small claims court cases); what to do in an accident; how to determine if you’ve been discriminated against in the workplace; and so on.
If your blog’s legal advice helps someone, chances are they will remember that and recommend your firm as a resource. Or if they ever experience future legal trouble, they may reach out to you for legal representation. Word of mouth marketing goes a long way.
Writing isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but thankfully there are other ways to create content for your website. You can create videos, upload them to YouTube, and embed them on your website.
Same goes for podcasts (though you’re more likely to upload it to Apple’s iTunes store or another podcast hosting platform, like Stitcher or Spotify, instead of YouTube). If you’re able to create blogs using multiple components of media (i.e., a blog post summarizing or transcribing a podcast), that’s even better. Making your content accessible to as many people as possible is always a good thing, and search engines will take notice of that.
3. Think Locally
Since search engines take into account a user’s physical location when they search for businesses and services, the nearest locations are the ones that will show up first on the search results page. That’s why it’s imperative to create a Google My Business account for your law firm and ensure your location (address) and contact information is accurate and up to date.
Don’t stop at just Google My Business, either; make sure that information is available on Yelp, Yellow Pages, and other relevant business and legal directories.
When writing blog posts, try to include your law firm’s location in the blog title and body, or mention it in your podcast or video’s title and description. Narrowing down your location can be very useful, particularly in cases where laws may differ from state to state. That will save both you and prospects time when deciding whether or not there is a case worth taking to court.
4. Request Reviews and Testimonials
Once your Google My Business page and website begin to move up higher in the search results on Google, you’ll want to make sure you have reviews. More four- and five-star reviews can push you up in the rankings but they also instill trust in prospects who are deciding whether or not to contact your law firm for legal representation.
Same goes for testimonials, which should be updated on your website. Testimonials can be powerful marketing tools, as they tell a story of how you really helped a client out when they needed it.
So when you’ve won a case or helped a client settle a claim, be sure to ask them for a testimonial and/or review. You can also encourage former clients to write a testimonial with a contest, such as a raffle or drawing for every client who has written a testimonial or review for your law firm. The prize doesn’t have to be extravagant — it could be something as simple as a gift card to a local business.
Contact OppGen for more ideas on how to request reviews.
5. Create Social Media Accounts on Relevant Platforms
Social media is a great platform for reaching out to prospects and to current clients, especially when you take advertising options into consideration. But you shouldn’t create social media accounts for every single platform. While TikTok is all the rage with Generation Z and younger Millennials, it’s probably not the best place to market to clients who need legal representation.
On the other hand, if you’re a bankruptcy lawyer or business attorney, LinkedIn might be one of the best platforms to market your law firm’s services, especially because you can create ads and have them targeted to people in specific companies and certain positions.
As a general rule of thumb, Facebook and Instagram are safe choices for marketing most law firms, given their wide swaths of users from different backgrounds, as well as their highly targeted audience targeting tools.
6. Hire Digital Marketing Experts
Sometimes, it’s best to refer a prospective client to a law firm that specializes in a different practice area. Similarly, it may be best to reach out to a digital marketing agency that specializes in digital marketing for law firms.
OppGen has worked with law firms in different practice areas to ensure their digital presence best represents the work they do. We’ve created websites and landing pages that feature our proprietary tracking system that shows where a lead came from and how valuable the channel they came through is.
To discover where your law firm’s online marketing strategy can improve, fill out our free digital audit today, or contact us for more information.
