7 Tips for Your Law Firm’s Online Marketing Practices

law firm's online marketing

The legal industry is slow to change in many ways, from hiring more women to embracing online marketing. Many of the nation’s biggest law firms are still reluctant to pursue true innovation in marketing, and their clients are noticing.

Your law firm’s online marketing is a critical way of showing your clients that you understand their needs. Whether you are part of a big firm or you practice by yourself, you need an online marketing plan that is up-to-date and effective.

Take a communications audit and check to see whether your law firm’s marketing is hitting its mark. If not, here are seven tips to enhance your digital presence and make sure you are reaching your desired audience.

1. Use Your Analytics

Take a look at your law firm’s online marketing using Google Analytics or another platform like Clicky. What kind of traffic is your site getting?

Specifically, what pages are your visitors clicking on? If you have a contact us page or a live chat option, are people using them? When you post an article on your blog, are people clicking through to your site, responding and sharing?

If you are not observing and analyzing the information you can get from your online marketing tactics, you are wasting your money. The reason your law firm invested in online marketing techniques is that they are trackable. You can see in real time what works and what doesn’t.

The huge advantage of your law firm’s online marketing is that you can adjust it as soon as you realize there is an issue. With traditional marketing like a brochure, if anything changes you have to redo the entire thing at great expense.

2. Choose Appropriate Keywords

What are the questions your clients are asking?

If you represent clients involved in personal injury cases, they are probably asking about car accidents, dog bites, and slip and falls. If you are a matrimonial attorney, your clients are Googling for information on divorce and child custody.

This is how you choose the keywords which are right for your practice.

If you write a blog post about a relevant area of law but you fail to include the exact words your clients are searching, you are missing an opportunity.

On this site, the attorney knows exactly who her clients are (dissatisfied owners of timeshares) and how she can help them. Her website copy uses the keyword “timeshare” frequently so that people searching this niche area will find her immediately.

An SEO expert can help you identify the keywords you should be using (and what your competitors are using) to help you come up with an effective strategy.

3. Explore Adding Video

Video is very friendly to the search engines and can help boost your law firms in the rankings. Why don’t you shoot a quick segment where you and your partners talk about how you have helped people in specific situations?

A short video Q & A on your website accomplishes several things. It gives your potential clients a way to see and hear you. They also get a glimpse of your personal style, which is an important factor in how people choose their lawyers.

It can also answer your clients’ questions directly. If your client types into Google the query, “What do I do if I am arrested for DUI in Florida,” a video where you tell them how to proceed is very valuable.

4. Optimize Your Blog Posts

Many lawyers have blogs on their websites. Many use them to post articles on arcane areas of law, updates from the legislature and analyses of various legal concepts.

Check your analytics. Is anyone reading your blog posts besides other lawyers?

Blogs are more than online legal journals. While they certainly are a viable option for lawyers wishing to publish their esoteric legal pieces, they can also serve an important business development function.

Blog posts, when updated consistently and crafted with keywords in mind, are an important way of keeping your law firm high in the search engine rankings. Make sure your law firm’s online marketing is using blogging as a content marketing tool, not just a publishing vehicle.

5. Pay Attention to the Biographies

Biographies are the most visited pages on law firm websites. So why don’t law firms and their CMOs pay more attention to them?

A sure-fire way to improve your law firm’s online marketing is to revise your attorney biographies. Include keywords relevant to each lawyer’s niche.

Skip the legalese and the “alphabet soup” of acronyms. Concentrate on telling your audience how you can help them.

A general counsel or potential client may spend literally seconds on your biography page. You need to grab them with a catchy opening line and a great photo right off the bat or they will click away from your page.

6. Leverage Social Media

If your law firm’s online marketing includes social media, make sure that your posts and content are coordinated with your website. If you are publishing a blog post, push it out on LinkedIn and Twitter, too.

Encourage your followers to share your website. If they can provide a testimonial on your behalf, all the better.

Respond to tweets with a link to your site. The more you engage with your audience, the greater your chance of driving them to your law firm website.

7. Integrate Online and Offline Marketing

Online and offline marketing must be treated like an integrated package. Make sure you have a branding guide which keeps all graphic styles, logos and messaging consistent.

When you are producing “real life” marketing, make sure it lives on forever on your site. For example, film your lawyers’ breakfast seminar and post it as a webcast for people who couldn’t attend.

Post all biographies and practice brochures as pdfs online so people can download them themselves. It will save you money on postage!

Your Law Firm’s Online Marketing Can Bring You Business

You can’t just post a website promoting your law practice and assume that people will find it and call you up.

Your online marketing must be managed on a daily basis in order to stay ahead of your competition. Luckily, online marketing can be effective at reaching your audiences and converting them to clients–if you conduct it the right way.

For more information on improving your website traffic and results for your law firm, please contact us.