Lawyers are the best at quickly becoming experts on a new topic and make a living by being able to understand which details matter. Law firm marketing can be an entirely different beast, and many lawyers find themselves struggling to stand out online amid all the profiles, various websites, and referral services. SEO is more important for lawyers than almost anyone else: it’s a way to put your firm (literally) on top of your competitors without actually making a comparison. Given the strict rules on law firm advertising, anything your firm can do to stand out counts. Let’s look at a few tips for how lawyers can market their firm with SEO.
- Target Local Keywords
Focus your website’s content on your local presence. In some cases, this may mean listing the cities or neighborhoods you practice in. If done tactfully, customers can learn a lot about your practice while search engines acknowledge your location. Meeting in the middle can be tough, but accept that, especially early on, you won’t be able to compete for broad keywords like “divorce lawyer,” “personal injury,” or your major metro area. Once your rank is established in your immediate vicinity, you will stand a better chance at competing in more populous areas.
- Update your local listings.
Visit Google Places for Business and create a profile for your business with its name, address, and phone number. Google will mail you a postcard to verify the address, after filling it out, your business will be listed with local results. You can go through a similar process at Yahoo, Yelp, Avvo, and many other sites. Having consistent entries across these sites makes showing your firm much more appealing to search engines, and helps potential customers find reviews or information about you more easily.
- Focus on your practice areas.
This really applies to two areas of a site: page layout and content creation. It’s unlikely that you or your firm only do one thing: cross-selling and offering a breadth of knowledge are how lawyers attract and retain clients, so it would be foolish if you did. As a result, law firm websites are often a cluttered mess that attempts to highlight all the areas of practice, littered with testimonials and personal bios. In order to make your website search engine friendly, it’s critical that each page has a focus, including your homepage. Whether it’s an area of practice, bio, location information, or a blog, make it obvious what the purpose of the page is. This goes doubly for content. Don’t just write for the sake of writing, write to inform, entertain, promote, encourage, or otherwise provide for the reader. The rest of the population depends on lawyers for their insight into the law; shed some light on a topic or offer a perspective that your potential customers couldn’t get anywhere else.
- Improve the user experience
Your website should be a lot like your office: if it’s comfortable, easy to find, and gets the job done, customers will think fondly of it and want to come back. You don’t have to pull a full Jesse James Garrett and go crazy over UX on your website; after all, you are your product and the website is just how people get to you. The goal of your website then should be to make it as easy as possible for potential customers to get to you and your information: what you practice, what you’re like, where you are, when you’re open, how capable you are, and what experience you have. If your website looks trustworthy, it can be enough to make you stand out from your competition, even in the face of bad reviews.
These 4 steps drive traffic and customer engagement; things that lawyers aren’t always thinking about, but that ultimately add fuel to the growth of your firm. A better web presence drives more traffic, which turns into higher search rankings, which means more traffic, and so on, until your firm is bursting at the seams with new business because you dominate the local market.
At bizmktg.com, we put lawyers in front of their future clients. Call or e-mail the marketing machines to learn more: (800) 808-0249 or info@bizmktg.com.
