Digital Marketing Tips for Law Firms
Digital marketing for law firms is one of the fastest and easiest ways for lawyers to grow their business. The more people who discover your law firm, the potential clients you will gain and the more growth your business will experience. So, what are the best digital marketing strategies for law firms to adopt?
Do Law Firms need to invest in digital marketing?
We always suggest that legal firms invest in digital marketing due to the fact it is one of the best ways to promote their legal services and attract new clients. It is also a great way to build brand awareness and establish your firm as a trusted and reliable source.
Digital marketing for law firms includes the use of digital channels and techniques in order to get the results you want to see, whether that’s an increase in leads or higher engagement on your social platforms.
What types of digital marketing strategies are there?
There are few different types of digital marketing strategies that you can use in order to get the results you want.
Strategies such as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Content Marketing heavily focus on improving and optimising your website and how this can organically bring in new clients, as well as retaining old ones.
Other strategies focus more on how you can drive people from other avenues to your website. For example, PPC, Social Media and Email Marketing are all great ways to get new leads from external sources to your website, not just organically from search result pages.
Can digital marketing work for the legal industry?
With the right strategy implemented, digital marketing for your law firm can help to increase website traffic, generate new leads and ultimately drive your business to be one of the top ranking sites on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).
However, it is important to remember that these results won’t be instantaneous and will depend on several factors, such as:
- The target audience
- Your competitors
- The quality of your marketing efforts
- The standard of your site to begin with
Kickstart your Digital Journey
Chat with the teamDigital marketing strategies for law firms
There are several different digital strategies that can be implemented to promote your legal services:
Website Auditing and Optimisation
As a law firm, it is vital you have a formidable website to stand out against your competitors, especially since so much of your business will come from local clients. Your website serves as the foundation for most of your digital marketing efforts and it’s where you will provide key information about your services, as well as high quality blogs for your current and prospective clients.
Part of having an optimised website is ensuring that it is centred around user experience (UX). This will not only take into account the needs, values and limitations of your users, but the goals and objectives of your business. Your website should be easy to navigate, accessible to all users, useful and credible.
These values also need to be carried across to your mobile site. Some of the basics to make your site more mobile friendly include:
- Making your site adaptive to any device such as mobile, laptop, tablet and so on
- Always use responsive design for assets like images
- Use shorter meta titles since they are easier to read on mobile
- Avoid pop-ups that cover content and cause visitors to leave the site
Consider where and when long-form content is appropriate.
SEO
SEO is the process of optimising your content and your site in order to achieve higher rankings in SERPs. Ultimately, implementing an SEO strategy for your law firm will bring in the right visitors organically to drive more leads and sales.
It involves a variety of different tactics, such as:
- Fixing and monitoring technical issues
- Implementing core SEO features like title tags, meta descriptions and schema
- Working on Core Web Vitals
- Creating high-quality content
- Optimising content around specific keywords
Targeting local keywords will help you to show up for relevant searches made by prospects in your area. Using these keywords will increase your visibility and the potential of attracting new clients.
Optimising individual pages can help make them easier for search engines to read, which allows you to compete with other local law firms. Optimisation includes a variety of different factors including images, text, video, schema, HTML tags and so on.
Using the above techniques will help your site to rank higher on SERPs, which in turn allows you to build brand awareness and trust from your visitors. They will be more inclined to purchase your services than they would if you didn’t have a great web presence.
Our SEO tips for Law Firms goes into more detail on how this all works.
Email Marketing
Email marketing involves sending promotional and information emails to build relationships with your audience, win over prospects and turn one-time buyers into repeat customers. Emails can include a variety of different content from new services, promoted website content or general messages on behalf of your business.
Law firms can tap into this market by asking users to subscribe on their website, dedicating a specific webpage that asks for their email and even giving away something free, such as an ebook or a PDF, in exchange for their email address.
Emails are a great way to promote traffic to your website, as the emails you send to your subscribers should contain links to pages. A good way to determine the success of your emails is through key performance indicators, such as open-rate and click-through rate.
Compared to other marketing strategies, email marketing is usually quite cost-effective, which is great for new law firms starting up.
Social Media
Social media marketing utilises social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter. You may use social media marketing techniques if you want to:
- Promote your content and services
- Build brand awareness and visibility
- Gain more followers
- Engage with current and prospective customers
- Drive traffic to your website
- Tap into a different audience
Using social media for marketing is a relatively low budget, but it does require ongoing advertising spending and most of the time, you will need a landing page designed specifically for users from that spend.
Social media is, however, a great place to achieve audience engagement. Choosing the right channels, doing research on how the platforms work and creating useful and interesting content is a tried and tested way for many in achieving a social presence.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is based on answering people’s questions and really helping them through the content, rather than interrupting them with promotions about your business. It can include content such as blog posts, landing pages, white papers, ebooks, case studies and much more.
In most cases, content marketing is used to:
- Put content in front of prospective clients when searching
- Improve brand awareness and online authority
- Improve brand loyalty
- Educate your target audience
- Convert and keep leads
In order to do the above, a great strategy to include is by creating what is known as a “content hub”, which is a curated collection of content on a specific topic or subject. You can then fill your resource hub with a combination of informative and useful pieces of content which utilise your key terms and common industry queries.
Not only is this a great way to contend with your competitors, but it also increases your brand visibility online and therefore, generates organic traffic through your content showing up on SERPs.
Content marketing also goes hand-in-hand with SEO. This means that if you have high-quality content, it will significantly improve your website’s SEO, so you can enjoy more organic website traffic that will turn visitors into buyers.
Google Business Profile and Reviews
Google Business Profile is a section about your business that appears on the side of Google’s SERP. It will appear when someone searches for you or your business in their area.
It is essentially a brief overview of your business, including:
- Your business name and address
- Primary and secondary categories (the services you offer)
- Photos of the team, business, service offering
- Location on Google Maps
- Opening hours and contact details
- Website
- Reviews
Having a Google Business Profile (GBP) can particularly help with local SEO. Ensuring your information is up to date and well optimised is highly likely to be a ranking factor that can help Google to understand your business offerings.
Every business should have a GBP as it helps potential clients find your business. For example, if someone locally searches “law firms near me” into Google, you will appear based on the location you have listed. These clients may have never found your business otherwise.
PPC Advertising
Pay-per-click advertising, or PPC, is a strategy in which you pay every time a user clicks on one of your online ads. It is most commonly done through Google Ads and it is an effective way to reach people who are searching for terms related to your business. Implementing a PPC campaign will likely be used to help increase your sales or leads.
Costs can vary quite drastically, from relatively inexpensive to thousands of pounds per month, depending on the size of your campaign. When campaigns are discontinued, the traffic generated by that campaign is also discontinued.
When users click on PPC ads, they are directed to a landing page that encourages them to take a certain action. Either:
- Make a purchase
- Complete a form
- Download a report, or something similar.
PPC campaigns are really easy to track, especially with platforms like Google Ads. You’ll be able to track how many people view your ads as well as how many click on them and what percentage of them convert.
Which digital marketing strategy is best for your law firm?
There is no single strategy that will work best for all law firms. Even within the same industry, online and search marketing strategies will need to be tailored to your individual business.
The first step in any digital marketing journey should be a website audit. These audits allow you to gain a better understanding of the position that your site is, in order to plan the most effective next steps.
By working with an SEO agency, you’ll be able to discover and discuss:
- Your goals, needs and current strategy
- Your competitors and the industry
- How your site is currently performing
- Whether your site has any issues
- What digital marketing channels would work best for your firm, and why
To get started, we just need a few details about your business and chat about where you want to go. Contact the team today.