SEO marketing for law firms and lawyers is a key component to getting more clients today. According to a study by Blue Corona, SEO leads for law firms have a 14.6% close rate.
That’s compared to just 1.7% for outbound leads which include flyers, print ads, billboards, etc. This is due to the fact that SEO plays a key part in literally anything you want to search on the internet.
Hence, when people are looking for legal representation, they want it quickly, and they also want the nearest choice.
These two things play a key role in defining what marketing and SEO are both about in today’s world. They point consumers to the closest and the quickest solutions available.
Think about it. What would you do if you required the quickest and fastest legal representation to get out of a jam?
Would you spend valuable time talking to someone that can point you to the best lawyers?
This is the age of the internet after all and we turn to it almost as a reflex action now. That will be true more than ever in the future. Hence, this piece will shed light on why SEO and online marketing strategies are so important for law firms today.
1- How Can Content Marketing Grow Your Law Firm?
Studies indicate that 97% of consumers go online to search for local products and services. For law firms specifically, this is incredibly valuable. Local businesses and individuals coming to your offices is exactly what you want as a law firm.
Hence, getting the most out of local individuals and businesses demands that you invest in Lawyer SEO.
Case studies indicate that law firms, when they invest in SEO, get great returns. A specific study done with a law firm in Northern Virginia showed 439% increase in organic visits over 12 months.
It also showed an 869% increase in organic visits in the 18 months. That’s a great ROI that anyone would want. What that ultimately translates into is better leads, more conversions, better word of mouth, and incredible sales and revenue.
2- Create Separate Landing Pages for Law Firm Marketing
According to a study by HubSpot, businesses that had more than 40 landing pages generated 12 times more leads than those with 1-5 landing pages. This is not merely a fluke. It’s a direct effect of compartmentalization and structuring information.
Optimizing for Lawyer Marketing Niches
A landing page is created to tell the reader about a specific service or product. However, it can also be made to tell a specific reader or niche customer about a specific service or product.
The second point is what makes separate landing pages so effective.
When you target multiple sub-niches within your niche, you’re more liable to increase traffic. People will be searching for legal representation for all types of situations, yes.
However, they will also search for legal representation they can afford, that exists in their town or district, etc. Hence, optimizing your landing pages for those specific niches is a good strategy to get more traffic.
Optimizing for Lawyer SEO for Business Clients
While creating landing pages, you should also target large business clients. Individuals and pro bono cases look great when it comes to press.
However, when it comes to hard cash, nothing pays greater than business clients.
For sub-niches here, you need to target specific businesses that relate to the kind of clients you want. You can expand later into businesses that are more lucrative, or that deviate from your expertise later.
However, you need to focus on the clients that you’re most familiar with in the beginning.
3- Use Enticing Visuals to Boost Web Marketing for Law Firms
Visual content is extremely effective for marketing since 90% of the information transmitted to the brain is visual.
Using visuals in your marketing strategy can help not only appeal more to the users, but help them understand information better.
Images Entice and Explain Content Better
According to a study by Smart Insights, 93% of all blog posts include images. This is because they’re attractive; of course, but also because they help understand information better.
Coupling information with an image, even if it’s a graph or a pie chart, will make the information more lucid.
Videos Make Content More Relatable and Appealing
Videos are generally considered to be more engaging and appealing than even images. Just look at the endearing popularity of YouTube and other streaming platforms.
According to a study by Statista, nearly 85% of all internet users in the US watched online video content on their device.
This shows the endearing appeal of video. Coupling it with blog posts and web content can boost SEO too. 59% of people would rather watch video than read blocks of text any day.
This is why it’s so important to include video in the marketing strategy for your law firm.
4- Post Blogs Regularly for Online Marketing for Law Firms
High quality blog content can boost website traffic by up to 2000%. However, that’s not the only reason that you should write blogs for your audience. Writing blogs regularly has shown to retain people’s interest.
Blogging’s impact on inbound ROI has been shown to be 13 times more likely for marketers that have prioritized it. It has also shown to retain a loyal audience that is interested in more than your services.
Take the example of content creators or bloggers that write on platforms like WordPress or Blogger. Nearly 77 million new blog comments are generated every single month.
For the best blogs, millions of people visit them every single month. That is extraordinary engagement.
While that doesn’t necessarily mean that you can get millions of views with a single post, you can get engagement.
That counts for something when you look at conversions, sales, and repeat clients. However, in order to do that, you require consistency. You may consider hiring someone that can get you some great content for blogs like SEO Resellers Canada.
4.1- Write for a Specific Audience
There are about 500 million blogs in the world right now. They encompass probably every topic that you can think of and then some. Obviously, as a law firm, you will have competition when it comes to content.
However, that’s where you need to be smart about it. You need to write for a niche audience. You need to capitalize on what that audience is interested in.
This goes for both keywords, and content. You need to find out what your niche audience likes to read about.
This could be general legal advice, things that the average person should know about their rights, etc. You could also write about specific types of laws that affect your target clients and consumers.
What this will help you with is to target your niche and become successful within it. It will also translate to profits and a greater number of revenue streams.
The simple truth is that people buy based on what they trust and what they know. According to a study by Dragon Search Marketing, 61% of consumers said their buying decision was influenced by custom content. Your goal as a law firm should be to generate that type of custom content.
Write for the Reader and then Google
You may think with all this talk of SEO that only keywords and phrases are important. This isn’t true. When someone clicks on your webpage and doesn’t find what they need, they will quickly bounce.
The number of times this happens over the total visits to your web page is called the bounce rate. While Gary Illyes from Google said that bounce rates don’t affect search rankings, they do affect trust.
If visitors regularly bounce from your site, it indicates that they’re not getting useful information.
It indicates that though your webpage includes the relevant keywords, it doesn’t include the relevant information. So, in the long run, this will result in a decline in your Google search rankings.
Hence, when you’re writing content, do so for a person, not for Google. It will be better for your rankings in the long run and generate much greater sales and revenue.
4.2- Choose Relevant, Trending Topics
Trends, analytics, and relevant topics are key elements in SEO. If you’re not talking about relevant topics within your niche, you can lose the audience.
Hence, it’s important to keep tools like Google keyword planner, or Google trends close to you. These can help you identify topics that are gaining steam or losing steam.
When you’re stumped on what to blog about, you can always take a look at what’s trending.
While that may seem like pandering to your audience, that’s what you need to do to generate more traffic. Specifically, for seasonal trends and holiday trends, these spikes and valleys are very important.
You need to focus on what’s important for your firm’s continual growth.
4.3- Use Clear Evidence in Your Content
One thing that Google absolutely loves is accurate information. It has been shaping and tweaking its search algorithms to search for accurate information. This helps users find actionable data that they can actually trust and use.
If you want your law firm to grow, you need to be mindful of this fact. It doesn’t matter if the data is your own. You can backlink to trustworthy sources and piggyback off their high ratings.
This will help your pages climb higher in Google’s search results. More on this later in the Google E-A-T section.
4.4- Fill Blogs with Actionable Content for Better Lawyer SEO
As a law firm, you should be providing clear and actionable information to your prospective clients and consumers. It shouldn’t be filled with fluff or big words that should just impress those clients. This is a huge part of SEO.
Law firms need to capitalize on this trend towards more accurate, clear, and simple information that is useful. Only then will their landing pages, blogs, and other web content grow organically and get more hits.
As evidence, you can look at random search results when you’re searching for anything. At times, ten-year-old posts are in the top results. This is because their content and SEO still qualify them as useful.
4.5- Avoid Plagiarized Content
Plagiarism doesn’t go over well with Google. In fact, Google has been updating its search algorithms to completely avoid content that is plagiarized or copied. With their Google E-A-T update, they’ve put an emphasis on “Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness”.
This is not just a piece of advice. It’s a score that Google keeps on your website to classify it. The higher the score is, the more Google will index your website for search results. The more that happens, the more your site will be listed at the top of the search results.
Hence, any blog that wants to grow has to demonstrate accuracy, trustworthiness, and authority.
You need to publish accurate information which needs to be sourced. You need to cultivate trust by continuously posting content that is fresh and accurate and not copied. You also need to cultivate authority regularly posting trustworthy content.
4.6- Use a Professional Tone
You’re a law firm. Hence, you need to use a more professional tone than, say, a website for a business that sells toys. This is obvious, but it needs to be acknowledged for the niche you’re writing for.
4.7- Optimize Readability by Structuring Content
This is very important for Google SEO. Remember that whenever you write content, you should structure it so it’s spaced out and easily readable.
It should be split up into different headings and sub-headings. It should also be split into multiple paragraphs.
This will allow Google’s algorithms to identify the most relevant information for its users. Whatever the query, if you structure your content, Google will point to it more easily.
This way, your content can appear in the form of snippets in Google search results. When a search result points to exactly what a user is looking for, they’re more likely to click. In fact, an Ahref study of 2 million featured snippets showed that 30.9% of featured snippets ranked #1.
4.8- Create a Posting Calendar or Schedule
Remember that posting regularly is the key to retaining people’s interests. Hence, making a posting schedule is essential.
Better to set reminders and post on a regular basis so that consumers expect content at a certain time. This subconsciously triggers their brain to anticipate your content.
5- Data Analytics are Essential for Lawyer Marketing
Data analytics deals with finding trends and patterns within data collected. The more data collected, the better it is to identify and extract insights.
The better classified the data is, the better it is to find that elusive metric that you need to target clients. Hence, data analytics is increasingly a key part of SEO and marketing for any business, as well as law firms.
There is an increasing trend towards data analytics today. 67% of small businesses said that they spend more than $10,000 a year on data analytics. This is a trend that is liable to grow in the future because data puts everything at your feet.
Not only does it help you identify trends and improve your relationship with your clients, it helps you grow. Data can help you find the needle in a haystack that you couldn’t before.
Essentially, it can help you grow faster, and beat your competition. As a law firm, that’s exactly what you need for your marketing strategy.
Here are a few things you will need to do to excel at data analytics.
5.1- Find the Available Data
There are three types of data you should be focused on if you’re a law firm looking to data analytics for marketing.
Individual Data
Google analytics, trends, your landing pages, email campaigns, and cookies all classify as individual data.
This provides insights into your website’s performance, search engine rankings, and visitor activity. It also identifies which content is the most effective.
Industry Data
This is bulk data that is amassed by third party organizations for an entire industry. This data is usually from research organizations, think tanks, etc. and these studies deal with huge data volumes.
Law firms can use this data to act on the newest trends and to reassess their marketing strategies as a whole. They can also use this research to compete against rival firms.
Internal Data
Internal data refers to billing, time tracking, client lifestyle, etc. This helps to identify patterns which exist among common clients, different clients, and provides insights for future clients.
This is the most immediate data that can help the law firm grow and target their most lucrative niches.
5.2- Case Type Profitability is Paramount
Every law firm, no matter how big or small, has a case type. They bring in these cases because they’re well equipped to handle them, and because they relate to common clients. However, data analytics will help to determine the profitability of these cases.
Data analytics can help to identify which types of cases require the most billable hours, and require the most resources.
In essence, data analytics can help root out the most profitable case types and clients that the firm has. Using this information, law firms can target their most profitable niches more aggressively to produce higher revenue and greater profits.
5.3- Find Your Ideal Client
Through data analytics, you can find your ideal client down to the age, gender, financial status, etc.
This can be true of individual clients as well as businesses. The internet has transformed the legal client into a sophisticated consumer now. Hence, they want demonstrated expertise from legal companies.
You can use data analytics to identify which type of landing pages, blog content, etc. is generating the most interest.
Hence, you can pick out what type of information and what type of representation your ideal client wants.
5.4- Identify Trends
If it’s one thing that data analytics is good at, it’s identifying the latest trends and patters. Data science helps to analyze markets for what is generating the greatest interest.
Successful law firms need to know which way the wind is blowing in order to survive. There is no greater barometer for that then data analytics.
Your law firm needs to invest in data analytics to identify the latest trends in your business. This may relate to identifying what type of cases or clients are the most lucrative.
It may also relate to identifying which cases are the least taxing and generate the greatest ROI.
You can segment this information by type of customer in terms of age, gender, religion, geographical location, etc. You can also segment this information in terms of seasonal trends, seasonal cases, etc.
5.5- Determine Effective Attorney Marketing Strategies
Data analytics can help you gauge your marketing efforts by measuring how effective your current efforts are.
Law firms can use data analytics to identify the type of marketing campaigns which are working to bring new clients in. they can also see which marketing campaigns are just draining funds.
The ways that data analytics can be used for these purposes include:
- Analyzing which sources constitute the majority of traffic
- Understanding the way users interact with your website
- Identifying the percentage of the website traffic can convert to paying clients
- Finding website weaknesses and blind spots
- Identifying which marketing channels are the most effective and which warrant further investment
6- SEO Tips for Web Marketing for Lawyers
According to a survey by SEMrush, 67% of marketers say that SEO was the most efficient tactic implemented in 2019. This is predicted to be true for 2020 as well. To get the best SEO for your website, you should contact SEO Resellers Canada.
6.1- Find the Most Searched Legal Queries on Google
The most searched legal queries don’t necessarily come to the top of search results.
Those can include paid ads and Google AdWord content. However, paying Google to publish your ads can often be a waste of time. What you need to do is concentrate on long term organic traffic.
The best way to do that is to find the most searched legal queries on Google. These can change, mind you, so you should update your web pages to take advantage.
However, using those queries to market your legal firm will help to rake in the most common visitors for your niche.
6.2- Keywords Should be Based on Intent
Keywords are the be all and end all of SEO, at least for now. Keywords can help categorize your niches and subniches so that you can market to them. They can help you make separate landing pages to target those niches.
However, there are three specific types of keywords you should target based on their intent.
- Discover Keywords capitalize on users looking for new information on your services (Attorney reviews, Attorney cost)
- Attention Keywords are looking for information on their own cases (how to file a case for wrongful death, how to sue for personal injury)
- Money Keywords target users that are looking for your services for their own interests (hire an attorney in LA, hire lawyer in Vancouver or Toronto)
6.3- Optimize for Search Using Website Structure
Google SEO loves when you organize a website properly. Structuring your website will help Google’s algorithms crawl through it and present the most relevant information to users. Hence, making landing pages, specific advertising pages, and organizing information is the best way forward.
You can also improve the SEO of individual pages by structuring the content with headings and sub-headings. As previously mentioned, this helps Google generate snippets for users that search for specific content.
6.4- Pay Attention to Local SEO
Local SEO is booming right now. People want more immediate answers to their queries and that includes their searches for products and services. There has been a 900% growth in “near me” and “tonight/today” searches according to a study.
Law firms need to leverage this in order to generate as much interest and conversions from local business. This will be effective in growing your business to the next level and also cultivating a local persona.
Start by making a Google My Business page and building landing pages featuring specific geographical keywords. Work your way up from there.
6.5- Create Enticing Content for New Customers
This could be both blog content and/or web content. When you need to attract new customers, you should generate content that is trending and that caters to another niche.
You can search for new trends and capitalize on data analytics from your own research as well as bulk research.
However, you also need to analyze your competition. Find out what they’re doing better than you and how you can catch up. Find out what they’re marketing that they’re succeeding at and you’re failing at.
Find out the difference between their marketing strategies and yours and bridge the gap.
7- Document Your Content Marketing Strategies for Lawyers and Reassess
According to a study by Smart Insights, 69% of B2B marketers with a documented marketing strategy are the most successful.
This number is on the rise from 2018 when the survey was first taken. Another survey regarding B2B marketing showed that only 39% of B2B content programs had a documented strategy. However, they were twice as likely to report success in their content marketing.
Law firms thus need to optimize their marketing by continuously assessing and reassessing, and documenting.
7.1- Capitalize on Popular Posts for a Law Firm Marketing Plan
You know how they say “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”? Well that applies to marketing for law firms too. If a blog post or a landing page is doing extremely well, then you should capitalize off it.
Create spin-off blog posts, or videos, or infographics. Do a podcast on the topic if you want to, create similar landing pages that target different niches, etc.
7.2- Ask the User
Generating fresh content isn’t easy. If you’re out of ideas, why not ask the user? You can do this using different tactics like quizzers, surveys, comments, etc.
Conduct a Marketing Survey
The first way to ask the user what they want to read about is conducting a survey. Ask them what kind of legal problems they’ve faced or most heard about. Ask them what kinds of legal troubles they fear the most and which ones they search for the most.
All of these questions and their answers can give you insights into what your readers will love to read about.
It will also let you know what services your readers are most interested in learning about or getting.
Encourage Discussion in Blog Posts
Another way to ask the user is to encourage a discussion in the comments. At times, blog posts generate a huge comment section on their own.
However, at other times you need to encourage people to talk or discuss in the comments. At times, these comments can give you an insight into what users want to learn about or find interesting.
These SEO tips will help you market your law firm better in the age of the internet.
