Written by Market My Market’s content team, with contributions from Jordan Kimmel, Hannah Kernal, Kenzie Fox, Ryan Klein, and Lindsay Bennett
If you have time and money invested into a digital marketing strategy, you may think to yourself, “How is this helping me?” or “What am I getting out of this?” After all, with a portion of your hard-earned capital going towards digital marketing, it’s only fair that you consider how it’s benefiting you and the ways in which you can make the most out of it.
Let’s imagine you’re a personal injury law firm specializing in car accidents. If someone is standing on the side of the road, peering at what used to be a working vehicle and nursing broken bones, they likely know they’re going to need someone to represent them. At this point, the first thing they’ll do is pull out their phone and check to see if there’s a lawyer nearby who can help them. However, the chances they find you can be slim if you’re not on the first page of the search results.
In this post, we walk you through how to develop your law firm into an industry leader by establishing a top-of-the-line law firm marketing strategy and generating a powerful marketing plan based on your goals.
Contributed by Jordan Kimmel, Content Writer
What Elements Are Essential to a Successful Legal Marketing Strategy?
As you begin to think about what makes sense for your law firm, consider the following elements to get you started:
An Optimized Firm Website
A successful legal marketing strategy starts with an optimized firm website. Every time a person enters a question into a search engine like Google, the engine estimates which pages will perform well on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) and ranks sites accordingly. An optimized website is not only beneficial for SEO and rankings, but also can drastically improve user experience and accessibility of your firm’s website. Some ways you can optimize your website to improve SEO and generate new leads for your business include the following:
- Ensure search engines can effectively crawl your site: Keeping your website’s sitemap up-to-date can help Google and other search engines navigate and index. Establishing clear website navigation and submitting your sitemap to Google can help your important pages appear in search results.
- Include an about page with attorney information: Highlighting specific attorneys experience and accolades in an easily accessible area of your site can add to your firm’s online credibility and improve SEO.
- Optimize your site for mobile users: Often, users may access your site from a mobile device. If your site’s desktop experience does not transfer well to mobile devices, your users may become frustrated and search engines may find your site more challenging to index.
- Regularly post high-quality content: Fresh, informative, and engaging content is essential for generating organic traffic to your site. Be sure to include a call to action in every blog post and page to emphasize how your firm can help and encourage visitors to contact you.
These are only a few of the many ways you can optimize your site for improved SEO and user experience. If you keep your visitors’ experience and ease of navigation in mind as you optimize your site, SEO improvements will follow naturally.
Contributed by Lindsay Bennett, Content Writer
Content That Is SEO-Friendly
Creating SEO-friendly content is essential for every marketing strategy, legal or otherwise. This means search engines and their users can easily find the blogs and pages you write, and you’ve taken intentional steps to ensure this is the case. There are several basic steps you can take to give your written content a boost, including some of the following:
- Adding relevant images that draw in audience’s attention and add helpful visuals that clarify complicated concepts
- Using targeted keywords in your title, subtitles, and body text
- Only using keywords and variations naturally, without forcing them to appear in the content
- Citing reputable sources
- Making your content is easy to read and understand, such as:
- Using terms a layperson would likely understand
- Including easy-to-understand vocabulary
- Decreasing wordiness
- Choosing active voice over passive voice
- Breaking up paragraphs into three-to-six-line chunks
- Defining necessary terms
- Overall, focusing on the end user’s experience
Search engines, including Google, Yahoo!, and Bing, are most interested in answering user questions and delivering helpful information. As long as you focus on creating a positive experience for your audience, you’re likely doing an excellent job optimizing your content. With just a few tweaks to your strategy, your content will likely rank higher and become easier to find.
Contributed by Hannah Kernal, Content Writer
A Professional Online Presence
Technology is built into almost every aspect of our society. Paying bills, buying new furniture, and even doctors appointments are switching to accessible online formats. With most consumers accustomed to purchasing their necessities online, developing a strong online presence is essential for a company’s success.
In the second annual Major Purchase Shopper Study, GE Capital Retail Bank found that 81% of consumers conduct research before making major purchases. Without a trustworthy and consistent online presence, consumers may question the validity of your company and choose a competitor with a reliable social media presence and website.
While some may view social media and website marketing as time consuming and unnecessary, there are significant benefits to building a sincere and personable presence online.
Contributed by Kenzie Fox, Content Writer
Local SEO
When users search for legal services in their area, they type keywords into their search engine to find law firms near them. You can better your chances of reaching users by using local SEO to target specific states, cities, and towns. This allows you to reduce your competition to a much smaller area and reach more potential clients.
For example, optimizing keywords like “best personal injury lawyer in Tampa” gives you better chances of ranking higher than “best personal injury lawyers.” Google wants to show users the most accurate results possible, so keep the following ranking factors in mind:
- The proximity of your address to the searcher’s location
- Keywords used in blog or pages titles
- A large number of reviews that contain keywords
- Complete Google My Business profile and its primary category
- And address in the searcher’s city
- High-quality and trustworthy links to your site
Implementing these local SEO strategies could benefit your business in the following ways:
- Ranking higher than your competitors to reach more potential clients
- Presenting more opportunities for users to contact you by showing your Google My Business profile
- Gaining further traffic through your blog
- Generating more positive reviews to establish your firm as trustworthy
- Drawing in traffic and leads with minimal effort once implemented
- Turning traffic into actual clients
- Establishing your authority in the industry
These advantages make local SEO one of the most effective strategies you can use to ensure your firm’s success. If you focus on improving ranking factors, you will likely see an increase in your content’s visibility and higher traffic volume. Ultimately, applying effective local SEO strategies makes your content more accessible to those looking for it.
Contributed by Katie McLoughlin, Content Writer
Focused Keyword Research
Most law firms have been chasing the same keywords for a long time. How often do you take a moment to evaluate if consumer behavior has changed over the past few years?
For example, “(city) car accident lawyer” and “dui lawyer in (city),” as well as “family lawyers in (city)” and “(city) estate planning lawyers” are formats that are still acceptable today, though the share of consumers searching this way has incrementally decreased each year, even by just a percentage point or two. The portion of people using these types of terms has receded quicker over the past two years perhaps because of COVID and fairly dramatic shifts in what the average person is looking for in a lawyer in terms of social validation, costs, and even values.
Take proximate searches for example:
There are numerous ways we consider these searches, but “near me” is the clear winner. What about “best” vs. “top?”
A strong correlation of qualifying words, but “best” is clearly on top.
What keywords are best? Are there tools to help us find good keywords? How many keywords are too many? How do we know if there are too few? There are certainly best practices that can be found on the MMM website, but other resources that will help you validate strong keywords are what’s above, Google Trends, along with Google Search Console (of your own website and data), Ubersuggest, and Answer the Public from our experience.
Contributed by Ryan Klein, CEO
Contact Market My Market For Legal Marketing Assistance Today
A solid legal marketing strategy is critical for effectively establishing your firm’s online presence and generating qualified leads. At Market My Market, our highly-qualified legal marketing team has extensive experience in proven SEO strategies, cutting-edge web design, as well as factual and engaging content creation.
We understand there is no one-size-fits-all approach to legal marketing, so we tailor our services to fit each of our client’s unique needs. When you partner with us, you can expect us to be dedicated, transparent, and accountable as we optimize your strategy to meet and exceed your firm’s short and long-term goals. To learn more about how we can take your legal marketing to the next level, call us today at (866) 270-2250 or complete our online contact form.
Contributed by Lindsay Bennett, Content Writer
