Whether you’re just starting out or ready to expand your law firm marketing online reach, it’s important to be strategic with your marketing efforts. Every industry is unique regarding its marketing techniques, and the intricacies of law firm marketing strategies are no exception.
In the past, billboards, television, newspapers, bus signs, etc., were effective ways for law firms to put their names out there and attract the best clients. However, over the last decade, technology has taken over and changed the marketing world across every industry, and legal services are no exception. Potential clients now search for lawyers and law-related topics on the internet.
By taking full advantage of the reach you can create for your firm online through search marketing, you stand a greater chance of beating your competition. Search marketing is a strategy used to gain online presence and traffic via paid (pay-per-clicks) and unpaid (search engine optimization) strategies on search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
This article will discuss search marketing in detail and how your law firm can leverage it to expand your online reach.
Search Engine Optimization & Paid Advertising
Search marketing is gaining traffic and visibility from search engines through paid and unpaid efforts. Search marketing is short for search engine marketing. Whenever we look something up on google, it directs us to a page known as the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
The higher you rank on the SERPs, the more traffic you’ll get to your website and, therefore, a larger reach for your law firm marketing. The question now is, how do you rank higher on these SERPs?
There’re basically two branches of search marketing.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization is the implementation of different strategies that increase the ‘rank’ of a website for various search terms. As potential clients scour the internet for legal solutions, search traffic will go to the organic search results. Thus, it only makes sense to be on page one if you want to increase your revenue.
Paid Advertising
Paid advertising or pay-per-click is most closely associated with Google. However, you can still run PPC ads on Facebook, Bing, and other search engines. With PPC marketing, your law firm has to pay a fee every time someone clicks on your ad — hence the name pay-per-click.
7 Strategies to Increase Your Law Firm Marketing Reach Through Search Marketing
Below are some effective search marketing strategies for your law firm:
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Optimize Google Business Profile
Optimizing your firm’s Google Business Profile (GBP) is a great way to expand its reach. GBP improves the discoverability of your law firm’s website on search engines.
This profile also enhances client engagement and enables your law firm marketing to reach a wider audience via maps and location searches. Additionally, creating and optimizing your Google Business Profile helps you manage your law firm marketing’s online reputation by interacting with reviews.
The messaging feature of GBP makes it easy for potential clients to contact your firm. You’ll see SEO results through increased impressions on Google Maps and rich Google search results.
When optimizing your profile listing, add the correct business category. You must also avoid keyword stuffing in the description and title. For example, if you specialize in DUIs, you must optimize your listing title and description with relevant keywords such as ‘DUI lawyer in Texas.’ This allows your website to appear organically in the search results when people search for those specific terms.
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Attorney Schema
Schema is HTML code integrated into your website’s content to make it machine-understandable. It helps search engines understand the relationships between different pieces of content. The legal industry has its own set of schema that lets search engines know content is connected to a law firm or legal professional.
Schema should be applied to a law firm’s website content, including phone numbers, addresses, emails, attorney names, reviews, and attorney biographies. By giving specific information through structured data that crawlers choose to show in prominent SERP positions, you can use schema to optimize for rich results. These rich results expand the firm’s online reach and can boost the click-through rate (CTR) by 58%.
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Improve Site Speed
The quicker your page loads, the higher it will rank in Google search results. Your website’s speed is one of the first things visitors encounter when they arrive at your site. If your content loads slowly, they will likely become frustrated, leave your site, or try a different search result altogether.
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Google Ads
Google Ads is an excellent avenue to score new clients because it enables your law firm to dominate the search engine results pages. It also supplements the organic traffic you generate with search engine optimization on your firm’s website and offers a cost-effective way to improve its marketing strategy to attract more clients.
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Create a Blog and Publish Frequently
Search engines, especially Google, love fresh content. Therefore, creating new blog posts frequently will improve your search engine ranking. In addition, answer frequently asked questions so potential clients can get quick answers to their inquiries without needing consultation or doing additional research. You can create FAQs that target local keywords for better search engine optimization results.
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Use Social Media
Expanding the reach of your legal services is incomplete if you ignore social media. Statista showed more than 40% of the world’s population owns a social media account. Also, over 50% of users depend on social media to research brands and products.
Therefore, it’d be unwise not to use a platform that can expand your firm’s reach directly to your target audience. You can also use it to boost your SEO by driving traffic back to your website.
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Reviews
Trust in a service can be built better by knowing another user’s experience. Reviews add value to your services and stand as a source of proof about your law firm. Make sure you add testimonials from your Google Business platform or any other credible source.
Google can differentiate between fake and true reviews and will rank you higher if the testimonials are true. You can get more reviews for your law firm by enabling reviews on your Google Business Profile. You should also encourage existing clients of the law firm to leave reviews.
Reach a Wider Audience Today With Our Law Firm Marketing Experts
Law firms need to focus on their online marketing to beat the competition in this digital world. Search engine optimization is a top priority and should be intentionally treated as such.
If you secure the digital marketing services of a reputable agency in Greenville, SC, you won’t have to worry about getting your firm’s services to a larger audience. At EverConvert, you will get experienced SEO strategists to implement techniques that suit your firm’s unique needs. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help.
