attorney marketing

Are You Missing Potential Clients by Finding a Niche for Your Law Firm?

Here’s a question I just got: In niching down, is the fear of missing out on clients that are good but not ideal clients overblown?

My answer:

You do immigration law. And you’re asking if you were to niche down to a specific type of client, whether you would miss out on other clients that would be good? Well, niching down can mean a few different things.

How To Choose (And Not To Choose) a Niche

There are a lot of different things you can do with immigration. There are investor visas, there’s family immigration, and there are a lot of different things like that. But I always recommend taking the most desirable practice area and focusing on that for all your content.

If you’re creating content, you’re really living and breathing this stuff. And if it’s something that you don’t want to do, for example, you may hate traumatic brain injury cases or medical malpractice, you’ll burn out.

Let’s say you want car accident cases, but you think that there are some really big cases in medical malpractice, so you can really make a lot of money if you get the right one. So you want to do a medical malpractice campaign, but the problem is that you’re going to burn out.

What I Do

As for me, I talk so much about Law Firm marketing, and I don’t consider it work. I enjoy doing this. We’ve been on here for 45 minutes now, and I’m not sitting here watching the clock thinking, oh my god, this is a drag. I like talking about this stuff.

How To Choose Your Favorite Practice Area

The most important thing is that you figure out what the practice area is that you most want to do. If you had to get rid of everything else, of all your other practice areas, and you could only focus on this one thing, what would you most want to do?

And that’s what I would focus on. What ends up happening is that you’ll get so many cases in that one practice area that you don’t necessarily care about the other ones anymore.

As for me, I get so many lawyers that are trying to contact me every single day, asking me to do their marketing or to help them with their law firm’s marketing in some capacity that I don’t miss all the chiropractors that I’m not getting. After all, I’m really not going after them and I don’t really care about them.

What You Can Do In The Immigration Practice Area

Now, here’s something you could do… Immigration is the kind of niche where you could be a little bit more broad than with something like personal injury. With personal injury, anybody could be in a car accident, so how do you target everyone, right?

That’s why I really emphasize niching down for something like that, but for immigration, you could target all of the investment visas, for example, the EB-5, the E-,1 and the E-2. Or you could do business law and focus on the H-1B visas and help businesses that have employees overseas.

Or you can just focus on a specific nationality. I think there’s a group called Indians in Atlanta that has about 25,000 people in it. At the end of the day, what do you really want to talk about?

How To Target Immigration Easily, Especially With Facebook Ads

You really could talk about all things in immigration because you can target immigration very easily. And here’s the way that you target immigration, especially if you’re targeting it with Facebook Ads.

Just find celebrities that would only be known to people from a specific country and target those celebrities. And that’s how you find people that are from those countries, even if they’re living in the United States.

How You Should Handle Niching Down

So, that’s how you do immigration but at the end of the day, niching down is all about personal preference. I can’t tell you what you want to do or what the best thing. What you should really focus on is what you enjoy doing the most and what you’re the most passionate about and what you most want to talk about.

Will you miss some clients? Probably. But you’ll get so many clients that you want that you don’t really care about the ones that you’re missing.

There are so many clients that I’m probably missing that if I wanted other niches, I’m sure that I could get a lot of. Yes, there are different types of clients but I’m so busy with lawyers that it just doesn’t really make a difference.

This is the question: Can I talk to your clients? Any good marketing company is going to have lots of clients that will happily give them testimonials. That’s why when you go to my website, I’ve got about 25 testimonials from clients.

How We Answer This Question For Clients

When someone wants to hire us, they ask us, can we talk to your clients? We typically don’t give them any contact information. My partner tells them that their names are listed on our website and to call them. That way, we’re not skewing anything.

The biggest thing is that if they’ve got clients that are happy and have gotten results, you can talk to the clients and ask them what’s it like. Are they responsive? Have you gotten results? But, the most important question is can I talk to your clients?

Our caveat is always that you can talk to them and ask our clients, but our clients are busy, and the only way that you’re allowed to call our clients and ask about us is if that’s the only thing you need to move forward. If you’re still on the fence and you want to talk to them, but are still unsure, don’t call them. Don’t waste their time.

What If Campaigns Were Not Working?

I don’t think we have a single client that wouldn’t give us a good recommendation. That’s true even for clients that we’ve been struggling with, even if something was not working one way or another. It’s marketing. Nothing is 100% perfect, and that’s important too.

When you talk to a marketing company, you have to understand that Google and search engine optimization does not always work. That’s something that marketing companies just won’t tell you. There’s a randomness factor in Google that drives me up the freaking wall. There are times when SEO and search engine optimization just does not work.

I’m pounding my head against that brick wall right behind me because we’ve done everything. This works for every other client. We literally cannot figure out what is going on. We don’t know why this isn’t working. But, sometimes it just doesn’t work.

How Companies React When Things Go Wrong

One of the real telling points of a company is how do they react when things go wrong, when they run into a campaign that isn’t working. We’ve got clients that’ll tell you that we came out of pocket and paid for AdWords, or we came out of pocket and paid for social media campaigns, or we suspended their payments for a couple of months. That’s a true test.

Sometimes it just doesn’t work, or sometimes things go wrong, but the real test is how do they handle that?

The Question

I’ve seen you talk about influencer marketing. I’m a personal injury attorney. How can I use influencer marketing to help market my firm?

My Answer

That’s a tricky one for personal injury attorneys. You need to find influencers in your market. You can go into Instagram, for example, search for the top posts from a specific location and sort it by things like “recent.”

How to Find Influencers

Then you can click on them and see people that are in your area. You’ll see people that had basically the most popular posts in Baltimore. and the more followers they have, the more popular the posts are going to be.

More people are going to interact with their posts and engage with them and just because they have so many followers, it’s going to end up being a top post. So, that’s how you find the influencers.

How to Connect With Them

And then, you can send them a direct message and say, “Hey, I’ll give you 50 bucks to promote my stuff,” or “I’ll give you something to promote my stuff.”

Another Approach

Another thing you can do is to keep an eye on the influencers. Perhaps you see an influencer get into a car accident or get arrested or something like that. Or you can reach out to them and ask them if they know anyone that they can tell any stories about, such as, “Hey I got arrested and — you know, I talked to this attorney and…”

They can weave stories and somehow weave you into the story. It doesn’t necessarily have to be that you represented them, but they could say something like, “I got arrested and I talked to Atty. John Smith and he gave me some really interesting advice…

“For example, if you’re arrested and you’re pulled over for DUI or for suspicion of DUI, he told me that under some circumstances they can get the case stopped or thrown out.” Do you know what I mean?

Use something where you’re not giving legal advice but where he tells a story about how he talked to you and makes you the expert. And at the end of it, he could say, “He’s a really, really strong attorney, and really knows his stuff. If you have any questions, give him a call at 407 123 1234.”

If You Want To Go Big…

You could do something like that. Of course, it depends on how big you want to go with influencer marketing. An attorney named Dan Newlin in Orlando just put on a Pitbull concert. Somebody told me that he spent in the neighborhood of $650,000 on it.

Then again, Pitbull is a very big influencer, and he used that influence and that fame and that level of celebrity to get his name out there. I think they had like 20,000 or 30,000 people show up for that. It was pretty big because this was a free Pitbull concert.

So, you can use influencer marketing in a lot of different ways. The biggest thing is finding the influencers. Just search for the top posts on Instagram in your location and then look to see if they’re from your area and have a lot of followers.

Avoid This:

One thing you might want to avoid is half-naked women. It’s pretty easy to build a really big following if your entire account is just naked women. But that’s probably not a really great audience for you.

How To Work With Smaller Numbers Effectively

Also, they don’t really have to be huge numbers. If you find somebody that has 2,000 followers but is local to Chicago or local to your area, it might be worth tossing him 50 bucks or 25 bucks. You could also just give them a Starbucks or Outback Steakhouse gift card just to get in front of their audience.

You never know… Let’s say you’re a DUI attorney. If you find a college kid who’s posting a lot of pictures of them partying on Instagram, then it might be worth it for you to give him a hundred dollars and have him promote you to his 2,500 local Chicago frat brothers. Because there’s a good chance that you might get a DUI case or two out of that.

It’s all about being creative and looking at who’s there and then figuring out, okay, what can I offer them? Because at the end of the day, you have to think about what do they want?

They want to leverage their account, and if they have smaller listings, then they probably don’t get asked that often. Because in the grand scheme of things, if I’m trying to do a national campaign, I’m not interested in somebody that has 2,000 followers.

But if it’s 2,000 college kids and 2,000 of whoever it is that’s in your direct market, then that might not be a bad way to tackle influencer marketing. So, hopefully, that helps.

Today, we are going to talk about the three most important SEO elements for your law firm’s website. You’ll need them if you want to rank on Google. All three of these are very important. But I’m going to go from the least important one to the most critical and most important one. 

The H1 Header

Number three is the website’s H1 Header. Now, the H1 Header is a little difficult to identify, but when you go to a website, typically, the biggest header on the website is going to be the H1 Header.

It’s the page title and a lot of times it’ll say, “New Orleans Personal Injury Lawyer” or “Baltimore DUI Attorney”, or whatever it is. But a lot of times, SEO companies will not use keywords in the H1 Header. 

The H1 Header is really important because it’s the overall title of the page. It’s not to be confused with something that we’re going to talk about later. But what you want to do in your H1 Header is to make sure that you have one of your most important keywords and your city. 

Now with the H1 Header, I like to make it conversational. So, if you’re a personal injury lawyer in New Orleans, a lot of times, you’ll see people use, “New Orleans Personal Injury Lawyer”, and that’s okay. 

Make It Conversational

But I like to get different keywords in there to make the H1 Header a little more conversational. So I would say something like, “Personal Injury Lawyer Representing Accident Victims in New Orleans Since 1984.” 

That’s kind of a nice page title. It gets “New Orleans Personal Injury Lawyer” in there, but it’s not just “New Orleans Personal Injury Lawyer,” which is what a lot of people do with their websites. 

Another thing about the H1 Header is to make sure that you only have one H1 Header. A lot of times, the logo on your website is wrapped in an H1 Header. I don’t know why developers do that, but they always do it and it’s one of the first things that we always have to fix whenever we take over a new client’s website. 

So, there should be one H1 Header. Make sure that it’s conversational, and that it contains your location and your main keyword. So, “personal injury attorney,” “criminal defense lawyer,” “divorce lawyer,” “family law attorney,” whatever you are, make sure it’s in your H1 Header.

Your Website’s URL

Now, your second most important element on a website is going to be the website’s URL. Now, the homepage is a little different because sometimes you’ll have a branded homepage, so it’s like: smithlawfirm.com. But a lot of times, you’ll see layers that have the URL of, for example, orangecountyduiattorney.com. 

The Exact Match Domain Issue

That’s called an exact match domain, where basically, the domain name matches the exact keyword that you’re going for and there are arguments to be made on both sides of that. 

I feel that when you have an exact match domain, Google is more critical of your domain. You won’t get penalized, but it’s more difficult to rank exact match domains in a lot of instances. 

There are also times when exact match domains work really, really well, but it kind of depends on a few different things. From the research I’ve seen and from the actual examples I’ve seen, I’ve found that it can be a little more difficult with exact match domains. 

Now, a long time ago, if you had orangecountyduiattorney.com, you would always be number one for orangecountyduiattorney.com. It didn’t matter what you had on the website — you could just have a bunch of pictures of cats — but if someone searches “Orange County DUI attorney,” you would still show up for it — and your website would still rank number one. 

And that’s kind of why Google has made it more difficult for these exact match domains. Before, you could buy the exact match and then just kind of own the search regardless of how good your website was or what you had on the website. So, that’s kind of why they changed that. 

The URL For An Internal Page

Now, if it’s an internal page — let’s say your homepage is a personal injury page and your internal page is the car accident page, for example — then your URL can be a little different. 

In that case, you’ll have smithlawfirm.com, and then you’re going to insert your keywords. There are a couple of ways you can do it. You could do use new-Orleans-personal-injury-lawyer, though that’s a little spammy. I don’t like doing that. 

What I would do instead is use a keyword that’s related to the general topic. So, I might use something like smithlawfirm.com/caraccident or /autoaccident or/slip and fall or something like that. Essentially, I’d use a short URL that doesn’t have the word “attorney” in it, and that doesn’t even necessarily have the geo in it, but it does have the keyword. 

I think that the URL is more important than the H1 Header because I’ve seen bigger impacts from making changes to URLs in terms of Google ranks. We change the URL, rankings go up or they go down, and I’ve seen that more than with H1 Headers. 

But I’m still very cautious about stuffing too many keywords into the URLs and structuring the URLs in a way that seems a little unnatural. 

The Page Title

Now the most important place where you can put your keywords and the most important part for on-page search engine optimization is the Page Title. The Page Title serves a couple of purposes. 

When you have multiple tabs open on your browser, the Page Title is the text that’s actually on the top of the tab. The Page Title is also displayed in the Google SERPs. When you search “personal injury lawyer Baltimore” for example, you’re going to see all the listings. And the actual title of every single one of those listings is the Page Title of the website. 

Where To Put Your Keywords

Now, the most important place to put your most important keyword is at the beginning of the Page Title. So if you’re a Baltimore personal injury attorney, your Page Title should say: “Baltimore Personal Injury Attorney” or “Personal Injury Attorney Baltimore,” depending on which has higher search volume. 

And that’s something that you or your SEO team should take a look at. What has the higher search volume. Sometimes, it’s the same but sometimes, it’s different. 

I also like to look at what gets more searches. Is it “Baltimore Personal Injury Lawyer” or “Baltimore Personal Injury Attorney” or “Law Firm” or “Attorneys” or “Lawyers”? 

But the Page TItle is by far the most important part to your law firm’s SEO for every single page: an optimized Page Title with the Page Title being the very first thing. Don’t put your law firm name in there and then the keyword. The further left the Page Title is, the more important Google sees it.

So these are the three most important elements of your website: The Page Title, the URL, and the H1 Header. 

My Step-By-Step Video Series

Now would you like a 24-part video series that’s going to show you step-by-step how to rank your law firm in the Google Maps? It’ll also show you how to make sure that your Page Title is correct, how to make sure your URL is correct, how to get your H1 Headers correct, and how to identify all these things. 

I’ll show you in a very easy, non-techno-babble-y way because this stuff can be a little difficult. This is kind of basic SEO, and it’s really not that difficult if you have somebody showing you what to do. 

So I created a 24-part video series that shows you step-by-step over my shoulder how you get your law firm ranked in the Google Maps. I actually share my screen so you can take a look and see on the actual screen how I’m doing everything. It’s a completely free guide. All I ask is that you help me cover the shipping and handling and I’ll send it to you on a USB. 

So if you want to get that completely free, just go to heylawyers.com. If you have any questions, leave them in the comments below and I hope this was helpful.

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