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What Your Law Firm Needs in Order to Excel is Great Marketing!

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Ideas to Market Your Law Firm

No matter how long your law firm has been around, or the amount of experience that your best attorneys have, you still have to compete with a ton of other law firms in and around your area. These days, whenever a person is injured in an accident through someone else’s negligence, get into criminal trouble, or find themselves in any other situation that requires the services of a qualified attorney, the first that they do is turn to the internet. What that person types in something like, “attorneys near me,” he or she is going to get more possible lawyers to hire that you can shake a pointed stick at! Try it yourself to see how much competition you have out there. Imagine that person who is looking for a lawyer seeing all those results and having to choose from them. Imagine that your law firm is one of those results. How would you stand out from the rest so that it is your law firm that gets clicked on instead of all the rest? Law firm marketing is the answer, and here are a few tips to help you do just that.

  1.   You Have to Utilize SEO

You might have heard about SEO before but are not quite sure about what it is. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has to do with making particular changes to the content of a website so that search engines will be drawn to it when people enter certain search items. The ultimate goal is to get your website’s “ranking” as high as possible so that it appears on the first page of a search’s results. Getting to that first page is crucial because most people never navigate to the second page of the results that they get. Of course, this is not so easy to accomplish and requires the services of SEO experts who know precisely what they are doing. There are a ton of ways to measure your SEO success, but the right agency will know the best metrics to track for your law firm and the best way to show you the impact of your marketing budget. 

  1.   The Importance of Quality Content

Once you get potential clients to click on your website, the goal is to keep them there and get them to contact you for a consultation. It is essential that your website contains quality content in order to achieve this; otherwise, your visitors might shake their heads and leave and go straight to your competition. No matter what area of law you happen to focus on, your content should be clear and right to the point. Keep in mind that, in most cases, you will be dealing with regular people who do not understand the legal jargon and will not put up with overcomplicated text. Your content should also be very easy for your visitors to navigate so that they get to the part that concerns them without any hassles.

  1.   PPC advertising can help a lot

 Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a great idea that works wonders. PPC is basically a way to pay Google to list your ads at the top of web searches. It works well because it highlights your firm to potential clients, basically making you look great. You can choose to utilize campaigns that target specific potential clients such as those who have already visited your website but did not call you for a consultation for one reason or another.

  1.   Use the power of social media

 We all know how powerful social media has become and not just when it comes to socializing. Just about any business that you can think of is now active on social media and that can make the difference between being profitable and not. Of course, Facebook is the most powerful social network of them all so you should be present on it; but you might want to have a presence on other specific social networks depending on what area of law you focus on. For example, if you focus on bankruptcy and other financial areas of law, LinkedIn is definitely a social networking site that you should be on!

  1.   Email marketing is still around!

 Anyone in marketing will tell you that despite some people thinking that email marketing is dead, it is still very much alive for one reason alone: it works! 

You can get more information here: https://socialfirestarter.com

 

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Do Followers & Friends Matter For Your Law Social Media Page?

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The question

Do you have any tips for getting more Facebook friends, Facebook followers, and Twitter followers? My attorney boss really wants those numbers to go up. I really want to be more authentic with my comments and posts, but I’m worried about being too real. I know I need to represent the law firm professionally, so I hold back and it’s all just super boring. 

My answer

I’m not going to talk about Twitter cause I don’t do a lot on Twitter. Twitter overwhelms me. I’ve just managed to stay off of Twitter. I don’t do a lot with Twitter, so I’m not an expert on that. 

Now about Facebook followers and friends… If we’re talking about a business page — and I had a conversation with a client about this very thing this morning — it doesn’t really matter what the number of people is because the reach is so small. 

About engagement campaigns on Facebook

Facebook has become pay to play. So if it’s just a vanity game, then you can just run ads that are basically just an engagement campaign. 

I don’t ever do these because I don’t care about likes, but you can run a Facebook ad that is kind of an engagement campaign. If you go into the ads manager and you go into the different goals, there are different types: there’s a reach, and there’s traffic, and then there’s engagement and different things like that. 

And I’m almost positive that within engagement or within reach, there’s a place in there where you can actually invite people to like the page. That means you can run ads to get people to like the page. So that’s one way you can do it. 

I mean, don’t BUY likes. Definitely, do not buy likes because that’s going to screw all your stuff up. 

A better way to get more likes

Here’s what I would do instead if your boss really cares about it: I would probably create a really good post, a post that solves a problem.

So, for example, here’s one thing we did for a traumatic brain injury attorney: we created a guide that taught clients how to set up a GoFundMe campaign after an accident. A lot of times, people get into an accident and they need money because they can’t work. You know the drill. 

So we said: “Here is a step-by-step guide that teaches you how to set up a GoFundMe campaign so that you can get your friends and family to help out and cover some of your living expenses and medical expenses.” This is also helpful after a wrongful death type of situation. You see these things spring up all the time. 

So, we created a guide that shows exactly how to do that and we ran ads to that post and that post, because you’re paying for it, gets a ton of likes, a ton of comments and it’s actually useful. 

Compare this to a page that isn’t really useful

Compare that to s a Facebook page that just isn’t really useful. For example, my Facebook page — my Andrew Stickel entrepreneur business Facebook page — I really have no idea how many likes I have. I might have 10 likes, I might have a thousand likes, I have no idea because I just haven’t looked at it. 

I just don’t care because I know it doesn’t help me because the reach is just so small. Sure, you can spend this money on building up likes. And if you have just 5 likes, then maybe you should try to invest a little bit to get a couple of hundred likes on there, but it’s a point of diminishing returns. 

What you should do

If you do a good job and you provide value, then people will start liking you. If you put that guide out there, then people will like you. It’s just how it works. So, that’s what I would do. I mean, you can run the Facebook ads, you can ask people — but providing value is probably the best way to do it.

How To Get More Clients From Your Law Firm’s Blog Content

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The Question

What is your philosophy on website content? 400 words or so surface-level content or a thousand words or so with in-depth content. I’ve talked with people on both sides.

My Answer

I can give you the definitive answer in terms of what actually works and what your website copy should be. I know it’s the definitive answer because a couple of years ago we tested this with our clients — about 50 websites. And we got the same result for every website, so I know this is correct. 

The Panda Update

NOTE: The Panda Update was in 2011!

In 2017 (I believe), Google made a major change to its algorithm and added something called the panda update, which basically deals with the overall quality of your website. And one of the major things that Google considers when it comes to your website is the actual website content. 

The Target Of The Panda Update

So we realized that there were websites that had this really thin kind of low-quality, short content, like 300- to 500-word blog posts that really didn’t provide a lot of substance. They were just there for the purpose of being there, and they didn’t actually solve any problems. 

They didn’t help anybody, and they were just kind of blah. What we found is that websites that had a lot of that content actually scored lower on Google’s quality score.

The Results Of The Panda Update

So we went through and got rid of all of that low-quality, crappy content and website traffic went through the roof. It was crazy. 

Our blogging strategy for our clients had been three blogs per week. We would do three blogs per week and they would be like 300-word to 500-word blog posts and they were okay. I mean, they were what they were. 

Their purpose was for search engine optimization. We were doing that for years, and it worked for a long time… until it didn’t. It’s just like with SEO, where the stuff we do today is probably not going to work in two years. You’re always evolving. 

What We Did To Fix It

So we downloaded the Google Analytics data for our clients and we looked at which blog posts over the last three months were getting organic traffic and which ones were not getting organic traffic. 

And if it’s not getting organic traffic, it means that Google is not showing it for the search terms that we’re trying to rank for. When we did these, the blogs would basically be focused around a keyword that had a pretty decent search volume. And if we’re not getting the traffic for that, then there’s no point to having the blog. 

So here’s what we did for every single client… This was a huge project because we had about 50 clients. We left the blogs that had traffic alone. But we got rid of the blogs that had no organic visits over the last three months and did not have any backlinks to them. 

We either deleted them if it was just crappy content, or we added them to other blogs and expanded them into better content. And what ended up happening is that traffic went through the roof. 

What We Do Now

So here’s the answer to the question of “What is your philosophy on website content, 400 words or so?” I don’t really look at website content in terms of numbers.