Digital Marketing For Law Firms - A Complete Guide
In our digital age, it comes as no surprise that roughly 96% of all people searching for a lawyer resort to a search engine for their needs, making digital marketing for law firms the #1 way to gain clientele. If you take a look at the top law firms in America they all are similar in the sense that their websites are interactive and user-friendly, and they have to dominate SEO and Google ads campaigns. Making digital marketing for law firms something that cant be ignored.
- August 5, 2020
Digital Marketing For Law Firms - Trust Is A Must
Trust is a must when it comes to digital marketing for law firms, and having a good website is the #1 way to build that trust. After all, it is the heart of your firm’s digital marketing, and the face of your business. When going about your website you first want to make sure it is HTTPS supported and has a load speed of 3 seconds or less. This ensures that users can get to your website swiftly, GTmetrix is a great tool to test your website page speed.
The website itself should have nicely taken photos that are not stock images, and you should refrain from bunching up to much content. Most importantly, your law firm website needs to be usable and interactive on both mobile and desktop interfaces, and remain aesthetic. Lastly, your going to want some sort of CTA – Call To Action that provokes prospects, something like a free consultation would work.
If you are unsure where to start, or would like some professional guidance we offer a fully customized and free website design plan for law firms.
Digital Marketing For Law Firms - SEO
SEO for law firms is a driving force in many of the larger firm’s constant growth and success. Although the process can be lengthy, ranking organically has a much higher conversion rate than any other form of digital marketing for law firms and should not be ignored when considering the long-term growth and well-being of your firm.
SEO in itself contains 3 critical elements: Technical SEO, On-page SEO, and most importantly Off-page SEO. When done right, these three branches help to build trust with search engines creating a steady increase in organic traffic and conversions.
Technical SEO For Law Firms
Technical SEO should not be taken lightly as it is critical in enhancing the crawlability of your website and the user experience which Google looks to provide its users. If your Off-page and On-page SEO are perfect but the technical side is bad it could disrupt the other aspects of your law firm’s digital marketing. Below are some of the most important factors of technical SEO.
- Fix Crawl Errors
- Switch To HTTPS Over HTTP
- XML Sitemap
- Find & Fix Broken Links
- Backlinks Should Come From High DA-Domain Authority URLs
- Website Speed Optimization
- User Friendly On All Interfaces
A great way to keep track of your technical SEO performance is through a paid tool: SEMrush. If your budget is tight, GSC-Google Search Console is a great tool to measure your mobile usability and website crawlability, and you can check out our “Ultimate Guide To Eliminating Bad Backlinks” to learn more about backlinks and how to clean up your backlink profile, as well as the overall SEO aspect of the digital marketing for your law firm. As for page speed, we have found that GTMetrix is a reliable tool and provides some great feedback on what you can do to improve your webpage load speed.
On-page SEO For Law Firms
Aside from technical SEO, On-page SEO is yet another significant factor in ranking your family law firm on Google. On-page SEO consists of the optimization of all the on-site content and assets, and should not be ignored when carrying out digital marketing for your law firm.
- Optimize Slug URLs For Keywords
- Optimize Heading Tags For Keywords
- Internal Link Optimization
- Optimize Image ALT Tags For Keywords
When performing keyword research you’re going to want to use a tool like SEMrush to compile a list of non-competitive relative keywords that would be perfect for the clients your trying to get. If you’re just starting out, making sure your keywords aren’t overly competitive is important as these keywords require years of content, backlink generation, and a huge budget to acquire, we recommend sticking below a KD-Keyword Difficulty score of 45 if you’re just starting out.
Once you have completed your keyword research it is time to validate the search traffic of your keywords using Google Trends, as making sure your keywords are actually being searched is a pretty important step you don’t want to miss in you’re law firms digital marketing.
Once your keywords are validated you need to optimize each webpage for 1-3 relative keywords(the less the better). You’re going to want to embed these targets into your headers, Slug URLs, Image ALT tags, and page content, along with setting up relative internal links with keyword-optimized anchor text. The YoastSEO plugin is a great way of measuring your On-page SEO score.
Off-page SEO For Law Firms
Here we go, the area where most people fail or lose patience. Unfortunately, optimized Technical and On-page SEO is not enough to get your website visible and ranking, Google requires that you have a respectable number of authoritative backlinks and content leading back to your website as well. Do not get it twisted, black hat SEO methods that generate you thousands of backlinks in a single hour are nothing but trouble and a way to get your website banned from Google.
What you want to do here is focus on creating quality content that can be guest posted on relative niche websites that have a DA-Domain Authority between 25-100. Think of Google as a search engine that relies entirely on trust. You have to prove to Google you are trustworthy by showing that your content is good enough to be shared across the web, as you might assume the higher the DA the more impact it has on your own personal websites DA and trust. However, keep in mind that getting backlinks from very high DA is usually very expensive and difficult. Once again, SEMrush is a great tool for generating relative backlink prospects, but if you’re on a tighter budget searching the following is a good way to find relative guest posting and backlink-generating opportunities.
- “Law firm submit a guest post”
- “Family law firm guest post”
- “Law firm accepting guest post”
- “Law firm write for us”
Although guest posting or off-page link insertions are the best practice for getting clients and building your DA. Getting backlinks and profiles set up on relative forums and directories is also a good way to get some more backlinks and boost your firm’s visibility.
Digital Marketing For Law Firms - PPC
The next best thing besides organic SEO is paid traffic. Paid traffic is a great tool to leverage for an abundance of fast traffic. However, running generic ads isn’t enough. When looking to successfully advertise the key is making data backed experiments or A/B tests to yield a better CTR – Click Through Rate, CPA – Cost Per Acquisition, and CPC – Cost Per Click.
Aside from continuously split testing and optimizing your campaigns and advertisements you are also going to want to place a major focus on the development and optimization of your landing pages. Whereas, optimizing your ads involves driving the correct traffic with the correct ad copy to the right page, landing page optimization involves the optimization of those pages and CTAs to better convert users.
For instance, experimenting with two different landing pages with different button text, may hint that button A is far more compelling in getting users to sign up for a free consultation than button B. A great tool to help track user interaction is Reactflow, a screen recording software that shows live footage of your website viewers. If you are still unsure where to start, you can request a free digital advertising plan for law firms
Digital Marketing For Law Firms FAQ
When it comes to digital marketing there is no such thing as a one size fits all approach. The cost of digital marketing is dependent on numerous factors including your goals, any project time limits, the method(s) your using for digital marketing, your competitors, your current digital situation, and more. Typically we see budgets ranging anywhere from $1,500-$50,000 a month, but the cost is much more when employing an in-house team.
You’re website is the face of your firm. Your prospects unconsciously will make assumptions about your business based on the way your website looks and performs. Think back to the last time you even bothered messing around with a confusing or sketchy looking website, that’s right you didn’t, instead you exited out and clicked on a different one. as you can see, without a strong and compelling website it is hard to do much of anything. Using word of mouth tactics to get clients is great but does not support sustainable growth in our digital age.
The most asked question we receive, and the short answer is long. It can take anywhere from 3-12+ months to see results with SEO depending on your starting point, your competitors, your niche and your budget. Google works based on trust, if your SEO performance has been weak for quite some time it can be more difficult to regain Googles trust, but given the right methods its very worth it.
SEO has been known to yield a much higher conversion rate than PPC, but takes a considerable amount of time and effort to drive traffic whereas advertising methods get traffic faster, but the second you stop spending your traffic is gone. In other words, SEO is more of an evergreen and long-term strategy but both serve there place in digital marketing.
Depends! In-house marketing requires a substantial budget that not only has to account for the services, and tools needed, but also the salary of each team member. On the other hand, it can be harder to get that personal feel with an outsourced agency, especially if they are large. Our small agency acts as an extension of our clients providing highly personalized services and great customer experiences. We get very personal sometimes taking trips together, sending gifts, etc..
