The giant billboard won’t help you much. Neither will expect people to search through the yellow pages to find your name. Most people do not use the same traditional means, they used to use to not just find an attorney, but find anything and anyone. As a solo lawyer, you are already in a fierce competition to get noticed and that won’t happen unless you use the same techniques that large law firms use online.
If you still believe that you don’t need a website or Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and digital marketing to move your firm to the top alongside of big firms, then perhaps knowing that 70% of law firms have generated new cases through their website, and 74% of all legal consumers visit law firm websites to take action, might change your mind.
Besides statistics, it’s more important for you to know why independent lawyers need to employ online tools available to them. So let’s get right into it and by the time you’ve read this post, it will be very clear to you the importance and the benefits of an online marketing strategy. You can learn more about digital marketing here, a great source for relevant information.
Visibility: The concept of SEO is simple; maximize your visibility and rank high on a search engine page. Keywords are the words used by searchers online and are based on: target audience, the volume of keywords, keywords’ search intent and competition. A decent SEO program will set your law firm apart from your competition by making sure you’re visible in the right place and at the right time. Where and when people are looking for a lawyer, SEO practices will put you within a target audience reach.
Content: A website without great content is practically useless. As a lawyer, your entire career is based on helping others, so your website should do the same. Let’s say some keywords are ‘how’ or ‘why’, which entails people searching for solutions; they have a research intent when using these types of words. When your website posts, blogs, videos or case studies that pertain to answering people’s questions about how and why, it creates great content for your site. The concept is easy, but the actual process is far deeper and more complex, because the final objective isn’t just about gaining traffic to your site, it’s about converting traffic into leads, which are the visitors that have the potential of becoming a client. Even if you have good knowledge about SEO and digital marketing, you won’t have the time for it, which is why lawyers hire companies that specialize in search engine optimization for law firms, if they want to rank high on Google’s or other search engines first page.
Get the right people: We could write books and books about why digital marketing is needed, but for now, it’s enough just to say because we’re living in the digital age. Digital marketing techniques are your best chance to compete in an already highly competitive field as law. This post began with a mention of billboards. While it’s still used as a marketing tool, can you assure how many people will see your billboard, should you put one up? More importantly, can you assure the ‘right’ people will see it? The right people means getting the people who are looking for your service. Via digital marketing, you have the opportunity and the resources to create a marketing strategy that were once only available to huge firms.
Reviews: Reviews are essential in the legal field, and surveys have shown that 67% of consumers are influenced by reviews. You can consider online reviews as the evolution of word-of-mouth but much quicker. Word-of-mouth is still successful, but it takes years to establish. Now, people are more than willing to leave reviews, and it’s still the place to learn from and how and what you can do to improve your services. Spread out your reviews so clients have options on where they could post a review. It could be on your website, or your social media profile, or on Google which are some of the options.
Mobile Friendly: Always stay ahead, and know that your site needs to be mobile-friendly and optimized to load quickly. To do that, images need to be shrunk, improve server response time, and compress file sizes.
From blogging, to creating citations for backlinks, to gathering reviews, it can be and is overwhelming deciding where to focus your time and resources. The good news is you don’t need to do it alone. The good news is when done correctly, marketing dominance is highly achievable for independent lawyers.