Digital Marketing for Lawyers : Growing a Law Practice with SEO
If you run a law firm, digital marketing can be an especially effective tool to reach out to your customers. Despite digital advertising being so effective, you need to know how to implement it. Otherwise, it could prove to be a costly venture with little return on investment. If you understand the trends around digital advertising for law firms, you could find yourself attracting more clients than ever before.
Here is a close look at some of the methods you can use to grow your law firm with SEO:
You will need a solid SEO Strategy
In the recent past, search engine optimization for lawyers has grown in significance. Although it has always been key to digital advertising, its importance has grown even more today. The reason for this is that many law firms are already using SEO to promote their services. You will thus need to find ways to stand out from the crowd.
Just applying a few simple tactics will not guarantee you success. You will need to work at it and ensure you have great quality links to get traffic to your site. While SEO works great for all types of law firms, it is quite effective in some niches. For instance, if you are thinking of using the digital space for estate planning advertising, it can be quite effective.
For some law firms, using SEO means they have to outsource experts, others just hire more staff to help with it. The bottom line is that SEO works great for any type of business, and especially so for lawyers.
Making Use of Keywords
A huge part of any SEO strategy is conducting effective keyword research. If you are wondering how to promote your law firm online, it will all start with keyword research. You will then pay a search engine to have your ads displayed for certain keywords. Besides that, if your site is optimized to target specific clientele, you can access them by using the right keywords.
In such an instance, you will not even need to buy ad space from a search engine. You will only have to ensure that your site and services can reach people organically. This is great for a law firm that may not have much to spend on advertising.
The Call to Action and SEO
Part of any SEO strategy is to ensure a high conversion rate. To achieve this, the site needs to have an effective call to action. The first tip in having a good CTA is to place it above the fold. This is the point after which visitors to a website have to start scrolling to see more information. Besides that, the lawyer’s site should have a number on every page. It is important to ensure that this number is displayed prominently. Otherwise, when visitors have to start looking for such important information, they may move on to another site.
Another great SEO strategy is to ensure that there are more than one means of getting in touch with the law firm. For instance, if there is no one at the office to receive a phone call, the visitor should be given an email address through which to contact the firm.
Site Schema
Schema is HTML code that is applied to content on a website. This helps to make it machine-readable. In short, it helps the search engine understand the unique relationship between the different sections of content. Websites related to the legal field have their unique site schema. This helps search engines know that such information is related to a law firm.
Link Building for Law Firms
Google, a major search engine recently announced that link building would play a significant role in site ranking. You need to put yourself in the shoes of clients and ask yourself how to find an estate planning lawyer, how to challenge a will or how to leave a legacy for your kids for instance. They will not always do a search; they may instead visit a forum and pose a question about the best lawyer in town.
If you get high-quality links from dependable sources, the site will rank higher in the search engines when a potential client uses certain keywords. If a site has many high-quality links pointing towards it, this will have a positive influence on how Google ranks the site. However, if the links are of low quality and come from undependable sources, it could hurt the site.
Contents Needs to High Quality
Ideally, all the content needs to be written by lawyers or people knowledgeable about the law. If visitors with vast experience in the legal field come to a site, they will assess the site based on the content. If the content has been written by a hack, it could cause them to bounce. For instance, estate planning lawyers should look for a paralegal in the field to generate the content.
Marketing a law firm online is now no longer just an option; it is mandatory if they hope to maintain a steady stream of clients. Most people now use the internet to find most of what they need, including lawyers. It is thus essential that a law firm show up in the search engine when clients need them.
