Web marketing is an essential part of growing any lawyer’s practice. Consumers are purchasing more and more products online, and they’re also using the web to compare professional service providers such as lawyers. The more online marketing you do, the more likely consumers are to hear positive information about you, which makes it more likely that those in need of legal services will turn to you and your practice. The challenge, however, comes in knowing which sections of the web to focus on; it is, after all, a vast resource with millions of websites. Here’s where you should focus the majority of your time and energy. 

Your website. This may sound obvious, but the number of firms who don’t update their websites regularly is staggering. Given that a large amount of your online marketing efforts are geared towards getting visitors to visit your website (and then use your website to contact you), that is a huge oversight. No, your firm will never become a must-click-at-least-once-a-day phenomenon like Deadspin or Gawker, but that’s not your goal: your goal is to demonstrate that yours is a modern practice that is professional and that will be able to use modern technology in pursuit of your clients’ legal aims. That may mean including a feed from a legal news website, or issuing a press release at least once a week, or even including a daily (or biweekly) blog feature, but the important thing is that they see evidence that the site reflects a vibrant firm rather than a ghost town. At the same time, your site needs to look contemporary; if you haven’t changed your website for a number of years, an overhaul may be necessary. At a minimum, adding some flash components (such as an introductory page), an informational video or two, and a Facebook social plug-in will help you position your firm as one that’s in-touch and modern. 

Your search engine results. One of the best marketing tactics to increase the flow of traffic to your website is to optimize your website for search engines (also known as search engine optimization, or SEO). In brief, these are tactics designed to tie your website to specific search terms. When a variation of those search terms are entered by a user into a search engine (such as Google), then your successfully optimized website will appear on page 1 of the search results. The most basic form of optimization is called on-page optimization and comes by carefully selecting the search terms you want to use, and then making sure that each web page of your site uses those search terms (at a rate no greater than 7 percent of the total text on the page). Once that is done, you should make sure that the underlying architecture (such as meta text and page titles) also uses your search terms; at that point, you can move on to off-page optimization, which is essentially convincing other websites to link to your own site. While this may seem nonsensical at first glance, the algorithms used by the major search engines take the number of sites linking to your webpage into account, and rank them based on their popularity. So if, for example, a popular website like that of the American Bar Association links to your own website, it will lift your website in your search ratings.

Legal directories. People searching for a lawyer on the web will almost inevitably wind up on a legal directory. They’re convenient ways of looking for local lawyers, and the good directories are already search engine optimized, meaning that if someone types in, “Good Lawyer Atlanta Georgia” into a search engine, a directory or two is likely to come up on the first page. Among these directories, one of the newest marketing trends is lawyer video directories, which offers the unique benefit of prospective clients getting to see and hear you during their searches. This helps them get a better sense of whom they’d like to represent them—and gives you a chance to impress with your professionalism, experience, and knowledge of the law.

While there is a great deal more to online marketing for lawyers, these three pieces are building blocks to establishing a successful web presence, increasing the flow of traffic to your website, and building a broader client base.

Tags: lawyer online marketing, web marketing for lawyers