Online Marketing is absolutely necessary for Lawyers and Law Practices who want to be found on the internet. The most important and inexpensive way drive visitors (and clients) to your website is to achieve high rank for your targeted keywords on main search engines. When you create a webpage, search engine “spiders” index the page content you’ve provided, so it’s best to leave them “clues” as to what your website is about. They can read the clues and then accurately deliver this information to searchers. This is known as “Search Engine Optimization”, or SEO.
Why Search Engine Optimization? It’s vital to the success of your business—all entrepreneurial attorneys looking to expand their clientele base should establish themselves as valuable resource and web presence for potential customers. In this day and age, the success of your law firm does depend on the way you market yourself and your firm on the internet. In this blog post and the following, we’ll discuss tips and tricks to get your website—and your law firm—found on the internet.
The competition for recognition on the Internet is fierce, especially for law firms. It doesn’t matter if you have the best looking website around because a lot of web success is based upon SEO practices. The truth is that if you’re not ranking on the first or second page of Google, you’re essentially invisible to your clients. Getting placed well in Google isn’t a matter of luck nor does it reflect how much money you are spending on your internet marketing efforts.
Too many law practices are stuck in the same old ways of doing things. The following series of blog posts discuss how lawyers can use internet marketing strategies and search engine optimization to establish a web presence, work with Google to rank their website well, drive web traffic, and educate and provide resources for their audience as well as attract clientele.
To kick things off, here’s a checklist for lawyer websites:
Lawyer SEO: How SEO friendly is Your Website? Checklist for Making Your Website Popular With Search Engines
Online marketing is essential for any lawyer who wants to grow their practice and attract clients. The best way to attract potential clients to your website is to go beyond the typical legal website. Of the following, which of these are you applying to your Law Firm’s website?
- If your law practice has earned any certifications, or supports any causes, are they on the home page/displayed prominently on your website?
- Does your website attract clients? How many leads are you getting and how are customers finding you? Are you tracking and measuring your marketing efforts?
- Does your website serve as an informational resource? Does it provide answers that site visitors are searching for?
- Are you effectively using Social Media (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) to promote your website and attract new visitors?
- Does your website have a “Call to Action”, or prompt customers to pick up the phone or send you an email?
- Do you have the ability to update and edit your website content instantly, without assistance from a webmaster?
- Do you have the ability to create a video and then upload it to your website?
- Does your website have a blog? Do you frequently create and post SEO friendly blog posts to attract new clients and visitors?
- Does your website feature interactive media, videos, testimonials, and other downloadable information?
- Do you have the ability to publish, archive, and store documents on your website?
- Does your law practice issue a monthly e-newsletter? Are you archiving copies to your website?
- Have you optimized your website with relevant keywords and web page content, titles, headers, and meta descriptions?
- Have you submitted your website to lawyer directories?
- Have you locally optimized your website? This includes targeting your law firm to nearby locations to capture new clients there and submitting it to search engines’ local directories.
- Do you offer clients packages, ebooks, CD’s, multimedia, customer guides or other useful information?
- To supplement your organic SEO and internet marketing efforts, have you considered paid advertising on Google?
We will flesh out these questions and present 10 strategies to make lawyer websites SEO friendly and attractive to new clientele.