Hours and hours of work are put in by professionals everywhere. Aside from seeing to your clients’ needs, you also try to be updated with current legal issues and even bring home some work with you. That’s why it is a no-brainer to make the most out of the results of all that hard work. Given the option of a job you can accomplish in 20 hours and another that can be finished in 40 years, subject to the same rate of pay, you’d choose the one with the shorter period.
Search engines have proven to be quite a goldmine of new clients for law firms in recent years, making law firm search engine optimization a top favorite marketing strategy among legal practitioners. In the use of law firm SEO as a marketing strategy, the key is to derive as much benefit as you can from as little amount of money and time you can afford to dispense. Let me show you how:
Work closely with your SEO Consultant. If you hired a third party to do the SEO marketing on your behalf, close coordination is necessary. It is one way of ensuring that you get the best services from them since your close involvement means you’d want to be informed every step of the way. In addition, however, the greater benefit is that you can let them know what is working and what is not, so that they can refine their efforts. Just because they manage to increase your traffic doesn’t instantly mean they’re doing a very good job because many of those potential clients may be the wrong types, or they might not become actual clients.
Blog on your main interests or thrusts. If you keep up a blog for attorney marketing purposes (not necessary but certainly not harmful), then make sure to always blog about the latest things you’ve read or learned with respect to your practice. Aside from being a good self-learning tool, they are also effective in giving the impression to potential clients about the breadth and width of your knowledge and expertise, as well as your experience. Focusing on keyword-heavy articles would only result in blog posts that are only moderately interesting, random and confusing, throwing off your potential clients.
Single out your law firm SEO. You’ll hear this tip from a lot of good SEO consultants and writers, and there is a good reason. Being specific is great advice in any form of marketing, since it’s better to intensely appeal to 100 people than it is to mildly appeal to 100,000. This is doubly true when it comes to search engine optimization, since searches themselves are very specific. People who are specifically looking for lawyers to advise them on matters regarding child custody would be more inclined to choose those who present themselves as child custody lawyers instead of the broader ‘family lawyers’ tag.
Treat SEO as you would any other marketing tool; that is the best advice I’ve ever been given as a lawyer. Treat it as something that will make you more visible to the kind of potential clients that you’re looking to attract and will give you the opportunity to present them with some sort of relevant sales pitch. Posts should be actually useful and interesting to potential clients and the search engines should be utilized properly. It will always come back to bite you.
Marketing, specifically the use of SEO, may be a necessary evil for lawyers and law firms, but if done right, it could actually turn into something that would work to your advantage and something you’d look forward to doing more of.Take advantage, and hopefully both your bottom line and your happiness will benefit.