5 Brilliant Legal Marketing Tips

1. Create a separate web page for each practice area

Every client has a particular need and you need to show you understand and have experience in that area.  Having a single page mentioning a myriad of specialties doesn’t cut it and people won’t read it.

Creating a unique page for each practice area and sub-category, enables you to showcase your experience in that specific issue and shows the client you fully grasp their requirements.

In addition, creating all these extra pages is fantastic for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). High quality content is an extremely important factor in helping to get your website higher up in natural search ranking. Creating more pages of relevant information increases your chances of getting found in the various search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.

2. Invest time in SEO – Search Engine Optimization for Solicitors

Creating all this additional content is great but in order to maximize your reach in the search engines, you need to ensure your law firm website pages are optimized.

This means getting your content formatted in a way that helps search engines read your pages and rank them accordingly. Ensure your page titles and descriptions are optimized to include your key search phrases (such as solicitors, personal injury, employment law etc.) and don’t go over character limits. Ensure your page content is marked up with appropriate heading tags and your images have alternative text added.

If your website is developed in Wordpress you can easily do this yourself using the free Yoast SEO plugin. This will give you extra form options to complete within each page of content or blog post. It’s pretty straightforward.

In addition, you need to start building something called backlinks. These are simply links to your website from another website.  The search engines view backlinks as a measure of your website popularity.  However, not all backlinks are equal.

For example, a link to your website from the BBC website would be more highly valued than a link to your website from small online blog.  They are all of value but getting links to your site from what is known as authority websites, may help increase your rankings even more.

You can do all of this yourself but if it all sounds a bit technical and time consuming then you can always hire an SEO expert. Ask them to do both on-page SEO (formatting your content correctly) and off-page SEO (increase your backlinks).

3. Get social

Ensure you have all the main social media accounts registered for your legal practice including Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube, Linkedin and even Instagram.

Start building up your followers on these accounts by regularly posting relevant and interesting comments. Include links in your posts to pages on your website where people can read more.

Start following other people, firms and organizations. Often they will follow back. Reach out to people on social media with solutions to problems they post about.

Become a leader in commentating on the latest industry issues surrounding solicitors and share your thoughts via the various social media accounts.

Create free videos on legal topics and post them on YouTube for people to watch and share. Include links to your website in the video description so that people can contact you.

Network with other professionals, solicitors and potential clients via Linkedin. Create a company profile on the platform and post regular articles, join Linkedin groups and comment on posts.

You may think Instagram is pointless for legal marketing but you’d be wrong. Local solicitor firms can especially benefit from Instagram.  Posting local photos, local events and charity events that your company is involved in can help make you part of the local community and get your name noticed. Be sure to mention the local area in the title and #hashtags. Add your website link to your company Instagram profile.

4. Pay Per Click Advertising for solicitors

Relying completely on free, natural search clicks is ultimately not a good business model. Although SEO should be a major part of your overall strategy, the search engines often change their algorithms and way of displaying results that can sometime affect your rankings – both up and down.

Using a well managed Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing campaign will ensure your legal firm can always be found by people searching online.

The most popular PPC platform is Google Adwords. Creating an account is free and you can set up your ads and get them displayed within minutes. You only pay each time somebody clicks on your ad.  By setting a maximum cost per click (CPC) and a maximum daily budget, you can properly manage the amount spent.

5. Create regular content

Start building a regular audience and stream of visitors to your website by creating interesting content via a blog or video update.

Aim to create at least one blog post a week or more if you have time. Ensure that each post contains genuinely useful information and not just solicitor marketing material. Each post should ideally be around 600 words and a maximum of 1,000 words. This will signal to search engines that this article is worth indexing and made available to people searching.

Come up with blog post ideas from the latest legal ruling, industry news or just general advice that would be helpful for potential new clients.

Ensure you tweet out a link to your latest blog post with a title and short description. Post it on Facebook, Linkedin and Google+

In addition to blog posts, consider creating simple YouTube videos. The best and most watched videos are usually ones that explain how to do something or offer an explanation of how things work such as legal procedures or legal terms.

6 - BONUS TIP!

Add your firm to the UK Justice Directory

The UK Justice Directory only lists UK based law firms and legal services. You get a dedicated full page description of your services together with your contact information. Depending on the option selected, you can add multiple practice areas to so that you appear in various categories.

Perhaps most importantly, you can add your website link that can potentially give you extra SEO benefits. The link is a direct connection to your website for potential new clients.  Furthermore, you can add your important social media profiles to attract new followers.