Marketing personal injury law firm services requires skill and expertise because it is one of the most competitive legal services. This means the costs can quickly creep up and with the wrong strategy you can waste money on the wrong thing.
In fact, according to Google ads keyword planner, to bid on the term “injury solicitor” and get your ad to appear near the top of the page could cost you as much as £59 per click.
So we're looking at almost £600 to get 5 people to engage with one of our ads.
We’d better make sure that one of those 5 people turns into a paying client!
The reverse is also true. If one of those 5 people does become a paying client then you may make back 10 times your original investment.
But where should you start?
How personal injury law firms work
Personal injury claims can take months, if not years to settle.
That means that when you take a case on and start working on it, it may be a few years before you get paid for it.
Before then you may have to pay for medical experts, witness reports and various other things that will aid your clients case.
So paying an additional cost in order to get enquiries about personal injury, before they even turned into paying clients may seem like a bridge too far.
But if you can create a cost-effective marketing strategy that generates regular enquiries And you're happy to employ a tiny bit of patience, then you might just find some answers to your personal injury law prayers.
This graph shows the growth in online enquiries for one of our clients. From one in May 2020 to 182 per month in September 2021.
Competition
Competition is an important consideration when it comes to personal injury law.
The question “have you been injured in an accident that wasn't your fault?” seems forever ingrained in our consciousness after being bombarded with advert after advert on the topic by large national law firms for a number of years.
The larger firms have deep pockets and the reason that platforms like Google ads are so expensive is because people are prepared to pay that amount to get one visitor to the website or one interaction with one of the ads. Knowing that if they do it often enough, they'll recoup the money from paying clients.
Go to google and search something like “injury lawyer” or “accident lawyer” and see who occupies the top slots.
Then you consider the number of people searching for accident and injury legal advice in search engines like Google.
Above is just a selection of some of the most popular keywords for personal injury in Google.
If you add up all the potential people using Google alone to search for injury and accident legal services, there are tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people every month.
That’s good news, because it means that the market is there.
Your marketing team’s job is to make sure you reach the right people at the right time and then engage and persuade them to become your client.
Costs
For many personal injury lawyers cost can be particularly sensitive as they often have to pay upfront for the things like expert medical advice to support a claim.
It could be a long time before the case is settled and you receive a fee hence you have to be prepared to play the long game when it comes to your marketing investment for personal injury.
However if you're in a position to take a gamble or even better a calculated decision, based on the number of enquiries you were likely to get vs number of those enquiries that are going to become paying clients vs. the potential you will get from any personal injury settlements, then investing in your marketing for accident and injury is a good idea indeed.
Return on investment
It's a great idea to try and calculate what the potential return on your marketing investment might be for your spend on marketing personal injury services.
Because the level of compensation involved in accident and injury cases can be wildly different, a good starting point might be to calculate the average revenue you get per case.
You can work backwards and determine how much you're prepared to invest to win one case by understanding how many enquiries you need to get one paying client.
For example for every 10 enquiries you get, how many of those turn into paying, clients?
This should give you a great steer in terms of how much money you can invest in your marketing over six months a year and even 2 years.
Strategy
Once we've established how much you can afford to invest in marketing, we can take a look at a strategy to drive more enquiries.
How do we find, engage and persuade people who are looking for legal advice for accidents and injuries?
And what channels should be used as well as resources do we need?
We could guess or we could ask the experts.
Here are 12 things that have worked for our personal injury law clients.
Offer and value proposition
Bear in mind that if people have visited your website or interacted with you, then there's a good chance they will have visited two or three of your competitors (at least).
What is it that sets you apart and what are the things that are likely to make somebody make an enquiry with you as opposed to a competitor?
If in doubt try some of these:
- you’ll only take a case on when you think there’s a good chance of winning
- your success rate
- accreditations and awards
- a free consultation
- a review of your case
- fast responses to your legal issues
- low fees or a lower percentage of any awards clients receive vs competitors
- customer service
- number of years of experience
- practical examples of working on similar cases successfully
Mobile website optimisation
Pro: most of the visitors to your website are using mobile phones to do so. For our law firm clients, an average of over 60% of all traffic comes from mobile devices. Providing a better mobile experience = more enquiries.
Con: You’ll need a flexible CMS (content management system) so you can easily make adjustments based on Google’s recommendations. (We recommend WordPress).
In the above example we recognise what people are looking for with regards to a mobile experience for personal injury accident advice.
- clear, click to call us button at the top
- speak directly to a solicitor (great value proposition)
- free 30 minute consultation
- fast feedback on whether you have a claim
- below that we have a request a call back form
This experience is all about the user. We are making it very easy for them to get in touch and the conversation starts from there.
Having a website that works on mobile is no longer optional.
Google has recently moved to mobile first indexing, which means that if your mobile website is slow or difficult to use, then you're likely to suffer search engine visibility and rankings.
You need to think about how the website works on mobile, how people interact with your content and how you can encourage them to make an enquiry. Try the following:
- optimised forms
- quick click-to-call options
- get a quote functionality e.g. I've been injured in a car accident and want to claim for whiplash
- make the benefit to the user clear
Long form content and question answering
Pro - a great way of generating organic (free) website traffic for months years to come.
Con - content needs to be well written, researched and better than search engine competitors. It can also take a few months before your content ranks highly in Google and starts generating traffic.
Example - "How long does a personal injury claim take to go to court?"
By researching the blog title above, we were able to rank it in first place in Google, resulting in an extra 800+ visitors to the website per month from one blog alone.
The website converts over 4% of visitors into enquiries. So that’s at least 32 relevant enquiries from 1 piece of long form content (published over a year ago and still going strong).
Creating long form content for your website that answers common questions around accident and injury is a great way of getting organic (free) traffic from search engines to your website.
This is a great strategy because it continues to drive traffic to your website for months after your content has been published and reduces the amount that you might have to spend on advertising to get traffic to your website.
The more quality, relevant content you publish, the more quality website traffic you get from Google.
Bear in mind though that your content needs to
- answer a question that is commonly asked in Google
- be well researched from a competitive point of view I can you make it better than other search engine results
- the ideal length vs competitors
- well-structured - how have you structured each section to add value?
- well linked to from other website
Find out more about SEO copywriting for solicitors.
Repurpose your content
Once you have created long form content, there are various ways that you can repurpose it, saving you loads of time and allowing you to post it in different formats.
For example a long form blog post titled “How to make a whiplash claim”, can not only sit on your website, but can then be reformatted into:
- a video where you talk through each step (you could talk to camera or create a presentation using powerpoint)
- a single image where you highlight a key point from the blog (for Instagram, Facebook, Linkedin)
- a sliding image that highlights a number of points in a succinct way (for Instagram, Facebook, Linkedin)
Technical SEO
There’s no point in creating a great website experience and wonderful content if Google and other search engines are unable to crawl your website effectively.
Chrome slow loading pages to inefficient coding and site structure, it's important to do an audit of your site for technical SEO issues and correct them.
Free tools for this provided by Google including the Google Search console and Google mobile speed test tool.
Link Building
The technical SEO issues on your website and have created some great personal injury content, you can start trying to build quality links from other authoritative websites.
Links act like votes of confidence from other websites and the more quality relevant links you have the more likely your website will rank for certain search terms in Google.
Structured data
This is a great way of telling Google what your content is about. Google can then include this data in search engine results pages.
Including data on your pages means that your search engine results will take up more room bumping competitors further down and giving searchers more options to click and engage with your content.
The image above shows an example of structured FAQ data. By showing Google that we have additional questions that have been answered on our web page, we can provide searchers with more answers, more reasons to click and more credibility.
Google Ads
Remember we said it could cost upwards of £60 for one click in Google ads because of the competition for terms such as “personal injury solicitors”.
It doesn't mean there aren't opportunities.
If you can find slightly less competitive search terms that are relevant to accident and injury law but still have a high Intent of using your services, then you can still see real results from Google ads (and to a lesser extent - Bing ads).
Top tip: By using regional words in your search terms you can get more visibility, more clicks and more potential traffic to your website.
For example instead of it being “personal injury solicitors” it could be “personal injury solicitors in Manchester” or even a suburb of Manchester to narrow it down further.
If your keyword is slightly less competitive you can then make sure that:
- your ad is relevant to the search term you are bidding on
- your landing page is relevant to the ad
These are both things that can help bring the average cost per click down.
Retargeting
Pros: A cost effective way of re-engaging people who previously interacted with you online. A great way of generating enquiries from those who previously didn’t take action.
Cons: You need to generate traffic and interactions in order to have an audience to remarket to.
Example: Someone visits content about “how do you make an injury claim?”
In the case of the above ad, we created a retargeting campaign for anyone who visited content about accident and injury law and then ensured they saw the ad when visiting other websites.
It could also reinforce one of your brand messages and emphasise the fact that you are there when people need you.
Every time a visitor visits a certain part of your website, you can capture information from them and put them into a specific “remarketing list”.
This means that you can apply your remarketing list to a channel like Google or a social channel like Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn. You can then “retarget” previous visits to your websites with a message that encourages them to come back and choose you.
This is a great chance to remove any objections that they may have to making an enquiry.
For example, your ad might appear on a website next time they're looking at the news and it may ask a simple question like “have you booked your 20-minute free consultation yet?”
The ad reinforces the brand message and reminds them that we can help.
You can also remarket using Youtube to remove barriers to enquiry:
The point about retargeting is that it can be far more cost-effective than other ad campaigns.
For example rather than paying £60 for one click in the Google Search network you have an already created specific audience the very few of the people are competing with hence it can be much more cost-effective.
Google My Business
Another way of generating local traffic from people in your area who are looking for accident and injury legal services.
By optimising your Google my business page for these services, you can increase your visibility, get more clicks and allow people to contact you directly from a Google my business page.
Reviews
Another great benefit of having a Google my business pages that you can ask clients for reviews. You can send them out the link to your page at the point that you know they're going to be happiest and encourage them to leave public feedback.
Who doesn’t click on the option with more 5 stars?
Tracking
When marketing your personal injury law firm costs can quickly run away with you if you don't have a strategy in place. Is therefore very important to measure everything from the start.
News free tracking such as google Analytics and make sure it is connected to any ad platforms that you choose to use such as Google ads.
From there you can track how many interactions you're getting how much traffic and how much engagement. Most importantly you can see which channels are working and which aren't and make changes from there.