Paid ads on Google, Youtube and social media are all effective, fast ways to promote your law firm online. There are also some great long term strategies, like SEO, that if done right, can save your law firm tonnes of money on marketing, while attracting loads of relevant enquiries.
The best ways to promote your law firm online...
Channel | What is it? | Results* |
|---|---|---|
Google Search Ads | Serve ads to targeted audiences when they search in Google. | 1-2 Weeks |
Google Display Ads | Serve ads to targeted audiences on relevant websites or apps. | 3-4 Weeks |
Youtube Ads | Serve video or text ads to targets audiences on youtube. | 3-4 Weeks |
SEO | Free traffic from search engines. A sustainable long term strategy. | 3-6 Months |
Social Media Ads | Targeted ads to people on Facebook, Instagram and Linkedin | 1-2 weeks |
Content Marketing | An important part of SEO and Social Media strategy | 4-6 Months |
*Results = average time it takes to start seeing a return on investment (the time and money invested) based on law firm clients we have worked with over the past 18 months.
What makes a law firm promotion strategy online?
Online marketing can be a big part of your overall marketing strategy and many clients of ours focus almost their entire marketing efforts online (as opposed to traditional, offline marketing).
The big reason for this is that online marketing is a cost-effective, scalable way to find and connect with potential clients for your law firm.
The reason you want to promote your law firm is to get more paying clients at a lower cost.
As with all marketing, when trying to promote your law firm online, there's a danger of investing time and money in the wrong thing.
So stop chasing Facebook likes that are never going to turn into paying clients and ask yourself the questions that are going to drive your law firm's promotion strategy:
Experience and expertise
A big part of promoting your law firm online is the expertise that you can bring to the table.
You have knowledge of how to help your clients overcome legal issues. You know how the legal system works and can prove it to potential clients.
What you may not have is the time and expertise to find and engage new clients.
Do you understand all the moving parts of an SEO for solicitors strategy? From keyword strategy to content creation and technical SEO.
Can you get the best from a Google ads or social media ads campaign?
Can you use data and proven sales techniques to make sure visits to your website turn into relevant enquiries?
Do you have a team who can help create, implement and succeed with your online promotion strategy?
If you've answered no to most of the above, then it's time to get some expert help. Contact us here.
Media budget
This is how much you're prepared to invest in ads. There's no fixed amount, so you can start of small and invest more as you start to see results.
A media budget can help you to connect with your ideal customers through precise targeting on channels like Google, social media channels, like Facebook and LinkedIn and video platforms like YouTube.
The beauty of this is that you're in full control of how much you spend and you can make adjustments anytime you need to. There's no upfront commitment other than the time and expertise of the ads manager.
The downside is of course that you'll need to pay either every time somebody clicks on one of your ads or everytime 1000 people see one of your ads (CPM).
So there are a few important factors:
How to start promoting your law firm
If you don't have website analytics on your website, you really should.
You can see how many visits you get, where they come from and what they do when they are on your website.
Google Analytics is free and tells you how many website visitors you're getting each month and each day.
You can set up goals to tell you how many people are enquiring via website forms and where they came from.
You can also take a look through the most popular pages on your website to see what content visitors are engaging with most.
Your content goldmine
You might not realise that they're sitting on a potential goldmine of website content.
Any law firm that has historically written news or blog articles may just find a lot of those are ranking in the top 30 positions in Google already.
You may also find that some of your service pages for your local region are also ranking well.
How can you find these opportunities?
There's a great free tool called Google search console. You'll need a Google account to sign up.
Wait a few days and you should start to see some data as to how your site is performing. And more importantly, which search terms your site is already ranking for.
By optimising existing website content to make it more relevant the search terms you already rank for in Google, you could further increase your ranking and further increase the amount of free traffic you get.
This data also comes in handy when planning which search terms to bid on using Google ads.
Spy on competitors
If your website is relatively new and has no real history then fear not... it's time to take a look at some competitors.
First thing to do is head over to Google and enter a search term that's relevant to your business, for example, it could be "business solicitors".
Can you do better than the results that appear in the top spots?
You can also use paid tools like semrush to see you what search terms your competitors are ranking for and how difficult it would be for you to do the same.
Both spying on your competitors and reviewing your existing website performance should give you some good ideas as to how to improve your own content or which new content you need to create.
Add your law firm website to relevant business directories
There are loads of free (and some paid) website directories that are great for law firms.
Some are specific to the legal industry such as venables.co.uk. Others are directories for businesses and local areas such as yell.com or 192.com
Adding your law firm’s details to these directories can not only help increase your online visibility, but it can also help increase website visits and enquiries.
In some cases the directories will also allow you to list your website with what is called a “dofollow” link. This can contribute to your SEO strategy by telling Google that a quality website is linking to yours.
Ask partners for links
While we are on the subject of getting links from other websites, a great way to increase visibility and traffic is to ask partners that you work with to link to your website from theirs.
This could be in the form of a guest blog, where you provide them with some useful content on an expert area of yours. Or it could simply be a link from one of their pages that directs people to your website, for example “find out more about conveyancing”.
Run some ads
With Google ads you can often get some free credit when you start try here.
To get started quickly you'll just need to set up a campaign with ad groups that target a few closely related keywords and ads that are relevant to both the keywords and a destination that you're sending people to ( your website).
For the budget we do recommend a couple of hundred quid as a starting point.
Most importantly of all you can measure how many enquiries you have received as a result in Google ads activity both by a phone call and and website enquiry directly from the ad itself. Look at your full flexibility to see what your cost per enquiry is.
Existing customer reviews via email
Online reviews help other potential clients make a decision.
Work into your customer service workflow a simple email at the end of a case where you ask them for feedback on your Google local business page or you might use platforms like trustpilot or feefo.
You can start building up some great case studies and help other people to make a decision.
Content creation and SEO
Website content for landing pages and blogs, as well as visuals for videos and ads are important parts of marketing for law firms.
Creating valuable content that prompts action is an important skill.
How many websites do you see that start "At [insert law firm name]... we believe [insert generic beliefs]"?
How valuable is that to visitors, given that they are likely to have visited 3 or 4 of your local competitors’ websites as well?
Content plays a big part in the SEO strategy.
This is the channel that we see most long-term success among law firm clients that we work with.
If you have an effective SEO strategy then you'll keep free traffic coming to your website from search engines month after month and this can grow incrementally.
Find out how we increased monthly search traffic by over 900% in our law firm SEO case study.
SEO boils down to three things:
- Technical SEO to make sure that Google crawl your site efficiently.
- Carefully created content that answers your client's needs and provides value.
- Links from other websites and internal links from pages on your own website.
Website experience
Another big SEO factor is the speed of your website. Big images, loads of CSS and moving things can really slow it down. So while you think it looks nice, Google might not.
There are two things that should make you take note of site speed:
- You'll be able to give visitors what they want faster and prevent them from going to competing websites.
- Google has identified website speed as a really important SEO factor as they strive to make the internet a better place. If you have a faster website than competitors on both mobile and desktop, there's a good chance you might find yourself creeping up the search rankings and getting more visibility and traffic in the coming months.
Content structure is also vital for both SEO and the user experience. You should make it really easy for visitors to find information understand how you can help them as well as why and how they should make an enquiry with you.
It's amazing home many law firms are still designing websites for desktop first. I'm willing to be (at least 20p) that the majority of your website visits come from Mobile devices.
Google ads and social media advertising are great places to advertise your law firm online.
With Google ads you can match a user’s search intent with one of your text adverts. They can then contact you directly from the ad or you can take them to a landing page where you can tell them why they should choose you and get them to make an enquiry.
Facebook ads are a great way of building awareness in your local market and can act like a traditional TV or radio ad by not only increasing your reach but also engagement with potential clients.
Law firms can use their personality and expertise to differentiate from bigger competitors.
With a small budget and a tiny bit of patience you can create a really effective SEO strategy that keeps free website visitors coming month after month.