Marketing Tips For Your Law Firm: SEO Services

Most industries today are riding the digital marketing wave brought on by the advent of the internet, but a few have been slow to keep up with the “phone book” of the 21st century. Generally speaking, the legal profession is one of these.

In this series of articles, we’ll discuss how your law firm marketing strategy can benefit from obtaining SEO services, participating in pay-per-click advertising, improving local search rankings, implementing a content marketing plan, and how lawyers can, in fact, grow their law firms with these marketing strategies.

First, we’ll start with SEO services.

How Can SEO Services Help My Law Firm Grow?

SEO or search engine optimization is the process of getting a higher quantity and better quality website visits from search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Bing.

An SEO service provider is akin to the phone book advertiser who calls you every year to renew your directory listing – except the benefits of SEO are more profound.

Here are three ways SEO services can help your law firm grow.

Attract new and better clients.

Though the American Bar Association still recommends people ask a trusted relative or friend for a legal referral, a survey conducted by FindLaw.com and Thomson Reuters in 2015 reports that using the internet is, in fact, the most popular method used to find a lawyer.

Being present online not only allows you access to more potential clients, or prospects, interested in your legal services, but, with SEO, mere website visitors can also convert into a better quality client.

Why? Because the visitors who find you via a search engine were matched to your law firm using sophisticated search engine algorithms. These algorithms take the search terms your potential client is using to look for a law firm just like yours and match it to the content published on your website. And this is where SEO comes in.

Using professional SEO services can help your firm be matched more frequently and accurately with the clients your firm wants to help.

Build your law firm’s credibility through client education.

Not only can you attract more and better prospects, SEO gives you a platform to educate potential clients about a variety of legal topics that are not only important to them, but also identify your firm as a knowledgeable resource on that given topic.

This is important because the internet is where trust is built and broken today. Research shows that four out of five online consumers will change their mind about doing business with an organization if they find unfavorable information about it online.

Writing helpful white papers or discussing case studies on your website, for example, and making them accessible to potential website visitors using SEO, will demonstrate your legal expertise and offset any negative mentions of your firm online.

An SEO services provider can help your firm develop a marketing strategy that highlights your organization’s knowledge, setting it apart from other lawyers or firms in your specialty or area.

Get benefits that last – unlike the phone book.

Additionally, SEO services can provide long-lasting results. Networking only drives referrals if you keep in touch, and your firm’s directory listings are usually annual. But SEO is evergreen – and often growing.

As long as a page is live on the Internet, SEO can help you reach customers whenever and however they are searching for your legal services.

On-page SEO, or a web page optimized for a specific search term, is an excellent example of this. Optimizing a page for “criminal lawyer near me” will continue to draw in visitors looking for criminal lawyers near them over time as long as that page is live on the internet and well maintained.

SEO services can help your law firm achieve a presence online that continues to draw more clients, better clients, and clients who recognize you as an authority in your field long-term.

Next Steps

The first step is to hire an SEO service provider and start optimizing your law firm’s web pages for search. The next step is to determine whether or not part of your law firm marketing strategy includes creating new content to help prospects find you. (We’ll address this later in the series.)

Law firm marketing is not for the faint of heart. If you don’t have time to do your own SEO or to keep up with the ever-developing rules of SEO, Above the Fold Media provides SEO services. Learn more about what we can offer your law firm now.