Law Firm Marketing Agency
Attracting new clients to your legal website means outranking your competitors, regardless of how long they’ve been practicing.
If you have an established law practice, you probably have a client base that has provided you referrals through the years. By now, you may also have a presence on the web as a means of marketing your firm. So how does the new law firm up the road rank better than your practice on search engines, like Google, Bing and Duck-Duck Go?
Creating a successful digital marketing campaign is not easy for a practicing attorney; your main priority is serving your clients, not mastering marketing techniques in the digital world. Nonetheless, your website’s visibility to the search engines drives rankings, which can generate leads and hopefully conversions.
While experience and name recognition may give you an advantage over your competitors, the way to find prospective clients on the web is through a comprehensive digital marketing strategy, across multiple channels, devices and audiences. Attracting new clients to your legal website means outranking your competitors, regardless of how long they’ve been practicing.
Ultimately, the best way to implement a successful strategy is to partner with web design and digital marketing pros. In the meantime, let’s take a look at the factors that drive search engine rankings.
SEO, PPC, and SERPs: What’s It All About Anyway?
Going up against another law firm on the web is not like competing with the other side in a civil or criminal case. In fact, your main competition is not the newly minted lawyer, but rather the dark horse: search engine algorithms that govern Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
A SERP is where your site appears when a user enters a search query on Google. SERPs can contain multiple sections including:
- Local “Map Pack” results
- Organic search results
- Paid Google ads (PPC) results
- Featured snippets
- Image and video results
That’s a lot to take on when you’re busy meeting clients, drafting pleadings and making court appearances. Let our digital marketing team handle the details of developing a strategy that achieves your objectives. It starts by having a solid foundation.
The Key to Digital Marketing for Law Firms
The aim of digital marketing is to break through the traffic and noise on the internet by creating compelling messaging that captures the user’s attention. The way for your legal website to be noticed by potential clients is to:
- Have engaging practice area content
- Design appropriate fonts and colors
- Utilize motivational calls to action
- Choose appealing images that display your professionalism
Ultimately, attaining priority rankings on search engines and generating leads hinges on implementing a content marketing strategy that encompasses informative text, infographics and videos. Your website content must inform users about your practice areas, tell them how you can resolve their legal issues, and prompt them to reach out and become clients.
At the same time, your content must also be identifiable by the “ bots” that evaluate web pages. While search engine optimization (SEO) remains fundamental to content marketing, relying on outdated techniques no longer works. Today, Google’s natural language processing applications are designed to learn how users interact with search engines, particularly through personal assistant devices (e.g. Alexa).
How Do Search Engines Evaluate Web Pages?
When people search Google for an attorney, they type or say words related to their legal problem. As an example, someone looking for a personal injury lawyer may search “car accident attorney,” or “can I sue if I slipped on my neighbor’s cracked sidewalk?”
Those are referred to as keywords, which is key to SEO. Your website ranking is not merely a matter of keyword optimization, however, but also the quality of the information. When Google evaluates web pages, it considers factors such as:
- Purpose of the page
- Content quality and amount (more is better)
- Accessibility
- Page speed
- User interaction with the page (e.g. time on page, bounce rates)
These and various other factors are assessed by Google’s algorithm and help to determine rankings on the SERPS. Google shows users relevant results to what they’re searching for, ranks the most relevant first and the rest on successive pages.
Finally, your website design not only impacts user experience, but search engine rankings as well. In this regard, your website must be easy to navigate. Potential clients are not only more likely to engage your website longer if it’s easy to use, but search engines also capture information about how a site is structured and factor that into their rankings.
In short, how you rank that new attorney in terms of experience or skill and how search engines rank legal websites are totally unrelated. They don’t care how long you’ve been practicing, or even if you’re a good attorney for that matter. That’s where you come in.
Choosing a Digital Marketing Partner
Now that you know why that new attorney is ranking better than you on Google, it’s time to implement your comprehensive digital marketing strategy. At Zola Media, we design elegant websites and implement innovative marketing techniques for law firms that improve their rankings. When you partner with us, we will design a strategy that helps to increase your visibility on the web, generate leads and grow your practice. Trust Zola Media to develop a site that lays the groundwork for your strategy and positions you to outrank that new law firm on the search engines.