“Can we help you?”
It’s the familiar calling card of a fancy law firm website. Spend a little time browsing the leading legal websites in your region, and you’ll find plenty of pop-up invitations to chat with a lawyer (or a law firm representative, as is more likely the case) in real time. Continue reading “Google to Penalize Websites Using Invasive Pop-Up Features”
It’s all fine and dandy to have a PPC ad or other online advertising tactic that’s driving people to your law firm’s landing page. But what if that page isn’t converting at the same rate you are driving people there?
Let’s review the reason a landing page exists anyway: to convert visitors coming from marketing campaigns as quickly as possible. Remember, this is not your law firm’s website, this is an entirely different beast. Continue reading “3 Reasons Your Landing Pages Aren’t Converting”
Yes, the way people are choosing to view television is very different these days. However, statistics continue to demonstrate that TV still works very well for the legal industry, which thrives on reaching a broad segment of the population. Continue reading “An overview of TV advertising for lawyers”
Lawyers in smaller markets get stuck in rigid thinking that can be detrimental to the future of their practices.
The biggest issue we see? Thinking “small” just because of the size of your market and community.
There are big benefits of being in a highly localized community. There are so many affordable strategies and tactics law firms in smaller markets can use. There’s a great opportunity because you can dominate for a reasonable cost.
More assumptions that inhibit winning new business include ideas such as:
If you can relate to these statements – keep reading! Smaller law firms can and should compete like law practices in large urban centers. Continue reading “Common Legal Marketing Mistakes Series: Small Law Firms”
There are lots of questions that pop up when lawyers hear the phrase organic digital marketing. For example:
These are some the very questions that we address daily as we help our legal clients find the right mix and balance of search engine marketing tactics.
There are two ways—paid and organic—to get your law firm’s website to appear in the first page of the search results, regardless of which search engine you use. Paid and organic marketing have the same goal: getting potential clients to your site. But the strategy behind them couldn’t be more different.
Paid search is exactly what it sounds like. You, or your law firm’s marketing agency, create ads for keywords with high search volume or high conversion rates, paying only for each click or impression the ad earns. Of course, your law firm’s pay per click campaigns may be more complicated than that. If you have that do-it-yourself attitude, you can check out this guide to SEM & Paid Search Marketing from Search Engine Land.
Organic search (SEO) is a different process entirely. You’re not bidding on clicks and impressions, which can save a lot of money in the marketing budget. But organic isn’t 100 percent free either. You don’t pay for clicks or impressions, but you do have to invest in meaningful, well-produced content, site design and functionality, and site promotion.
You are paying for results one way or the other.
You can ask six different SEO experts how to do their job and you’ll get six different answers. That said, there are clear strategies every law firm should employ in order to have a successful organic campaign. Assuming your marketing agency or in-house SEO specialist isn’t using black-hat tactics, these include:
You need content on your properties that resonates well with your potential clients. Content can be anything from a 500-word blog post to a well-crafted infographic or video.
Each piece of content should have a specific purpose—the key to content marketing for lawyers. That’s how you know if it works or it doesn’t. For example, a service page on your site may convert well but perform poorly on your social media pages. Whereas a video, infographic or a piece of interactive content might earn a ton of social shares or backlinks, but convert poorly. Having both scenarios is ideal. There’s one piece of content that directly affects your law firm’s bottom line and another that improves brand awareness.
Creating content at such a high level requires a lot of research, trial and error, and a bit of luck, to be honest. It’s also unique to each market. What works well for a Boston firm may not earn the same results in Tampa or Seattle.
Likewise, “If you build it, they will come” worked great in A Field of Dreams, but it won’t work for your content. You need a promotional component to get your content in front of the right people.
These time-consuming tactics range from sharing it multiple times on your social channels to sending personalized messages to individuals and webmasters. You could add a paid Facebook campaign as well. It’s a high-risk tactic, but if successful, the results are well worth the investment.
In 2015, Google announced that mobile search volume outpaced desktop for the first time. So what does that mean for your website and digital marketing for law firms in general?
It means you ignore mobile devices at your own risk. Google tweaked their ranking algorithm to ding sites that aren’t friendly to mobile users. That first update in 2015 was called “Mobilegeddon,” promising to do just that. Thankfully, there wasn’t a lot of fall out because agencies and webmasters made the necessary changes to websites to avoid the penalty.
It doesn’t matter if your website has a responsive design (adjusts to a user’s screen size) or a standalone mobile site, as long as it’s user friendly. If you don’t know if your site is mobile friendly, you could ask your marketing agency or use Google’s Mobile Friendly Testing tool.
But you’re not done yet. You need to pay local SEO some attention.
The first organic result isn’t what it used to be. The first organic listing used to get the majority of clicks. These days, depending on the search result, that No. 1 position may actually be the eighth link on the page—behind four paid ads and three local listings.
It’s one reason why folks in the SEO marketing industry have moved away from just reporting on keyword rankings to validate their work. Just remember, rankings are still important, but they aren’t the indicators of success that they used to be.
So how do you overcome this change to the results? There are two ways. First, you could start a PPC campaign. But depending on your market and the legal keyword you’re targeting, that can get expensive in a hurry.
The second option is getting your business in that local pack. Like creating content, that’s easier said than done, but there are a few things you can do to improve your chance of getting in.
You’ll want to create or claim a Google My Business profile. (Tip: Always claim a listing if it already exists.) After claiming the profile, you or your representative should confirm the information is correct and add in anything that’s missing. Repeat that process on Bing, Yelp and other local listing platforms.
All law firm marketing strategies should answer one question first: Are your attorneys or law office giving prospective clients (users) what they want?
From the content on your website to the videos and photos you share on Facebook or Twitter, these are all tools to reach an audience. If you don’t know who your audience is and what they want, then you’re essentially just throwing things against the wall and hoping they stick.
Identify your audience, give them what they want, and share your content where your audience is. Go to them first, then they’ll start coming to you.
We can get into the weeds about content, backlinks, mobile-friendly designs and so on. But if you’re ignoring the user, then why are you wasting time and money advertising at all?
Measuring success for organic strategies requires teamwork between your law firm and advertising agency. At Network Affiliates, we can tell you how many users filled out a form or clicked on a digital ad to call your office, but that’s where our data ends. And unless you’re using a track-line phone number, we have no way of knowing whether those leads turned into clients.
That’s why intake is such important component of marketing plans for lawyers. If your intake specialist is capturing the right information from online leads, then we can compare the information we gather with theirs. It gives us a better idea of how well (or poorly) your site is performing.
Google Analytics is the most important tool to have installed on your website. While it’s far from perfect, it’s one of the better ways to see how people are engaging with your website. You can track how many leads your site generated, where those people came from and how many pages they visited before converting to a lead. Analytics lets you monitor traffic sources from organic and social channels, time on site or page, and a myriad of other metrics.
It is far from perfect. Spam traffic can inflate bounce rates and page visits and improperly set goals can skew your conversion data. Those issues can be fixed with the right configuration or a little bit of foresight.
For social channels, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+ have their own reporting dashboards. Those dashboards give you the social information that Google Analytics can’t. You can really dive down to see what resonated with your audience for that respective platform.
That level of reporting and teamwork takes all the guesswork out of calculating your ROI, cost per lead and cost per case. Time consuming? Yes. Worth it? Absolutely.
Let Network Affiliates eliminate the guesswork from your law firm’s digital marketing efforts. Give our organic search pros all call today – (888) 461-1016
Not unlike the law firm marketing challenges seen in small and medium sized markets, firms in large metro areas also face their own set of obstacles when trying to effectively advertise their legal services:
Continue reading “Common Legal Marketing Mistakes Series: Large Markets”
Continue reading “5 ways to ensure your Facebook ads won’t fail”
Print advertising used to be almighty—a powerful strategy to capture eyeballs and spread your legal marketing message far and wide. In fact, print was once among the most effective forms of advertising for lawyers. Continue reading “How to Market a Law Firm Series: Print Advertising”
Law firms of different sizes face different marketing challenges along their paths to success. Continue reading “Common Legal Marketing Mistakes In Medium Sized Markets”
Lawyers, if you didn’t get the memo: The internet is the new Yellow Pages. Law firm marketing is officially a digital play.
Rather than tracking phone calls from clients thumbing through the phone book, today it’s all about tracking leads and conversions through the internet.
Call tracking used to be simple: Put a tracking number on your TV ad, a tracking number in your Yellow Pages ad, and monitor inbound-call numbers.
When a person used the phone book they would scan for the heading of attorneys; look at the largest ads; find the ones that mentioned the service they needed; and call three to five ads to “interview” lawyers. In the past, law firms used a simple internal system to track the phone calls that converted to cases, and thus prove the profitability of marketing efforts.
Your website is a conversion tool. You must display all of your law firm’s information in a format that is easy to read and navigate.
On the internet, people type what they’re looking for into a search box. They are shown websites that best pertain to their search or “answer” their problem. Users will then scan presented websites, and, based on what they see, may or may not call you. Like before, people make up to five calls to interview law firms and make a decision about who to go with.
Today, the internet is an undoubtedly more powerful channel than the phone book, but it’s also more complicated. There are so many more digital channels to keep track—and take advantage—of.
Digital marketing strategies for lawyers require more precision and demand that law firms know the answers to all kinds of questions, including:
To answer these questions, lawyers should be using something known as dynamic phone number insertion (DNI). DNI is a tech tool that measures the impact of digital efforts on inbound phone calls.
If you’re not using a company that has this tracking capability, you should start looking for one that does. As smart lawyers build marketing plans for the future and learn how to systematically advertise their law firm online, DNI is an absolute must for tracking the success of digital marketing campaigns and legitimate return on investment.
When a consumer clicks though to your website from an organic listing, DNI technology generates and displays a number unique to that specific user. Essentially, each user will see a different number appear on your website. When they call that exclusive number (all linked to your office system), we are able to monitor the inbound calls, knowing that each came from your organic SEO efforts.
Much the same way it does with SEO. When users land on your website by clicking on your paid Google ad, each person will see a different phone number based on the keyword search they initiated. This gives you remarkable control over targeting keywords more efficiently and managing your PPC budget. You can strategically shift money toward keywords that are producing strong phone calls and away from keywords that are ending in clicks alone. That’s dynamic!
Yes, most Google ads are tied to a distinct number. Do a search for “injury lawyers”. You will notice the top ads (denoted by the yellow “Ad” icon) have a tracking number different from other numbers listed on the attorney’s website. If a user doesn’t click the ad but calls the number listed, this is a “free” inbound call, which provides valuable ROI. Our current numbers show attorneys are getting approximately half of their phone calls from Google ads.
With today’s available technology, it’s hard to deny that lawyers should be spending money on targeted search engine marketing.
Ready to see how profitable your online marketing can be? The experts at Network Affiliates use DNI to enhance our clients’ digital marketing strategies and produce results people can measure. We’ve got all kinds of marketing tips for law firms. Contact us today to learn more (888) 461-1016!