The Foundation to a Successful Law Firm Web Marketing Strategy
Based on my experience creating law firm web marketing strategies over the years, I am now compelled to share some of my insights to the world. Ensuring your web marketing strategy is cohesive across multiple channels is absolutely essential in today’s digital age.
And this is especially critical for law firms. Because legal professionals are often savvy with their web marketing initiatives, the competition (especially in more metropolitan areas) can be fierce.
In this article, I lay the foundation to building a successful law firm web marketing strategy. These pillars are critical to help your law firm grow and succeed via the Internet.
Learning & Investing in Social Media
Almost everyone who uses the Internet is also present on one or more social media platforms. With advents like Facebook Advertising and Twitter’s promoted tweets, it’s easier to target in-market prospects to help grow and market your law firm’s web presence.
Social media requires a different approach. In short, the hard sell just doesn’t work. Instead you need to offer your prospects value and meaning. For instance, offer a free white paper or article that shares insights with respect to your legal practice areas. An example could be promoting an article (via Facebook promoted posts) educating (and targeting) your local audience about their legal rights in specific situations. This will establish your firm as trusted local source for legal services. And at the very least, you may be able to grow your social media following.
Mastering Your Craft in Content Marketing
Defining the latter example of using social media to promote valuable content is, well, content marketing. By producing and sharing quality content, your social media, SEO and public relations strategies will flourish. In essence, this is the backbone to your law firm web marketing strategy.
The possibilities of content marketing, as well as the different types of content you can produce are endless. Whether via blog posts and online articles, e-books and white papers, infographics, podcasts, or videos, the spectrum of marketable content is vast. Just be sure that every form of content you produce offers value, meaning, and purpose (and is not simply keyword optimized to help supplement your SEO efforts.)
Building a Local SEO Strategy
One of the most powerful components to a successful law firm web marketing strategy is making your presence known in the organic search results. Local SEO has been around for awhile, but the best practices continue to evolve every year.
Although website keyword optimization is still important to establish relevancy, two other elements play a much larger role: natural and authoritative backlinks, and establishing a powerful Google+ page (that’s properly linked to your website.)
As for backlinks, the easiest and most natural sources are web directories. Some of the big one’s include Lexmundi, Super Lawyers, and Martindale.com. Additionally, scout for local directories such as your local chamber of commerce and other listings that offer great sources of backlinks (as well as direct referral traffic!)
Lastly, spend some time freshening-up on Google Authorship and how to leverage your Google+ presence for SEO. Creating well-optimized blog posts can lead to greater organic search engine exposure and solid local SEO campaign.
Dominating the Results with Local PPC Advertising
In order to develop a powerful law firm web marketing strategy, you firm should have a noticeable search engine presence. Supplementing your local SEO campaign with PPC is great method. Additionally, with PPC advertising, you can test the conversion potential of certain keywords for SEO. That is, if you’re website fails to convert traffic based on a keyword like “business tax law,” then perhaps the keyword is waste of time for your SEO efforts.
Local PPC in particular is wickedly effective, especially using mobile PPC campaigns. Although the competition can be fierce, a properly targeted local PPC campaign (coupled with a solid Google+ page and top organic ranking) can help your law firm own the search results for your desired keyword targets.
About the Author
Tyler Tafelsky has over five years of experience in web marketing. Starting as SEO copywriter and serving many different law firms both on a local and international scale, Tyler has wealth of experience in law firm web marketing. You can learn more by connecting with Tyler on Google+, or following Tyler on Twitter.
