As a professional, you spend a lot of time working. You personally attend to your clients, you acquire information on this and that pertinent issue, and you probably even take work home with you. That's why it is a no-brainer to make the most out of the results of all that hard work. Given the option of a job you can accomplish in 20 hours and another that can be finished in 40 years, subject to the same rate of pay, you'd choose the one with the shorter period.
Search engines have proven to be quite a goldmine of new clients for law firms in recent years, making law firm SEO a top favorite marketing strategy among legal practitioners. In the use of law firm SEO as a marketing strategy, the key is to derive as much benefit as you can from as little amount of money and time you can afford to dispense. Here are some tips to help accomplish that:
Work closely with your SEO Consultant. If you hired a third party to do the SEO marketing on your behalf, close coordination is necessary. The knowledge that you are a hands-on client who want to be apprised every step of the way will push them to do their best work. This close involvement would also enable you to spot irregularities or weaknesses that need to be addressed straight away. They might be getting you a lot of traffic and even calls, but perhaps these turn out to be the wrong kind of potential clients (either you don't want to take them on or they end up not being interested).
Your primary interests should be the focus of your blog. If your SEO marketing includes the setup of a blog, then the articles or the posts made on the blog should be current and related to your legal practice. If you do that, potential clients will see how updated you are regarding the legal practice; it is also a way for you to learn and keep yourself updated on the recent developments affecting the industry. You will be risking putting your potential clients in a state of confusion regarding your practice and your expertise if you only concentrate on posting mildly interesting material which, unfortunately, is what you'd end up with if you concentrate on the keywords instead of the subjects.
Single out your law firm SEO. Seo consultants and writers give this tip quite often, and for good reason. Being specific is great advice in any form of marketing, since it's better to intensely appeal to 100 people than it is to mildly appeal to 100,000. Searches made on search engines have this same trait of being specific, which is why the same principle applies to SEO. It's much better to appeal to people searching for a child custody lawyer than it is to rank highly for family lawyer, since anyone with a child custody issue really wants to know that you're going to be able to solve that specific problem.
The best advice a lawyer could ever get regarding the use of SEO is to treat it like any other marketing tool. Treat it as something that will make you more visible to the kind of potential clients that you're looking to attract and will give you the opportunity to present them with some sort of relevant sales pitch. Use the search engines properly and productively and post worthwhile and useful content. It will always come back to bite you.
Marketing is a game and task that many lawyers and law firms view as a necessary evil, but SEO can make it both easier and somewhat more interesting if you follow the above tips and find ways to integrate your interests and experiences with everything that you publish and post online. Be wise and use your resources well; if you do, you can simply watch your business - and your profits - rise.
If you're running your own legal practice, then you probably already have strategies for most of the work that you perform for your clients. In order to win a case, you probably have strategies in place on how to argue your case at trial, including the tactical maneuvers you will need to employ. Similarly, if you are closing deals for your clients, you also have a strategy for how to get the deal done and protect your client's interest.
In other words, all your actions for your client will be directed by an encompassing strategy to reach a goal or objective that you have set in your sights.
So why should you have a different approach to your attorney marketing strategy?
I was being rhetorical; of course it shouldn't be any different. Anyone who is serious about marketing should have a strategy and stick to it. Sure, they may change or be modified, but they will be what your actions will revolve around in order to reach your goal. Let us take a closer look:
Target - Your marketing strategy needs to have focus. Your target should be clearly distinguished, not just anybody who is in need of legal services. It should be an exact subset of individuals undergoing a particular issue needing legal attention. Now this subset or group should be the focus of all your marketing efforts. If you have a more defined target of the potential clients you will be aiming for, the greater your chances will be of turning them into actual clients.
Diligence - I am not saying you should fastidiously stick to a certain marketing strategy even if it is clearly a losing idea. Make it a point to set aside time to evaluate the state of your marketing so you can revise it accordingly. However, you should also be diligent about following through on your strategy. The reason why marketing strategies fail is not because the ideas sucked to begin with, but because the implementation and follow-through fell short.
Learn - Most attorneys, partially because of their education, believe that they can read and think and learn all that they need to know about marketing. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. Unless you have an expert marketer on your particular focus market working with your or under you, you would have to stay on your toes and revise your strategy accordingly. And often, you only find out what works by finding 5-10 things that don't work. It could be quite a lengthy process, but what you need the most is determination and effort.
Marketing is not for the faint of heart, and getting clients as an attorney is never as simple or straight-forward as you might like. However, the bar is actually set pretty low, so if you know what you're doing, and if you're persistent, your attorney marketing can easily and quickly become very successful and very effective.
A starting point and a well-laid plan that you can stick to are what you need. If you don't have a plan, then either develop one on your own (even if you don't have experience), or ask for help. You can either acquire the services of a marketing firm or ask for the help of other attorneys who have already been doing it. Whatever route you choose to take, you must have a plan and you should stick to that plan until you have learned enough to figure out if something is working or not.
