SSDI Marketing for Lawyers: A Simple Guide

Marketing for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) lawyers includes promoting their legal services to potential clients. This can include a mix of digital and traditional tactics, like SEO, content marketing, social media, event marketing, and referral marketing.

The plan is simple: reach the right audience, win their trust, and convert a fraction of them into your paying customers.

In addition to stimulating lead generation, effective SSD or SSDI lawyer marketing also leads to the following benefits:

• Establish a credible, authoritative brand for your law firm
• Highlight what makes your firm stand out from competitors
• Increase client satisfaction and trust
• Tap into more lucrative networking opportunities
• Build your reputation in the local community

Digital Marketing 101 for SSDI Lawyers

Here are the top 11 disability attorney marketing strategies that are proven to get profitable results:

1. Establish Your SSDI Firm’s Brand

A lot of law firms gloss over this step, but defining your SSDI’s brand identity sets the tone for all future marketing and pay-per-click or PPC campaigns. It allows you to establish a clear and recognizable brand identity that sets your SSDI law firm apart, which will be reflected on all your marketing efforts.

This includes the following components:

• Your firm’s logo
• Color scheme
• Typography

You can work with a professional brand designer, hire a full-service law firm marketing agency, or do it yourself. Either way, your branding decisions will help you make a powerful first impression on prospects who visit your website.

Aside from your firm’s logo, colors, and typography, your brand also has something to do with consistent, clear, and unique brand messaging.

Developing a unique brand identity is one of the first steps mentioned by personal injury and disability attorney Ben Glass of BenGlassLaw in an interview on his marketing success.

“If you don’t know what else to do, look around at what everyone else is doing and stop doing that,” says Ben Glass. “You cannot be delivering the same message that everyone else is doing.”

Ben Glass had a practical approach to competitor research: visit the regional library, check the yellow pages of local lawyers, and come up with a unique proposition that hasn’t been offered before. You can do the same by looking at the top SSDI law firm websites in your area and find a different way to present your legal services that hasn’t been done before.

The next step is to be absolutely clear and consistent with your brand message.

For example, BenGlassLaw’s ideal disability clients are those whose claims are denied but are unsure whether hiring a lawyer is worth the trouble. They address their target audience’s pain points as well as lower the barrier by offering free consultations and waiving all fees “unless they win.”

You can find numerous examples of BenGlassLaw upholding their brand message all over their website.

2. Define Your Audience and Marketing Strategy

Another important takeaway from the Ben Glass interview is to understand who your target audiences are.

“You have to give deep thought to all the different ways that your client/patient/customer is going to discover you—and where along their journey they’re going to discover you,” says Ben Glass.

This raises a series of questions, like:

• Where do potential clients look for information?
• When and why would they need to look for SSDI law firms?
• What type of information do these new clients look for?

For SSDI lawyers, the target audience is often claimants or people who need disability benefits but don’t have the proper knowledge or time for the paperwork.

But it’s also important to know where they are in their journey, like people who are sending an application from scratch, restarting their disability benefits, or are still contemplating whether to lawyer up or process their application themselves.

Getting to know your target audience lets you grasp and cater to their pain points when planning your marketing strategy.

3. Choose a Few Social Media Channels to Focus on

Social media marketing allows your SSDI law firm to quickly build online reach, enhance your brand image, and communicate with prospective clients on the same platform.

A prudent approach is to focus on only a handful of social media channels at first. Once you gain momentum and see profitable results, you can scale your online presence by marketing through other networks over time.

For attorneys in general, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook are the top three social media platforms. Some of the strategies you should remember are:

• Start with a clear social media policy
• Specify your social media marketing goals
• Publish content about disability cases, benefits, and laws that resonate with your target audience
• Fine-tune your social pages to reflect your brand identity

It’s also worth investigating how competitors use social media and interact with their audience. This will help you get better results by implementing tactics that are proven to work.

Local SEO for SSDI Lawyers

A lot of law firms and local businesses start with just local SEO or search engine optimization. It can help you generate social security disability leads quickly and raise brand awareness without spending thousands of dollars on an elaborate marketing campaign.

Here’s how it works:

4. Secure Your Google Business Profile

Claiming your Google Business Profile will go a long way in promoting your SSDI law firm.

Your GBP boosts your visibility in local searches and provides potential clients with essential information about your firm, like your website URL, business address, office hours, and phone number. It’s also a great way to showcase positive reviews and ratings to online searchers.

To optimize your GBP for local searches, make sure to enter the complete details of your firm. This includes your business name, category (“law firm”), description, and up-to-date contact information.

Since GBP doesn’t have a designated secondary category for SSDI lawyers, one way to highlight your legal services is to build service or product pages.

Going with product pages lets you take advantage of images and categories to help users find the service they need.

For service pages, be sure to choose ‘disability benefits litigation’ as your service category. Also, include relevant keywords like “social security disability attorney” and “social security attorney” in your service description to help your profile appear in relevant searches.

Read our full guide on optimizing your Google Business Profile for more quick and actionable tips.

5. Get Connected Through Local Citations

Another way to quickly get the word out on your SSDI law firm is through citations from local legal directories.

In simple terms, citations are mentions of your law firm and important business details—mainly your NAP (Name, Address, and Phone) information. As an SSDI law firm, you need to get your name added to multiple online legal directories, such as:

• Lawyers.com
• FindLaw
• Avvo
• Nolo
• HG.org

6. Rack Up Positive Client Reviews

Online review management is a crucial aspect of law firm marketing.

Showing off positive reviews from satisfied clients are great tools for winning your target audience’s trust. They also make your GBP pop more in local search results, specifically in the local 3-Pack that normally appears above the organic results.

Organic SEO for SSDI Lawyers

After establishing a solid local SEO presence, it’s time to create your own law firm website. This lets you cash in on the potential traffic you’ve amassed through your GBP, social media, and local citations—as well as open up a new traffic source: organic search.

7. Amp Up Your SSDI website

First on your list is to make your website design mobile-responsive, visually appealing, user-friendly, and complete with pages that offer value to your audience.

Start by building a complete homepage and functional essential pages like your “About” and “Contact Us” pages. Be sure to incorporate your brand’s design language and core messaging.

Here are a few tips when creating essential pages for your SSDI law firm website:

• Mention the benefits of hiring you as an SSDI lawyer.
• Include frequently asked questions in a scannable format.
• Emphasize the unique reasons why clients should choose you.
• Insert call-to-action (CTA) buttons, ideally alongside a contact form.

For pages that highlight client stories and case results, highlight the numbers that can really grab the attention of potential clients. This can be the total amount you’ve recovered for clients or the number of lawyers working in your firm.

8. Create Optimized High-Quality Content

To supplement your online growth, it’s important to publish quality content to drive even more traffic and establish your expertise in your law practice.

For this, the first order of business is to create a dedicated practice area landing page for your SSDI legal services.

Make sure to conduct keyword research beforehand with a SEO tool like SEMRush and Ahrefs. After all, incorporating keywords improves your landing page’s performance on search engine results pages (SERPs), helping you build a recurring stream of organic traffic.

For example, here’s a landing page that’s optimized for the keyword “Orlando Social Security Disability Lawyer” from Bogin, Munns & Munns.

Another advantage of keyword research is that it helps you identify relevant topics that your target audience cares about. Some examples are:

• How much does a social security disability lawyer cost?
• How do you choose the right social security disability lawyer?
• Why hire a social security disability lawyer?
• What is the difference between SSI and SSDI?
• How to apply for SSDI?

Keep in mind that keywords reflect questions that your target audience searches for online.

This will help you determine the kind of information you need to cover in order to win their trust and spark conversations. If they start asking more questions, you can put them on your list of prospects to follow up on or directly reach out to.

“You need to start the conversation that’s in their head,” says Ben Glass. “Our marketing is designed to get someone to raise their hand, so now I know who they are.”

9. Start Building Backlinks

Links help you generate referral traffic, boost your visibility to search engine crawlers, and improve your rankings.

We explained the nitty-gritty of this process in our process of link building for lawyers. In a nutshell, you can reliably build backlinks for your SSDI law firm through three tactics:

• Contribute guest posts to relevant industry publications (e.g., Bloomberg Law News, Disability Insider, and DisabilityHelp.org)
• Become an expert source for other journalists and content creators
• Publish linkable assets like free tools or calculators and conduct original research

As a bonus tip, you can use tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs to uncover your top competitors’ backlink sources. This should give you a priority list of target websites for contributing guest posts.

Paid Advertising for SSDI Lawyers

Paid advertising is not as rewarding as organic tactics like social media marketing or SEO, but it does promise faster and more predictable results.

10. Get Instant Traction with Google Ads

Done right, Google Ads can provide your law firm a spot at the top of search results—without all the time, commitment, and effort required in organic SEO.

Setting up a Google Ads campaign can be broken down into six main steps:

• Step 1 — Set up your main objective and choose a campaign type.
• Step 2 — Set your bidding strategy (how you pay for ad placements).
• Step 3 — Define your audience targeting settings.
• Step 4 — Enter your target keywords.
• Step 5 — Create your ad content.
• Step 6 — Set a campaign budget.

11. Social Media Ads

Advertising on social media can also give your SSDI law firm instant traction. The only difference is, your ads will be visible to social media users—not on SERPs.

Each social media network comes with different advertising features. LinkedIn Ads, for example, enables a dozen ad formats for specific objectives, be it follower growth, direct outreach, or generating social security disability leads.

Ideally, you should focus on the platform that brought you the most success.

For SSDI lawyers, people in need of disability benefits tend to ask questions on Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. Start small with your budget and track results to fine-tune your strategy over time.

Fast-Track Your SSDI Firm’s Marketing

We just covered the top 11 online marketing strategies every SSDI law firm should know. Don’t forget to explore other marketing strategies to widen your local reach. This includes traditional tactics like sponsoring events, practicing local networking, as well as running print ads and other lawyer marketing materials.

You can also increase your chances of achieving real, measurable results by hiring professional legal marketing services.

Don’t just look for marketing experts—look for a lawyer marketing company with a proven track record of success with law firms.

To learn more, contact us and get a free marketing audit today.