Digital Marketing For Lawyers: A Simple Guide

What is Digital Marketing For Law Firms?

Digital marketing for law firms is the practice of promoting your practice online to attract new clients. It generally starts with building a law firm website but includes social media marketing, SEO, and online advertising.

Why Do Law Firms Need a Sound Digital Marketing Strategy?

To scale effectively, word-of-mouth referrals can only take your firm so far. A solid digital strategy can build a positive online reputation and establish a reliable source of lead generation.

14 Digital Marketing Tactics For 2024

Let’s look at a mix of various tactics to establish your thought leadership in front of potential clients. We’ll begin with the basics then cover more

1. Define Your Key Business Geographic Areas

Time required: 2-3 days

Impact: Quality Leads and Traffic

Defining all your key business locations and having a strong optimization campaign for them can help you reach your target audience and win new clients over the competition.

We were able to do this for law firm Hipskind & McAninch, wherein optimizing their website for all local areas (even smaller cities) brought them their largest personal injury case against a national bus line.

If you haven’t already defined your target areas, you can start with a simple list or spreadsheet of all your locations so you can easily reference it when you’re creating multi-location SEO campaigns.

2. Create an Optimized Google Business Profile

Time required: 2- 4 weeks

Impact: Increased Visibility in Local Search

Your Google Business Profile (GBP) is essential to dominating local SEO. When setting up your GBP account, ensure the following:

• Enter complete and accurate information. Fill out every field when listing your law firm including your business name, address, phone number, category, website URL, and business hours.
• Upload professional photos of your location. Photos are important in creating and optimizing GBP listings. You can use high-quality photos of your office, your staff, and your building’s exterior.
• Naturally incorporate keywords. When relevant, include keywords that people may use to describe your firm’s legal services.

3. Focus on Local SEO

Time required: 3 – 6 months

Impact: More Qualified Leads

Focusing on local SEO in your marketing efforts goes beyond creating and optimizing a Google Business Profile. It also includes:

• Building citations – List your firm in online law firm directories like Avvo, Super Lawyers, and Lawyers.com.
• Create location-focused content – This includes creating local pages for each of your locations and using location-focused keywords for your website’s content including headlines, title tags, meta descriptions, and page copy.
• Optimize your law firm website for mobile – Most people use their phones to search for nearby services, so ensure your website loads fast and looks great on mobile devices.
• Track and monitor local SEO performance – You need to know if your local SEO efforts are creating tangible results. Use tools like Google Analytics to learn your website’s performance and metrics like page views, bounce rate, and engagement.

4. Get More Online Reviews From Happy Clients

Time required: 3 – 6 months

Impact: Increased Online Reputation / Improved Sales and Conversions

Provide the best customer experience to your clients and create a streamlined approach to asking for customer reviews. These two practices can help boost your reviews and improve your brand’s reputation which can lead to more new clients.

5. Build a Professional Website For Your Law Firm

Time required: 1 – 3 months

Impact: Elevated Credibility That Builds Customer Trust / Increased Visitor Engagement

 Focus on these elements to create the best law firm website that boosts your online presence:

Clean, minimalist design. Your website should be free of visual clutter and distractions and focuses only on conveying your message to your audience.

Optimized content. Your website’s content should be optimized for relevant keywords that describe your firm’s legal services so it increases its place in search engine rankings and bring you more leads.

Technical SEO. This is a way to improve user experience for your website and involves an overhaul of your website’s structure, speed, and security to ensure a safe, user-friendly browsing experience.

6. Structure Your Website Around Key Locations and Practice Areas

Time required: 1 – 2 weeks

Impact: Relevant Local Traffic and Sales

Design your website’s structure around your locations and practice areas. Hipskind & McAninch, the firm who won their biggest case as mentioned earlier, has a website with focus on its location with a page called Areas We Serve and the headline being “Belleville Personal Injury Lawyers”.

7. Start Organic Search Engine Optimization

Time required: 6 – 12 months

Impact: Improved Search Engine Rankings

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a solid internet marketing method that brings your website organic traffic and helps with lead generation when you rank for specific keywords in search engine results.

Conducting keyword research to know which ones to use in your website content is the first step. After this, you’ll need to implement a content creation plan using your target keywords and place them strategically throughout your site.

When done right, SEO for lawyers can help your firm gain online visibility and grow your clientele.

8. Try Pay-Per-Click Marketing

Time required: 1 – 2 months

Impact: Increased Leads and Conversion Rate

Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing, or promoting a product or service with digital advertising, can be a faster yet cost-effective way to generate leads. Most marketing experts use Google Ads for PPC campaigns. The advantage of PPC, in addition to its fast results, is the ability to target your audience according to their demographics.

One of our clients, Nunez Law, was able to generate leads and boost conversions by 15% after just two months of running PPC campaigns for its personal injury firm.

9. Start Content Marketing

Time required: 3 – 6 months

Impact: Brand Awareness

Content marketing is where you can add value to your website visitors with high-quality content like articles, blog posts, and guides. While it may not lead to instant leads and conversions, it helps establish your brand with an audience who may later consider hiring you for your services when they need them.

Most lawyers and law firms don’t have the bandwidth to consistently create content for their firm online, so they usually hire a digital marketing agency for law firms that offer content writing.

Blogging Ideas

To start your content creation process, you need to have a plan on the type of blog posts you want to publish. These can be:

• How To Guides (How To File For Divorce, How To File A Personal Injury Claim)
• Defining A Legal Term or Process (What Is A No-Fault Divorce?)
• Frequently Asked Questions (Car Accident FAQs)
• Location-Specific Content (How To Find A Lawyer In Miami)

10. Engage Prospective Clients With Video Marketing

Time required: 1 – 3 weeks

Impact: Higher Audience Engagement

Video has become the most preferred format for most internet users, and marketers have confirmed that videos help bring conversions up.

Adding video content to your legal marketing assets allows you to have more opportunities to connect with your audience. In addition, video content is considered to be more authentic and can therefore lead to a sale or conversion.

Developing video content for your practice can be a daunting task, so it’s best to consult with a video production firm that specializes in working with lawyers and law firms.

11. Build a Social Media Marketing Strategy

Time required: 2 – 4 months

Impact: Brand Awareness/Increased Online Visibility

Building a social media presence still remains to be a powerful marketing strategy for brands and companies, including those in the legal industry. If your firm does not have accounts in social media platforms like LinkedIn or Facebook, then it’s time to create them.

To be constantly posting updates on social media profiles and always have content ready, you need to create a social media content calendar.

There are many free and paid apps for social media management that you can use or you can hire a social media agency to create, publish, and manage posts for your social media channels.

12. Try Your Hand at Digital PR

Time required: 1 – 4 months

Impact: Establish Credibility

One of our clients, Thompson Consumer Law, caught the eye of a Fox News correspondent after emailing their content. The reporter ended up featuring the law firm in her story about repossession risks in the country.

13. Experiment With Email Marketing

Time required: 2 – 3 months

Impact: Strong Customer Relationships / Improved Sales and Conversions

Email marketing takes some time before seeing results, but it’s worth the trouble when you get highly loyal and engaged customers. The benefits of email marketing include being able to personalize your email, build automated workflows, and streamline your lead-generating efforts.

Starting off an email campaign can be as easy as creating a signup form on your website and building a subscriber list. You can use email marketing services like MailChimp to build your email list. Then you can create subgroups from your list so you can customize your emails according to their needs.

14. Offer Free Virtual Consultations

Time required: 1 – 3 weeks

Impact: More Sales and Conversions

Another quick way to grow your client base is to offer free virtual consultations or webinars. During the free consultation, remember to ask questions about the law firm’s goals, challenges, and expectations. In this way, you identify clients who align with your ideal client profile and have a higher chance of converting into paying customers.

Bonus Tip: Keep Identifying Quick Wins

If you use any kind of software for your marketing campaigns, check if there are quick fixes you can do to improve your metrics.

Our CSM, Andrew DeGryse, describes how he was able to rank a client to the top spot: 

“We did a Surfer SEO content update, but I used around 10 keyword variations for our guidelines. So terms like: memphis car accident lawyer, car accident lawyer memphis, car accident attorney memphis, and so on.”

DeGryse adds, “A small content update helped us move from position 15 to 9 for Memphis Car Accident lawyer.”

This only shows that simple updates and quick fixes can still have a huge impact on your entire marketing plan.

Online Marketing For Your Law Firm vs. Yourself

The difference between marketing yourself as a lawyer and marketing your law firm lies in the following:

When you build your personal brand, you tell your audience about your educational background, work experience, practice area, and track record.

When you build a law firm’s brand, you’re defining an organization. This time, you get to showcase your services, your satisfied clients, your professional staff, and achievements in your industry.

Blending these two approaches creates a holistic overview of your law practice, which can help build trust with your target audience.

Can a Lawyer Do Digital Marketing Themselves?

Yes, you can do digital marketing DIY. At the beginning, it makes sense to execute campaigns yourself and establish a strong foundation. But once you’ve a certain number of clients, marketing may lead to loss of billable hours.

Here’s When You Need to Hire a Digital Marketing Agency…

When your firm has grown sufficiently, and you can spare a budget of about $3k to $5k per month to spend on hiring a digital marketing agency, it may make sense to hire one. Experienced specialists can then take care of your website design, social media, and SEO—thereby letting you to focus on serving your clients.

Digital Marketing FAQs For Lawyers

Can Lawyers Even Advertise Online?

Yes, you can advertise online, as long as you abide by the rules set by the American Bar Association.

How Much Do Lawyers Spend on Marketing?

Lawyers typically spend between $5,000 to $50,000 a month on different digital marketing channels.Your marketing budget is dependent on your current size, business goals, and the competitive landscape in your practice area and geography.

What Kind of ROI Can You Expect From Your Digital Marketing Campaigns?

The return on investment from law firm digital campaigns can range from 5:1 to 20:1. This means for every $1 spent, lawyers get $5 (or $20) in return. Depending on the tactic you rely on, seeing that ROI could take anywhere from 6 months to over a couple of years.