14 Law Firm Marketing Strategies To Improve Your Online Presence

In the post COVID-19 era, when developing marketing ideas for law firms, it is important to remember how much people’s habits have switched to doing more of their business online. With some businesses not returning to the office fully for some time (or ever), the marketing that relied on the eyes of commuters has lost even more value against those that reach telecommuters. Making the most of your legal online marketing dollar in 2024 and beyond means taking into account the changes the pandemic has brought to consumer habits.

Strategies for Law Firm Marketing

In this article we will share strategies to help you see the importance and benefits of digital marketing for law firms in 2024. In an age when people spend more time consuming content on their phones and computers, law firms have so many new opportunities to reach clients to take advantage of. A law firm marketing consultant can help you use all these new tools and is an important piece of the puzzle to take your firm to the next level.

Why Is Law Firm Marketing Important And What Is It?

Imagine you are a law firm that specializes in accident and personal injury claims. Someone is standing on the side of the road, looking at what used to be their car, and they know that they are going to need someone to represent them. The first thing they are going to be likely to do is pull out their phone and do a search for a lawyer nearby who can help them. The chances of them finding you are slim if you are not on the first page of the search results.

The Competition of Legal Marketing

The legal field is increasingly competitive and over the last ten years the need for your firm to stand out has become even more important. Law firms need to be at the top of search results. And, a good digital law firm marketing strategy is going to be what gets you there and gets people clicking on your website. Potential clients need to be able to find your website fast, and once they click on it they need to be quickly presented with content that is relevant to their search. The days of just throwing some ads on TV and in print are in the past and your firm needs to be ready for the future of marketing a law practice.

The key to successful law firm web marketing is taking the tools available and putting them into use to drive potential clients to your site. A law firm marketing agency like ComboApp knows how best to put together these tools to market to your clients effectively and help you grow your business. In the rest of this article, we are going to be looking at 14 of the best marketing strategies to use in 2024.

The 14 Best Law Firm Marketing Strategies To Grow Your Practice

It is important to know how to market a law firm and there are certain techniques that will make your firm stand above the rest. Those techniques are the tools that drive your success and we are going to look at 14 tips for marketing of legal services online.

Create A Law Firm Marketing Plan

Establishing a marketing plan is the first step to successful law firm marketing. Before you spend a single dollar on an attorney marketing campaign, your firm needs to have a clear plan. Here is a quick look at how to create an effective strategy.

1. Set Goals

What do you want your marketing efforts to achieve for your law firm? Define specific goals with a time frame for achievement such as “increase revenue by $2,000,000 in 2 years.” or “add 100 new clients in 1 year.” Just make sure these goals are achievable and easy to measure.

2. Define Your Clients And How You Will Reach Them

Figure out who you want to reach with your marketing. Who is your ideal client? What are their legal problems? How are you most likely to reach them? What will your messaging to them be? This will help you know how to best target your marketing efforts. Tailoring your law firm marketing towards reaching your target audience will help you to achieve the goals your firm set above.

3. How Much Is Your Firm Willing To Spend

Marketing is an investment in the success of your law firm. As with any investment, the ROI of your law firm marketing budget will be based on what you put in. If you go with the lowest budget marketing agency, you risk losing out to competitors who understand the importance of a proper marketing budget. Hire the best agency for the job that has a proven track record of success.

Pros - Gives your law firm a set of goals and a plan to achieve them

Cons - none

Approximate Budget - N/A

Basic Law Firm Marketing Strategies

4. Build Your Brand

Your company has a specialty, but what you specialize in is not who you are. Whether you are a personal injury firm, or if you focus on legal services for businesses, you still need to let clients know WHO you are and not just what you do. Your branding is a chance to make potential clients comfortable and make them feel like they can relate to you and trust you.

This is your chance to sell to the client the aspects of your business that make you unique. Well designed law firm websites and content can be used to show the personality of your company, giving clients a first impression that lets them know why they should choose your firm out of all the other available options. Connect with the potential client and let them know your firm and its story. If you build trust with them with your online presence you have already developed a lead over your competition.

Pros - Helps your firm establish an identity and stand out.

Cons - Can be difficult and time consuming to get right.

Budget - Free (if done yourself) to as high as the tens of thousands.

5. Demonstrate Your Firm’s Credibility And Authority

Potential clients need to know why they should be hiring you. They want to feel like they are in skilled and comfortable hands that will lead them to victory and satisfaction of their legal grievances. Legal website marketing messaging needs to establish your bonafides as a legal firm. Focus on your firm’s experience, successes, and expertise. Show that your firm is an authority on solving your ideal client’s legal problems.

Pros:

• Give clients a reason to trust and choose your firm.
• Content generated can be used in other forms of marketing.

Cons - Can take time to research and write your content as well as seeking comments from past clients.

Budget - Varies

Timeline - Several hours a week

KPIs - Increase in conversion metrics

6. Work With A Law Firm Marketing Agency

Your focus is the operation of your law company and winning cases for your clients, as it should be. Hiring a full service digital marketing agency for law firms allows you to keep focusing on your job. Let a team of professionals build your digital marketing strategy and put it into practice. You would never tell a potential client to represent themselves in a courtroom, so choose an agency who specializes in digital marketing to represent you to the world.

A law firm marketing company like ComboApp can bring your ideas to life as well as develop strategies including building an app to help you connect with clients, creating video content that is relevant to your business, and reaching potential clients on social media.

Pros - Having experts handling your marketing helps to ensure success.

Cons - Can be costly

Budget - $1,500 - $25,000+ a month

Timeline - 12+ months

KPIs:

• Increase in clients
• return on investment over time

Law Firm SEO Marketing Strategies To Gain Organic Traffic From Search Engines

7. Optimize Your Website For Search Engines

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is one of the most important tools in your law firm website marketing toolbox. This means building a website and content that is designed with Google algorithms in mind to ensure that you rank high on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). SEO for law firm websites is going to focus heavily on local search rankings, which means that even things off of your page like your Google My Business listing need to be fully optimized.

75% of users never go past the first page of a Google search, so if you are not on the first page 3/4ths of people searching will never know you exist. Your digital law firm marketing agency will ensure that you get into the top search results by using their knowledge of search engine optimization for lawyers to build your site by following best practices like:

• Creating a mobile-friendly website to comply with Google’s “mobile first” indexing policy.
• Performing page speed optimization for mobile search by addressing round trip requests, render-blocking, lazy-loading, compression, caching, and the Accelerated Mobile Page HTML code options.
• Improving your website’s technical SEO so the search engines can crawl and index it without any problems.
• Researching target keywords.
• Creating and optimizing both your content and the keyword placement within it.
• Creating SEO-friendly metatags.
• Optimizing your site for voice search which is quickly growing as a source of potential traffic.
• Link-building to establish, maintain, and increase website authority.
• Reaching out to media outlets to disseminate your content and increase inbound traffic.
• Proper schema markup for legal services.

Having a site that is SEO-optimized is critical for the success of your law firm marketing plan. ComboApp’s law firm marketing services include using their knowledge of SEO for law firms and attorneys to get you the rankings you deserve.

8. Make Sure Your Website Is Mobile-Friendly

81% of Americans own smartphones and 3-in-4 of them search with their phones to address their immediate needs. People take their mobile experience seriously, and 52% of users said they would be less likely to engage with a company if the mobile experience on their website was bad.

These bits of information alone were good reasons to make sure your site is optimized for a mobile experience, but in 2021 Google has made mobile-first indexing their primary ranking and indexing tool. This means that when Google crawls the web, it looks primarily at your mobile site to decide where you rank.

Your law practice needs a website that is built for a mobile experience in order to be competitive and get those first page rankings on Google in 2024.

ComboApp also would recommend using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights in order to track and improve the speed of your site on various device types. Investment in sites that are optimized for both mobile and desktop is an investment in the success of your attorney website marketing.

9. Content Marketing Gets Your Message Out

Content is king. That has been the rule on the Internet for a long time. Website marketing for law firms is going to be focused on content that informs clients of who you are and what services you provide to your clients. Pages that discuss each service you provide will make sure that potential clients get right to the content that they are looking for. If a client is looking for bankruptcy services, they are more likely to stay on your website and contact you if they can be presented with that information on first click. (Rather than if they have to hunt through your site looking for it.)

SEO for law firm websites also includes creating dedicated landing pages for each of your services and blog posts as it gives you more opportunities to optimize your content with related keywords and improve your search rankings.

The Need for Full Content Strategy

Beyond just pages for your services, content marketing for legal firms should also focus on a full content strategy including videos, blog and social media posts such as:

• Legal advice, including answering questions from visitors and potential clients.
• Updates and opinions on legal cases and rulings, both local and national, that might affect your clients.
• Interviews with staff and client testimonials.
• Your digital marketing agency will work with you to develop the best content strategy and law firm marketing ideas to make you stand out from the rest.

10. Voice Search Optimization Puts You Ahead Of The Curve

Voice search has quickly started to climb as a major driver of traffic in 2024, as more and more devices are listening to the questions that users ask out loud and giving them the answers they are looking for.

You want to be the provider of those answers.

Voice search is the next big change in Internet marketing, and it is going to produce a whole new set of challenges and opportunities. Rising to those challenges and taking the opportunities provided will be key to continued success in 2024 and beyond. SEO for law firm websites will need to take voice search into account and law firm marketing strategies will include it more and more.

Getting in on this now means getting your results featured when someone asks a question like “Do I need a lawyer to file articles of incorporation?” or “Who is the best lawyer near me?” to their Alexa, Siri, Cortana, or other digital assistant. Voice search will be critical for law firm SEO marketing soon, so now is the time to be a leader and get a head start on the competition.

11. Local SEO To Find Local Clients

Clients tend to seek lawyers who are local to them, so you need to make sure they can find you. Making sure your website is optimized for Google’s local stack is a vitally important bit of digital marketing for lawyers. A Google MyBusiness page that is claimed and updated is an excellent tool for your local marketing. Your law firm should also be participating in the community to help generate good PR and backlinks, as well as creating local focused content.

Overview of SEO Marketing Strategies

Pros:

• Ensure your site is found by your ideal clients
• increases traffic and ensures the quality of the traffic remains high

Cons - Takes months to a year for ROI

Budget - $1,000 - $10,000 a month

Timeline - Initial optimization within 2 months, but SEO efforts are ongoing

KPIs:

• Increase in organic search engine traffic
• Higher SERP rankings on relevant keywords
• Leads Generated

Getting Traffic From Sources Other Than Search Engines - Off Site SEO

12. Digital Public Relations To Build Trust In Your Firm And Establish You As An Authority

One of the challenges legal firms have in the marketplace is gaining the trust of potential clients. A great digital public relations team is a fantastic tool for marketing a law practice. A public relations expert can help you establish an online reputation that shows your community that you are a valuable asset that can help them when they are most in need.

A PR person or team can write press releases that have local news sites writing about some feel good cases you have won, or have you contributing guest articles to sites to allow you to share your knowledge and expertise. Perhaps there is a case in the local news that you can share some insight on, they will get you interviews that allow you to offer your thoughts. All of these are just a few ways that public relations can be an important ingredient in marketing for legal firms.

13. Social Media Marketing For Law Firms

70-80% of adults are on social media. That means that it is incredibly likely that your law firm’s ideal client is just waiting to see your ad or posting at the right time. From Facebook to YouTube, social media is an important part of content marketing for lawyers. Social platforms give your firm the opportunity to interact with potential clients, and reach them with your message in an interactive and educational way.

14. Get Listed On Legal Directories

Legal directories are a fantastic resource when it comes to online marketing for law firms. These directories, such as FindLaw and Justia, get millions of monthly visitors and rank high on google searches. You can turn their traffic to your advantage by getting listed on these sites. Citations are an important part of your ranking on Google and other SERP’s, and having citations from sites that are ranked that high helps increase your site authority.

Legal directories are a simple method of internet marketing for attorneys that can give a lot of benefit for little cost. Some of them also offer further marketing tools that allow you to further build your brand and demonstrate your knowledge, like contributing to Q&A sections.

Overview of Off Site SEO Strategies

Pros:

• Increases visibility of your law firm
• Generates engaging content

Cons - Can be time consuming

Budget - Free - $15,000 a month

Timeline - Ongoing

KPIs:

• Increase in engagement
• Leads Generated

Conclusion

Marketing a law firm has a lot of challenges, from overcoming people’s distrust of lawyers, to a crowded market. Your marketing agency is your partner in getting to the next level of business operations. Your law firm marketing plan should take into account all of the best marketing strategies for law firms. Putting these tips into practice will effectively ensure that your website is seen through search, but converts users to paying clients.

Online marketing for law firms consists of putting all the tools mentioned in this article to use to stand head-and-shoulders above the competition. SEO for law firms will include a heavy local focus and measure, will ensure that the site is optimized for mobile and voice search, and that your keyword-optimized content will get you ranking on the top of the SERPs.

ComboApp is a Chicago law firm marketing company that has the skills to make your law firm digital marketing a driving force for your business. Contact us at contact@comboapp.com so we can help you take the first step towards your firm’s digital futur