In an extremely competitive marketplace, effective law firm marketing can help your business to stand out from the competition online. 

After working with several legal clients over the last 5 years helping them develop their digital marketing strategy, I can confidently say that the importance of a strong online presence is not to be underestimated - if done correctly, your website can turn into a business development machine.

When marketing your law firm, your marketing efforts need to ensure that prospective clients see you as a trustworthy, thought leading and successful law firm.

Below, I have summarised a few important tips to ensure your law firm marketing strategy is ticking the right boxes, and how to hopefully turn prospective clients, into paying clients:

Your Website

This sounds like a no-brainer, but making sure your website is the most accurate representation of your law firm and its ethos can improve your chances of potential clients. A well-optimised website with good user experience will do the legwork for you.

Here are some key things to make sure your law firm website is performing to the best of its ability:

1. Make sure your service pages are optimised with keywords that generate the most relevant traffic to your website; things change quickly in the online marketing world so make sure you review this regularly
2. Keep on top of any algorithmic changes with search engines like Google (these happen often) and make sure you carry out the correct digital marketing activity to minimise the impact.
3. Optimised blog content and content marketing that provides value and answers the questions that potential clients are looking for is a brilliant way of targeting long tail keywords and increasing relevant traffic to your website. They also go a long way in supporting your key service pages and overall digital marketing strategy (make sure you internally link!)
4. Case studies help potential clients understand how you’ve helped people in similar positions to them; they build trust and it goes a long way in the decision making process when demonstrating what you have done for past clients. Do not underestimate their value!
5. Use third party digital marketing tools to review how potential clients are interacting with your website, such as Mouseflow or Hotjar - if there are snags that are preventing target clients from getting to the conversion, review and amend them. Make your user's journey as easy as possible!

Your Online Reviews

Online reviews can be viewed as a poisoned chalice. Handing over the power to the public to rate your law firm can be a scary thing. However, they are a powerful trust signal and tool that, if managed correctly, can increase the validity of your law firm's reputation and the quality of your legal services very effectively.

Here are some pointers to ensure you maximise the effectiveness of online reviews:

1. People are more likely to leave a bad review than a good review, but it is how you deal with the bad review that can be the difference maker. Reply promptly and with as much detail as you can to ensure potential customers have both sides of the story. Waiting weeks, months or not replying at all does not look good and can put potential customers off while damaging the reputation of your law firm online
2. Use email marketing to encourage reviews from clients. Making it easy for a satisfied customer to leave a review can increase both the volume and star rating of your review profile. Once a case is closed, send a follow up email linking through to the review platform of your choice and encourage them to leave a review. If a customer is satisfied with your service, more often than not they will leave a positive review. With each positive review, trust builds, and with trust, comes an increased likelihood of a conversion.
3. Do not delete reviews! You do not need a100% positive review score. In fact, there is something slightly suspicious about a law firm having hundreds of reviews without a single one being negative. In such a highly emotive sector, it is almost impossible for most law firms to never receive a negative review, and users need the full picture to understand the experience people have had using your law firm (see tip 1 again^)

So there you have it, a few tips to ensure your law firm is doing the right things to deliver  a good online experience to existing and potential clients. If you would like to get in touch to discuss how our full service marketing agency can help you across all marketing channels, please feel free to email me or give us a call on 0161 402 3170 to discuss your options.