Deciding Whether To Outsource Your Law Firm Web Marketing
Trying to determine whether or not to outsource your law firm’s web marketing can be a difficult decision. This is especially true when you’re not really sure what exactly web marketing entails.
Before learning how to hire the right law firm web marketing consultant for your firm, the first step is to analyze whether it makes more sense to do it in-house of hire an outside consultant.
First, we need to be sure we’re talking apples to apples here. There are a wide variety of components to web marketing and the techniques and strategies that may be implemented vary vastly in both effectiveness and efficiency.
For the purposes of this article, when I refer to web marketing, I mean the following: keyword research, website/blog management, on-page optimization, content production (blog posts / pages, whitepapers), link-building, social media marketing, and analytics reporting.
Please note that the times provided are merely guidelines and may vary greatly depending on your law firm’s goals.
Ok, now that we have a common frame of reference, let’s talk about the time and effectiveness that each of these components may take.
Keyword Research
Assuming you’re starting from scratch, building your first keyword list is extremely important since it is upon these keywords that your entire web presence will be built. The first step is to brainstorm some core keywords for your firm. Once feel confident that you have a highly relevant list of say 25-50 keywords, you need to analyze them for search volume and competitiveness. Depending on what keyword tools you have access to, and your familiarity with using them, this process may take anywhere from a couple hours to a couple days.
Time: 5-6 Hours / Month
Website/Blog Management
Website and blog management is typically best handled by an outside consultant. However, if you are tech-savvy, or at least someone in your office is, you may be able to manage your website and blog in-house. Website/Blog management may include the following tasks: website/blog installation, hosting, content management system installation, content production, site structure design, and internal linking structure. For some, site/blog management may not be very difficult. However, it does require some basic technical knowledge.
Time: 1-2 Hours / Week
On-Page Optimization
On-page search engine optimization includes all those tasks that make the page itself relevant to your targeted keywords. This technique generally accounts for about 25% of the “secret sauce” to getting found in Google. On-page SEO includes mapping keywords to existing web pages, optimizing title, meta, header, and various other tags for your targeted keywords. This process is on-going as new pages/posts are generated and new keywords are added to your targeted keyword list.
Time: 1-2 Hours / Week (depending on new content production)
Content Production
Creating new content for your site/blog is one of the most important and time intensive aspects of web marketing. Content needs to be relevant, original, interesting, usable, SEO optimized, link-worthy. It also should be produced several times per week.
Time: 5-6 Hours / Week
Link Building
Next to content production, link building is the next most important component to successful law firm web marketing. This is also an area where outsourcing professional assistance makes a lot of sense. There are many strategies out there for link building. Some good, some useless, some harmful. Having just a enough link building knowledge can be dangerous. This is also an area in which the difference between a good law firm web marketer and a bad one, makes a world of difference.
Time: 1-2 Hours / Day
Social Media Marketing
While many lawyers believe they are able to “handle” their social media marketing, when pushed to describe what it is they are doing, most will say, I’ve already set up a profile. Merely setting up a profile on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook is not enough to get results from social media marketing. You have to participate. This means publicizing your content, answering questions, participating in group discussions, and various other social media interactive tasks. Social media marketing is the hot new thing, but it is also very misunderstood. While effective social media marketing strategies can develop new professional relationships, and grow your firm’s reputation, poorly executed strategies are a huge waste of time.
Time: 1 Hour / Day
Now that we have outlined some of these basic lawyer internet marketing strategies, you have to ask yourself, are you capable of performing these tasks, and if so, is your professional time best spent doing them?
While many lawyers are becoming more knowledgeable about “how” to do some of these basic web marketing tasks, it just isn’t worth their professional time to do them. In those cases, outsourcing your web marketing makes a lot of sense. But you have to be careful. Once you have made the decision to outsource, you need to make sure you find consultants that are affordable, ethical, and effective.
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Jeff Berman, is co-founder of AttorneySync."Properly marketing a law firm online is about producing relevant content that helps a prospective client understand your expertise and how you are able to help them. Finally, it’s about getting that content found by the people you are trying to help."
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