Marketing a law firm online presents unique challenges from marketing other businesses on the web. What works in other industries, doesn't necessarily work for law firm marketing. Also, there are many ethical considerations that are unique to law firm marketing the rules for which vary from state to state.
Due to the unique challenges of marketing a law firm online, it is that much more important to seek out professionals that specialize in internet marketing for law firms.
Like the practice of law, there can be no substitute for experience. SEO for law firms is part technical science and part technique. For most law firm SEO's, these skills are developed by working with clients and producing results. Again, experienced specialists in SEO for law firms know how to navigate many of the obstacles, pitfalls, and challenges associated with web-based practice growth.
From keywords to linkerati resources, to content production and publication, those that specialize in online law firm marketing have a competitive advantage over other legal-specific marketing consultants that don't have experience handling legal specific web campaigns.
One great way to distinguish specialists from more general search engine optimization consultants is through the use of targeted searches. For example, searches for "search engine optimization consultants" won't produce as targeted results as searches for "law firm search engine optimization consultants". Using legal modifiers like lawyer, attorney, and law firm in your searches for search engine optimization companies will help you find those that specialize in working with law firms.
Since a large part of law firm internet marketing is about "getting found" in various search engines, like Google, law firm SEO firms that rank-well in the organic listings for these types of terms provide good empirical evidence that they "know what they're doing". Keep in mind that this is more of a guideline than a rule.
Some law firm search engine optimization companies will push the envelope of acceptable practices. So, while these companies may enjoy short term success in the search engines, over time their rankings begin to diminish. Performing multiple searches for targeted relevant terms is a good way of weeding out some of these more short-minded firms.
If you're in the market for a law firm SEO company, be sure to check out their online reviews and ask around. Quite frankly, there are a lot more questionable firms than any of us in the industry would probably like to admit.
Over the years, law firm prospects have sent us reports from just about all of our competitors. Unfortunately, even today, some law firm marketing agencies still mislead their clients via "reporting." One particularly egregious example comes in the form of ranking reports. Which prompted this LinkedIn post. To my surprise, I received a lot of […]
John Wanamaker supposedly said "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." In an an effort to figure out "what half is working," attribution was born. Coupled with a transition from traditional, offline ads to digital media, attribution became the holy grail for analyzing advertising spends. But […]
I recently asked ChatGPT, "What are some of the top personal injury law firms in Chicago?? Actually, first I ask "who are some of the top personal injury lawyers in Chicago?" ChatGPT couldn't handle that one, so I modified the prompt. ChatGPT listed five very well-known firms downtown. Can you guess the other four? That's […]
If you're like me, you have some degree of AI, ChatGBT, Bard, exhaustion. Now don't get me wrong, this is stuff is remarkable and is changing, well, a lot. But before you hook up the ChatGPT API to your WordPress API and crank out 10,000 pages, here are a few things to think about. Let's […]
If you know me, you know my opinions about links and SEO advice from Google. If you don't, here's the TL;DR: Meh, links! Meaning, all things being equal, links still remain a competitive difference maker for ranking. Take Google's SEO advice with several grains of salt. Google has no economic incentive to help your site […]
The best marketing advice I can give you is to be authentic. Of course, you don't find that very helpful in terms of meeting your growth goals. So, you might decide to game the system. As I'm writing this, one of the more popular ways to gain the system is to pay for engagement. This […]
The following post was written by ChatGPT. ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is a state-of-the-art language model that can generate human-like text based on a given prompt or context. This technology has the potential to revolutionize the way that businesses, including law firms, market themselves to potential clients. One way that a law firm could use […]
How long does SEO take? When can I expect to see results? What results should I expect to see? These are all reasonable questions that we field from lawyers every day. And, like many legal answers, the answer is: It depends. Yes, I know that's not the answer you wanted. But it's the most honest […]
And how much time should they spend doing it? I recently had the privilege of chatting with Tyson, Jim, and Conrad for an upcoming episode of The Maximum Lawyer Podcast. If you're not familiar with The Maximum Lawyer community, you should definitely check it out. Jim asked a really great question about who should do […]
