There are many links in the chain of generating new clients from the Internet. If any one of these links is weak, or broken, your likelihood of having success will be significantly diminished:
Traffic
Law firm web marketing has to start with traffic. Obviously, if you don't get traffic to your website, it is very unlikely that you will be able to generate new business. But traffic for the sake of traffic isn't enough. If visitors for your site aren't looking for the information or services that you provide, they will likely leave, or bounce off, your site without taking any action. Therefore, your website traffic needs to be targeted. Targeted traffic to your law firm website is the first link in the law firm web marketing chain.
Leads
Leads, or conversions, are the portion of targeted traffic that takes some sort of action on your law firm website. A conversion might be a phone call to your firm, a request for a consultation, or some other informational request (i.e. whitepaper, guide, e-book). Having several well-placed calls to action, will increase the likelihood of a visitor to convert into a lead. Converting traffic into leads is the second link in the law firm web marketing chain.
Clients
Finally, in order to generate a positive return on investment, your law firm web marketing efforts ultimately must generate clients. While having traffic and leads is a good start, those leads have to turn into new revenue for your law firm. The likelihood of your law firm website traffic turning into a new client for your law firm depends on all these links working effectively and efficiently. If you're not getting visitors, then your conversion optimization is meaningless. If you're not converting traffic into leads, then your monthly visitor metrics become meaningless. Finally, your phone could be ringing off the hook but if those calls aren't looking for the services that you provide, again, your law firm web marketing is probably failing.
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 […]
