Are you looking for ways to gain new clients, expand your reach and market your law firm online? 

Simple marketing guidelines of today boast that content is still king, so how can you use this to your advantage in the realm of law?

After working with clients in this industry, we’ve had some practice ramping up the marketing efforts of attorneys and law groups and have put together a shortlist of fun ideas to implement! 

Before you continue reading about our 6 ways to market your law firm online, you should first be able to answer “YES” to one really important question…

Have you started identifying your law firm’s brand identity? 

If you can’t exactly answer “YES” to this question, you have a prerequisite to accomplish before moving on to the next 6 ways to market your law firm online. 

Prerequisite: Make Sure Your Law Firm Has a Brand Identity 

Luckily for the smaller firms, branding is not about having expensive letterhead, big billboards, matching business cards, peer recognition or even winning awards. 

If you want to kill your online marketing game, the first thing you need to do is establish your brand identity. To do so, first ask yourself these questions and write down your answers:

1. What makes your law firm unique? Why are you different?
2. What is your value proposition? Why should they listen to you?
3. What qualities represent your brand’s voice online and in person?
4. What are your company values?

In other words, your “brand” is your law firm’s personality. Without an identity, it will be difficult to market your law firm online with the five ways we are about to outline next. 

By establishing a strong brand you set yourself apart from the competition from the start and begin to build trust and loyalty from an audience who truly believes in you. 

By keeping your brand identity in mind, you can more easily formulate an effective online marketing strategy for your law firm. 

Once you have outlined and established a solid brand identity for your law firm, you can begin to tackle the next 6 strategies to market your law firm online in 2020. 

Read More: 5 Signs That It’s Time To Redesign Your Website

6 Powerful Methods to Market Your Law Firm Online in 2020

1. Assess Your Law Firm Website’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

We’ve covered the importance of SEO optimization when it comes to a website in great detail in previous articles. It is no different for law firms than any other business. 

Arguably one of the most crucial beginning steps of ramping up your law firm’s marketing efforts is to ensure that your target audience can find your website online. 

It’s important to remember that the purpose of SEO is to show up organically online when your target audience searches for your services on the Internet. The overarching goal is to bring traffic to your website. 

Generally, there is a lot of competition in the local legal space when it comes to ranking on search engines. One of the main things you can do to ensure that you are staying on top of the competition is to hire a online marketing expert or agency to help you achieve the best results. 

By implementing a chat box, internal and external link building, utilizing blogs, writing FAQs and ensuring fast page load times, you can improve the ranking of your website on Google, little by little. 

There are several tactics you can include in your strategy. Please feel free to reach out to us with any specific questions or comment on this article below and we will get back to you as soon as possible. 

There are many free tools you can use to assess your law firm website’s SEO performance. 

Although we strongly recommend using tools to assess your own law firm’s SEO, keep in mind that most free tools online will not give you complete SEO audits, but it will give you a general idea of how your web pages look in the eyes of search engines such as Google. 

Here are some free SEO performance tools we recommend looking into:

1. SEOptimer (snapshot of the report featured above)
2. Neil Patel’s SEO Analyzer
3. Woorank

These are all wonderful tools that you can use to help better your SEO efforts and more successfully market your law firm online. 

2. Ensure your Website is Mobile Optimized

One huge aspect that is commonly looked over by lawyers looking to improve their online marketing is ensuring that their website is optimized for mobile viewers. 

Remember, 95% of smartphone owners use their cell phones to search for local information and resources online. It is important that you keep these users top of mind in today’s world of technology. 

How do you optimize your law firm website for mobile devices?

Make sure your website was designed for easy user accessibility. Utilize click-to-call buttons, link to Google Maps, ensure that your mobile pages load quickly and (most importantly) that they automatically resize to fit varying device sizes properly. 

Keep in mind that we are living in a mobile-optimized world nowadays. 

Google now does a mobile-first index. 

This means, Google’s search algorithms that choose which websites they want to rank in search engine result pages (SERPs) now look at how the website appears on mobile devices before checking the desktop version. 

It goes without saying that if you want your website to rank on Google, make sure that the mobile version does not look like garbage. 

If you are going to consider hiring a website design or marketing agency to redesign your law firm website, it may be a good idea to ask them to focus on mobile first and foremost. 

3. Start Content Marketing! (What are you waiting for?)

Despite popular belief, modern marketing is all about providing value to your audience, not selling yourself, your product, or your service.

If you are looking to generate real leads from your content marketing, we aren’t talking about regurgitating the same blogs written on the first page of Google. You are going to have to put in a little more effort than that. 

Stay with us here. 

The average person isn’t familiar with law or the process of a lawsuit. And oftentimes it can be pretty overwhelming and even intimidating to pursue legal action (for almost any matter) when you are unfamiliar with the process. 

By content marketing through writing short articles (aka blogging) covering some of your most common client questions and concerns, you can help educate your audience and your future potential clients online. 

When coming up with topics to write about, consider your ideal clients’ most pressing and concerning questions. Then, answer them in detail. 

Blogging can also help your website rank higher on Google, bringing you to the forefront of a search query. But when shared on social media, can inspire more conversation, shares, exposure, and traffic to your website. 

Read More: To Update My Current Website Or To Redesign From Scratch?

4. Video Video Video!

Similar to blogging, with video you can cover helpful topics for potential clients to more effectively market your law firm online. 

However, if you aren’t utilizing video in your law firm’s 2020 online marketing strategy, you are behind the curve. 

Video can be helpful beyond simply providing information on the topics you chose to cover and information you provide. 

Video gives a more holistic overview of who you are and how well the viewer might work with you and your law firm! It conveys personality, professionalism, and expertise better than website copy ever could. 

Through body language, tone of voice and dynamic visuals, video is often more engaging and warm than blogging alone. We highly suggest using a combination of text blogs and video to create the most engaging user content and to create a returning audience.  

Not to mention, by utilizing video on your website pages and blog posts, you keep visitors engaged on your page for longer, which also helps improve your credibility and search engine rankings. 

5. Use Social Media for Increased Exposure

Being active on social media in 2020 is important for any business. Social media provides a space for potential clients to read honest reviews and learn more about your business. 

We often see law firms missing the mark on their online marketing goals because they are not actually utilizing their social media accounts. 

Social media is a great place to keep your existing clients engaged and informed, share your resources (videos and blogs), connect with potential clients, and create local targeted ads to put your content in front of your ideal audience! It’s not 100% necessary to spend money on target ads on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, but doing so could mean increased and targeted exposure. 

Share your blogs and videos to expand the reach of your helpful information! 

Whether you are a fan of social media or not, ignoring it will only hurt your law firm’s online lead generation. 

We recommend creating and sticking to a unique and dynamic social media and editorial calendar for best results. 

6. Implement Google Adwords

By doing a little research into keywords and your target audience(s), you can create targeted ads through Google to reach potential clients for your law firm. If you’re a personal injury attorney, you may include related keywords for a car accident case. This will target individuals searching for related topics and services. 

Unlike some of the other tips above, ads through Google will require a pay-per-click budget and do cost money to produce but can prove to be extremely helpful for some marketing plans.

Opposed to social media advertising, advertising through Google Adwords provides a great advantage to law firms who are looking to grab the attention of Google users with search intent (aka who are online searching for a particular product or service that the law firm offers). 

 Even if users don’t take action on your law firm’s Google Adwords landing page, you can still retarget them with Facebook and Instagram advertisements with the proper tracking and analytics installed on your website. 

The Best Law Firm Online Marketing Tip: Hire a Digital Marketing Partner

Marketing your law firm online in 2020 requires a lot of attention to detail and strategy. This list that we compiled for you will help you get on the right track to a successful digital marketing strategy, but there are more factors that should also be considered. 

However, we hope you’ll be able to take a few of these tips and change things up with marketing your law services! Best of luck!

If you’re still unsure where to begin, have questions, or feel overwhelmed by the whole process, please let us know if there’s anything we can do to help determine a marketing plan for you!