5 Tips To Make The Most Of Your Attorney Marketing Efforts

5 Tips To Make The Most Of Your Attorney Marketing Efforts

Are you using the power of the internet to the fullest?

Make no mistake, the web is replacing the traditional advertising that law firms used to do like yellow pages, newspapers, billboards & even tv in some markets. The web is by far the best place for savvy Lawyer Marketing experts to overwhelm other attorneys in their city, local county, or even their state. The good news is that if you haven’t started advertising on the internet yet, you haven’t lost too much ground, and can still make money. Here are three tips to get you going:

1. Optimize Now. Start to optimize your website. You are invisible to people looking specifically for you every month. There are literally thousands of searches every month for someone looking for a Drunk Driving Attorney (or whatever your practice area is) in Portland (or whatever your city is). Bottom line, you need to be found on Google, Yahoo & Bing, ideally the first page. That is what optimization does for you. If done well, SEO will get you on the first page for the most-searched keywords people are using to try and find you.

2. Don’t Be Such A Control Freak – Hire a Pro – Yes, there are many tagging changes you can do to help yourself, but there is only so much improving of your important tags like title/description/keyword, italisizing your text, heading improvements and other simple SEO techniques you can do yourself. Why do people hire you? Because you’re an expert. Whatever money you spend on a competent SEO Consultant for Law Firms is money well spent. But do your research. Don’t just hire a local website company who says they know optimization. Make sure they are good at optimizing lawyer web sites, as lawyer sites are incredibly competitive and hard to get on page one.

Check up on them too. So go To Google / Yahoo & type in Lawyer Marketing, or Attorney Marketing SEO. If their own site shows up for those highly-competitive terms, then they probably have the ability to get your web site ranked high too. Depending on your city and practice area, (some like Drunk Driving) are more competitive than others) you could expect to pay anywhere from $1500/mo to $3500/mo or more for a qualified SEO professional. But if thousands of searchers are looking for what you do, do you think you would get at least one to two clients a month? What would you make from cases like that? I know people that were spending $5,000 – $10,000 a month on yellow pages! I don’t even want to cover what TV costs.

3. Create An Impressive Web Site – Don’t go on the cheap for this one. You are competing with other firms who know the value of the internet. When you think of your site, think of it as a lead-generator. The real goalof your site is to get them to contact you. Lets say someone gets referred to you, where are they going to go to do their research on you? Correct! Your website! So when they type your name into Google / Yahoo, make sure what they see is top quality. The worst thing you want is someone to be so unimpressed with your site or your message, that they go back to Google / Yahoo & type in and look for your competitors.

4. Linking – Get familiar with Social Networking – If you aren’t familiar with Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Digg, del.icio.us & others, there’s no time like the present. Use these tools to communicate with others in the legal field, keep in touch with your former clients, and just keep relationships warm while cultivating new ones. You shouldn’t look at it as advertising, look at it as relationship-building. Those same people will be a good source of referrals in the future, and you will also establish yourself as an authority in your field.

5. – Blog – Blogging is a great way to keep fresh content on your website & another way to give simple free tidbits to add value to your services. If you blog, do it no less than 1 time a week, preferably 3 times a week. You don’t need to write a novel each time, just between 300-500 words, about 2-3 paragraphs. If you go above & beyond of what you say you’re going to do, then people will appreciate it.

I encourage your feedback & input. Do you know of any other ways to generate more business from the internet?