Having a successful website is now more important than ever to any owner of a law firm. However, putting together and actioning a digital marketing plan can be time-consuming and requires a lot of research to stay up to date with digital trends. Aspects of digital marketing, such as search engine optimisation, can also take time for their impacts to show. Due to this, it is essential to be patient. There are four main components of digital marketing that need attention to generate website traffic and, most importantly, leads. These four components are search engine optimisation (SEO), paid ads (PPC), social media, and an engaging content plan.
Why is it important to plan your digital marketing?
Having a plan in place and ways to gauge success is extremely important. Many law firms will put money into their digital marketing, and it will end up being wasted due to a lack of plan and direction. It will waste money and time if you aren’t able to fit digital marketing actions into a broader strategy.
To put together a useful plan, you will need to consider your target audience and review how they currently interact with your content online, i.e. what’s boosting engagement and what is not. You can then use this information to create a plan to give you a competitive edge and attract more users to your site. Suppose you are not sure where to start. In that case, this guide can help you understand the basics of the four components of digital marketing and how they can work together to complement each other within your digital marketing strategy.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
SEO is the best way to attract potential clients to your firm’s website organically. The whole point of SEO is to make sure that search engines can recognise your website and understand that your website has value. Search engines like Google will then rank your website higher up the search engine results page (SERP), and people are more likely to click on results higher up the page. So if a potential client searches “lawyer in London” or any other location, if your site is higher up the page, you will get more traffic. Search engines are likely to be the main way potential clients will find you, so working hard on an SEO strategy is a good use of time and requires no extra cost once you know what you are doing.
Why is SEO important for law firms?
Due to the law industry being so competitive, it is important to get your company viewed by as many people as you can and ranking high on SERP will do just this.
How to generate success with SEO
One thing to note about SEO is that it takes time and your site will never be fully optimised. SEO is compromised by various factors, one of the most important being the use of keywords. You can use sites like ahrefs and SEMrush to easily do keyword research for your field and find keywords that are being searched for a lot, but maybe are less competitive. Optimising your pages for these specific keywords will make your website rank higher up the SERP when the queries are searched for.
Another more recent addition to SEO is your core web vitals. Pagespeed has always been an SEO factor but not general user experience is more of an indicator. Core web vitals look at the specific time it takes to load larger parts of the page, how long until the site is interactive and how much-unexpected shift there is in the page after it has loaded. You can use Ahrefs and SEMrush to review these factors, but you can also use lighthouse which is a free Google tool that breaks down your core web vitals.
Paid Search (PPC)
A more rapid way to generate traffic to your page is through the use of paid search. This can be done on Google and Bing, though Google is more popular. For paid ads, you can bid on certain keywords to appear above the organic results. You can also bid to display ads throughout Google’s display network to increase brand identity and increase clicks. PPC is great for quickly getting clicks and insights into your audience, but it can be expensive when not watched closely.
How to spend less on PPC
An important note for PPC is to not bid on generic terms like “lawyer,” not only will these have high competition and be an expensive word to bid for, but it doesn’t have any intent. People may search “lawyer” for a number of reasons and not actually be a potential client. Someone may search it to find out the correct spelling or to find out about law as a career path. If you are showing your ads to these people, you are wasting your money. You can save money on PPC by targeting high intent keywords such as “English divorce lawyer in Manchester” this will have less competition due to being a more specific long-tail keyword. More specific keywords mean you can link more specific landing pages, increasing your ad quality score and likely decreasing ad bounce rate. Having a successful PPC strategy can also benefit your SEO because more people will be engaging with your site, which will signal to search engines that your content is useful.
PPC can be difficult to get set up, and it can be worth seeking the help of an expert to ensure your campaign set-up makes sense.
Social Media
Social media can be a difficult way for a lawyer to get leads if not done correctly. A good way to get engagement is with eyecatching infographics and informative articles related to your field of law. Try to start a conversation with previous and potential clients. Different sites will also provide different levels of engagement on different topics, so it’s good to try a couple and find out what works best for you and what you feel comfortable with. It’s good to base what sites you use on your target demographic. For example, if you specialise in corporate law, then Linkedin may be the best way to connect with professionals who are more likely to be interested in your services. Meanwhile, sites like Tik Tok have a much younger demographic.
It is also worth remembering that paid ads can also be done on social media. Facebook especially has a very accessible ads centre to set up a variety of ad types that can be extremely targeted (you can even target members of specific groups and people who like a specific page). Another good thing about Facebook ads is you can use an eye-catching lead generation campaign where people interested in your services can very simply fill out their details, and you can get in touch with them to discuss their needs.
Content
Having good content is the root of the other digital marketing components. It would be challenging to work on SEO if you don’t have any engaging content. PPC will be useless if you don’t have appropriate and exciting landing pages for your ads, and blogs are a great thing to share on social media to start a conversation.
Informational blogs and how-to guides are a great way to attract potential clients to your sites. When creating content built around highly searched topics, which can be found through SEMrush, ahrefs or even Google Trends, you will bring interested users to your site. Blogs like “How to file for a divorce in the UK” or “How to choose a good law firm” are great to share on social media and draw people to your page to explore insightful content. Sharing knowledge about these topics will also make your law firm more trustworthy and encourage people to contact you.
Sharing regular blogs on your site is a good way to signal to search engines that the site is kept up to date and relevant. This will also lead to higher SERP rankings.
If your content is well crafted, it will encourage other sites to link to your content which is great from an SEO perspective and can be a great way to get referral traffic.
Digital marketing is essential in order to grow your law practice’s online presence and therefore increase traffic and leads. Having a strategy that connects SEO, PPC, social media and content is the best way to ensure the long term growth of your British law firm. With more and more people searching for a law practice using the internet, there’s never been a better time to use all the tools on offer to you.
If you have any questions on setting up your digital marketing strategy or feel like you will need assistance in attracting the right kind of client, make sure to get in contact with the experts at Innocent Digital who specialise in digital marketing for lawyers.
