Although having an operational and engaging website to market your law firm is essential, it’s not enough to set up a website and let it be. The internet is a living organism, and it adapts and evolves every day. Even if your law practice has taken the time to set up an organized, informative, and client-centered website that communicates your firm’s mission and values clearly and effectively, search engine algorithms like Google are constantly updating their criteria for evaluating and ranking websites. The ranking algorithms prioritize websites that are refreshed and updated regularly with keyword-heavy (yet naturally sounding) content that anticipates and addresses common search queries.
You have to think of it as a hub
If your website is just sitting there alone, it won’t be seen or acknowledged by search engines – and that’s really what we’re talking about. Search engines are the source of most legal information these days, and therefor, they’re the source of most legal clients. If you want to learn about how people actually choose an attorney – read this.
Search engines like Google use algorithms to assess a searcher’s question and deliver accurate, reliable, and relevant results. For example, if someone types “personal injury lawyer near me” into the search bar, the algorithm will use the searcher’s location, the authority of nearby law firms, websites with relevant keywords, and many other factors to provide the searcher with website results that best anticipate and address their needs. Law firms that invest in an integrated marketing strategy tend to see much more measurable results than those whose only digital marketing effort is constrained to building a website as a one-time endeavor. Google’s search engine algorithm favors law firms that prioritize a law firm digital marketing strategy that is interconnected, integrated, and consistent across all platforms.
Reviews are positive feedback loops
Reviews are more than just a rating system, they’re essential to basic digital visibility. They play a major role in how sites like Google decide who to promote. If a law firm has no reviews, to Google, it’s like they don’t exist. If a law firm has a constant stream of high quality reviews that appear on the local Google platform, Google assumes that law firm is the go-to resource in the area and they start to promote that firm above and beyond what they do for other firms. The key is, the reviews you get don’t just live on your website, they exist on other websites, like Google, and they point back to your site. This is how they essentially function like a feedback loop. The more positive reviews you get, the more you are promoted to new clients, which in turn brings in more reviews.
Local content connects where it matters
If your site doesn’t have a high quality blog, almost nothing else matters. That’s how important it is to have a constant stream of good content. In particular for lawyers, you need content that connects to local issues. Legal lead generation is almost 100% local. Nobody is looking for an attorney in a different state. Rarely are they even looking in a different town. If you’re in San Diego, you need to be putting out content that applies specifically to local California law in whatever area you operate. Google is very smart, when it is deciding who to promote, it looks at everything. If your site is just sitting all by itself, that is where Google is going to leave you. If your site is connected, constantly, to every issue that gets clicks in a local market, you will be seen as an expert in that market and promoted as such.
Analyze the local market first
If you’re serious about upping your game and bringing in new clients, step one is analysis. You need to see what search terms are most active in your local market and where you stand among your competitors. From there, you can create a roadmap of what you need to do next. But first, you need the information.
