Most people say the hardest part about doing anything – like reaching your career goals – is just starting. If you just started your own law firm, you may think the hardest part is behind you. This may be true in some ways, but many new lawyers don’t understand that the hardest part about starting your own practice is business development and getting your potential clients’ attention.
The legal industry is incredibly saturated, no matter your geographic location. You can find a law firm on almost every block in major cities.
This means if you’re just starting to seek new clients, as a lawyer, you’ll need to differentiate yourself and your new law firm from local competitors. This can be much more difficult than it seems at face value. And furthermore, professors in law school don’t teach you this. They just teach you how to solve people’s legal problems.
The best and most foolproof strategy for client acquisition is essentially the same for all lawyers. The way that the marketing strategy is carried out, however, will depend on the specific needs of the law firm.
New Lawyers: How To Get New Clients
The way to get clients as a new lawyer essentially boils down to a few select digital marketing techniques.
These techniques include:
- Search engine optimization (SEO), which helps your website rank higher in the organic search results
- Paid online advertising, either using PPC management, Local Service Ads, or social media ads management
- Optimized website design, which helps ensure that your website is built for increased visibility on search engines, as well as for conversions
How a Brand New Law Firm Can Get New Clients
If you’re a new lawyer, you may think that actually starting your own law practice is the biggest hurdle to overcome in your career. What many new lawyers don’t realize is that overall business development, implementing solid marketing efforts, and getting new legal clients is actually the biggest hurdle to overcome. After all, you went to law school to practice law, not to learn the best digital marketing strategy. It’s time to stop relying on other lawyers to refer clients to you. You can get your own paying clients. But how? The best way for a new law firm to get clients is to:- Create an aesthetically pleasing, functional, and optimized law firm website
- Create plenty of informative pages and blogs on your law firm’s website based on data-driven keyword research
- Work on your law firm’s social media presence (Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.)
- Get your name, biography, and website on a legal directory like Justia
- Ask former clients and colleagues to leave you positive Google reviews for the sake of reputation management
- Get your law firm’s name out there with Google and social media ads
Especially for a new lawyer, this is the best way to get clients.
How Do Prospective Clients Look For Law Firms?
Let’s break down the 57% of clients who searched for a lawyer on their own. How exactly did they search for one? The legal report states that 17% of clients searched for a lawyer via the lawyer’s website, and 17% searched for a lawyer via search engines like Google.
What should this data say to you, as someone with a new private practice who’s trying to bring in new clients?
It should say that you need an attractive, informative, and functional website. You also need to show up first on the search engine results pages when potential legal clients search for the services your law firm offers. And you need high-quality search engine marketing in order to reach both of these goals.
How to Get New Clients as a Solo Lawyer With Digital Marketing Services
Whether you’re a brand new personal injury lawyer, criminal defense lawyer, probate lawyer, bankruptcy lawyer, or family lawyer, the best way to bring in more clients is through website development, search engine optimization (SEO), and online advertising.
Build a High-Performance Website for Your Law Firm
You first need an attractive and functional website before you actually send clients to the website. When a potential client first sees your site, they’re immediately going to make a judgment on how it looks. Are the logos, colors, fonts, and overall formatting of the site visually pleasing?
Side Note: If your firm’s website is built by a large-scale cookie-cutter law firm marketing agency, like FindLaw, your website isn’t going to look any different than the other standard, cookie-cutter legal sites out there. Keep this in mind when you’re choosing law firm marketing agencies.
Next, they’re going to focus on finding information about you and your law firm, as well as their specific legal issue, to determine whether or not they want to work with you or other attorneys in their area.
So, are all the practice areas on your website in plain view? Does each practice area page provide a prospective client with enough helpful information to determine an adequate solution to their problem? Is your site overall easy to navigate?
Basically, if your site is unattractive, unfunctional, or uninformative, potential clients will leave your website and move on to another legal firm’s site in a matter of seconds.
Digital Logic offers law firm website development services as part of several marketing packages.
Invest in Search Engine Optimization Services to Attract Clients
Once your legal website is up and running, it’s time to get clients’ attention. But how?
We recommend SEO for law firms.
Keyword Research
A good SEO strategy starts with keyword research. In order to secure more clients online, you first need to understand what your target audience is searching for. The best way to determine this is to perform a lawyer competitive analysis and use various keyword research programs to see how potential clients search for lawyers, like yourself.
Many lawyers want to optimize their website for more obvious keyphrases, such as [Location] Personal Injury Lawyer, Criminal Defense Lawyer in [Location], [Location Accident Lawyer], and the list goes on.
While our marketing agency certainly optimizes for high-performance keywords like these, it’s important to remember that your prospective clients may also be searching for relevant questions, such as, “Can I sue for a car accident?” or “Can I sue for a slip and fall accident?”
In order to rank for the higher-level keywords in the legal industry, you also have to research supporting topics for those hard-to-rank-for keywords.
This brings us to content marketing strategy.
Content Marketing for Lawyers
Remember, the majority of your potential clients are going to be searching for legal advice and counsel via Google. You want the content on your website to pop up on the first page of the search engine results, preferably within the first three results on the first page.
In order to make this happen with law firm marketing, all of your practice area pages and relevant blogs need to be fully optimized by a team of SEO experts.
Digital Logic offers expert content marketing for lawyers.
Technical SEO
Next comes technical SEO work. Technical SEO refers to changes to your website that your website visitors don’t see. The goal is to optimize your site from the “back end” so that it compliments Google’s algorithm.
Examples of technical SEO services can include:
- Technical audits
- Page speed optimization
- Image compression
- URL structure optimization
- Caching performance
- Finding and fixing internal errors
- Log file analysis
- Website structure optimization
Local SEO
All law firms – new or old, large or small – need to get their name out to the community in order to thrive.
There are many ways to accomplish this – through billboards along the interstate, local TV commercials, or radio ads, for example. But again, the vast majority of consumers seeking a lawyer will search for legal services on search engines, like Google.
Therefore, you need to ensure that when potential clients are typing [your location + one of your legal practice areas] into the search bar, you are one of the first law firms that they see in their local search engine results pages (SERPs).
This is done using local SEO for lawyers.
Most of our law firm clients come to us and wonder why they’re only getting new clients through a legal referral service and not through their websites. In many cases, it’s because their law firms are popping up on the 15th or even the 2nd page of the local search results. You’re not going to get more clients like this because, think about it, when is the last time you have gone to the 15th page of Google search results for anything? Probably never.
In fact, nearly 100% of Googlers don’t really look past the first few results on the first page of Google because they want solutions. Google provides searchers with excellent solutions without them needing to scroll too far.
So, the key here is making Google believe that your law firm is also a viable solution for specific legal problems.
Run Optimized Google Ads Campaigns Online to Get More Law Firm Clients
Another effective way to appeal to your target market is through ads on Google or social media.
PPC Advertising for Lawyers
PPC ads are online advertisements that cost a certain amount when a user clicks on them. When you run ads on Google, you are essentially paying to send qualified traffic to your legal website.
Online ads are an effective way to attract clients and, therefore, a worthy investment for most law firms.
While the basis of PPC management is fairly straightforward, running a great ad campaign that secures a steady stream of legal clients is much more complex than most think.
It’s not just posting ads and waiting for people to click. There has to be an individualized strategy for PPC ads in order to get the most bang for your buck.
The Google Ads experts at Digital Logic know how to do just that by:
- Adjusting bids,
- Adjusting ad placement,
- Making geofencing improvements,
- Adjusting target audiences,
- Researching relevant keywords,
- Monitoring calls,
- And so much more.
Our online advertising specialists improve your campaigns until we’re sure that they’re bringing in the best ROI.
Learn more about PPC management for lawyers.
Local Service Ads for Law Firms
Local service ads are similar to PPC ads in that they pop up on Google when a potential client in your area searches for something relevant to your law practice. The main difference lies in how you pay for these ads.
Instead of paying for every single click, you’re paying every single time someone contacts you through the ad. Essentially, you’re paying a certain amount of money for every single lead you get.
Another perk of Google Service Ads is that you can dispute any phone calls that were not in reference to your service areas. When Digital Logic runs Local Service Ads for lawyers, we call and make the dispute on your behalf.
This form of online advertising has brought great success for many of our clients.
Remarketing Ads for Lawyers
Remarketing ads are targeted toward people who have visited your website before. This type of ad is tailored specifically to those who are further along the buyer’s journey. Our marketing team uses specific language to encourage website visitors to engage with your website again and hopefully hire you to take on their family law, criminal defense, estate planning, or personal injury case.
Remarketing ads can be an incredibly powerful marketing tool, especially in the legal profession.
Think about it: how much convincing or encouragement do you need before you finally invest your time, money, or energy into a certain product or service? Most of the time, you need to read up on your specific problem as well as a variety of solutions to your problem. You then need time to think: “Can I solve this problem by myself, or do I really need this product or service?”
If you decide you need outside help to solve your problem, you’re then going to ponder: “What product or service is the best solution to my problem?” Because there are millions of businesses out there offering relatively the same products and services. Finally, you may need a couple of shoves before you finally spend the money on a product or service to solve your problem.
This is all part of the buyer’s or consumer’s journey.
Every new client of yours is going to go through a similar process before finally investing their money into the services your law practice offers.
However, these clients may need even more encouragement before they finally decide to spend their money on you.
Let’s face it: it’s expensive to solve legal matters, and, in many cases, your client’s finances or, in some cases, freedom, hinges on finding a good law firm to represent them in court.
Remarketing ads essentially exist to help accelerate the normal buyer’s journey so that you can get more clients faster.
Leverage Online Reviews and Legal Directories to Reach More Legal Clients
Another important marketing strategy for new lawyers who are trying to get more clients is increasing their amount of Google reviews and legal directories.
Google Business Listing for Law Firms
Most prospective clients won’t simply hire the first lawyer they come across. So, its helpful to have a good amount of positive reviews under your Google Business Listing.
If you’re a new lawyer, you may not be able to ask past clients for a review, but you could consider asking colleagues, law students, family and friends, etc., to leave a positive review on your Google Business Listing.
Not only do these reviews help your entire site rank better on Google, but they can also help convert prospective clients.
Legal Directories
Market Your Legal Services on Social Media
While most consumers search for legal services on Google and legal directories, they also search for legal services on social media, as well. That’s why it’s important to build a strong social media presence by posting a mix of informative and entertaining content.
At Digital Logic, we always make sure that we add a relevant landing page link on social media posts, as this help directly drive traffic to your legal website. It also provides another ranking signal to Google’s algorithm, helping the algorithm better understand your website as a whole.
Both solo attorneys and entire law firms can benefit from frequent social media posts.
Learn more about our social media services for attorneys.
Work With an Experienced Law Firm Marketing Agency To Get More Clients as a Lawyer
You went to law school to practice law, not to promote yourself and your legal services. So if you’re reading this and feeling overwhelmed about how to get clients in the most effective way possible, you’re not alone.
That’s why so many law firms turn to full-service digital marketing agencies, like Digital Logic.
Our services include SEO, PPC management, social media management, Local Service Ads, web development, content marketing, graphic design, and so much more so that your law firm can get ahead of the local competition.
Let us handing the online marketing while you focus on taking care of your clients.
We offer:
- Personal Injury Lawyer Marketing Services
- Criminal Defense Attorney Marketing Services
- Bankruptcy Lawyer Marketing Services
- Family Law Marketing Services
- Divorce Attorney Marketing Services
- Immigration Lawyer Marketing Services
- Estate Planning Marketing Services
- and more!
Not convinced yet? Check out our case results and then request a quote from one of our SEO specialists.
