Social media is an amazing marketing tool if used properly. Unfortunately, many times law firms invest in this type of marketing they don't do so with an eye on their goals. The result is that they lose out on potential clients because they don't understand how social media marketing works. Many legal firms see social media marketing like blog posts - attracting attention and drawing users in. However, it's so much more in-depth than that. Like all other forms of content marketing social media needs to have high-quality content combined with regular posting on a schedule. Social media posts should also cover a wide range of content from images to video and text.
A marketing channel is any medium that a business seeks to attract prospective clients from. They include things like social media, as well as blog posts, video, and anything that might direct a user back top the company's website or online presence. A channel can also rely on other types of marketing tools like Google analytics to figure out the site or post's search engine rankings. Search terms can help direct prospective clients to a company's website when they're looking for specific search queries.
When investing in these channels, it's vital that the company have a well-defined marketing strategy. The strategy should encompass one or more marketing goals and come in underneath the business's marketing budget. One of the best things about social media marketing is how cost-effective it is. SEO for lawyers can direct potential clients to the firm's website and offer better return on investment than other forms of advertising. But how does a lawyer leverage the outreach power of organic search? Is online search a better medium for landing clients than other methods of advertising? It could be if used properly.
Search optimization is the process of ensuring that search engines rank a post high enough to attract users. A search engine uses automated robots to sift through web pages. When they pass through these pages, they collect details about the content and user experience to send back to the parent search engine. These details help the search engine to register relevant content that the website may have posted.
Obviously, for a company to properly benefit from SEO, they need to have a well-define strategy. An SEO strategy deals with the amount of posts that a company makes, when they make it, what target audience they want to see the posts and a whole slew of other metrics. These metrics help to pinpoint who sees the posts and whether the audience likes it. User experience is a key component of a good SEO strategy since it allows the website owner to better tailor their content to the audience.
Search engine optimization works best with websites, but they can be tied into social media presence as well. When a websites creates a new post, they can schedule to post automatically to different social media outlets. Blogs can therefore tap into the existing audience of a social media page and leverage it for views. The more people see the post and engage with it, the more people will be likely to see the post. Some businesses also use Google ads to help them get more people to see their posts. Google ads rely on search terms and appear on pages via widgets. These ads can pull users from other parts of the internet based on the intent of their searches. Users searching for legal advice, therefore, are more likely to find the lawyer's website.
How does a company develop a social media marketing strategy to get the traffic it wants from its SEO efforts. Defining the marketing goal of the company's online marketing strategy is the first step in crafting a law firm marketing plan that delivers results. This goal should encompass the amount of traffic the company expects to see passing through it's website. Law firm marketing experts can help to define these metrics and give the company some figures to work with.
One of the most important metrics to keep an eye on is bounce rate. When a visitor ends up on a website, they might stick around for a bit. However, if the user hops onto the website and realizes it's not what they're looking for, they immediately leave. The amount of visitors who click onto the website and then click back off immediately compared to the total visitors is the bounce rate. When a website has high bounce rates, it means that their content isn't relevant to the visitors who get directed to their sites. Relevant content is an essential component of ranking highly in SEO ratings. Fixing this issue might require consulting a company that has law firm SEO services as part of their portfolio.
The social media and SEO strategy that a business comes up with should be linked to the business goals. What does the company want to achieve from this investment? Does it want to present itself for potential clients, or does it simply want to have a presence on certain social media platforms? What is the target audience for the content? How does that audience benefit from this content? All of these questions are crucial to crating the right social media strategy for a law firm.
What constitutes good content? The context of good content can be traced back to the earliest days of search engine optimization. During these early days, it was very easy to get ranked on a search engine results page. All a firm had to do was put all they keywords for their legal services on the same page and let the ranking do the rest. Thanks to this low-effort content, many early websites were simply collections of slightly related keyword content. However, this didn't benefit users at all, and the search engines eventually realized that they needed to step up their game.
Google's first major update during this period saw many of these keyword-stuffed pages get kicked off the front page of results. Instead, the search engine started to move towards relevant search results. It achieved this by ranking a page based on the freshness of its content (how often it was updated with new content), its accessibility, and the other websites that it linked to and linked to it. With time, these requirements changed and evolved, because search engines like Google started to see search results in a different light.
Initially, search results would be used to serve ads to individuals based on search terms. However, the search engines realized that the way to reduce bounce rate on websites was to offer users exactly what they were searching for. Google coined the phrase "intent-based search" for this type of search result ranking. So, if a law firm would produce legal content of a consistently high quality, they would rank much higher than other law firms in the same area. Another update allowed for online marketing that offered closer search results higher up the search engine results page (SERP).
A legal marketing plan needs to take general SEO into account, but it can't just stop there. SEO for law firms needs to deal with legal content in such a way to incorporate advanced marketing strategies. For example, a law firm specializing in real estate should produce consistent content to tap into that target client base. Organic search will do the rest and drive traffic towards the website. However, a Legal marketing strategy only starts with the content on the page. For a successful law firm marketing plan, a company needs to reach further. Luckily, Google has provided an easy way of establishing an online presence through Google My Business.
Google My Business is, in essence, a profile for a small business. Anyone can make a Google My Business account but having ownership of the business address grants certain privileges. Google allows a business, such as a lawyer, to make a local business listing including their real-world address. This address ties into local search terms which can allow a business to take advantage of Google Maps for placement. In addition to the location showing up on Google Maps after a search, a business also has the option to mention the services to clients that they offer. A law firm marketing plan would do well to include their Google My Business listing in addition to their other legal marketing strategy tactics.
Digital marketing incorporates things like social media, but it also requires a website for professional purposes. Online platforms such as Google My Business and social media need to tie into a business's push to have their bespoke website show up in the results. Organic traffic from search is best utilized when a business uses a low-competition primary keyword. Keywords should be a significant part of a business's marketing strategy. Having keywords relevant to the business is a crucial step in getting search engines to pay attention to the website.
Keywords are not just for the website either. Firm website design must also have a place for regular blog updates. Remember, the ranking a web page gets depending on how often its content is refreshed. While landing pages might not need to be refreshed often, having new content coming out from a blog is another critical step towards ranking well on online search results. A blog is only as good as its audience however, and cultivating an online community can help to boost a blog's traffic and its authority score.
In the older days of website design, a professional would need to attach a forum to their blog to allow for discussion. These days it's a lot easier as blogs usually come with an option to enable commenting for anyone who wants to do so. Engaging users in conversation can help to drive the popularity of a blog and answer pointed questions as well as demonstrate expertise in a topic. Community involvement can also be garnered through social media pages. Having a page for professional purposes is a good option for lawyers since it gives them a presence online that they can use to comment and advise free of charge. Investing this time can pay dividends in potential clients.
Another thing that professionals might want to consider when setting up their online presence is another digital marketing strategy that utilizes emails and newsletters. There are many things written about email marketing strategy, both good and bad. However, many a digital marketing company can swear by the effectiveness of an email marketing campaign. In these campaigns, blog entries draw users to the website which then asks them to sign up with their email addresses. Since these email addresses are being collected for a professional purpose, it's important that they don't end up being harvested by bots for spam emails.
Instead, the legal firm must manage the email list responsibly. This management includes adding the subscribers to a potential email newsletter listing and sending out newsletters over time. Some companies limit themselves to one email newsletter a week while others send out updates daily. One of the most vital rules of thumb to pay attention to is that your newsletter should never waste the reader's time. Direct mail campaigns are designed to draw users in and get them subscribed to the email list. Email campaigns can be hugely successful for professional purposes if executed properly.
When we covered content production on a schedule, we mentioned content strategy. A content strategy may have several goals. One of the more common aims of setting up a strategy for content posting is the establish oneself as a subject matter expert. A law firm marketing plan should encompass social media strategy along with fresh content posting on a schedule. While building content for online purposes, it's vital that this content be useful. If you're making content that doesn't have a particular value to the client, they won't bother to read it. Valuable content equals potential clients.
Updating the blog makes no sense if no one knows that it's updated. That's partially why your online content should be tied to one of more social media channels. Each social media channel that references your blog entries offers the potential for more outreach. Social media also encourages discussion so being sure about your sources and conclusions is essential to making a difference as a lawyer. What sort of content should you create? There are a lot of places a lawyer can look to for content. Some of these include:
With so much content being produced, it's easy to think that your audience will all see your posts. However, there's an important consideration most new online marketing teams miss. Responsive design refers to how a website deals with shifting screen size between desktop and tablets or phones. Over 80% of current users of the internet are on mobile devices. Because of this statistic, it's essential that responsive design be a core part of your business website. Additionally, Google and other search engines tend to penalize sites without responsiveness built in by avoiding sharing results for that page if the user is on mobile.
