Digital Marketing For Law Firms: An Ultimate Guide

 

What is Digital Marketing for Law Firms?

Digital marketing is the strategic use of platforms and tools to promote your business and its services to an active target audience. The aims of a digital marketing strategy are usually to boost online visibility, increase website traffic and see an uptick in leads and sales.

A great digital marketing strategy covers a variety of techniques, from search engine optimisation (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising to email marketing and social media promotion.

In the legal sector in particular, digital marketing can help law firms manage their online reputation and be seen in places where potential customers might be unknowingly looking for their services. This forward-thinking approach plays a pivotal role in business growth, especially in a sector as competitive as the legal industry.

 

Why is Digital Marketing Important?

Did you know that nearly 50% of consumers use the internet to search for legal advice or information before anything else? This means any law firm not playing an active role in improving their online presence will inherently be at a disadvantage compared to the rest of the sector.

Digital marketing in a law firm is a proven method for increased business growth. An innovative legal digital marketing strategy can transform a law firm’s online presence, enabling firms to reach a wider and more targeted audience.

By consistently placing your business where potential clients are active, you gradually start to build the most important part of your relationship with customers – trust.

In the legal sector, 95% of consumers base their loyalty on trust. The more you’re seen in relevant places, the more likely a new customer will trust your business.

It’s the rule of seven. An individual needs to see your brand at least seven times before making a purchase decision. Law firms can achieve this by utilising a blend of organic and paid digital marketing strategies that showcase their expertise and build trust with new customers.

But there’s much more to a digital marketing strategy than the opportunity to build trust with clients. Below are eight of the key advantages of digital marketing for legal firms including:

• Increased leads and sales

• Higher engagement

• Organic growth

• Measurable results

• Targeted reach

• Increased visibility

• Cost efficiency

• Enhanced brand awareness

 

First Steps To Marketing Your Law Firm

Before you start your digital marketing strategy, there are a few things you need to get in line first.

Each of these play a key role in how effective your strategy will be and how potential clients will react to your marketing efforts. 

 

Brand Identity

Your brand is everything. From the message, tone of voice, and visuals you present, a cohesive and well-defined brand identity is fundamental for any law firm.

It serves as the foundation upon which you build your marketing efforts, providing consistency and clarity across all digital platforms.

A strong brand identity helps distinguish your law firm from competitors and communicates your values and unique services to potential clients.

Before embarking on a digital marketing strategy, establishing a fully realised brand identity ensures every piece of content resonates with your target audience, builds trust, and boosts your reputation.

 

Website and UX

What’s the point in investing in a digital strategy when your website isn’t up to scratch? It’s a hard truth but if your website isn’t delivering a great user experience, you’ve already lost any potential leads you might have converted online.

It takes a user just 50 milliseconds to make their first impression of a website, often causing them to leave in less than 10 seconds. So, in an industry where first impressions count, your website acts as the digital ‘face’ of your firm and the first point of contact for potential clients seeking legal advice or services online.

A well-structured website, with relevant content, clear navigation, fast loading times and a streamlined design, acts as the bedrock of any digital marketing campaign. This indicates to potential clients that your business is professional, up to the industry standard, and can be trusted.

User experience is more than just great content. Fast loading speeds and mobile-friendly design are two of the most important factors for any modern website, often being the make or break factor on whether an optimised website ranks highly on the first page of Google or not.

It can be hard to know when the right time is to update your website, but by taking a step back and thinking about how effective your current website is, you’ll be on the right track to increased business growth.

 

A Guide to Digital Marketing for Law Firms

There is no one-size-fits-all solution to digital marketing for law firms.

Each business has unique needs, target audiences, and objectives that require a tailored approach.

While it’s tempting to single out specific strategies, the most impactful method is to embrace a holistic approach that combines various techniques.

Below are the five key strategies businesses should consider when creating their digital marketing plan:

 

SEO

You’ve probably heard of Search engine optimisation. It’s a digital marketing strategy that helps get your website organically seen by search engines and users actively searching for specific keywords and phrases.

With one in three adults using the internet to seek legal help, SEO helps law firms consistently keep their business in the shop window to potential customers by ranking high on competitive search engine results pages – think of the power of seven I mentioned earlier.

Let’s start with the keywords. These are the exact phrases searched by users and what digital marketers will use to base a large part of their SEO strategy around.

As a rule of thumb, the shorter the keyword, the harder it is to rank for.

For example, ranking in the top position for the keyword “law firm” will be nearly impossible. Instead, try targeting “Manchester Law Firm” or “Business Lawyers London”.

By adding extra words you turn a short-tail keyword into a medium or long-tail keyword.

But enough of the technical jargon, what do you do with these keywords?

You start by optimising existing pages on your website with the keywords – but be careful not to keyword stuff, as this can actually have a negative impact on your SEO efforts.

One of the most popular methods of SEO is content marketing. This means creating educational blog posts that target these keywords. The aim of this is to increase online visibility and establish your business as a thought leader.

Keeping this content fresh and up to date is a great best practice to consider, as search engines value content that reflects the present moment – especially in the legal sector where laws and regulations frequently change.

However, SEO is much more than just keywords and content marketing.

It’s a dense, complicated and fast-moving field that takes years to fully understand. That’s why we’ve included a brief overview of the three pillars of SEO to start you on your journey:

• Onsite SEO: Onsite SEO is the process of optimising the content on your website itself to rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). This includes optimising body text, page titles, meta descriptions, H1 tags, image alt text and other elements that show up directly in the source code of a website.
• Offsite SEO: Offsite SEO looks at factors outside the website, helping it gain online authority through other sites. Generating quality backlinks from reputable websites plays a key role in offsite SEO, with these links signalling to search engines that your website can be trusted.
• Technical SEO: Technical SEO focuses on improving a website’s backend structure and foundation so that search engines can crawl your website correctly. It looks at page loading speeds, mobile responsiveness and the structure of a website’s internal linking system, amongst other factors.

 

Local SEO

Following on from our last tip, optimising for local SEO can play a major part in the success of any SME law firm’s digital marketing strategy.

46% of all Google searches have local intent. This means that the user is searching for something specific to their area (such as “lawyers near me”).

As most seasoned legal professionals know, locality plays a big role in lead generation as clients typically want to partner with lawyers who live in the same city, town or state.

Optimising for local SEO can help increase your visibility to these potential clients looking for your services, which could then result in boosted lead conversion rates.

 

Email Marketing

Outside of SEO, there’s still a whole world of digital marketing to explore as a legal practice.

Email marketing is an extremely direct form of digital marketing that can help your business boost its brand awareness and be placed right in front of the people you want to reach.

However, as I’m sure you know, there are many rules, regulations and laws around sending marketing emails.

For example, customers are only able to receive your marketing material via email if they have given their explicit consent to receive it.

That’s why we recommend cold emailing as a technique. By emailing these people with personalised introductions to you and your business, you could open the door to new opportunities.

Personalising these emails allows the recipient to understand why you’ve selected to email them, rather than it just being a cookie-cutter message.

There’s a lot to master with email marketing, but our biggest tip is to keep it brief. Nobody wants to read paragraphs upon paragraphs of text in an email.

If you already have contacts you could reach out to from a mailing list, consider sending a monthly newsletter to keep past clients in the loop and remain at the forefront of their minds when they need legal advice or services.

 

Social Media

Boosting your social media presence is a quintessential component of a sound digital marketing strategy for law firms, especially when it’s backed by strategic social media SEO and well-curated posts.

Social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are not just communication channels; they are also significant search engines in their own right.

By optimising your social media profiles, posts, and hashtags for search, you can extend your firm’s online visibility and organic reach.

Moreover, targeted posts—those designed with a clear understanding of your client’s profile and their needs—can resonate more deeply with your audience, fostering engagement, trust, and brand loyalty.

Thus, a robust social media presence, fortified with Social Media SEO and targeted content, can spell the difference between a law firm that merely exists online and a law firm that thrives online.

 

PPC Ad Campaigns

All of the digital marketing strategies listed so far are either organic or direct techniques that will cost your business little to no money to execute. 

However, as the name suggests, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising will cost your business money and needs to be factored into your marketing budget.

PPC advertising can be done on most platforms, from Google and Bing to Meta (Facebook and Instagram) and LinkedIn. Truthfully, it entirely depends on where your target audience is.

Let’s take Google Ads as an example. A great Google PPC campaign involves searching for the cost-per-click (CPC) of any given keyword and targeting this with an optimised landing page. 

Finding the right keyword to target is a balancing act.

A keyword with a high CPC will be more competitive to generate leads from but will usually result in higher conversions. On the other hand, keywords with a low CPC will be easier to rank for but might not result in many leads.

One way of managing this is by only making your ad active on specific days and hours throughout the week, maximising the times when your target audience is looking for your services.

Your landing page should also be structured slightly differently from an average service page. The sole purpose of this page is to convert leads – and it needs to show it.

Clear calls to action, intuitive layout, concise messaging and a dedicated sales-minded approach can ensure that your PPC ads convert leads for your legal practice and fuel business growth.

 

Online Reviews For Law Firms

As we’ve established, a law firm’s reputation is everything.

So, what can we do to make sure your online presence represents your legal practices’s commitment to excellence and immediately builds trust with potential customers?

One of the most effective ways to do this is by encouraging your customers to post online reviews.

Reviews on websites such as Google Reviews, Trustpilot and Yelp act as a social signal to clients and search engines that your business can be trusted to deliver exceptional service. These reviews can massively increase your online reputation by:

• Showcasing your industry expertise to potential customers.
• Highlighting your dedication to providing a great customer experience.
• Building trust with your customers based on a track history of consistently outstanding results.
• Influencing undecided customers to choose your business for their needs.
• Demonstrating to search engines that your business is authoritative, trustworthy and professional.

Let’s explore how you can build online reviews as part of your legal digital marketing strategy.

 

How To Build Up Reviews For A Legal Practice

Compared to other digital marketing strategies, building up a catalogue of online reviews is much more straightforward.

That’s because you’ve already built a relationship with your customers and have access to their contact information. All you need to do is ask.

Sending a friendly follow up email to a past client and asking for a review on a platform of your choice has a noticeably high conversion rate.

The worst case scenario is that they ignore your email, or worse, leave a bad review. So, how do you deal with that?

 

How To Deal With Bad Reviews

Not all reviews will be good reviews (unless you’re a truly exceptional business).

But that’s not a bad thing. Negative reviews present businesses with an opportunity to showcase their customer service skills, transparency and ability to communicate with clients.

First, you should make sure the review is legitimate. Is this someone you have worked with in the past? Or does it look like it could be a bot or a fake account? If it’s the latter, report it to Google (or whatever platform the review was left on).

Once you’ve ensured the review is real, it’s time to respond. Possibly the worst thing you could do is ignore the review.

Responding in a clear, concise and open manner that highlights reasons why your service may not have been to the highest standard and what you have done to make the situation better is a great way of switching a negative situation into a positive one.

It shows that you are confident enough to respond to criticism, take accountability and are on top of these kinds of things.

However, if someone truly was not satisfied with your service, you should offer to address their complaint offline to reach a mutually beneficial resolution.

 

Challenges of Law Firm Digital Marketing

While digital marketing provides immense opportunities for law firms to reach and engage with potential clients, it also presents unique challenges. Some of these challenges include:

 

Cost

No matter your industry, one of the most significant challenges of any digital marketing strategy is the cost.

Executing a digital marketing strategy that involves SEO, UX web design, email marketing, social media and PPC doesn’t come cheap.

And nobody wants to get halfway into a marketing strategy only to run out of budget without converting any leads. Plus, you don’t want to be relying on potential leads coming through the door in order to continue your marketing efforts.

You can cut costs by doing things internally rather than going to an expert, but this presents a whole new set of challenges that we’ll get to in a few point’s time.

What you need is to be smart and create a marketing budget.

Knowing exactly how much you have to spend over a certain period of time can help your business understand the most cost-effective methods to achieve success with your marketing strategy.

 

Clear Strategy

Once your budget is set, you need to map out your marketing strategy.

Too many businesses attempt to hit the ground running with their marketing efforts without thinking about their end goal, how they’re going to get there and what milestones they need to set themselves along the way.

The result can be a meandering, aimless and expensive strategy that rarely results in increased revenue, brand awareness or leads.

Instead, think about where you want to be seen, who you want to be seen by, how you can be discovered in these places and what you have the budget to realistically achieve.

 

Measuring ROI

Return on investment (ROI) is the aim of any marketing strategy. Nobody wants to be spending money on internet marketing without seeing a penny come back.

Understanding what metrics you need to measure (such as impressions, traffic, sales and conversions) is key to your success.

Tools like Google Analytics can help you accurately measure your marketing efforts, with this data being key to how you evaluate and adjust your marketing decisions.

 

In-House vs Outsourced Digital Marketing

The age-old question: should you hire a professional to execute your marketing strategy or keep it all in-house?

Unless you’re a super lawyer with a specialist background in SEO and web design, we recommend you hire an industry expert.

Delivering a digital marketing strategy takes time. It doesn’t deliver results overnight and knowing the best way to reach your target audience takes experience.

A specialist can help demystify the intimidating world of marketing, allowing you to feel in control of your law firm’s success while also being able to focus on what you do best – managing your business. 

In recent years, some law firms have started building their own in-house marketing team, which allows them to hyper-focus on their company’s growth. 

However, this isn’t an option for everyone, especially when you consider the cost of hiring a new member of staff far exceeds the cost of hiring an experienced marketing studio – so choose wisely.

 

Conclusion

Digital marketing can make your law firm more visible, engaging, and accessible to your target audience. It plays a key role in fuelling business growth and establishing yourself as a modern leader within a highly competitive legal sector.

But it’s hard to do alone. Partnering with a specialist digital marketing company allows professional lawyers to focus on growing their business and delivering excellent customer service, without needing to worry about the online growth of their company.

Get in touch with our team to learn more. We can craft a strategy tailor-made to your business needs, budget and goals.