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Top Internet Marketing Tactics for Law Firms in 2012

Top Internet Marketing Strategies for Aggressive Law Firms in 2012

The tactics below are often overlooked by most law firms and we believe through our experiences that their importance in 2012 will only grow!

Conversion Rate Optimization

You’re site ranks top three for most of the keywords you’re targeting, but you’re still hungry to boost lead count and revenue. Where do you turn? Try Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). CRO is the art and science of improving your website’s conversion rate. Here are some tips to help improve your conversions in 2012:

Has it been a few years since your last website design? Consider redesigning your website with two key things in mind; usability for your visitors/clients and a clean design that keeps your company site looking modern, professional, and approachable. Make sure that you are also having the site designed for viewing on different platforms including mobile platforms.
Is your content engaging, educational and persuasive? Focus on your reader’s experience and make sure that your copy is engaging, educational, persuasive, and clearly articulates who you are and what they can do on your site. Make sure you have a clear call to action on every page (what do you want the reader to do after they have read your content?).

Measurement

Do you know where your leads are coming from? Do you know what you’re most profitable keywords are? Do you know how much you’re paying per lead on PPC, SEO and Yellow Pages? How about those FindLaw and Lawyers.com listings? If not, it’s time to take online measurement and analytics seriously. In the past we have used Google Analytics for tracking fluctuations in traffic. Moving into 2012 we’re stepping up our game with goal tracking and unique phone numbers (that integrate with Google Analytics) to provide actionable data that will help us better calculate ROI for our client’s campaigns.

Remember that every campaign must be profitable. Whether you’re using PPC, SEO, lead generations or Yellow Pages. If the marketing channel isn’t producing a positive ROI, kill it.

Interested in learning more about analyics? We recommend the Google Analytics training session by ROI Revolution and the book Web Analytics 2.0 by Avinish Kaushik. If you’re looking to track leads with a unique trackable phone number that integrates with Google Analytics, we recommend IfByPhone.com.

Reputation Management

In October of 2010 Google began showing links to Place pages near the organic listings. On your Place page, Google is compiling reviews of your business from other websites and directories.

Here’s a screen shot of a typical organic listing with the link to the Place page located to the far right:

With Google adding a link to your Place page from the organic results, your reputation (good or bad) is open for the world to see. There is no better time than right now to begin building up your online reputation by obtaining quality reviews from current and past clients.

Take a look at some of these comments that Google is showing on Place pages:

Would you contact any of those attorneys after reading their reviews?

Here’s a question for you: How many of those reviews were written by competitors? Here’s a story about an attorney writing negative reviews about his competitors. Could it happen to you? Absolutely. Are you prepared for negative reviews?

If you haven’t put a program in place to help protect or improve your brand image, now is definitely the time!

Here are some basic steps to get you started:

Purchase the following extensions for “YourBrandName”: .com, .net, .org, .us, .biz…etc
Launch a one page WordPress website on each of the domain names with information about your firm.
Purchase the following extensions for “YourBrandNameSucks”: .com, .net, .org
Put together a document that has a list of places where someone could give you a positive review. When you have a client that is satisfied with your services, ask that they write a testimonial on a website that accepts reviews.

Google Maps/Places Optimization

If there’s one big thing we’ve learned in 2010, it’s that Google is taking local search results VERY seriously. If you haven’t already verified your Google listing, you are behind the curve, but even if you’ve verified your listing, you need to take steps to make your Places page the best it can possibly be:

Submit your website to the Universal Business Listing (UBL) service. When optimizing a website for the organic results, it’s all about acquiring high quality backlinks. But when you want to rank well in Google Places/Maps, you need to obtain citations from as many directories and websites as possible. The UBL gives your Places page a jump start by submitting your business information to some of the most popular and widely respective directories on the Internet. The $49 option seems to work well for most clients.
Upload relevant videos and pictures to your Place page.
Write an engaging description about your firm, and use your primary keywords when possible. However, don’t feel like you need to use any of your keywords more than once.
As we said above in the reputation management section, encourage your happy customers to write a review for your law firm.
Make sure your firm is setup under the right categories. If you’re an injury attorney, “Personal Injury Attorney” is definitely better than just “Attorney”.

Are you serious about your Google maps results? Read this full list of Google Maps ranking factors and get to work!

Mobile

Quote from Google CEO, Eric Schmidt: “Most people in the future will access Internet mostly from mobile devices.”

Checkout this article that states “Mobile will outpace desktops by 2013” (yes, that’s only two years away!!)

When was the last time you viewed your website on an iPhone, Droid or iPad? In the past, browser compatibility was relatively simple, but with the growth of mobile phones, your website must be accessible from all devices. When choosing a firm to re-design your website, make sure you ask them how usable their websites are on mobile platforms.

Landing Page Design

Lately I’ve been seeing more and more lawyers and legal lead generation companies using great looking landing page designs for their PPC campaigns. If you’re spending more than $5,000/month on PPC, you should definitely be trying various landing pages and testing them with Google Website Optimizer. The cost to test a few different landing pages can be recouped quickly from the increase in conversions you’ll obtain by simply testing.

Link Building

SEO is still an extremely effective form of marketing for law firms, but few attorneys know how SEO works and how to boost their rankings. I’ve long preached to clients that about 80% of Google’s algorithm is based on link popularity (i.e. the quantity and quality of websites linking to you). The law firms that win in the organic section in 2012 will be the ones that take their link building very seriously.

Looking to give your SEO campaign a boost? Here are some great directory links to boost your link popularity:

In Conclusion

Online marketing is a critical part to the success of your law firm. With SEO, social media, videos, blogs, reputation management, Maps/Places, link building…etc it’s easy to get lost in all the “ideas” of promoting your firm, and not get anything done (or do many things poorly).

Choose of a few of the ideas from this post and execute them with excellence. And, consider hiring an expert to help bring fresh ideas to your law firm. For example, have you tried hiring a landing page design expert? Consider the following designers who do nothing but landing page designs:

Best of luck to you and your law firm’s Internet marketing promotions in 2012!