Marketing for Attorneys and The Magic Beans
Marketing for attorneys is just like Jack and the Beanstalk. Every attorney I meet wants to plant the magic beans, go to sleep and wake up with a beanstalk that will lead him to a beautiful place in the sky that contains untold riches. Of course there is a giant who guards this place and he enjoys eating attorneys who climb the beanstalk. Occasionally, one or two attorneys will make it down from the beanstalk with the hen that lays the golden eggs. But most of them spend a lot of time and money and in the end; they get devoured by the giant.
In marketing for attorneys, the magic beans are their website. The attorneys believe you plant the seeds, go to sleep and wake up with a vehicle that will lead the clients to your doorstep. In a few cases, this actually happens. But in most cases, fees, costs, and unforeseen expenses (the giant) beat you up pretty well before you even sniff any gold.
Don’t get me wrong, a website is a critically important tool in marketing for attorneys. You must include it in your arsenal but success doesn’t happen overnight. Here are four things you must do if you want your website to deliver qualified clients to your doorstep:
Post New Articles at Least Three Times per Week
Static web pages are as useless as brochures. (In case you didn’t know, I hate brochures. They provide no value and they only enrich the printers who sell them to you.) You must have dynamic content on your website and it must be updated a few times each week to drive your webpage to the top of search engine rankings. The articles you post do not need to be long but fresh content is critical.
Focus the Content on the Client
Don’t write about you and your firm. Someone who just arrived at your website is searching for help in solving a problem. Write about solutions to problems. You must enter the conversation that is going on in your client’s mind. Provide the information the client needs and he will check out your background once he sees what you can do for him. This doesn’t just apply to the Internet; it is a fundamental principle of marketing for attorneys.
Offer Information for Free in Return for Contact Info
The thing that separates your website from a brochure is the response device. This is a little section on the website where you offer information in return for the client’s contact information. It can be in the form of a little box at the top of the page that says: “Enter your first name and email address for my free report titled: ‘Five Things You Need to Know About Hiring a Personal Injury Lawyer’” or whatever your practice area may be.
Follow-up, Follow-up, Follow-up
Marketing for attorneys is all about follow-up. The web is no different than any other media. Once you get a lead you need to call and email that person within 24 hours. After your initial contact, if they don’t ask to come into your office for a consultation, you should keep them on your mailing list forever. That’s right. I said forever. Your goal is to be the FIRST and ONLY attorney they think of when they have an issue in your area of expertise.
In marketing for attorneys there are no magic beans but your website can eventually help you live happily ever after.
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EmailFive Killer Mistakes Law Firms Make With Their Websites
In today’s technology driven world, every law firm needs to have a website.
If you have a small firm tucked away in a sparsely populated geographic area or a solo practice, you still need to have a website for your firm. Your law firm’s website can be a marketing tool or it can simply be a way for current clients to find you. Many people today use websites like digital business cards. They save websites to their favorites and refer to them when they need to contact their dentist, doctor or lawyer.
A good website gives your firm credibility. Not having one gives potential clients the impression that your firm is not established or that your firm is not keeping up with the trends in business and technology. Neither impression is a good one. Fortunately, more and more attorneys are realizing just how important it is to have a website for their firm. Unfortunately, many legal websites make mistakes that are easily avoidable.
Like it or not, your firm’s website will require more than minimal attention. A website that was haphazardly thrown together is easy to spot. Don’t give your clients the impression that your firm doesn’t care enough to do things well.
Following are the 5 killer mistakes made by attorneys on their law firm websites.
The Secrets of Search Engine Optimization for Law Firm Websites
Is your law firm’s website lost in cyberspace?
Sure you can still get there by typing in the exact web address, but would a person searching for an attorney in your city, who specializes in your area of law, be able to find you or your firm through a basic web search?
A simple Google search for an attorney in a midsize metropolitan city can generate 300,000 results over 45 pages. Unfortunately, most clients make selections from the first few pages of search results. If your website is listed on page 10, chances are that potential clients are not finding your law firm.
Search engines have created a set of criteria that they use to determine how your attorney website will be ranked. Websites are listed according to their ranking. Search engines rank websites because they want to keep customers coming back again and again by supplying them with the most useful and well-organized web sites. If your ranking for a particular set of key words is 356,500 then you may have a problem.
Thankfully, hope is not lost.
If your law firm’s website does not appear within the first few pages of search results, then it can be optimized to make it more appealing to search engines. This process is called search engine optimization or SEO.
The Basics of Law Firm Search Engine Optimization
Search engines use “web spiders” that essentially “crawl” across every website to determine how to rank them. A spider is a program that searches the Internet for pages on a specific topic and then feeds those pages to search engines.
While there are a handful of things that almost every search engine spider looks for, each search engine has its own set of criteria that they change on a regular basis. They try to keep their criteria a secret so that companies do not manipulate the system and create websites that are high in traffic and low on useful content.
Here are some of the things that search engine spiders look for as they index and rank content for attorney web sites:
Law 2.0 - Oh please….
It seems as though there is a 2.0 slapped on everything these days.
The genesis of this phenomenon probably comes from the tech world where it is most commonly used to describe the interactivity on many websites. At one time it was hip and trendy. At one time it was actually “cool” to say that a website was very “web 2.0”.
That time is over.
In fact, one of the magazines that archeologists will one day point to as a symbol of the craze – Business 2.0 – actually shuttered its print edition last year.
This should have signaled the end of the era.
Actually, it should have been over when NBC television bastardized 2.0 with their version of it – NBCU 2.0. This was basically a slash and burn job that had them cutting costs and trying to put an evolutionary spin on it. .
So now that I’m working with attorneys here at RainmakerLawyer.com I figured my first order of business should be to get everyone straightened out on this whole 2.0 thing. I mean right off the bat, I’m hearing whispers about how this site is going to help advance the cause of Law 2.0.
God I hope not.
There’s a more valuable area of focus for attorneys and technology. In fact, it is something we should have been thinking about all along.
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