Marketing Your Firm! Advertising or marketing your website can be a time-consuming and challenging undertaking if you’re not a marketing professional. PPC, link-building, SEO, SEM – there are many industry terms that you are likely not familiar with and it can be confusing and even intimidating to get started.
To start, the ways that law firms market themselves has changed drastically with the advent of the digital era, and lawyers can no longer rely solely on traditional tactics like billboards, mailers, TV commercials, or the Yellow Pages. Instead, more effort is spent on digital marketing, the first step of which is establishing an online presence of some kind. This means letting the internet know you exist – whether that’s actually creating a website, listing your business with Yelp or other local directories, setting up a social media account – basically any information that exists online which serves as a representation of your law firm. Digital Marketing cannot be ignored – studies show that more than 60% of all searches for legal representation begin on the web. And the majority of those are all using the same channel – Google Search. If you’ve used Google before you understand how to perform a search, and have seen the SERP (search engine results page) that lists your search results. The process of trying to make your website a relevant search result and land at the top of the list for users is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – and there are volumes of literature online dedicated to this subject alone. If you’d like to learn more about SEO specifically, check out our SEO series: The Trilogy of SEO.
But SEO is one part of the bigger picture, referred to as Search Engine Marketing, or SEM. Search Engine Marketing refers to the process of building your website’s authority through SEO & other paid marketing outreaches available online. Google Adwords is very popular, as your website is included at the very top of SERP results and you only pay if someone visits your website. Social Media should also be utilized, as it’s a way to communicate directly with users and to serve unique, interesting content to attract new clients. Content Marketing is a specialty within the digital marketing field that refers to the act of producing & delivering content to consumers. Content for attorneys usually comes in the form of written blog posts, legal advice, powerful graphics, or videos, which are served on the attorney’s website, social media channels, or through email blasts.
