Last week, our founder and CEO Jason Hennessey gave a virtual presentation for PILMMA’s 2021 Internet Domination Bootcamp for Lawyers. In his talk, Jason broke down his top 25 tips for how to increase law firm leads and revenue.
If you missed the event, fear not! Here’s a video of Jason’s PILMMA 2021 presentation, and we’ve recapped Jason’s tips below for you to reference.
- Use Google Local Services Ads. It used to be that Google was just a search engine. Now, Google is a search engine and an advertising platform, which is why Google Local Services Ads are so important. They take up valuable real estate on page 1 and Google is placing more emphasis on these ads, so it’s worth going through the verification process to participate in Google Local Service Ads for your firm.
- Related to Google Local Service Ads, you should also look into the two ads in the space below Google Local Services Ads. These can be expensive, but It all comes down to dollars and cents. For the average cost per signed case, Google ads could be worth it, especially if you’re in a highly competitive area.
- Make sure you’re driving paid traffic to a landing page that is set up to convert. If you’re sending all your paid traffic to your homepage, this is a fatal mistake I see law firms make. Have a dedicated landing page that answers the questions that the person doing the search has and gets into their frame of mind. For example, most people don’t realize that personal injury lawyers work on a contingency basis, so having “free consultation” in a prominent spot on your landing page is important. Split test your landing pages to increase conversions and pick the winner to run your paid media and pay-per-click campaigns. Use Google remarketing campaigns to target and follow visitors who might just be doing a passive search.
- Review your website regularly from desktop, mobile, and tablet perspectives to make sure your lead form is showing properly. Is it user-friendly? Are you asking for way too much information on your lead form? Have your employees check your website for broken links, typos, and form errors. Make sure your chatbot window isn’t covering up vital information on your website, like your phone number.
- Button up your intake process. If you’re spending a lot on organic SEO and paid traffic but not seeing these efforts translate into signed cases, check your intake process to make sure you’re responding to leads quickly. We recently conducted a law firm response time study to test how long it would take for top law firms across the country to respond to our lead form submissions, and the results were surprising: over 40% of firms didn’t respond at all!
- Page speed matters. Google has a free tool called PageSpeed Insights to test how long it takes for your website to load, so check your site regularly for this. Page speed is critically important because Google wants to create a good user experience for its users, and if your page is slow to load, this will push your website down in rankings.
- Own your Google My Business listing. Local search results are only becoming more and more important, and there are free resources to improve your local ranking on Google. Step one is to verify your Google My Business (GMB) listing and give as much detail and information about your business as possible. Google determines local rankings by listing relevance and prominence, including information gleaned from photos. And speaking of photos…
- Have a Google-certified photographer take photos for your business. Find a photographer in your area and they will come to your office and shoot a panoramic virtual tour, which is great for your local search rankings. It’s also one of the best citations you can get.
- Upload plenty of still photos of your office to your Google My Business listing. Take photos with your phone with your GPS coordinates on and upload them directly to your listing. You should be regularly taking photos of clients that come into the office, business cards, and framed credentials. Google is sophisticated and can distinguish what is actually in the photo using something called CloudVision to calculate a confidence level about that photo. This is a big secret for how to succeed with your GMB listing!
- Put yourself in the mindset of a visitor or user on your website. For example: if someone was just in a car accident, they don’t want to see statistics about car accidents in their city. They want to know how to solve their problem now. When you’re writing content, have empathy for your customer’s situation and answer their questions right away—or they’ll click away to a different website that can help them.
- Have a content strategy. If you’re just writing and publishing random content, you’re only creating a mess for yourself. There’s a lot that goes into how you structure your pages and how they link with each other and the technical aspects behind it, so consult with a content strategist if you’re not already. My advice is without a content strategy, don’t bother publishing content at all.
- Revamp your old content. Revisit old content pages and check how they perform on search, because Google continues to measure how visitors interact with that page. Look at how the content is structured, update old statistics, and increase the value of your page by updating legacy content.
- Check for duplicate content. Duplicate content will kill your website’s ranking! Use tools like Copyscape to see if anyone is stealing your content and Siteliner to see if you have any internal duplicate content on your website.
- Link building is super important. Make sure your referring domains are increasing and that your domain rating is growing, and use tools like Ahrefs to monitor these. When it comes to link building, think quality over quantity: a couple good quality links can make all the difference in the world!
- Compare links with your competitors. Does a competing firm of yours have a Chamber of Commerce link and you don’t? This is good information to have. Use tools like Ahrefs’ Link Intersect to compare your website to your competitors and build your website’s link equity.
- Taking the comparison game a step further, study the top-ranking websites for keywords you want to rank for. Gather research and see what the top sites are doing: for example, do all top-ranking websites in major markets have links in common with high domain ratings? (Justia is a big one for the legal industry.) If you want to see what this looks like for you, Hennessey Digital can help! Reach out to [email protected] to do a site comparison and build a game plan.
- Consider Barnacle SEO. When you search for an important keyword like “Los Angeles car accident lawyer”, there are web pages you can leverage by advertising with them. We recommend this strategy to our clients: there is a lot of benefit to having a link to sites like FindLaw or Expertise.com, including for SEO value.
- Do at least a quarterly press release for your firm. Have you had a key attorney join your firm, or a large verdict? Announce these things to the world! Build a press page for your site and release them there first, then use a wire service like Accesswire or Cision to distribute them to get valuable news links back to your site.
- Position yourself as an authority. You want to be seen as a thought leader in your space to build your brand authority, get you exposure, and get links back to your website. For me personally, I started publishing content on Entrepreneur, The National Law Review, and Inc. Magazine, and I’m also a frequent podcast guest. Get yourself out there!
- Technical SEO counts. If you’re not familiar with technical SEO, it can read like another language. You don’t need to know this stuff, but you DO need to hire someone who does to make sure your website isn’t being penalized by search engines because of something in your code. Make sure you’re working with a trusted partner to make sure your content isn’t getting blocked because of technical issues behind the scenes.
- Showcase a well-produced video on your firm right on your homepage. This is a great use of website real estate and stresses that the site has a nice, user-focused design. Video is a great way to connect with your customers and invite them to work with you with a clear call to action.
- And speaking of connecting with your customers, give people a great intake experience. Invest in a call center to answer and pre-qualify calls: some will even sign cases for you!
- Track your leads. Have a solid intake partner to account for every phone call that comes in so you can attribute where your leads are coming from and track your ROI. Where are your signed cases coming from? Know how much your spend is for each source so you can adjust your marketing budget accordingly.
- Create a short video for lead form submissions. Many websites use a generic “thank you!” page that leads are taken to once they submit a form on your website, but in a short video, you can connect directly to your customer and explain what’s going to happen next. It helps manage expectations and is a great use of video to strengthen your brand.
- This last one isn’t a tip, but a preview: my first book, Law Firm SEO, is out! I’ve packed 20 years of experience into this book and I’m so excited about it. Be sure to join my Legal Marketing Brain Trust group on Facebook to connect with your peers, share insights from the book, and get more great tips like these from top attorneys.
Did you learn something new in this top tips list that you didn’t know before? Want to start implementing these strategies with expert partners? Reach out to [email protected] and let’s talk!