If you are like most attorneys, you, too, must be overwhelmed by the countless options available for you to market yourself online. But do you need to do them all?
If you are worried that marketing yourself online will expose you to people who would come to you for free legal advice and never with the actual business, you can always start off small.
We have put together some basic marketing activities that you must do first – on a priority basis – to find clients who are actually interested in employing your services.
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Define your niche and promote it
Your niche is your unique area of expertise. It helps you stand out and is what you should be focusing on to increase your visibility online.
As an attorney, you should have a clear understanding of who your target clientele is, what their pain points are, and how you can help them. Once you have identified this, use it to target your marketing efforts, you can choose a niche that has the potential to be small enough to be specific and big enough to generate sizeable revenue for you.
For instance, your niche could be “Divorce Attorney in New York City,” rather than “Divorce Attorney” or even “Attorney in New York City.” This might seem basic, but it is a crucial step in building a successful online persona because it helps you identify what to sell and who to sell it to.
Invest in local SEO
As with any attorney, we are certain that a significant chunk of your clientele, too, must be local. It makes sense because if someone is looking for a lawyer who specializes in, say estate planning, they will first consider one who resides in their neighborhood.
Therefore, it is important for you to focus on improving your local reputation and visibility using local SEO and Google My Business.
Even before you create a website, get yourself on local listings. It will allow you to gain some traction till you get your website off the ground and enable you to gather feedback and reviews from existing clients. So, even if you don’t have a website, you will still enjoy a few (if not many) online leads.
Collect feedback
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Social proof is incredibly important for any business’ online presence. It is a way to “validate” your claims and convince people you are an expert. People are much more likely to hire someone if they have read positive feedback about that person or their services.
In fact, one of the reasons why social proof works is because it operates on the principle that ‘people imitate other people.’ If they see a group of people doing something, they do it themselves because they believe it is the right thing to do.
This is because humans don’t enjoy being responsible for their actions. Hence, they gladly believe other people’s opinions when investing money in products or services.
So, if you have 10 reviews from your existing clientele and they are all positive, your prospective clients won’t think twice before hiring you. This will significantly cut down your lead generation process and drive more traffic to your web presence without you having to do anything else.
Write expert content to establish yourself as one
This is self-explanatory, but it is worth mentioning because it is one of the most overlooked methods. There is no reason you can’t put together a blog post on certain aspects of your practice and develop a following that can’t be matched by anyone else in your field.
And it always works! Simply because expert authors are more likely to rank higher in search engine results, which increases the chances of your potential clients finding you.
Still, many attorneys would rather them outsource their entire content creation to a freelancer who may not have the same expertise on the topic as them.
Now, we understand that it isn’t always possible for you to post content while running a practice and we aren’t asking you not to outsource your content. But you can always publish a couple of articles on your site alongside the usual outsourced content.
It will give your audience something to look forward to and help you showcase your knowledge every now and then.
Create case studies to show off your wins
Case studies are stories that feature real clients who have consulted with you over a specific topic or problem that you solved. They help educate your online audience and show them how knowledgeable you are in your field. More importantly, they can be used to highlight different aspects of your work and show your online audience what you can do for them.
For example, if you specialize in patent cases, your case studies could talk about how many patents you have filed and won as well as the specific cases that were a watershed in your career.
Not only can case studies help you build trust but they can also be used to engage prospective clients who wish to read more about you and your methods.
Publish on high-authority sites
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Here is the tricky part about having a website that not many people tell you:
To rank a website, you need to build your domain authority. And one of the fastest but most challenging ways of doing that is by guest posting on other websites, which already have high domain authority.
So, the goal of guest blogging should be to build your personal brand and get backlinks to your site so that search engines can see it as a legitimate presence and send more people to it.
Remember that guest blogging takes time. It is like any other marketing activity; you have to put in the time and effort for it to work out. So, make sure you start with the right platforms, which cater to the audience you are looking to reach, to speed up your results.
Cyrusson Inc. is a leading digital marketing agency based out from San Francisco and our sole aim is to make digital marketing accessible and affordable for small- and mid-sized law firms. We have a team of highly skilled and inspired individuals who understand the changing dynamics of digital marketing and can quickly adapt to changing requirements. If you are unhappy with your current digital marketing endeavors, talk to us today. We are sure we will get to the root of your problem and together we can solve the problems – one step at a time.