Internet Marketing for Law Firms

From Rekall’s inception and especially with our new TechTalk, we have worked on internet marketing in almost every facet.  We’ve been tracking our website traffic every day, multiple times a day with Google Analytics. Between our blog posts, interviews and podcasts, we find that it’s very helpful and keeps us motivated when we see people actually spending time on our site viewing our content. New businesses must create content because they cannot rely on word of mouth in the beginning. This is the same for law firms as well. Today, in order to get noticed, you have to blog or create original content with some consistency. It amazes me how many firms are not doing this and the ones who do, don’t track their website traffic. Many firms produce material but stop after some time because partners don’t see a quick enough return on investment. Unfortunately, growing your business this way is a slow process and it’s not cheap either. Blogging is free, but distribution of your content to a wider channel usually takes some bucks. Think of all of this as an investment for the future, do whatever it takes to grow your firm but also do this and stick to it, it does help. And when you finally see your traffic numbers start to rise each week, you’ll be motivated to invest more in your internet marketing campaigns. Keep this statistic in mind, 90% of blogs have only 5 posts, stick to your blog.

Blogging is an informal way to get information out there and show that you’re an expert in your field. One thing that a lot of firms don’t utilize is SEO (Search Engine Optimization) practices. The idea is simple, you post a blog on a topic, if “buzz” words are present in that article, your article will most likely be higher on a Google search. For this you can use theGoogle Adwords Analysis tool. By typing in words and phrases you can get a good idea of how often certain words are Googled in numbers per month and even searching in your area per month. Obviously the more obscure the word or phrase, the less times it gets Googled. The idea is to use these buzz words in your article so that it gets picked up higher in a search for that particular word or phrase. Your looking for the middle ground of a few hundred searches, maybe 1,000 max. Certain words gets Googled hundreds of thousands of times like the phrase “cloud computing” which gets Googled 450,000 times in a given month. Obviously writing about cloud computing is good but unless you rank for other words located in that same cloud computing article, chances are you wont show up on the first few pages of the Google search. This brings me to another point, if your not on the first page,your on the last page. People generally do not go past the first page of a Google search. If they cant find what they’re looking for they usually refine their search and again, don’t go past the first page.

Other than blogging there are other ways to get your firm’s name out there. Use social media and post every day, we’re talking about facebook, twitter, and linkedin, amybe even Google+. Use an email service like iContact to send email blasts to your email lists. This helps new business and also helps you stay top of mind for your current clients. If you have some money to spend, you can even write press releases and release them through PRWeb. They give you 2 releases a month for a year plus iContact for about $2,500. It’s a bit steep but it expands your reach for new clients and content coverage. Internet marketing is a lot of work, don’t get me wrong. In order to grow, your expected bill you time, manage your firm and do this work as well. You can always hire a social media person and pay them X amount per hour but the content will never be as good as you writing it because your the expert, not this hired person. It’s tough, and it’s a lot of work, but we do it because it gets fun, and you can get creative with it. It also helps when clients mention your posts when you speak to them. It makes you feel like your getting a return even though it’s not monetary. I suggest that all law firms do this, but since they don’t and probably wont, you should jump on it. You’re firm will stand out on the web while their’s will only be a home base for that attorney bio info. Join us in the 21st century, start marketing your firm on the internet.