Should Legal Professionals Invest in an Online Presence?

While traditional marketing methods are still important for legal professionals, an online presence is a critical next step to remain relevant. A term that’s slowly starting to gain traction is “legaltech.” These tech-based legal firms have found a way to carve out a niche that makes legal services easily […]

While traditional marketing methods are still important for legal professionals, an online presence is a critical next step to remain relevant.

A term that’s slowly starting to gain traction is “legaltech.” These tech-based legal firms have found a way to carve out a niche that makes legal services easily accessible to the general public. Companies such as LegalZoom are already enjoying customer bases in excess of 2 million. But where does that leave other legal professionals? The traditional brick-and-mortar law firms are still big players, but a large component of their visibility will be determined by how well they establish an online presence through the proper use of technology.

Know Your Online Status

An online presence might already exist for the law firm, whether you created one or not. Things such a Google and Yelp reviews may already exist, as well as ratings from Avvo and Superlawyers. But this isn’t enough. These are merely bells and whistles that will enhance an online profile. An online profile is also much more than simply providing contact information. It also happens to be a powerful lead generation tool. Reviews and testimonials help potential clients decide whether they’re happy to go with a firm or not and if there aren’t any online, they may be forced to look at the profiles of other law firms. A surprising finding reveals that only 57% of solo law firms have a website, while 90% of other law firm sizes reported having a site.

Capitalizing on Organic Traffic

A website is a perfect catch net for potential customers, but to get the right visitors to site, law firms need to ensure that they’re targeting the right audience. They also need to know what their audience is expecting. Google and other search engines rely on specific algorithms to send web traffic to certain sites. For a website to get traffic directed to their site, they need to fulfill certain criteria and for law firms, this means including an SEO strategy in their marketing budget. It’s not enough to simply have keywords listed on the sites, the sites need to provide value in order for the page to rank higher. SEO strategies for law firms should be tailored to the nature of the service and the level of professionalism, which would obviously be different from that of a theme park or event planning company.

Build Trust with Non-Paid Ranking

Legal professionals will want to get their website listed on the first page of Google’s rankings, as 92% of traffic goes to the first page. A strange statistic, however, is that the very first result only receives 33% of the traffic. While this may seem like an anomaly, ads and paid rankings don’t always attract all the traffic. What’s important is that the search result provides some insight into the question asked, which means snippets and headlines mean a great deal. An ad might just be unrelated to the search result, which will discourage users from going to the site.

While traditional marketing methods are still important for legal professionals, an online presence is a critical next step to remain relevant. Not only will it allow organic traffic for lead building, but with the right content, allow these sites to build trust with their audience.

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