Making the Case for Online Marketing for Legal Services & Solicitors

Over the past couple of years, the internet truly has become an invaluable resource for people looking for every kind of service available.

If you want to find a mechanic, plumber or electrician, the chances are you won't sit and flick through a Yellow Pages until you find one. Instead, the likelihood is you'll log on to your computer and run a search on Google or another major search engine, which offers a huge number of relevant results in a fraction of a second. 

With solicitors it's no different. According to a recent YouGov poll commissioned by Legally Better, the second most popular way of choosing a lawyer - after personal recommendation - is by searching on the internet.

But while this is all very useful for the consumer, what about the law firms?

In such a competitive sector, lawyers can only take advantage of the potential of the internet if their website is visible to all those people searching for the services they offer.  And to improve their online visibility, online marketing is essential.

The Benefits of Online Marketing for Solicitors

There are many benefits of online marketing for solicitors and legal firms.

The main one, though, as discussed above, is that it helps to make your company more visible on the internet, giving you a greater chance of boosting your traffic, revenue and reputation.

At I-COM, for example, it's not unusual for our services to lead to 40% increases in traffic to clients' websites and 90% increases in conversions - visitors landing on the website and then choosing to purchase a product or contact the firm.

If you take a look at our case studies, you'll see that the work we have done with big law firms has achieved even more than that. Within just one month of working with Pannone, our services led to 153 first-place listings and 361 first-page listings for the firm in Google.com and Google.co.uk.

More evidence of the advantages of online marketing come from the services we provided for JMW Solicitors. Two months after designing, developing and marketing a new website, the average number of page views per visitor had more than doubled.

Online marketing also offers advantages that traditional offline marketing doesn't.

It can create instant conversions, as people can immediately react to a promotion. With offline marketing, however, somebody may see an advert at a bus stop and not have the chance to do anything about it until they get home half an hour later, by which time they may have forgotten about it.

Furthermore, Google Analytics and other useful software means you are able to track the progress of marketing campaigns, monitoring everything from number of visits, types of traffic sources and the keywords leading people to your site to the average amount of time spent on a specific page by visitors.

Online Marketing Techniques

Online marketing can generally be divided into the following services:

• SEO (search engine optimisation) - Helping websites rank well in the search engine results pages for relevant keyphrases.
• Social media marketing - Using social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to generate leads, interact with clients, respond to customer service issues, promote services, manage reputation and boost online presence.
• PPC (pay-per-click) marketing - Placing paid adverts in prominent positions on major search engines and websites to direct traffic to the site.
• Web design - Optimising and improving the design of your website and online marketing materials to appeal to your target audience and improve your conversion rate. This also involves making sure the site is structured in the way that your visitors expect it to be and reflecting the character, brand and values of the firm, as well as its knowledge and expertise, effectively through design and imagery.
• Web development - Ensuring your website is easy to use for visitors and administrators and is simple to find for search engines.
• Copywriting - Putting the appropriate words on websites, blogs, adverts, press releases and so on, that will convey a positive image of your company, drum up interest in your services, persuade people to invest and ensure visitors find the language used on the site is familiar and easy to understand.
  

Leave it to the Experts

If you want to know more about how online marketing can benefit solicitors and legal service providers, get in touch with the legal website experts here at I-COM.

We have more than 50 legal clients on our books and have a long history of helping solicitors find their place on the internet.

To get in touch with us, call 0844 704 6830 or send us an email.