DIY Marketing Tips for Lawyers

Recent advances in technology have dramatically expanded marketing options for law firms. It’s not like the old days when all you had to do was place an ad in the Yellow Pages and wait for the calls to come rolling in.

Digital marketing provides exciting opportunities to connect with the people in your area who are already seeking your services—but it can feel intimidating at times due to the slew of concepts and terminology you may not be familiar with.

Fortunately, the basic principles underlying digital marketing aren’t as complicated as some marketers would have you believe. There are a lot of steps you can take to improve your website and increase the number of new clients that contact your office.

Applying Effective Keyword Research

Keywords are words and phrases that are strategically placed on your website to improve rankings in search engine queries for the services you provide. For example, personal injury attorneys will want to show up at the top of their local search engine results page (SERP) in Google queries that contain the following types of terms:

• Car accidents
• Best car accident lawyer
• Traumatic brain injury
• Personal injury attorney
• Rear-end accidents
• Hit-and-run

It’s not that difficult to apply keyword research to improve your website’s search engine optimization (SEO) for the services you offer. You can start by using Google Chrome or Google Analytics to find out which pages on your site are currently receiving the most traffic. Then, you can make a list of the search terms people are using to connect with your website on Google and highlight frequently used terms.

Digital marketing tools such as SEMrush and Ahrefs will tell you which keywords your competitors are using, and this is one of the most effective keyword strategies. Many available tools, such as Google Keyword Planner, are free.

Lately, a lot of marketers are finding success using ChatGPT to generate lists of keywords. The great thing about this approach is that you can find new words that other people aren’t already using.

It’s important to use keywords strategically. Don’t overuse them because Google penalizes websites that engage in keyword stuffing, and you always want your writing to sound natural. Using keywords in headlines can enhance SEO, especially near the beginning of headlines.

Refreshing Content and Eliminating Redundancy

Look over your entire website to make sure all the information is accurate and up-to-date. For example, if your state passes new legislation changing the rules for filing a wrongful death claim, you’ll want to update the wrongful death pages and blogs on your website. It’s also a good idea to update staff photos and bios periodically and add other important new information to your website, such as reviews, awards, client testimonials, and memberships to organizations, such as the Better Business Bureau and the Million Dollar Advocates Forum.

Websites with several blogs and pages that have been compiled over the years are likely to contain redundant information and information that’s out of date. This may cause Google to penalize your site. That’s why it’s necessary to regularly update your content.

If you have several pages or blogs that include similar content, you’ll want to consolidate this information into fewer pages. When consolidating content to eliminate redundancy, you can use redirects to preserve SEO equity. For example, let’s say you have the following blogs on your websites that contain similar or redundant information:

• How Snowy Weather Causes Accidents
• Safe Wintertime Driving Habits
• How To Avoid Black Ice

Using Google Chrome, you can find out which of these blogs is receiving the most traffic. If it turns out that “Safe Wintertime Driving Habits” is getting the most hits, then you can rewrite it and include the best features from the other blogs. When you eliminate the other two blogs to avoid redundancy, you won’t want to lose the traffic they have been generating. When you add redirects, it sends traffic that was going to all three blogs to the new, consolidated blog post.

Is Your Website Helping Grow Your Business?

Does your website look good, load quickly, and show up at the top of the page when people are looking for your services? If you have any concerns, the SEO engineers at SLS Consulting, Inc. will be happy to conduct an audit to pinpoint the problem.

At SLS Consulting, Inc., our websites have a conversion rate of five to seven percent. That’s much higher than the industry average of only two to three percent.

To learn more, call (323) 254-1510 and schedule a FREE consultation today.