With over 900 million users in more than 200 countries, LinkedIn offers users everything from recruitment tools and advertising capabilities to educational subscriptions and beyond.

With that, LinkedIn is a powerful marketing tool for any business, but especially for law firms. Given the often complex and regimented nature of the legal field, LinkedIn is a great platform for law firms to showcase their expertise and attract clients.

Here’s why your law firm should have a company LinkedIn page, plus some examples of law firms who are doing it right on LinkedIn.

Why You Should Have a LinkedIn Page for Your Law Firm

LinkedIn is so much more than just a networking website. It brings many benefits for law firms looking to grow their online presence and attract new clients.

There are a few reasons why you should have a law firm LinkedIn page:

• Organic marketing. LinkedIn’s organic (i.e. unpaid) platform allows you to reach other professionals and potential clients through LinkedIn posts, articles, comments, and connections. LinkedIn essentially works as a search engine, allowing users to find you by searching for keywords that match your services/profile.
• Networking. LinkedIn allows you to connect with other industry professionals. With your law firm’s LinkedIn page, you can connect with other lawyers, engage with past clients, attract potential clients, and discover what’s trending in your industry.
• Advertising. LinkedIn also has paid marketing tools; specifically, LinkedIn Ads. Creating a business profile is one of the first steps to getting started with paid LinkedIn Ads. Then, you can advertise your content and attract new clients.
• Brand building. LinkedIn gives you yet another platform to showcase your law firm beyond the usual social media channels. You can showcase your expertise, client testimonials, case studies, successes, and company news to a wider audience. This can help you build trust with existing followers and attract new clients.
• Hiring talent. You can post open job positions on LinkedIn’s job board, attracting new talent to your law firm. Your LinkedIn page communicates your brand values, mission, and culture, which may attract applicants to you organically.
• Business development. LinkedIn has free and paid courses to help you grow your practice, improve your leadership skills, and so much more. You can join relevant Groups, participate in discussions, post your own articles, and further maximize your reach on the platform.

Top Law Firm LinkedIn Pages to Inspire Your Strategy

Whether you already have a law firm LinkedIn page or are starting from scratch, the following law firm pages will inspire you to step up your game to make the most of the platform.

With these examples, we’ll include some tips for how to improve your branding, messaging, and LinkedIn Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to reach more users and, hopefully, clients!

1. The Basile Law Firm

An initial search for “law firm” on LinkedIn.com brings up The Basile Law Firm as one of the first results, which is a good indication that this firm has a strong LinkedIn presence.

This profile is well-optimized with content that’s relevant to the services they offer, and they have clearly spent time growing their follower base.

A quick look at their profile and you will see that their tagline clearly articulates the types of legal services they provide: “Securities Litigation and Public Company Restructuring.” They also include the term “law firm” in their tagline in order to rank for this keyword in LinkedIn search.

Further, the About section of their profile includes a strong value statement: “The Basile Law Firm P.C. is recognized in the public markets as one of the nation’s foremost securities litigation firms…”. The entire About section is well-optimized with relevant keywords as well, e.g. “public company restructuring,” “securities litigation,” “securities law,” etc.

The Basile Law Firm’s LinkedIn page is a great example of LinkedIn SEO at work, using relevant keywords to attract potential clients and rank high in LinkedIn search for the types of services they offer.

2. Stanton IP Law Firm

The Stanton IP Law Firm, P.A. is one of the first results when searching LinkedIn for “IP law firm”. Not only is their profile optimized for LinkedIn search, but their visual branding helps them stand out.

Right away, their tagline communicates their registered slogan, “You own it, we protect it!” They have a professional logo for their profile photo, as well as a well-designed background photo.

The Stanton IP Law Firm appears to be very active on LinkedIn, posting every few days. They have shared an open job position on the platform and continuously post organic posts (like the ChatGPT conversation post above).

This profile is a good example of how to use LinkedIn to find potential talent, drum up organic engagement, and boost brand authority.

3. Parnall Law Firm

The Parnall Law Firm is using eye-catching copy to attract clients. Right away, their profile name says, “Parnall Law Firm – Hurt? Call Bert.” The background photo includes a photo of the lead attorney, plus the name of the firm and their phone number.

Their profile also includes high-quality photos of the entire team, with a call-to action to “See life at Parnall Law Firm.”

Their profile is completely filled out, including a link to the law firm’s website, their phone number, their headquarters location, and their specialty areas. They are using the full LinkedIn real estate to their advantage!

When filling out your law firm’s LinkedIn profile, be sure to complete all of the fields available to you. This includes your tagline, About section, website link, phone number, Industry, Specialties, and more. This provides users with all the necessary information to learn about your law firm and to contact you if they are interested in your services.

4. Beasley Allen Law Firm

The Beasley Allen Law Firm LinkedIn page stands out as one of the best profiles around, given its bright and smiling background photo and well-written About section.

Their profile photo is their professional logo and their tagline says, “Helping Those Who Need It Most.” Their entire profile showcases their professionalism, friendly nature, and their experienced civil litigation law services.

They are sure to include their service areas (Atlanta, Montgomery, etc.), which allows users to know the areas they serve, and likely helps with LinkedIn SEO. They list all of their specialties (Business Litigation, Personal Injury, etc.), which likely helps them rank in LinkedIn search for these terms as well.

When you optimize your law firm LinkedIn profile, think about the types of keywords you want to rank for. Include your service areas and specialties in your profile, whether your tagline, About section, or Specialties section. This will help you attract the right types of clients and rank higher in LinkedIn search.

5. Wilshire Law Firm

Wilshire Law Firm is mastering its LinkedIn strategy with a fully-optimized profile and active video marketing. Their tagline includes relevant keywords (e.g. “personal injury,” “employment,” and “class action lawyers”), attracting potential clients and improving their LinkedIn rankings.

They have also posted multiple videos to support their organic LinkedIn strategy. Some of their videos include the firm wishing followers Happy Holidays, sharing a “save the date” notice for an upcoming event, and a recap of one of their successful wrongful termination cases.

LinkedIn’s organic algorithm considers user engagement (comments and likes), number of followers/connections, degree of connections, content relevance, and regularity of posting to surface your content to users. The more you use LinkedIn (by sharing blog posts, posting articles, sharing videos, commenting on posts, etc.), the more likely you are to reach more users.

So, stay active, post different types of content, and stay engaged with your audience!

Optimize Your Law Firm LinkedIn Profile and Grow Your Reach

LinkedIn is a powerful marketing, advertising, networking, and talent acquisition platform that allows law firms like yours to attract new clients and broaden their reach. Above, we covered 5 examples of law firms that are doing this well – with stellar branding, strong SEO, and active posting.

We’ve just covered the tip of the iceberg when it comes to LinkedIn’s capabilities. But the best way to use LinkedIn to your advantage is to get started now (versus later), optimize your profile, and get posting!

The post 5 Best Law Firm LinkedIn Pages to Inspire Your LinkedIn Marketing Strategy appeared first on Hennessey Digital.

On this blog, we like to be vulnerable. We share openly about client issues that arise and obstacles we’ve faced as an agency as we grow. And my team and I love sharing what I know, from trends in learning and development to how to increase law firm leads.

We also share mistakes we make and ways we’ve fallen short. Sharing the full story helps us remember we’re all human. But for every failure, we create a new solution, like developing in-house digital marketing technology to prevent and correct human errors.

Recently our team experienced the disappointment of losing a client that taught us about expectations, communication, and the reality of SEO.

A recent case study

In late 2021, we started working with a client who joined us after reading Law Firm SEO. We were excited to work with them, and they had been working with a reputable vendor that only does organic SEO for personal injury lawyers.

When they came to us, neither the client nor their previous agency could figure out what was wrong with their website. The site had experienced significant dips in traffic and keyword positions on Google from September 2019 to November 2021.

When we first engaged with this client, our SEO team audited the site from a technical perspective and then our team of engineers started to fix the critical issues.  We saw small gains from these efforts, but quickly realized that we were just putting band-aids on a site that was on life support.

We created a special task force to work on this site and would meet every morning at 9:30 AM EST for 45 minutes. I made it a personal mission of mine to fix this site and make it one of our case studies. On some occasions, the client would join us on the call to have more transparency while we were all in the SEO operating room.

Our team’s strategy was to fully deconstruct the site and recode it from scratch while improving page speed and core web vitals, modifying URL structure and taxonomy, optimizing breadcrumbs, and incorporating better internal link strategies among many other technical and content improvements.

In conjunction with the website rebuild, we also started an aggressive PR and link building campaign leveraging creative stories and angles, interesting data points, and lots of outreach to the media. These link building campaigns generated lots of buzz and dozens of links from major online publications such as ABC News, MSN, Washington Post, Inc., Entrepreneur, Law.com, Fox News, and dozens more.

What happened

Because of pressure from investors, this client needed results faster than what they saw. And because we had just finished rebuilding their website, immediate positive results were not realistic.

When you rebuild a website and start changing the URL structure and internal links, it’s to be expected that traffic will temporarily suffer because Google is removing old URLs from the index and following redirect rules to reindex and cache the new pages. Unfortunately, we did a very poor job managing the clients expectations and educating them on the short term repercussions.

We saw this after the May 2022 Google core update, when the site really started to take off and reap the benefits of the work we put in over the previous five months.

The client’s website had an initial dip in performance as a result of the recent Google update. But as the newly rebuilt site pages are now getting indexed, performance has gone back up and continues to increase, as we had predicted.

We can’t predict Google, and neither can any agency out there. We won’t make unrealistic promises to clients, nor will we hide behind data to claim credit for others’ work. But what we can do is communicate early and often on what to expect from SEO.

In this case, under-communication on our part led to the client leaving us. We didn’t do a good enough job managing client expectations, and while we never like when that happens, it was a learning opportunity and a chance for us to be vulnerable about something that didn’t go our way.

The reality of SEO

The reality is that SEO is a long game. It’s not for quick-fix types who want immediate results. But patience pays off, and our clients who’ve been with us a long time are still realizing the benefits of work we did years ago.

This case study scenario is what happens when we inherit a broken website. When our team made the decision to rebuild that client’s site, we knew performance would take an initial hit. And after the May 2022 Google core update, their site is now making big gains.

SEO is also for realists. I recently shared on our company Instagram that I don’t always tell clients to swing for the fences when it comes to SEO. What I mean by that is, if you’re just getting started in your SEO journey, chances are your website isn’t going to rank for high-value keywords with a large search volume.

If you’re not yet in a position to rank nationally for top keywords, I recommend focusing on ranking for an important longtail question that’s further down the interest funnel for people doing a search. As your site grows and becomes more of an authority, it can start to rank for more desired keywords.

For example, our law firm digital marketing clients might choose “personal injury lawyer” as a focus keyword. Instead of swinging for the fences, try for a base hit. Work on ranking for a longtail FAQ first. (And if you’re a personal injury attorney, here is a good example of what those FAQs can look like.)

As long as I’ve studied SEO, organic search has been a push/pull and an exercise in expectations versus reality. SEO is for people who are all in. It would be wrong of me as a leader—and us as an agency—to promise short-term results on a strategy that’s designed for the long run.

Long-term results need a long-term strategy

Because of the long-term nature of SEO, we expect to work with our clients over the long run. If a potential client comes to us wanting instant gratification through organic search, we set clear expectations and educate them on how SEO really works.

We design SEO strategies intended for the long run. If clients leave us after three or four months, they won’t see the benefits of what a long-term SEO strategy does for their website. We can’t make short-term guarantees, and we never overpromise. (This is the worst.)

In the case of our client who left us after we rebuilt their website, the real story of how SEO works reveals itself. Now that their website has the proper SEO foundation post-rebuild, we’re watching it start to gain. If the client had stuck around just another 45 days, they’d have seen their performance take off!

And just like this illustration of expectations versus reality, progress is still being made in SEO even when performance is flat. The work that doesn’t look or feel like progress will pay you dividends every time.

We’ve had clients leave us after two months and have watched from the sidelines as they’ve gained and grown. I’ll be honest: it sucks, and we agonize over it. But we always want to learn and improve, so we dissect what happened and update our processes to incorporate new information and client feedback.

There are plenty of misconceptions about SEO out there. The truth is if you’re not in a long-term relationship with your SEO agency, you need to adjust your expectations about organic search.

What we learned and how we’re improving

Regardless of the outcome, this experience reminded us to always clearly communicate goals and plans, encourage open dialog, and be open to pivot when Google changes its algorithm. SEO is like human behavior: people sometimes make irrational decisions, and search engine algorithms can be unpredictable.

When it comes to communication, we’ve learned that it’s important to make sure that the other party really hears and understands what we’re saying. When we say “It will probably take a little while for results to really start to show,” and they say, “Yup, I hear that all the time,” it’s not enough to mentally check that box and move on. We need to make sure that they get what we’re saying and can visualize what that means for their commitment to us.

As CEO of Hennessey Digital, I try my best to lead by example. I assume positive intent and practice empathy in the workplace, and I encourage everyone who works with us to do the same. And if something does go wrong, I take responsibility. We believe in positive thinking, but taking action matters most.

Moving forward, we know who we are and that we’re good at what we do. We’ve had clients switch to us because of our standard of service. Their results with their previous agency were decent, but they felt they weren’t getting the attention they should from their account team. We care about our clients’ success, and they trust us to get them results that grow their businesses.

And if you need help growing your business, fill out the form below to work with Hennessey Digital or reach out to me directly to schedule a 1:1 coaching session.

The post What We’ve Learned About the Reality of SEO appeared first on Hennessey Digital.

This agency was founded on the ethos of “educate and empower” and I love sharing what I know to help others. To that end, I share digital marketing tips for the legal industry in this space and I’m a regular contributor to Inc. and The National Law Review.

When clients can see our work delivering results, they’re sold on the value of SEO. Our first guiding principle at Hennessey Digital is “be honest and transparent” and it’s how we do business as an agency. Clients see everything we do behind the scenes through our HD Platform.

And in my new book Law Firm SEO, I teach lawyers what to know and what to expect of a potential SEO partner they’re looking to hire. I also share my 20-plus years of knowledge as an SEO practitioner and digital agency executive.

The book officially dropped on August 3 and just became an Amazon Best Seller and was also named a #1 Amazon Hot New Release in the Search Engine Optimization category. I’m proud of the book and am thrilled that it’s already making an impact in the SEO world!

So in the spirit of “educate and empower,” here’s a preview of select chapters of Law Firm SEO with actionable tips to start implementing your SEO strategy.

What to know about law firm SEO

SEO can grow a law firm’s website into a lead generation machine. But it’s important to know the fundamentals before you start talking about SEO strategy and tactics.

First, SEO doesn’t have to be complicated. (I don’t code, and you don’t need to either.) Law firm SEO is all about business value and involves optimizing your website to boost traffic. There are several ways to do this.

There are three main components of SEO: relevancy according to search engines; popularity with users; and data integrity. Top-ranking websites have each of these components.

The key to your SEO strategy? Content. Fresh, relevant content is what Google needs to know to push you higher in search results.

Behind the scenes of the Google algorithm

Google is the dominant player in the search engine game and is how most online users will find you. Ultimately, Google has two goals: be profitable, and create a good user experience for visitors. As such, it’s important to create a good user experience for your website users.

The factors that go into the Google algorithm change frequently, but your website should always load quickly and publish fresh, high-quality content with relevant information for users.

Google continuously searches the internet to index web pages and display results in SERPs (search engine results pages). Your website must also be free of technical errors for Google to properly crawl it.

If you know how Google’s algorithm works, you can use it to your advantage to increase your rankings—and boost your law firm’s revenue.

A blueprint for law firm SEO strategy

SEO efforts can fail for several reasons. If you think SEO is a “one-and-done” kind of effort or generic SEO strategies will get results, it’s time to reset your expectations.

You need a personalized, specific SEO strategy before you start writing content. Plan out the pillar pages for your website and how in-depth subpages will link back to those.

Is there a competing law firm in your area that outranks you? Study their strategies. Use tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, and Screaming Frog to look at competitors’ websites and see which keywords they rank for.

If you can reverse-engineer the successful strategies your competitors are using, you can dominate the market share.

Your law firm digital marketing team

I sometimes hear “SEO sucks!” from skeptics and even clients who’ve been burned in the past by bad SEO practitioners. In many cases, they’re already on their fourth or fifth agency.

I get it. 

SEO is hard to get right and it’s unfortunate that there are charlatans out there taking advantage of people.

For most law firms, it makes sense to hire an agency versus bringing SEO in house. A great SEO agency has expertise in content writing, technical SEO, and data analytics to constantly test and verify results.

The right SEO partner brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to nail your SEO strategy. Robust agencies have experts in marketing, PR, technical SEO, paid media, graphic design, web development, and more.

Though I’m known as an SEO expert and speak frequently on the topic, I’m most proud of the team we’ve built at Hennessey Digital. Even if you don’t hire us as your digital marketing agency, we want to empower you with the information you need to hire the right SEO partner.

Remember, accountability is key. Law Firm SEO gives you the information and questions to ask a potential digital marketing partner so you’ll know you’re hiring the right team.

Tools to measure SEO success

Google is your most powerful SEO tool. It offers features like Google Analytics, PageSpeed Insights, and Google Search Console to monitor your site’s speed and analytics.

I mentioned a few key SEO tools earlier in this post, but there are many more tools available to boost your SEO. Third-party tools for link analysis, online visibility, conversion rate optimization (CRO), and duplicate content detection play a crucial role in your digital marketing strategy.

Accessibility is also a factor in making your website user-friendly for a wide audience. Tools like UserWay help make your site compatible with accessibility requirements.

Technical SEO

Content is the engine behind your SEO strategy, but technical SEO is equally important.

Technical SEO is a complex area and refers to the functionality of your website. Many law firms outsource this function due to the depth and breadth of knowledge needed. It’s hard to fix problems you don’t know exist!

An SEO professional should start the process with an audit of your website. A good technical SEO expert will monitor your site for factors like crawl depth and errors, URL structure, duplicate content, and page speed.

And if you’re interested in learning more about technical SEO, iloveseo.com is a resource for SEO tips and industry news. It’s also Hennessey Digital’s sister company: we love SEO so much we launched a separate site!

Turn web traffic into more signed cases

Did you know Google uses AI to look at photos and videos for keyword relevancy?

Text isn’t the only element on your website involved in SEO. The images and multimedia you include affect how your site loads and is perceived by users and search engines.

You want to have high-quality photos and videos that optimize your site for chosen keywords. Do a Google search for “attorney” or “personal injury lawyer” and see what images Google serves. This will give you an idea of what the search engine associates with your target keywords. Now, think about how you can create your own original photos to post to your Google My Business listing.

Media production can be expensive but is a worthwhile investment for your firm. It can lead to more backlinks, increased traffic, better rankings, and more leads.

This is what law firm SEO is all about: turning all the web traffic you’re getting into revenue.

The Law Firm SEO Community

These tips are just the beginning. Law Firm SEO gets into the finer details of important tools like Google Maps and tactics for photos and video on your site.

The book doesn’t cover every single technical aspect of SEO. But after reading it, you’ll know exactly what to ask a potential SEO partner—and how to launch your own SEO strategy.

I eat and breathe SEO and I’m proud to do what I do and share what I know. My legal industry relationships and involvement with executive coaching and leadership groups like Vistage and YPO have helped me be successful as a leader.

Law Firm SEO came about because I wanted to set the record straight with SEO. But any success I’ve had is thanks to relationships built over the years and the love and encouragement from my family and friends.

Hennessey Digital is part of a community of digital marketers and legal industry partners, and our relationships have shaped us as an agency. As such, I owe a big thank you to our clients, team members, and partners for making us a success.

Get the book

Order your copy of Law Firm SEO on Amazon.

Reach out to me on LinkedIn and Twitter with your burning SEO questions.

And for attorneys: if you haven’t already, join my Legal Marketing Brain Trust. Share ideas with your peers on the business of marketing and running a law firm. It’s a great group with great people—join the conversation!

The post A Law Firm SEO Primer appeared first on Hennessey Digital.

If you missed the event, fear not! Here’s a video of Jason’s PILMMA 2021 presentation, and we’ve recapped Jason’s tips below for you to reference.

1. Use Google Local Services Ads. It used to be that Google was just a search engine. Now, Google is a search engine and an advertising platform, which is why Google Local Services Ads are so important. They take up valuable real estate on page 1 and Google is placing more emphasis on these ads, so it’s worth going through the verification process to participate in Google Local Service Ads for your firm.
2. Related to Google Local Service Ads, you should also look into the two ads in the space below Google Local Services Ads. These can be expensive, but It all comes down to dollars and cents. For the average cost per signed case, Google ads could be worth it, especially if you’re in a highly competitive area.
3. Make sure you’re driving paid traffic to a landing page that is set up to convert. If you’re sending all your paid traffic to your homepage, this is a fatal mistake I see law firms make. Have a dedicated landing page that answers the questions that the person doing the search has and gets into their frame of mind. For example, most people don’t realize that personal injury lawyers work on a contingency basis, so having “free consultation” in a prominent spot on your landing page is important. Split test your landing pages to increase conversions and pick the winner to run your paid media and pay-per-click campaigns. Use Google remarketing campaigns to target and follow visitors who might just be doing a passive search.
4. Review your website regularly from desktop, mobile, and tablet perspectives to make sure your lead form is showing properly. Is it user-friendly? Are you asking for way too much information on your lead form? Have your employees check your website for broken links, typos, and form errors. Make sure your chatbot window isn’t covering up vital information on your website, like your phone number.
5. Button up your intake process. If you’re spending a lot on organic SEO and paid traffic but not seeing these efforts translate into signed cases, check your intake process to make sure you’re responding to leads quickly. We recently conducted a law firm response time study to test how long it would take for top law firms across the country to respond to our lead form submissions, and the results were surprising: over 40% of firms didn’t respond at all!
6. Page speed matters. Google has a free tool called PageSpeed Insights to test how long it takes for your website to load, so check your site regularly for this. Page speed is critically important because Google wants to create a good user experience for its users, and if your page is slow to load, this will push your website down in rankings.
7. Own your Google My Business listing. Local search results are only becoming more and more important, and there are free resources to improve your local ranking on Google. Step one is to verify your Google My Business (GMB) listing and give as much detail and information about your business as possible. Google determines local rankings by listing relevance and prominence, including information gleaned from photos. And speaking of photos…
8. Have a Google-certified photographer take photos for your business. Find a photographer in your area and they will come to your office and shoot a panoramic virtual tour, which is great for your local search rankings. It’s also one of the best citations you can get.
9. Upload plenty of still photos of your office to your Google My Business listing. Take photos with your phone with your GPS coordinates on and upload them directly to your listing. You should be regularly taking photos of clients that come into the office, business cards, and framed credentials. Google is sophisticated and can distinguish what is actually in the photo using something called CloudVision to calculate a confidence level about that photo. This is a big secret for how to succeed with your GMB listing!
10. Put yourself in the mindset of a visitor or user on your website. For example: if someone was just in a car accident, they don’t want to see statistics about car accidents in their city. They want to know how to solve their problem now. When you’re writing content, have empathy for your customer’s situation and answer their questions right away—or they’ll click away to a different website that can help them.
11. Have a content strategy. If you’re just writing and publishing random content, you’re only creating a mess for yourself. There’s a lot that goes into how you structure your pages and how they link with each other and the technical aspects behind it, so consult with a content strategist if you’re not already. My advice is without a content strategy, don’t bother publishing content at all.
12. Revamp your old content. Revisit old content pages and check how they perform on search, because Google continues to measure how visitors interact with that page. Look at how the content is structured, update old statistics, and increase the value of your page by updating legacy content.
13. Check for duplicate content. Duplicate content will kill your website’s ranking! Use tools like Copyscape to see if anyone is stealing your content and Siteliner to see if you have any internal duplicate content on your website.
14. Link building is super important. Make sure your referring domains are increasing and that your domain rating is growing, and use tools like Ahrefs to monitor these. When it comes to link building, think quality over quantity: a couple good quality links can make all the difference in the world!
15. Compare links with your competitors. Does a competing firm of yours have a Chamber of Commerce link and you don’t? This is good information to have. Use tools like Ahrefs’ Link Intersect to compare your website to your competitors and build your website’s link equity.
16. Taking the comparison game a step further, study the top-ranking websites for keywords you want to rank for. Gather research and see what the top sites are doing: for example, do all top-ranking websites in major markets have links in common with high domain ratings? (Justia is a big one for the legal industry.) If you want to see what this looks like for you, Hennessey Digital can help! Reach out to rob@hennessey.com to do a site comparison and build a game plan.
17. Consider Barnacle SEO. When you search for an important keyword like “Los Angeles car accident lawyer”, there are web pages you can leverage by advertising with them. We recommend this strategy to our clients: there is a lot of benefit to having a link to sites like FindLaw or Expertise.com, including for SEO value.
18. Do at least a quarterly press release for your firm. Have you had a key attorney join your firm, or a large verdict? Announce these things to the world! Build a press page for your site and release them there first, then use a wire service like Accesswire or Cision to distribute them to get valuable news links back to your site.
19. Position yourself as an authority. You want to be seen as a thought leader in your space to build your brand authority, get you exposure, and get links back to your website. For me personally, I started publishing content on Entrepreneur, The National Law Review, and Inc. Magazine, and I’m also a frequent podcast guest. Get yourself out there!
20. Technical SEO counts. If you’re not familiar with technical SEO, it can read like another language. You don’t need to know this stuff, but you DO need to hire someone who does to make sure your website isn’t being penalized by search engines because of something in your code. Make sure you’re working with a trusted partner to make sure your content isn’t getting blocked because of technical issues behind the scenes.
21. Showcase a well-produced video on your firm right on your homepage. This is a great use of website real estate and stresses that the site has a nice, user-focused design. Video is a great way to connect with your customers and invite them to work with you with a clear call to action.
22. And speaking of connecting with your customers, give people a great intake experience. Invest in a call center to answer and pre-qualify calls: some will even sign cases for you!
23. Track your leads. Have a solid intake partner to account for every phone call that comes in so you can attribute where your leads are coming from and track your ROI. Where are your signed cases coming from? Know how much your spend is for each source so you can adjust your marketing budget accordingly.
24. Create a short video for lead form submissions. Many websites use a generic “thank you!” page that leads are taken to once they submit a form on your website, but in a short video, you can connect directly to your customer and explain what’s going to happen next. It helps manage expectations and is a great use of video to strengthen your brand.
25. This last one isn’t a tip, but a preview: my first book, Law Firm SEO, is out! I’ve packed 20 years of experience into this book and I’m so excited about it. Be sure to join my Legal Marketing Brain Trust group on Facebook to connect with your peers, share insights from the book, and get more great tips like these from top attorneys.

Did you learn something new in this top tips list that you didn’t know before? Want to start implementing these strategies with expert partners? Reach out to rob@hennessey.com and let’s talk!

The post 25 Tips to Increase Law Firm Leads and Revenue appeared first on Hennessey Digital.

Below are highlights from that discussion.

Tip 1 – Investing in Brand Development, Thought Leadership and Public Relations

In the world of SEO, you have a website and the goal is to make your website more popular. You could do that artificially by paying link building companies to build volumes of links back to your website, or you could do it more naturally through thought leadership, public relations and brand development.

There are plenty of sites that you as the law firm owner, aka entrepreneur or thought leader in the space, can actually go out and start publishing on. I personally write for The National Law Review, Entrepreneur, Inc., and Fast Company. It’s not easy to get onto those sites, but once you get one, it’s easier to get the next, and so on. As you start to publish content on sites like that, not only do you get the value of the link equity that comes over from you publishing—your byline links back to your website—but you also are now representing as a thought leader.

The content that I publish on The National Law Review, because that site is so authoritative, by me just publishing a piece of content, that site will also rank on Google. So now I have my site that is ranking on Google, I have the National Law Review that is ranking on Google, and so they call that “barnacle SEO.” That’s a good strategy to get leads not only from your website, but from all these other websites that are probably even more trusted than your own website.

Doing podcasts is another great way to get your brand out there. That podcast links back to you, so there are many SEO benefits from that. If you think about it, most law firm names are known, but people also want to know who are the human beings behind the law firm. When you think of Tesla, you think Elon Musk; when you think of Facebook, you think Mark Zuckerberg; when you think of Apple, you think of Steve Jobs.

What you want to be is the human being behind the brand. For me personally, I don’t love to write, but I love getting on calls and I love speaking. I have an executive assistant and Wednesdays are my creative days where Kathryn (my assistant) interviews me for an hour and a half. From that interview, we get all kinds of great content. She gets our conversations transcribed and she’ll take that and come up with the articles that I can use and submit.

If you have a budget to go out and hire a PR company, that’s a great way to leverage the relationships they already have and get you more press quicker than you might be able to get it alone. But in the absence of that, just take the time to do it yourself. You’ll be amazed at the results you can get just by putting in the work.

There’s a site called HARO where journalists are looking for opportunities to connect with thought leaders about particular subjects. At the end of the day, it comes down to finding time to do it. A lot of mistakes I see lawyers make is just hiring anybody to write blog content using their name. Because now that is their legacy, their character, and their brand  if you have someone writing content under your byline. If you stamp your name on something, you should review it and publish it. Because that is what will get you more speaking engagements.

Tip 2 – Inbound Text Messaging

If someone shoots me an email on Thursday at 9:00 in the morning, I’m probably not going to get back to that email and respond for at least 24 hours, just because of how many things are coming in and out of your inbox and your meetings. But even like right now, if I get a text message, it just pops into my phone and you’ve got my immediate attention. And it’s short.

Same thing with your prospects: they are engaging with you because text is the preferred way of communication these days, so it’s great. It’s also a good way to keep in touch and give quick updates. After you engage with a prospect and they turn into a client, it’s a good way to keep the communication long afterwards.

Tip 3 – Reading, Reviewing and Revamping Legacy Content

If we go back to the genesis of content strategy or content marketing in terms of SEO to generate leads, like 20 years ago, you’d write a piece of content and you’d optimize it for a robot first. You’d put in keywords and make sure the density was 7% and bold your keywords, and every page you read didn’t really make sense. It was just a bunch of gibberish, but that’s what it took to rank on Google. And over the years, you started to write less for the bots and more for the human, but you had to have that balance.

In most cases back then, people just wrote content and just kept it up there and Google would shift things around, but if you were ranking in the top 3 positions, why mess with it?

Nowadays, it’s a little different. Google relies heavily on user signals and user engagement signals. If you have a piece of content you write and publish, you want to see how it settles with Google after about 2 weeks. Is it on page 3, page 1, middle of page 1? As it settles, then go back in and revamp the content. If it’s in position 7, there’s a reason why it’s in position 7. Because once you get to the first page of Google, Google’s relying heavily on user signals, like how people are interacting with the website.

So if somebody does a Google search for some kind of term and they click on your page and they’re only there for 7 seconds, but then they click back to Google, that’s called “pogo sticking”.

The more that your page does not satisfy the intent of the person that is doing the search, the further you’re going to get pushed down to page 2 and page 3, etc. This is generally speaking, so that’s why I encourage people to always go back and review your content.

Read your content. If in the first paragraph of an Atlanta car accident lawyer page, you’re talking about statistics of all car accidents that take place in Atlanta, you’re not satisfying the intent of the person that is doing that search. The person that is doing that search was involved in a car accident, they think they might not be able to get to work, they’ve got medical bills, somebody was in the hospital and there’s so much stress. The last thing they want to see in that first paragraph is statistics on all car accidents that take place in Atlanta.

It’s important to read your content and ask, would you hire yourself if you read your own content? Constantly go back to your existing content and try to make the content a little bit better.

Tip 4 – Online Reviews

You have to do online reviews because if you don’t, it’s almost next to impossible to rank within the Google map. If you’re not getting reviews, and you’re not responding to reviews, Google is looking at the keywords that are used in those reviews. And if you think about it, reviews are so important: we’re almost conditioned to look at reviews now, even with leaving reviews.

A lot of times, you’ll get people that call you, and for whatever reason you might not be able to accept their case, or can’t help them, but maybe if you take an extra 3 minutes with that prospect and steer them in the right direction, tell them that there’s a free resource and this is the link, or tell them that they can call these people who would be able to help them.

And after that, say “By the way, I hope I was helpful. If I was, would you mind leaving a review for us?” Even if they’re not a customer, if you treat them with good customer service, you can ask for the review as payment because you went out of your way to help them.

Tip 5 – Conversion Rate Optimization

When you think about conversion rate optimization, it seems complicated; like you have to have a data science background. But it’s not as complicated if you simplify it, because you’re doing everything you can to build an audience and to get traffic to your website.

That’s half the equation.

The other half of the equation is getting people to trust you by making sure that you’re addressing their problem and getting them to convert. Where I see a lot of lawyers make mistakes on their website is in the vanity of branding yourself: there’s billboards all over the place of you, and that’s fine. If you built a personal brand and people recognize your face, it’s perfectly fine to put your face up there so that they recognize you from TV or from billboards, but don’t make it all about you.

People are visiting a website because they have a problem, and every single website I see has all the accolades listed. That’s fine and you should have that, but you really should be addressing their problems and issues first.

Most people that reach out to a personal injury lawyer—I’d say about 70%—don’t realize that it’s free; not “free”, but free on a contingency basis. If someone is in a car accident, say “Hey; you should get a lawyer,” and they say “Oh, I can’t afford a lawyer.”

You go to the page and they visit the website and it says “your call is free,” “you don’t pay us a dime unless we win,” “we can get you a cash advance in less than 24 hours,” “we can help pay your medical bills,” and what else can you do for them. That’s the language you want to be using above the fold, not so much all about us, us us.

It’s a balance, though; just as simple as changing the language or changing the text on the submit button. For example, instead of just saying “submit,” have the button say “submit for a free case review.” Just change the littlest things.

You don’t need to make drastic changes every two weeks to your site, because a 2% conversion rate which then goes to a 2.7% conversion rate which then goes to a 3% conversion rate is going to equate to hundreds of thousands of dollars by just making those slight little adjustments to your website to try and improve the conversion rate.

Final Thoughts: Law Firm Master Class

We recently had a client that reached out to us because they were concerned that their bounce rate was a little high. A bounce rate is where someone goes to your website, and then they don’t really click around.

The problem with that, for a site like a law firm, is in most cases, the first place that somebody will go to your website, they’ll do a Google search for something like “slip and fall lawyer.” They’ll land on your slip and fall page, and they might walk away to the bathroom and come back and then they’re still on the page and then they read your page and then they call you.

They didn’t go anywhere else, because the goal is to get them to convert or they filled out a chat. And because they didn’t go anywhere else on the site, even if they’re on the webpage for 15 minutes, Google deems that as a bounce.

For personal injury lawyers or law firms: don’t spend too much time concerned over your bounce rate, because the goal is to get people to convert from the page that they’re on. If you have an e-commerce site where the goal is to get them from a product page to checkout page, obviously bounce rate is a very important metric that you want to fix. But don’t stress over a bounce rate.

Note: The information above is a partial transcript from Law Firm Master Class: 5 Ways to Increase Your Website Leads in 2021 hosted by Kenect on March 11, 2021.

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