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The world has changed. You can’t walk down the street without noticing someone with their head glued to their Smartphone. Additionally, before you go out to eat you (or at least people you know) are jumping on a review website such as Yelp to see what others have written about the restaurant. Looking for a local coffee shop? We’re guessing you pull up Google Maps (or another mapping application). Thinking of buying a TV? Head on over to Circuit City. Oh wait, Amazon ran them out of business. The world has gone digital. Before anyone purchases a product or a service, they jump on the Internet to read about reviews and compare prices. This is where digital marketing comes in.
The below is a list of the number of Internet sources consulted by the type of buyer before making a purchase:
If I told you that your law firm could be in front of the majority of people in your city that are looking for legal help in your niche, you’d probably say that’s impossible. Take a closer look at the number above. People consult 14 online sources before making an electronics purchase. Voters consult 15 sources prior to voting day. The bottom line is this: People jump on the internet to both educate themselves about purchasing options as well as to confirm knowledge about a product or service before making a purchase. They do the same thing before choosing a lawyer or attorney. When people search for lawyers, the key is getting your law firm in front of the searcher in order to capture that legal lead.
LEGAL LEADS: TRADITIONAL MARKETING VS. DIGITAL MARKETING
- Traditional Marketing
- Television
- Radio
- Billboard
- Newspaper and Magazine
- Direct Mail
- Digital Marketing
- Paid Search (Google AdWords)
- Search Engine Optimization
- Display Advertising
- email Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
The effectiveness of traditional marketing in the legal industry can best be summed up by asking a few questions:
1. Do you know any lawyers that are currently having success (obtaining legal leads) with television ads?
2. Do you know any lawyers that are currently having success with radio ads?
3. Have you heard the same lawyers advertising on radio for the past year or two? If radio is so effective, then why didn’t the law firm keep advertising?
4. Do you know any lawyers that are currently having success with billboard advertising? Or, are the billboards in your area void of attorney advertising? If not, has the same attorney been on the billboard for multiple years?
5. Do you know any law firms that have recently had success advertising in newspapers or magazines?
6. Do you know any attorneys that have recently had success sending out mass mailings to an area in order to obtain attorney leads?
We’re guessing you probably answered “no” to most if not all of these questions. Put simply, traditional advertising simply does not provide a positive return on your investment in the legal industry. Yes, you may get a few legal leads, maybe even a client. However, is it worth $X,XXX a month. Absolutely not.
So why do the traditional advertising approaches mentioned above fail int he alw industry? Simple. Because the way people buy products or purchase services has changed. When was the last time you opened up the yellow pages? Exactly. The Internet has made the way people buy products and purchase services not only much easier (people can do it from the comfort of their couch), but also more thoroughly (people can research a potential product or service in less than a minute). As a result, digital marketing has trumped traditional marketing.
Traditional marketing is simply the process of yelling at as many people as possible in order to find a new client or two. The vast majority of people have no interest in obtaining legal help. How many TV commercials actually apply to you? How annoying are TV commercials? Exactly!
Instead, advertise to only people that are looking for the type of legal service you provide. If someone goes to Google and types in “Best Personal Injury Lawyer,” we know exactly what that person is looking for. And if you’re a personal injury lawyer looking for new clients, this person is in your wheelhouse. They might as well be standing outside your office holding a sign that says, “I need a Personal Injury Lawyer.”
PAID SEARCH (GOOGLE ADWORDS) AND ATTORNEYS LEADS
In order to clear up any potential misconceptions, let’s cover a few of the basics of paid search
1. Paid search ads are the ads that appear on the search results page of search engines such as Google and Bing. They only appear for the search terms for which you want them to appear (e.g. a bankruptcy lawyer would not want his adds appearing when someone searches for the term “personal injury attorney”). When your ads are clicked, they direct the searcher to your website. To better illustrate:
GREEN BOXES: These are all ads! When I searched “Personal Injury Attorney” while located in Chicago, I had 11 ads pop-up.
After someone clicks an ad, they would be taken to an optimized webpage (i.e. landing page) on your website. This webpage has one sole purpose: To convince the website visitor to give you their contact information. Here is an example of a simple landing page that converts at probably around 10% (meaning almost 1 out of every 10 visitors leaves their contact information for the lower).
Earlier we talked about how you rarely see more than a few lawyers advertising on television, radio, or billboards for an extended period of time. Guess what – Many of these lawyers and law firms have been advertising on Google for years. Why? Because it is extremely effective.
2. Google, Bing, and Yahoo all deliver paid search ads on their search engines. Google has approximately 70% market share. At the time of this writing, Google was on pace to do for the year (2014). Approximately Google refers to their paid search program as “Google AdWords.”
3. There are around 12 billion searches on Google!
4. A Click of an ad on Google can cost anywhere from a few pennies to around $450. Yes, four hundred and fifty dollars.
Obviously, $450 is a lot to pay for a single click. However, let’s apply some math.Assume I specialize in mesothelioma legal settlements. I know that my average settlement is $200,000. I take 20% of the settlement. That would mean I make $40,000 per settlement. Now, let’s assume that I know that 1 out of every 10 people that come to my website submits their contact information. Furthermore, I land 1 out of every 5 of these people as a client. Therefore, for approximately every 50 people that come to my website, I get a new client. Now, if 50 people click on my “mesothelioma lawyer” ad in the month of July, I would be paying Google $17,250 (50 clicks*$345-a-click). This is a lot of money. However, because I land 1 out of every 50 visitors as a client, and each client makes me $40,000, my net return (before factoring in my time) is $40,000-$17,250=$22,750
As you can see, deciding whether to run a paid search advertising campaign is simply an exercise in math:
*What percentage of people that come to my site give me their contact information (our websites are around 10%)? *How often do I close these legal leads? *Therefore, about how much does it cost me acquire a new client About how much does each client make me? *Now subtract how much the average client makes you by how much it costs to acquire a client
You’ll quickly see that it’s not a matter of whether you should run paid search advertising or not, but instead a matter of how fast you can scale up your advertising spend, as the higher spend means the more clients your law firm will have.
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION AND LAWYER LEADS
Just like we did with Paid Search Advertising, let’s cover some of the basics of search engine optimization.
What exactly is search engine optimization? In order to appropriately answer this question, we need to wind back time 15-20 years. Try to remember the first time you used a search engine (e.g. Yahoo or Alta Vista). You can probably remember clicking links and then being taken to web pages that had a solid color background (like red) and really difficult to read text. Many of these sites you went to were complete garbage. Yet, how were they ranking high in search engines? Simple. They would keyword stuff (keywords being terms that people search for, such as “New York Restaurants,” “Buy Insurance,” “Injury Lawyer,” etc.
Fast forward 15 years and Google, Bing, and Yahoo now all have extremely complex algorithms that scour the internet and rank web pages (a very simplified explanation). However, 15-20 years ago, most search engines would count the number of occurrences of a keyword on a webpage, then rank the pages that used the keyword the most times the highest (again, a bit of a simplification). Marketers knew this, so they would simply pack the keyword as many times as possible onto a web page in order to rank high in search engines. Many times, these were the web pages with the solid color background and illegible font that we discussed earlier.
Google knew that this was a problem, so they set out to create an algorithm that would provide the best possible search results for people. After all, why would people use search engines if the search engines only returned crappy results? They wouldn’t. Google knew that if they returned the best results, then everyone would use them instead of their competitors. Fast forward 15-20 years and Google has achieved their goal of providing elite search results so much so that they are a household name. To “Google” something means to “search on the internet” (very similar to how people use the word “Kleenex” when they technically mean “tissue”).
So if we cant keyword stuff anymore, then how do we rank high in Google in order to get personal injury leads, bankruptcy leads, etc. ?
Good question. For all intents and purposes, search engine optimization (SEO) can be broken down into two components:
On-Site SEO: The process of optimizing your website for Google’s algorithm (telling Google what your site is about and for which search terms you would like to appear)
Off-Site SEO: Obtaining quality links from other websites to your website. This tells Google that you are an authoritative source on the search term and therefore should be displayed prominently in the search results.
1. On-Site Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Just because we can’t keyword stuff does not mean that keywords are not important anymore. In fact, they are just as important. As you may or may not have guessed by now, some keywords are much more difficult to rank high for in Google than other keywords. For example, the search term “car insurance.”
Now keep in mind the green box is filled with ads, so look below that. The top three results are billion dollar companies that probably have search engine optimization marketing budgets in the millions. Even the greatest search engine optimizer ever would not be able to start a website from scratch on a small or even medium size budget and be able to move into one of the top three spots. Point being, if I’m a small company that sells car insurance, I’m an absolute idiot for trying to rank for a term like “car insurance.” I need to find a different search term that is much less competitive to rank for. Fortunately, there are thousands upon thousands of different ways people search for “car insurance” (affordable car insurance, cheap car insurance, car insurance in Freemont California, cheap car insurance near me, car accident protection insurance, etc.).
Hopefully now you’re thinking the following two thoughts: 1. How do I know the exact terms people search for in my law area of practice? 2. How do I know if a term is too difficult to rank for and I am better off going after a lesser term?
This is a multi-step process. First, we need to find all of the potential search terms that people are using in your area. Different industries vary widely on the number of ways people search for a product or service. For example, the dry cleaning/Laundromat niche has about 700 or so unique search terms for that niche On the other hand, the apartment rental industry has about 2,500 or so unique search terms. Some of these include (apartment building for rent, rent apartment, apartment complex, apt rent, (insert city) rent, (insert neighborhood) rent, 1 bedroom apt, 2 bedroom apartment, apartment with balcony, etc.). You can see how there would be thousands of unique search terms. Some of these terms only have 10 or so searches a month. Other search terms are typed into Google thousands of times a month (e.g. Chicago apartments).
Digging deeper, let’s assume you are in my shoes and are looking to rank high for lawyer marketing and attorney lead related search terms. There are a lot of ways lawyers search for these services, so I will just highlight a few. The first column is the search term and the second column is the number of times that term has been searched this month.
Looks like “law Firm Marketing” is the clear winner, right? It has the highest search volume (certainly higher than both lawyer marketing and attorney marketing), which make it a no brainer, right? Nope. Not at all. Think back to the example about trying to rank high for the search term “car insurance.”
Let’s look and see how difficult it is to rank for law firm marketing, legal leads, lawyer seo, and the other terms. Fortunately, we have the ability to synthesize ranking difficulty of each specific search term into a single numerical value. This is known as keyword difficulty and simply tells us how difficult it is to rank for that keyword (the terms “keyword” and “search term” are interchangeable). Let’s see the results:
Ouch! The term with the highest search volume, “Law Firm Marketing” (880 searches a month), has a keyword difficulty of 58. Unfortunately, that is a very high keyword difficulty and we would have an incredibly difficult time ranking prominently for that term unless we had a decent five-figure marketing budget.
Hopefully we’re crystal clear now on why we cant just target the search term/keyword with the highest search volume. What’s the point of targeting a specific keyword, like “law firm marketing” if we have no shot at ranking high for it in Google? It would be a tremendous waste of time and money.
So how do we select the best keywords to target? The easiest way to accomplish this is to open an excel file and create three columns:
Column 1: The Keyword (search term) Column 2: The Search Volume of that keyword Column 3: The Ranking Difficulty of that keyword (keyword difficulty)
Here are the results:
As you can see, keywords ending in “marketing” and “seo” are extremely difficult to rank for. However, all of the “leads” related keywords are very manageable (highlighted in green). If you have not figured it out by now, we are looking for the keyword with the best combination of high search volume and low keyword difficulty. The clear winner is “legal leads,” as it has a search volume of 260 searches a month and a ranking difficulty of only 25.
Just to be 100% thorough. The keyword “Law Firm Marketing” has the highest search volume with 880 searches a month. However, we would be lucky to get 5 of those 880 clicks because it is so competitive. On the other end of the spectrum is “Legal Leads” with 260 searches a month and a ranking difficulty of only 25. Hopefully in a few months time we would be able to move up to one of the top 2-3 Google spots for when that term is searched. If we can accomplish that, we are looking at 50-100 clicks a month (one click of which was probably you coming to this site!).
Therefore, we will target “Legal leads” as a keyword.
On-Site Law Firm SEO: How many keywords can I target? So far we’ve been focusing on how to find keywords as well as how to select the best keyword. Now that we know how the process works, we need to implement a simple principal:
Each one of our web pages should target a single, unique keyword
Let’s assume you are a personal injury lawyer looking for personal injury leads. You have a decent website that includes the usual web pages (contact us, about us, past settlements, etc.). So how do attract more visitors from Google? Simple. Look at your keyword research. You’ll probably notice that people type in all types things into Google, they don’t just type in “Personal Injury Lawyer.” Remember how I said earlier that there were 2,500 or so different terms people type into Google when looking for apartments? Well, there are many, many ways people search on Google for personal injury law firms. More specifically, they search by injury type and by accident type. This is for “car accident lawyer” related searches only. Without digging very deep, we’ve immediately uncovered 100 different search terms only pertaining to “car accident lawyers”:
Now that you’ve concluded the keyword discovery phase (finding all the ways people search for a particular niche, this case “car accident lawyer”), you would then figure out the keyword difficulty, After that, you would then select the single best keyword pertaining to “car accident lawyers.”
If you already have a page on your website devoted to “car accidents,” then you would simply optimize the page using the single best car accident lawyer keyword you just selected. However, if you don’t have a page dedicated to “Car accident lawyer or attorney,” then you would want to make one (assuming you take on this type of client, obviously).
With that done, we would then do the following for motorcycle accident lawyers, trucking accident lawyers, work injury lawyers, medical malpractice lawyers, etc. Basically, you would do this for every type of client you represent (each of these areas would be a “theme”).
Once you have figured out the single best keyword for each “theme” and have properly optimized the desired webpage, then you are all done with law firm website SEO (at least beginner SEO, advanced on-site SEO won’t be covered here).
2. Off-Site Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Earlier, we discussed that SEO can be broken down into two components:
On-Site SEO: The process of optimizing your website for Google’s algorithm (telling Google what your site is about and for which search terms you would like to appear)
Off-Site SEO: Obtaining quality links from other quality websites to your website. This tells Google that you are an authoritative source on the search term and therefore should be displayed prominently in the search results.
We also talked about how 15-10 years ago people would just stuff a webpage with the keyword they wanted to rank for many times (the solid color background sites, often red, with illegible font). We also mentioned that Google figured out a way to end this practice and thus provide much higher quality search results than all the other search engines (hence, why Google has 70% market share). So how did Google do this?
In a word – Backlinks
A backlink is simply a link from someone else’s website to your website. For example, if the New York Times wrote an article about LegalLeads.com, they would probably include a link in their article that, when clicked, would take readers to LegalLeads.com. You can think of backlinks as a voting mechanism. In Google’s eyes, if a bunch of other websites are linking to a single website (e.g. Wikipedia), then from Google’s perspective, Wikipedia must be a very authoritative source. Therefore, Google will rank Wikipedia higher in search rankings.
There is a caveat though: Not all links are created equal. Google gives much more weight to links from very authoritative sites (e.g. New York Times). They give much less weight to non-authoritative sites (e.g. JoeSchmoesHappyNews.biz). Therefore, it is essential when doing off-site SEO to gain links from authoritative sites. Yes, getting a link from the New York Times probably isn’t going to happen. However, there are literally hundreds of millions of websites in existence, so finding authoritative sites in the lawyer niche is not a problem.
To illustrate this point, let’s look at the competition for the term “Personal Injury Lawyer.” These are the search results for the Chicago market:
(Green=Paid Search Ads) (Red=organic listings)
So you don’t need to squint, these are the top three organic results (red box): 1. 2. 3.
Number 1 and 3 are personal injury law firms. Number 2 is a hiring assistance site (somewhat like Angie’s List).
Let’s look closer at the number of backlinks the above personal injury law firms have. I’ve also included a law firm that has not engaged in backlink building. They appear on the 6th page of the Google search results (deep enough that pretty much no searcher is going to find them). I’ve taken the liberty of partially hiding that personal injury law firm’s URL to be courteous:
(Source: OpenSiteExplorer.com)
KEY Domain Authority: Estimated authority of the associated website Page Authority: Estimated authority of the specific page in the URL text box Just Discovered: New links the algorithm has found in the last 60 Days Established Links: Backlink Data.
As you can see, Levin Perconti (58 unique domains linking to them) and Clifford (145 unique domains linking to them) have much larger backlink portfolios than our comparison site (6 unique domains linking to them). Hence, Levin Perconti and Clifford rank much higher in Google.
Please keep in mind that Chicago is an extremely competitive market. A lawyer from Peoria, Illinois or Wichita, Kansas is going to have a much, much easier time ranking high in Google simply because there is not as much competition in Peoria as in Chicago.
Now that we have covered both on-site and off-site seo, let’s move onto another marketing approach:
REMARKETING TO POTENTIAL LAW FIRM LEADS
Remarketing is a fairly simple premise. It has been around for a while and has become a staple of digital marketing due its tremendous return on investment. In fact, it is quite possibly the most effective form of digital marketing in existence.
Assume you are a bankruptcy lawyer in Chicago looking for leads. This is how it works:
1. Someone visits your bankruptcy law firm website. Maybe they clicked a paid search ad, maybe they clicked an organic listing, maybe they were referred by a friend and simply typed in your website URL directly into their browser. How they found you doesn’t really matter.
2. As soon as they arrive on your website, Google begins monitoring which web pages they have been to.
3. The website visitor leaves without becoming a bankruptcy lead (i.e. they did not submit their contact information to you)
4. The visitor goes to other websites. Let’s assume one of the other websites they go to is the New York Times.
5. When they arrive at the New York Times, they will see your banner ad. Yes, you read that right; you can put your bankruptcy law firm banner ad on the new York Times.
6. You only pay Google if the visitor clicks your ad. Each click will typically cost between $1-$2.
7. If they click your ad, they will be taken to back to your website. Based-off client data, we’ve found that approximately 30% of website visitors wont submit their information (e.g. email address) to an attorney’s website during their first visit. Said another way, 30% of visitors came back to a website multiple times before submitting their contact information. Point being, some people simply will not give you their information the first go-around. They need to have a few experiences with your website before giving you their contact information. This is why remarketing is so affective.
8. Also, keep in mind that they also may see your banner ad, not click it, yet go back to your website anyways through a different method and become a bankruptcy lead that way.
The second enormous benefit of remarketing ads is that you are associating yourself with a very credible source. In this case, the New York Times. Having your bankruptcy lawyer ad associated with the New York Times can lend instant credibility to your law firm. People often think to themselves, “Well, if this law firm is on the New York Times, then they must be trustful and good at what they do. Otherwise, the New York Times would not display their bankruptcy banner ad.
To recap, Remarketing has two main benefits 1. Getting people to commit that simply wont commit the first-time around 2. Associating your law firm with highly credible source
LAWYER LEAD GENERATION CONCLUSION
We’ve covered a lot of legal leads territory here. Hopefully you’ve gleaned enough knowledge to see the benefits of digital marketing, specifically law firm seo, paid search, and remarketing.
If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us. We’re happy to talk.
Thanks for reading, Baltoro
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