Law Firm Marketing: The Human Connection

Most states and cities have relaxed their stay-at-home orders, but we are a long way from going back to the old patterns of interaction for business and social occasions. People are craving a human connection. Since virtual meetings are the new normal, your opportunities to make a good impression in person will be limited for the foreseeable future. The attorney-client relationship really begins when clients feel like they are getting to know you; Duncan Shaw calls it “surfacing your law firm’s intellectual capital.” Building a rapport with clients is an essential part of law firm marketing; here are some ways to use your law firm’s website and digital communications to connect with clients on a human level.

Attorney Bios on Your Law Firm’s Website

Marketing advice for business websites often focuses on landing pages directly connected to a prospective client’s search query, but where the prospective clients click after they reach the landing page is just as important for conversion from Google seeker to client of your law firm. Once prospective clients find themselves on a law firm’s website, they often click around the site to find out more about the law firm. Many visitors’ first step, after reaching the landing page, is to click on the heading that leads to the bios of the firm’s attorneys. It might be labeled “attorneys,” “our team,” or something similar.

This is your chance to give readers a feeling for what you are like as a person. Some lawyers, in an attempt to forge a human connection, will just have a boring bio that lists their qualifications and accomplishments, followed by one sentence of small talk about their favorite sports team, dog breed, or dessert. This does not create a meaningful connection. Instead, be specific about what got you interested in the legal profession, your practice area, and your city. For example, if you are a family law attorney who decided to go to law school when you were a single mom who needed to use your rehabilitative alimony to build a new career, then tell this to your clients.

True Stories of Your Cases

Many law firm websites contain client testimonials, but they are not much fun to read or watch; they just sound like advertisements. Instead, you should write about cases you have won. Don’t just say, “my client got a settlement of X amount of money, and you can, too!” Instead, talk about the laws that influenced the court’s decision and what you as a lawyer did to build a strong case.

Connecting with Prospective Clients by Email

When visitors to your site fill out a contact form, they input their email addresses. Use these addresses to build an email list, and send out newsletters. These don’t have to be very long; they can mostly be links to news relevant to your practice area, with a few comments from you.

No Time to Write - Hire Legal Content Writers

Outsourcing your author bio pages and other page content to professional law marketing writers is a good investment. Contact Law Blog Writers about law firm web page content, blog posts, and other marketing content for your law firm.

Quick SEO Keyword Research Experiments For Legal Writing Strategy

According to the Pomodoro method, the average adult’s attention span is about 25 minutes, at least when it comes to focusing on a productive task. Now that more than two thirds of the U.S. population are under orders to stay home, lawyers throughout the country are struggling to block out distractions while working from home. Even when you do find an uninterrupted half hour to focus on your cases, you need to take a short break before your next burst of productivity.

It is probably tempting to check the latest statistics about the number of COVID-19 cases in your county or state and the pandemic’s effects on the local and national economy. These days, it’s mostly bad news, but there is another way to get your fix for graphs and statistics between productive tasks. You can do SEO keyword research to give your ideas about the best digital legal marketing strategy for your law firm.

Research Keywords Now, Implement Your Content Marketing Strategy Later

Britney Muller of Moz describes it as the lazy writer’s approach to keyword research, but all the techniques she recommends are very effective ways of gathering useful information for your content marketing strategy. The exploratory techniques Muller recommends are so much fun that they don’t feel like work. It feels like Facebook stalking your target audience and competitor law firms. Some of her recommendations require you to download analytics apps, but most of these apps are free or inexpensive.

· Google Suggest – Type a very generic search query, and see what Google suggests. She demonstrates with wedding industry keywords; for example, “wedding a” can lead to suggestions like “wedding appetizers” and “wedding accessories,” while “wedding b” can yield “wedding bands” and “wedding bouquets.” By typing “child custody a,” you find suggestions like “child custody agreement,” child custody amendment,” and “child custody alienation of affection.” Write the suggestions down or save them in a spreadsheet so you can write or commission blog posts about them later.

· Answer the Public – The Answer the Public site shows you the questions users most often ask about the topic you enter. If one of your quarantine projects is to make an FAQ page for your law firm’s website, Answer the Public will help you get started.

· SimilarWeb – This website shows you the most popular pages on your competitors’ websites. Compare them to the traffic on your site’s various pages, and you have a new goal, making your pages rank about your competitors’.

Hire Legal Content Writers

Researching SEO keywords for your law firm’s website does not take a lot of time or technical expertise. Writing effective web content, however, is more time-consuming. The stress of more deadlines and more work that requires intense concentration is the last thing you need. You can count on Law Blog Writers to turn your SEO keyword research meanderings into website content that will help you achieve your content marketing goals while you concentrate on surviving the pandemic.

Backlinks Are the New Elbow Bumps: Building Online Relationships in the Age of Social Distancing

Even if you are an introvert, all these weeks of staying home with no one to talk to except your immediate family is probably making you miss your co-workers, your former co-workers, and your law school classmates. In many cases, online socializing does not lead to anything good. Looking at the social media profiles of people you used to know just makes you feel insecure about your personal and professional accomplishments. The coronavirus pandemic seems to be changing everything in our society, including the role of online social connections. When you are stuck at home for the foreseeable future, and so is almost every lawyer in the United States, reconnecting with your lawyer acquaintances, former acquaintances, and frenemies just might be the best thing for your law firm marketing strategy.

You Don’t Have to Be a Tech Whiz, You Can Just Call or Email

Learning SEO and making your law firm’s website into a more effective marketing tool is a worthy goal for the age of social distancing, but watching video tutorials and poring over keyword data is not everyone’s cup of tea. Yes, SEO trends change all the time, but link-building is a time-tested SEO strategy. When other websites link meaningfully to your site, and yours to theirs, everyone wins.

Therefore, you have nothing to lose by emailing lawyers and colleagues in other fields and proposing a link exchange. Show them the pages on your site that would interest their target audience and offer to link to their site. Just seeing their names in your email inbox when they respond will break the monotony of social distancing, and if you actually score some link exchanges, then everyone wins.

Your Ideal Link Exchange Partner

The more backlinks (links on other people’s sites that lead to your site) you can get, the better. As long as Google does not have reason to suspect that this was a meretricious exchange of backlinks (the link-building equivalent of robo-clicks), the links will enhance the SEO rankings of your law firm’s website. The best places to link your site are to sites that already rank highly by themselves and where the people who follow the links are likely to spend time on your site. Therefore, the best link exchange partner is another law-related blog about your state, perhaps even belonging to another law firm.

If your link exchange partner is in another city in your same state, even better, because the same state laws apply, but you and your link exchange partner are not in direct competition for clients, and therefore the other firm has no incentive to reject your link exchange proposal. For example, if you are family law attorney in Philadelphia, you should contact a former classmate who now practices family law in Pittsburgh.

Legal Content Writers for Law Firms

Another solution is to entrust the link-building to professional legal content writers. You can count on Law Blog Writers to compose blog content that links to sites your target audience will want to read.