Part 1 of this series offered some insight for figuring out whether you actually need SEO. Part 2 explained how to optimize SEO by becoming an authority in your chosen niche. Part 3 reviewed how becoming the “go-to” business factors into SEO. The last installment discussed when paying to advertise with search engines is easier and more cost effective than SEO. In this final installment, I offer some SEO strategy conclusions.
If you’ve read all four parts of this series, hopefully the wheels are turning and you're excited about the opportunities available for almost any practice area. You now also know just about everything you need as a lawyer to speak competently about SEO and online advertising. The final piece is creating a strategic mix of these to suit your firm.
Law Firms That Work with Businesses or the Government
Business firms generate almost all of their work from referrals, networking, speaking, and publishing. It's unlikely that a business owner or government agent doesn't know how to get a referral, so the most important thing is that online searches for this firm, or its attorneys, quickly show the firm website and other accurate, positive information about the firm.
Most of the time, a firm with business clients simply needs a well-constructed website and a solid base of NAP (name, address, and phone) citations to spread its contact information around.
The exception in this field is for niche practice areas within business law. If the firm has a specialty in cloud software licensing agreements, yoga studio liability waivers, startup biotech companies, or some other niche that is commonly researched online, targeted SEO and advertising are worth a look. Your goals and competitors always dictate the exact mix of services and cost for promoting a niche practice, but typically it starts with advertising and branches out into SEO if that makes sense.
The Small-Town Consumer Practice
If you have a practice that traditionally works well with advertising (i.e., family law, bankruptcy, immigration, criminal, personal injury, estate planning, probate) in a town with fewer than 50,000 people, a typical marketing plan may involve some initial SEO and NAP citations for local searches, as well as content that focuses on your main services.
The benefit of being in a small town is that with relatively little content and minimal continued content growth, you can achieve pretty decent search rankings by just having the site built properly and the initial pages optimized. In fact, just a few weeks after we finish websites for small-town clients, they are often experiencing pretty good search rankings.
The downside of being in a small town is that it may not have enough business to sustain your practice. As you now know, search engines make it hard for law firms to get organic visibility in towns where they don't have a physical address. Depending on the situation, you can try multiple strategies. If neighboring towns are very small, adding content to the website about that town or county will often make the firm show up there.
The most reliable solution, however, is creating a PPC (pay-per-click) and display network campaign that targets the areas the firm wants. So, small town consumer firms use a mix of website authority and local business SEO for their immediate market, and PPC and display network advertising to reach outlying areas. After data comes in, you may identify opportunities to do more targeted SEO/content development as needed.
The Suburban Consumer Practice
Law firms in suburbs of a large metropolitan area are in one of the toughest situations from an online marketing perspective. They are, wisely, located where their clients live, and they often have better value and easier access and parking than firms in the big city. Unfortunately, client convenience doesn’t translate into high search rankings.
These firms’ organic rankings are negatively impacted by their proximity to the big city. Big city firms with bigger budgets have enough NAP citations that they spill over and show up as local listings in the suburbs. The big city market is also so competitive that trying to get a suburban firm to show up in the big city’s local listings is nearly impossible.
Suburban firms’ marketing strategy typically starts with creating a saturating SEO presence in their local suburb. Then, guided by advertising campaign data, they move strategically into other suburban communities, skirting around the edges of the big city. Using suburban Detroit as an example, a firm might be located in Novi (about 20 miles from Detroit, population 56,000) and start off by seeking presence in all Novi searches related to their practice.
At the same time, that firm might fire up an advertising campaign that covers nearby suburbs like Plymouth, Northville, and Farmington Hills. Having good organic and advertising presence in Novi and solid advertising presence in neighboring suburbs can be a winning strategy. If the firm wants even more business, it could consider expanding into more towns or starting to use the advertising data to guide content creation and raise organic rankings in those other towns and suburbs.
The Big-City Consumer Practice
In larger cities, those with over 150,000 residents, the game changes again. Now you have more attorneys competing for the same number of spots. Budget and creative strategies are more important than ever because one wrong step can mean hundreds or thousands of dollars wasted.
Defining and prioritizing the practice areas to be promoted is critical, as the initial budget may limit what a firm can pursue. For instance, a criminal defense firm in Detroit may not initially have the budget to show up citywide for all of the desired search terms. From an SEO perspective, the firm could start building local presence with citations and optimizing content for a few keywords that have long-term value (e.g., Detroit criminal attorney, Wayne County DUI attorney).
On the advertising front, the firm could start with a targeted PPC campaign to gain instant visibility and work from there. The firm’s budget may limit the campaign’s reach. It might only be able to target certain parts of the city, reach into the less expensive suburbs, or limit practice area choices.
With any campaign, the goal is to reach a suitable return on investment (ROI = profit divided by expenses) as quickly as possible and then maximize it. A big-city firm may initially have a marketing budget of $1,200 per month, but if a PPC and online advertising campaign yields $8,500 in work, we've established a pretty good ROI of 608%. Raising the budget to $2,000 per month may allow us to target more of the city or go after some of the more competitive practice areas, so that the outlay yields $18,000 in work, with a ROI of 800%.
As a campaign builds momentum, you can also collect valuable data on what practice areas and spots in the city are the most lucrative. That data can be used to do SEO content writing to try and gain visibility organically, so that there is no need to pay for every click to the website. For example, if there is a hotbed of “minor in possession of alcohol” work around the Wayne State college campus, you could begin drafting blog entries related to MIPs at a rate of two per month to achieve better organic placement for that topic. The beauty of building a campaign this way is that you can start with a conservative budget and then learn and grow from there.