Just in the last decade, technology has jumped from a decently functional iPhone 3Gs to smartphone specs that exceed 2010s desktops. This swift advancement became an opportunity for everyday activities and transactions to go digital. In 2021, smartphones can be used to buy products and avail services.
What made way for the current digital reality of today was a combination of hardware and software developments that took advantage of the internet. Tech companies used the internet’s ability to connect people and devices, even across great distances, and created a reliable space to interact and transact.
Even before the pandemic, people were already used to looking for anything they needed through the internet. People used search engines like Google to look up a celebrity’s birthday, watch television shows, find detailed academic research papers, and hire professional services.
It’s not a surprise that the internet became a viable space for marketing—and that includes legal services. A quick search on Google will show millions of legal industry-related pages, all built and optimized for Law Firm Marketing. In addition, users can find millions of legal guides, blogs, tutorials, how-tos, news, and opinion pieces related to law and legal practice.
Instead of browsing through the Yellow Pages for a list of law firms, people can now use Google to find a list of viable candidates—complete with names, addresses, contact information, and reviews. Instead of asking for referrals via word-of-mouth, a potential client can look at the list of law firms themselves, do some research, and transact from the comfort of their homes.
Law firms are now competing to rank first in search results. The higher a website is in the search engine ranking, the more cases they get. This is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes in. SEO involves implementing tactics and strategies to rank for chosen keywords. The higher the search volume of a keyword, the more coveted the top spot is.
So if a user wants to hire an Employment Lawyer in Los Angeles, they will most likely type “employment lawyer los angeles” into the search bar. If a law firm’s pages, blog posts, or homepage are optimized for the exact keyword typed by the said user, the specific page from that law firm’s website will appear in the results. The better the optimization, the higher the pages will be on the search results.
When there’s more competition, the harder it becomes to boost a website’s rankings. Lawyer SEO has since evolved from simply relying on keywords to climb up the search results. Domain authority, reputability, content quality, and average traffic are now important ranking factors.
These ranking factors allow search engines like Google to give their users the best and most relevant results to search queries. Since there’s a standard for high-quality and relevant content, it also minimizes spam. Domains attempting to cheat the system by spamming backlinks, stuffing keywords, and posting low-quality content in high volumes get penalized, pushed down, or removed from the searches altogether.
While it’s possible for one person to implement SEO tactics from their personal computer, using it as a law firm marketing strategy necessitates a steep learning curve. Some law firms set aside a dedicated marketing budget to pay for premium SEO tools, content writers, web developers, SEO experts, and marketing specialists.
With the level of competition right now, simply optimizing for a high volume keyword like “wrongful termination lawyer los angeles” will not guarantee leads. A page has to be fully optimized to even reach the fifth or sixth page of the Google search results.
The entire page not only needs to optimize for the chosen keyword, but it also has to have well-placed images in suitable formats, well-composed headlines and headers, catchy meta-descriptions, tags, and links. The website that publishes the content also has to have fast loading speeds, easy navigation, and no errors.
On top of that, the domain itself has to have high domain authority, which search engines can determine by computing the number of backlinks, the quality of the backlinks, and the traffic coming in from multiple sources. The return of investments from implementing Lawyer SEO practices doesn’t happen overnight, but it happens faster for websites that get it right from the beginning.
Just because digital marketing no longer requires lawyers to hand out calling cards and pay for printed ads, it doesn’t mean that it’s easier than offline marketing practices. On the contrary, digital marketing is still as competitive, but with different rules and audiences.
As more and more people do everyday tasks through digital channels, a law firm refusing to incorporate digital marketing strategies might get left behind fast. Ultimately, the world has shifted into the age of the internet, and like everything else around it, law firms must adapt.
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