These days, having a strong digital presence is vital for small, local law firms. Otherwise, you are effectively invisible to potential clients in your area searching for legal services.
However, it is a mistake to build your digital presence entirely on third-party platforms like Yelp and social media. The companies that own these platforms have their own agendas and are constantly changing their terms of service, getting hacked, etc. You could potentially lose the ability to access your content and interact with your audience if they decide to suspend or delete your profile – rendering you digitally invisible once more.
In contrast, you fully control your website, which allows you to independently:
- Build search engine credibility for your practice to improve online visibility.
- Collect data and insights about your audience to make informed business decisions.
- Generate leads and convert them into clients.
Your website is your online home base and provides a solid foundation from which you can grow your digital footprint.
Traffic Quality Over Traffic Volume
Getting a healthy flow of traffic to your website is an important component of digital marketing strategy. However, to be successful, you need more than a large number of people visiting your website.
When it comes to website traffic, people often overlook the fact that quality matters more than sheer volume. It does not matter if you get a thousand site visits a month if 90% are from bots and another 9.9% bounce away after a few seconds. Instead, you need to focus on attracting visitors who are likely to spend time on your site, convert, and yield revenues for your law firm.
So, in this article, we are sharing eight actionable steps for how lawyers can increase website traffic, keep relevant visitors engaged, and increase their digital marketing ROI.
How Lawyers Can Increase Website Traffic
1. Manage & Optimize Your Google Business Profile
Optimizing your Google Business profile gives you more visibility on Google Search and helps drive qualified traffic to your website. It also improves your law firm’s ranking in Google’s Local Map Pack so that you show in relevant location searches in your service area.
To optimize your Google Business profile:
- Fill out every section available, including your business category and specializations.
- Be sure to include your website URL.
- Add photos of your staff and office.
- Keep your business information updated – for instance, holiday closures.
- Publish Google Posts with links back to your website.
- Use the Q&A section to provide helpful answers to prospective clients’ most common questions.
2. Claim and Manage Your Local Business Directories
Pay attention to local business listings and citations. For example, many state bar associations have a directory of lawyers, broken down by location or area of practice. The more online citations your law firm has, the more chances you have to capture someone’s attention and drive them to your website.
Make sure your practice is listed in directories with accurate information. You want your NAP (name, address, and phone number) information and website URL to be as consistent as possible across all of your online listings. This is because citation consistency is one of the ways search engines confirm that you are: 1) a legitimate business and 2) the law firm the person wants. For example, suppose one site shows your business name as “ABC Law Firm” and another directory has you listed as “ABC Attorney-at-Law”. This can cause confusion as to whether you are the same legal practice or two separate businesses with similar names.
To keep things simple, we recommend matching all of your citation info to how you have it formatted in your Google Business profile.
3. Get More Reviews on Top Platforms
Online review platforms like Google, Yelp, Avvo, and Lawyers.com are another important source of relevant website traffic. If someone likes what they read about your legal practice, they will follow up by visiting your website to learn more.
A 2021 study showed that 28% of people only pay attention to reviews left in the last month, so try and generate at least a couple of new reviews a month. But make sure you’re staying in line with ABA best practices for review requests. Also, make sure you promptly and thoughtfully respond to each comment – even negative ones. How you respond to reviews can tell prospective clients a lot about your practice.
4. Be Active and Engaging on Social Media
Social media is a great way to continuously drive traffic to your website, as people are frequently looking for advice and referrals. Joining the conversation in relevant Facebook groups, Quora spaces, and Reddit threads help you to stay in the know about the issues that concern members of your community.
However, be strategic in what content you share on social media. Remember, the goal is to create value for your audience by providing useful information when they’re seeking help. Blatant self-promotion will not work. For example, don’t encourage people to “visit my website to learn more!”. Instead, focus on creating an authentic human engagement and simply include a website link as part of your signature.
5. Ensure Your Website Has High-Value Content
The more high-value content you offer on your website – blog articles, videos, photos, etc. – the more times you will appear in traditional, visual, and voice search results.
Use social listening tools to understand how your target audience thinks about legal services so you can create relevant content that will draw them to your site. For example, what questions do they commonly ask? What keywords are they using when they search for legal advice? Also, make sure to use interesting, localized, angles to stand out from the crowd. For instance, explain how a ruling from a state or federal court might affect members of your community.
6. Leverage Email Marketing
Another great way to drive traffic to your website is to leverage email marketing. For example, you can use a newsletter that contains a relevant CTA to drive current subscribers to your site for a quick traffic boost. The more traffic a page gets, the better it will rank in search – thereby driving new visitors to your website.
7. Set Local Targeting Parameters for Your Digital Advertising
In addition to improving your organic search rankings, another tactic you can use to quickly drive traffic to your website is paid online advertising. Using local targeting parameters for your ads will help ensure they only show to people who live/work within your target area. You can also include relevant local keywords, such as city names, within your ad copy to help catch the viewer’s attention. Localizing your ads is important as you only want prospective clients coming from states where you are licensed to practice.
8. Establish Hyperlocal Signals Across Your Online Presence Through Check-ins
Continuing the above point about localization, you will also want to optimize your SEO efforts for local search by using a tool like GeoJuice to geo-tag your content, reviews, social profile, web pages, etc. Geo-tagging sends a signal to search engines, helping them understand that your content is relevant to users conducting a local search. Doing so helps increase your visibility in local search, which drives more relevant traffic to your website.
TLDR: How Lawyers Can Increase Website Traffic
So, to quickly recap, eight tactics you can use to get more qualified visitors to your law firm’s website are to:
- Optimize your Google Business Profile
- Claim your local business directories
- Get more reviews on the top review platforms for your industry
- Have an active social media presence active
- Ensure your website has features relevant, high-value content
- Leverage email marketing to engage prospects and send them to your website with a relevant CTA
- Set local targeting parameters for your digital advertising
- Establish hyperlocal signals across your online presence
However, we understand that lawyers are busy people, and you might not feel like you have the time to complete all of these different steps. That is why we designed the industry-leading business intelligence marketing platform. With it, you have all the tools you need to easily implement and manage these eight traffic-boosting tactics. You can claim business listings, respond to online reviews, create geo-tagged content, manage your digital ads, set up email campaigns, review performance data, and more – all from a single place.
Schedule a free demo and learn how the Surefire Local can help you save time and take control of your marketing
