With a few rare exceptions, most law firms don’t operate nationally. They tend to be small to mid-sized organizations that operate in precise geographic locations. For them, it’s not about attracting the attention of the biggest audience possible – it’s about reaching the right audience of people who need their unique blend of legal services.
But even though they’re not operating nationally, they are competing with those major firms when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO) and online marketing. This is ultimately why localizing your online marketing tactics as a local, small law firm is of critical importance.
According to one recent study, local and organic searches combined to make up 69% of all digital traffic last year. When you also consider that out of Google’s 8.5 billion annual searches, roughly 46% of them are local, you can begin to see a pattern emerging.
So from that perspective, you don’t need to be able to outspend your larger competitors. You simply need to outperform them in the place where it matters most: right in your own backyard.
Getting to Know Your Local Community
Lawyers are no strangers to research, which is why the first step towards putting together a local search marketing strategy for your firm involves getting to know your local community. First, conduct a thorough demographic analysis to find out who your hypothetical “best” clients are. That way, you know what they need to hear and when they need to hear it to entice them to take action and give you a call.
Likewise, identify local trends, interests, and preferences that matter most to these people. At the same time, be sure to understand your local competition and their current online marketing efforts. That way, you can learn from their successes and avoid their failures.
The Best Local Search Marketing Tactics for Lawyers
Google Business Profile Optimization
One of the major assets that a law firm has when it comes to attracting new clients is their credibility. Because of that, you’ll want to start your local search marketing efforts by claiming and verifying your business on Google.
Most people will find you for the first time via Google, so you absolutely want that information to be accurate. Optimize your profile to verify that everything is accurate, including but not limited to things like:
- Your firm’s hours of operation.
- Your law firm’s address and other contact information.
- Photos of your legal team.
- Videos.
- Reviews.
- Questions and answers about your specific legal practice area.
- The service areas you operate in.
- The precise legal services you offer.
Whenever you have a successful experience with a current client, encourage them to leave a review that calls attention to the areas you service. This will help enormously when it comes to local SEO.
The Power of Localized Content Marketing
If you want to establish your law firm as a trusted authority, you have to prove it and localized content marketing is a big part of how you do it.
Create location-specific content that resonates with your clients. They are likely to have a lot of questions about your specific legal practice area. Write blogs that help answer those questions and that offer more insight into what you do.
All the while, incorporate local keywords naturally into your website. Don’t just focus on the written word – be sure to include them in visual materials as well. You should also leverage local events, news, and trends to get ideas for blog posts, social media updates, and more.
Crafting Local SEO Strategies
As you’re developing your law firm’s website, be sure to implement on-page SEO tactics that focus on the locations you want to rank highly in. Don’t just target whatever the nearest major city is – target the smaller surrounding communities, too. People are willing to drive to meet a lawyer if they feel like they’re getting someone who will fight tirelessly for their rights.
You should also acquire high-quality backlinks from other local businesses, directories, and community websites. Nothing lends credibility quite like being one of the only law firms mentioned on a city’s official website.
Note that you must also optimize your website to be mobile-friendly and fast to load. As of 2021 about 54.4% of all website traffic around the world was mobile. If your firm’s website doesn’t load quickly and isn’t easy to use on a smartphone, you run the risk of alienating more than half of your potential target audience.
Innovating With Local Online Advertising
Another key part of your law firm’s local search marketing strategy should involve creating targeted online ads through platforms like Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and others.
This is a great opportunity because you can set specific parameters to target potential customers within a certain radius of your location and write ad copy that speaks directly to them. You can also use the built-in tools to monitor and analyze your ad performance, which will quickly show you opportunities to optimize things for better results moving forward.
Empowering Your Local Branding
A successful law firm should be seen as a pillar of your community and one of the most effective ways to do that is to partner with complementary local businesses for cross-promotion opportunities. Because you’re operating a law firm you might have to think outside the box on this one, but you’d be surprised by how many will be willing to partner up.
You should also connect with local charities and community leaders to help create a mutually beneficial situation for everyone. When you participate in events that have a strong online presence, you can use that as a way to generate strong PR for your firm. Every time the event is posted about you’ll be mentioned, which could potentially open you up to a whole new audience.
Proactively Monitoring and Analyzing Performance
Finally, always make an effort to track key performance indicators (KPIs) so you know which of your efforts are working and, more importantly, which ones aren’t. At a bare minimum, you should be looking at things like website traffic, conversion rates, and local search rankings.
You can use tools like Google Analytics to accomplish this. Google Analytics will also help you gain insights into local customer behavior. You’ll find out more about how they located your firm, what content they interacted with on your site or on social media, what actions they took, and so much more.
The more data you have to draw from, the easier it is to make informed choices regarding what shape your marketing campaign needs to take. You’ll be able to fully optimize based not on gut instinct or intuition, but on actual performance metrics. The importance of this cannot be overstated, especially in a field that is as highly competitive as the legal profession.
Grow Your Law Firm With Surefire Local and a Local Search Marketing Strategy
Especially when you’re talking about an organization like a law firm, localizing your online marketing accomplishes several essential things, all at the same time. At a bare minimum, you’ll significantly increase engagement levels with your target potential clients. Even if someone isn’t ready for a lawyer right now, you’ll stay at the top of their mind so that when that time comes, you increase the chances that yours is the number they call.
This helps to enable the right type of business growth for your firm, which you will have an effective local online marketing campaign to thank for.
At Surefire Local, we help small businesses like law firms effectively handle all of their localized online marketing needs. We work to establish the type of online presence that plays to the strengths that make your firm unique, creating local signals across platforms and profiles that make it easier for new clients to find you when they need you the most.
As an all-in-one marketing platform for local law firms, Surefire Local offers advanced features like:
- Website/local SEO optimizations, which involves creating geotagged content that is published on your firm’s website, blog, and social media profiles.
- Online review management to help those reviews from real, satisfied clients rise to the top and boost your social proof.
- Directories management, which involves our platform automatically claiming, editing, and publishing new content like photos across 80+ online directory listing platforms.
- Content marketing, which will see locally targeted and relevant content published to your blog, Google Business Profile, business directors, social profiles, and more to establish your law firm as a true authority in your area.
- Social media management, which makes it easier than ever to schedule posts, track engagement metrics, and respond to comments.
All told, our local online advertising efforts for law firms are designed to attract only the attention of clients within your service area. We’ll also use analytics and reporting to give you an unparalleled level of transparency into your campaign performance. You can see how every last one of your marketing dollars is being spent, what it is generating, and where you can make improvements moving forward. This, coupled with our educational resources like webinars and blogs that are designed to help your law firm learn all things local online marketing, creates an endless sea of opportunities you can’t afford to pass up.
So to find out more information, contact the team at Surefire Local today. You can also attend a Surefire Local demo so that you can see exactly what kinds of results our all-in-one marketing platform is capable of generating for your law firm.