According to one recent study, there were over 425,000 law firms in the United States as of 2023. While that is a decline of about 0.4% from a year prior, it’s still a massive number – meaning that regardless of what type of law you practice or where you’re located, competition is likely fierce within your local community.
One of the major resources that someone uses when deciding on a law firm to go with involves looking at online reviews. If two firms appear to offer the same basic service, online reviews could be the lone element that creates a competitive advantage for one over the other.
But in terms of your larger lawyer reputation management strategies, online reviews are also important for another reason – one that far too many often overlook. They’re enormously valuable in terms of local search engine optimization, or local SEO.
So not only will online reviews help make a decision about whether to go with your firm once they’ve found you, they’ll also be crucial with regard to how those people are likely to discover you in the first place.
Understanding the Impact of Online Reviews
To say that online reviews influence consumer decisions, even when talking about a service-based organization like a law firm, is likely a little bit of an understatement.
According to one recent study, almost 19% of people in the United States trust online reviews just as much as personal recommendations from people they actually know. Not only that, but people are actually about 1.5 times more likely to make a purchase based on an online review than they are by a discount or some other type of special offer.
Keep in mind, however, that the reverse is also true. About 94% of people say that a single bad review has made them avoid a business at some point in their lives.
In terms of search engine optimization, online reviews are also one of the best opportunities you have to almost dramatically boost your SEO and larger online visibility. Think about it: every review that someone writes about your business has your name in it. It has the type of law that you practice. It has the areas and cities that you service.
All of those things are keywords that help localize the brand-specific content that is getting put out into the world on the Internet. Do you want to rank highly for phrases like “law firm in Cleveland?” Get all your Cleveland-based clients to write positive online reviews about you.
That’s how online reviews help to kill two proverbial birds with one stone. They build your reputation and make it easier for people to find you. Those people are greeted with a positive reputation about your firm, which creates a cycle that soon becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in the best possible way.
Steps to Localize Your Online Presence Through Reviews
Build a Positive Online Reputation
If you want to get more online reviews to build up your reputation as a law firm, the first place you should start is with your clients themselves.
Whenever possible, encourage satisfied clients to leave reviews and make it as easy as possible for them to do so. If you want someone to take a desired action, it can’t be overly complicated. Send them an email with a link to the review platform of your choice. Include a QR code with their payment invoice that they can scan with their phone.
As people do start to leave reviews, make sure that you not only respond, but do so promptly and professionally. Remember that other people will see those replies so you need to come across in the way you want to be perceived. Always include local details in your replies to give yourself that coveted local SEO boost.
Utilize Local SEO Strategies
When you write business descriptions of your law firm for various online profiles (and even in your review responses), always incorporate location-based keywords. Don’t just respond as a law firm. Respond as a law firm that specializes in personal injury (or whatever your focus is) in Baltimore (or wherever your firm is located). Take this same approach in review responses as well.
Take the same approach as you optimize your law firm’s online review profiles for local search algorithms. Include location information and other geo-targeted keywords in your Google Business Profile, on your Yelp listing, on your Facebook page, and more. Make sure that your address and updated contact information are listed wherever possible. All this goes a long way toward improving your local SEO ranking.
Leverage Review Platforms
On the subject of review platforms, be sure to identify those relevant review platforms that make the most sense for your business. Not everyone uses Yelp to look for a law firm, for example. Some might use Avvo or FindLaw.
This is helpful for a few reasons. For starters, there are far too many general review platforms than you would ever be able to manage on your own. This will give you a good sense of what to prioritize, especially as you start to grow your online reputation.
Secondly, it’s also giving your firm’s clients the chance to pick the review platforms that they’re the most comfortable with.
Create and optimize your profiles on these platforms. Think about the type of information that someone would need when deciding which law firm to go with. Make sure you personally claim each profile so that people are certain it belongs to you and not a “cyber squatter.” Showcase recent reviews from other clients with a wide range of different experiences, along with your responses.
Encourage User-Generated Content
Even law firms can benefit from the user-generated content phenomenon. This is when you encourage your clients to share photos and more details about the real, satisfying experience they’ve had under your care.
According to one recent study, about 93% of people say that they find user-generated content “very helpful” when it comes to making buying decisions.
As a bonus, you’ll be able to showcase this user-generated content not only on your social media platforms like Facebook, but also on your firm’s own website as well.
Monitor and Analyze Online Reviews
As you’re no doubt aware of from practicing in a field like law, things can and often do change rapidly. That’s why you can’t take the hard work you’ve already done -and the online reviews you’ve already amassed – for granted.
Set up review alerts so that you can get notified about new reviews for your law firm in real-time. Make an effort to always respond to them quickly to show people how active you are. Remember that it isn’t just about getting to the top of Google – it’s about staying there.
This will also give you a chance to analyze trends and patterns in reviews that may have otherwise gone undiscovered. You can learn what people like about your law firm and, most importantly, what they don’t. That way, you can make more informed decisions about how to empower the former and eliminate the latter at every opportunity.
A New Era of Online Reviews Begins Now
Especially when you’re operating a service-based business like a law firm, online reviews often matter a lot more than people realize.
Yes, people look at them before deciding whether to pick up the phone and give you a call. But they also help dramatically with your online visibility as well. When you consider that those law firms that focus on local search engine optimization tend to grow at a rate that is 44% higher than those that don’t, it’s easy to see why this is such an important concept.
The more reviews you have, the more opportunities you have to rank not only in the general legal profession but for the specific services and practice areas that you’re concerned with. The higher you rank, the more clients you bring in. It really is that simple.
At Surefire Local, we understand that lawyer reputation management strategies like these can quickly become a full-time job – which is why we want to make things as easy as possible. We help small businesses like your law firm establish their online presence with an all-in-one localized online marketing platform. We create local signals across platforms and profiles to make it easier for people to find you at the exact moment when they need you the most.
We do this, in part, through online review management as referenced above. Surefire Local can make it effortless to send review requests, write responses to the reviews you already have, analyze the overall sentiment about your firm, and more. This helps you know exactly what people think about you as a lawyer and what areas you should focus on improving in the future.
Other essential elements of the Surefire Local platform include:
- Educational resources like webinars and blogs that help you not only learn everything you need to embrace local online marketing, but to get a leg up on your competitors as well.
- Analytics and reporting. Never guess again about how much revenue your marketing dollars are bringing in. You’ll be able to see everything in great detail and our AI-generated recommendations will even tell you specifically what to do next.
- Content marketing. Create compelling, relevant, and locally-targeted content for your blog, your social media profiles, your Google Business Profile, all those legal business directories, and more.
- Directories management. Speaking of directories, we make it easy to claim, edit, and even publish new content like photos and special offers across more than 80 online directory listing platforms.
But more than anything, we want to free up as much of your time as possible so that you can worry less about lawyer reputation management strategies and focus more of your attention on providing the best experience possible for your clients. That’s how you not only create a competitive advantage for yourself, but cement it for years to come.
If you’re interested in finding out more information about online reviews and how they fit into your larger legal SEO efforts, or if you’d just like to discuss your business’ own needs with a team of passionate professionals in a bit more detail, please don’t hesitate to contact us today. You can also click here to attend a Surefire Local demo to see up close and personally what our powerful suite of tools can do for you.