With spring’s arrival comes the need to refresh things. While that may mean cleaning out a winter’s worth of papers on your desk or the debris in the yard, it also has to do with your online presence. Your online presence as a lawyer has a direct relationship with how well clients view your brand and whether they engage with you. Consider the following components of effective online presence management.
What Does Online Presence Mean?
Your online presence refers to the representation of your law firm through social media, websites, search engine results pages, and any other mentions of your brand online. It includes all of the digital interactions that your clients have with your brand online.
Over time, your presence may become muddled, especially if you’ve run various branding campaigns or haven’t stayed up to date on your Google Business Profile. However, by taking some time now to make a few adjustments, you could see several benefits:
- More accurate display of your brand, mission, services, and competitive edge across all digital touchpoints
- Improved SEO ranking
- Attract more of the clients you desire
- Improve the ROI on any investment you make to build your law firm
Spring Cleaning Strategies for Your Online Presence as a Lawyer
A core lesson in law firm marketing is that you must be consistent. You can’t post on Facebook and assume it will always remain easy for clients to see. For that reason, consider these 9 strategies for spring cleaning your law firm’s online presence.
#1: Assess Where You Are
It’s essential to know where your brand stands right now. The simplest way to do this is to Google your law firm’s name, your attorney’s name, and terms like “law firm in CITY” and find out how well your site is ranking.
Your online identity becomes a bit clearer. However, look deeper than just how well you rank:
- Are other blogs sharing your content?
- Are there social media mentions of your firm?
- How well are you ranking in the law directories you’re listed in?
You can use tools to help you manage your online brand reputation. This allows you to have a constant eye on what’s happening with terms that refer to your brand.
#2: Freshen Up Your SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a powerful tool for law firm marketing. Most people looking for an attorney will perform a simple Google search to see options. If your SEO is stale, it’s not likely performing for you.
To fix this, consider a few simple steps to take now:
- Refresh your keyword research, as these terms change frequently
- Go back to old content on your website and optimize it with better, more keyword-centric meta descriptions, title tags, SEO descriptions, and other data
- Improve internal linking on your website
Keep up to date on keyword changes. As your competitors change up their strategy, that’s going to impact how well you rank.
#3: Ensure Your Website Offers the Best First Impression
When was the last time you updated your law firm’s website? It doesn’t have to be a full refresh, but you should consider any broken links, ineffective pages, or pages that are not ranking. Make improvements to these pages to ensure they are on-brand and optimized.
There are several core components to an effective online presence that your website must convey:
- A clear, target-audience-focused brand that ensures your potential clients truly understand what you can do to help them
- Mobile-friendly design, and by that, we mean a website that’s designed for mobile use, not just altered to fit into a mobile format
- Fast-loading, no-delays functionality since today’s consumer waits just seconds before moving to your competition
Have someone you don’t know visit your website and find a specific page. Ask them to tell you how well it loads and looks. This will give you an idea of areas for improvement.
#4: Clean Up and Revitalize Your Social Media
A big part of your online presence as a law firm is your social media presence. For most lawyers, this includes LinkedIn (especially if you provide services to businesses), Facebook, Instagram, and X. Your social media presence should have specific guidelines for any posts and interactions that happen there. You’ll also want to consider these steps to gain more traction and traffic.
- Improve the frequency and consistency of your posting, aiming for 2 to 3 posts a week geared towards your audience
- Focus more on providing helpful, quality content that makes challenging legal concepts easy to understand
- Interact with comments, but also within community groups and forums to build a local reputation
A positive online presence for a lawyer is packed with information and expertise, focused on providing solutions to those in dire need, and personable.
#5: Raise Google Business Profile Presence
Your Google Business Profile is not a simple listing that you create and leave it be. It’s meant to be managed on an ongoing basis over time. As a lawyer, your profile allows you to build your reputation while also ensuring you are demonstrating how well you support your clients. If you have not done so recently, update the content on your profile to ensure it has a local SEO focus, updated photos of your firm and legal team, and new content. Then, consider these strategies:
- Ask your existing clients to provide a review for you to boost your Google rankings (send them a link directly to your Google reviews where they can leave one for you)
- Respond to existing reviews on your profile by providing both positive and negative reviews with an appropriate response showcasing your business’s professionalism
- Use questions clients ask you on your profile as a tool to educate, build SEO, and engage – and all you have to do is answer them
Spend some time each week updating your profile. When you do, you’ll see your online presence as a lawyer increase.
#6: Get Into the Google Local Map Pack
Many law firm clients come from the general vicinity around your office. When someone within that area Googles your firm or the law firm services you offer, you want to be sure your website is one of the three listed in the Map Pack (It’s a listing that’s right in front of your searchers). To do this, focus on these areas:
- Ensure your Google Business Profile is up to date
- Use local search strategies that incorporate terms like “lawyer near me” and other “near me” phrases
- Ensure your profile, website, and all other digital mentions of your business maintain the same branding and messaging for consistency
With improvement to your local SEO strategy, you’ll see your Google Map Pack ranking increase and become more prominently displayed for all of your potential clients.
#7: Check Out the Competition
If you haven’t completed a competitor analysis in some time, now is the ideal opportunity to do so. You’re looking to see what your competitors are doing to pull in leads and how well they rank. To review your online presence, you have to know where gaps are in your competitors’ strategies so you can beat them and take advantage of those gaps. Consider the following strategies:
- Complete a keyword analysis on your competitor’s sites; however, focus on those law firm sites that are ranking above or close to you (not necessarily those you believe are to be your top competitors)
- Find out what keywords they are ranking for to determine if you need to increase your strategies with those words
- Seek to add keywords to your own strategy that they are not competing for
Competition isn’t something to ignore. The more they change to compete with you, the more they influence the leads you obtain.
#8: Build Online Reviews
Reviews are a component of your Google Business Profile, but you’re likely getting them in other areas as well. Building reviews helps consumers feel better at ease with choosing your firm. It allows them to learn who you are through the way you respond and showcases the real experiences customers get. Focus on these strategies:
- Send an email requesting reviews from recent clients, including even those that you might not have spoken to recently (within reason) but that you know had a good experience
- Look for all review sites your firm is listed in, including services like Yelp and professional legal directories
- Use constructive criticism on your reviews to help improve your business
#9: Automate the Process
One of the most important things you can do to improve your online presence this spring is to improve its consistency. With automation tools, you can ensure you are consistently on top of what people are saying about you and monitoring your SEO over time. Focus on:
- An all-in-one platform that helps you rank and get reviews consistently
- Choose a marketing partner who can help bring expertise with digital advertising
- Always select a tool that offers analytics – you need to know how well you’re doing.
The best route to get started is to build your online presence using Surefire Local. Request a demo now to get started.