Since the rise of the Internet, we’ve seen an explosion of ways to advertise legal services online. Some of them, like paid advertising, simply reproduce familiar marketing methods for the Internet. Others, like search engine optimization, are specific to the online environment. If you’re new to the world of online legal marketing, you could be forgiven for needing help sorting through all these options to see what works.
Luckily, there’s a lot to like about online advertising. When done right, online ads can bring in clients at a lower cost than traditional ads. Many online marketing techniques are inexpensive or cost nothing more than your time, and run by themselves once you’ve done the initial setup. Online advertising also makes it easy to reach specific audiences, by geography or interests, which is an essential part of marketing for law firms. And of course, it’s great at reaching younger audiences.
Unfortunately, it’s also possible to spend a lot of money on online marketing without getting a lot of clients. This article provides an overview of online marketing options, intended to help attorneys and law firms sort through their options and ultimately make the choices that get them the most page views for their dollars — and the most clients from their page views.
Legal Directories
One of the most well-known ways attorneys advertise online is through legal directory websites. You may already have run across online directories on sites like FindLaw.com or Lawyers.com, or even been solicited by those sites. Other, smaller directory sites may be based on geographic area, practice area or both. Sometimes, inclusion is free or based on membership in a bar association or other group; FindLaw’s basic listings are drawn from subscribers to Westlaw. Many of these online directories will charge extra for prominent placement on the site or in search results.
It may be tempting to start with a paid legal directory, since they’re such a prominent part of online legal advertising. However, they won’t necessarily give you a lot for your money. The cost of paid placement can vary from $30 to $1,000 a month, which is a flat rate not connected to your traffic or clients. Furthermore, there’s some question about whether clients actually use these sites, and they aren’t usually the top result in a Web search for phrases like “New York car crash lawyer.” There’s no harm in including your firm in directories that are free, including local bar group sites and law school alumni directories — but when it comes to paid placement, it pays to do the math.
Search Engine Optimization
Another online marketing method you may have heard a lot about is search engine optimization, or SEO. SEO is a fancy name for “writing and coding your content in a way that encourages search engines to rank it highly.” This matters because when clients start looking for law firms online, they usually start with a search engine — such as Google or Yahoo! — and look at the first page of results. SEO helps your site turn up high in the results, thus encouraging Web searchers to actually visit. Driving traffic from specific Web searches substantially increases the chance that the visitor will actually be interested in your services.
There’s a lot to say about SEO, and we’ve gone into it in more detail in a related article on this site, “Secrets to Promoting Your Legal Blog or Website.” For this article, we’ll skip the aspects of SEO that focus on the site’s content and code, and focus on a third part of SEO: the number of relevant links back to your site. You may think you have no control over this, but that’s not necessarily true. You can get links fairly quickly and easily through listings in free attorney directories and in online Yellow Pages. You can also create links easily by promoting the website through social media sites like LinkedIn and Facebook.
If you’re willing to put a bit more effort into SEO, you can also build back links by creating new content on other sites. You can start a blog (or “blawg”) on another domain name, or write articles about your area of practice and submit them to some of the many article websites or news aggregators on the Internet. In addition to creating links, this is a time-honored way to promote yourself as an expert in the field.
Social Media
Social media has been heavily hyped, but that doesn’t mean it’s snake oil. For one thing, it’s very inexpensive — creating an account on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and other sites is free. It takes a time investment to actually engage the people your connect with on those sites, but once you make that time investment, you’ll be in contact with them frequently — and thus, first in their minds when they need an attorney.
Engaging a social media audience means giving them a reason to be interested in your profile or feed — interesting content, conversations or both. You should certainly post your press releases and any mention you get in the traditional media. But in addition, consider posting news relevant to your practice or to your clients’ interests. If you’re a business litigator, for example, your small business clients will want to know about new laws expanding their liability or court decisions interpreting important laws. And don’t forget to take advantage of images and video, which can be inexpensive to produce and create an enthusiastic response.
Online advertising may be more familiar to attorneys who have used print and television ads, but it’s not quite the same as its offline counterpart. Paid advertising online includes text-only ads as well as advertisements that use graphics. Text advertisements show up alongside or on top of search engine results and on some websites, with a headline and one or two lines of text. Graphic and multimedia ads give advertisers more room to work with, and can include banner ads as well as graphics that float above the page, pop-ups and others.
Most text ads and some graphic ads are paid for by the click — that is, you as an advertiser pay each time someone clicks on the ad. The ad is only displayed when the user searches keywords you specify. The price of these pay-per-click ads varies widely according to the popularity of the keywords that trigger them.
Pay-per-click is popular because everyone who sees your ad searched for a closely related topic. This is called targeted advertising, and its advantages are clear: you’re more likely to get business from any one person who sees the ad. Targeted online advertising is especially great for attorneys, who usually target specific geographic areas and practice areas. Unfortunately, search engines know that. Many of the most expensive keywords are related to the law, including multiple geographic variations on “mesothelioma,” “DUI” and “car crash lawyer.”
Another popular online advertising option is cost-per-mille, in which you pay a set amount per thousand visitors to the advertiser website. This doesn’t necessarily involve keywords, so it casts a broad net in the same way print advertising does. Typically, it’s not targeted in the same way; an advertisement on the largest newspaper website in your region reaches everyone who views that site, not just people who’ve searched or browsed for specific information.
However, cost-per-mille ads can be cheaper than pay-per-click if your practice uses expensive keywords. For example, at $50 per click, which would be quite an expensive keyword, you pay $250 for five people who clicked your ad. But if you’re paying $5 per thousand visitors on a site that gets 10,000 visitors a month, that’s $50 — and you only need 0.05 percent of those 10,000 visitors to click on the ad to get the same five leads.
And don’t think you can’t use targeted advertising with cost-per-mille ads. Because nearly everyone with an Internet connection and enough free time can self-publish or publish on very specialized topics, there are huge numbers of websites out there, many aimed at people with specific interests. Advertising on those sites is one way to reach a targeted audience — people who have already demonstrated an interest in your topic. These sites may be less well visited than bigger advertisers such as Facebook or major newspapers, but when the audience is more likely to be potential clients, that’s all right.
These smaller, more targeted websites may not be obvious choices for advertising. Unlike major advertisers, they are often obscure, at least to people not interested in their subjects. However, because they are so narrowly focused, these sites are often naturally high in search engine results (the goal of SEO). They can also be cheaper on a cost-per-mille basis than major advertisers. That means these smaller targeted sites can be an excellent use of your advertising dollars. If you don’t know how to find smaller targeted sites, or measure their advertising potential, you can find an online ad company specializing in smaller targeted markets.
Online advertising offers a lot of advantages to attorneys and law firms. The Internet allows small businesses with specific needs to narrow the audience for their advertisements, making the most of their dollars. And many advertising opportunities are inexpensive — especially compared to print advertising — or even free, if you’re willing to put in the time. With a little knowledge and exploration, it’s easy to grow your legal business online.
