Being responsible for your law firm’s digital marketing can be daunting, even for the most experienced legal marketers. If you’ve been given this mammoth task, then you’ve come to the right place to make the best possible start.
Contra has been implementing bespoke legal marketing strategies for over 24 years, helping leading law firms boost leads and generate clients.
We can overcome even the most complex marketing challenges but, for now, let’s keep it simple.
We’ve put together this beginner’s guide to digital marketing for law firms outlining the key considerations and must-haves for your marketing strategy.
What is law firm digital marketing and why do you need it?
If you’ve been tasked with organising the marketing for your law firm, there’s a good chance a strategy hasn’t been carried out effectively up to this point.
From experience, we’ve found that law firm marketing is often overlooked for a few key reasons.
Firstly, your lawyers might be so busy with heavy case loads that there’s simply not enough hours in a day to dedicate any time to marketing.
Or, there’s an underlying belief within your firm that marketing offers limited value.
Why do we need more clients if the current volume we’re generating is already enough to keep everyone busy?
Won’t attracting more clients mean we can’t keep up with demand, potentially harming the quality of services we offer?
Clearly, this kind of question is commonly asked internally, with only 20% of Managing Partners feeling that marketing’s value is well understood within their firms, as reported in the Legal Marketing Leadership Survey 2024.
In reality, the benefits of legal marketing go beyond simply increase traffic. An effective law firm digital marketing strategy:
- reinforces your brand
- enhances your reputation
- improves productivity
- attracts and retains clients
- generates qualified leads
- enhances client engagement
Law firms are gradually beginning to realise this, with 65% of law firms now spending most of their marketing budget online, meaning you could be falling behind your competition if you’re not making the same investment.
Law firm digital marketing strategies
Conduct internal and external research
With an understanding of the importance of law firm digital marketing, you’re in a position to begin implementing a strategy.
It's essential you start by researching and understanding your audience.
Your target audience is often determined by the services you specialise in or the ones you want to prioritise, especially if they generate the majority of your revenue.
For example, are you focusing on services aimed at individuals such as personal injury claims, or do you offer services for businesses?
From here, you can refine your audience further based on their characteristics, interests, challenges, and values.
Using these ideas, you can create detailed buyer personas, which are fictional representations of your ideal clients based on your research and some educated assumptions.
These personas help guide your marketing efforts by ensuring you’re addressing the right problems and speaking in a tone that resonates with your audience.
Additionally, it’s equally important to conduct internal research.
Interviews with your firm’s key stakeholders—whether it be fee earners or managing partners—can help paint a realistic picture of your firm and uncover what makes it unique.
This helps you develop strong law firm branding and uncover your unique value proposition.
It defines why prospective clients are better off choosing you to resolve their problems over choosing one of your competitors, laying the foundation for your messaging throughout your digital marketing.
Set ambitious but realistic goals
Setting measurable goals that are ambitious yet achievable is the next step of implementing a law firm marketing strategy.
We highly recommend using SMART goals to do this effectively.
SMART goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. For example, instead of aiming to "increase website traffic," a SMART goal would be "increase website traffic by 20% within six months."
These goals provide clarity and focus, ensuring you can clearly measure whether your marketing efforts have been successful.
To track progress towards your main objective, it’s important to define and monitor Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
Law firm KPIs are measurable metrics. For law firms, these might include:
- YoY Summary and Previous Period Summary: Reporting on both 'all users' and 'organic users.'
- Active Users
- New Users
- Total Conversions
- Conversion Event Breakdown
- User Conversion Rate
- Percentage of Engaged Users
- Average Engagement Time
- Service Rankings (e.g., Personal Injury)
- Subservice Rankings (e.g., Accidents at Work)
- Rankings Distribution
- Benchmark Rankings vs. Current Rankings
- Sources and Engagement
- Best and Worst
- Rankers
- Climbers
- Performing Pages (traffic, conversions, engagement time)
- Enquiry-to-client converison rate
- Number of new matters/cases
These metrics give you valuable insights into what’s working and where improvements are needed.
Ultimately, the entire purpose of monitoring progress and making data-driven adjustments is to get the most out of your budget, optimising your ROI.
Conduct keyword research
As you likely already know, legal SEO is the process of improving your firm’s visibility in search engine results.
It's a vital aspect of law firm digital marketing, ensuring you appear towards the top of results pages when users make relevant searches like “divorce solicitors in London” or “employment law advice.”
Appearing at the top of results pages can significantly boost web traffic, with the number one result being ten times more likely to receive a click than the result in tenth spot.
Consequently, good law firm SEO helps attract potential clients to your website by matching their search queries with your expertise.
Effectively carrying out keyword research is vital to achieving this.
Start by identifying your key services and think about what your potential clients are searching for and how they phrase their queries.
For instance, a firm specialising in medical negligence might focus on terms like “birth injury claims” or “misdiagnosis compensation.”
However, it’s not as simple as using an SEO tool like Semrush to identify the most popular, relevant term your audience is searching for.
Established firms that have been running their SEO strategies for years are likely to dominate the highest value terms, meaning you might find it difficult to compete.
And, while popular terms are clearly being searched for a lot, they’re often broad and not highly targeted.
Therefore, targeting them might improve web visibility but it won’t necessarily generate significantly more leads.
For example, “legal rights UK” may drive traffic but may not attract clients looking to hire a law firm.
Instead, focus on finding the right balance between popularity and search intent.
Prioritise more specific terms known as long-tail keywords, such as “no-win-no-fee medical negligence solicitor.”
If someone makes this search, you can be absolutely sure they’re interested in the services you provide, making them likely to convert if they come across your website.
Optimise your website
Having conducted your keyword research, you’re in a good spot to begin optimising your website.
Of course, optimising your main pages with your target keywords is a key element of this, but there’s much more involved too.
More often than not, prospective clients get their first impression of your firm by visiting your website, requiring a sleek law firm website design.
That’s why we begin our web design process with a comprehensive website audit.
This involves analysing your current site to identify any technical issues, design flaws, or structural inefficiencies.
Based on the findings, we’ll provide a tailored strategy to elevate your website’s performance and user experience.
Whether this means starting fresh with a brand-new site or improving your existing one, a well-optimised website can showcase your professionalism, build trust, and attract more inquiries.
Without overwhelming you with too many details at once, website optimisation involves a few key areas:
Design and Branding: We’ll ensure your website reflects your firm’s personality, professionalism, and values, while creating an engaging and visually appealing design.
Site Structure: A clear, intuitive structure is vital to make it easy for clients to navigate and find the information they need.
Technical Performance: From loading speeds to mobile-friendliness, we’ll address technical elements to ensure your website runs seamlessly and meets modern standards.
Implementing all this isn’t straightforward, so it’s best to partner with an experienced law firm digital marketing agency to get the very best out of your newly optimised website.
Implement a content strategy
Your main service pages only represent a portion of your law firm’s website.
In addition to these pages, content like thought leadership articles will account for a significant amount of your website’s content, offering more detail addressing propsective client queries and your key services.
As with your landing pages, keyword research acts as the foundation of your law firm's content strategy.
It helps to ensure your content stays on topic, answering your audience’s common questions.
Naturally, this can make it beneficial to phrase headers as questions throughout your content, making it as clear as possible to both users and search engines that the query has been clearly answered.
An analysis of 306 million keywords by Backlinko found that 14.1% of searches are question keywords, meaning they contain “who”, “what”, “where”, “why” or “how”.
And our analysis on optimising law firm landing pages for ChatGPT Search found that 47.6% of H2 subtitles were question-based on high-ranking law firm landing pages (e.g., "What is Medical Negligence?" or "What happens if you do not have a Will?").
Including keywords in your header is an important aspect of your front-end optimisation, as is including them in your meta descriptions and threading them naturally throughout your text.
It’s also essential to optimise the back-end elements of your content that aren’t visible to users, such as adding schema markup and descriptive alt tags to images.
If you’re new to law firm digital marketing and content creation, it can be hard to know whether you’re effectively utilising SEO best practices, which is why it’s best to get some help from a specialist law firm SEO agency.
Having said that, it’s vital the bulk of the content production is carried out by your own people.
Your fee earners are the people who possess the expertise about your services, so your blogs, articles, and white papers should be created based on their knowledge.
Sharing genuine, authentic insights strengthens topic authority, establishing you as a reliable source of information for both potential clients and search engines, consequently improving your rankings.
Building topic authority can also be achieved by creating internal content clusters (e.g. linking blogs about divorce law to a detailed family law guide) and earning backlinks from reputable websites.
Again, a specialist agency can help you implement best practices for building authority such as highlighting social proof by showcasing testimonials, case studies, or awards, as well as help you create a bespoke backlink strategy.
Finally, as many of your prospective clients are likely to be in close proximity to your offices, it can be beneficial for law firms to prioritise local SEO.
This involves creating content targeting specific geographical locations by optimising pages for queries like “solicitors near me” or “employment lawyers in [your area]”.
Consider PPC and LinkedIn marketing
Unlike SEO which takes a significant amount of time to produce results, Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising, such as Google Ads, can be used by law firms to drive almost immediate traffic to their website.
One similarity between SEO and PPC is the idea of targeting relevant search terms. However, the method of trying to rank for them is very different.
Rather than targeting keywords organically by optimising your content, PPC involves bidding on them so your ad appears at the top of search results.
While this can generate quick visibility, it can involve significant cost and limited ROI if you aren’t careful about the particular terms you’re targeting.
High-traffic keywords, such as "personal injury lawyer" or "divorce lawyer”, come with high competition, consequently requiring a higher bid if you want to rank for them.
However, this doesn’t mean you should immediately exclude the more popular terms. The process often involves some trial and error to identify the most fruitful keywords and to create a fully optimised ad.
If you want to get the best out of your campaign, it's highly recommended to work with a specialist agency that understands the nuances of PPC in the legal sector.
In addition to PPC, LinkedIn is an invaluable platform to utilise as part of your law firm’s marketing strategy, particularly if you specialise in business law.
LinkedIn’s user base includes 65 million decision-makers, meaning it offers a wealth of networking opportunities so you can connect directly with prospective clients.
Creating a strong profile, sharing insightful content, and engaging with relevant professionals are all key to optimising your law firm’s LinkedIn presence.
Utilise automation and reporting
Having spent so much time and effort implementing your law firm’s digital marketing strategy, you don’t want to rely on guesswork when making important optimisations later down the line.
Instead, you want to make informed, data-driven decisions by unlocking law firm KPIs and marketing ROI reporting.
Gaining access to the valuable insights you need requires you to integrate various pieces of essential software.
Integrating Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and a keyword ranking tool like Semrush is vital to monitoring the key metrics we discussed earlier.
It enables you to base your marketing strategies on real data rather than assumptions, which is a far more reliable way of operating, particularly while you’re still relatively new to legal marketing.
As well as improving decision-making, integrating software can also enhance the effectiveness of your marketing through the power of automation.
As a busy legal professional, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the day-to-day demands of running a firm, leaving little room to focus on marketing. This is where automation can help.
Implementing a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system and marketing automation software like HubSpot provides number of benefits:
- Streamlining workflows, task management, and client intake.
- Drafting blogs, articles, and social media posts efficiently.
- Generating content ideas, outlines, and scripts.
- Optimising content for different platforms and formats.
- Providing audio and video transcripts.
- Segmenting audiences using demographic and behavioural data.
- Creating automated, tailored email campaigns.
- Offering real-time, personalised client responses.
- Enhancing speed and impact of communications.
- Drafting content collaboratively with professionals.
This streamlines your processes, allowing you to focus on other tasks while ensuring your leads are nurtured at every stage, constantly making them feel valued they’re more likely to become clients.
As a HubSpot Certified Gold Partner Agency, our implementation and onboarding services are fully bespoke, allowing you to get the very best out of your CRM.
To take your reporting a step further, we also highly recommend integrating Google Looker Studio.
The software enables you to create highly-visual, informative dashboards to provide clearer insights into your key metrics, making it even simpler to monitor performance.
This is particularly beneficial for highlighting successes and communicating the value of your marketing efforts to key stakeholders.
They also motivate fee earners by showcasing the impact of their thought leadership, giving them the encouragement they need to keep producing content, which is crucial to your overall marketing strategy.
A specialist agency like Contra has the expertise required to integrate all these systems, improving both functionality and visibility by keeping everything your firm needs in one place.
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Need a law firm digital marketing agency?
After reading this guide, you’re already more familiar with the basics of legal marketing, but there’s still plenty more involved in implementing an effective strategy.
For that, you need the help of a law firm digital marketing agency experienced in implementing bespoke solutions for leading organisations. Request a free consultation today.