Internet Online Search Marketing for Law Firms

So how do search engines affect the legal services industry?

Well to be honest, they affect the legal services industry as much as every other industry. The long and the short of it is this; there are thousands upon thousands of buyers of legal services using search engines to find companies they then do business with.

Are you on the receiving end of this?

The strange thing is that this happens in the background, silently without it being obvious.

One thing you can do is click on this tool:
https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal

And type in the word 'solicitor' into the box.

At time of writing I saw the following numbers of searches were conducted in January:

• 40,500 for solicitors london (plural)
  
• 22,200 for solicitor londen (singular)
  
• 18,000 for property solicitor
• 14,000 for employement solicitor
• 14,000 for family solicitor
• 15,000 for injury solicitor
• 12,000 for conveyancing solicitor
• 9,500 for immigration solicitor
• 8,000 for criminal solicitor

The list goes on and on. Almost forever.

I wrote a breif article on how the Internet and specifically search engine marketing creates unlimited demand for law firms.

The keyword tool begins to explain how this works.

When you do any kind of research into keywords, you get the same old shape.

You get a massive amount of search volume for the big umbrella terms 'law', 'car', 'travel' etc

Then as you get more specific 'law firm', 'used car', 'travel guide', there's still a massive amount of search volume but an increase in 'quality' in terms of identifying what the person wants.

This trend continues until we get to the low volume stuff like 'french campaing holidays' or 'solicitors in sheffield' which obviously narrows down the number of times these terms are searched, but that doesn't matter.

What we really want at the end of the day is new customers and having every man and his dog come to our website isn't going to achieve that i.e. if our website appeared at the top of Google when someone typed in 'law firm' or 'solicitor'.

You don't want a person searching for 'solicitor' on your website, because by their nature they are wholelly unqualified.

How do you know what to do with this person? We know they want to buy legal services but what kind? What situation are they in?

The answer is we don't know and that's exactly the point. These people will end up wasting your time.

Now take it to the other end of the extreme to a firm like Adie O'Reilly a company we've had discussions with regarding online marketing.

Adie O'Reilly have a key strength in the area of construction law and are leaders in their field in their local market.

Bearing in mind Google provides complete freedom as to what you are allowed to type into the search box, couple that with the fact that the searcher doesn't want to waste time and you end up with a search for 'specialist construction solicitor in lincoln'.

How qualified is that?

How likely is that to convert into a fee? It's not guarunteed but it's very high.

Imagine how comfortable the prospective client feels, they found you.