Internet Online Search Marketing for Law Firms

How Search Engine Marketing Creates Unlimited Demand for Law Firms

Like most industries, the legal industry has niches.

You get full service law firms at one end, highly specialist law firms at the other and every shade of grey in-between.

The way search engine marketing is creating unlimited demand for law firms is by empowering the buyer of legal services to find exactly what he or she wants, despite the fact that there may be no local firm who can help them.

Think of it like this. We're all familiar with the Yellow Pages right? Now that's a directory, it has a fixed set of categories and when you want to advertise in there you have to choose one of those categories.

A lot of time people don't like doing this because inevitably you end up thinking 'well that's not quite what we do', but you accept it because there are only so many categories.

If you were able to choose your own category there would be the same number of categories as there were companies listed.

You'd have 'manchester based specialist construction lawyers offering fixed fee services' along with 'london based personal injury compensation specialist offering no win no fee'.

Plus every other variation a law firm believed best described what they did.

The way search engine marketing revolutionised this was to allow the buyer to freely type into a text field, exactly what they were looking for.

So instead of having to click through the hierarchy of categories:

Legal > Solicitors & Barristers > Solicitors > Conveyancing > Birmingham
And THEN ending up with a whole list of firms that still might not be able to help me, with search I decide exactly what I want and then Google recommends companies that can help me.

So using the long winded example I gave regarding creating a category for each firm tailored to their unique traits, this we can now do:

If we want a manchester based specialist conveyancing lawyers offering fixed fee services, then that's exactly what we type into the search box!

Click here to run this search on Google and see what comes up.

At time of writing there were no suitable companies appearing in the search results, just a bunch of online directory sites listing general solicitors.

Where are all the websites belonging to the firms I want to spend my money with? They are not there.

And why is this? Well because as with 90% of websites in existence, their company websites either don't exist or have not had any search engine optimisation done on them. Without SEO Google has an almost impossible job of bringing you back the results you want.

This is yet another example of why Upright Solutions exists, helping law firms to take advantage of the huge benefits on offer from the Internet.

Chris Coney
Upright Solutions

Labels: search engine optimisation, seo

posted by Chris Coney BSc at 13:42 | 0 Comments

Generating Personal Injury Case Referrals from the Internet

Claiming compensation for personal injury. A well known topic by all, even those not in the legal industry.

I remember what a shock we got when we took on our first solicitor firm who specialised in personal injury.

They wanted (as all our clients do) to generate enquiries / referrals from the Internet for people wanting to claim personal injury compensation.

It wasn't the client company that gave us the shock it was the initial research and the subsequent experience we had conducting their campaign.

What do I mean by this? One word, competitive.

Very very very competitive in fact.

Our initial research indicated that using Google Adwords and the pay per click marketing system we would be spending around the £5-10 per click mark. Quite a lot compared to other legal service areas but it's all relative when you think how much you pay in referral fees for such clients.

Even having said that £5-£10 seems quite harsh, but we did the projection and the business case was there. There was enough margin in it for the client to make it viable so we launched the campaign.

After we'd got some data in, in fact we were spot on with the projection, £8.64 was the average cost per click and we tweak the clients site to the point were it was converting at about 4.8%, so the enquiries were being generated for every £172 invested, not bad.

The campaign is now paused until we know the true results (we all know how long the cycle can take). We don't want to soldier on and then end up with a bunch of enquiries that brought in no business.

This is what online marketing is all about test, measure, tweak, improve. But it's important that campaigns be given enough time for the tweaks that are made along the way to take effect.

Once we get the financial results back, we'll be able to determine exactly which keywords generated those enquiries that turned into business and focus phase two on those.

My feeling is that we'll probably end up taking the most effective keywords and putting them into an organic search engine optimisation campaign, so the client can have a predictable investment each month and doesn't then have to keep upping their budget if they want more business.

Chris Coney
Upright Solution

Labels: email marketing, pay per click, personal injury, search engine optimisation

posted by Chris Coney BSc at 14:27 | 0 Comments