Your prospective client needs a lawyer and local SEO can help them find you. They enter the keywords “lawyers near me” in Google. Your law firm appears. As they scan through the search results, they see your law firm, again and again. Most of the information they see demonstrates your ability to get things done for your clients.

Slowly they begin to realize the truth. You’re something special. Imagine that you could achieve these results in your law firm. What would this do for your career, reputation, or firm?

Local SEO is the key to Google search success

The majority of small to medium-sized law firms struggle with at least one of the following problems:

1. Lack of quantity and quality of leads

2. Lawyers are struggling to close the leads they have

3. Law firm margins are too small due to mistakes like discounts, write-downs, and write-offs

4. Firms are undercut by low cost providers and industry disruptors like LegalZoom or RocketLawyer

5. Advertising costs are too high

6. They’re attracting poor quality clients, which hurts realization and retention rates in the long term

Local search can help lawyers address these problems. Using local search, law firms can:

• Increase the number of traffic-producing keywords that drive clients to their site

• Make credibility, authority, and prestige markers (e.g., awards, specialization, wins) more visible in Google

• Increase the number of leads generated so they can raise their prices comfortably

• Make competitors irrelevant or zone them out of Google’s search results

• Decrease advertising costs by getting others to rave about your firm

• Attract clients who will fight for your attention, spend more with your firm and pay higher fees

How lawyers can increase traffic, leads, and revenue via local SEO

Local SEO for lawyers doesn’t have to be expensive. There are several low cost and no cost tactics lawyers can use to boost search results. Before we take a look at these tactics, I want to cover some general principles regarding marketing. These aren’t absolute rules. They’re simply important details to keep in mind.

1. Paid advertising produces results faster. Using services like Facebook or Google Ads means you’re able to generate traffic, leads, and revenue immediately. The nature of paid advertising and marketing means these paid services lack longevity. Results go away as soon as you stop paying.

2. Free advertising takes time. Free tactics like search engine optimization, review management, influencer marketing, etc. all require time to generate results organically. If results are rushed, they’re typically pretty lackluster. As a general rule, free advertising tactics perform well over the long term. It takes time to set up but lasts for a long time.

3. Combine free and paid advertising tactics for the best results. Combining free and paid advertising tactics produce exponential growth (think 2 + 2 = 42). Both of these tactics play off each other, boosting your firm’s reputed and presumed credibility.

4. Paid advertising can be free. Structure your offers the right way, and your paid advertising can be free. This can be accomplished in several ways, i.e., using paid ads to send prospective clients to a paid consultation page to gauge their interest.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at the local SEO search tactics you can use to generate 2x more leads:

• Consistently build a robust online review portfolio

• Systematically build a strong publicity/mentions portfolio

• Use newsjacking to promote your firm’s pro bono work

• Pick a public fight against a worthy adversary

• Write for notable publications

• Speak at local events where your target audience is present

• Use positive controversy to raise your firm’s profile

• Local advertising via Google Ads

• Remarketing advertising to boost sign-ups from previous visitors

• Become a career interviewee on radio and podcast shows

• Create your own radio show

• Syndicate your content to client-facing sources

• Become a career interviewer, interviewing people your clients want to hear from

Just one of these tactics can 2x your lead generation campaigns. Overlap these strategies, and the positive results grow exponentially. These local SEO strategies can be used to dominate Google’s local search results, many of these strategies, yes, even paid advertising, can be low/no cost tactics when they’re used effectively.

Here’s the most significant reason your law firm should invest in local SEO: Most law firms aren’t using it well. If most firms are doing the same things poorly, no wonder it isn’t working all that well. But it can.

Lawyers near me = your firm, everywhere

At least, that’s how it should be. When done right, local SEO for lawyers will help you drive more traffic and appear higher in searches. When your prospective clients enter location-specific keywords in Google, they should see your firm everywhere. As they scan through Google’s search results, your firm and accomplishments should appear consistently.

Andrew McDermott contributed to this article. 

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