It is true that as a law firm you will attract a lot of new clients based on the quality of the work you deliver, the testimonials you receive from those clients for whom you work and their willingness to refer their friends, colleagues and contacts to you.
You will encourage your lawyers to network, to cross-sell services throughout the firm and to ensure they regularly follow up with old clients to stay relevant, with the hope of inducing more work to come their way.
But there are ways to generate prospects with little input from your legal resources; channels that can work hard behind the scenes to raise awareness of your firm and the quality of the work it undertakes.
Your website is your shop window to the world. It must build trust and guide the journey of every visitor to turn prospects into customers, before you sell anything to them. If you’re not confident this is the case for your website, then that’s a different conversation we need to have.
Assuming you’re happy with what the services, sectors, people and about us pages achieve for you, then the content you should be adding regularly to demonstrate expertise, experience, specialist knowledge and commercial acumen is key.
Attracting prospects with buying intent
If you are still choosing to advertise your services in local publications or securing advertorial space to explain why your firm should be the first choice to help resolve family disputes, buy a house, write a Will, help recover debts or draft a contract, you will have to be lucky. Very lucky.
It is rare that any reader will need your services at the exact moment they choose to flick through the pages and see your advert. The chances they are the type of client you want to attract, at a time when you need them, only adds to the rarity of this approach delivering new business.
And yet this approach is typical of law firms, of all sizes, complexity and ambition. Adverts and advertorial are a staple from a bygone age, when the competition was not quite so fierce and prospects were less well-versed in ways to judge the quality of service providers.
Legal services can be a distress purchase, but many prospective clients are not ready to buy, they are still at the research stage. A new generation of clients wants to understand the challenges they face more clearly before seeking professional help. They want to know what they don’t know.
And whatever the topic, a few questions typed into the search engines will deliver a multitude of solutions, from simple explanations of likely outcomes to hours long seminars aggregating the opinions of a host of impressive minds.
Recognising that around 15% of daily searches are unique, search engines rely on automated systems and processes, which consider many factors, including the words in the search query, the content of website pages, the expertise of the sources, the searchers location, etc.
The search engines are designed to deliver the most relevant and reliable information available, which may or may not be found on your website. The search engines work hard to deliver the most accurate, high-quality content and cannot be fooled easily despite the ‘tricks’ some websites try.
What we do know is that the search terms used, will give an indication of the searcher’s buying intent. There is a big difference in buying intent between a searcher trying to understand if they need a Will when buying a house and the searcher who wants to contest a Will.
By offering content that meets the needs of both searchers, you are significantly increasing the chances of your website turning prospects into clients, without you having to do a lot more than keep the content relevant, current and engaging, whilst targeting the words we know searchers use.
In part 2 of this blog on legal content, we will look at the importance of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for the pages of your website and also how it should help shape the content drafted for legal blogs, legal news and thought leadership articles added regularly to your site.
Until then, if you believe you need a new, more effective website that will bring in the leads you need without breaking the marketing budget, please get in touch and we’ll explain what WorkPR can do to help and how cost-effective our solutions are.