The Truth About Lawyer Internet Marketing

 Think about Search Engine Optimization this way: no matter how good you are, if you are not getting yourself out on the Internet letting everyone know what you are doing, what your expertise is, how experienced you are and what makes you the right choice for your prospects-and on a regular basis, no one searching online for a lawyer will be able to find you.

 Many attorneys want to get to the point where they can just practice law. They want the phone to ring with the best cases calling from referrals, or at least have the choice of operating this way once they have grown to the level they are comfortable with. Your referrals “Google” you by name, and as long as your site represents you well and is decently designed you should come up at the top of Google by name. Even the referral based firms need to remember that more people will see their website than see their offices, so they need to try to keep their website up to date and at a level that does not increase the risk of you losing referrals.

 I was at a firm a few months ago that said every time the phone rang from a referral that said “I was looking at your website…” the attorneys cringed because as good as they were, their website looked very “last century”. They did not want to invest in optimization for advertising purposes, but they needed to be represented online at least as well as they were at their office location and through the words of others who were referring them business. A firm like this can get a fully customized website with RSS feeds, and add flash and video for a total cost of between $5K and $15K-with no need for significant time or money spent on Search Engine Optimization.

 If you aren’t already famous, but think that you have something to offer, and you need more quality clients, then you need to treat the Internet like another community that you are reaching out to and getting to know. You need to “take Google out to lunch” and discover what they want from you for you to be considered an authority in your field and recommend you to the people who come to their site looking for an attorney like you.

 You need to get up to date information about you and your firm online regularly. Taking a doctor out to lunch once every two years is not going to work as well as taking them out once a month or once a week.

 How do you do that? The short answer is through blogs, press releases, forum postings, videos, emails and of course your website or websites.

 If networking is not your strong suit, you might consider developing that skill or hiring a PR or sales/marketing specialist to do it for you. If you are not capable of implementing the strategies required to earn Google’s respect and have them begin to refer you business, and you do not want to spend your time learning how to be a website developer and optimization specialist, then you need to hire someone you can trust to do it for you.

 How do you find someone to do it for you?

Check out my previous post on search engine optimization.

 Of course, if you really wanted to be thorough, you could take the time to put together a comprehensive RFP (request for proposal) and ask 2-3 reputable SEO service providers to look at it, put together a proposal and present it to you.

The problem is that you are not likely to be an Internet marketing expert (if you are, that’s still only half the battle). Every SEO service provider has a story as to why you should hire them and not the other guy. Call me at 720-985-7945 and I will help you put an RFP together for free, as long as you let LexisNexis be one of the respondants to your RFP.

 Meanwhile here is a link to an RFP outline you might consider using- rfp-outline.doc

Tags: attorney marketing, Internet marketing, lawyer marketing, search engine optimization

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 4th, 2008 at 8:51 pm and is filed under Lawyer Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.