Law Firm Digital Marketing

For attorneys just starting out—or any lawyer looking for a rebrand—we offer full-service web design. This fundamental service includes domain research and purchasing; search engine optimization (SEO) and local marketing maximization (which assures your website ranks well on Google Maps, Apple, Yahoo, Yelp, and other major GPS Services and local websites); social media; content creation (blogs, social media posts, videos etc.); as well as practice management analytics (traffic reporting, call tracking and live-chat services). With an eye toward accessibility, site load speed and security, our talented team of web designers, programmers, and graphics designers will help you build a site that performs well with Google.

What is involved in Trial Guides Digital Marketing custom web design?

Web site appearance and user experience matter. But, our custom web design service goes way beyond looks. We consider site functionality from every angle, from site hierarchy, programming language, metadata and schema markup to load speed, security, and other issues. They impact the perception of potential customers, but they also impact your Google ranking. Updating a web site correctly is equally important. If we build a new web site from existing content, we carefully check all inward and outward links; broken links can seriously damage your website’s reputation score, and cost you in Google rankings. Checking redirect extensions, active and updated links and other issues critical to website ranking, makes the difference between your new website being successful and not achieving your objectives.

If you are an attorney with an established website and brand, we offer a wide range of services that maximize the reach and value of your website as discussed below.

Nearly 100% of all potential legal clients will start their process by looking for legal advice online, and about one in three clients choose a lawyer from their website. This means your website must represent you in the best possible light. Is your website up to date? Fast-loading? Mobile-friendly? Our digital marketing site audit service starts with an exhaustive website audit. This often allows us to offer some early “easy wins” as we plan your digital marketing strategy.

A site audit includes, but is not limited to, the following services:

Current Marketing Analysis

What’s in a name? As it turns out, quite a bit. Your domain name—and its authority score—determine not just how Google ranks you, but how easy you are for potential clients to find. An established domain name that positively reflects you and your business, a location that is centrally located, and a phone number with an established area code: all these factors add to your marketing power.

Security and Hosting

Legal websites are not impervious to cyber attacks. Not only would a security breach drastically reduce your authority score and Google ranking, but it can create ongoing issues with site security, and make e-mail from your law firm be marked as spam impacting your ability to reach insurers, opposing counsel or judges. We can recommend web site languages and web hosting with robust security, to reduce your worry about this worst-case scenario.

Schema

A website is like a guidebook; the subject matter must be clear, the table of contents should reflect the scope of work, and the content itself needs to be organized, accessible, and representative of the services you provide. Poorly designed websites may have duplicate pages or content, poor traffic on their anchor pages (like “practice area” pages), and a hard-to-follow site hierarchy that leaves users confused and frustrated. This can significantly damage your Google ranking as well, making it difficult for potential clients to find you online.

Site Speed

The difference between a fast-loading website and a slow one could mean the difference between you or your competitor getting a high value client. eCommerce research suggests that with every 0.1 seconds increase in site load speed, you lose 1% of viewers. According to Google research, 40% of all web site viewers will abandon a web site that doesn't completely load within 3 seconds. As a result, site speed is a key determining factor for Google’s ranking algorithm. Which means that slow site load speed reduces the number of clients who will hire your firm through your web site by much more than 40%.

Mobile Functionality

It’s no secret that a very high percentage of web site use occurs on our smartphones. As of 2022, 62.0% of all web site traffic is on mobile devices, and 92.1% of people in the United States access the internet with their mobile phone. If your website is not mobile-friendly, your clients will find an attorney whose website is. The effect of web site mobile compatibility problems is compounded by web site ranking. Mobile compatibility and mobile site load speed are both key determinants of Google ranking. Let us help you maximize your reach by making sure that your site looks great on both iOS and Android devices.

Blog Optimization

It’s not enough to simply have a website with a content page; you’ll also need to share content that aligns with your client’s needs. Not all content is created equal, however; using specific keywords, writing paragraphs and blogs to a certain length, and posting frequently will improve your SEO and web site ranking.

Site Issues and Warnings

It happens on the best of sites: as your web host updates their software, or Google shifts their algorithm, you may see issues arise. Our site audit always looks for these issues first so that you can make the best choices to preserve or improve your Google page ranking.

Backlink Analysis

When other websites link to your content, that is called a “backlink.” In many cases, backlinks improve your reach and authority score. Conversely: backlinks from "spam" web sites (which you may not even know exist) will hurt your website in Google rankings. A backlink analysis is a critical component of every site audit. Once you know they are there, removing them is important to improving your Google ranking.

The goal of any digital marketing team is gaining visibility on Google, and one of the most direct ways to accomplish this is to create a Google Business Profile. As part of our SEO services, we create a Google Business Profile, formerly known as Google My Business, for your law firm.

What is a Google Business Profile?

A Google Business Profile is both a Google-based business listing that appears in online searches, as well as a tool to manage and optimize your web search results. These static business listings may appear on Google Maps, as well as in local search results (for example, “attorney near me”). It may include directions, hours, reviews, services, frequently asked questions, and contact/website information. In this capacity, your Google profile can double as an effective SEO and lead generation tool.

Why is a Google Business Profile essential for local SEO?

Local SEO is arguably the most important component of digital marketing.—and marketing strategies that target local searches rely on accurate information about your business. An up-to-date Google Business Profile profile communicates business stability, scope of work and community involvement. Moreover, having a Google Business Profile increases the likelihood of being featured in the "Google Map Pack", or "local pack" of highlighted businesses in your area.

What is a “local pack”?

A “local pack” refers to the first-page results on local searches (for example, “trucking lawyer new me”). For local searches, studies show that Google-listed businesses appear above organic results more than 90% of the time. As a result, “local pack” businesses receive more than 40% of clicks; law firms may see impressions increasing by as much as 400%. If you are not optimizing your Google Business Profile profile, you are missing out on potential client leads.

Can a Google Business Profile increase my reviews?

Yes! A Google Business Profile can help your reviews stand out by offering a platform to display your positive reviews (and respond quickly, and respectfully, to negative reviews). Your Google Business Profile demonstrates to future clients that you are professional, engaged, and client-focused. In a competitive legal market, a set of strong reviews are necessary if you want your business profile to rank well.

While a Google profile does not always allow you to remove bad reviews or less-than-flattering information, it does provide opportunities to interact with clients in a public sphere. When you reply to reviews, you build trust and rapport with your customers; it’s an easy way to interact with your customers in a way that improves your local SEO rankings and increases your visibility in local searches. This helps engage customers, boost your general appeal, and increase the likelihood of a person finding your law firm website.

Are Google reviews important?

Here’s the truth that many digital marketing companies miss: your reviews can be just as important as your website keywords. As Google has increased the frequency of Featured Snippets, FAQ dropdowns, and Google Map Pack listings that appear first in search results, the space for organic results has decreased. A high-ranking Google Business Profile will show above the top performing site relying on organic searches.

How many Google reviews do I need?

While conventional advice is to aim for at least 20 reviews, we suggest looking at your top local competitors and comparing their review section with your own. You may be surprised to see that your competitors may have dozens, or even hundreds, of positive reviews. In addition to establishing your Google presence, we offer solutions to automate the solicitation of reviews. Over time, your Google Business Profile will fill with useful information.

Who are your top competitors? They might not be who you think! Our Law Firm Competitor Analysis will show you how your website competes with theirs, what types of new clients they are targeting, and how you can best compete with them for the clients you want most. We can also identify law firms you may not think are your competitors, who are competing for the same clients as you without you even knowing it. This can help you identify if a large national or regional competitor is moving into your market, so that you can plan accordingly.

Competitor Tracking: If you sign a contract for ongoing marketing services, we can create a comprehensive dashboard for your digital marketing performance, including how you are performing compared to your closest competitors.  This helps you identify how to compete and beat your competition for the type of cases you want most.  With ongoing marketing services we help you understand what content needs to be written for the web site, where you might want to move your paid advertising budget, and much more.  Competitor tracking can also help you plan for a major national law firm moving into your area, so that you can take significant action now, before you get crushed by a firm with massive marketing firepower.

The numbers don’t lie. That’s why we offer a client data platform that contains all marketing metrics, displaying them neatly in one place to compare and adjust your efforts. We set up and train your staff to use services like call tracking, site use tracking, and overall metrics through the data console. Track new and returning users, bounce rate, and website impressions with ease—or opt for our monthly retainer service where we can monitor these metrics for you and advise you on how to attract new customers with the best return on your financial investment.

Our standard service includes setting up Google's Data Studio to track website analytics, pay-per-click success and basic information on how viewers reach your website, website performance issues, and website impressions. We provide training videos on how your staff can use call tracking, site use tracking and overall metrics through the Google Analytics console.

An upgrade option exists for a customized data studio for your law firm that tracks incoming traffic from all of your digital marketing campaigns including organic website traffic, pay-per-click advertising, email, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and more, to give you a better understanding on how your overall marketing efforts are performing. We can also install software that records how your website visitors are interacting with your website, how they move through the site and what they view. This can provide helpful information on where to further develop your website content to capture more new clients.

Google processes over 60,000 search queries every second, translating to 5.6 billion searches per day and approximately 2 trillion global searches per year. Nearly half of those searches are users seeking local information about a product or service. Improving your SEO is a fundamental part of mobile marketing, and other forms of digital marketing.

We offer both global and local SEO to help your business rank higher where it counts most. Any business that has a physical location or serves a geographic area can benefit from local SEO.

Blogging

When was the last time you shared an idea, a legal update, or a verdict story with your followers? Organic content—blogs, videos and the like—are the lifeblood of your business. Optimizing your content to meet keyword trends greatly increases the likelihood of your content being liked, shared, and bumped up in Google search results.

Our team of content creators include seasoned professionals with backgrounds in everything from law and economics to social media and marketing. We start by getting to know you and your brand, as well as your professional goals. From there, we write clean, quick, bespoke copy on topics that attract readership. We offer blog packages, as well as a convenient retainer option that allows the relief of knowing that your blog will always remain current, curated, and customized across your digital channels.

Promotional Videos and Stock Photos

It’s a fact: websites that include video content have longer visits, higher engagement, and better conversion rates than those that don’t. Trial Guides Digital Marketing is also a resource for unique courtroom stock photography and video that cannot be purchased elsewhere. We also can arrange high quality video services filmed with you on location at a beautiful retired Courthouse in Portland, Oregon. We offer everything from film direction and videography to staging and extras staffing. Our videographers and editors have created corporate videos for Nike, Microsoft, NASA, HBO and others as well as legal videos for Trial Guides authors Nick Rowley and Aaron DeShaw. Let us help you resonate with your clients—and future jurors—by telling a compelling visual story.

Facebook now has over 1 billion users, Twitter has over 500 million users, and LinkedIn has almost 250 million active users. Social media generates almost twice the marketing leads as trade shows, direct mail, or telemarketing. If your social media channels don't measure up, our social media experts can help you get up to speed.

Trial Guides has spent years doing social media marketing, and uses cutting-edge methods to target groups to improve your chances of reaching a specific audience. In one recent example, we helped a client reach potential clients and fact witnesses in a natural gas explosion case with a small investment in targeted social media advertising. This holds significant potential for law firms wanting mass tort cases or where you may be seeking referrals from a particular group or geographic area.

You’ve got a great domain, a beautiful legal web site, you’re posting regularly on your blog, and you’ve invested in high-quality video to connect with your audience. But are you leveraging pay-per-click (PPC) to its maximum value?

More than 6 in 10 website searchers will click on a paid link. When a potential client is looking for legal representation, being the first face they see could mean the difference between them choosing you or your competitor. PPC can generate quick results, but it can also be very expensive.  In fact, legal keywords are amongst the most expensive of all PPC campaigns in Google. For this reason, our PPC strategists focus on targeted PPC campaigns to minimize costs and maximize reach; we focus on a narrow target audience and underscore your specific practice areas so we can launch your PPC campaign with confidence. We have the tools to make this powerful marketing automation move your website to the top of the list.

Our PPC service is only the beginning. Through real-time analysis of paid marketing campaigns, we can see what’s working—and what needs work. We understand the fickle nature of online advertising; we pride ourselves on honing in quickly to what’s working well, and moving quickly away from dead ends and non-starters. Our PPC efforts will not only minimize cost per click (CPC) but also hone in on the audience you want. We are constantly seeking perfection, moving your marketing results from good to great.

Trial Guides' own experience provides a powerful insight about how important it is to work with the right agency. A number of years ago, Trial Guides worked with a prominent national marketing agency with an excellent reputation. Rather than doing the hard work of targeting important topics for our pay-per-click advertising, the agency simply spent our money advertising our own name - resulting in us paying Google for customers who searched our company name. It didn't result in improved outcomes, but it did make their "return on investment" numbers look better. As an agency, we won't waste your money advertising for words where you will already get traffic for free. We work diligently to focus advertising dollars on getting you clients you wouldn't get otherwise, and excluding terms you do not want to pay to attract.

Any marketing expert will tell you that email is the most effective marketing channel in digital marketing. Even with the proliferation of social media and mobile apps, email continues to deliver results. Integrating email marketing should be a part of every marketing strategy; it quickly, and affordably, converts readers into customers or referral sources. A compelling email campaign will not only put your services in front of your optimal audience, but offer an invaluable opportunity to promote to known referral sources. This is a tool used by few law firms, but is the secret weapon of most successful ecommerce companies.

Overwhelmed? Let us help.

A high-traffic, high-retention email marketing campaign offers something to readers that they want: a tip, a service, important change in law, or a success story. With the help of email software that offers analytics—like clickthrough rate—and high-quality content, an email marketing channel will accentuate the strength of your marketing message.

Some law firms have experienced web site hacks and phishing attacks from their website domain.  The result of this is that Google will remove your website from their rankings and mark you as a potential threat in most of the website browsers.  It can also result in your law firm's email being sent to the spam folder of everyone you try to reach, including insurers, opposing counsel, court staff and judges.  It can destroy years of hard work on your web site. And creating a new web site under a new domain will make ranking with Google very difficult because domain age is an important factor in Google rankings. Thankfully, our team has experience repairing web domain reputation damage.

In one client's case, a lawyer's web site had been ranking #1 in Google for many of his desired practice area keywords.  After his Wordpress website was hacked, his website was removed from Google and his staff's email started being marked as spam. Despite building a new website, the damage to the law firm's domain was not repaired. Through our work we were able to repair the damage to his domain reputation, get the law firm's Google rankings back to #1 again, and generate multiple $1,000,000+ cases within a few months.

If you are interested in any of the above services for your law firm, complete our waitlist form here.