So, you’ve just started your legal practice and are looking for your first set of clients to get going. You’ve put advertisements in the newspaper, you’ve bought ad space around your city, and you’ve also bought television time so that people can see you. After having all of this for weeks, you’ve noticed you’ve gotten almost no calls and your legal practice seems to be failing. Has this ever happened to you? In today’s day and age, it is important to explore all marketing methods and with the popularity of the internet rising exponentially, it is necessary to get yourself onto there as well.
How do you go about marketing yourself online you may ask? There are plenty of different methods to do this and help to reach your audience. Making sure your website is readily available, has a permanent line of communication available, and making all relevant information easy to find are just the start on ways to properly market yourself online. Failure to market yourself on the internet will be catastrophic as well, as your competitors will already be utilizing these means and benefitting from them.
Here are some tips to help properly market yourself online and create a successful legal practice.
Create a website
The first step towards marketing practice online is to create a website. Your potential clients need a way to find you and a website is the best way to do this. Look into companies that sell domains for you to put your website on. It’s not good enough to just make the website. Once it’s made, you have to market it and set it up correctly. Using proper web design techniques, according to https://www.consultwebs.com/blog/web-design-for-law-firms-before-after/, will make a huge difference in getting more people to visit your site and employ your services. Don’t you want more clients? Web design is essential for doing this and you’ll notice you will be getting more clients. Creating a website and using good web design techniques is critical for marketing your practice online.
Use SEO and PPC to get your website traffic
Search engine optimization, or SEO for short, is a great way to increase the traffic of your website. SEO helps to make your website appear higher up on search engines, therefore increasing the likelihood that people will visit it. SEO is one of the best ways to increase web traffic, so ensure that you take the steps necessary to boost your page within a search engine. When you have searched for something, have you ever gone past the third page of results? The answer to that is probably not, so unfortunately your website will not get many clicks if it is sitting on page twenty in the search engine results.
SEO helps to bump this up and move it to much higher pages, so people do not have to work nearly as hard to find it. Pay-per-click or PPC is another method in which you bid on a keyword. If you win the bid, when people click the keyword, they will be taken over to your website and will see your services. Bidding on words that pertain to your legal practice ensures that those who are looking for those exact services will be brought over. Start investing in SEO and PPC to gain that marketing edge
Make your website compatible
All the SEO and PPC in the world cannot help you if your website is formatted poorly. In a day and age when people mobile browse, it is absolutely crucial that you design your website to be mobile friendly. You are segregating your clients and creating an unnecessary barrier by refusing to make it mobile friendly. By eliminating roughly half of your client base, you are jeopardizing the success of your business. Don’t be stuck in the 90s and early 2000s with your web design, make it compatible for all devices to fully utilize all the SEO and PPC marketing you have put into your site.
Make all important information readily available
You’ve finally made your website compatible for other devices and the SEO and PPC is doing a great job as you are noticing the amount of traffic in your website has increased tenfold. There is one thing you are noticing though, you’re not getting any clients. The newest problem with your marketing and web design is the layout of your website. It’s confusing, bulky, and impossible to locate anything. Clients come to your website confused about the type of services you offer and are also unable to find a method to communicate with you.
The first thing a client should see when they access your website is exactly what you do and how you can benefit them. From there, there should be an easily clickable way to get in touch with you to allow for a direct line of communication. Failure to do this means that your clients will come to your website and then quickly leave to go elsewhere. Market your website to be professional and focus on the services you offer to help increase your business.
At the end of the day, as a startup attorney, things will always start slow. Building a reliable client base takes time and there is no way of getting around it. You can, however greatly reduce the amount of time spent building a client base by marketing yourself successfully online. Use SEO and PPC, make the website compatible, and make it easy to understand, so your clients will visit you and stay with you. So, what are you waiting for? Get out there and market your practice and build a client base.