Simply being a lawyer with a website is not enough to sign new cases these days (in most cases).
Many people make the mistake thinking that if they invest one time in a website that it will take off and start generating leads. Sadly this leads to many firm owners thinking that it simply doesn’t work. However, for Juris Digital clients, their website is their biggest case generating asset.
That is because they understand the nuances of what it takes to really be successful in a crowded market where almost every firm in your city has their own website. They understand that they don’t only need to be found, but their potential customers also have to chose them above others in the exact same market.
Here is a list of the most common legal website mistakes we see at Juris Digital.
The worst offenders I see here are typically general practice firms where they try to tell people they’re the experts at everything. But as you know you can’t be the best at everything. The problem is that your clients and Google understand that as well.
The worst thing that you can do as a lawyer is to try to seem general. Potential clients are going to be hiring you for a reason. You have to showcase what your firm does front and center.
Do you want to field calls from people who are window shopping, or do you want to do business with clients who understand that you can help them immediately?
Pro Tip: Did you know that focusing on a narrow niche and becoming known as an expert in your field can get your MORE of the BEST cases?
Potential clients are always wanting to hire the best lawyer for their legal matter. Especially the clients with the deepest pocket books. Have you ever heard of the phrase “Jack of all trades, master of none?”? If you market yourself as a lawyer that does literally everything, you might lose trust with potential consumers. Instead, make sure to highlight your speciality and show why you’re the best.
Also the more you diversify the harder it is on your attorney SEO campaign.
I recently met with an attorney who was dead set on displaying social channel feeds, video feeds, forums, and other 3rd party plugins on his site, yet his purpose was to convert visitors. If you create a website that has more ways to leave your website instead of guiding them down a conversion funnel, then you’re mistaken.
Other attorneys make this same mistake by making their website busy and overbearing. Somehow, they believe, this will make people believe that the firm is smarter than the competition. This cannot be farther from the truth.
The best law firm sites are simple and to the point. The sales funnel technique that works for selling socks also works for selling your firm’s services. Give your audience a single path to follow, and make sure that they know exactly where they are going. Answer any questions they might have with great content.
If your website looks like this you have issues. And I just had a seizure.
You do not have to showcase your knowledge of Black’s Law Dictionary, especially since your client base probably does not know what Black’s Law Dictionary is.
This is a mistake that newer lawyers make; they are fresh out of school and they want to make an impression. Unfortunately, showing off using verbose language will only turn people away. Save it for the judge and for your opposition.
The exception to this is if you’re marketing directly to other law firms online.
For most practice areas you want to focus on content geared so that a high schooler or 8th grader can understand it. You want to be clear, concise, and address their pain points with great answers as soon as you can.
People that need to hire a lawyer are generally in one of the most stressful situations in their life. They want to work with someone who they know that can help them, someone they can get along with, and someone who is a clear subject matter expert.
Pictures say 1000 words. Sometimes when newer law firms are launching a new website they take shortcuts.
Photos is one place where you shouldn’t take shortcuts. Having professional photos really says a lot about you and who you are. It shows that you care about details and can instill confidence in prospective clients. In our experience having bad photos will break your website and having good photos can help increase conversions.
And let’s be honest. There is more to this than bad photos. How many websites have you been to where the main hero image on the website is all of the partners wearing suits standing in front of a courthouse or the office? Pretty much all of them.
If you don’t plan on standing out this is a great strategy to take with your photos.
The year is 2023 and more searches are done on mobile devices everyday than computers. That should tell you something. However there are still unethical companies out there building non responsive or non mobile first websites.
This is a sure fire way to lose conversions from potential clients.
Not having clear and concise information. Law firm websites should provide clear and concise information about the firm’s services, attorneys, and areas of practice. This can help potential clients quickly understand what the firm has to offer and whether they may be a good fit.
A call-to-action is a prompt that encourages website visitors to take a specific action, such as contacting the firm or filling out a contact form. Without a clear call-to-action, potential clients may not know how to get in touch with the firm or may be unsure of the next steps to take.
t is important for law firms to regularly update their websites with fresh content, such as blog posts or case updates. This can help keep the website current and relevant, and can also improve its ranking in search engine results.
Looking at your website day in and day out becomes useless after a while. You get too focused or trained on one thing and start ignoring the obvious. If you need a trained set of eyes to give you a second look on your website, give us a call. We’re happy to help.
Pay-per-click advertising on Google can be an effective way for law firms to generate new clients. It can also be a good way for lawyers to shovel large amounts of cash directly into Google’s coffers and walk away without anything to show for it.
It is not at all uncommon for valuable legal keywords to cost hundreds of dollars per click. For example, check out the estimated cost per click for this group of Dallas personal injury keywords:
With per-click prices reaching into the hundreds of dollars in some legal practice areas, it’s easy to see how law firms can get absolutely torched on their PPC investment if they don’t get the basics right.
In this post I’ve shared 10 tips to help you avoid turning your ad dollars to ash, maximizing the return you realize from your investment in PPC instead.
Structuring your law firm PPC account correctly is the best way to ensure you are getting the most for your budget. A simplified campaign structure is not only easy to manage but provides the best results.
Ideally, your account should only have 1 search campaign that contains multiple ad groups for different keywords and landing pages.
Separate campaigns should only be created if you want to target:
Example of how your account could look:
Campaign #1
Location Target = West Texas
Campaign #2
Location Target = Houston
Campaign #3
Display Campaign
Campaign #4
Dedicated Budget for Mass Tort Campaign
It’s all about location. This is true in real estate and in PPC for lawyers. Your campaigns should have the target location option set to:
Reach people in or regularly in your targeted locations (Presence). This option lets you show your ads to people who are likely to be located, or regularly located in the locations you’ve targeted.
Source
By default, when you start your law firm PPC campaign, Google will set your location target option to Presence or Interest.
With this default setting, your ad will be shown to people whom Google deems as having an interest in your area, but not physically in your target location. While this may sound good in theory, it can result in a lot of “bad” clicks that eat away at your budget. While not 100% foolproof, the Presence option helps cut down on any out-of-location leads.
In 2021, Google changed the way keyword match types function. Phrase and Exact match became a lot more lenient and the intent of the searcher was taken into consideration as opposed to only going off of exactly what the user typed.
For example, before 2021, if you were bidding on the exact match keyword [personal injury lawyer] your ad would have only shown up for people who typed “personal injury lawyer”. Now, with that same exact match keyword, your ad will trigger even if someone types in “personal injuries lawyer” “personal injury attorneys” or “law firm for personal injury.” So you don’t have to worry about missing out on valid searches.
Google really really wants you to use broad match and is going to recommend it to you with every campaign improvement suggestion. You can also find a lot of articles on how the new broad match paired with smart bidding is a good choice. While that may be true for some industries, we have never seen this work for law firm PPC. What you usually end up with is completely generic phrases like “law firm” and a lot of wasted clicks.
Our advice, stick with Exact and Phrase Match for your keywords, no matter how many times Google asks you to switch.
Automation is taking over Google. And while you do not want to give up full control, you should let Google help you where it can.
Smart Bidding lets Google take all the data and signals it is receiving from your campaign and automatically optimize it for better results. It is something that is impossible to manually replicate, so it is best to let Google do the work for you.
In our experience, Target CPA has worked best for lawyer PPC accounts that get a lot of impressions and Maximize Conversions has worked best for low impression campaigns. Keep in mind that both these strategies will take time to work. Google needs lots of data and that can mean your campaign will need to be running for 3-months before it can start performing at an optimal level.
Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) are the only type of text ads that Google will allow you to create for search campaigns. Unlike the old extended text ads, RSAs are designed to let Google cycle through a bunch of different ad copy and automatically serve the best ads for your audience.
When creating your RSAs you should fill out all 15 headlines, four descriptions, and use a minimal amount of pinning. This will signal to Google that it needs to serve your ad to more people at a quicker pace to figure out the best-performing combinations.
Here are some specific tips to help you create an effective RSA:
The only way to not only understand the performance of your attorney PPC campaign – but to maximize positive results as well – is to track all of the leads that your ads are generating. This includes emails, phone calls, chats, and any other way that potential new clients contact you.
This is essential data that Google needs to optimize your campaign. Without a full picture of the leads you are receiving, you will never be able to fully optimize your campaign for success. Feed the Google machine and you will be rewarded.
Pro Tip: A tool like CallRail will automatically import data to and from Google Ads and allow you to track quality and value. All these metrics will only help you get higher-value leads from your PPC.
While you want to let Google help you where it can, using fully automated campaigns such as Performance Max, should be done with caution. Google makes these campaigns very easy to set up and run, but you have very little control over where your ad shows and what keywords you are bidding on. This could mean getting a bunch of leads for non-targeted services.
If you would like to use an automated campaign like Performance Max it is best done as an accompaniment to Search campaigns.
A few things to note if you are running both campaigns:
Google likes to give you a lot of suggestions on how to improve your campaign (please see the paragraph on broad match). 90% of the time, these suggestions do not make sense for law firm PPC and will not improve your performance.
You should never blindly apply Google’s recommendations to your campaigns. Always click view recommendations and decide for yourself if the changes make sense based on the specifics of your services and your goals.
Every PPC campaign will generate some unwanted keywords, but you don’t want to waste a large number of clicks or impressions on undesirable, irrelevant keywords.
You should regularly check your search terms and add any “bad” keywords to your Account-level negative keyword list. You will also want to add all states and major cities that you can’t serve. This will keep your ads from being served to people located in your target area who are searching for services in another city or state.
PPC for law firms is expensive and not having a realistic monthly budget is the #1 problem that hampers campaign success. If you don’t have a healthy budget you are never going to get enough leads to turn into signed cases. You will basically be flushing money down the drain.
Personal Injury keywords are some of the most expensive keywords on Google Ads. We have seen some keywords in large markets that can cost $1,000 per click! That is just for a click, not a lead.
To figure out a realistic monthly budget use the keyword planner to see the average cost per click to be at the top of the page on keywords in your target location. You can assume that ~20% of clicks will turn into leads. If the average CPC is $150, a budget of $2,000 will only get you 13 clicks, which means 2–3 leads total for the month. Any budget that is getting you under 10 leads a month is not worth your time.
I hope you found these tips useful and feel empowered to go out and optimize your law firm’s PPC campaigns. If you’d like another set of eyes on your ad setup, don’t hesitate to reach out to us for a strategy review.
So you need more leads for your personal injury practice. You are intrigued by the prospect of simply purchasing personal injury leads from a lead generation company. After all, you are a lawyer, not an advertiser or marketer. You know how to recover compensation for your clients, not necessarily how to get those clients in the door.
But is buying personal injury leads the best way to invest your growth dollars?
Or, should you invest in building marketing assets whereby you generate your own personal injury leads and cut out the middle man?
Here’s my best advice as someone who has helped grow dozens of personal injury law firms over the last decade:
Buying personal injury leads can be an effective way to generate revenue quickly. However, buying leads produces zero residual value for your law firm. When you stop paying, the leads stop coming. Alternatively, when you invest in marketing for your law firm, the returns on that investment compound over time because you own those assets rather than renting someone else’s.
If you have the resources, it might make sense to both purchase personal injury leads from a lead generation company, and invest in building and marketing your own properties to drive leads directly to your firm. But if it comes down to a choice of one or the other, I say you are always better off investing in marketing your own brand rather than renting someone else’s.
At Juris Digital we do not sell personal injury leads. Instead, we help law firms invest in digital market assets that establish their brand identity and effectively produce consistent and quality personal injury leads in a sustainable fashion.
If that sounds interesting to you, let’s talk.
Note: If you are looking for a comparison of personal injury lead generation companies, this post won’t help you. The only way to know for sure whether a particular lead generation company can deliver on its promise is to engage with them directly and test out their service.
Before we go any further, there is an important distinction that needs to be made between companies that generate and sell you leads, and companies that advertise your law firm on their web property (law firm advertising platforms).
If you search the web for something like “personal injury leads” you are going to find a smattering of companies who offer something like this:
Companies like this advertise for general personal injury representation via TV, radio, SEO, PCC, social media, etc., send the resulting leads to you, and charge you a fee for each lead.
On the other hand, there are a plethora of law firm advertising platforms where you can pay to have your firm listed. Examples of this sort of service include websites like Avvo.com, FindLaw.com, and Nolo.com.
Some of these platforms offer some version of a pay-per-lead model. Others simply charge a fee for ad space and do not take the number of leads generated into account whatsoever.
Google offers a pay-per-lead ad service called Google Local Service Ads (LSAs) which it began offering to law firms in 2020. Here’s what these ads look like when someone is searching for a personal injury lawyer on Google:
It’s important to distinguish between buying leads from a lead generation company and advertising your law firm on a platform that may help generate leads for your firm.
When you buy leads from a lead generation company those leads will have zero information about your law firm because lead generation companies don’t advertise your law firm. Instead, they advertise your general services.
Alternatively, when you advertise with Avvo.com, FindLaw.com, Nolo.com, or Google LSAs – while the end goal is the same (to generate leads) – there is the additional value that any given lead will have already had a touch-point with your firm.
In other words, advertising on a law firm ad platform is an exercise in brand building. Buying pre-generated leads is not.
Let’s take for granted that the lead generation company you end up using delivers on its promise of sending you viable personal injury case leads. Here are the key questions you should ask yourself before deciding whether to buy personal injury leads.
Just like every other marketing initiative, it’s important that you have tracking in place to determine your ROI before launching a campaign. Ultimately this is how you will find out if it’s worth the investment for your law firm.
Below is an example of how you might calculate and track the cost per acquisition for any given lead generation source. In the example below we use the ROAS formula wherein the return on investment means how much money you make for each $1 you invest in a specific channel.
| Lead Source | Cases Signed | Cost Per Case | Avg Case Value | Return on Investment |
| SEO | 10 | $750 | $20,000 | $26.60 |
| Local Service Ads | 10 | $1,900 | $20,000 | $10.52 |
| Nolo.com | 10 | $8,650 | $20,000 | $2.31 |
Tracking these numbers and building a campaign around them will help you make data-informed decisions on your marketing efforts as opposed to anecdotal ones.
With almost any personal injury lead gen company you work with, you are going to pay per lead, not per new case. This means that if you can’t close the good leads you receive at a high rate, your investment will go entirely to waste. Ask yourself:
If the answer to any of these questions is not a resounding Yes, buying leads might not be right for you.
When you are purchasing personal injury leads, it’s a numbers game. You will most likely need to speak with 10 leads in order to sign a single case, which means you need to have adequate support staff in place to properly follow up with, qualify, and work with those leads. While 80 or 90% of the leads that you pay for are not going to become clients you’ve still got to be able to work every lead like it has potential in order to sign up any cases at all. If you find this prospect upsetting, purchasing personal injury case leads might not be right for you.
If you are only looking for the highest-value serious injury and wrongful death cases, you will almost certainly be disappointed by the leads you get from a lead generation company. While you may on occasion get a high-value lead, the majority of the leads you get are going to be middle-of-the-road injury claims. You need to be willing and able to monetize these cases in order to see a return on your investment.
If you practice in California or Texas or Florida sure there is more competition for personal injury leads, but there is also an extreme abundance of cases. Conversely, if you practice in Rhode Island or Wyoming, the volume of leads is so small no lead generation company will be able to produce consistent and quality leads. If you are in a small market you’ll be far better off owning your lead generation sources instead of renting someone else’s.
There are some obvious benefits to purchasing personal injury leads from a lead generation company rather than investing in marketing and advertising to generate those leads yourself. There are also drawbacks. Here are the pros and cons that I find most important for law firms to consider:
Now let’s look at the pros and cons of investing in marketing in order to generate your own leads.
The pros and cons of investing in marketing your personal injury law firm in order to create lead-generating assets that you own are more or less the opposites of the pros and cons of buying leads.
At Juris Digital we encourage our clients to invest in holistic, inbound digital marketing channels – like web design, branding, SEO, and content marketing – because we believe it’s the best way for personal injury law firms to achieve sustainable growth while establishing a brand that makes selling less difficult.
We also recognize the concerns that many firms have with investing in marketing, and we know that under certain circumstances buying personal injury case leads can generate reliable revenue and a positive return on investment.
If you’re trying to solve the problem of getting new clients for your personal injury law firm, don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We’ll listen to your position and offer our best advice on how you can achieve your goals.
This post reflects the opinions of the leadership team at Juris Digital: CEO Casey Meraz, CSO Matt Green, and COO Leann Pickard.
Imagine that you are pregnant. You know the sex of the baby and you’ve got a name picked out. You’ve started preparing your home for the arrival of your new family member. You have dreams and aspirations for your child.
You go in for a routine appointment with your doctor, and you’re given the worst news imaginable: Your baby has a disease that prevents lung tissue from developing. Your doctor informs you that your baby will, at most, live for minutes after being born. And she tells you that giving birth to your baby will put your life in danger.
Now imagine that you live in a state where abortion is illegal, and so your doctor tells you that she cannot help you safely terminate the pregnancy. Moments after receiving the most devastating possible news about your baby, you must now face the reality that you need to travel out of your state to receive an abortion to avoid risking death or decades-long imprisonment.
This is not some far-fetched hypothetical. 8 percent of all pregnancies involve complications that threaten the life of the baby and the mother.
Want to help women get access to safe abortions? Check out this resource from Alison Turkos.
We are appalled by the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade. We believe that this decision to strip women of sovereignty over their own bodies is not only a symptom of a dying democracy but will literally cause women to die.
We believe that women have a self-evident right to control their own bodies and that any law to the contrary is a violation of their human rights.
We recognize that women who live in states where abortion has been criminalized – and who do not have the financial resources to travel – will be most impacted. This will disproportionately affect women of color.
We recognize that 1 out of every 6 American women will be the victim of rape in her lifetime and that this barbaric ruling will prevent those women from safely terminating pregnancies that result from rape.
At this time Juris Digital’s leadership is dialoguing with legal counsel and women’s rights advocates to understand how we can direct our resources to help the women on our team and in our communities get access to abortions and reproductive health care that is safe, private, and free from government tyranny.
In the meantime, we wanted to make our position clear.
If you want to help, we encourage you to visit this resource which provides a list of the most productive ways to support access to safe abortions.
Did you know that Google penalizes websites that operate outside of their terms of service? A couple of years ago Google was actively penalizing a lot of law firm websites who were going after links in unnatural ways. But penalties are not just limited to law firm websites.
Having been actively involved in the SEO industry for almost 20 years now, iv’e seen, worked with, and been apart of some very nasty penalties. Iv’e seen first hand what they can do to a law firm’s case intake and also seen the joy they receive when getting out of a mess like this.
This whole journey is part of our story and why we’re ethical white hat marketers. Unfortunately uneducated marketers may not even know how to diagnose a penalty or realize that they’ve been in one.
If you’ve ever hired an internet marketing company, built links, or participated in shortcuts it’s probably a good idea to run an analysis to see if your website is under a Google Penalty.
There are a few signs that may indicate that your website has been penalized by Google:
If you think your website has been penalized, you can try to identify the issue by reviewing the guidelines provided by Google and making any necessary changes to your website. You can also try submitting a reconsideration request through Google Search Console to ask Google to review your website again.
To learn what types of penalties you can get let’s first talk about Type of Penalty and then we can get into the causes of penalties. Not all type’s of penalties are created equally. Here is a brief run down of the types and how they can affect you.
1. Manual Penalties
Manual actions are actions that members from Google’s Webspam team took against some or part of your website. In these cases someone from their quality team physically reviewed your site to come up with the decision to send you into a penalty.
With manual penalties you will be notified in Google Webmaster Tools via the message center and can also check it by visiting: Search Traffic > Manual Actions. (You can see an example of this to the right side of the screen)
On this page any manual penalties will be listed along with more information about the penalty. We will get into this a little bit later.
With manual actions there are two sub types you can get hit with:
A. Site Wide Action
Site wide actions indicate that the problem is affecting every page of your website and none are immune to the penalty.
B. Partial Matches
Partial matches are penalties that impact individual URL’s. It will be limited to the individual pages or sections on the site which the action applies to.
Watch this video from Google’s former head of Webspam Matt Cutts to learn more
2. Algorithmic Penalties
In addition to getting a penalty that was manually assessed by a Google Employee, you can also get what we call algorithmic penalties. Have you heard of the dreaded Google Updates named after animals such as Panda or Penguin?
These updates the algorithm are meant to take out people trying to manipulate Google’s search results unnaturally at the algorithmic level. Since there are so many violators this is a way they can assess quality in much greater volume based on trends of spam based websites.
Since people are constantly trying to manipulate search engines you can can safely assume that there are a lot of ways a website can be penalized. I’ll go into all of them briefly below but the most common ones I see are link penalties, Content Penalties, and Hacked sites. More on this in a bit.
Unnatural links
How To Remove It: Manually remove bad links and create a disavow file. Submit reconsideration if it’s a manual penalty.
This is a big one that is about as common as SEO companies sending you emails trying to sell you SEO services. One of the problems with unnatural links is understanding trends and being able to make corrective actions. If you have ever paid for a link or participated in a scheme for the purpose of getting a link then you have violated the Google Webmaster Guidelines.
Remember how I mentioned Thumbtack.com earlier? They were penalized by giving away “points” in exchange for a link to their website. Google is a corporation and can make their own rules so it’s important to stay in the loop with them.
In the law space here are the most common things I have seen Webmaster’s participate in that has gotten them penalized.
Even if you didn’t participate in any of the above tactics you need to be checking into this. In some cases your SEO company may not have told you what they participated in. In others you could be a victim of negative SEO where potential competitors or other shady goons are building unnatural links to your website.
Thin content with little or no added value
How To Remove It: Create good substantial content and get the pages re-indexed.
If you’ve familiarized yourself with Google’s best practices or commonly read internet marketing blogs then you must have heard how bad duplicate content is. Duplicate content won’t help you rank in the search engines.
In addition to this, thin content won’t help you either and also puts you in a very tricky situation with a looming penalty. Thin content could be pages with just a few words or it could also be doorway pages.
In 2008 I saw a lot of law firms create multiple city landing pages with little or no unique content. In these cases I also noticed them copy and paste these to different pages optimized for different cities while replacing just the city name.
If you did this get rid of it ASAP. That’s just asking for it if you’re still getting away with it.
Hidden text and/or keyword stuffing
How To Remove It: Remove keyword stuffing and clean up your content
Back in early 2000’s someone figured out that search engines were remarkably less sophisticated back then and relied heavily on the number of keywords used on the page. You may have heard the Keyword Density Myth. If you’re hiding black text keywords on a black background you will need a time machine to succeed.
Although I joke about this, it’s sad because I still see it from time to time. However more commonly I see keyword stuffing as a problem. How do you know if you’re keyword stuffing? Just ask yourself if it reads naturally. If not, you may have a problem.
Things like this make me puke: “Do you need a Los Angeles personal injury lawyer to help you with your Los Angeles personal injury case?” ~ and you can get MUCH worse than this.
Hacked Websites
How To Remove It: Remove spam or hacked issues. Submit reconsideration request.
This one is actually pretty common and unless you’ve seen the notice you might not know. Hacked websites are pretty common because hackers are constantly finding vulnerabilities in platforms and plugins.
Pro Tip: Be careful about the WordPress plugins you install. Some can cause vulnerabilities.
Spam
How To Remove It: Remove spam. Submit reconsideration request.
Thankfully spam reasons are not as common as anything else I see. Typically if you get a spam warning you know you did something wrong and that you need to fix it. As a rule of thumb don’t do anything unnatural such as using spammy structured markup or participate in cloaking and you’ll be ok.
Want to know more about penalty types? Here is some further reading from Google on Manual Penalties. (Source: Google Search Console Help)
Now to the meat of this this post. Are you wondering if your website has a penalty? At this point I’m assuming you’ve already checked to see if there is a manual penalty associated with your website. If you haven’t, here is what you need to do.
Checking For A Manual Penalty
**Note: You must have Google Webmaster Tools Installed
If you do have a manual penalty it’s best to consult a penalty recovery expert for further advice. I am working on a penalty recovery guide for attorneys which will be published soon.
Keep in mind that link based penalties will take dedication to remove and can be more complicated than most others.
Checking For Algorithmic Penalties
Checking for algorithmic penalties is a serious business. The problem with algorithmic penalties is that unlike manual penalties there are no notifications. In addition to this, algorithmic penalties may only affect a page or a small section of your website.
Learning how to read between the lines here and figure out whether or not your penalized is best left up to experts. However there are some things you can do to get a good idea if you were penalized or not. One such method is by using a free tool called Panguin by Barracuda Digital. This tool requires you have Google Analytics but will connect to it and align known updates with your analytics data.
A quick tutorial on how to use this is below:
This tool is a very powerful tool that allows you to comb through organic traffic data and get a clear picture pretty easily. The problem is that identifying you have a penalty due to a traffic drop off on a certain data requires different work to remove it.
If you do see major traffic drop offs with these changes you need to develop a plan to see which specific pages were affected and how you can go about removing the penalty.
First relax and take a deep breath. Your situation may not be as bad as you think. Honestly it just depends on how far in the hole you are with Google. Penalties mean Google has lost trust in your website to some extent. Determining the extent to which the trust was lost is important as is figuring out a plan to help you get back where you were.
When your website was penalized it was receiving some sort of artificial boost from your activities. Not only do you want to remove the penalty, you want to gain back the trust naturally and in a white hat method.
Penalties suck and since I’ve personally seen some of the worst I would be happy to talk with you about your current situation. Simply give me a call or feel free to email me direct at cmeraz (at) lawyerseomarketing.org. I can also advise you on do it yourself options.
If you’ve made the decision to invest in content for your law firm’s website, congrats! You’ve made a really good choice.
At Juris Digital we can genuinely claim to have built our business on the back of targeted, compelling, and useful website content.
In turn, we have helped hundreds of law firms grow their practices and get more of their best cases by deploying strategic lawyer website content.
Did You Know: Juris Digital is a marketing and SEO agency that also staffs a 30-attorney content writing team with experience in dozens of practice areas and jurisdictions? It’s a potent combination. Ready to put us to work for your law firm?
Let’s Talk ContentMy name is Matt Green and I am one of the founding partners here at Juris Digital. I love to help lawyers and legal marketers make smart investments in effective website content that creates measurable growth for their business.
In this post, I’ll discuss 9 of the most important questions that you ought to ask yourself before you invest in website content for your law firm.
It’s important that you understand why you’re creating content for your law firm’s website. What do you hope to achieve by publishing content? In most cases law firms use website content for marketing –– to directly attract new clients to the firm.
However, there are plenty of other productive reasons to invest in content for your website:
Before investing in legal web content it’s important that you clarify the purpose of the content you’re creating. A strategic content service provider will help you with this during the initial phase of your engagement.
RELATED: How Much Should I Pay for Legal Content?
For most law firms the primary audience for their website content is prospective new clients. In other words, the individuals that they hope will hire the firm to help with their legal issues.
For some though, the primary audience is the firm’s existing clients, attorneys who refer cases to the firm, other attorneys at the firm, or even journalists and news media who cover the firm’s casework.
Before investing in website content it’s crucial that you define who your primary audience is for each piece of content that you create.
Once we have defined who the audience is for our website content we need to ask ourselves what type of content is required to satisfy those folks and ultimately have them take the action we want them to take.
There are a several website content archetypes that we deploy for our clients at Juris Digital:
These are pages on your website that convey your primary services. These tend to be linked-to from the main website navigation and are more or less “static” in nature. These pages are normally aimed directly at potential new clients.
Service pages are generally optimized for search keywords that have a strong transactional and local intent (eg. “DUI attorney houston”). Service pages are a more-or-less essential ingredient of any law firm website.
Here are a few examples of service pages that perform well for our clients:
About the firm pages are just what you’d expect: Pages that convey things about the law firm such as the firm’s history and mission, biographies of the firm’s attorneys, examples of the firm’s results for clients, testimonials from the firm’s clients, and honors, awards, and media coverage that the firm has received.
I sometimes refer to these as braggy pages. They represent the firm’s opportunity to talk themselves up. Here are a few examples of About the Firm pages that perform well for our clients:
Client success stories are among this author’s favorite types of website content for law firms. These are pages that tell the story of the firm’s clients. In my opinion, there is no better way to convince your audience – whether they be your potential clients, your existing clients, or people who can refer you clients – that your firm is the right choice than by telling the stories of others that you’ve helped.
At Juris Digital we offer client success story creation as a service. You can learn all about what that looks like – and see examples of our work – on our client success story service page.
RELATED: How to Create Client Success Stories That Turn Website Visitors Into Your Best Clients
Informational articles are aimed at folks who have questions or are doing research about your area(s) of practice. Law firms who are serious about deploying content as a means of widening their reach and gaining more new clients online invest in informational content. Whereas service pages are written for folks who are presumably ready to hire a lawyer, informational articles attract a much wider audience because people who search for legal information are not necessarily ready to – or even considering – hiring a lawyer (though they often are!).
An example of a search that someone looking for an informational legal article might conduct is “average payout fo 18-wheeler accident“. Someone who searches a query like this is looking for information that is relevant to the services of a personal injury law firm, even if they are not yet convinced that they need to hire a lawyer. Law firms who publish this sort of website content give themselves an opportunity to get in front of these folks.
Here are a few examples of informational legal articles that perform well for our clients.
RELATED: Evergreen Content Marketing for Law Firms
This sort of content is typically delivered in the form of blog posts. This includes reactions to and analysis of legal rulings in the firm’s practice areas, and research related to the firm’s areas of practice. Generally, this is not content that can be effectively ghost-written by an agency like ours. This sort of content needs to be produced by experts in the field (ie. the attorneys at your firm).
The audience for this type of content is generally folks who can help amplify the law firm such as journalists, bloggers, thought-leaders, etc. While this type of content can absolutely generate positive outcomes for the firm, those outcomes tend to be much more difficult to track and attribute because the benefits they produce are indirect.
At Juris Digital we believe that the best way for law firms to get their content in front of their audience is via organic search (SEO). When a content strategy is backed by keyword search data the results can be transformative.
But there are other digital channels for getting your website content in front of your audience as well including:
A strategic website content partner like Juris Digital will work with you to understand the best channels for promoting your law firm’s website content.
For law firms that have been engaged in content marketing or other forms of web marketing for some time, there is often an opportunity to significantly improve results by evaluating what content exists and then repurposing and revamping that content strategically.
One of the things that separate Juris Digital from other legal web content vendors is that we take the time to assess our client’s current website content before making recommendations for new content. Of course, sometimes the clients who come to us are starting from scratch and so they need new content written from the ground-up. But often we are able to save time and money and achieve positive outcomes by repurposing and revamping existing content.
CLIENT SUCCESS STORY
See how we deployed legal content marketing to help Massingill Law massively increase traffic and leads from the web.
Before investing in website content for your law firm you need a plan for measuring the performance of the content you published.
At Juris Digital, because we are a marketing agency and not just a purveyor of written words, we help our clients understand the potential outcomes of any given piece of content, and we help them measure the performance of the content after it’s published. We do this by ensuring that web traffic tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console are properly configured on your website. This enables us to help our clients understand what specific pieces of content are most effective at generating positive outcomes so that those pieces can be prioritized for continual updates and improvements.
You might be noticing a theme here, which is: Simply “ordering” pieces of website content is not good enough. There needs to be strategic consideration behind each new piece of website content your law firm produces. One of the key considerations before investing in legal web content is to understand where that content should live within the existing structure of your website.
For example, if you want to do a piece on the penalties for a third DUI charge in your state, should that content be presented as a service page? Or as an informational article? Or, should it not even be its own page, but instead, be incorporated as a new section in your existing DUI service page?
In making this determination, we may uncover opportunities to make improvements to the way that your website’s existing content is structured. At Juris Digital we help our clients uncover these opportunities by taking a holistic approach to website content creation.
RELATED: How to Use Topic Clusters and Keyword Clusters for More Effective Legal Content Marketing
In the world of legal marketing, the word content is often synonymous with written content — words. But written words are far from the only format for conveying information on the web. Based on the nature of your law firm’s practice and the specific topics you want to cover, you may benefit from producing other forms of content including:
At Juris Digital we advise our clients on what supplemental content types might be needed to achieve their goals, and because we are a full-service digital marketing shop, we have the talent and resources to create those additional assets.
It’s important to understand that website content is simultaneously an asset and a liability. It is an asset in the sense that it can fundamentally transform the quantity and quality of new business opportunities that your firm generates from the web.
But it’s also a liability in the sense that it’s something that must be hosted, managed, and updated over time. Accordingly, it’s important that before you invest in content for your attorney website you consider whose job it will be to manage that content, and what that process ought to look like.
At Juris Digital we can help you define what must be done to maintain high-performing content over the long term, and put a plan in place for ensuring that is achieved.
To sum up: It’s possible that you understand perfectly what sort of content you need for your law firm’s website, and you simply need someone to write the words. In that case, we might not be the best fit for you. But if you’re like most of our clients, you’d benefit from a website content provider who will go beyond typeing words, and will also take the time up-front to understand your goals and your audience – using a rubric like the one I’ve presented here – in order to maximize the efficacy of your investment.
Let’s Talk Content
If your attorney SEO program or paid search marketing is not generating enough signed cases, the first step needs to be looking internally.
One of the biggest problems I see with attorneys who struggle with internet marketing is that they’re getting leads, but not taking them as seriously as they should. Let me explain:
Recently I finished conducting a survey where I interviewed over 30 successful attorneys across the country about their online marketing efforts.
During these conversations I gained significant insight into what digital marketing channels are working the best at getting new clients for law firms.
While most of these calls were very insightful to me, I also found myself answering a few questions for them.
As I dove deeper with my questioning I found that many of these attorneys didn’t have a problem with their online marketing, but rather a problem of not converting as many leads as they should have.
While you can’t expect to close 100% of cases, you should be able to close a very high percentage of qualified cases. Lead qualification will vary greatly from firm to firm but once you set your criteria for the minimum requirements to take a case you can work on a higher closing rate.
Firms that are not signing 90% of their qualified cases have room for improvement. Here are some of the top reasons I have seen for close rates being low.
You probably think this one is a no-brainer, but it was shocking to me how many attorneys told me that they return calls promptly. The fact is that your firm should be set up to answer all calls at all times. If a potential client is looking for you online they’re shopping.
When they pick up the phone they want to talk to someone. If it takes too long or they have to leave a message, you better believe they’re calling someone else next. Lost calls are lost money.
If you don’t have an after hours answering service or overflow procedure in place you need to set one up. We recommend our clients work with Alert Communications.
I once worked with an attorney who told me he returned emails within 24 hours because they didn’t seem as urgent to him. That is the wrong mindset to have. If you have a method for collecting customer information you need to be able to respond to that request immediately.
Whether it’s an automated email that links to a calendar booking appointment or just a SMS notification to one of your staff members so they see it right away, you need to get on that. Responding promptly is going to boost your close rate. Even if they respond with a contact form, call them right away.
Take a critical look at your staff. Have you ever gotten a bad online review because of an interaction the client had with your company? It doesn’t mean that you have the wrong staff members on board, but sometimes it means they need more training. Remember that every interaction someone has with your company is a brand experience.
If your intake staff is not well trained enough to the point where they’re not being helpful or creating a bad customer experience, or they don’t know the answers to common questions, then you’re losing business. Invest in your staff and make sure they get the proper training.
Let’s say you have a potential client on the phone and the case looks like something you want to take on. Do you have an online intake that you can go through there and then with the client? If not, you’re missing out.
How much time do you waste using investigators, screening cases further, or doing manual paperwork to get a case signed? Did you know you can provide a BETTER customer experience? Making it easier for the potential client will save your firm time, improve your organization, and make a difficult process easy on them. If you’re not converting 90% of your qualified cases, this tip can help you improve your business fast.
Even if the initial call goes well but the client wants to speak to an attorney you should always avoid transferring the call to voicemail. Voicemail is the lead killer. Ensure you create the proper procedures so that clients are always taken care of on that first touch point. Invest in the backup systems and ensure that you can do everything in your power to avoid this scenario.
Nobody has time to wait around for a phone call to be returned.
Strategies for Bringing in Consistent Clients for Your Family Law Practice
So you’re looking to get more clients for your family law practice? Getting started with marketing your family law practice online can be daunting, but don’t fret! You’ve come to the right place.
Here, I’ve laid out a specific action plan for building and executing a marketing strategy for your family law firm that will generate relevant leads via inbound digital marketing channels.
Note: For the most part I have not included any “traditional” marketing methods (ie. networking, billboards, TV ads, etc.) in this post. Rather, I’ve focused on online, inbound marketing, as this is our area of expertise and what we believe to be the best method for building a sustainable lead generation engine for your family law practice over the long term.
CLIENT SUCCESS STORY
See how we deployed a combination of holistic strategy consulting and advanced digital marketing execution to help Vantage Group Legal grow from zero online presence to attracting potential new clients every day.
Before you can go about generating new clients for your law firm on the web, it’s critical that you understand who you are targeting, and why they should choose to hire you instead of someone else.
To define your target audience, spend some time answering the following questions about your ideal client:
Once you’ve answered these questions and have a strong understanding of who your target clients are, turn your attention to defining why you are the best choice to represent them.
The fact is, you can generate thousands of unique visitors to your website, but if you can’t clearly convey why your firm is their best choice, all of that traffic will be for naught.
To come up with your unique value propositions, spend some time answering the following questions:
For an example of a family law attorney who does a great job conveying his unique value propositions on his website, click here.
You can invest tens of thousands of dollars on your firm’s digital marketing assets – custom website design, beautiful photography, videos, graphics, etc – but if you fail to publish useful information which is optimized for keywords that your potential clients search when they need your services, your results will be lackluster.
Below is arguably the most valuable information in this entire article: choose keywords that your know result in highly relevant traffic and optimize for those keywords.
For the purpose of giving you realistic examples, we have used Illinois and Texas as the state for these target keywords. You can simply replace these states with the name of your state for your keywords.
Now that you understand who your target audience is and you’ve defined why they should hire you for their family law needs, it’s time to put that information on the web.
There are of course endless online channels and tactics that you could utilize to get in front of your potential customers. Below I’ve prioritized what we at Juris Digital believe to be the most effective digital properties for marketing your family law practice.
The most important (and likely most expensive) piece of your family law firm’s marketing tool kit is your website. Unlike social media profiles or ads on legal directories like Avvo.com or Lawyers.com, your Firm’s website is an asset for your business. It is a digital property that you own and control 100%. Accordingly, it’s a critical investment.
You ought to treat your website as the cornerstone of your Firm’s marketing efforts. If digital marketing follows a hub and spoke model, your website is the hub. It is where your best content lives, and where you should direct all potential customers regardless of where they discover you.
At Juris Digital we have written extensively on what law firms need to know about creating an effective website. Below I have curated and linked to the most important of those articles that will help you understand the right process for creating your family law firm’s website:
The second most important web property for your family law practice is your Google My Business listing. Google My Business is the name of Google’s free tool that business owners use to manage the information about their business that is presented to the world on Google.
Because your family law firm is a local business that services local clients, it is essential that you claim and optimize your listing on Google so that people find you when they search general, local queries related to your business, for example:
To optimize your Firm’s Google My Business listing, you need to make sure to do the following:
In 2020 Google rolled out a pay-per-lead ad offering for family law firms called Local Service Ads. You’ve probably seen these ads before without necessarily realizing it. They look like this:
These ads have quickly gained popularity because unlike traditional Google PPC ads – where you pay for each click your ad gets – local service ads are pay-per-lead, where you only get billed when your ad generates a contact.
You made it to the bottom; thanks for reading! If you have any questions about the information presented here please drop a comment below and I’ll respond in short order.
Ever wonder why you prefer one law firm website design over another?
The answer: Simplicity. Or, in other words, “less visually complex”.
Simplicity in a law firm website doesn’t mean your homepage has to be nothing but white with black text, or extremely minimalistic in the aesthetic.
Rather, simplicity refers to a design which facilitates seamless communication between the eyes and the brain, allowing us to process information quickly and effectively. This 2013 Harvard study taught us that humans generally make a decision on a website design within 1/50th to 1/20th of a second based on the “visual complexity” of the design.
Below is a perfect example of how use of white space and typography can completely alter the emotion that a word evokes:
Despite being the same word, our minds react differently to the version on the left than the one on the right.
Again, this doesn’t mean that your website’s homepage must be nothing but a white background with black text. Rather, I’m suggesting that you simplify the “clutter” (which evokes feelings of anxiety and stress), using enough space to help the user gather what is being communicated within the content and aesthetic of the page.
The whole idea of “web experience” is not to make the viewer feel “trapped” or “run away” but to feel comfortable enough to read your content and find out what your law firm is about. The attorney-client relationships require a certain level of trust and comfort, and you want to evoke those feeling with your website’s design. White space can help achieve just that.
If you invest in content marketing (articles, blog posts, videos, infographics, etc.) it is likely that the majority of your site’s visitors are interested in learning something. That’s why at Juris Digital we prefer simple design places our best content at the forefront of our client’s websites.
When a design is stuffed with decorative, flashy, blinking, moving, bright colored icons or elements, it’s can be easy for the user to become distracted from the task of navigating the site to find what they are looking for.
Who doesn’t want more conversions, right?! At Juris Digital we have simplified the structure of a law firm homepage into four parts:
Web design and conversion optimization go hand in hand. A user is expecting to do something on your website, to take some sort of action. It’s our job to create a simple flow to help the user accomplish that goal.
We generally suggest that a law firm website’s primary navigation include no more than six parent links. This should include Home and Contact links. You don’t need excessive links to complicate or clutter a navigation system. How is this done?
Simple Navigation:
Overly Complex Navigation:
We loooove fast load times. Simplistic design normally correlates with page speed, and page speed normally correlates with websites that people love. Elements such as image borders, drop shadows, extra illustrative images, big images, image calls, video embeds, social share buttons, parallax scrolling, giant background images, all increase page load times. Most web design companies add this “flare”, which commonly accomplishes nothing but slowing down the site’s page load times.
Just remember your homepage is often your law firm’s first impression. Strive for simple, elegant design which evokes the emotions you want your clients to feel.
Whether you’re using WordPress, HubSpot or Webflow it may be time to seriously consider how your site is designed to attract ideal clients.
