This is how law firm marketing works with Google

Nowadays, anyone looking for a lawyer in their city or region no longer uses the traditional yellow pages or advertisements in the local newspaper. Instead, potential clients research online which attorney or law firm might be a good fit for a client.

Lawyers and law firms that present themselves professionally on the Internet can consequently gain many clients. However, there are different ways in which you can use the Internet for client acquisition.

The first requirement is to have your own website. With this you can present your law firm in detail to potential interested parties. On your website, introduce the legal team, describe your core competencies and areas of expertise, and refer to references.

Having your own Google My Business profile is a must for every lawyer and law firm. The Google My Business entries are displayed much more prominently than the normal search results. Moreover, only through Google My Business you secure the quite important entry at Google Maps.

At Google My Business you can list your law firm to be found in Google Search or on Google Maps. For this purpose, you store all relevant business information such as opening hours, contact details and photos. If potential clients can find pictures of your team and your premises, it looks more personal and builds trust.

Creating an attractive Google My Business profile takes about 2-3 hours and does not involve any costs. Your My Business profile will then be displayed in relevant search queries on, for example, your law firm’s area of expertise and location. Thus, you reach potential clients exactly when they are specifically looking for a lawyer. Especially for local searches (e.g. “specialist lawyer labor law Munich”), a good Google My Business entry significantly improves the visibility of your law firm.

Also remember to update your Google My Business listing with posts regularly. You can also allow users to ask questions through your Google My Business profile, demonstrating customer intimacy and friendliness.

By listing your law firm on Google My Business, you have set the stage for potential clients to find you through a Google search. Your next step should be to set yourself apart from your competitors. Google provides a tool for this that has so far been used effectively by very few law firms: Customer reviews.

Google displays reviews by previous clients in the form of stars in your My Business listing. You can achieve a maximum of five stars. Law firms that have many positive reviews tend to show up at the top of search queries. So you have the opportunity to significantly increase the visibility of your law firm profile this way. Positive reviews not only help to increase visibility, but also serve as a quality indicator for potential clients to select a law firm.

But how do you collect ratings? In principle, quite simple! Ask satisfied clients to give your law firm a positive rating on Google My Business. You simply send the corresponding link to your clients by e-mail with their consent.

Pro-tip: Remember to answer the reviews briefly. Even with negative reviews, stay friendly, keep it short, and even with positive feedback, thank them for the review they submitted. This creates sympathy and builds trust!

For you to effectively use your law firm website to acquire clients, it’s not enough to introduce your areas of expertise and your team in a few words on your website and leave it at that – after all, you want to maximize your visibility on the Internet.

Potential clients search for legal information in search engines such as Google or already directly for specialist lawyers. In order for your law firm homepage to rank prominently on Google, you need to optimize your website for search engines. Because the order in which websites are displayed on Google depends to a large extent on how well you succeed in convincing potential clients of your offer. This algorithm uses information that so-called crawlers have collected on your website.

The main criterion for placement in Google search results is that your website’s content perfectly matches the user’s search query. For each search query, such as “specialist lawyer labor law Berlin”, the relevance of your website is determined and its placement (ranking) is determined. The best places are naturally at the top of the first search results page, bringing in the most potential clients.

But how can you optimize your website for more clients? Search engine optimization can basically be divided into two areas:

In technical optimization, you focus on the structure and layout of your website so that Google can read your website optimally and your website is played out for relevant search queries or potential clients.

Important points here are also the display of the website on smartphones as well as loading times and accessibility. It can be quite useful to get support in search engine optimization from a specialized SEO agency.

Search engine optimization is a long-term project, because the criteria for ranking in search engines change regularly and only with continuous optimization you can ensure that you will always be found. So don’t be discouraged if you’re not on page one of Google’s search results for your top queries within a few weeks.

A sustainable and professional search engine optimization will help you to prepare your website in such a way that Google will show your website on the best rankings for suitable search queries and thus you will be found by potential clients in your city.

The focus of content optimization should be on detailed keyword research. Which inquiries from potential clients are relevant for you? The matching keywords should be findable on your website along with high quality content (Cotent). They should provide the solution to the seeker’s problem.

But also remember that the best content won’t work if it’s not presented in an engaging and easy-to-read way. The pleasant usability of the website is therefore also important.

Google offers Google Ads, an ad program that allows you to ensure that your law firm website is placed at the top as a hit for selected search queries. The first three to four search results are ads that are placed even before the so-called organic search results. Especially on mobile devices, these ads take up the entire screen before the user scrolls down further.

You can use this prominent placement of Google Ads ads to win valuable mandates.

The costs for such an ad are variable, as the ad spaces are auctioned off anew in a bidding process for each search query. The more law firms and lawyers use a search term (keyword), the more expensive the click on the ad becomes. However, you only have to pay for an ad if the user clicks on it. This allows the success of an advertising campaign to be measured precisely. You can determine to the penny how many users reached your law firm website through the ads and how much you had to pay for them.

The decisive factor is, of course, how many of these visitors have become clients (conversions). Therefore, you should of course pay attention to the ratio (conversion rate) of clicks on your ad to new clients acquired via Google Ads.

Tip: Document how clients become aware of you, for example, by asking personally or including this information in a client sheet. This is the only way to calculate how much a new mandate will cost you and whether your ads on Google Ads will bring in revenue.

With the conversion tracking of Google Ads, you can also automatically record inquiries via your contact form or calls and thus determine very precisely how much an inquiry via Google Ads has actually cost you.

You should consider search engine optimization (SEO) and Google Ads(SEA) holistically. For example, it makes sense to run ads with Google Ads for keywords where your website is not yet well positioned in the organic search results.

Or you decide, despite good successes in search engine optimization, to further increase your visibility and use ads as an important supplement to also be placed in the first three to four Google search results.

Which law firm marketing measures are suitable for you and your law firm depends on how much time and budget you can and want to invest.

Regardless of which law firm marketing measures you decide on in the end, it is important that you consistently use the opportunities for acquiring new clients on the Internet and do not leave them exclusively to your competitors.