Client acquisition and law firm marketing on Google

Nowadays, anyone looking for a lawyer in their city or region no longer uses the traditional yellow pages or advertisements in the local daily newspaper. Instead, potential clients research online to find out which lawyer or which law firm are suitable for a mandate.

As a result, lawyers and law firms who present themselves professionally on the Internet can attract many clients. However, there are different ways in which you can use the Internet for client acquisition.

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

Your own Google My Business profile is a must for every lawyer and every law firm. The Google My Business entries are displayed much more prominently than the normal search results. In addition, you can only secure the very important entry on Google Maps with Google My Business.

You can enter your law firm on Google My Business in order to be found in Google Search or on Google Maps. To do this, store all relevant business information such as opening times, contact details and photos. When potential clients can find pictures of your team and your premises, it looks more personal and creates trust.

Creating an attractive Google My Business profile takes about 2-3 hours and is free of charge. Your My Business profile will then be displayed in the event of relevant search queries, for example on the subject area and location of your law firm. This means that you can reach potential clients precisely when they are specifically looking for a lawyer. A good Google My Business entry significantly improves the visibility of your law firm, especially for local searches (eg “Fachanwalt Arbeitsrecht München”).

Also, remember to regularly update your Google My Business listing with posts. You can also give users the opportunity to ask questions via your Google My Business profile, thus demonstrating customer proximity and friendliness.

With the entry of your law firm on Google My Business, you have created the prerequisites for potential clients to become aware of you via a Google search. In the next step, your goal should be to set yourself apart from your competitors. Google provides a tool for this that has so far only been used effectively by very few law firms: customer reviews.

Google displays ratings from previous clients in the form of stars in your My Business entry. You can achieve a maximum of five stars. Firms that have many positive reviews are usually shown at the top of searches. So you have the opportunity to significantly increase the visibility of your law firm profile in this way. Positive ratings not only help to increase visibility, but also serve as a quality feature for potential clients when choosing a law firm.

But how do you collect reviews? In principle it’s very simple! Ask satisfied clients to rate your law firm positively on Google My Business. Simply send the corresponding link to your clients by email with their consent.

Pro tip: remember to answer the reviews briefly. Stay friendly even with negative reviews, keep it short and thank you for the rating given if you have positive feedback. That creates sympathy and builds trust!

In order for you to be able to use your law firm’s website effectively for client acquisition, it is not enough to present your specialist areas and your team on your website in a few words 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 even directly for specialist lawyers. In order for your law firm’s homepage to be placed prominently on Google, you need to optimize your website for search engines. Because the order in which websites are displayed on Google depends largely 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 a placement in Google search results is that your website perfectly matches the user’s search query. For every search query such as “Fachanwalt Arbeitsrecht Berlin”, the relevance of your website is determined and its placement (ranking) is determined. The best places are of course at the top of the first search results page and thus bring the most potential clients.

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

During technical optimization, you concentrate on the structure and structure of your website so that Google can read your website optimally and your website is displayed for relevant search queries or potential clients.

Important points are also the presentation of the website on smartphones as well as loading times and accessibility. It can make perfect sense to seek support from a specialized SEO agency for search engine optimization.

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

Sustainable and professional search engine optimization helps you to prepare your website in such a way that Google displays your website in the best positions for suitable search queries, so that potential clients in your city can find you.

The focus of the content optimization should be on a detailed keyword research. Which inquiries from potential clients are relevant to you? The matching search terms should be found 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 will not work if it is not presented in an appealing and easy-to-read manner. The pleasant usability of the website (usability) is also important.

With Google Ads, Google offers an ad program that you can use to ensure that your law firm website is placed at the top of the list for selected search queries. The first three to four search results are ads that are placed 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 gain valuable mandates.

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

In the end, of course, the decisive factor is 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 that are acquired via Google Ads.
Tip: Document how clients become aware of you, for example by asking personally or by including this information in a customer questionnaire. This is the only way you can calculate how much a new mandate will cost you and whether your ads generate revenue from Google Ads.

With the conversion tracking of Google Ads, you can also automatically record inquiries via your contact form or calls and thus determine exactly how much a request via Google Ads actually cost you.

You should take a holistic view of search engine optimization (SEO) and Google Ads (SEA). For example, it makes sense to use Google Ads to show keywords for which your website is not yet well positioned in the organic search results.

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

Which law firm marketing measures come into question 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 ultimately decide on: it is important that you consistently use the opportunities to acquire new clients on the Internet and not leave them exclusively to your competitors.