Marketing for small law firms is a job in itself. Some of our more ambitious clients embrace the DIY aspect of marketing. But let’s be real time is money, and working with a law firm marketing partner will be worth the costs. Here we’ve compiled 4 digital marketing tasks you should outsource to help your law firm see consistent growth.
4 Digital Marketing Tasks You Should Outsource Today
Digital marketing for small law firms takes skill, expertise and consistency. Often lawyers have a great understanding of what they want to achieve, but Small law firms often struggle to keep up with the demands of digital marketing. Outsourcing certain tasks can help alleviate the burden and allow firms to focus on their core legal services. Here are four digital marketing tasks that every small law firm should consider outsourcing:
1. Search Engine Optimization
There are two main components to a law firm’s website visibility, on-page and off-page optimization. On pages includes both technical components, such as title tagging, speed optimization, content optimization, and keyword research, to name a few, as well as off-page optimization, known as authority building.
They compliment each other like peanut butter and jelly, spaghetti and meatballs, or a burger and fries. This may sound silly but it really does emphasize one point: without both components of search optimization working in tandem, the strategy is likely to fail. Really, who wants just a burger.
Although this is a joke, it really does illustrate the need to focus on both on-page and off-page optimization to help your content be visible to legal consumers. Instead of imaging SEO as two parts, commit to understanding them as one.
Additionally, many attorneys are great at writing their own content. Often they don’t really know how to do proper keyword research, generate topics that their clients are actually interested in, or are unaware of technical issues with their site that may be preventing it from being competitive in search results.
And guess what, maybe everything on-page is working 100%. That’s great! But if your site lacks authority, that content will never see page one of search results, and unfortunately is likely to never be seen. Then much of that great content is for nothing.
2. Content Creation
Let’s talk about content. Creating content is not easy. A strong content marketing plan for a small law firm involves both research and consistency. Often, it can be difficult to keep a tight schedule and create high-quality, research intensive content consistently. In recent years we’ve seen that the amount of content that a law firm needs to create on the regular has increased significantly.
With many firms understanding the value of top search engine rankings, it’s important to create high-quality content consistently month in, month out.
Why outsource your firms content to an agency? Well, there are two reasons.
Consistency
Consistency is one of the most difficult challenges small law firms encounter when it comes to their marketing. It can take 60 to 90 days for search engines to index and fully begin to appreciate the value of a blog post or practice area page you’ve created. By creating content on a consistent basis your site will signal to search engines that it’s active and has staying power.
Often attorneys will start strong, writing their own content, and after a month or two the content quantity begins to wain. Before you know it 6 months goes by and the site hasn’t had a new blog post published.
That is a negative indicator, and any competitive search rankings can begin to fall off as the site starts losing relevance when compared to the competition.
Quality
First, by quality we mean by a search engine’s standard. Yes, grammar and structure is extremely important, but it’s important to make this distinction. With the help of an article from Search Engine Journal, here are a few markers for what search engines deem as quality content:
- Comprehensive
- Useful
- Helpful
- Accurate
- The Best Answer for the Searcher’s Query
Attorneys are natural born writers. They are articulate, intelligent and very familiar with explaining the law. The part that can escape them is the last point: The Best Answer for the Searcher’s Query.
Through intensive keyword research, competitor analysis and searcher intent understanding, a skillful writer will identify the intent of a search. This is a key aspect of content writing. Without fully understanding they searchers intent there is a good chance the content may never be visible in front of the right people.
3. Paid Search
Paid search ads, such as Google and Bing Ads can bring a tremendous flood of new clients to a small law firm. These platforms are complex and intelligent machines that require extensive experience to maximize their output.
Many lawyers can absolutely research, construct, implement and manage their search engine PPC campaigns, but it’s important to remember that often the learning curve can be lengthy and come with expensive Cost-per-Click rates, poorly targeted traffic and mediocre-performing ads. Not just that, what about the destination page. Is it optimized correctly to elicit the response you want? To get the client.
STOP! This is not your fault. I want to make that distinction. It takes PPC experts years and years of practice and education to fully master some of these platforms. Their entire job IS to build and manage paid search campaigns.
The time you spend learning, building, managing, troubleshooting, etc can be spent closing new clients.
4. Website Design and Maintenance
We’ve seen it many times. An attorney got started with their new firm, they wanted to get up and running as quickly as possible. They needed a website so they decided to create one through their web host or another quick-start platform.
These platforms are fantastic for getting a brand started. And if you are looking to truly compete online, there will come a time when you need more. A more custom brand, custom design language, a team who is going to take your brand to the next level. And, as your site grows, it becomes more complex. It will begin to require more resources. All of a sudden your site is gaining traffic and security becomes a real concern.
As you start to gain more and more traffic online you’re going to want to utilize a scalable model that helps your website grow in the most efficient and secure ways possible.
A websites with a focus on converting your hard earned traffic, a site with the proper security hardening, a site with secure and efficient hosting, will become paramount to the future of your firm. It’s important to free yourself of the burden of managing your site.
Get Help and Free Yourself to Take Things to the Next Level
There you go! The 4 digital marketing tasks your should outsource today. By no means are we saying that lawyers cannot manage these tasks on their own. But, often the hours required to truly maximize your own return can severely outweigh the investment of having professionals take these tasks off your shoulders.
If you think you may need help marketing your law firm, contact us today to schedule a completely free marketing consultation. Conversations are always free! Never hesitate to get in touch.
