If you have a personal injury law firm, you’re probably considering different ways to promote your business. Truth be told, the traditional approach doesn’t work as it used to, so you’ll probably be forced to go with digital marketing tactics. Strategies such as SEO, social media marketing, and pay-per-click are just a few options personal injury lawyers have at their disposal.
Out of all these options, search engine optimization stands out as the best process to build brand awareness and generate leads. Personal injury lawyer SEO is a meticulous approach where you improve your site for search engines. The best thing yet, you can mix this tactic with other digital and traditional tactics to increase the reach of your message.
In this article, we talk about SEO benefits and how it compares to other marketing tactics.
Why does SEO matter for a personal injury law firm?
Unlike some other businesses, attorney firms need a constant influx of personal injury clients. While lawyers generally have high client retention numbers, what are the odds that the same person will get injured twice? As a result, they need to continuously invest money in their marketing efforts.
The reason why SEO is the best promotional channel is that most other tactics don’t work.
For example, while word of mouth is a fantastic way for service providers to gain clients, it doesn’t work that well for personal injury attorneys. Simply put, this service is too specific, and most people around you will never need it. Also, potential clients won’t use traditional or social media to look for a law firm.
Because of these factors, a client’s best bet is to open a browser and look for legal providers. It’s worth mentioning that local SEO is especially beneficial in this case, as your potential customers are commonly searching for a provider close to them.
Benefits of SEO for personal injury lawyers
Besides being the best method for generating leads, search optimization provides other perks:
Improved website functionality
Technical audit is at the heart of every SEO strategy. When SEO specialists take on a new project, the first thing they do is check your website’s health. They introduce various technical improvements meant to enhance crawlability, website architecture, page speed, and mobile friendliness while also eliminating existing errors.
Most of these improvements are permanent, and you won’t have to hassle with them again, that is, until the next algorithmic change. Soon after hiring an SEO expert, you’ll have a well-polished site that provides a great user experience and works within the confines of Google’s algorithms.
Improved website functionality is critical if you ever decide to switch your marketing strategy. As your attorney site will remain well-optimized, you can use it as a landing page for leads you accrue via email marketing, social media, and pay-per-click campaigns.
Better organic search engine visibility
Although technical improvements to your personal injury lawyer site are incredible, the main reason companies do SEO is to increase online visibility. Google’s search traffic beats any other source of web exposure both in terms of visitor quantity and conversions. So, ranking on top of search engine results pages remains the best way of promoting your legal business.
Aside from driving a vast number of qualified leads, it can also help improve brand awareness and serve as a vehicle for other marketing campaigns. High placement in SERPs puts you in the driver’s seat, presenting your brand as a reputable, authoritative source within the legal industry.
Major long-term benefits
Speaking of permanent effects, everything done during an SEO campaign stays attached to the client brand. You get benefits from links and content in perpetuity, in a similar way you would benefit from technical audits. This is a far cry from paid advertising, where benefits stop as soon as you stop paying.
Even short-term wins, such as reaching the top of search engine rankings, will provide benefits for a while. If your SEO provider leaves the project tomorrow, you’ll still get lots of organic traffic from ranking keywords in the following months.
Should I combine SEO with other marketing tactics?
In our opinion, attorney SEO should serve as the basis for all your marketing efforts. In the end, if your website isn’t functioning properly, you won’t be able to close prospective clients who come via social media platforms and paid searches.
So, here’s a short explanation as to how SEO will affect your other marketing investments:
SEO and PPC
Pay-per-click advertising is a method that drives paid traffic via search engines. Given that paid results are placed above organic pages, PPC should, in theory, provide better results than SEO. Then again, there are also cases where people purposely don’t want to click on ads, worried about the quality of content.
Here are a few benefits of using these two methods together:
- PPC is mainly a short-term strategy, while SEO is a long-term approach. So, using both methods can cover the entire timeline
- Combining two methods helps you dominate rankings for target keywords. Even if you’re beaten during PPC bidding, you get another chance to reach the top via SEO and website content
- Both these approaches hinge on quality content and site relevancy. So, by hiring a legal marketing agency that creates quality posts, you can cover both sides
Interestingly enough, even SEO companies use a combination of paid and organic traffic to promote their businesses. While using both approaches simultaneously might be expensive, it also allows you to repurpose a lot of marketing material.
SEO and SMM
Using social media marketing is now considered a necessity for maximizing SEO efforts in numerous industries. Personal injury firms can utilize various marketing channels to reach new audiences they couldn’t otherwise reach via search engines.
Here are a few things to be mindful of when using SEO and SMM:
- Nowadays, Google utilizes user experience factors to measure the quality of pages. Things such as click-through rate and time spent on a page go a long way in improving rankings. So, if you have loyal fans on social media, they can unknowingly help boost your optimization efforts
- Social media can help you reach influencers who rarely browse related law queries. Furthermore, these platforms provide a simple, relaxed method for connecting with audiences
- Among others, you can use social media’s messaging features for your outreach campaigns
- Similar to PPC, SMM allows you to repurpose existing content
Unfortunately, focusing too much on social media isn’t the best choice for a personal injury firm. This type of business is hard to promote via social channels, so you probably shouldn’t invest too much effort into it. In other words, while, in theory, SMM can boost your SEO, you still need lots of followers to get to this point.
SEO and influencer marketing
In many ways, influencer marketing is better than social media marketing. Although most of these online authorities use social platforms to spread their message, they have a highly targeted audience. Instead of trying to develop legal followership, a personal injury lawyer can tap into the right influencer’s audience
This is why influencer marketing matters:
- Using influencers is great for law firm SEO. Just make sure that your future partner has a stead and relevant audience that you can also benefit from
- By relying on influencer marketing, you can utilize platforms on which you don’t have followership
Your biggest challenge with influencer marketing is finding the right person to promote your brand. Truth be told, there aren’t many influencers who cover this topic. Law is one of those “boring” subjects that a general viewership doesn’t care about unless they have a need for legal services.
There’s always an option of partnering up with a person who works in a related industry, but this might cause issues with your audience targeting. Our suggestion is to seek out the biggest podcasters who cover legal topics.
SEO and affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is a branch of marketing where you pay for every lead that a person gets you. A personal injury lawyer can offer monetary compensation, products, or even access to their services.
Unfortunately, affiliate marketing suffers from similar issues as SMM and influencer marketing. Simply put, promoting legal companies on social media and other platforms is really hard as people aren’t interested in this type of content.
So, the best way to gain value from affiliate and influencer marketing is if someone promotes your brand through their own website. Unfortunately, this usually leads to a conflict of interest, especially if a person is from the same industry.
What would MiroMind do?
As an agency that has been in the legal business for a while, we have enormous experience with different marketing approaches. Although we specialize in search engine optimization, we’ve tried lots of approaches for promoting personal injury firms.
Based on our experience, social media channels are the worst converting ones. People simply don’t care about this type of content, so generating quality leads is almost impossible. In other words, you can also scratch influencers who get most of their clicks via Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
Legal podcasts might be a good solution if you find the right partners. There are a lot of accounts that cover similar topics, so you can offer their owners affiliate and influencer partnerships.
Out of all these methods, pay-per-click seems like the optimal option. Unfortunately, using this approach is very expensive, especially when paired with SEO. So, we suggest you start with optimization and consider implementing other methods as your business grows.
The best SEO services for personal injury law firms
Ideally, a personal injury lawyer should purchase an all-in-one SEO package for his business. That way, a veteran provider doesn’t have to feel pressured when introducing changes.
The good thing about different law firm SEO services is that each one of them serves a particular purpose for your marketing. Even if you decide to abandon search engine optimization, you can still gain benefits from previously implementing SEO tactics.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO or technical audit is a process meant to analyze and improve various aspects of your site. Marketing expert uses tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console to detect issues and address them accordingly. Among others, the provider is responsible for improving the following:
- Improving website architecture and adding a sitemap
- Checking a personal injury lawyer site for speed and mobile friendliness
- Resolving all errors and penalties
- Introducing redirects, no-follows, and addressing duplicate content
- Ensuring that Google can properly index pages
- Improving accessibility for people with disabilities
Aside from improvements, the technical side of SEO presumes several analytical actions
- Performing competitive analysis
- Analyzing the link profile for potential dangers and quality
- Checking current keywords, content, and page rankings
- Performing keyword research
Sometimes, SEO experts might also tackle the design aspects of a website. For example, they might change menus or introduce widgets. They might also suggest improvements to site branding and introduce strategies to boost landing page conversions.
As previously mentioned, technical SEO is a precursor for all other marketing efforts. A personal injury lawyer can’t survive without a solid site, which serves as a digital calling card. Besides improving rankings within search engine result pages, technical optimization is also used for converting leads that come from other sources.
Content creation and optimization
Quality content is the most common type of online marketing material for a personal injury lawyer. Brands primarily use it for their website as a vehicle for generating rankings and driving leads. A personal injury lawyer can also spread the content via social media and other platforms.
Here’s why having good content is vital for your legal business:
- Despite all other optimization practices, content is what makes the difference between a successful and unsuccessful brand. If a target audience doesn’t want to interact with your pages, it doesn’t matter what you do externally, how many influencers you hire, or how many fans you have on social media
- Quality content is critical for establishing expertise and authority. This is especially true if you decide to invest money in case studies and white papers. These pieces set you up as a reliable legal expert who knows his stuff. That way, good content can help maximize your sales funnel
- A personal injury lawyer can repurpose content for other platforms. Besides their website, legal experts can use articles and posts on social media, forums, and platforms that allow user-generated content
Content creation is almost always connected to SEO services showing how important this practice is for website optimization. Of course, you can also hire writing freelancers to create pieces for your site without paying for comprehensive optimization. Then again, you’ll still need someone in the company who can track and tweak your marketing strategy.
Nowadays, it’s not enough to write quality content to reach the top of search engine rankings. You also have to implement the best on-page optimization practices that involve:
- Make sure to add the right phrases in your articles according to the target keyword you’re pursuing. A personal injury lawyer firm should invest in tools like SurferSEO to optimize for personal injury keywords
- Personal injury lawyers should put emphasis on readability. Using shorter sentences, paragraphs, bullet lists, and keeping your section neat can significantly improve user experience
- Law firms need to introduce internal links that would connect related pieces. Among others, you can use links to indicate the hierarchy between different articles
Using relevant keywords and best writing practices is vital for content creation. Additionally, you should provide a unique opinion that would set you apart from all other law firms.
Link building
When we talk about link building, we primarily refer to quality links gained from relevant industry sites. These hyperlinks are a vital Google signal indicating content quality and relevancy to search engine’s algorithms.
Link building is vital for any personal injury lawyer as there’s only a limited number of ways to promote a site. In many cases, the number and quality of links is what differentiates one article from another in search engine rankings. Here are a few common tactics SEO experts use to accrue them:
- The most common tactic for getting links is organic outreach. You can pitch other website owners with your content, asking them for a link back. Unfortunately, this approach isn’t that efficient as it takes a lot of time to implement and provides subpar results
- Guest posts remain one of the best ways of acquiring links from other blogs. As most legal blogs are unwilling to help, you should find sites that cover multiple industries, including legal
- HARO is an approach that works for some bloggers. It’s a method where you share newsworthy topics with journalists for an opportunity to be featured on their site (of course, they also give you a link back)
Besides SEO, links are also valuable for all other marketing processes. They provide indirect website traffic, and you can use them for social media campaigns. Generally speaking, the more you build them, the more audience becomes aware of your legal brand.
Local SEO
Many law firms prioritize local optimization. This method is fantastic for smaller service brands that target the local market, and, as such, it’s optimal for a personal injury lawyer. Local SEO is much easier to perform than other optimization tactics but still requires some know-how. Here’s what the process looks like in practice:
- Start by creating a Google Business profile
- Add your site to various global and local directories
- Make sure all your business information is the same across the board
- Accrue positive feedback from users
- Gain reviews from the biggest review platforms
- Create and optimize content for relevant local keywords
Keep in mind that local optimization relies on a steady stream of positive reviews. So, although an SEO expert can still help your business, your legal firm also has to entice visitors to leave web feedback.
Besides putting your business on the map, local optimization gives you a chance to gain a snippet in Google’s Three Pack. This alone can ensure that you have proper lead generation and can drive an enormous number of website visitors.