How to 3x Your Law Firm’s Leads with Effective Online Marketing Strategies

Find out the marketing strategies we execute and 3x your law firm or solicitor leads. This guide includes specific SEO and Ad strategies you can implement today.

Even if you offer the best legal services in the industry, if you do not have an effective marketing strategy, your business will never reach its full potential. Successful businesses require a comprehensive mix of marketing strategies to reach their target audience and generate leads. With new marketing tools and techniques continually emerging, you must be equipped to leverage the potential of the most effective marketing solutions available.

If you have not reviewed and adapted your marketing strategy for some time or you are looking for new ways to generate leads to get the edge over your competitors, these are some of the most powerful marketing tactics you should be implementing for the optimal results:

Outline Your Marketing Strategy

The first steps to successfully marketing your law firm should be:

Defining your target audience
Setting marketing goals and budgets

Defining your target audience involves understanding what type of people are looking for your services and which services you want to focus your marketing efforts on. If you want to promote family law, your digital marketing requires empathetic messaging and using channels that the typical demographics using family law services use the most frequently. If you provide employment law services, your messaging will be targeted for businesses using a very professional tone, with content that asserts your expertise.

Setting your marketing goals allows you to measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. Determine the key goals that you want to achieve such as:

Increasing website traffic
Building LinkedIn followers
Boosting your average online review ratings
Multiplying the number of consultations booked through your website or social media

Once you have built an in-depth understanding of your target audience(s) and set your marketing goals, you can decide which digital marketing strategies will be most effective in achieving your law firm’s marketing goals.

This detailed guide covers the most effective digital marketing strategies to grow your law firm’s leads:

Employ local and national SEO tactics
Implement a high quality link building strategy
Consider the user experience of your website
Create compelling calls-to-action
Utilise human live chat
Set-up paid advertising
Carry out call-only campaigns
Deliver effective email marketing
Be active on the right social media platforms
Demonstrate your trustworthiness
Continuously review and analyse to improve performance

Law firms rely on local and national SEO

SEO (search engine optimisation) is one of the most important digital marketing strategies law firms can use to drive organic traffic to their website. The legal industry is one of the most competitive for SEO, so it is an area that lawyers and solicitors need to prioritise if they want to see noticeable results.

To rank higher than your competitors in the search results, your website content must be search engine optimised, from regularly updating your content and providing useful information, to on-page optimisation techniques such as optimised meta descriptions, page titles and headings. Website speed and mobile responsiveness are also important factors in ensuring your website ranks well.

A highly optimised website requires high quality, original content. Many businesses have experimented with AI generated content, which can help to produce content quickly but there are search engine ranking implications to be aware of. Google introduced an update in March 2024 that penalises AI generated content that does not meet their quality standards.

For Google to rank your website content well, you must ensure your blogs, web pages and structures meet their standards, which focus on creating helpful, reliable, people-first content. For legal firms, content should help website users to understand some of the legal processes that they are involved in. For example, creating a blog that helps people going through a divorce to understand the various steps that are involved in the full divorce process. The content should be easy to read, jargon free and relevant to the user.

Ensuring your content is up to date and creating regular content such as blogs or news articles will help your website to rank well. If your law firm mostly provides services to local clients, you need to implement local SEO to compete with your local competitors.

An effective SEO strategy involves keyword research and optimisation using tools such as SEMrush. Keyword generator tools can be used to find the phrases and questions to include in your website content, such as ‘family law solicitors’ and ‘divorce solicitors near me’.

It should also include SEO competitor analysis to monitor how your website is performing against your main competitors.

Don't forget to build links

Link building is another very important element of your SEO strategy, and this involves getting other websites to link to your content. Creating high quality content is an essential part of this but you can also use outreach techniques to build backlinks. This involves approaching relevant, high-authority websites to publish posts that link to your website. In-depth guides covering pertinent legal information are ideal types of content to help strengthen backlinks to your website.

News publications may choose articles on your website to include as links, so publishing up to date information on details such as divorce rates, legal fees and other highly searched legal content will help to attract these types of links.

Fact sheets and legal letter templates are also great for generating links to your website from high authority websites. For example, if you provide legal services for tenancy evictions, including templates for tenancy eviction notices can attract links from landlord advice websites.

Consider how the structure of your law firm's website affects the user experience

For legal firms, having a complete content hub that clearly shows the different types of services provided, helps to generate a higher volume of leads. For example, creating a hub for family law, which encompasses dedicated pages that provide detailed information about specific services such as marital finances, child matters, prenuptials etc. will bring more visitors to your website. You can use these pages to answer common questions that people have about these aspects of family law to attract high quality leads which have a high chance of conversion.

Including an FAQ section on pages with high volume search queries such as ‘My husband has asked for a divorce, what next?’ will also help to generate high quality leads. Your website should have a simple navigation structure with category pages, a sitemap and internal linking to help website visitors to quickly find the information that they are searching for.

Do your calls to action actually drive leads?

To convert your website visitors into clients, you need to have compelling call to actions (CTAs) throughout your website. These include strategically placed buttons, as well as using strong action verbs and contextual links within your website. Slide-in CTAs and pop-ups are also powerful techniques to incorporate CTAs onto your website. Strong call to actions create a sense of urgency and convince website users that your services can solve their problems.

Performing split testing to analyse the performance of your CTAs will help to improve your conversion rates by identifying better ways to implement your CTAs. This might include improving the placement, using more persuasive wording and making calls to action stand out more.

Improving the CTAs on your website can be a really quick win, with a minimum amount of work involved but these small changes can have a significant impact on your conversion rates and overall revenue.

Live chat can convert an audience that craves an instance response

Live chat technology has advanced significantly in recent years and there are several options to consider. Chat bots can provide information outside of office hours and reduce call enquiries but human live chat solutions such as MoneyPenny provide a live messaging service for people who want to speak to a person rather than a bot.

MoneyPenny offer a great way to drive leads from those that would rather an instant response. Although you will pay a fee for each lead, businesses can benefit from around 150 more leads per month by utilising this live chat solution dependant on traffic levels.

Paid ads are still an essential lead generator for law firms

PPC campaigns such as Google Ads produce one of the highest ROI (return on investment) out of all the marketing channels. According to Google, the average ROAS (return on ad spend) is 200%, so that equates to a £2 return on every £1 spent by the business.

To achieve good results from Google Ads, you need to consistently monitor and analyse the ad performance to keep adapting your ads to optimise the success of your ads. To maximise results, your ad campaigns should be dedicated to specific functions. For example, running campaigns for wills and probates. You should also consider whether you want to localise your campaigns to generate leads from local clients or whether to run national campaigns where local search volumes are too low, such as separation agreement campaigns.

To fully leverage the power of paid ads, you may choose to outsource your campaigns to a specialist digital marketing agency, who will be able to apply the most effective strategies to drive a high ROI.

Experienced ad campaign managers will be able to develop a highly successful campaign strategy, identifying the best methods to attract your target audience. Content targeting techniques such as topic targeting, keyword utilisation and placement will also ensure that the ads are relevant to the audience.

Google Ads increased costs by up to 30% in the last 12 months and it important that businesses respond by increasing their ad budgets to continue to deliver the required conversion targets. By increasing the ad budget, we have seen law firms lower conversion costs while increasing their conversions.

Call only campaigns drive mobile leads

Another option to consider for your paid ads is call-only campaigns, which help to generate more calls into your business. Instead of including links that direct ad viewers to your website, call-only ads enable you to target call-making devices, so that mobile users can instantly call your business, providing a faster conversion.

Call-only campaigns can cost around £20/£25 per conversion which can put some businesses off but if you consider that the result of the conversion can be worth over £1,000 to your business revenue, the ROI ensures the initial investment is worthwhile.

An effective email marketing strategy can help turn those warm leads into repeat customers

Despite many other marketing channels entering the landscape, email marketing continues to be a highly effective digital marketing channel. Email marketing is one of the most cost effective ways to market to prospects compared to other options such as paid ads. However, successful email marketing requires you to invest time into building email lists and designing professional emails.

To build an email list you need to comply with the relevant data protection regulations, so your email list must be permission based and only include people who have given consent to be on your email list.

You can set up a subscription based newsletter to build up your list and offer lead magnets such as free downloadable guides and templates in exchange for signing up to the email list. Timed pop up boxes can also be used to capture email addresses by offering something useful and relevant to your website visitors. Valuable content such as letter templates or checklists can help generate a list of people who have an interest in your legal services.

Once you have developed a quality email list, it is time to put some work into the design of your email campaigns. Using email marketing software such as HubSpot and Mailchimp provides you with easy to use templates including optimal layouts and call to action buttons. They can also help to ensure you are compliant with GDPR regulations, providing an unsubscribe link to email recipients. Creating visually attractive emails using images and embedded videos can also increase conversion rates, which is easier to do when you are using a user-friendly email marketing solution.

Email segmentation can increase the conversion rates by targeting subscribers based on tags and demographics. For example, you can target email campaigns for age demographics for wills or content topics they have previously shown an interest in. If people have downloaded a free guide on family law, they are more likely to be interested in using your services for child matters.

Using automation tools enable you to set up follow up emails and reminders without taking up extra time to send them out.

Social media can drive leads for your business services team

Social media is important for building your brand and developing trust and credibility. When executed well, social media marketing can generate high volumes of leads for businesses, but a vital element of your social media strategy is to focus on the platforms that are used most frequently by your target audience.

Before you decide which social media platforms to invest your resources into, you should analyse your audience demographics, preferences and the legal issues they are likely to need support with.

With over 1 billion users, LinkedIn is the best social media platform for establishing professional connections and creating a digital presence as legal experts. To demonstrate your knowledge and expertise you need to create and share content that resonates with your audience and provides information that they are looking for. LinkedIn is ideal for building a network with businesspeople who may require legal services by offering expert-written content on topics such as employment law, data security regulations and tax updates.

Case studies and white papers that provide detailed insights into legal topics can be used to attract newsletter subscribers.

As well as creating high quality articles and other content marketing, you should cultivate discussions to build an engaged network. Make sure that you respond to comments and messages quickly to help build trust in your company. Creating content that followers are likely to share will amplify your social media marketing results, so consider using visuals such as infographics and publishing important legal updates as soon as new legislation is introduced.

Many legal firms dismiss social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram as they are not regarded to be as professional as LinkedIn. However, with usage on these platforms growing exponentially, creating content such as videos providing legal advice could be a powerful way to generate leads and increase your brand awareness.

Legal firms have successfully generated social media leads by answering common questions about topics such as divorce or probate. For example, you could upload a short video that answers the question ‘what happens when there is no will?’ or ‘how do assets get split in a divorce?’.

The trust factor

81% of people will research legal services before they decide which firm to use. As well as visiting your website, people will check your online reviews to see how other clients have rated your services. This includes Google Business Profile reviews, TrustPilot, Facebook reviews and other review platforms.

The first step to successfully managing your online profiles is to identify which major review sites are being used by your clients and claiming your business listing. You can then complete your profiles on the review sites with details such as descriptions of your services, contact numbers and opening hours.

Your digital marketing strategy should incorporate managing and nurturing reviews on these platforms. Online reviews that your clients leave provide valuable insights into processes and services and can help you to quickly identify an issue that needs to be rectified. For example, clients may have found it difficult to get in touch with their case manager, so you can identify a solution.

The legal industry is one of the most exposed to receiving poor reviews based on the huge impact legal services have on a person’s life, so investing in online review management is highly recommended for legal firms. Effective online review management can increase a 2 star average to over 4 stars, which in turn generates high volumes of organic traffic.

It is important to address negative reviews in a professional manner, acknowledging the issue and asking the reviewer to contact you so the issue can be resolved. You can use reputation management software to set up alerts when people leave reviews so that you can promptly respond. Sites such as Trustpilot enable you to request reviewers to resubmit a rating if they are happy with how you have responded to their original negative review, which can significantly improve your average score.

Legal services consumers rely heavily on the online feedback from others and social proof is a powerful way to build trust in your services. Review your internal processes to encourage clients to leave reviews. This could be sending an email post completion to request feedback on Google. You should only ever focus on requesting feedback on one platform, but you might want to switch your focus from Google to TrustPilot if you notice a trend of poor reviews and you want to work on increasing your average ratings.

Once you have established a high number of positive reviews, you should promote these by embedding them into your website and sharing feedback on your social profiles to increase credibility.

Continuous learning, continuous improvement

These are some of the key fundamentals to increasing the effectiveness of your law firm’s digital marketing strategy, but for your strategy to keep delivering the results you want, it has to continually evolve and adapt to feedback and insights.

New digital marketing tools and trends will influence the performance of your digital marketing strategy and continuous refinement will help you to stay ahead of your competitors. Use data analysis and client feedback to delve deeper into the effectiveness of your current digital marketing channels.

Software such as Google Analytics will help to provide valuable insights into your website traffic, user behaviour and conversion, while A/B testing is also a good way to measure the performance of landing pages, CTAs and email campaigns.

Are you ready to boost your legal firm’s leads through a more effective digital marketing strategy? We have helped a host of law firms increase their lead generation through innovative, customised digital marketing strategies using the latest marketing techniques to achieve business-specific marketing goals. Discover more about our marketing packages for law firms here.