If you’ve spent time and money revamping your law firm website, all of your work could be in vain if no-one knows about it.
Unfortunately, just having a website isn’t enough. Now, more than ever before, your website is your shop window.
You need people to be able to find it easily, in order to bring new clients to your firm.
If you’re confident that your site accurately reflects your practice, the services you offer and it’s performing well, here are a few tips to help increase traffic.
One of the most effective ways to increase site traffic is to utilise your firm’s social channels, either by regularly posting great content or by taking advantage of social media advertising.
Many practices are active across Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter and by advertising here you can take advantage of the various platforms’ user demographic data to target ads appropriately.
Social campaigns can be specifically targeted too. For example, a recent successful campaign on Facebook targeted men and women over 40, within 15 miles of a firm’s location. The advert was for pre-nuptial agreements.
Because of the increasing specificity of demographic targeting that’s now possible, social media ad campaigns are becoming an increasingly important way of driving traffic to legal websites.
On-page SEO can help boost your organic traffic (visits that are generated by users searching for terms in search engines), so optimising your website’s content for search engines is still incredibly important.
Your website may look great at first glance, but if it’s not optimised for search engines, it will be difficult for visitors to find your legal practice. Plus, major SEO issues can actually hurt your website rankings, decreasing your traffic.
In the first instance, check that whoever’s posting your content (blogs, news pieces, homepage updates etc) is optimising it for keywords, adding internal and external links and meta descriptions to each page and using image alt text. All of this will help search engines crawl and rank your content.
Pay per click advertising, or PPC, is a form of digital marketing where you pay a small fee every time that someone clicks on your internet ad.
It’s an effective, low-cost way of bringing visitors to your site, rather than relying on them all coming from organic search results.
Put simply, most law firms should be doing some kind of PPC advertising. It can be carried out in a number of ways, on a number of platforms.
Here’s a brief explanation of each:
Search engine PPC is a form of advertising in which you bid for ad placement in a search engine’s sponsored links. These will appear when a user searches for a keyword or phrase related to your business.
For example, if someone searches for ‘family law solicitors’ the results that show in the top spots in Google are all likely to be paid-for adverts.
Local PPC is paid advertising designed to focus on potential customers within a specific region.
It involves using local keywords, for example ‘medical negligence lawyer Leeds’, and very clever geo-targeting.
Google (and other search engines) allow you to use postcode, town and city boundaries to target ads to specific locations.
On Google you can draw a custom-sized radius centred on your own location, so that people in your area searching for the keywords you’ve specified will be shown your ad.
You can also stop your ads from being displayed in certain locations by specifying negative geographic targets – and you only pay when a user clicks on your ad.
Remarketing allows you to show your ad to potential customers who have previously visited your site.
Thanks to cookies, you’ll have probably seen remarketing ads when browsing. When people leave your website, remarketing helps you to reconnect with them by showing them your ads as they browse other websites.
Ascensor are an award-winning digital agency based in Leeds, with dedicated experts specialising in PPC, SEO, email marketing and social media.
If you need more advice on how you can drive traffic to your website, we’ve got a proven track record of helping legal practices get more from their digital assets.
Get in touch with the Ascensor team to discover how we can help your firm grow.
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