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Growing A Law Practice with Internet Marketing

3 Smart Moves that can Turn Your Website into a Powerful New Client Generation Channel

Less than one year after starting his own law practice, Mack Babcock had to move his firm to a bigger office location and hire an assistant. After three years, he’s hired another attorney and is considering a second assistant.

From the start, he knew he wanted to attract a high-quality clientele. To reach that audience, he shunned traditional channels and focused on building a strong Internet presence. He told us, “Many law firms take the traditional approach, relying on TV and Yellow Pages ads. You’ll never see the Babcock Law Firm advertising on TV. I’ve seen how TV advertising can completely change the way a law firm is perceived. It attracts a certain type of case that ultimately erodes profitability.”

Today, the number of leads from The Babcock Law Firm’s website continues to grow. With an Internet contact-to-client conversion rate around 23%, he can count on a growing pipeline of cases and even predict future firm revenues at a specific win-rate for the types of cases he takes on. See the steps he took to get here.

Smart Move #1:
Optimize Your Web Site for Google Searches

As expected, one of Babcock’s first steps was to build a website for his new law firm.

He wanted to make sure he could count on a strong flow of traffic from potential clients. Since it’s quite rare to find a website designer who also understands all the nuances and technicalities of search engine optimization, Babcock hired SEO Advantage to optimize his site and ensure it would rank on the first page when his target audience searched online. He also engaged the usability and copywriting team at SEO Advantage to ensure his law firm’s site could engage and convert the resulting traffic.

This meant he could start to gain momentum from the beginning rather than waiting to address these issues down the road, which could potentially require costly do-overs to optimize the website’s structure and delay search engine rankings.

Smart Move #2:
Plan for Long-Term Results

Though the site was optimized from the start, Babcock knew it would take time to build a profitable flow of leads for his law firm through Google searches.

The mistaken assumption that SEO is going to bring a sudden flow of revenues can cause some law firms to give up after “trying” it for a couple months. However, approached as part of a long-term plan, SEO can cultivate a growing presence that will add significant value to a legal practice’s site in terms of content and other factors that also add credibility for the law firm, while reducing cost/lead.

It also takes time for a new law firm to see revenues start flowing in, if the firm works on a contingency basis as Babcock’s does. It may take two years or more for a case to be settled, and only after the settlement is paid will Babcock receive payment for his work. This means it can be years before a lead is successfully converted to revenue, even if successfully converted to a client right away.

To mitigate these factors, it was crucial to start building a client base quickly. Babcock invested in pay-per-click advertising. This let him build targeted traffic in the short term while his site built history and credibility in the natural search engine results.

During this time, Babcock was forced to pause his optimization activities as he channeled resources into administrative expenses brought on by growth that was much faster than anticipated. The following year, Babcock was ready to start reducing his law firms’ reliance on pay-per-click and shift traffic sources toward natural, or “organic”, search, which usually carries greater credibility and conversion rates than paid search.

Babcock explains, “I think there’s some difference between the clients who reach me via PPC versus natural search. The client who’s searching on the Internet is often educating themselves. The Internet still has a feeling of being a reference, and I think that’s the reason that organic search is so much more important than paid search. Your organic listings are much more credible--people understand you’ve earned your spot there. When you click the paid searches, it seems you get less of what you’re looking for.”

Since the foundation of his site was already optimized and had a chance to grow some history in Google, it was primed for a boost. SEO Advantage stepped up search engine optimization activities, and The Babcock Law Firm saw the number of retained clients from its website double.

Internet Leads
Leads from The Babcock Law Firm’s web site continue to grow, providing a reliable influx of profitable new clients.

Attorney Referral Leads
Referrals from other attorneys have been an excellent source of leads. Babcock feels his online presence has helped him build a strong reputation and forge new relationships.

Yellow Pages Leads
Yellow Pages advertising brought many low-quality leads, resulting in very few new clients.

Smart Move #3:
Measure What Works and Adjust Marketing Tactics

Babcock focused on his website marketing to capture online searchers and his industry involvement to stimulate referrals from other attorneys. He also tried Yellow Pages-type advertising.

He relentlessly focused on capturing data to understand his law firm’s marketing effectiveness. He wanted to be able to see which tactics were paying off most for him and then focus resources on those that proved most profitable. SEO Advantage also implemented tracking and reporting software to show him specific performance data for his website.

The data tells the story. Babcock says, “In hindsight, it was a mistake to spend money on Yellow Pages advertising when I could have channeled that into optimizing my website further.” His website is now a source of high-quality leads that’s a close second to referrals from other attorneys. And the number of leads from his site is growing as SEO Advantage continues the innovative marketing that keeps The Babcock Law Firm front and center online.

Stay tuned to see the next stage of Internet marketing for The Babcock Law Firm as the online landscape continues to evolve.

Dominating Page One – The Babcock Law Firm

Here, follow his law firm’s progress in his own words…

	“I check my site’s rankings every day. Sometimes we were up, other days we had moved down. We’ve been consistently on Page One for some time now. And that’s for all of the important terms that clients search on.”
	“We saw another jump in the number of leads recently after making some changes on the site that I would never have thought of. My leads are up 200% again over last year and growing. ”
	“My site and Internet presence have supported my reputation and credibility as a successful lawyer. It’s a very valuable intangible asset not always shown in the numbers.”
	“My Internet leads more than doubled in the second half of 2009, after starting up SEO again. The number of retained clients from the Internet also doubled.”
	“It can be a curse to be too successful too fast. The longer I was away from SEO, the less activity I saw from my site. After 7 months, leads from my site dwindled to 0. It was a mistake to spend money on Yellow Pages advertising when I could have channeled that into optimizing my website further, instead of relying on paid search.”
	“Unlike any other aspect of running a business, Internet marketing was the single most difficult thing to try and figure out. When I first started talking to providers, they were talking organic versus pay-per-click and meta tags and keywords and inbound links… you have no frame of reference to try and figure that out. SEO Advantage took the time to understand my goals and explain the things I needed to know.”
	“I knew from the start I wanted to attract higher quality cases–-I want to handle fewer cases and make more per case. The Internet brings that kind of client. They’re much higher quality than those who respond to ads on TV, buses, billboards or the Yellow Pages.”