Digital marketing is a must-have for all businesses, and that includes law firms.

Most law firms do a bit of digital marketing. They have a website, and they post on social media occasionally. But they don’t take it much further than that.

This guide is exactly how you can take it further.

Ready to earn more legal leads? Then let’s go.

10x Your Legal Leads

Download our free 77-page eBook, inc. templates and checklists, and increase your legal leads

Download my free copy

Research

You wouldn’t start on a case without research, and your marketing is no different.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a well-established firm or a new one — research is key to running a winning marketing campaign.

So, where do you start?

With your clients.

Client Research

Getting inside the heads of your ideal clients will help you tailor your marketing strategy.

Why? Well, let’s say a potential client is searching for personal injury law. The way they find you will be different than if they’re looking for someone to help with corporate transactional work.

Getting to Know Your Ideal Client

These questions, worries and goals will help you understand why clients seek you out so you can do the best marketing.

Why do they need your expertise and services? What’s keeping them up at night?

Knowing these things will help you reach and connect with them.

One great way to do this is simply by speaking to your existing clients or reflecting on past talks with them.

How did they find your law firm?
What questions did they have?
What did they find easy to understand, and what was harder?

All these questions will help you pin down who your target client is.

Then, you can create client personas.

How to Create Client Personas

Client personas are fictional “characters” based on your ideal client. The purpose of these personas is to guide all your marketing. If you write a blog, you should be writing it with your persona in mind.

Your client persona will help you narrow down your marketing channels (blog, social media platforms, email and more) so that you’re reaching this ideal client.

Your client persona can be based on a current client or be completely made from scratch.

You could include:

• Their age
• Their name
• Their job role*
• Their family situation*
• Their pain points
• Their goals and motivations

*These will be more or less relevant depending on the type of law you practise.

Here are some ways to find the information you need to build a client persona.

• Speak to existing clients
• Speak to team members from your different departments
• Conduct keyword and competitor research (which we’ll cover later in this guide)
• Visit forums like Reddit or Quora to find questions and pain points.

Add these details to a document with a photo of your ideal client. You can grab a free stock photo from a website like Pexels.

Here’s an example of how your client persona could look.

Not sure where to start? Download our ebook on How To Earn 10x More Legal Clients for a free client persona template.

Is your marketing underperforming?

Request a free website and marketing review and our team will tell you how to improve your marketing.

Request a Free Review

Competitor Research

Competitor research helps you see what’s working for other law firms and what you want to avoid. It will help with your positioning, too.

We’ll be focusing on your digital competitors here. These are the websites and ads that appear in search engines when people are searching for your services.

You want to take a look at their:

• Positioning
• SEO
• Content
• PPC
• Social Media.

To find your digital competitors, pop your main keyword into Google and see who appears in the results. This keyword could be something like “Property law Chicago.”

Pay attention to the ads, the top results and the businesses that appear in the map pack.

Once you’ve found your competitors, visit their websites and look at what they’re saying on their homepage.

This is something the team at Thinkplus does at the start of every campaign to ensure we fully understand what our client is up against.

You should also input their URL into a tool like Semrush* to see which of their pages are likely to be getting the most traffic. You can analyse their PPC ads using Meta Ad Library to see their social media ads or Semrush’s AdClarity to learn how all their ads are performing.

Finally, look at their social media, both the platforms they post on and the type of posts that do well. It’s important you also look at the profiles of their individual lawyers. This will help you see if they are using personal branding to help bring clients to their firm.

There’s more information on how to do research for your law firm’s marketing strategy in our downloadable guide.

Law Firm Positioning

You’ve done your research and found lots of information about your target clients.

But you’re struggling to stand out from the other law firms in your area.

This is where positioning comes in. Positioning is what will help you stand out from the crowd.

It’ll be a boost to the amazing marketing strategy you will have put in place by the end of this playbook.

How to Find Your Law Firm’s Positioning

Start by looking inward. Are there any causes your law firm supports, or is there anything unique about your staff?

It could be that you get back to potential clients very quickly, or you have a high win rate compared to other firms.

You should also look at your client research and personas. What is important to them?

Here’s an example. Patino Law Firm is veteran-owned and offers a no-win-no-fee deal. Their staff speak Spanish and English, and they have lots of 5-star Google reviews.

They know these things are important to their target clients, so they highlight them in a benefits bar at the top of their website.

According to a study by CallRail, law firms lose 46 clients to slow response times every year.

So, you could position your firm as being the fastest to respond to clients. But you need to actually do this — you can’t claim to have speedy response times and then leave people waiting days to hear from your firm.

Another way to find clients’ issues is through Google’s search autofill. By searching “why do solicitors” and letting Google fill in the rest of the response, you can get an insight into what people are searching for.

We can see that people wonder why solicitors “take so long”, “charge so much” and “never reply”. You could put these concerns at ease with your positioning by being more honest than competitors and including your response times and rates.

Your positioning should be reflected in everything you do. If you pride yourselves on only speaking to your clients in layman’s terms — no legal jargon — then this should be reflected in your blogs, social media, emails…everywhere!

One of the most important places for your positioning to stand out is on your website, which we’ll cover in the next section.

Website

In just a few seconds, your website needs to make it clear:

• What you’re offering
• Why someone should pay you for that offering
• And how they can become a client.

Not only that, your offering needs to be enticing enough that the visitor becomes a client rather than heading back to search.

So, how can you do this?

Let’s explore some good law firm websites and point out some common mistakes we see law firms make.

Get to the top of Google

Learn how to get your website to the very top of Google (and turn that traffic into revenue).

Download my free copy

Design & Conversion Rate Optimisation

When you think of a great website, the first thing you think of is design. But, too many firms fall into the trap of going for great design but no usability.

You can absolutely have a website that looks amazing but also helps visitors get the information they need.

Here’s a website from Grette. The design is stunning — it’s professional and sleek but uses slightly warmer tones to give friendly vibes.

Image Source

The staff photos are super high quality, and there’s not a stock photo in sight.

It’s also clear from the headline that this is related to law.

But…here’s where things start to fall apart a bit.

There’s no clear next step. If you’re hiring a legal professional for the first time, you won’t know what to put in that search bar. You won’t know if this firm will be able to handle your issue. You just know they offer lawyers and expertise. That’s it.

So you leave, potentially missing out on hiring some amazing lawyers.

Here’s another website.

Image source

It’s not as sleek as the first — the design is okay, but that photo in the background makes things feel a bit cluttered.

But, this website is likely to get more clients than the first one.

It’s clear right away the type of law this firm offers — personal injury, criminal defence, bankruptcy and social security disability.

They show they’re trustworthy by including that they have a lot of high-rated Google Reviews.

Then, they make it easy for the visitor to take the next step by offering a free consultation or the option to call the firm.

The Hoglund Law site isn’t perfect by any means — they could tidy up the design and offer an alternative to getting a free consultation, such as learning more about the legal process.

For the most part, though, this website ticks many good boxes.

You need to find a middle ground between these two websites. Something that looks nice but makes it easy for visitors to become clients.

Our Conversion Rate Optimisation team has a near-endless list of ways to increase landing page conversion rates, including several you can learn from our conversion rate explainer videos on YouTube.

Not sure how your website stacks up? Our downloadable guide includes a handy checklist so you can see where your website could be doing better.

SEO

Search engine optimisation. One of the most powerful tools in your digital marketing kit.

It’s crucial. It takes time and dedication. But it’s so worth it.

SEO is one way we helped our client, Patino Law Firm, more than double the organic traffic (no ads here!) they get from Google. We achieved this in less than a year.

And you can achieve it, too.

Starting with keyword research.

Struggling to get all your marketing done?

Download our marketing priority planner and get your marketing back on track.

Download my free copy

Keyword Research

In digital marketing, keywords are everything.

They influence all the pages and content on your website and help you show up in search results.

To be clear, by “keyword” we don’t just mean individual words. We mean keyphrases, too, which could be a few words or longer sentences. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll just call them all keywords.

Start by listing topics and words related to your law firm. Do this even if you already have a keyword list. It’s good to look at things with fresh eyes.

These will be things like your location and specialities, for example:

• Law firm Atlanta
• Divorce solicitor London
• Family law Utah.

It’s very hard (more likely impossible) to rank for things like “law”, “law firm” or “lawyer”. It’s also fairly pointless if you want to get more clients.

They’re too generic and need qualifying words attached, like in the examples above.

People searching for these terms are likely to be looking up how to become a lawyer or simply what these words mean rather than looking to hire a lawyer.

Next, find the keywords your site is already ranking for using a tool like Semrush (which you can try for free for 14 days with our link). Add any keywords you want to continue ranking for to your list.

Take note of which pages are ranking for each keyword. You might want pages to keep ranking for the same keyword, or you may want them to rank for something different. The opposite is true as well. Some pages might be ranking for the wrong keywords.

Then, look for questions your potential clients are asking. You might have some already from your client persona research, but you can use tools like AlsoAsked or Answer the Public to find more questions.

By typing “personal injury law” into AlsoAsked, we got some great key questions that could be targeted by blog posts on your website, including,

• Should I use a solicitor for a personal injury claim?
• How long does a personal injury claim take to settle?
• What is the average payout for personal injury claims?

Since most law firms are local or focus on one or two areas, you’ll also want to research local keywords.

People will search for terms like “lawyer near me”, “solicitor Nottingham”, or “What is the average payout for personal injury claims in the UK?”

You’ll need these keywords to optimise your website for SEO, which we cover in our downloadable guide, “Earn 10x More Legal Clients”.

Once you have your list of keywords (between 25 and 50), use a tool like Semrush* to analyse them. You want keywords with a decent search volume that aren’t too competitive.

That said if your keyword tool is showing that a search is getting 0 traffic, but you know your clients are searching for it, then you can still target it. Keyword tools aren’t always accurate when it comes to lower numbers.

That’s why at Thinkplus, we’ve developed a specialist method for identifying the best keywords and not just following exactly what the tools suggest.

Local SEO

Local SEO helps search engines understand where this law firm is and show it to relevant people.

If Google shows a law firm based in London to someone in Australia, the user won’t have a good experience. They might decide not to use Google again. And Google doesn’t want that.

So they want to show local results to their users. And they need your help to do it.

There are a couple of ways you can do this. The first is what we’ve already discussed — including the places you offer your services naturally on your pages.

But don’t write the locations in big, bold letters a bunch of times in your text to get Google’s attention. They don’t like that.

Another way to improve your local SEO is through your Google Business Profile.

Google Business for Local SEO

A Google Business Profile is an account set up by you where you can add information about your law firm, such as location, opening times, reviews and more.

Having a well-built Google Business profile helps you appear in the map pack on Google (that map with the red dots that appear sometimes when you search).

We helped our client Lockings Solicitors reach the top of the map pack. The results? Website clicks doubled, in part thanks to the map pack pictured below.

If you want some help getting started with local SEO or want to ensure you haven’t missed anything, download our guide, which includes a snazzy local SEO checklist.

Content Marketing

People looking for legal advice are going to have a lot of questions. They’re likely going to be feeling scared, both about their upcoming legal battle and hiring the right attorney and asking Google for help.

That’s where content marketing comes in.

Content marketing is used to describe a few different types of marketing. In this section, we’ll look at blogging and digital PR.

Underwhelmed by your digital marketing agency?

Learn all the signs that it might be time to change

Download my free copy

Blogging

Blogging is a fantastic marketing asset, but it’s often used poorly by law firms.

Instead of sharing great insights and answering questions their target audience wants answers to, they share news about their firm and jargon-filled updates about the legal industry.

We want to change that!

How to structure your blogs

If you’re new to blog writing, it can feel a bit daunting.

Here are a few tips for writing great blogs.

1. Start with a strong title/heading that includes your keywords, but don’t sacrifice an easy-to-read title just to shove your keywords in there. This title should use an H1 heading.
2. Next up is your introduction. We’d suggest writing this last, as it should be a summary of what you’re going to talk about in the guide. If you’re covering pain points you should also paint an image for your reader — highlight their pain and show them you understand how they’re feeling.
3. After the introduction is the main bulk of your blog. This should be split up into sections, using H2 headings at the start of a new section and H3 headings to break up those sections.
4. Use images and videos throughout. If possible, make your own graphics using a platform like Canva. These graphics should all be consistent and have a similar style.
5. Where possible, use examples of how you helped a client solve the problem you’re describing in the blog. This shows you have the experience to answer their questions and potentially help them with their legal case.
6. Include calls to action throughout your guide. It’s important that these CTAs are relevant to the content you’re writing.

Remember, the overall goal is to create a blog post that is easy to read, informative, and engaging.

Keep paragraphs concise, use a mix of text and visuals, and consider your target audience’s preferences and needs.

These preferences and needs will influence the Calls To Action (CTAs) you use in your blog.

Finally, be careful of the language you use. Your audience probably won’t know legal jargon or the specific ways you refer to different types of law.

You can learn more about how to connect with your audience in our downloadable guide.

Backlinking, Digital PR and Journalist Requests

Once you’ve got blogs out there, you need to get eyes on them.

One important way that Google decides which pages should appear at the top of the search results page is the amount of backlinks to your site as a whole and to that particular page.

You can get backlinks by publishing great content and leading writers from publications to link back to your fantastic insights.

You don’t just want backlinks for the sake of links. You also want to try and get some referral traffic from those websites.

Getting publications to link back to your blogs is one way to get backlinks. You can also reach out to publications who already mention you and ask them for a link if they didn’t include one.

They already like you enough to mention you, so the hard part is done!

To learn more about how to get backlinks, download our guide.

Digital PR for lawyers

Digital PR, or digital public relations, is the strategic use of online platforms and communication channels to manage a brand’s reputation, build relationships with online audiences, and generate positive visibility.

It involves activities such as online media outreach, influencer collaborations, content marketing, and social media engagement to establish and maintain a good online presence for your law firm.

One popular way to get featured is by sharing data in an interesting way. As a law firm, you’ll have plenty of insight into the most common crimes that are committed, the cases that have the highest win rate and more, and you can share this with the world in a way that grabs people’s attention.

This report by the FBI included useful infographics that publications can easily share in their stories about the report. It also helps publications understand what the data means, making it easier for them to report on it.

As a result, this report was linked back to over 6,000 times by 3,000 different websites. A great turnout.

10x Your Legal Leads

Download our free 77-page eBook, inc. templates and checklists, and increase your legal leads

Download my free copy

Journalist requests

Journalists are often looking for expert quotes for their news stories. This helps them add some authority and human element.

Since true crime is a popular topic online and high-profile celebrity court cases, lawyers have many opportunities to give their expert opinions on these topics.

There are a few ways you can find these journalist requests.

• Through HARO or Qwoted, who email you each day with requests that are likely relevant to you
• Through X (formerly known as Twitter), using the hashtag #journorequest or on journalist’s profiles
• Through LinkedIn, using the hashtag #journorequest.

We’ve helped clients get into huge publications like the Daily Mail, the BBC and The Guardian, meaning they have backlinks from well-established websites. Google will take this as a positive signal and boost them up in the search results.

If you’re staring at a blank email and struggling to get started with your outreach for backlinks, digital PR or journo requests, download our email outreach templates. They’ll make contacting publications a breeze.

With AI search becoming more popular, we expect digital PR will be more important than ever before. Check out this video to find out why.

Social Media

Social media is a great tool for legal professionals. In fact, a report by CallRail showed that law firms consider social media to be their most valuable channel.

It also found that it’s the #1 underperforming channel.

Let’s change that together.

Education and Personal Branding

People are unlikely to browse social media hoping the algorithm brings them an attorney because they have a legal issue.

They’re more likely to go to search for that.

They’re looking for entertainment. Maybe even some education. Edutainment, if you will.

This is one way you can connect with potential clients — especially those who don’t need your services right away.

LegalEagle is a great example.

This channel has nearly 3 million subscribers and gets over 1 million views per video.

They share videos about celebrity lawsuits and any high-profile cases.

In each video description, there’s a link to the LegalEagle law website, which invites visitors to find a lawyer. If you need legal help and you’ve watched some of LegalEagle’s videos, you’re more likely to visit their website first.

Download our playbook for a step-by-step guide on how to build your social media presence.

PPC

PPC, which stands for Pay-per-Click advertising but is used to describe all online ads, is an important marketing tool for any law firm.

It can help you get to the top of search engines when potential clients are searching for legal assistance, or it can help you reconnect with people who visited your website but didn’t convert immediately.

Search Ads

Here’s an example of the ads that appear for the search “will solicitor near me”.

All these ads are relevant to the search, and some even highlight a nearby location (in this case, Grantham).

Some include prices and special offers. You can also see that the keywords from the search are highlighted.

When creating a search ad, it’s important to include the following:

• A strong headline that’s enticing and includes the keywords you are targeting. Think back to the titles of the blogs we discussed earlier.
• A compelling offering in the text. This should make it clear what you’re offering and why the viewer should choose you.
• Ad extensions, including other relevant pages on your site or a click-to-call button so viewers can get in touch right away.
• Consider the intent of the search. Ads run on a search where users are not quite ready to convert will have different CTAs to those that are for people ready to get in touch with your law firm.

Take a look at the ads already running on the keywords you want to target to see what competitors are sharing. Then, make something better.

Social Media Ads

Social media ads can be useful for reaching visitors to your website who didn’t convert.

You can target visitors based on the pages they looked at on your site. This is called remarketing or retargeting.

For example, if someone visited a page about accidents abroad, you might retarget them with an ad about making a claim.

This ad from Slater and Gordon is great — it has eye-catching visuals that include a question — “injured on holiday?” You know that if they visited your accidents abroad page or a blog related to this, then they likely were injured on holiday.

The ad copy (the text above the ad) highlights that Slater and Gordon have legal experts who can offer specialist advice, making it clear what the ad is for.

There’s also a CTA under the ad reinforcing the text in the image, asking again if the viewer has been injured on holiday, and stating that they’re an award-winning law firm to build trust and credibility.

Read more about PPC best practices for law firms in our downloadable guide.

How to Measure Success

Ok, so you’re ready to implement the advice in this guide. You can see how you’re getting more clients, but how can you prove that your digital marketing efforts are the cause?

There are a few metrics that you should focus on:

• Return on Investment
• Conversion Rate
• Click Through Rate
• Qualified Leads
• New Clients
• Cost Per Lead.

Download our guide for more information about the metrics you should measure, how to measure them and what you can learn from the data.

How to Calculate Your Marketing Investment

If your law firm is new to digital marketing or has been investing in marketing here and there, then it’s time you put a budget together.

We put together a detailed guide on how to calculate your marketing budget, as well as a video. It’s based on over 10 years of experience helping businesses invest in their marketing, so we know our stuff.

 

What’s Next?

You should have plenty of ideas to take your law firm’s marketing to the next level.

It’s a lot to take in, so let’s recap everything we’ve discussed in this guide.

• Your marketing strategy needs to start with research. Clients, keywords and competitors. Without that, you won’t know what you’re up against or what type of digital marketing you should do to get the best clients.
• You can then use this research to determine your law firm’s positioning. What will make you stand out while appealing to your target clients?
• Your positioning will influence the information you include on your website. You need to make it clear what you’re offering (don’t assume every visitor knows you’re a law firm), accompanied by an enticing CTA.
• It’ll be hard for potential clients to find you online without some good SEO. Check which pages are ranking for which keywords on your site, and make adjustments if needed.
• Content is a huge part of SEO. This ranges from the content on your web pages to your blog and any digital PR you do.
• Social media is a type of content, too. Law firms can encourage their lawyers to build a presence on social media, connecting with potential clients in a fun but educational way.
• Another way to connect with target clients is through PPC ads. You can reconnect with people who already visited your site through remarketing.
• Once your digital marketing campaigns are running, you must ensure you’re measuring results. Without results, you won’t know what’s working and what needs adjusting.

And that’s everything you need to know to create a high-performance, high-ROI digital marketing campaign for your law firm.

Looking for help with your marketing? Request a free website and marketing review, and one of our marketing consultants will look at how your marketing could be improved.

Otherwise, we have many ways for you to keep learning, including all our videos, podcasts, and blogs.

Want to Learn More?

• Take a closer look at client personas and how to build them
• Find out more about how to do keyword research like a pro
• Get inside the minds of your ideal clients
• Explore the power of positioning and how it can help your law firm stand out
• Learn how to take your website to the next level and turn it into a conversion machine
• Take your content to the next level with this guide on how to create a ninja content strategy
• PPC trends are changing — learn all about what’s new with PPC.

*Some links within this guide are affiliate links, which Thinkplus receives a fee for promoting (these links are not sponsored). Thinkplus only promotes services we already use within our marketing stack.