What other people say about you is always going to hold more weight than what you say about yourself. This is why word-of-mouth marketing or relationship marketing is so effective.
But the most common step after prospects have been referred is for them to search online for that lawyer’s name or the law firm’s name.
Appearing at the top of search result pages for your name and your firm’s name is paramount. This is a part-science part-art discipline known as search engine optimisation (SEO).
A lawyer’s name and the firm name are fairly straightforward to rank for, but you need a website to do it.
Exceptions do apply (for example, if a lawyer’s name is very common, i.e. John Smith or your firm’s name has a generic word in the name – i.e. your firm’s name is “Business Lawyers”).
We will cover SEO in a separate series of posts, but for now, we’ll focus on the importance of a website overall.
Once people are on your website, what are they looking for? What do they want to get from it?
We answer this question in our post, Law firm website user experience (UX): Who is visiting your website and what are they looking for?
A website is more than just a resource for referrers and prospects. If you have experience in relationship marketing and earning referrals, you’ll know that an online presence can be an amazing resource for your existing clients if you invest in relevant content marketing and a well-planned website.
Bonus tip: If you have a current website, we encourage you to look at your most visited pages on Google Analytics. Make sure you select an appropriate date range (minimum 30 days of data). Apart from the home page, what are the most common pages on your website? This will help you get an idea of what your audience is reading and what they’re interested in.