6 Ways Your Firm is Losing Revenue
When a Firm hires a Legal Marketing Agency, they should get measurable results that are clear and concise to understand. However, this is not often the case, and your firm may be losing revenue as a result.
When addressing your firm’s digital marketing, you only get out of it what you put into it. The sad reality is most of these so-called SEO agencies may offer SEO, content, or link building services for less than $1,000 per month, but the results of their efforts often fall short of expectations, leaving you and/or your firm searching for another SEO every 6-8 months.
Let’s focus on stopping this cycle so you can find a Marketing Agency that will work with you in getting measurable results and be satisfied with your investment.
Here are 6 ways your firm is losing revenue through digital marketing:
1. More than just a Pretty Website
It’s great having a website that looks fantastic, but having a pretty website doesn’t make you money because no one knows it’s there.
This often happens because an attorney or law firm may hire a fantastic web developer, and they will get the site that they want because the web developer is good at his job. But web developers usually are not SEO or marketing experts.
The reason is web developers typically don’t:
- Write or Edit content for a website, such as a blog.
- Stay up-to-date on best SEO practices, including but not limited to…
- Link Building/Outreach
- Audit/Analyze and Diagnose/Repair the On-Site SEO of a website.
- Experience in digital marketing, especially for a law firm.
- The ethical concerns with various state bars. For example, in Texas you have to submit your site for full approval to the bar.
But basic on-page Search Engine Optimization is never enough to be competitive, especially when your firm is competing with hundreds of others in your area.
How to reduce your loss in revenue:
When hiring a marketing agency, they should be able to share:
- Examples of their SEO success through case studies of their clients.
- Demonstrate clearly how SEO improved search engine visibility, increase in website traffic and phone calls, along with specific keyword rankings over times for their clients.
- Actual Data from an analytics tool such as Google Analytics, and be able any questions to where you can understand them.
While having a great looking website is nice, just remember that alone is not SEO.
Having a Legal Marketing Agency that works with designers (or have their own) will help you reduce the potential of your Law Firm in needing to find a new agency every few months because your not getting the results you need in improving website traffic or acquiring leads.
2. Managing your Digital Marketing Expectations
If you spend up to $10,000 a month in ad spend on Facebook, how do you know you are getting what you paid for?
Many agencies will send screenshots their Google Analytics reports and highlight the metrics that put the results in the best light. But often attorney’s don’t know what these screenshots or reports mean as they either the reports are vague, or more importantly the attorney doesn’t even have a clue as to what the agency does every month.
Not understanding basic reporting from an agency is not understanding where your money is going. If an agency doesn’t manage this expectation by answering your questions and making sure you understand what is going on, it may be time to search for a new agency to manage your digital marketing efforts.
How to reduce your loss in revenue:
Having a report that you understand is paramount in helping you reign in the cost associated with your business.
A digital marketing agency should help you understand what any report is saying and help you feel at ease while they help you through the entire SEO process.
From doing a digital audit and providing recommendations, the agency should be able to show and explain what needs to be done every step of the way and have your trust in making those recommendations happen.
3. Marketing is Metrics
With all this money invested each month into your digital marketing efforts, how do you know it’s actually working?
A Digital Marketing Agency does this by setting up the metrics to ‘track’ the results of their efforts. This often includes adding some code to landing pages, websites, etc… in order to monitor and report on specific goals.
This is the core of improving your Firms digital marketing efforts that allows the agency to have the evidence they require to make informed decisions.
How to reduce your loss in revenue
By ensuring the proper tracking codes and metrics are in place, you can see what parts of your marketing efforts are actually generating revenue.
For example, by setting up call tracking, you will know if the content you are creating and publishing is increasing calls because the metrics are recording this information.
Tracking conversions like phone calls, live chats and forms being filled out allows for you to not only measure results, but to see how to regularly improve those results. A quality Legal Marketing Agency will address this ‘Intake’ of information and data, and consistently work with you to actually LOOK at the data and doesn’t just sell you on services.
Just know that Marketing is Metrics, and without the information to review, you are just making assumptions.
4. Content is King
Going back to #2, let’s manage your expectations…
When hiring an agency to improve your law firms SEO, know that it’s nearly impossible to get more traffic to your firm’s website without having a comprehensive content strategy in place.
SEO takes work, and there’s only so much that can be done with a website that is less than 20 pages, which are MOST law firm sites.
It takes a consistent amount of highly targeted content to obtain an increase in traffic and leads.
How to reduce your loss in revenue
When discussing content, we usually talk about articles or blog posts as part of your website to help drive interest and traffic to your site which should increase client leads.
To address the issue of content marketing, your Law Firm needs to have a content marketing calendar. This calendar should include specific topics associated with your practice, and when to publish those topics. This is part of documenting your content marketing strategy, and without it, you’re without a proper strategy to address Search Engine Optimization.
But who will write the content?
Having an quality agency that will take on this responsibility is extremely important.
The competition must be studied, keywords must be researched, a content strategy must be developed and the content must be written.
Keywords are those words and phrases people actually use when searching for something on the internet. Research and developing a keyword list drives the content that is needed for your Firm. In our business, there are few converting keywords… such as Divorce Lawyer, Divorce Attorney and … near me are the main converting keywords. You may want more Child Custody cases, so tailoring blogs and content to those specific keywords drives the the development of your content marketing calendar.
Many law firms prefer lawyers writing content for their website, however the people reading the content most likely will not be lawyers. Rather they are individuals who are seeking a lawyer for their services.
A good marketing agency should be able to work with you in making sure content is written by a qualified individual that speaks to the right target audience while at the same time ensuring that portion of content published is optimized appropriately for search engines.
It should be stated that no matter who writes the content, legal advice shouldn’t be given for legal and ethical reasons.
5. Building Links
This is often the most confusing part of digital marketing to a lawyer. It’s also the part of SEO that can do more harm than good if done improperly. But having an experienced agency to address this will help you avoid bad and damaging practices.
Search engines, such as Google, rank sites based on their quality and reputation. The algorithm may change each year, but the concept still remains. To get your law firms site onto the first page of search engine results, not only do you have to have quality content and your website optimized, but other sites that are more reputable than yours need to cite your content as well.
Publishing content and cleaning up on-site SEO are the basics, but sets your firm up for a quality link-building strategy. Not building links aggressively will make it more difficult to compete, especially in the legal industry.
How to reduce your loss in revenue
Building links is all about quality, and the best links are usually earned.
An agency may do outreach or publish link-worthy content, but the goal is to get a link from your website onto a website that is of a similar or related topic. In this regard, it’s good to note that an agency can’t build all the links you need.
A good agency will be transparent as to what links are being built – and if they are safe or potentially risky.
Knowing where and how your Law Firm is cited on the web will help you market yourself and your firm better.
6. Education Never Ends
The world of digital marketing is always shifting based on latest trends, and a good marketing agency should be willing and able to teach you the latest practices.
Although you may be paying an agency to address all of these items, it’s important you have a good concept of how SEO works, and how it can improve your firms bottom line by providing more website traffic and increase the number of leads (clients) for your firm.
By staying up to date on latest trends, you should be able to hold your agency accountable for their efforts.
Need help learning more about how a legal marketing specific agency can help you improve SEO for your Law Firm? Contact us today at 877-602-7510.