How To Get Clients As A Lawyer The Easy Way: 5 Must-Know Tips 

No law school will teach you how to get clients as a lawyer. You have to learn it on your own or hire an expert to handle the marketing part of your business.    

You need clients. Every law firm does. You need clients to hire you so that you can generate revenue. But, unfortunately, you’re not the only law firm. You’re competing with several others.  

How can you stand out? How can you get constant streams of clients? Here, I’ll discuss ways new and existing law firms can attract clients. It is not rocket science, but you’ll get it right if you follow the tips here. Let’s get into it. 

How To Get Clients As A Lawyer 

You can get clients in two ways. One is traditional marketing, while the other is digital. I will explain both and elaborate on how to get more clients online. Why? 96% of people seeking legal advice use search engines (Google Consumer Survey, November 2013). 

A study by FindLaw reveals that searches on the internet have taken over word-of-mouth as the preferred means of finding lawyers. 

Anyway, I am still going to discuss traditional and online marketing methods here. Also, you can deploy both strategies to get clients. With that, you will take advantage of every opportunity to land clients.   

How To Get Legal Clients With Traditional Marketing Techniques 

The traditional method is what most lawyers deploy to get clients. It has been in use even before marketing became more digitized. 

How does the traditional method of acquiring clients work? Three vital steps can fetch you, legal clients, via conventional means. These include networking, referrals, and reviews. 

When you deliver quality legal service, a satisfied client won’t hesitate to mention your law firm or name when approached to recommend a good lawyer. Even someone who isn’t your client but has heard good reviews about you can refer people to you. 

Networking is another crucial strategy to get legal clients. But it would help if you looked beyond industry-specific events. If you’re an accident lawyer, attend any related events in your community. Request to speak at the events and even participate in contests. 

If it’s a motorcycle riders’ workshop, show interest in riding or participate in whatever is happening. Community involvement is crucial. It will give potential clients a chance to get to know you personally. 

Furthermore, clients appreciate lawyers who care a lot about their lives. They know they can count on such lawyers to take their cases seriously. 

The bottom line is to get your name out there. Let people know your law firm and associate you with something good in your geographical location. Participate in events and organize yours. Be involved in the activities happening in your community.   

How To Get Legal Clients With Search Engine Optimization

Getting clients without blowing your marketing budget is a strategy I will always advise any law firm or lawyer to adopt. You don’t have to spend heavily to land sustainable legal clients. 

Search engine optimization is cost-effective and can yield massive results for your law firm. It can help you generate sustainable traffic and gain massive online popularity. 

Here is how to use SEO to get clients as lawyers. 

1: Build a professional-looking website:

Do you have an official website? If yes, visit the website to assess it. Now, assume you’re a visitor. Are you comfortable with what you’re seeing? Does the website attract you?

Your website should tell visitors at first glance that they are on a lawyer’s website. It should look professional and captivating. 

Your website is like your physical office. It is also like your sales representative, and a more sensitive one. Why do I say so? When a customer approaches your sales representative, the rep will have more chances and time to convince the prospects. They’ll meet up with the prospect and use various means to convince them. 

Your website is different. Unfortunately, neither you nor your sales representative will be around most of the time when potential clients visit your website. 

A Handy Tip: Do you already have a website? Have you been making SEO efforts? If not, you have missed great opportunities to get clients. 

Having a website isn’t enough. You need to optimize it. It is like having a pet dog. If you don’t feed the dog, it won’t grow. 

If you don’t know about SEO, hire an expert to help you. You can contact an SEO Expert for law firms to get help. 

2: Populate your law firm website with valuable content:

How can writing content or blog posts help a lawyer get clients? I’ll explain. 

Search engines won’t rank an empty website. That is a website without content. Even when you have content, it must be well-optimized with the right keywords – we will discuss keywords or search terms shortly. 

Secondly, you cannot optimize your website for search engines without content. It doesn’t work that way. 

Thirdly, what will keep your visitors on your website, develop their interest in your legal service, showcase you as the right lawyer for their case, and convince them to hire you? It is majorly the quality of your content. 

Populating your website with high-quality content will build the confidence of your visitors. It will convince them that you are an authority in your practice area.

So, write content that provides value and helps potential clients understand several concepts in law.  

A Handy Tip: Avoid writing promotional content. In other words, don’t let your content be about your legal services or how good you are. First, provide value. You can promote your services in the conclusion or author’s bio section.

3: Leverage the power of law firm SEO:

You can deploy Search engine optimization strategies to make your law firm website search-engine friendly. Search engines like Google consider over 200+ factors when ranking sites. 

Here are some of the Google ranking factors:

• Quality content: Your content must be top-notch. Provide value. It should also be unique, error-free, and informative. Make your content easy to read and understand.  
• Keyword optimization: Google will consider how well-optimized your content is. This involves the keyword used, including how you placed the keyword in your content and how well-optimized your images are. 
• Technical SEO: Do users have pain-free and stress-free experience on your website? Do they navigate from page to page with ease? Google considers your website’s user experience (UX). And technical SEO factors to look out for are website loading speed, mobile-friendliness, and crawlability. You must make your website technically sound if you want to rank high. Make it easier for Google’s robots to crawl, understand, and index your page. 
• Backlink profile: Your backlink profile talks about the quality of your backlinks. Google checks them. That is why you must get quality and niche-relevant backlinks from non-spammy websites. Check every website thoroughly before requesting backlinks. 

Google uses over 200+ ranking factors when deciding where to rank a website on the search result page. So, these are just some of the major ones. 

These ranking factors make search engine optimization complex. Another thing that makes SEO complex is Google’s constant algorithm changes. In a year, Google updates its algorithms more than 6000 times, approximately twice daily.

Every algorithm update comes with its surprises. You may find a website ranking in #1 drop massively in the SERP. Some may even disappear from the search engine result page. 

Hiring a lawyer SEO expert will benefit your law firm. The SEO expert will take care of your SEO, monitor website performance, and make the necessary adjustments while you focus on delivering legal services to your clients. 

4: Perform on-site search engine optimization:

We are still on SEO. Search engine optimization is a broad topic and a crucial one for law firms looking for online success. SEO can improve your website ranking, organic traffic, brand awareness, and authority if done correctly. 

Another thing you need to know or may have noticed about SEO is that it is cost-effective compared to other online marketing strategies. It can bring sustainable traffic to your website. 

With a paid advert, your website will disappear from the search engine result page once your Google Ads account funds are drained. But that isn’t the case with SEO.

In SEO, you are not paying Google any penny to place your website on the search result page. When you provide valuable content, Google will reward you by ranking your webpage higher than others whose content isn’t better. 

What are the on-site SEO strategies? Here is a summary below

• Build internal & external links
• Create well-optimized and high-quality content
• Write high-quality and captivating meta titles
• Write high-quality and captivating meta-descriptions
• Incorporate your primary keywords naturally in the meta descriptions and meta titles. 
• Optimize your images
• Use the right keywords in your content. 

5: Perform local search engine optimization: 

 You can perform local SEO for law firms in two ways – use location-specific keywords, while the second option is to create a profile for your law firm in legal directories. 

Let me explain. 

Location-specific keywords will enable search engines to display your website to clients searching from the area where you’re doing your law practice. You can use the phrase “near me” or include your location (city, neighborhood, or state).

For instance, if you’re a family lawyer and practice in Houston, your keywords can be “family lawyer in Houston.” When you target such keywords, Google will display your website to potential clients using such keywords on the search engine to look for a family lawyer based in Houston. 

See the examples of law firms ranking in the first and second positions for the keyword “Family lawyer in Houston.”

You can be a divorce lawyer, accident lawyer, bankruptcy lawyer, etc. It doesn’t matter what your area of practice is. With search engine optimization, you can rank high and make it easier for potential legal clients to find you.  

But note that you cannot formulate keywords in your head. You have to conduct in-depth keyword research. 

Why do you need keyword research? With keyword research, you would know if people are using the keywords. The keyword research software will show you the search volume, CPC, and keyword difficulty. 

In other words, you’ll know how many people use the keyword every month and how difficult ranking for that specific SEO keyword is. 

Another important thing is to follow SEO best practices when performing on-site and off-site optimization. Avoid any mistake that could lead to a violation of Google’s rules. 

Here are keyword mistakes people make:

• Keyword stuffing: It is against Google’s rules to add the same keyword in a post multiple times. If you do that, Google search engines will assume you’re trying to cheat the system to rank high, and they will penalize you. So, stop repeating keywords and phrases so often that they start sounding unnatural. Use your keywords naturally in your content. 
• Keyword cannibalization: This keyword use mistake happens when two or more pages on a website target the same or similar keywords. Avoid this at all costs. 

 Creating a profile For Your Law Firm In Legal Directories 

Having a website is great, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t explore other ways to display your business to potential clients. You’ll increase your chances of being found online by prospects when you have a website and still go ahead to create a profile in legal directories. 

Are the legal directories for law firms free? Not all of them are free. Some require payment to keep your profile active on their platform. 

Examples of online legal directories you can explore:

• FindLaw

• Justia
• Avvo
• Legal Zoom
• Lawyers
• SuperLawyers

Creating A Google Business Profile

Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) is a free online directory from Google. You don’t pay a penny to create or maintain a Google Business profile. 

When you search Google with the keyword “Family lawyer in Houston,” the Google Business Profile of law firms with well-optimized GB profiles will pop up. Not just their profiles; you’ll also find Google Maps showing their location in Houston. 

Additionally, Google My Business Profiles gives companies the opportunity to solicit reviews from clients. You can see the reviews for each law firm displayed above. 

The benefits of reviews are more than words can explain. They can help you build solid social proof and make potential clients trust you even more. 

Your law firm marketing skills won’t get you positive reviews from new legal clients. Instead, the quality of legal services you render to your legal clients will bring positive reviews. So, you need to make your loyal clients satisfied. Deliver quality legal services that will encourage more legal clients to refer clients to your own law firm.

Negative reviews in your legal career may have little or no impact depending on how you respond to them. If you respond to negative online reviews in any legal directory (Justia, SuperLawyers, etc) emphatically, no potential client will have a wrong impression about your legal practice. 

Your response will show your prospective client that you can handle their legal matters and are ready to go the extra mile to deliver the desired results.

Conclusion

Knowing how to get clients as a lawyer is vital for the growth of your law firm. You need clients to generate revenue and keep your business going. 

You can find clients via traditional and online marketing strategies. However, search engine optimization is the best and most cost-effective marketing strategy you can deploy to get clients. 

When you optimize your law firm’s website, you automatically make it easier for clients who are searching for legal representation online to find you. SEO places your law firm in front of potential clients online. 

You can handle your website SEO or find a competent law firm like us to help you. Hire a law firm that is always willing to go the extra mile to get the desired results.