Referrals are not enough to sustain your law firm.

You’ll need a constant stream of new case leads to fuel and support your personal injury law firm.

Marketing for personal injury lawyers has always been kind of a pain point — most law firms lack a marketing department.

However, I’ll give you a proper education on the basics of a digital marketing strategy, including SEO to help you find more clients online.

In this post, you’ll learn about the importance of building a custom law firm website, what types of content to put on your website, what SEO is and how it works, ideas for blog posts, and a general overview of how paid Google Ads work.

How to get new personal injury clients online

It all begins with your website because that’s where your contact forms and lead paths are.

The key, then, is to find and optimize ways to increase traffic to your website to convert your visitors into new client leads.

Have a custom website to impress your audience

Your website is the place where your online traffic converts into new client leads.

Without a website, there would be no lead generation.

Assuming you already have a website, it’s very important that your website is up-to-date and mobile-responsive.

Mobile-responsive simply means you can view the website effortlessly on a mobile phone without having to zoom out or resize your screen.

Next, your legal website should follow the intuitive patterns most internet users are accustomed to, such as:

• Company logo on the top left of the page
• Site navigation at the top with About, Contact, Blog, Our Team, Services
• Footer at the bottom with address, phone number, email address, and site links
• Contact forms on the right side of the page
• Calls-to-action (CTAs) buttons throughout the website encourage people to fill out a contact form or download free content
• An attractive, clean, contemporary design

You’ll find website builders such as WordPress or Squarespace have many free and paid templates to allow easy, but somewhat limited, customization within those themes. 

However, if you want a truly custom website, you’ll most likely need to hire a web developer. They’ll be able to step inside the coding of WordPress to add extra features or rearrange certain design elements to craft a truly custom website.

Pexels and Unsplash are royalty-free stock photography websites filled with tons of high-quality legal stock photos to populate your site with.

Take steps to improve your website’s SEO to get more visibility 

Everyone is talking about SEO these days. “You need an SEO strategy to bring in new clients” you’ve probably heard before.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of making your website highly visible in a Google search. 

When a user searches Google for a query about personal injury law firms, Google will quickly match up the keywords in their search with the words on hundreds of billions of websites.

But keyword matching isn’t the only thing Google is looking for when determining a website’s relevance. 

Other important factors that influence a personal injury attorney’s SEO include:

• High-quality blog content, free of plagiarized content, AI-generated content, and misspellings.
• Updated or recent blog content.
• Blog posts with at least 1000 words, however, 2000 words is better.
• Blog posts that use the proper header types. For example, the article’s title is an H1 header size, while subheadings are H2, H3, and H4.
• Backlinks. Backlinks are when other websites link people to your website. The more backlinks your website has, the higher it will rank in Google.
• Mobile-responsiveness. Google doesn’t want to direct people to bad mobile websites.
• Page load speed. Slow-loading websites are usually caused by too many images, videos, animations, or images that exceed recommended file size.
• Having an HTTPS secure website is preferable to unsecured websites.
• Time spent on site. Google tracks how long people spend on average on your website. The more time spent, the higher your website will rank.
• Low bounce rate. A bounce rate is when a visitor arrives on a site, and leaves without clicking on anything in under 30 seconds. The higher the bounce rate, the lower the Google ranking.

Add landing pages about your key practice areas

You’ll need to build out detailed pages (landing pages) about your law firm’s key practice areas to fill out your website’s content.

This means if you cover personal injury practice, car accidents, surgical errors, and medical malpractice each of these services needs to have its own unique page name and URL.

The point of this is to improve your website’s searchability in a Google search.

When people search for a “car accident attorney” your website will be considered more relevant because of your car accident landing page.

You’ll need to do this for every key practice area you offer.

It not only helps your visitors get the information they need, it also drives more traffic to your website and can be optimized to generate leads.

Take charge of your content by writing more blogs

Content marketing mainly refers to blogging — constantly producing high-quality articles on your website that attract people from Google searches.

I’ll let you in on a secret — besides paid ads, organic search through blogging is the number one traffic source to websites. So yeah, you really need to be blogging!

An easy place to start is writing blogs related to your key practice areas.

Put yourself in your clients’ shoes and write an article with the information they absolutely need to know regarding their legal situation.

Also, turn to your competitors to see what they’re blogging about — specifically the keywords or search terms they are targeting — to get a good idea of what types of blogs really drive-up traffic.

Ideas for content pieces include:

• How-to legal guides
• Specific legal scenarios
• Interview a local celebrity or influencer to piggy-back off their following and cross-promote
• Write about a recent or controversial legal issue to take advantage of timely issues with a high search volume and low competition
• Lists articles “listicles” of the most important information to know regarding legal situations
• YouTube videos about law topics
• Podcasts, either create your own or be a guest on a popular podcast
• Infographics and branded charts
• Free eBooks or downloadable guides or cheat sheets
• Templates
• Answering legal questions on Q&A sites, such as Quora, Reddit, FindLaw, Avvo

Create social media channels to expand your reach

Social media pages are completely 100% free to set up, so why not try your hand at social media?

Don’t feel like you need to be an expert on every platform. After all, your law firm doesn’t need a Snapchat or TikTok account.

But you should set up a Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube account to extend your marketing game into platforms with hundreds of million users.

Since you’ve already devoted time to crafting high-quality blogs, you can simply repost these blogs on your social media pages to extend their reach. 

It can take a few days for your new blog posts to show up in a Google search engine results, but they’ll be made readily available to your followers instantly when you repost them on social media.

Create a Google Business profile to improve your local SEO

Google has likely already indexed your law firm’s office location and placed it into Google Maps. This is an example of “local SEO” that you may have heard about.

If your law firm’s location hasn’t been added already, you can get your location on the map by setting up a Google Business profile.

A Google Business profile will also create a large information box, known as a “Knowledge Graph”, on the right side of Google’s sidebar when people Google your company.

Your Knowledge Graph will contain:

• Pictures of your office location
• A pin on Google maps of your address
• A clickable link to your website
• A clickable link to call
• A clickable directions button
• A save button
• Popular times when you’re busy
• Phone number
• Hours
• Social media profiles
• Questions and Answers that you can enter

Generate more online reviews to build trust and improve your Google ranking

You have to earn the trust of your prospective clients before you can expect them to send you a personal message or fill out a form.

People turn to third party review sites, such as Yelp and Google Reviews, to help them compare personal injury law firms before reaching out.

The more positive reviews your law firm has, the more credible and trustworthy it will be. 

Also, Google Business profiles that have more positive reviews will also rank higher in the search results, getting significantly more clicks and phone calls.

The first step in getting a great online review is providing outstanding work.

Besides that, you can simply ask your clients for reviews.

I would recommend starting this process by compiling a list of clients you’ve helped win a personal injury case for. 

If for any reason, you get a negative review — respond politely and professionally, it’ll make you look better.

Never be the business owner who responds negatively to a negative review unless you want to scare people away.

One caveat: You cannot pay or bribe people to recommend your services online, including writing a Google review. This goes against the AMA’s Rule 7.2 regarding advertising a personal injury lawyer’s services online.

Apparently, “nominal” gifts may be given, so tread lightly when it comes to rewarding people for reviews.

However, can you ask for a review? Yes! And you should. Just don’t do it in the middle of a case.

Use email to stay in touch with potential clients

For the people out there who don’t use social media, you can still reach them through email marketing — because everybody uses email! 

Email marketing platforms, such as MailChimp, are pretty affordable. They offer a free version with a limit of 10,000 emails sent a month, or 2,000 sent a day, which may be enough to get you started.

As for getting your clients’ email addresses — that’s part of the overall lead generation strategy. 

When visitors land on your website, they’ll be encouraged to fill out a contact form. Once they fill out that form, their email address will automatically be added to your CRM, and can send out automatic emails to keep them in the loop.

Looking for ideas to send in your emails? Send out your new blog content and see which emails have a higher open rate. This is good data to inform your content marketing strategy.

And of course, always include a call-to-action in your emails to get people to interact or share their emails with others, or to schedule a free consultation.

Why do personal injury law firms need an SEO strategy?

First, I should let you know that if you’re just getting started in the personal injury SEO game, you’re going to have to play catch up for a bit until your website starts ranking. 

Keep in mind that the legal space online is competitive, and your competitors probably have a head start on you already. That’s all right, you can still compete in this space and rank high. But it will take a proper SEO strategy to get you there.

That’s what I’m here for — to educate you on the best SEO practices so your legal website can get more visibility and clicks.

Okay, let me answer the question on why you need an SEO strategy:

• Increased visibility in Google searches. Also known as impressions, this is the number of views your website has shown in a search.
• Increased clicks in Google searches. 
• More traffic to the website.
• More personal injury case leads.
• Improve your law firm’s credibility, authority, and trust.
• Dominate the competition.

Use a Google Ads campaign to find new personal injury clients

You always hear lawyers say “you need SEO and PPC ads to drive real traffic to your website.” Since I’ve already covered SEO, let’s break down paid ads, also known as pay-per-click (PPC) ads.

Did you know that Google has 9 different types of ads? And they continue to grow with more types every year. 

As a lawyer, you won’t need to use all of these, but you will need a Google Ads account.

Let’s focus on just four types of Google search ads to be aware of.

Text ads

These should make up the majority of your ad types. Text ads are text-only ads that appear at the top of Google’s search results. 

To get your ad to show, you must “bid” on the keyword that’s getting searched to trigger your paid ad. When people click on your ad, you get charged the amount you bid on the keyword.

Unsurprisingly, legal keywords are among the most expensive keywords available, so a PPC strategy is essential to find underused and cheaper search terms to target.

Once people click on the ad, they’ll be directed to a specific page on your website to fill out a contact form. If you’re successful in getting them to fill out the form, that counts as a “conversion.”

Over time, conversion rates can be optimized by analyzing which ads performed the best and creating variations of those ads.

Video marketing ads

If you’ve produced video content, you can place that video at the beginning, middle, or end of a another YouTube video.

These are referred to as cost-per-view (CPV) ads. Competition is lower for video ads, so you may consider producing at least one video ad to show on repeat.

Image ads

Also known as banner ads, these are picture ads that appear at the top of websites or in the sidebar of millions of Google Display Network websites.

Remarketing or retargeting display ads

Retargeting ads place a cookie in the browser of your website visitors so that after they leave, they’ll still see display ads for your law firm on other websites.

Remarketing ads work wonders for bringing past visitors back to your website to fill out a form. Just check your local jurisdiction’s laws regarding placing tracking cookies in your visitor’s browsers.

Hire Kaleidico — a marketing agency for personal injury law firms

Kaleidico is a full-service marketing and lead generation agency for personal injury law firms and lawyers.

We’ll help you generate more case leads to fuel your business, and offer a full range of services including:

• Website design
• Website development
• Content strategy 
• SEO optimization
• PPC ads
• Email marketing
• Social media marketing
• Graphic design and branding
• Blog writing and content production

Reach out to schedule a Discovery session so we can learn more about your firm and offer ways in which we can help. 

Download your free 90-Day Law Firm Marketing Plan for a more in-depth explanation of marketing for personal injury lawyers.