The First Free Step in Marketing Your Law Firm Online: Local Search
I’ve heard it said that, ultimately, almost all of a given law firm’s business is local… barring rare exceptions for specialty practices, it’s seldom that someone will come across the country to hire the Law Offices of Smith, Brown and Jones to handle their personal injury case. This would seem to put most online marketing “out of touch” with an attorney’s target market. Should lawyers just stick with local tv and newspapers? Of course, we don’t think so…
Most of the major search engines‘ results pages are not only composed of the standard, algorhythmic results, but they’re supplemented with local business listings gleaned from various online databases. Moreover, Google, Yahoo and MSN’s Local search portals are gaining in importance in and of themselves. This, together with the fact that search engines are getting better at “geo-targeting” users locations, allows relevant results local to the end user to be returned even when generic searches (like “injury lawyer”) are performed. This opens a great opportunity for brick-and-mortar law firms to promote themselves within these services. What’s great is that most of these local online listings are FREE! It’s just a matter of making sure your firm’s information is complete & up to date.
Here’s a quick and easy listing of the top local search databases we recommend you check and update… it will make a difference!
Yahoo! Local
Google Local
Localeze
InfoUSA
Acxiom
SuperPages
Switchboard
WorldPages
There’s much more to discuss when it comes to search engine marketing for local audiences, but this is a good first step to take in marketing your practice online. Once you’ve entered your information and waited a few months, these listings should be picked up by various publishers and used in their search results. Over time, this can increase both your web traffic and, more often, phone calls to your firm. Unless you have a phone number dedicated to online marketing campaigns, it’s difficult to correlate these phone calls to your online campaign, so make sure your receptionist asks where the potential client heard about your firm!
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