Lead generation can feel like another full-time job if you want it to actually bring results. But how to get clients as a lawyer without having to sacrifice your main activity — legal practice? A smart digital marketing strategy is the answer.
A thriving legal practice requires both legal expertise and client connections. Yet, lead acquisition remains a challenging task for many law firms since it’s not always clear where to start and which marketing channel to choose. In this guide, we share the top strategies that will help attorneys attract new legal clients.
- Most client journeys in the legal field include digital research.
- An optimized website is one of the best ways to get clients as a lawyer.
- Local SEO is particularly important for law firms that serve clients in a specific location.
- Legal content marketing helps establish authority and drive traffic.
- While paid ads can deliver immediate results, they work best when combined with SEO.
- Online reputation management is critical, as 40% of people consider online reviews the main deciding factor when choosing an attorney.
How Do Lawyers Get Clients? Start from the Client’s Position
Instead of thinking about how to get clients as a lawyer, start by flipping the script and considering how a client searches for a lawyer. In other words, let’s put ourselves into your clients’ shoes.
They may start by asking people they trust. For instance, family members and friends who’ve been through similar situations or colleagues who might know someone. Yes, this is the good old word of mouth, and it remains a powerful tool in the legal industry. Some law firms still find clients through sponsored events, magazine ads, billboards, and radio.
But even when someone’s friend recommends you, your potential client might still want to Google you to find more information and scan your Google Maps reviews to confirm their friend’s opinion. In fact, online reviews are the main deciding factor for 40% of people when they’re choosing an attorney.
And what happens when people don’t have any personal recommendations or time to wait until they occasionally drive past your billboard or flip to your ad in a magazine? They go online to find a couple of law firms, learn about their pricing models, browse their attorney profiles to evaluate their experience, and pick the one that seems to address their needs better. According to law firm marketing statistics, 75% of clients compare multiple law firm websites (between two and five) before deciding which lawyer to contact.
Ultimately, no matter where the client journey begins, it almost always continues in the digital space. This makes digital marketing not just one channel among many but the foundation for all your efforts to get more clients as a lawyer.
How to Get Law Firm Clients with Digital Marketing?
Now, let’s get straight to the question, “How to find clients as a lawyer?” With the right digital strategy, you can attract even those clients who never heard your name before they typed their legal problem into a search bar. Here’s how you can implement such a strategy for your own practice.
1. Define Your Niche and Target Audience
A common mistake new lawyers make is trying to write about all types of legal issues to target clients with all kinds of needs. But when you try to speak to everyone, you may end up connecting with no one. Thus, before you invest a single dollar in ads or write your first blog post, it’s important to understand exactly who you want to reach.
Defining your niche and target audience impacts all your further steps, like the headline on your landing page, the keywords you target to rank better in Google search results, the content of your social media posts, and even the design of your website. The more specific you can be, the better.
Base your research on your main practice area and analyze who might be interested in such legal representation. What matters to these people? What are their main problems? These aspects will determine what and how you write so that potential clients can self-identify and think, “This attorney has already worked with cases like mine.”
Here’s an example of how family lawyers can tailor their online presence to their clients, targeting their pain points right from the first glance:
2. Refine Your Website for Long-Term Growth
Your website is the new business card, but a digital one, and it can bring you prospects around the clock. Of course, it should be visually appealing and modern, reflecting the standards of the legal profession. However, what matters even more when you want to get more clients as a lawyer is your site’s content.
The topics you discuss describe your specializations, while the language you use either invites people in or pushes them away. But even the best content is useless if your prospective clients can’t find it.
That’s why you should consider search engine optimization (SEO) — the practice that aims to make your website visible to people actively searching for legal help. To get reliable and lasting results, you can outsource SEO to an agency that specializes in legal marketing.
Good SEO is built on three key pillars:
- On-page SEO: This involves optimizing your content, like blog articles and service pages, with relevant keywords so people can easily find you online and creating converting pages that turn visitors into paying clients.
- Technical SEO: This implies a wide range of technical adjustments to make sure your website works well for users and satisfies search engine guidelines. For instance, Google has specific requirements regarding your website speed and performance on mobile devices, and technical SEO addresses them.
- Link building: This is when other reputable sites link to yours. Link building for lawyers lets you rank higher in search results since it builds authority in Google’s eyes, as well as improves your reputation in the eyes of readers. You can earn backlinks from legal directories, relevant business publications, and more, or by doing guest posting.
At the same time, be aware of companies that try to sell you SEO myths, such as quick fixes or guaranteed results. They often use manipulative tactics that can only negatively affect your rankings.
3. Use Local SEO
Since most law firms serve people within driving distance, they need local SEO to find clients. This is a specialized branch of search engine optimization designed for businesses that serve clients in specific geographic areas, and it’s one of the best ways to get more clients for your law firm. But what should a local SEO strategy for a law firm include?
To get more law firm leads, you should set up and optimize your Google Business Profile. This helps your business appear in the local search results with the map, photos, hours, and reviews:
To optimize your profile properly, you should:
- Add high-quality photos of your office, your team, and yourself in professional settings
- Write a detailed business description that includes your practice areas and unique value proposition
- Set accurate business hours
- Select the most specific business categories relevant to your practice.
Here’s how these details can look in local results:
Citations in legal directories can further improve your online presence. For this, your firm needs to be regularly listed on local or industry-specific business platforms, such as Justia:
Another critical detail of your SEO strategy is NAP consistency. NAP stands for name, address, and phone number. These details must be identical everywhere online — across your website, Google profile, social media, and directories. This is how search engines know whether listings represent the same business, and you get more chances to appear in the local pack.
SeoProfy brings extensive experience to every legal client and helps law firms establish an authoritative digital presence. Here’s what you can receive with us:
- Better organic visibility
- Targeted traffic
- More qualified leads
4. Create Legal Content to Establish Authority and Drive Traffic
You can use your website not only to list your services and display pricing but also to showcase your expertise through informative blog articles. Blogging for lawyers does double duty — it proves to prospective clients you know your business, and it pulls in traffic from search engines (given your articles are optimized with relevant keywords).
You could provide guides on legal topics related to your practice area. In this screenshot, you can see an example of a personal injury law firm’s blog with informative articles:
However, blog posts are not the only type of content you could publish. You could drive more traffic, engagement, and interest by also offering:
- Case studies
- Client testimonials
- Legislative updates
- Videos and podcasts
- Interactive content, like settlement calculators.
Next, you can distribute the content across different channels and even repurpose it. For instance, use a blog article to create a series of social media tips with eye-catching visuals or an email newsletter.
Finally, for law firm content writing to bring lasting results, you need to stay consistent and regularly update your blog and social media pages. This way, both prospects and search engines can see that your legal practice is active.
5. Consider Paid Advertising
One of the most common ways a lawyer can attract clients looking for legal assistance is via Google Ads. It puts your firm at the top of search results for specific legal terms. For instance, when someone searches “family law attorney near me,” your ad appears before organic results.
You only pay when someone clicks the ad, and that’s why it’s also called pay-per-click (PPC). It’s an effective strategy for generating more leads as it can deliver prospects the same day you launch it.
You can also take advantage of social media ads. With Facebook, you can target by demographics, interests, and behaviors, while LinkedIn works well for B2B legal services, letting you target by job title, company size, or industry.
While you may face the classic SEO vs. PPC dilemma when developing your client acquisition strategy, the smartest approach is using both techniques. This way, you can expand your client base here and now while future-proofing your visibility and rankings in search results.
After all, when comparing organic vs. paid search, it’s important to evaluate both short-term and long-term ROI. While the initial SEO cost can seem high, it provides sustained benefits to your rankings and conversions. Paid ads, on the other hand, stop working as soon as you stop paying.
6. Master Online Branding and Reputation Management
While traditional branding focuses on logos and letterheads, digital branding is about everything people see about you online. It requires consistency across all platforms. Your law firm’s website, social profiles, directory listings, and content should tell the same story and help you stand out from other firms.
Reputation management is another integral part of online lead generation for lawyers. Client reviews and testimonials play a significant role in leads’ decision-making when they choose between your practice and other law firms.
Google reviews affect both your search ranking and whether people click on your listing. However, don’t be limited to Google only. Many lawyers are listed on specialized legal platforms like Avvo, Justia, and FindLaw, which people often use when they’re in search of unbiased information. And even Facebook reviews can help you get more law firm clients.
Reputation management also implies responding to your reviews. When it comes to positive testimonials from satisfied clients, it’s easy: you can simply reply, “Thank you.” But when it’s negative feedback, your reply is even more critical, as it can reflect your commitment to client satisfaction, even when things don’t go perfectly.
To respond to negative reviews, address concerns in a polite form (without breaking confidentiality) and explain which exact measures you took to fix the situation. This way, you’ll let potential clients know that you care about problem resolution.
7. Leverage Email and Social Media for Client Retention
Finding new clients is important, but keeping existing ones is just as valuable. Here are some channels you can use to always stay top of mind for your loyal clients:
- Email marketing: Unlike social posts that might get lost in busy feeds, emails land right in your past clients’ inboxes. Just make sure to send valuable resources they actually want to open and read. Plus, you can easily automate your lead generation efforts with email automation software.
- Social media: This channel is suitable for a more casual, everyday context, and each platform serves different purposes. LinkedIn is ideal for B2B legal services, and Facebook and Instagram help you connect on a more personal level.
- Online communities: Don’t underestimate legal forums and local business groups. With their help, you can demonstrate expertise by answering questions without advertising your services directly.
8. Take Advantage of the Power of Online Networking
A successful law practice has always relied on connections, but today’s networking happens as much in digital spaces as in courtroom hallways. You can join community events and legal seminars, connecting with other law firms, fellow attorneys, and potential clients across the state and country.
In addition, some lawyers host or take part in podcasts, online seminars, or even streams. It’s common for participants to promote such collaborations through their channels and provide links to each other. The Legally Speaking Podcast is a great example:
Summary
The modern client journey includes digital touchpoints most of the time. So, it’s essential to adopt a digital-first mindset if you want to get clients for your law firm. Google reviews, social media activity, and the quality of your digital content directly impact your reputation. Plus, without a solid online presence, you risk getting left behind by competitors who are more comfortable in the digital space.
Many lawyers don’t have the time to market themselves well, and that’s completely understandable. In this case, it might be worth considering professional SEO services.
At SeoProfy, we can help enhance your online visibility across multiple platforms simultaneously. Our experts know the ins and outs of optimizing legal websites, climbing the ranks in local search results, and creating content that motivates visitors to work with you.
Contact our law firm SEO agency to discuss your marketing goals during our free consultation, and we’ll gladly create a custom digital marketing strategy for you!
Andrew is the Head of SEO at SeoProfy, leading a team of more than 20 experienced SEO specialists. He has been involved in search engine optimization and digital marketing since 2016, gaining hands-on experience across various niches and regions. Andrew possesses strong analytical and strategic skills, particularly in planning SEO strategies for highly competitive projects.
