Online Marketing For Attorneys 101

If you're like most attorneys, online marketing is hardly your area of expertise. Civil and or criminal procedure in the state where you're licensed to practice? Sure! Constitutional law? You bet! Contracts, Probate, Testate and Corporate law? Absolutely! SEO? Maybe not so much.
Of course, you don't have to be an expert in online marketing in order to have a successful practice or for that matter, even to have your website bring in new business for your firm. However, you will need to have at least a basic understanding of the principles involved, even if you plan to have an outside firm handle the work. After all, it's a good idea to make sure that the company or consultants you hire to do the job know what they're doing, isn't it?
Online advertising is a large and rapidly growing sector of the economy and an increasingly important part of the marketing and advertising strategies of businesses of all types and sizes, including law firms. While you shouldn't abandon your existing traditional media efforts (as long as they're working for you, that is), it's a good idea to supplement these strategies with online marketing. As the saying goes, you need to be where the customers are - which means online in our day and age.
We're going to assume that your firm or private practice already has a website - if not, have one built for you ASAP, since your website is the most important piece of the puzzle here. Everything begins with having a well designed, easy to navigate site which is filled with original, high quality, informative content which is genuinely useful to prospective clients who want to learn more about the kind of services you offer and the areas of law that you or your firm specializes in. Without this, all the efforts you make to direct visitors to your site aren't going to do all that much good. Good content is what will make you stand out online; there are plenty of other lawyers and law firms out there who handle the same kinds of cases as you do, so the better your content, the better your chances of converting visitors into clients.
Once you have your site's content in place, it's time to start drawing in visitors. There are several different strategies you can use to build incoming links to your site and attract visitors both directly through these links as well as by increasing your site's visibility in search engines. The more inbound links your site has, the higher its position in search engine results will be.
You can build links by posting on legal-oriented forums, by starting a blog for your firm and posting on it regularly (make sure to include links to your main website in your posts, of course) and by writing articles on topics relevant to your practice and syndicating them through online directories. This builds links to your site from high traffic websites as well as giving you another place to reach potential readers (and clients).
This is only the beginning of what you can do to publicize your practice online; there are other free marketing strategies as well as paid online advertising, all of which are worth considering if you want your firm to expand its client base and capture a larger share of your local legal services market.