Protect Your Referrals Online Challenge Day 29: Your First Online Strategy

Here we are on Day 30, the last day of this challenge. Congratulations for making it through. This is one of our tougher challenges. There is a lot to start in this 30 days. In fact, for most of you, I assume many of you have a list of items that you will need to continue implementing over the next few months.

After this initial push to create the foundation for your web presence to “protect your referrals”, you will need to continue monitoring and working on some of the items we have covered this past month.

If you haven’t kept it up to date during this process, it would be worthwhile to go back to your Directory Listing Tracker and your Reviews Inventory to see how you stack up to the competition now.

During the last 30 days you have claimed many directory listings and optimized your key business profiles such as Google My Business, Facebook, Avvo, and more.  You worked on creating the minimum pages that every law firm website should include, maybe you even overhauled your website or took advantage of one of our quick to implement law firm website templates to use our proven, mobile friendly and conversion optimized websites. Finally, you began the process to build a strong set of online reviews from your clients and even started to build a culture of client satisfaction in your firm.

While our focus wasn’t on organic search of non-branded keywords, this foundation will certainly help in that are too. By claiming, editing, and creating a lot of directory listings for your firm you have created an initial set of links to your website that specifically say you are a law firm, areas you practice, and what city you are located in. Those are a required start to help google put your firm in the right bucket for searches like “Divorce attorney Denver Colorado” or “Accident Attorney Houston Texas”. 

We will have future challenges that will go into other things you can work on to increase your ranking in organic search to “grow your leads” from people that were not referred to you, but just find you online when they go to Google to begin figuring out how to solve a legal problem.

Before you start working on that though, the next challenge I recommend you consider, if you haven’t already completed it, is working on your defining and communicating your law firm’s brand. Knowing what makes you unique compared to the dozens of law firms that practice the same things you do within ten miles of your location. What is your definition of the best client for your firm and how can you differentiate your firm to attract more of your ideal client and repel the clients you don’t want to work with.

Many law firms are surprised to learn that not everyone has the same definition of an ideal client. For example, in family law, some lawyers like to take the fight to the other party in a divorce to maximize everything they can for their client, while other lawyers are looking for couples that want a collaborative divorce with as little friction as possible. Those are two very different clients and your law firm’s brand should communicate which one you best enjoy serving.

More information about that challenge is here: INSERT LINK TO BRAND CHALLENGE

Also, if you have any questions about Protecting Your Referrals or any other marketing questions, be sure to join us in the discussions on the private CompleteLegal Facebook page. You can also join our CompleteLegal Facebook Live Q&A sessions we hold once a week.

Tip: Even if you don’t have a question, it is good to join the Facebook Live Q&A broadcasts as you can listen to any updates we are sharing on the latest and greatest digital marketing tactics, or the questions other lawyers in the private community are asking may spark some new ideas for your firm.