How to Get More Lawyer Leads

Law firms rely on having potential clients constantly flooding in, and that means that every law firm’s website has to be built for maximum lead generation.

However, lead generation strategies can be hard to handle, and some are actually less efficient than ones that seem worse on paper.

Effective attorney lead generation can be a very powerful tool to have in your arsenal and something that can completely overhaul your law firm’s operations by giving you a long list of clients to work with.

But how do leads work, and how can you generate leads as a law firm?

Table of Contents

What are Leads?
Lead Generation Strategies
Useful Guides

What are Leads?

In short, lead generation is any kind of strategy where you are creating potential clients.

This could be putting your brand name out there so that more people become aware of your services, talking with clients directly, or even just posting ads online.

The most important thing behind leads generation is what the leads are for. By creating clients who have an interest in legal services, you can guarantee more customers and, therefore, more business success.

If you do not actively try to generate leads, then you have to rely on passive traffic, which most businesses can’t do.

Attorney lead generation is just another tool in the online marketing toolbox, but it needs to be used well to have any kind of success.

Being able to generate leads is nothing compared to understanding lead generation strategies and how to select the right one for each situation.

Lead Generation Strategies

There are some common lead generation strategies that appear across all industries, including the legal industry.

Even a small law firm’s website might benefit from an effective lead generation strategy that allows for more prospective clients, especially if the pool of existing clients is beginning to dry up. But how can you gather more leads within the law firm niche?

Paid Advertising

Advertising services and platforms are an ideal place for the legal industry to turn. There are potential clients on all kinds of platforms, including search engines and social media networks, and that means that advertising to them directly can generate quality leads quickly.

Paid ads allow you to promote a particular service or option to a huge range of potential clients, targeting the ads to drive traffic into your sales funnel – but only if they are relevant to your niche.

This kind of targeted online advertising makes Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising on sites like Google an ideal option of lead generation for lawyers. The ability to be specific means that you can market legal services to people who want and need them at that particular moment.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is one of the most effective attorney lead generation options in the law firm industry. Law firm SEO services and strategies provide you with an easy source of content marketing, drawing potential clients into your sales funnel at very little cost.

Search engine optimization is focused on optimizing your websites and content for the search results page, trying to match your site to organic search results keywords that you want to target. This means that anybody looking up those keywords has a chance of finding your site.

This is another good way to get high-quality leads since you can use the keywords to aim for audiences that are likely to become prospective clients. Since SEO is based on search engine rankings, you also get a lot of flexibility when it comes to law firm SEO.

Site Optimisation

Improving your law firm website can help you retain high-quality leads. Nobody wants to use a law firm with a website that looks a decade old, but a modern-looking law firm website can keep new leads much more effectively purely due to its aesthetics.

Improving the navigation and layout of your law firm site can also allow prospective clients to find their way around faster, meaning that new leads spend less time trying to find whatever blog posts or service pages you used to draw them in.

Site Content

You can leverage SEO to help push certain pages of your site to new heights. Search engine marketing is all about keywords, and using the right keywords on certain pages of your law firm website can make it far more visible online.

This is an easy way to try and draw in new clients. Instead of creating new law firm content, simply update existing content to add new keywords or make it more relevant to modern trends.

Blog Posts

While you should never dump all of your legal knowledge into free-to-access blog posts, a good blog can keep both current or potential clients invested in your site.

Not only does a blog tend to get the attention of website visitors, but it can be used alongside a range of other marketing strategies. For example, you can make content that other websites will want to link to, increasing your law firm SEO potential.

Blog posts are a good option for advertising your legal services without explicitly creating more advertisements. You can guide more leads towards content that markets certain legal services you offer and even provide links to pages for those law services.

Guest Blog Posts

The other option is to create blog posts somewhere other than your law firm website. Content marketing can include paying for (or paying to create your own) blog posts on other sites.

Doing this can be a good way to attract leads from other niches, especially if you are writing informative blog posts that fit with the audience of that blog. Even if you do not get many leads generated by the post, it will still contribute to your site’s SEO and overall visibility online.

Word of Mouth Marketing Strategies

Getting people to spread awareness of your law firm directly is a very risky and unpredictable option, but it is not a bad idea for generating leads.

However, pulling it off means that you need a specific system to promote people spreading your law firm through word-of-mouth unless you are happy to wait for clients to do it on their own terms.

Social Media Marketing

Social media is a great and underrated advertising platform, as well as a good source of lead generation for lawyers.

The instant posting and messaging means that it can be perfect for promoting law firms quickly and effectively, and a law firm can create an entire social media account to talk about all kinds of legal services they might offer.

Not only does social media offer easy lead generation for lawyers through the open nature of the platforms, but you often have access to direct content marketing services in the form of PPC advertising features or the ability to “promote” certain posts.

Reviews

Reviews can be a surprisingly good lead generation option that many people completely overlook. Unlike most forms of lawyer lead generation, they are focused on using past clients to appeal to a prospective client.

Positive online reviews reflect very well on your business. If they mention any law practice areas or pieces of legal expertise by name, then new visitors will have a good first impression of you and your law practice – and trust the legal help that you can offer.

Negative reviews are fine in moderation, but you want to get them taken down whenever possible. Do not delete them – instead, talk with the person who left them and try to find a solution or compromise. Paying a partial refund for a botched legal service is always better than leaving your reviews page tainted.

Local Advertising

While not necessarily a specific kind of lead generation process, local advertising can be an important way to gather a potential client source from your local area. Legal marketing in a local area can often be easier due to the smaller range of competing law firms.

While a focus on local advertising will limit your lead generation options and scale, that does not mean you can’t start generating leads. Creating a separate campaign to generate lawyer leads in your general area can be pretty effective, no matter how large your law firm is.

Using Google’s local service ads and other advertising systems can make it very easy to promote your business locally. Lead generation in your local area might not be your only focus, but it is worth doing, especially if there are not many other law firms near you.

Lead Magnets

A lead magnet can be an extremely risky way to acquire exclusive leads – but doing it incorrectly can harm your law firm more than it helps to promote it.

A lead magnet is any long-term resource that you can use to acquire legal leads, such as offering a sample of your legal advice in a free PDF if people sign up for a newsletter. This gives you easy access to a lot of potential client information that you can use for future marketing methods.

However, this can still be very risky. A legal practice needs to keep this data very secure, and you also need to avoid giving away too much. Excessive lead magnets can leave clients without a need for your services anymore, especially if they only needed one niche thing that you accidentally gave them for free.

Getting more prominent contact information is great, but not if you give up so much law firm advice that your qualified leads feel like they can take that information and use a different law firm instead.

Email Marketing

Email marketing can be hit-or-miss since you need to approach it in a very specific way.

Good email marketing allows you to handle excellent lead generation work while also keeping an easy channel open to update customers or registered site users about new events and pieces of information.

However, many people also dismiss email marketing because they find it annoying. This is where it can become a problem.

While Google ads and other direct advertising methods can be irritating to some, email marketing is a big risk. You need to think the emails out carefully and try to include something worthwhile in each, even if that means writing a miniature blog post for each one.

Cold Calling

Like email marketing, cold calling can be very risky.

However, cold calling also does work under certain circumstances. A lot of law firms use cold calling to get lucky with particular lead generation attempts, and a lot of the personal injury cold calls that go around are from real law firms.

Cold calling somebody about a personal injury lawsuit or other legal issues might not always work, but it has worked enough to become a staple of some businesses’ marketing campaigns. An independent attorney can really benefit from this if they have no easy way to market themselves.

Other Sources of Qualified Leads for Law Firms

Not all law firms use the same basic lead generation options. In fact, lead generation for lawyers can become incredibly complex when you consider how many different methods exist.

Here are some alternate ways that your law firm might be able to generate some extra-legal leads.

Putting your Law Firm’s Website on a Directory

A major lawyer directory can be a great place to turn. Lawyer directory pages are full of links but also act as lists for people to find lawyers that they can use.

This makes it an indirect source of legal leads, boosting your SEO and allowing you to earn qualified leads simply by existing on the directory.

Some directories are free (usually offering limited or no SEO benefits), and some are paid (offering full benefits). Choose the one that suits your digital marketing needs best.

Lead Generation Services

Full lead generation services are available online, allowing your law firm to get its leads generated by a third-party company. This might sound worrying at first, but it is no different from using a digital marketing company.

Lead generation services are all about getting the client the leads that they want quickly and effectively, and that means that you can earn legal leads quite quickly. The Martindale Legal Marketing Network is a good example of what these services can look like.

A pay-per-lead service is one of the most common types, but others exist as well. All of them are a great way to approach attorney leads if you do not have any other options that you can easily approach by yourself.

Obviously, the company you choose makes a difference. You want one that can get your law firm good legal leads.

Be Specific

Do not be afraid to get specific with your qualified leads. Market the things that you think will get the most attention.

Digital marketing is all about standing out, especially using paid options like Google Ads.

Even if you are not specifically a divorce lawyer, you can focus on specific services to target a certain niche instead of a general legal target audience.

People use search engines to find the things they need, and they will use whatever terms they can to help them do that.

If you spread out your services like this, you can often get more leads just because you are targeting those services and the people looking for them.

Use a Range of Techniques

Plenty of companies use a range of services and techniques to handle their lead generation needs. This gives them a lot more flexibility in getting the leads they want without being limited to only a few tools.

Remember that there is no perfect way to generate leads. Each firm relies on different methods and keywords specific to its services and target audiences.

Simplify Things

Do not over-complicate your marketing unless you have to.

Lead generation can be tough, and it can involve a lot of factors, but those do not have to be major parts of how you run the business or push out marketing material.

A lot of law firms can succeed by taking a casual approach and not rushing straight into major marketing attempts. Slowing down and simplifying everything can reveal lead generation opportunities that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.

This is not to say that you should be passive, but do not take things to any kind of extreme. If you need to generate leads, try to do it slowly and steadily rather than getting a single burst of leads that you can never replicate again.

The simpler you make everything, the easier it becomes to manage it again further down the line.

What Next For Your Law Firm?

Lead generation is complex, but planning ahead is just as important as getting the leads in the first place.

Leads are a source of serious growth, but they have to be used well. The more you plan ahead, the easier it becomes to use your leads effectively.

If you dive into lead generation with no plan, you might generate sub-par leads or even put yourself in a situation where you are bottlenecked by your own target audience.

Take some time to think over the situation you are in and your business’s short and long-term goals. Having even a simple idea of where to go next makes a huge difference.

Useful Guides

Please see some useful guides related to generating more business leads.

Kasra Dash

Kasra Dash is a Scottish entrepreneur, Kasra Primarily focuses on SEO & digital marketing for companies in the UK he enjoys brining positive ROI’s for business owners with his marketing expertise.

Kasra is also an investor in Searcharoo.

How to Get More Lawyer Leads

What are Leads?