Storytelling + SEO = Success

Blue paper partially torn open reveals text that reads, "Everyone has a story...

When Creating a Brand for your Law Firm, You Need to Tell a Story.

What does your firm do the best?  What is your history?  Why should people choose you over another firm? These are questions you need to answer on your website in order to better connect with your potential clients.

Once you have that story, you can then also focus on getting that message out to your core audience.  One of the best ways to do that long-term is SEO and ranking high in search.  Yes, there are other ways with ad campaigns, events, newsletters, and other marketing.  However, one of the best long-term strategies for getting noticed is ranking highly in search. 

The key is you need both strategies to work:  You need a great story about your firm.  You need to rank high.  Each own its own will fail.  You will either get traffic and people will leave your site quickly, or you will be able to write about your firm, but no one will be able to read it.  

Once you have both a story and high rankings, then you will have success in marketing your law firm. Let’s learn how to brand and market your firm. 

How Storytelling Can Enhance Your Law Firm’s Brand

The key to any firm’s brand is your message.  The message identifies what clients can expect when they work with you – in a way that’s personal and not just your awards and practice areas.  You create your message by telling a story.  Not just any story – YOUR story.

How Do You Create a Story?

Your story should highlight your values and the strengths of your services. While you want it to be engaging, your story must be true and non-contradictory. Again, the key is relating to your clients on a human level. Be more than just a person who goes to court. Let your potential clients understand who you are and what you represent.

Is Your Message Unique and Different from Another Firm?

You need to be different from your competitors.  You also need to avoid vague terms in your brand persona like “quality” or “we do it all.” Instead, showcase things like your unique leadership, market specialty, and heritage.  For more detailed info on this, you can check out our handy guide on Law Firm Branding: A Best Practices Guide.

Luckily, we have a handy list of eight ways that you can brand your firm. There are more, but let’s start with these eight. Once you complete these questions, which do you think will resonate the most with clients and make them choose you over the competition.

  • Being 1st.  Being first showcases your experience. You may be the first law firm to practice, get a big win, go paperless, or big case win? 
  • Attribute Ownership. What is one distinctive characteristic, peculiarity, or feature of your practice?  What can your firm say, that no other firm can say? 
  • Be a Leader.  Leadership positions automatically give respect and notoriety. What area are you a leader in?  Why are you a leader in that area? 
  • Heritage.  Having a history is a powerful way to brand the firm.  When did you first start practicing, even if not at this firm?  Do you have deep roots in your community? 
  • Specialize in your Market.  Those that concentrate their practice area are assumed to be experts in their field. What can you say about your practice that no one else can claim?  
  • Preferred Provider. People trust firms that represent big names, large organizations, famous people, or have lots of clients. 
  • Make your Service in a Special Way.  Do you practice in an innovative way? Paperless?  Unique case research?  Library of documents to work with?  All virtual?  
  • Be the Latest.  Is your business new?  Is it the latest trend? Did you start up practice to get away from doing it some other way?  

Now that you have a story, it’s time to focus on broadcasting it to the most people.  One way to do this is through search marketing. 

How to Have SEO Success with High Rankings

Ranking high is a long term process and takes a lot of effort.  We have broken this down into five critical stages:

Research: Keyword Research & Competitor Research

So you want to rank high?  Great. For what?  One of the first steps in a SEO process is figuring out what specific keyword phrases to target.  The way to start this process starts with brainstorming terms, analyzing their numbers, evaluating the data, and making a recommendation.  You can see a detailed article about keyword research here.

Content Plan: Planning, Writing, Editing, & Publishing

Once you have a good list of keywords you want to target, you next need to create a plan for your content. Make a list of your keyword phrases and match them to pages you have on the site.  You can make a list of pages you need to keep, edit, or perhaps you need to write new pages.  For a more detailed article on this, you can see our Guide to Content Marketing.

On-Page Optimization:  Tags, Tags and More Tags

Now that you know what you want to target, what pages you have (or will write), you need to get those pages online and updated.  You need to worry about direct keyword matches, headlines, subheads, word counts, title tags, meta descriptions, internal links, overstuffing, redirects, hidden text, synonyms, and more!  This article on best practices for on-page optimization is a great read.

So now you have relevant pages that match users’ searches, but you still are not ranking high?  It’s because someone else has written similar content.  Google ranks sites not only by the quality of your content, but also who links to that content.  You need to go out and get more links to your content.  The good news is that we have not one, but two, guides in this area.  The first is link building and local search guide.  The second guide is our list of top legal directories to get listed with. 

Analysis and Updates:  Monitor & Test

Finally, once you have done all of the above, you need to regularly check on your rankings.  You can automate this by using various websites to track rankings.  You can also check in manually yourself by using your own browser or Google Adwords Preview Tool.  Whichever way you go, you want to review, iterate, and improve. Good luck!

Conclusion

Your story + great SEO will bring success.

Simply having a great story does not create success.

Simply ranking high does not create success.

Once you have both, then you will have success in marketing your law firm.

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