What Your Competitors Can Teach You About Legal Marketing

Submitted by Deanna on Fri, 02/16/2018 - 12:38

Did you know your competitors can inadvertently give you a lot of advice on how to handle your legal marketing? Studying competitors is one of the best ways top law firms increase their caseload and increase their revenue. Here are some lessons you might be able to learn from your competitors:

What Type of Content Does Well

By cruising through a competing firm’s blog or FAQ, you can determine what types of content they’re focusing on. If you’re stuck in a rut for coming up with new pages of attention-grabbing content for your audience, competitor research may help.

Try to look for different pages on a similar topic. For example, you may find that a firm has a series of articles on personal injury attorneys in Dallas:

How Expensive is a Dallas PI Attorney?
How to Find a Dallas Personal Injury Attorney
Dallas PI Attorneys

If your competitor has a lot of content on one subject, it’s likely something that’s performing well.

Where to Place Ads

Unsure what keywords you should be on when running PPC campaigns on Google or Bing? Try doing a few searches yourself to see what types of results pop up. If you find that “Dallas PI attorneys” pulls up all of your competing firms, it’s likely a good keyword to bid on.

Are results all nationwide firms or major companies? This might be a challenging query to fight for. Search results say a lot about what traffic your competitors are (or are not) paying for.

How Much Traction You Could Get From Social Media

If you’re considering investing time and effort into social media (Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are all popular for law firms), you can see if your major competing firms also have large social media followings. If the biggest firms in the area have just 100 “likes” on Facebook or 50 Twitter followers, it may not be worth the effort.

How to Design Your Website

This is a great tip for firms just getting their websites off the ground—if you’re not sure how to format your website, try checking out your competitors’ sites. They should give you an idea as to where to put your “Contact Us” page, site navigation, and more.

A word of caution: don’t try to copy the first legal site you find. It’s possible that firm isn’t generating much traffic! A good idea is to try to find a competitor that consistently outranks you on Google or Bing and starting from there.

How About Ignoring the Competition?

If you’re bogged down trying to attract claimants to your firm and away from competitors, you may be interested in using lead generation services. Working with a lead provider is different than other forms of marketing because you’ll pay for contact information from claimants, not ad placements on Google.