In part one, I showed you how the Pennsylvania personal injury firm of Edgar Snyder & Associates (https://www.edgarsnyder.com) achieves positive results with their law firm marketing tactics online. Now I will show how they approach a few important off-site optimization and marketing factors for great search engine rankings.

Ratings/Reviews/Directories

Claim your name by finding and completing your law firm profiles on ratings and review sites like Lawyers.com. Notice how all the data is filled out and complete, including the firm’s logo.

Other listings that should be setup or claimed include those on:

• AVVO
• SuperLawyers
• The Better Business Bureau
• Yelp
• FindLaw
• Martindale.com
• Lawyers.com
• Justia
• HG Legal Resources

These sites will help you establish brand awareness, authority, and key you into how your firm is being received by the public and how your clients feel about your services. Don’t hesitate to answer both positive and negative comments, and invite any disgruntled clients to a phone consultation or office visit so you can work things out. You most certainly do not have to answer every comment, but don’t let too much time go by without at least acknowledging a few.

Make Use of Social Media

The Edgar Snyder firm leverages social media to establish them as a trusted authorities in their field. They use:

• Twitter – https://twitter.com/edgarsnyder
• Google+ – https://plus.google.com/+EdgarSnyderAssociatesPittsburgh/posts
• Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/EdgarSnyderAssociates
• LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/edgarsnyder
• Instagram – http://instagram.com/edgarsnyder/
• YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/user/edgarsnyder

They share regularly updated posts across all platforms, and also use the platforms independently depending on the topic. Their shareable content not only covers legal topics, but also community activities, public service announcements, and charitable events. Anyone who follows the firm through these platforms will quickly get a sense of rapport with the firm as a whole and with individual attorneys.

Blogging and Content

How you handle your blog depends on your circumstances. If you are in the early stages of building your web presence, you should consider establishing your blog as a separate entity instead of having it housed within your website. The practice of putting your blog in your website started several years ago as a way to increase search engine placement; however, the algorithms used today by search engines are very different than those used even last year. These shifts in what Google feels is important and relevant has most marketing firms using a separate domain for law firm blogs, as blogs are now used more for building authority in your niche.

If you have already established your online presence and your blog is under the same domain as your website, consider starting a separate blog that will focus on one of your practice areas, (or even several blogs for several practice areas) and give it a keyword rich domain name.

Takin’ it to the Streets

At least a part of what Edgar Snyder accomplishes in brand awareness, authority, and reputation is created by their presence in the local community. If you look through the history of one of their social media accounts, you will see many photos, announcements, articles, videos of activities and events in the Pittsburgh area. This is a firm that enjoys its role within the community and it shows.

When You Don’t Know What to Write About

If you are sitting here reading this thinking there is  no way that you will ever be able to come up with enough ideas to populate a blog and several social media accounts with quality content, then let me tell you the solution.

News aggregators (RSS readers) allow you to listen into the conversations on the web regarding specific topics. They help you follow up to the minute media reports and blogs that are relevant to your niche. Use an RSS reader like Feedly (http://feedly.com/), which makes it simple to jump into the conversation and introduce your firm, your services, and your thoughts and ideas to your network.

Sharing good content is equally as important as creating and publishing good content. You can keep the discussions going by sharing relevant news and blog posts and inviting comments from across your network. Remember, it doesn’t matter what social media platforms you decide to focus on, sharing your passions, experiences, knowledge and opinions with your clients, peers, and  other professionals is what makes them powerful tools.

 

Teresa Shaw is an SEO expert with 10 years experience helping attorneys and law firms across the country increase public awareness of their services.