You’ve been in a car accident. You’re injured. It wasn’t your fault.
After assessing your injuries, the instinct you may have is to immediately contact an attorney. This unexpected life event requires the assistance of a professional. Time is of the essence.
As a personal injury (PI) attorney, you’ve been on the other end of these frantic calls. Have you considered how this individual ended up calling you? There are a lot of factors that play into this – but the fact is – that if someone can find you quickly online, your lead volume will increase.
Let’s look at some of the steps you can make as a personal injury attorney to be that first contact for someone in need.
Specialize Your Website for PI (or Have a Microsite)
There’s nothing wrong with being a general practice attorney, or an attorney that works on several different case types. But if you want to be serious about personal injury in the digital space, you need to specialize.
Having a website dedicated and optimized solely for personal injury has several advantages. First, is the perception it gives off. When someone suffers an injury that requires them to seek an attorney, it’s a very personal matter. If your website mentions many different types of law practice, you aren’t giving them confidence that you are the best attorney to handle their case. By having a website that focuses solely on personal injury, you are instilling confidence in someone that this is what you do. The website should include:
- Confident tagline. Ex: “We Fight For You”
- Detailed content on your PI service areas
- Images of you and other PI attorneys at the firm
- Client testimonials
- Types of cases and money won for clients
If your firm is general practice, you could focus the homepage and optimization on personal injury and make the other practice areas ancillary on the site. Another option is to build a personal injury microsite that allows you to continue your general practice but has a site that is solely focused on PI and gives that appearance of specialization at your firm.
Invest in Personal Injury Content Marketing
An SEO-focused PI website is the first step to gaining more leads through online search. But to drive traffic to the site, you will want to invest in a strong ongoing SEO and content marketing strategy.
Implementing a content marketing strategy has several advantages. First, continually adding relevant content focused on personal injury keywords will improve the overall domain authority of your site, which helps the entire site show up for competitive keywords in your area.
In addition, the specific content pieces can individually rank, which will over time continually bring more traffic – and ultimately leads. For personal injury, utilizing longtail keywords is a good strategy – but it’s important to do the keyword research first. If you can create content tailored to the keywords that people with personal injury cases are searching for, you can find yourself ranking high on some lucrative search results pages.
Optimize and Continually Update your Google Business Profile
If there’s something that has rivaled having an optimized site in the last several years in terms of organic traffic acquisition, it’s the Google Business Profile (GBP). By optimizing and updating your GBP for personal injury, you are exposing your law firm to mobile visitors who are in your area by showing up in the maps listings in addition to supplementing the traditional organic listing.
In addition to creating, claiming, and optimizing your Google Business Profile, you need to be doing daily, weekly, and monthly updates to the page to ensure that it continues to stay in the good graces of Google. This ongoing work includes, but is not limited to:
- Responding to reviews
- Responding to questions
- Adding Google Posts
- Adding new photos
- Adding product listings
- Changing hours when necessary
- Adjusting to any Google updates
For more information, check out our full guide on how to optimize your Google Business Profile.
Personal Injury Paid Advertising
While organic acquisition is often the most cost-effective way to bring in online leads – provided you put in the time – paid advertising shouldn’t be ignored as part of a well-rounded marketing strategy. When it comes to personal injury, the cost per lead can be high, but depending on how specific you want to get, there are ways to avoid paying top-dollar per click by being very granular.
One of the most effective paid strategies for personal injury firms is utilizing Google Local Service Ads (LSAs). With Google LSAs, you only pay if someone calls your firm, and you can dispute leads that weren’t relevant to your business – often with success. There are also limits that you can put on the ads to help control the budget – and they are easy to turn on and off.
With LSAs, you can be mindful of your budget and get your firm in front of individuals who need immediate help thanks to the top-of-page placement of the ads.
Intaking Personal Injury Leads
None of the above matters if you don’t have an effective way to quickly intake the leads that are coming into your firm. As stated, personal injury leads are extremely time-sensitive, so having multiple channels to effectively intake your leads and have immediate consultative conversations is essential. You want to be flexible with the many ways someone may reach out. This can include:
- Phone Call
- Leads Form
- Online Chat
- Text Message
- Facebook Messenger
By providing a way for people to contact you how they are most comfortable, you are lowering the bar for someone and making your firm inviting to them. But, you need to make sure you are funneling each of these channels in a way that allows your firm to quickly follow up with the individual.
Conversely, if you want to vet your leads before intaking them with your team, you can utilize lead qualification tools on the website to make sure the leads that get to you and your team are leads you can take on.
At Civille, we’ve built lead qualification tools into our platform to help firms optimize their time – and save money. The process is further explained in the video below.
Get More Personal Injury Case Leads
Getting more online leads for your personal injury firm doesn’t just happen. But if you are wondering how some firms seem to be the go-to firms online, they are certainly utilizing some if not all of the strategies detailed above.
If you have questions about how to optimize the digital presence of your personal injury firm, feel free to contact us today.
