As a personal injury lawyer, your primary focus should be obtaining favorable results for your clients. However, if you want to grow your firm, personal injury marketing is essential.
Continue reading for a discussion of the importance of personal injury marketing, what makes it challenging, and how to implement a winning marketing strategy to set your firm apart from others.
What is Personal Injury Marketing?
Personal injury marketing refers to the ways you engage potential clients to bring in business for your personal injury law firm.
Traditional legal marketing methods include:
- word-of-mouth,
- television and
- radio advertisements,
- billboards,
- newspaper ads, and
- bench ads.
However, these strategies don’t necessarily reach your target audience: those looking for an attorney right now.
The best personal injury marketing involves a digital marketing campaign that helps accident victims in your geographic area to find you online.
Most people use Google and other search engines to look for legal services. Therefore, you’ll want to have a website that shows up high in organic search results.
For example, when someone searches for a “Houston personal injury lawyer,” you want your law firm to appear at the top.
That’s where personal injury marketing comes in.
Creating a robust online presence will increase user engagement, generate more client leads, and bolster your credibility as a leading personal injury lawyer.
What Makes Personal Injury Marketing so Difficult?
Personal injury practices are unique when it comes to marketing to potential clients. A prospective client may be facing one of the most challenging times in their life.
Appealing to vulnerable people who may be in pain and facing financial struggles requires a bit of finesse.
Here are some reasons personal injury marketing is difficult.
Accident Victims Need to Make Quick Decisions on Who to Hire
A personal injury accident victim is likely dealing with debilitating injuries that require ongoing medical care; they may be unable to work.
As their expenses pile up and they lose income, they may need compensation quickly to make ends meet.
Many accident victims need an attorney as soon as possible to help them recover the money they need. That means they’ll make a quick hiring decision. Therefore, first impressions are everything in personal injury marketing.
Studies show that people spend less than a minute on a webpage, so it’s critical to have an optimized and inviting website. Navigable web pages will allow prospective clients to find information quickly and easily.
You should also demonstrate your compassion for what accident victims may be going through – while also conveying your legal skills and ability to fiercely advocate on their behalf.
Personal Injury Lawyers Work on Contingency
Because most personal injury attorneys work on a contingency fee basis, they must target clients whose potential settlement or verdict will justify the amount of time and resources spent on their case.
Your personal injury marketing campaign may yield many client leads, but that doesn’t mean they will all result in conversions. If a client’s personal injury case will take significant work for a small settlement, it may not make financial sense to take it on.
The contingency fee arrangement also makes tracking your return on investment (ROI) difficult. For example, if you’re using paid advertising and it takes years for a case to settle, you may be unable to determine if your PPC campaign is truly paying off.
Personal Injury Marketing is Extremely Competitive
You may be shocked to learn how much it costs for paid ads for specific legal keywords in competitive geographic markets. Legal keywords are some of the most expensive terms on Google, measured by the cost per click (CPC).
For example, searching for the term “personal injury lawyer” in some regional markets may cost up to $560 per click!
According to some studies, the average CPC for legal services is around $6.75. Compare that to the average CPC for medical services ($2.62) and real estate ($2.37), and you can see how competitive legal marketing can be.
Keep in mind that these figures change frequently and depend on the methods used to measure them.
The point is that the personal injury industry is highly competitive, making it an especially difficult field for marketing.
So, where should you start?
Personal Injury Marketing Begins and Ends with Your Website
Nowadays, if you want to grow your law firm, you’ll have to do more than rely on word-of-mouth advertising. Law firms that want to get new clients and gain an edge over competitors must have a digital presence. Why? The internet is now the most common method people use to find a lawyer.
Therefore, if you want to attract clients to your firm, you’ll need a website. But having a website is just the first part.
You saw the statistic above: most people spend less than a minute on a webpage before clicking to another page or site.
Therefore, you’ll need a high-quality website with user-friendly navigation and a user-friendly design to make a good first impression and keep your readers attention.
Legal marketing for personal injury begins and ends with your website. So, you should follow a few steps to make your website stand out amongst the glut of law firm websites online.
Designing a visually appealing, user-friendly website
The best law firm websites have a visually appealing design. They incorporate content, graphics, images, and videos to make their websites more dynamic. Moreover, they use consistent color schemes to give their website a certain look and feel.
A beautiful website encourages users to remain on your site. The longer a visitor stays on your site, the higher the chance they might contact you for more information.
You should keep the following in mind to create a visually appealing website:
- Focus on simple, minimalistic designs with no clutter
- Use headers, short sentences, and small paragraphs
- Use easy-to-read fonts and font colors
- Utilize bullet points to communicate information
- Highlight important information
- Incorporate unique images and graphics optimized for speed
- Divide text with visual cues to improve readability
Your website should also be easy to use. It’s no use having a beautiful website if your visitors can navigate it. You need a streamlined, intuitive website structure.
Having a User-Friendly Website
Your website should have a Homepage (HP) and supporting content nestled beneath it. It should have clickable links and drop-down menus to help visitors navigate to other pages.
If your website has poor organization, visitors may become frustrated as they struggle to access other pages or information. A frustrated user will not stick around your website very long.
You should also make sure your website is optimized for mobile devices. Studies suggest that almost 60% of web traffic comes through mobile phones. Therefore, your web pages should display as well for mobile users as it does for desktop users.
Google has a mobile-friendly test that can help you determine whether your website is compatible with mobile devices.
Your website should also be fast. Nothing will turn away a user quicker than a slow-loading web page. In fact, over 50% of web users will return to search results and look for another website if a page takes three seconds or longer to load. You can check the speed of your website here.
Creating High-Quality, Authoritative Content
People typically visit a law firm website looking for information on a legal question. They typically discover a legal website through secondary landing pages like blogs and practice area pages.
Therefore, to attract visitors to your website, you should have a library of helpful articles and content that address the most pressing questions and challenges of accident victims.
Content marketing is about building trust and authority. Trust and authority with your clients. Trust an authority with search engines (which we’ll discuss in the next section).
By publishing helpful articles, you establish credibility with readers (and search engines). This credibility will lead to more website traffic and will increase the chances that a potential client reaches out to your law firm for help with their legal issue.
At a minimum, you should create:
- Practice area pages – to describe the type of injury claims you handle
- Blogs – to quickly answer relevant questions and topics in personal injury law
- Resource articles – to address topics that require more depth and space than a blog
Having a library of helpful content will also help you drive traffic to different pages on your website. You can promote your practice areas and articles using internal linking, which can encourage users to go deeper into your site.
Optimizing your website for conversions
The goal of getting visitors to your website isn’t just to give them information. It’s ultimately about conversions. You want visitors to contact your law firm to learn more information or to schedule a consultation.
Therefore, you should offer a few different calls-to-action (CTAs) on each of your webpages. You should include your contact information somewhere on the page, including your telephone number, address, email, and social media. You can also incorporate a contact form on your pages.
Many personal injury law firms use chat features to help drive conversions. Many people prefer to chat with a live person rather than call a phone number. By having a chat feature on your site, visitors can learn more about your firm 24/7.
Keep in mind: your website should not have too many CTAs. This can turn off visitors. Rather, you should strike the right balance between making it easy for people to contact your firm and being too pushy.
SEO – Why it’s so Important for Personal Injury Lawyers
We’ve already discussed how competitive personal injury marketing is. Every one of your competitors likely has a website.
They want to cash in on the large amount of traffic online, too. Therefore, it’s not just enough to have a great website. Potential clients will need to be able to find your website — quickly.
How will clients find your website quickly? Through search engines like Google. Over 95% of consumers use search engines when seeking legal services; 90% of online searches happen on Google.
Therefore, your website needs to be optimized for search engines, specifically Google, to generate significant website traffic and client leads.
Google’s First Page
Google’s first page is composed of three main sections: Paid Ads; Local Pack; Organic Results.
- Paid Ads: These ads are on the top of search results on Google. Law firms obtain these ads through the Google Ads auction system. These have an “Ad” box next to the URL.
- Local Pack: The local map pack will appear on the first page of searches with a local intent (e.g., “Miami personal injury lawyer,” or personal injury attorney near me).
- Organic Results: Google has deemed these pages most relevant to a user’s keyword or query.
Around 90% of online searches take place on Google. Only two to three percent of those searchers visit the second page of Google. Therefore, you should want your personal injury law firm website to appear on the first page of Google. That’s where SEO for lawyers comes in.
Search Engine Rankings for Personal Injury Sites
Every time someone searches for “New York City personal injury lawyer” or “What to do after an accident,” Google has to quickly evaluate thousands of pages with those keywords or search queries.
In fact, Google looks at over 200 factors to determine whether (and how high) to rank a website for a keyword or search term. It’s enough to make one’s head spin trying to figure them all out.
Fortunately, it prizes three factors above all others:
- Content – As discussed above, this means having high-quality, relevant information on your website. For personal injury lawyers, this information will usually take the form of blogs, articles, and practice area pages that address keywords and questions users input into Google.
- Links – This means obtaining back links to your website and other content from other websites. Google sees these backlinks and recognizes that other people find your content relevant and authoritative.
- Rank Brain – This is artificial intelligence that focuses on a searcher’s intent.
So, if you want to rank for competitive terms like “personal injury lawyer” or “car accident attorney” in your geographic area, your content better be good — great even. And other websites need to recognize that it’s great by linking to it on their own web pages.
YMYL and E-A-T
Incidentally, Google holds personal injury law firm websites and content to a higher standard than other content online. This content has a tendency to affect readers’ financial stability, health, and/or well-being.
Therefore, Google has designated online legal content as “Your Money or Your Life.”
It may sound like a silly term, but users searching for legal services often need help with a divorce, defending criminal charges, or obtaining compensation after an accident. So, the information they find online could mean their money or their life.
What does this mean for your personal injury website? Google will scrutinize your content’s expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (EAT) more carefully than generic information online.
It will also analyze your visitor’s “user experience” (UX) to determine if it should list you in top spots in its search results.
The following things are important to user experience:
- Visual appearance
- Accessibility
- Site speed
- On-Site Optimization
Google may ding your website if visitors leave after only viewing one page. This can indicate a poor user experience (bounce rate). On the other hand, it may reward your webpage if visitors spend a notable amount of time on it (dwell time).
Local SEO
Local SEO is about ranking your personal injury law firm in a particular geographic area. For law firms, you will want to appear in the city (or cities) where you have an office.
Ranking in the local pack is critical if you want your personal injury law firm to experience maximum growth. These map packs appear above organic listings in over 90% of the searches with local intent. Law firms in the local pack can receive a 400% increase in views and 100% in clicks.
Local SEO tactics include obtaining backlinks from local sources and optimizing your law firm’s website to highlight your community involvement. It also requires developing your Google My Business profile.
Personal injury lawyer SEO is a necessity if you want to grow your business and increase your presence online. If your website is not optimized for search engines, you are missing out on the best way to get more leads.
Paid Ads – A Key Way to Elevate Your Presence Online
Paid Ads are another useful way to increase your footprint online. Many paid ads are known as “Pay-per-click,” or “PPC.”
With this form of advertising, you will pay a host (like Google or Facebook) when a user clicks on your ad on the platform. If you don’t receive clicks, you will not be charged.
We mentioned earlier that over 90% of online searches happen on Google. In fact, Google sees:
- 3.8 million searches per minute
- 63,000 searches per second
- 228 million searches per hour
- 5.5 million searches per day
Google ads campaigns place you at the top of such search results — above the local pack and organic results.
While these ads are best used in conjunction with an SEO campaign, they are a great way to experience a quick, short-term increase in online traffic.
Personal Injury Lawyers Must Also Engage in Offsite Marketing
While onsite marketing such as web design and SEO is critical to personal injury marketing, your efforts offsite will be essential as well. They should actually complement your on-site marketing. Below, we’ll highlight a few key areas of offsite marketing that are worth focusing on.
Google My Business
Setting up a free Google My Business (GMB) profile is one of the best steps you can take to improve your personal injury offsite marketing.
You’ve probably come across one of these profiles before when performing your own Google searches. Well, lawyers have them, too.
Establishing a GMB profile is crucial for local visibility. These profiles are featured prominently when a user performs a local search such as “New York City personal injury lawyer.”
Google will select a handful of GMB profiles to feature for geo-modified search strings; you’ll want to be featured among them, as these profiles will appear above the organic search results for that query.
Your GMB profile could also be featured when a user performs a relevant search on Google Maps.
You can also share content to your GMB profile, such as blog posts and news about your firm. Sharing content like this is one way to have your profile rank higher on Google’s search results.
It also gives potential clients more opportunities to interact with your content, which could result in more marketing leads for your business.
Google My Business profiles are not especially difficult to set up, but they must be updated regularly in order to be most effective.
If managed correctly, a GMB profile can provide you with free advertising and can greatly improve your SEO presence.
Personal injury marketing is about making a good first impression, and your GMB profile will be the first thing a potential client sees in many instances.
Social Media Marketing
Another key aspect of offsite personal injury marketing is social media. An effective social media campaign can benefit your business in many ways, including improving your brand awareness, establishing further credibility among potential clients, improving your SEO, and allowing you to engage with potential leads.
The social media platforms to focus on for personal injury marketing are Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter. These platforms are still incredibly popular, and sharing content on them will reach many potential clients’ eyes.
Managing robust profiles on these platforms is worth the effort; you’ll grow your overall online presence, and your content will reach a wider audience.
These platforms also each fit a sort of niche within social media (YouTube for videos and Instagram for photos, for instance) and so utilizing each allows you to share more types of content.
While social media content technically doesn’t factor in when Google decides which pages to rank highly, it can still indirectly influence your SEO by driving more traffic to your website and by creating backlinks to your site.
The more quality, authoritative content you’re able to share across the web, the more likely it is that a potential client will come across your firm’s website before your competitors’.
It bears repeating that making a good first impression is more important to personal injury marketing than it is to other practice areas.
Many potential clients will be introduced to your firm via social media, so focus on sharing high-quality content on these platforms in order to stand out.
The more eyes that come across your content, the better, and social media is yet another opportunity to expand your online presence and, from there, your success as a personal injury law firm.
Legal Directories
Legal directories such as Avvo, Martindale-Hubbell, FindLaw, and Justia are growing in popularity and are another avenue through which to improve your personal injury marketing.
As with your GMB profile, you’ll want to make sure to completely fill out your legal directory profiles. Robust profiles on these directories will tend to have more success and will be more engaging in the eyes of potential clients.
Be sure to link back to your website when filling out your legal directory profiles as well; this will directly help your SEO.
These directories give potential clients the ability to search for a lawyer based on various filters such as practice area, location, and rating.
Potential clients likely won’t go past the first page of search results after performing a query on Google; the same trend applies to a legal directory like Justia.
Since you can list your social media pages on your legal directory profiles, these two aspects of offsite marketing can work in tandem.
The goal is to put quality, relevant, and authoritative content in front of potential clients’ eyes and to turn them into actual clients. Managing profiles on each of these legal directories is yet another opportunity to build awareness around your business and achieve that goal.
Building Trust – Obtain Client Reviews
Client reviews appear on each of the offsite marketing outlets we’ve discussed to this point and can make the difference between a potential client choosing your firm over the competition. These reviews are one of the best ways to improve your trust and credibility across the internet.
A potential client searching for a personal injury lawyer will probably want to know that the lawyer has successfully helped similarly situated clients.
Reading just one glowing review of your firm could be enough to convince them to reach out to you for more information. And if you have a large sample of positive reviews for the potential client to look over, even better.
When it comes to client reviews, both quality and quantity are important.
It’s worth encouraging former clients you’ve successfully represented to review your firm. Since you achieved a favorable outcome for them, they’ll be more willing to make an effort to write a positive review.
Over time, you’ll build up a significant pool of reviews, and you’ll increase your brand awareness and popularity in the process.
It’ll also help your personal injury marketing to respond to client reviews you’ve already received, whether the review is positive or negative. Responding demonstrates that you care about your work and the people you represent.
Track the Progress of Your Personal Injury Marketing
If you don’t track your personal injury marketing efforts, you won’t know how successful they are long term. Tracking the progress of your online marketing strategies will dictate whether they’re paying off or you need to adjust them to yield better results.
Some key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of your personal injury marketing campaign include:
- The increase in your organic web traffic
- The click volume and ranking for relevant personal injury keywords
- The increase in your conversion rates from web traffic
- The improvement of your local SEO presence
- The increase in your client referrals
- The increase in phone calls your firm receives
Successful SEO can take time, so don’t be alarmed if you don’t see results overnight. You may need to shift your marketing efforts many times before finding the right strategies for your personal injury law firm.
Be flexible and patient: effective personal injury marketing will eventually pay off if you have the right tools (including a successful legal marketing agency) on your side.
What Does Personal Injury Marketing Cost?
The cost of personal injury marketing will vary. Some factors that will influence the cost of your legal marketing include your geographic location, which marketing services you select, and the experience and expertise of your legal marketing agency.
Legal marketing agencies also differ in their pricing structures. You might encounter the following contract structures when searching for a legal marketing agency:
- Monthly contracts. Month-to-month contracts that feature particular SEO services.
- Fixed price. This contract typically sets a fixed price for marketing services for a specified amount of time, usually half a year to a year.
- Hourly rates. An SEO agency bills an hourly rate for the time they work on your project.
- Project-based contracts. These are for short-term projects like website design.
The return on investment (ROI) you’re looking for will also influence the cost of your personal injury marketing. Generally speaking, you’ll have to spend more to gain a higher ROI.
Depending on your desired ROI, you might be able to rule out some legal marketing agencies altogether, as some might not be able to help you reach that goal at a reasonable cost.
LawRank Can Help with All of Your Personal Injury Marketing Needs
Personal injury marketing is competitive and time-consuming. While you focus on advocating for accident victims in your area, you need a legal marketing agency working for your law firm. LawRank can help.
We have a proven track record of success helping law firms rank higher on Google and increase their website traffic and client leads. We’ll listen to your marketing goals and maintain open communication and transparency.
We’ll track the results of your law firm SEO campaign to ensure that we’re maximizing your return on investment. If a strategy isn’t working, we’ll adapt to ensure that you get the results you deserve.
Contact us today, and we’ll help you build a custom personal injury marketing package optimized for your law firm, including web design, PPC for lawyers, and local SEO.
