3 ways to market your boutique law firm online

I was involved in a discussion on LinkedIn recently with a personal injury litigator who had this question:

I am an experienced plaintiff’s personal injury attorney. My practice emphasizes motor vehicle collisions involving large trucks, automobiles, motorcycles and/or bicycles.

Most of my cases come by referral from clients, past or present and other people I know in the community. Marketing techniques that might work with corporate or organizational clients such as trade group participation and golf outings are not likely to be productive in reaching potential clients whose need for services are more of a “one-shot” situation. Further, there are ethical restrictions on the direct, in-person solicitation of cases. I don’t use large yellow pages ads or TV advertising and would prefer to avoid these.

I would like to carefully expand my practice, by adding a limited number of high quality cases (10-20 per year) preferably with emphasis on people injured in large truck accidents.

Your suggestions of specific marketing approaches/tactics or other ways to accomplish this goal would be greatly appreciated.

Here was my advice:

Online media are great for this kind of sales objective — highly targeted sales growth — because you can target your messages so tightly.

There are a couple of top-line things you can do online to get the results you’re looking for:

1. Optimize your Web site for high search engine visibility. There are a few components to that:

a) Have a Website that’s full of good content that uses words that people use when they’re looking for information about being represented in a major truck accident case. This will help with your visibility on the major search engines and will speak to your relevance to prospective clients visiting your site. Posting your own case summaries and commentary on relevant cases is one great way to do this (and a blog is a good tool for doing this).

b) Make sure your site is listed in all available, relevant, reputable third-party business directories

c) Make sure the code of your site is optimized to provide high search engine visibility

d) If you’re doing media releases, make sure they are also posted online with a link to your site. Post them on your own site and also on sites like prweb.com

2. Use Google’s AdWords service to do highly targeted advertising around truck accident-related keywords.

3. Increase referrals by connecting with your past clients using social networking services and email newsletters. That way, you’re top of mind with them when someone they know has a situation you can help with. Post content to those media that’s valuable and relevant to them.

This is advice I’d extent to just about any SMB with a well-defined market niche as well.