It’s not as ridiculous as it sounds. Whilst for established law firms, a website is the quintessential marketing hub from which everything derives, for start-up firms struggling to get oxygen sometimes a website is a secondary step.
Let’s get a few things clear though! If nothing else, a website does validate to a potential client that you’re real. But, in terms of marketing, if you’re a law firm start-up trying to get traction in a competitive niche, then it’s likely you need online traffic of which you’re going have to pay for.
What do I mean? You’ve probably heard of SEO (the practice of getting a website ranked well in Google for search terms). By and large, a majority of firms are doing this work across practice areas resulting in the difficulty for new start-ups to compete in those search results. The way around it, of course, is to run Google ads. Yes, you can also run Facebook ads, but there’s a different strategy behind doing that. Remember, of course, Facebook isn’t the location people go to, to find a lawyer to write their binding financial agreement. But they will go to Google to conduct that search.
To elaborate on this example, if you’re a family law start-up, then its likely that you’re going to miss out on this work because your firm doesn’t rank well in Google or other search engines for that search term. And of course, you won’t be anywhere at all in those results if you don’t have a website.
Here lies both the conundrum and the opportunity. If you were going to spend in the vicinity of $10,000 on a new website, that despite how good it looks, it’s still going to take an enormous amount of work and SEO spend to get ranked, and “getting ranked” might not mean in positions #1, #2 or #3 for competitive search results. That’s your conundrum!
Here’s the opportunity! If you were to divert those funds towards setting up key landing pages and on Adwords (paying Google to position you well for keyword searches) you may land an initial good run of clients that will then allow you to consider more broadly, your marketing strategy, including the build of a law firm website.
For example, let’s say you’re a family law firm in Sydney, Australia. The monthly search volume of people searching for “family lawyers Sydney” according to Google is approximately 1,600 people each month.
For your firm to run ads for this search term, the cost will be around $27.60 per click. Yes, it’s expensive and yes, there are plenty of other variables in those keywords that are cheaper etc! But for the purpose of answering the primary question of whether or not your law firm needs a website, a good spend on Adwords, over time will generate leads, as long as you’ve got the fundamentals right!
Is it a long-term strategy? Definitely not, but we’ve seen terrific ROI for those small firms or start-ups new to market needing a little oxygen to get them to the next level.
If you’ve got any questions about Adwords, or would like us to assess the likely spend on your firm running an Adwords campaign, then drop us a note right here: https://support.fastfirms.com/google-adwords/
