Much has changed in the marketing landscape in recent years. It’s no secret that technology has had a profound effect on the relationship between law firms and their audiences, not just digitally but across all channels.
As your organisation’s lead marketing expert, it’s your responsibility to evaluate and adapt to changes in your industry. Yet getting up to speed with the detail around digital marketing can feel daunting.
Two of the most popular strategies nowadays are pay-per-click advertising (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO). Let’s take a closer look at what every CMO needs to know.
What Is SEO and How Do I Know if Ours Is Any Good?
SEO is the process of making changes to your website so that it ranks higher on a search engine results page (SERP) and gets more visitors. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the practice of improving a website’s visibility by tweaking its code, writing more relevant content, and building more inbound links. The goal is to have your site appear near the top of Google for the keywords most frequently used by your clients and targets.
Here are a few signs that your website is optimised or that you still need to put in more work:
- You are getting leads: Recording whether your website is generating leads is the first priority in SEO.If you’re getting leads, you must be doing something right. 🙂
- Optimize metadata: Each page should have a title, meta-description, and headers that contain keywords you want to rank for. These are little signs to the search engines to say “this is what this page is about” and “here’s a question that we’re about to answer”.
- Check your ranking for keywords: With proper optimisation, your site should move towards the upper end of search engine results for your target keywords.But it’s getting harder and harder to rank near the top as most law firms are now optimising their content. That said the good news is that they could all do it better.
- Fast loading times and mobile compatibility: Google has standards when it comes to page speed and mobile friendliness. You can check how your website fares using their testing tools. We record the scores for loads of law firms – so just ask if you’d like yours and to hear how it performs against competitors.
- Auditing the site’s technical aspects: Your site shouldn’t have too many technical issues, like uncompressed images, 404 errors, broken links, or other problems. If it does, it’s going to get penalised with lower rankings for all your pages.
- Poor content: Bad content drags down the overall rankings for your site. You’re better off pruning your content and making sure that the things you most want to rank for are properly tended to.
What Is PPC and What Does a Good Result Look Like?
Whenever someone types in a search term that matches your product or service, a PPC ad will show up and promote it to them. These ads get their name from the fact that you only have to pay when someone clicks on them. There’s no guarantee that shelling out more money would raise the visibility of your ads over competitors.
It’s crucial to check analytics to see if your PPC campaign is successful. You can get a detailed picture of your performance with these metrics:
- Click-through rate (CTR): The number of times an ad was shown and how many times it was clicked.
- Conversion rate: How often a click leads to a sale
- Cost per conversion: Amount spent on advertising per paid conversion
- Cost per click (CPC): How much money was spent on average per click
- Quality score: Google’s evaluation of the relevance and quality of your ads
- Impression share: How frequently your ads are shown for a specific keyword
How Do I Hire the Right Person for Our In-house Digital Marketing Team, and What Can I Expect Them To Do?
Having an in-house marketing team means you have a dedicated department that handles all the company’s marketing efforts, such as PPC, SEO, social media marketing, email marketing, content marketing, and more. While digital marketing is increasingly important, it is difficult and time-consuming to assemble an in-house team. Here’s how to attract and hire top marketing talent:
- Searching in the right places: If you want a particular type of applicant, posting your job ad in the right place is crucial.
- Create a network and establish relationships: It’s a good idea to let your connections know you’re looking for employees so they can recommend qualified people.
- Evaluate how well-versed they are in your field: A marketer worth hiring will demonstrate in-depth familiarity with your offering, target audience, industry, and competitive landscape.
How Do I Hire the Right External Agency and What Can I Expect Them To Do?
Outsourcing to a marketing agency is another possible alternative to building your own in-house marketing team. Digital marketing agencies use various online strategies, techniques, and resources to help businesses achieve their advertising and revenue targets.
When searching for the ideal marketing agency for your company, here are four things you need to consider:
- Identify the needs of the business: Before hiring a digital marketing agency, it’s crucial to have a clear idea of your goals and objectives.
- Create a list of candidates: When you know what you want to achieve, you can begin looking for a company to help you get there, either through a matchmaking platform or references from your team or other companies.
- Provide them with some background information and request proposals: Create a request for proposal (RFP) to gather agency data and choose the best one. Describe your project and requirements.
- Finding your match: Once you have a shortlist of potential agencies, you can conduct further in-depth research. Check their online presence and meet their team.
Wrapping Up
These days, the average marketer faces a chaotic mix of ever-evolving business challenges and technological innovations. Learning more about trends like PPC and SEO and how hiring an in-house team or agency can help you take your marketing strategy to new heights.
TBD is an agency that helps marketing, recruitment and management teams to successfully position law firms in the UK market and beyond. If you have any queries, please get in touch: simon.marshall@tbdmarketing.co.uk.
