Making the Case for SEO to Law Firm Leadership

Date: May 19, 2022

A group of workers lean over a table filled with papers, analyzing each sheet.

SEO is nothing new, but many business owners and leaders still resist its benefits. When you are part of a law firm, it can be incredibly frustrating to realize all of the wasted potential. How many possible leads have you missed out on because of a simple Google search?

Unfortunately, the decision often falls into someone else’s hands, so you are left making a case outside of the courtroom. Instead of advocating for a client, you might find yourself making a case in defense of SEO to your law firm’s leadership. How can you persuade them? What sort of benefits will get their attention?

We’ll provide you with all of the information you need to know about the benefits of SEO, and we’ll help you prepare for your pitch. Keep reading to learn more about how to make a winning argument that would sway even the most keen of decision makers. 

The Benefits of SEO for Law Firms

Before you can even begin to approach the conversation with your law firm’s leadership, you need to make sure you are well prepared with a solid list of benefits. Make sure that you focus on critical points that will benefit the firm as a whole and not just the specific things you stand to gain. 

While there are many reasons to invest in a quality SEO strategy, the following are some ideas to help get you started with your research:

  • Increase Organic Traffic: As your SEO strategy starts to improve your rank on search engine results pages (SERPs), your website becomes more visible. The more visible it is, the more likely you are to get organic visitors looking at your site when they search for “divorce lawyers near me” or “accident attorneys in Newark.”
  • Better User Experience: Many people are under the impression that SEO is all about making Google happy, but it’s also about keeping visitors happy. When you work to improve the user experience (UX), visitors are more likely to stay on your website longer, which leads to more inquiries. It also lets Google know that your site is optimized, so it ends up helping your search engine rank after all.
  • Traffic from Referrals: When your website starts to make its way up in SERPs, other sites will take notice. Typically, they will want to link to your site, which will give your website more authority in Google’s eyes. It will also help you get more referrals.
  • Targeted Audience: Using local SEO keywords can help you to weed out any visitors who wouldn’t be interested in your services. For example, broad keywords like “family lawyer” could land visitors from Seattle who wouldn’t be interested in hiring a legal team in New Jersey. It saves you a lot of time on wasted leads and makes it easier to be connected to your specific target demographic.

How Small Firm Practitioners Can Achieve Buy-in from Partners/Colleagues 

If you are at a smaller firm, there is often less red tape to move through in decision-making. However, it does leave you with fewer people to convince. At first glance, this might sound like a good thing, but if your partner is firmly against SEO investments, you could find yourself at a standstill. 

Fortunately, there are a few ways that you can convince fellow partners to invest in a solid SEO strategy. If you are part of a boutique or specialized firm, we recommend that you focus on how website visibility can generate more leads for them and any web inquiries could be divided equally among all attorneys, which would level the playing field and land everyone more clients.  

How Legal Marketers Can Achieve Buy-in from Managing Partner

If you are a legal marketer, you already know how SEO can elevate a law firm, but sometimes it isn’t easy to communicate these benefits to those who would approve the spend. Often, a managing partner is the one holding the purse strings. In this case, you will have to make a case to them if you want any hope of achieving a buy-in.

We recommend that legal marketers make a case to executive leadership by focusing on how utilizing SEO services will align with your firm’s desired growth areas. You should also highlight which type of practices stand to benefit the most. Have you noticed any practices that have high-performing digital content? What does that mean for their business? 

These are all things you could include in your case. If your law firm is involved in Private Client Services, SEO could be especially beneficial so that you don’t have to rely on word of mouth alone.

When to Introduce the Discussion Around SEO Investment

After you’ve gone through all the trouble to prepare a business case for your law firm, you want to make sure that your time isn’t wasted and your pitch is given the consideration it deserves. If you present your case at the wrong time, it could be dismissed until a later date and pushed back until it’s forgotten. 

Instead, you should make a great impression by waiting until the third quarter, when most budget talks are commencing. Since a good SEO strategy is going to cost money, your firm is going to want to see how that will fit in with their overall spending.

Not only is Q3 the time that most firms are discussing their marketing budgets, but they are typically considering business development budgets as well. Since SEO falls under both categories, this would be the prime time to have a discussion with your colleagues or managing partner. 

When to Consider a Practice Carve-Out

If you are being met with resistance due to budgeting, you might want to suggest leveraging SEO for a specific practice that would benefit most from the effort. It is a much more budget-friendly option that you are more likely to get larger firms to agree to. Rather than making a firmwide investment for a complete SEO overhaul, you can just focus on one practice. 

Since it is a smaller scale, you’ll be able to work with a smaller budget without compromising the strategy. Once you start to see results, you can slowly start to scale the strategy up to other practices until you reach the entire firm. This option is usually much more palatable for those who find SEO intimidating, and is great for partners who aren’t ready to commit to a full-scale SEO revamp.

Learn More About How Small and Large Law Firms Benefit from an SEO Strategy

Whether you need a quote to include in your pitch or you simply want to know more about the benefits of SEO, you shouldn’t hesitate to contact us at 9Sail. Our SEO marketing agency specializes in services for law firms of all specialties and sizes, so you can be confident that our experts know all about the ways your website can benefit from a new strategy. 

That’s not all!

While we are happy to simply provide you with answers to all of your questions, we can also take it a step further. We offer completely free, no-obligation SEO site audits, so we would love to take a look at your firm’s website. With our feedback, you’ll be better prepared to make your case for an SEO investment.

To get started, you can call us at 201-632-1185, or you can submit your site details through our simple online form to request your audit.