How Much Time Should You Spend Developing Your Online Footprint?
If you spend an hour or so building your online profile and then 15 minutes a week enhancing it, you’ll see great results.
The other day, I was talking to an attorney who we’ll call Joe. Joe has had multiple seven-figure verdicts and one eight-figure verdict. His friend’s brother needed an attorney and the friend suggested he check out Joe. The brother had a couple of attorneys in mind, including Joe, and ultimately ended up choosing someone objectively less qualified in every regard. The friend asked his brother why and the brother said it was because he just couldn’t find much online about Joe.
If I want to buy a TV, I can go online and read hundreds of Amazon reviews, watch unboxing videos, download the manual, Google the model name to see if there are any customer service forums where common complaints emerge, etc. If I’m looking to buy a TV and it’s between one with 100 four-star ratings and one with no rating, the four-star rating is going to win every time because it’s just too suspicious to me that a product can exist like that and no one has any comments about it. It makes it seem less legit. That’s for buying a $700 TV. A lot of attorneys have just a small fraction of that information available about themselves online and expect clients to put their criminal matter/custody of their kids/formation of their business/future medical care/will in that attorney’s hands. For most of us, we need to beef up our online presence.
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You know who Googles personal injury attorney? Personal injury attorneys who are curious how they rank. If you’ve been in a car accident, what to do you Google? “L5-S1 disc herniation” or “insurance negotiations” or “contingency lawyer” or something along those lines. Clients Google things because they have questions. If you have answers, they might come looking some more on your online profile. Don’t disappoint them when they are investigating you. Here are some tips for buffing out your online presence.
Avvo
Your Avvo profile is probably going to show up somewhere in your search results when someone Googles “[your name] lawyer.” Claim your Avvo profile. Upload your photograph. Fill out your practice areas. Reach out to lawyers to endorse you. Pictures are very powerful. Clients are looking for someone they can trust to reach out to. Photographs help build trust. It’s hard to trust someone if you don’t know what they look like. Filling out your practice areas is important too to show your specialty. Clients usually look for lawyers when they have a particular problem. Let’s say you have a foot problem. You are going to look for a foot doctor. What are you going to think if you are looking for a doctor and that doctor either doesn’t list a specialty or lists all of the specialties from anesthesiology to radiology and everything in between. You’re probably going to pass on those two. It’s not like there are only two doctors to choose from. You just move on and look for the one that suits you. Same thing with lawyers. There are a lot of lawyers. You might get more clients by listing every specialty or maybe leaving it blank to purposefully create ambiguity, but you’ll probably lose more in the long run. This takes about 20 minutes.
State Bar Profile
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Some bar agencies have expanded profiles. California does. Make sure your information is correct. Make sure you have contact info on there, including a professional (not Gmail or AOL) email address. Not having a phone number or email address listed makes you look suspicious. This takes about 5 minutes.
Yelp
As with Avvo, you should claim your Yelp page. Add your picture and other information about your business. If you have a business, you probably have a Yelp page, whether you like it or not. It takes about 15 minutes to find your page, claim it, register for a business owner account, and update it.
Business Facebook Page
Create a business Facebook page for your firm. Upload some pictures and include details about your business. Create a “call to action” button on your page. This takes about 10 minutes.
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Webpage
You don’t need a fancy webpage. Services like GoDaddy have website builders where you can build from a template and have a pretty good-looking website in 30 minutes. Fancier ones take time, of course.
Total
If you spend an hour or two in week one building your online profile and then 15 minutes each week thereafter enhancing your online profile, you’ll see great results. Online marketing and advertising can be a slow-moving barge, so you might not see immediate returns, but for the time and effort, there is probably no greater marketing time spent.
Jeff Bennion is Of Counsel at Estey & Bomberger LLP, a plaintiffs’ law firm specializing in mass torts and catastrophic injuries. He serves as a member of the Board of Directors of San Diego’s plaintiffs’ trial lawyers association, Consumer Attorneys of San Diego. He is also the Education Chair and Executive Committee member of the State Bar of California’s Law Practice Management and Technologysection. He is a member of the Advisory Council and instructor at UCSD’s Litigation Technology Management program. His opinions are his own. Follow him on Twitter here or on Facebook here, or contact him by email at jeff@trial.technology.
