Law firm marketing for US firms

Choose the matters before the channels

A firm that markets itself as full service leaves a stranger to work out what it does. Start with a short note: the matters that should produce this year's work, the matters the firm will refer on, and how far it will travel.

A page, an advert, or a directory profile that pulls in work you do not want costs you time.

If marketing for lawyers skips that note, the firm buys activity. Posts, ads, and pages pile up, and the files that arrive are the ones nobody in the partnership wanted.

Write the note first. Every public page should still match it.

What a referral should find on the site

Someone who was given your name will look you up before they call. They want the lawyer, the matter, the office, and a way to make contact that still works that evening.

If the homepage is a slider and a generic welcome, that person has nothing to check.

• A page for each lawyer, with the specifics: where they qualified, the work they do, and the courts or transactions they will mention.
• A page for each matter you want more of. What belongs on that page is set out in our lawyer SEO marketing guide.
• The phone number in the header, including on a phone. A number that lives only in the footer gets missed.
• The address, the hours, and who the person will speak to.

Intake is part of the marketing

An enquiry that sits for two days is a failure you will not see in a traffic chart. Decide who answers, what they ask, and what a matter worth a consult looks like.

Then write that down, and make the form match it.

Name, a way to reply, the matter, and a short note are enough to call someone back. A form with twelve fields feels thorough and gets abandoned.

Do not promise a response time the firm does not keep. If calls are returned the same day, the page can say so.

If they are not, leave the sentence off.

Reviews, results, and the state bar

Prospective clients read reviews, and they read pages that announce a win. State bars differ on testimonials, past results, and words such as specialist and expert.

One state may want a disclaimer. Another may restrict how a result is described, or allow a claim of specialism only with a particular certification.

We will not hand you a stock disclaimer and call it compliance. The firm reads the rules for each state it practises in and tells us what may be said.

We write only what those rules allow. We do not invent clients or the results they got.

The search work, including the Google profile and why we will not publish sets of city pages, is on the lawyer SEO marketing page.

What to count

Count what the firm can see without a dashboard: calls and form enquiries, how many were the right kind of matter, how many became a consult, and how many you were hired for. If a channel produces visits and the wrong files, stop spending on it.

We report those counts. A visit total on its own does not tell you whether the files were the ones you wanted.

What we will not sell

We will not sell a blog calendar with no subjects. We will not sell a rebrand that leaves the pages a client reads untouched, and we will not guarantee rankings.

We will not sell a lead arrangement in which the same person is offered to several firms, unless you have asked who else receives that lead and you still want it.

This is written for US firms, and we quote it per project. UDG ghostwriting, on LinkedIn and X, is a separate part of the group: UDG ghostwriting.