How lawyer website profiles boost legal directory submissions

Legal directory rankings are a crucial part of the legal marketing toolkit for any law firm.

As law firm marketing experts, we’ve written many times about the importance of having a legal directory strategy and doing all you can to improve your chances. One overlooked area to improve your legal directory submission is by better marketing your lawyers through an optimised collection of website profiles.

Here, we discuss the perhaps unexpected impact they could have, as well as some places to start.

Lawyer profiles expand your legal directory submission

Word count should be utilised as effectively as possible in any legal directory submission.

Law firms can rest assured that being succinct will not do them any damage — quite the opposite. Judges do their due diligence and research by checking the website profiles of lawyers mentioned in your submissions. By optimising them, you effectively leave yourself with a greater word count to provide additional detail on other questions from the submission that you may not be able to expand on elsewhere.

From a legal marketing perspective, this is ideal space for covering each individual lawyer’s background, specific area of expertise, and any other accomplishments they may have collected during their career to date. Through optimalisation, your law firm is strategically linking them to your legal directory submission as a whole.

Be clear, concise, and current to optimise your lawyer marketing

Here are a handful of boxes to tick with your website’s lawyer profiles. These are a great place to start — but for a more thorough look through your lawyer website profiles, you can speak with our legal directory experts.

Clearly describe the lawyer’s role.

Be clear about what they specialise in, the industries and / or clients they generally serve, and the unique benefit they present to current and potential clients. Use concise, clear, and compelling language when outlining everything, and the reader should have a useful outline.

Highlight professional milestones.

Include qualifications, certifications, and any significant professional achievements, including any previous legal directory or legal award nominations and / or wins. These provide further insight into their specific field expertise and, put simply, build trust that this particular lawyer (and, by way of association, law firm) is a safe pair of hands.

Include (and seek) client testimonials.

What better way to show the potential positive experience new clients may have with you — and complement that legal directory submission you’re writing — than sharing the words of a previous client (even better if it’s one that’s referenced in the submission itself). Multimedia sources here, such as video interviews, are fantastic further endorsements to keep the reader engaged. If these are currently lacking for a particular lawyer, you could either contact past clients or encourage your law firm’s lawyers to include the collection of testimonials in future cases.

Provide links to further content.

Link to other relevant resources across the law firm’s website where possible. This could be case studies a lawyer has worked on or blog posts / articles they’ve previously written, both internally on your own site but also any with reputable external sources, too. This complements the lawyer with a hint of thought leadership to any judges reading, but also acts as an effective backlink strategy for your website’s SEO efforts.

Maintain profiles.

Keep everything up to date! Across the law firm, try to keep on top of lawyer profiles on a regular basis and set it as a specific agenda item whenever a new legal directory submission (or any larger legal marketing project) begins. Set reminders to check in with any new achievements, case results, or changes in your practice area that may want to be mentioned here.

Improve your legal marketing

Optimising your lawyer marketing through website profiles strategically links them to your legal directory submissions by providing comprehensive information to submission judges that, otherwise, would have sat in the submission itself, using up valuable word count.

As well as legal directory submissions, you have legal award submissions and general signposting of your lawyers to keep in mind. This establishes trust and credibility, not only with potential new clients but also Google, who will suddenly see reference to lots of other credible sources of information on your site’s SEO, as well as (in theory) lots more visits to each website profile.

If you need support with your law firm’s legal marketing, including profiles for your lawyers, legal directory submissions, and / or legal award submissions, get in touch with Kidd Aitken’s team of experts today.