The Frugal Attorney’s Guide to Headshots

Some professions, such as social media influencers, attract image-conscious people who enjoy making genuine or false displays of wealth; pharmaceutical reps tend to be hired on the basis of their good looks, too.  On the other hand, librarians and computer programmers tend to be introverts who don’t care about their own image or anyone else’s.  

Making a good impression, with the appearance of professionalism, is part of your job as a lawyer. However, as any client who is still struggling financially after filing a lawsuit knows, it is easier to find lawyers who are good at looking like lawyers than it is to find lawyers who are thorough and thoughtful enough to help clients get a successful outcome and even harder to find lawyers who can do this for an affordable price.  The things that make you stand out as a lawyer do not come across in a picture; professionalism is on the inside just as much as beauty is.  Despite this, your legal marketing content is not complete without a headshot on your law firm’s website.

Headshots Are Not Just for Photogenic Lawyers Anymore

If you think that prospective clients care more about whether you can help them resolve a probate dispute or car accident claim or modify a parenting plan than they do about how you look, you are correct.  Despite this, you need a headshot of yourself somewhere on your law firm’s website.  It can be on your attorney bio page instead of on one of the pages of your site that you regularly visit so that, if you don’t like looking at pictures of yourself, you don’t have to worry about your own face staring back at you every time you look something up on your own website.  It is important for clients to see a picture of you because the conversation at the initial conversation begins in the client’s mind before the client even fills out the contact form; prospective clients need a face to which to address their imagined discourse before they meet you in person.

If your law firm operates on a shoestring budget, you don’t have to get the picture taken professionally, but it should show you look your most professional.  You should use a picture that someone else took of you when you were standing in front of a blank wall at a conference while dressed in a business suit, for example.  Google will recognize this as a picture of a lawyer, even if your town and your practice area lend themselves to casual dress so that when you meet clients for the first time, you are usually wearing jeans and a T-shirt of your favorite sports team.

You Only Need One Headshot, but You Should Update Your Blog Frequently

A headshot is just one component of a comprehensive digital marketing strategy.  The professional law firm content marketers at Law Blog Writers, LLC can create custom-written blog posts that show your true personality more than your headshot does.

Think Locally to Feel the Pulse of Your Target Audience

These days, we use apps to order groceries, and many of us have not set foot in a bank in years, even if we are fortunate enough to have a bank account.  This does not mean that local business is a thing of the past, though.  For example, you probably know your dental hygienist and the person who cuts your hair by name, and you might have even gotten recommendations from them about local restaurants that have since become your favorites.  Yes, it is possible to download templates of legal forms from the Internet, but when people realize that they are in over their heads and need to hire a lawyer, they look locally, and if your law firm’s website is sufficiently visible to Google, they will find you.  Your legal marketing content is your opportunity to show local clients that you can meet their needs.

One Afternoon of People Watching Is Worth a Thousand Customer Personas

Marketing professionals sometimes create customer personas for businesses; they sometimes call them buyer personas, but the attorney-client relationship is not really about buying and selling.  The classic example of a customer persona is Becky, the soccer mom, the target audience for the Contemporary Christian radio format.  No one wants to be a buyer persona; the idea of turning the beneficiaries of your services into a product is horrifying.

Instead of trying to create your customers in a thought experiment on a whiteboard in a cubicle farm, meet them where they are.  Spend a day people-watching; remember, you don’t have to market your services to the entire American public, only the ones in your city.  If you are a family law attorney, spend a day at an indoor playground with a hefty admission fee, where the children play with environmentally sustainable toys while one mom tells another, “I knew I wasn’t going to have any more babies, so I decided to get a puppy.”  If any of the parents here are divorced, what are their co-parenting challenges?  What are the child-related expenses they will have to fight about or cut back on if they get divorced?  To find out about the co-parenting challenges of working-class parents, go to Chuck E. Cheese.  You might not be able to hear over the noise, but you will see what it looks like when cash-strapped parents try to make room for some fun in their limited parenting time.  What do the parents at the pricey indoor playground and at Chuck E. Cheese need from you?

Local content marketing is not just about adding oranges to your logo if you practice law in Florida and adding crabs to it if you practice law in Maryland.  It is about responding to the needs of real people in your community, in person and online.

Your Local Focus Will Show, Even If You Hire Professionals to Write Your Blog

The professional law firm content marketers at Law Blog Writers, LLC can deliver custom-written blog posts that show your awareness of the needs of your local target audience.

The Role of Practice Area Content Pages in Your Law Firm’s Digital Marketing Strategy

If you have done rudimentary research on search engine optimization (SEO) and are trying to create the perfect website for your law firm, one that Google will immediately notice because it stands out from the crowd, you are making one of two mistakes.  Either you didn’t read the SEO advice carefully enough, you zoned out during the instructional video, or you took advice from one of the legions of uninformed content creators who noisily give advice on the Internet.  SEO is not about entire websites; that is not how Google’s algorithms work. 

Instead, search engines seek and find individual web pages; if any of the pages on your site ranks first among organic search results, you win.  In the context of individual searches, it doesn’t matter whether your law firm’s website has one page or hundreds, as long as the page that Google ranks in first place belongs to you.  In practice, though, it counts in your page’s favor if it links to other pages within your site and if this site gets new pages added to it frequently.  This means that you should continue to add legal marketing content to your law firm’s website, but practice area pages are at least as important as blog posts.

A Practice Area Page Is Not a Blog Post

Blogs are a practical way to keep adding new pages to your site and updating its content; they also diversify your keyword repertoire.  Any business can have a blog on its site, from a burger joint that reposts jokey social media content and delves into local lore to a law firm where each blog post provides informative content about its state laws or analysis of legal cases that have made the news.

Blog posts are not the only type of web page that can proliferate on your site.  You should also have practice area pages that provide an introduction.  For example, if yours is a personal injury law firm, you can have practice area pages about car accidents, truck accidents, motorcycle accidents, and premises liability.  Each practice area page should provide a simple overview of the area.  Unlike blog posts, practice area pages should be evergreen.

A Practice Area Page Is Not a Landing Page

While the content on practice area pages tends to be simple and general a practice area page is not the same as a landing page.  Practice area pages should be informative and give clients what to expect.  By contrast landing pages, which are the pages that appear when a user clicks a clickable ad, have minimal content and are mainly window dressing for a button that enables the user to fill out an online contact form or submit payment.

Too Many Practice Area Pages Is Better Than Too Few

The professional law firm content marketers at Law Blog Writers, LLC will create legally accurate, custom-written practice area pages for each of your law firm’s practice areas.