How much extra traffic can Martindale.com generate for your law firm’s website?

• Attract visits from legal buyers that are not looking for your website directly
• Establish an online presence for your law firm if you do not have a website

When marketing for law firms, each organization has different strategic priorities and our approach to assessing the additional traffic that Martindale.com could generate for your firm is based on a combination of:

• Understanding of your law firm’s digital marketing strategy
• Historical search behaviour on Martindale.com
• Search engine optimisation and quality visits
• Relevant and up-to-date content
• How your law firm tracks new business

Understanding your law firm’s digital marketing strategy

If your law firm does not already have a website, Martindale.com can provide you with a structured online presence to increase your visibility among international buyers of legal services.

If you have an established website and digital marketing strategy for your law firm, it is helpful to gain an understanding of three sets of information to help us make a more realistic assessment on the amount of additional traffic Martindale.com can help to generate for your law firm:

• Web strategy and objectives - e.g. drive new visits, increase the number of enquiries etc.
• Tactical web activities - e.g. content and natural search, paid advertising campaigns such as Google AdWords or social media activities
• Site performance - performance metrics such as unique visitors, bounce rate, referrers to your website, keyword analysis and popular content.

Historical search behaviour on Martindale.com

Analytics that sit behind Martindale.com provide an excellent starting point to help us make a reasonable calculation of the amount of potential additional traffic that Martindale.com can help to generate for your law firm.

Learn more about the analytics we provide that help you measure return on investment to support your decisions about planned business development tactics as well as track the success of current activities.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) and quality visits

Our continued investment in SEO helps to ensure that Martindale.com maintains its position as the primary international law directory appearing as high as possible in search engine results to attract legal buyers not searching directly for law firms and lawyers on Martindale.com.

A survey by an independent marketing consultancy in January 2010 concluded that Martindale.com attracts visits from a higher quality of visitor than a search engine. Read the conclusions from Deborah McMurray’s research: The efficacy of Martindale.com as a referrer to your website. Essentially it’s due to the quality of the corporate counsel user base on Martindale.com and the extremely low bounce rate.

Take a moment to read a lawyer’s positive reaction to Deborah McMurray’s research on Martindale-Hubbell.

Relevant and up-to-date marketing content for your law firm

Relevant and up-to-date content is king in law firm marketing online. Potential buyers use the information about your law firm as an initial filter to help decide if they want to engage with your law firm further. Treat the content of your profile as you would a CV for a job interview. Providing detailed information about your law firm’s expertise and specific, relevant examples of how lawyers have helped clients will help to ensure that you attract the interest of buyers of legal services who will want to get in touch with you for further information.

Tracking new business for your Law Firm

What procedures does your law firm have in place to accurately track the sources of new business?

Do you use analytics software to monitor the performance of your law firm’s website, including the source of third party referrers? Have you integrated tracking procedures into your client and matter opening routines and is it used by fee-earners and support staff? Are they aware of the importance of this information? All of this data is vital to your law firm's marketing strategy.

While traffic reports from Martindale.com provide performance statistics about your firm’s listing and intelligence about potential buyers, this data should only be part of the information that your law firm uses to track inbound referrals to help support your decision to generate new clients.

Tracking where your new client work comes from helps you to understand how various marketing activities interlink to generate new work. This intelligence helps you to prioritise your marketing budget to undertake more of the activities that actually help to generate new work and less of those that don’t!