Personal Injury Lawyer Marketing

The online legal market is a densely saturated landscape. If your current marketing efforts are falling short or traditional advertising has let you down, you’re missing out on important leads.

Your clients can’t find you if you aren’t keeping up with the latest in personal injury lawyer marketing. In an ever-evolving, rapidly changing field, we want to help you revolutionize your approach to legal industry marketing. From personal injury SEO and blog posts to utilizing social media platforms, there is a solution out there for you. You just have to be willing to go after it.

The reality is that most law firms look at online marketing as checking off a few keywords, throwing up some quick content, and then waiting for more leads that will never actually show up. That’s because growing personal injury law firms through search engine marketing requires a significant time investment.

Here at GAVL, we pride ourselves on the dedication and tenacity of our digital marketing team. We’re here to support, guide, and grow your marketing journey every step of the way.

How Do You Grow a Personal Injury Law Firm in Today’s Online World?

In today’s online world, the most effective way to grow a personal injury law firm is to build a strong digital marketing strategy that:

Creates brand awareness,
Increases your visibility to your target audience,
Represents your personal injury attorneys’ values,
Makes use of competitor analysis, and
Is rooted in current best practices for personal injury SEO.

What Is Digital Marketing and Why Does It Matter for the Legal Industry?

Digital marketing is a branch of marketing that encompasses the use of digital and online technology to target and reach audiences as they use their desktop computers, laptops, smartphones, tablets, and other internet-accessible devices.

There are many different components and strategies that fall under the bigger umbrella of “digital marketing.” Whether you’re trying to rank on Google’s first page or want to see increased interaction with your online contact form, digital and online law firm marketing has the solution—you just have to be ready to take the first step.

The Top Six Essential Types of Digital Marketing for Personal Injury Attorneys

As a personal injury law firm, you don’t need to employ every single online marketing strategy out there. At GAVL, we have narrowed down the top six forms of personal injury marketing in the digital world. Not every single strategy might be right for you, which is why it’s important to first evaluate how your firm is currently performing and where you may be lacking.

#1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Want to rank higher on the Google search engine results page (SERP)? Stuck nine or ten pages deep but want your law firm to be listed on page one? Then you’re looking for improved search engine optimization.

One of the most important aspects of search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of carefully researching keywords and phrases, then building useful, authoritative content around them.

Google’s search engine AI is incredibly advanced, so you’ll have to do a lot more than just stuff as many keywords and phrases as possible into a piece of content. Google and other search engines are specifically looking for helpful content that is geared toward human readers, not toward pleasing the system. This means that you need more than good keywords—you need excellent written content.

#2. Social Media Marketing

Seven out of ten people in America use at least one type of social media, a statistic that seems unlikely to change at any point in the near future. You’ll find 81% of adults on Facebook and another 69% who regularly use YouTube. Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat, TikTok, and Reddit make up a significant portion of many people’s online usage. One study even found that 40% of young people do most of their online searching on Instagram or TikTok instead of Google’s search engine.

Social media platforms provide an untapped source of market exposure for personal injury law firms just like yours.

The good news is that you don’t have to be on every social media network. No one’s saying you have to start learning TikTok dances just to bring new clients in the door. For most personal injury attorneys, having a presence on social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn is a good jumping-off point.

#3. Content Marketing

From your landing and practice area pages to your “About Us” and testimonials page, every piece of content on your website should function with a shared goal—to move readers toward taking action.

You don’t want someone to visit your website, take one look, and then leave. But how do you make them stay?

Really. Great. Content.

Every piece of content on your law firm’s website should perform a few key functions. It should be:

Informative
Authoritative
Compelling
Easy to understand

Most importantly, the written content on your personal injury practice website should establish you as an expert in what you do. Injury victims don’t want to work with a personal injury lawyer who isn’t an expert in their subject matter.

That’s why the in-house content writing team at GAVL creates well-researched, highly informative landing pages, practice area pages, and blogs that build trust with your personal injury clients.

#4. Video Marketing

You might associate younger demographics with video-heavy social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. The tide has relatively recently shifted toward video content, but that doesn’t mean it should be considered a trend for dancing teenagers.

A 2023 report found that over 60% of Gen Z adults use TikTok on a daily basis. And adults aren’t just scrolling for entertainment—they’re looking for information they need to make major life decisions. More than ever before, people of all ages and demographics are turning to video content for answers.

Video isn’t just the future of online marketing. It’s the now of online marketing.

There are multiple ways you can use video to strengthen your brand and reach your marketing goals. Some of the best way to make use of the video medium are:

Client testimonials, stories, and interviews
Meet-our-team videos
Videos to explain practice areas
Brand and firm introduction
Blogs and how-to topics
Short Q&A videos with your attorneys
Answers to FAQs

The great thing about video marketing is that there’s really no limit to what you can do.

Video is one of the best ways to inspire trust, engage prospective clients, tell a story, and convey information that sticks. Did you know that 91% of people say they want to see more video content from brands and businesses? Using strategic video content in your online marketing strategy is simply the best way to meet the demands of today’s consumers.

You know you’re the law firm that best meets your target audience’s needs—tell them why in a video.

#5. Mobile Marketing

Some 11% of mobile phone users spend up to seven hours a day on their phones, while only around 5% use their phones for fewer than one hour a day. While these are two extremes, you should know that the average adult in the United States spends three hours and 15 minutes on their phone each and every day.

If personal injury lawyers want to recruit new clients, they need to meet them where they are—on their technology.

Smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices should play a key role in your legal marketing strategy. This means designing an internet marketing strategy for mobile technology. How people search for things on their phones is different than how they search on their computers, partly due to voice-to-text technology, smaller keyboards, and different reasons for searching.

Still not convinced you should care about mobile marketing? Think about this:

58% of Google searches originate on mobile devices.
Mobile-optimized websites have conversion rates that are as much as 300% higher than conversion rates on websites that are not optimized to be viewed on a phone screen.

No law firm marketing plan is complete without a strategy for reaching the target audience on their phones and other mobile devices.

#6 Awesome Website Design

What does your website tell visitors? Are you a professional firm that takes legal matters seriously? Are you a modern office that is prepared to meet the unique challenges of today’s personal injury clients?

Your website is the first interaction that many clients will have with you and your office. A streamlined, well-organized, professional website is non-negotiable in the highly competitive world of personal injury law.

At GAVL, we build stunning websites from the ground up using some of the most advanced tools available, including WP engine.

Why Bother With Digital Marketing for Personal Injury Firms?

Your target audience doesn’t need you until they’re hurt, so why bother accumulating more potential clients who haven’t even been in a car accident yet? In the legal industry, brand awareness isn’t important until it is, and when your prospective clients are in need of help, you want one of two things to happen:

They already know who you are and what you do, OR
Your personal injury law firm’s website is easy to find, fast to load, authoritative, and accessible.

One out of every three people who need a personal injury attorney starts with a Google search. If you’re not investing in your business development through comprehensive digital advertising strategies, you’re not going to show up in the search results.

Digital personal injury lawyer advertising isn’t an option anymore; it’s a requirement for upward growth and expanded brand recognition.

The Role of Marketing Analytics for a Personal Injury Practice

You’re embarking on a new personal injury marketing plan with the goal of raising awareness of your firm and generating qualified leads. So how do you know that it’s actually working?

Marketing analytics is the method of tracking marketing efforts, analyzing collected data, and drawing conclusions about the effectiveness of current strategies. With marketing analytics, you can:

Build stronger marketing strategies for the future
Improve your clients’ experiences
Get the best return on investment (ROI)

Personal injury lawyers who are data-driven in their approach to digital and online marketing are significantly more likely to see positive results from their efforts.

Understanding Your Client’s Journey With Marketing Analytics

Does your personal injury law firm know the journey your client takes from their initial injury to contacting you for help? Your work doesn’t start the moment they send you an email or call your office. If you don’t recognize and acknowledge the path your potential clients take to you, you’ll never be able to fully utilize the marketing strategies at your disposal.

Spend some time researching what an injury victim does before reaching out to a law office and what path ultimately leads them to you. How many of your clients are referral-based vs. how many come to you through an online search? Do they call a lawyer before or after they call a doctor? Are they searching for you on Google or through social media networks?

Don’t assume anything about your clients. Learn what their needs are and meet them there.

Stacking Growth With Multiple Marketing Channels

Now you know that injury law firm marketing encompasses a wide range of tools and approaches. So what do you do with that information? Run a social media campaign, write a few blogs, and hope for the best?

The most effective personal injury lawyer marketing efforts are rooted in the practice of stacking multiple marketing channels in one connected and strategic plan. You won’t grow your client base by writing a single blog or sharing a few social media posts—it’s the accumulation of multiple efforts over time that will help your marketing plan succeed.

As many law firms have already learned, successful internet marketing includes approaches like:

All-site SEO and local SEO strategies
Well-researched and informative blog posts
A strong social media presence
A maintained and updated Google Business Profile
Strategic email and newsletter marketing

Your multiple channels should cross streams, building an interconnected approach that shines a spotlight on your personal injury practice. Share your blog posts on social media, update your newsletter recipients about your latest charitable effort, and create SEO-optimized practice area pages that naturally steer people toward contacting your law office.

With GAVL, building out multiple marketing channels is a process that we want you to feel confident in.

We’ve seen time and time again how this process can elevate a personal injury law office to become a trusted local brand.

Choosing Your Digital Marketing Campaign Goals

Personal injury law firms who dive into online marketing campaigns without any discernable goals are unlikely to get the results they are really after—qualified leads for more clients.

Every personal injury lawyer marketing plan should be precise, goal-oriented, scalable, and measurable.

So what does this mean?

Precise – Your plan should leave no unanswered questions regarding marketing strategies. Avoid using vague expressions, and make sure everything is clearly defined and easily understood.
Goal-oriented – Is there part of your plan that isn’t serving your personal injury marketing goal? Then there’s no point in it being there. Tailor your marketing strategy until every aspect of it supports your final goal.
Scalable – Your marketing plan is an opportunity for you to envision the future growth of your personal injury firm. Make sure there’s room to build and grow your current strategies and efforts.
Measurable – Are your new marketing efforts actually working? How do you know? Incorporate methods to track everything from your Google SERP ranking to dwell time and click-through rates.

How do you decide what the goal of your digital marketing strategy is? At GAVL, we know that no two personal injury firms are alike. From solo practitioners in small markets to large, multi-attorney practices in highly competitive areas, every law firm deserves to have a personal online marketing strategy that reflects their needs and goals.

Your Injury Law Firm Marketing Plan Checklist

So are you ready to jump head-first into the world of online marketing? First, you need to make sure that you have essential elements of your marketing plan in place.

Identify your audience and their needs
Create a marketing framework
Employ current SEO techniques
Update, improve, or rewrite your landing page and pages for practice areas
Create a testing calendar
Employ hands-on monitoring

We cannot stress enough how important it is to constantly monitor and update your marketing strategies and on-page content. Adopting a “once and done” mindset might result in short-term positive gains but will only lead to dwindling traffic and reduced brand recognition in the future.

Marketing in a digital world requires a hands-on approach with constant monitoring, which is why so many personal injury lawyers choose to hire an outside marketing company.

Update Existing Content To Attract New Clients

There is no such thing as “set it and forget it” when it comes to digital marketing for personal injury firms. You have to recognize that your direct competitors who are serious about succeeding in an online space will be dedicated to constantly revamping and updating their existing content to make it the best it can possibly be.

With ever-evolving Google search algorithm standards and changing client markets, adopting a mindset of “once and done” will only serve as a detriment to you and your brand. Online and digital personal injury marketing demands that content be regularly evaluated for deficiencies and updated as regularly as needed.

If your content is still referencing injury statistics from 2005, visitors to your site can’t trust that they’re accessing the most relevant and up-to-date legal information possible.

Optimizing On-Page Content for SEO Success

The goal of content optimization is to help your content rank higher on Google’s search engine results page. Although there is definitely more at play, most personal injury lawyers find that the higher they rank, the greater number of leads they get. A highly optimized website can improve your brand awareness, generate a higher return on investment (ROI) for your efforts, and build a greater sense of trust between you and your audience.

Strategies for website optimization that every personal injury firm can put into practice include:

Creating robust backlinks
Monitoring keyword density
Finding a balance of external and internal links
Emphasizing key topics with meta tags
Improving page loading speed
Submitting your website’s sitemap to Google
Taking advantage of “index” and “no index” tags
Creating useful images and infographics
Interspersing text with videos and pictures

Crawling and indexing are the methods by which Google discovers pages and on-page links and then analyzes and stores that data for the purpose of search results.

It’s All About EEAT-ing

Quality guidelines from Google emphasize E-E-A-T: experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Let’s take a deeper look at what these terms really mean:

Experience – Do you have first-hand experience handling complex legal matters within the world of personal injury?
Expertise – Do you have the knowledge and background that is necessary to successfully handle a potential client’s personal injury claim?
Authoritativeness – What qualifies you to be an authority on this subject matter?
Trustworthiness – Can the personal injury attorneys at your law firm be trusted to handle sensitive legal matters?

So how do you create great content that the Google algorithm will love? It’s easy—don’t write for Google. You should never create content based on what you think will make a tech giant like Google happy. Instead, create well-researched, topical, and helpful content geared toward your readers and potential clients.

That’s right, Google rewards helpful content over content that is created for the sole purpose of ranking well. You’ll still have to play by the rules, and keyword research as part of producing personal injury marketing ideas will be key, but your E-E-A-T score will only improve when you shift your focus to providing informative content to readers.

The Importance of Keyword Research

Are you ranking #1 for a keyword or phrase that no one is searching for? Congratulations! You get…nothing. No increase in traffic, no client leads, no one filling out your online form or calling your office.

A focus keyword is supposed to be the best and most accurate descriptor of the content on your page. It’s the searchable term or phrase that you’re trying to get your page to rank for on Google’s SERP. So why is the keyword you’re targeting so important? Without the right research, you could be describing your services with one set of keywords or phrases while your potential clients are searching for something completely different.

When performing keyword research, there are three main features you should pay careful attention to:

Relevance
Authority
Volume

The marketing team at GAVL conducts thorough, in-depth research on what keywords are currently ranking well, which have the highest competition, and how our clients can benefit from adjusting or changing their target keywords. Our research doesn’t end at the beginning of the writing process, either. We are constantly evolving our approach and on-page content to ensure that our clients are targeting the best possible keywords and phrases.

Showcase Your Role in the Community With Location-Specific Content

Localized content is given priority on Google’s SERP. When you search for “personal injury lawyer” on Google, you’ll first be met with a list of paid ads followed by a map pack (or local pack). This map pack features a map of your local area or city and a list of local businesses that fall under the term you searched. The relevance of targeted keywords and location determines whether your law firm will show up in this section of the SERP.

Local SEO encompasses more than just the map pack, though. To position yourself as an authoritative and trustworthy local firm, showcase your connection to your city or community.

You can do this by:

Writing impactful blogs on local events
Creating a “Giving Back” page to showcase your support of local charities
Creating and managing a Google Business Profile
Submitting your law firm’s information to local business directories
Making connections with local businesses for link building campaigns

Utilizing Your Google Business Profile

Google Business Profile (formerly known as Google My Business) is an online tool designed to give business owners a say in how they appear on Google.

But if you already have a website and a strong social media presence, what’s the point of adding in another strategy to your marketing plan? When you create and maintain a Google Business Profile, you will:

Be more visible to searchers
Appear in the local map pack listings
Receive reviews from clients you’ve helped
Have access to useful data and insights

Law firms that lack a Google Business Profile may be perceived as less established and less trustworthy. Your clients live in an online world, and they expect to be able to find everything from your firm’s hours of operations to its busiest times and days conveniently listed in the same easy-to-understand format that most other businesses use.

A Google Business Profile fits perfectly into any plan regardless of marketing budget because, perhaps most importantly, it’s totally free to use.

Organically Growing Backlinks

When another website links to your page, we call that a backlink. Also referred to as an inbound or incoming link, a backlink is, at its most basic, a link that leads from another website to yours.

Backlinks are a cornerstone of SEO. They help establish you as an authoritative and trustworthy source of information, which ultimately increases your chances of ranking higher on Google’s SERP.

Getting backlinks can be one of the most challenging aspects of any internet marketing plan. So aside from creating high-quality and informative content, what else can you do?

Use the Skyscraper Technique

The Skyscraper Technique builds on past content that’s performing well and earning backlinks to create upward growth. There are only three steps to this technique:

Identify content that’s already earned lots of backlinks.
Create new and improved content similar to your highest-performing pieces in terms of backlinks.
Promote the new content to the individuals and organizations that gave backlinks to the original content.

Conduct Link Gap Analysis

Tools like SEMrush’s Backlink Gap tool help you identify websites that are linking to your competitors but not to you.

In general, websites that have linked to your competitors are much more likely to also link to your content. Of course, not every website identified through gap link analysis is a great match for your site. Some may have little to no relevance to your personal injury services, while others might be spammy or untrustworthy.

Not all backlinks are good links. You don’t want links from untrustworthy sites—your E-E-A-T score may take a hit.

Engage in Your Local Community

Have a locally owned coffee shop your personal injury lawyers often frequent? Is there a community charity you’re proud to support? Are you speaking at an upcoming event?

These are all examples of unique opportunities to organically build backlinks. You should be creating and crafting content about everything your law firm is doing and then reaching out to individuals, organizations, and community organizers who you think will be interested in linking back.

Video Production and Content

In an online world, video is king.

Videos increase the amount of time unique visitors spend on a page, an invaluable metric that boosts your SEO ranking. So is dropping a couple of YouTube videos into your website a smart strategy for increasing dwell time and converting visitors to clients? Not quite.

When someone is searching for a personal injury attorney, they are often experiencing some of the most difficult times of their lives. They’re hurt, scared, and want to speak with someone who is empathetic to what they’re dealing with.

You want a video that says I’m here, I understand, and I have the experience to help.

Our in-house cinematography team has the experience and knowledge needed to create a wide range of video products that fit the tone and theme of your services. Whether you’d like to create vlogs about how to talk to an insurance adjuster or want to capture video testimony from those you’ve helped, GAVL has you covered.

Results-Driven Digital Marketing for Personal Injury Law Firms

At GAVL, we know that small details drive big results. If every aspect of your current online marketing strategy isn’t helping build a sense of trust and expertise with your audience, you’re missing out. Because the truth of the matter is, when people can’t find your law firm, you lose.

We want to help you win.

No matter your current strategy or marketing budget, we want to talk to you about what a renewed focus on personal injury lawyer marketing can do for you.

We help law firms sign more cases.