If part of your client development strategy includes targeting specific types of injury victims (think mass torts, pharma, products), you have to be able to move fast.
Lawyers will sometimes contact me with a “big idea” about a new type of mass tort / injury class action audience to which they want to market.
Conceptually, this thinking can be sound. Obviously, it’s a bit speculative as to the viability of pursuing these types of claims. Nonetheless, when they “hit” they may be especially lucrative.
It should also be obvious that the mass tort legal web marketing landscape is particularly competitive. Especially, in well-established keyword marketplaces. However, if you can be first and fast, you may be able to stay ahead of the competition.
The traditional wisdom is that SEO campaigns are long-term. Most of the time, this is true. It can take a relatively long time to go from no visitors to new clients from organic search in competitive, mature keyword marketplaces. However, if you can build web presence in an emerging keyword marketplace, you might be able to beat everyone else to the punch.
If you like the sound of this approach, you’re going to need the ability to launch sites quickly. In fact, you probably need to turn new sites around the same day that you learn of a new potentially dangerous drug, product, etc.
Further, these sites can’t be light. In other words, you need to be able to generate a variety of useful pages as the news about the target emerges. You need to think of your new site like a journalist covering a story on the ground does in the age of the 24-hour news cycle.
Admittedly, this can be exceptionally difficult and require a lot in terms of time and money. Who is launching the sites? Who is writing the content? Who is editing it? A lot of the same problems news agencies face in an environment where speed is given precedence over quality.
Of course, the better your site’s content, the more likely it is to be shared, liked, linked to, and therefore, rank in search engines.
If it’s unrealistic for you to move at that pace, you should consider paid search advertising (SEM, PPC, AdWords, etc).
You should be able to launch paid search campaigns and landing pages much, much faster than you can build useful content sites on a topic.
Typically, I recommend that you investigate an area of new claims with paid search advertising first. Then, as you’ve vetted that the claims are viable, and likely more numerous, you can supplement with an organic strategy.
This is one of the ways that paid search marketing and search engine optimization complement one another.
If you’re going to do this yourself, your process probably needs to look something like this:
- Use Google Alerts or Mention to stay notified when target drugs / products make news.
- Register for a more robust web host (we like WPEngine) that will allow you to launch many sites very quickly.
- Have a few responsive WordPress themes from which to choose. You might register for a developer account with somewhere like Themify.
- Register for a phone call tracking solution that uses dynamic phone insertion (we like Ifbyphone and Call Rail).
- Check out Unbounce for landing page creation and Optimizely for testing.
- You should also probably sign-up for Fotolia or another place you can get a lot of stock imagery.
- You should also have a CRM solution in place to track open files by source (at a minimum). Salesforce and Avvo Ignite are good options.
Remember that speed is the key issue. Much of your success will hinge upon discovering a new opportunity to launching marketable web assets and paid search campaigns. If you can’t be fast, you’ll likely loose to faster competitors.
This is certainly not an approach for all (if not most) plaintiffs’ lawyers. As you might imagine, there are many very well-resourced firms playing in this sandbox. However, if you’re good at spotting new claim opportunities and can react very quickly to launching new campaigns, this might be a very effective approach for you.
Whatever approach you take, don’t forget that, to be successful, you have to understand how people search and find lawyers like you.
