The legal marketing industry has been oversaturated since COVID. It’s an industry that allows for remote work, caters to a high-value clientele, and focuses on the increasingly challenging pain point of visibility.
The main issue that becomes apparent when working with legal marketing agencies over time is that they can struggle to solve their clients’ visibility problem that they set out to solve due to a number of factors, primarily the complexity of modern digital marketing. As such, these agencies have begun to splinter off into different sects of marketing:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) agencies who have recently pivoted to become AI Optimization (AIO) or Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) agencies
- Pay-Per-Click (PPC) agencies, who have pivoted to become full-scale advertising agencies by offering Media Buying services for their clients
- Social Media Management (SMM) agencies who have recently pivoted to become Production Companies focused on TikTok, Meta Reels, and YouTube Shorts
No matter the name or speciality, they all sell you commoditized services. SEO (now called AIO or GEO), PPC, and SMM. Interestingly, the services they offer and the solutions they provide are commodities. They rarely differ from agency to agency and client to client.
An argument can be made that they are pressed under a difficult economy and need to standardize their workflows to keep profit margins up. While meant to lower bandwidth, this leads to the illusion that they can take on more clients, which creates subsequent bandwidth issues. Moreover, now that artificial intelligence (AI) has entered the marketing sphere, that illusion grows stronger and the commoditization grows more glaring.
Fortunately, we’re going to shed some light so that you can feel more equipped to speak with agencies trying to sell you the same services packaged up with a different logo.
What You Need to Know About Law Firm SEO, AIO, and GEO Agencies
Agencies that provide search engine optimization and AI search optimization tend to juggle a lot of balls for their clients:
- On-site SEO
- Off-site SEO
- Local SEO
- Technical SEO
Across the board, they rely on the following platforms:
- Google Analytics for web traffic data
- Google Search Console for impressions and click through rates (CTR)
- HotJar for user behavior data
- Moz, SEMrush, or Ahrefs for keyword tracking
These agencies brand themselves as “strategy agencies” or “lead gen agencies” that can bring you more leads than any other agency because of a patented or proprietary workflow; however, on the surface, they are primarily brand awareness agencies.
Their main metrics are:
- Organic web traffic
- Referral web traffic
- Online visibility
- Search engine results page (SERP) rank
- AI search response citation numbers
Because search engines have quickly evolved into AI-powered platforms and the public is quickly trending to rely on AI services like ChatGPT and Claude more than Google and other search engines, SEO has aptly rebranded itself to artificial intelligence optimization (AIO) or generative engine optimization (GEO). The phrase “SEO is dead” is thrown around a lot, but it’s really only had a makeover.
No matter what kind of optimization the agency does, it’s primarily bringing in top-of-funnel or middle-of-funnel leads who are not as likely to convert into clients.
SEO Agency Lead Generation Numbers
Your legal SEO agency may very well report increases in leads that correlate directly to the work they did for your law firm, but in reality, it’s not exactly a one-to-one comparison.
Getting organic leads is a numbers game and involves much more complex maneuvers than optimizing the speed at which a web page loads, the structure of that page, where the call-to-action form appears, and the number of times a keyword appears.
SEO Agencies are at the mercy of Google and the other search engines. When your stats are up, you see it as a job well done by them. When your stats are down, it’s the search algorithm’s fault.
In reality, they are doing what they can to get more users to see and click on your website. Everything else is bonus when you’re dealing with a purely SEO-centric agency. The conversation changes when your agency incorporates other forms of marketing into their services.
What You Need to Know About Law Firm PPC Agencies
Agencies that provide digital advertising services through pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns are actually tapping into a system designed to churn your law firm’s marketing budget into traffic and leads more efficiently than SEO solutions while still leaving you to the whims of factors out of their control.
That said, PPC agencies have much more control over the efficacy of legal marketing relative to their organic search counterparts. There’s a lot to be said for paying to be placed directly in front of your target audience. However, PPC can quickly become the basket holding all your eggs because of this. Take this course of action with moderation.
Modern PPC campaigns have the following formats:
- Text (Traditional Google ads with a headline, description, and potentially a few links to a landing page)
- Display (Static or dynamic image advertisements often seen as squares, banners, and “towers” on third-party sites)
- Video (Pre-roll and mid-stream YouTube advertisements, and connected television [CTV] or streaming [OTT] commercials)
- Audio (Podcast, radio, and music streaming advertisements)
- Native (Advertisements that look like organic content posted on social platforms and other online communities)
While there is great variety that comes with this style of marketing, the advertisements that often come out of digital ad agencies for lawyers do not feature a ton of personalization or uniqueness. As the legal industry grows more crowded, it’s the duty of your marketing agency to help your firm stand out and not just go through the motions.
It’s important to note that there are certainly some ad agencies that create incredibly unique advertising experiences for their clients’ audiences, but it’s often difficult to find these rare instances in legal marketing.
What You Need to Know About Social Media Management Agencies
Agencies that provide social media ideation, posting, and analysis solutions for law firms do a lot of heavy lifting in today’s legal market. When you think of a lawyer, you’re also thinking of a person who hates taking time away from cases to post a Reel on Instagram.
The fact of the matter is that social media is ever present in our society. Therefore, there has never been a more important time for law firms to develop communities for their target audiences. It may seem crazy to new attorneys and lawyers who work at smaller firms, but we have actually worked hand-in-hand with several law firms around the United States who have built strong online communities around the content they create. Their SMM agencies and consultants have their fingers on the pulse of each social platform’s algorithm.
Outside of simply posting for their clients, SMM agencies also:
- Respond to comments on their clients’ posts
- Respond to direct messages to their clients’ profiles
- Comment on other profiles’ posts that are strategically aligned with their clients’ needs
- Ideate and design image and video posts from scratch or at least templates
- Draft copywriting and descriptions for each and every post
The issue that often arises when a law firm relies on a social media manager is the feeling that social trends aren’t moving the needle for their business. Why would someone want to watch an attorney do some dance that has gone viral? Therein lies the answer. It’s all about personality. SMM agencies’ primary goal is to bring out the personality of a law firm and show the world that it employs people, not just suits.
However, SMM agencies share the same obstacle as the other two: bandwidth limitations. Think of how many social platforms the market expects you to keep up with. Between Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, X, BlueSky, and even Reddit, there are plenty of communities looking for your content and more are showing up all the time. When your agency has several clients, the number of posts they need to share across all platforms multiplies quickly.
Further, SMM is more considered to be a brand awareness play than a lead generation tactic in legal marketing.
Bringing the Different Legal Marketing Agencies Together
When a law firm decides to work on their marketing, they often start out strong but get buried in client work. This leads to reprioritizing time to focus on client cases and consider marketing an ancillary task. However, that’s when the downward spiral begins that causes the need for them to hire an agency.
In today’s market, law firms need to have their:
- Organic visibility (SEO, AIO, and GEO) managed and resilient to algorithm updates and shifts in the search market
- Paid visibility (PPC, CTV ads) budgeted and compliant with different channel requirements
- Social visibility (Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, etc.) trendy and resonant with regular posts and engagement
As a result, agencies have begun double dipping and doing multiple tasks for their clients. This has lead to a regression of agencies going back to being general marketing agencies for their law firm clients.
Remember that bandwidth issues led to a need to niche down and become more specialized. The bandwidth issues were more manageable, but they still remained. Now, they’re reversing and the bandwidth issues are becoming more difficult. Eventually, there will be a time when agencies niche down again and the cycle continues.
These bandwidth issues will never go away. However, they are an omen to an even deeper issue. Less time can be spent on strategy. The law firms that have a strong brand strategy that guides their SEO, advertising, and social media activity become the firms that standout and dominate the market over their competitors who simply target the same keywords, post the same viral social trends, and promote the same standardized advertisements.
While SEO, PPC, and SMM are all required for a well-rounded legal marketing strategy, the through line is the concept of strategy.
The Value of Law Firm branding and marketing Strategy
Strategy is the factor that makes or breaks SEO, PPC, and SMM. It’s the element that is required in all forms of marketing and branding. When it comes to successful law firms, the haves and the have nots are determined by who has the stronger, more unique, and resilient strategies for audience engagement. After all, just because you get seen by someone doesn’t mean they’re going to react how you’d like.
Creating a Guiding Strategy for Law Firms
No matter what a law firm does to position itself in the market and become more visible, there tends to always be one major error in the strategy: they blindly focus on what their competitors are doing.
They use keyword tracking tools to find out that their primary competitors are ranking well for keywords they don’t have on their own website, so it becomes a sprint to outrank them. However, they do not have data on whether those keywords generate any leads.
They use social media benchmarking platforms to see what their competitors are posting to generate likes and followers. However, they do not have data on whether those followers become clients.
Strategy is less about keeping up with the Joneses and more about resonating with your audience. When a law firm is figuring out what keywords to rank for, what social trends to engage in, and what channels to advertise on, they must identify their audience in each case. When you home in on your audience while your competitors focus on each other, the amount of low hanging fruit and white space available for you to capitalize on becomes astounding.
Developing an Audience-Focused Brand for Your Law Firm
A law firm’s brand needs authority and authenticity to be found online. However, to resonate with audiences, humanization is required. A brand full of suits is only that, and while a sterile approach to presentation may help garner some clients, you’ll gather many more by relating to others on a human level. This is accomplished in three easy steps:
- Understand your audience through social listening and surveying.
- Develop your creative strategy and outreach campaigns around your findings.
- Benchmark against your primary competitors and see how they resonate with audiences better.
Once you complete Step 3, adjust and repeat.
Partner With an Experienced Strategy Agency
Our team has worked with all forms of legal marketing agencies and is proud to be a strategy partner to agencies and law firms around the country. The key differentiator between Valley and other agencies is that we are a branding agency. We care about positioning and how your audience sees you relative to your competitors.
When you work with a marketing agency, they make you seen by your audience. When you add Valley into your marketing mix, we make you resonate with your audience. Contact us today to see how we can be the strategy partner for your law firm or legal marketing agency today.