People throughout the world need lawyers on a daily basis. As a law firm, you want them to employ you, right?

However, people can’t employ you and make use of your services if they don’t know that you exist, which means that it’s absolutely essential to build a strong online presence.

A strong online presence will help more people find you, and can put you at the head of the pack as one of the leading law firms in your area.

Making sure that you appear in the search engine results when people search for lawyers and lawyer related keywords is a major part of building a strong online presence.

You can do this in two ways – through Google AdWords, or through Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). In this article we will compare the pros and cons of both.

SEO

SEO, or search engine optimisation, is the act of making your website appear highly in the search engine results pages for certain keywords or subjects.

It is relatively cheap, it is effective, and it brings results. However, it also takes time to get yourself to the top of the search engine rankings pages.

Pros:

• SEO is relatively cheap compared to AdWords, especially for law firm marketing.
• It isn’t all that hard to get yourself to the top of the search engine results pages, especially if you focus on location-based keywords.
• A well crafted SEO strategy brings results. The majority of people click on one of the first couple of results on a search engine page, which will send them to your website if you rank highly.

Cons:

• SEO takes time.
• SEO takes a fair bit of work, especially creating content and building backlinks.
• Competitive keywords like ‘lawyer’ or ‘law firm’ can be quite difficult to rank for.

AdWords

Google AdWords involves paying for your website to appear on the search engine results page for particular keywords.

Unfortunately, AdWords marketing can be very competitive, and therefore expensive for law firms. This means that, unless you have a huge budget, you should probably focus on SEO.

Pros:

• AdWords allows new law firms to get their name out there.
• AdWords allows your website to be placed at the top of the search engine results page, irrespective of your SEO ranking.
• AdWords can drive more traffic to your website.

Cons:

• When it comes to law firm marketing, AdWords can be quite expensive.
• It can be very difficult to master using AdWords, which means that you will probably have to pay an expert to do your AdWords marketing for you.
• Unless you do it right, AdWords marketing can take a lot of money, fast.

Final Word

Both Google AdWords and SEO are effective methods of online marketing for law firms.

However, AdWords can be extremely competitive, and therefore quite expensive for lawyers, which means that you should focus on SEO, which costs less in the long term.

If you have a large advertising budget, you can try and rank at the top of the search engine results pages, while also advertising through AdWords.

This can create consumer confidence and encourage people to visit your website.