A strong online presence is one of the main roles of digital marketing. It is highly important as it reinforces your chambers as a brand, helps you stand out from competitors and also gives you the opportunity to showcase your services to all your target audiences.
How to build a strong online presence for your chambers
We have pulled out four of the main aspects of digital marketing you can utilise to build a strong online presence for your chambers. These are all really easy solutions to building up your brands and can be implemented regardless of the size of the chambers.
Optimise for Local Searches
With the rise of mobile search traffic continually on the up, it is crucial that you begin to understand the behaviour and intent of your target audience. As a chambers’ you need to take advantage of this and optimise your website for not only national searches, but also local ones in order to have more of an impact on those reaching you through mobile devices.
“One-third of all mobile searches are related to location” – Think with Google
There are a number of easy-to-implement tactics you can include in your SEO strategy to help target local searches and get your chambers ranking for them.
- Optimise local-based pages (e.g. contact pages) by including the location in both the title and meta description – The Yoast plugin can help you do this
- Find your chambers listed on Google My Business
- Find other relevant directories and get your Chambers and website listed on those too
These are only a few of the many things you can do to help optimise your website for local searches. The main thing to bear in mind when optimising your website is thinking about what the user would want to see.
Engage on Social Media
Engaging on social media may already be something you are actively doing, but there are some really easy ways you can further develop your social strategy in order to help build your Chambers’ online presence.
Firstly, when it comes to the promotion of your news and events content, you want to make sure that your social posts are as eye-catching as possible. On Twitter for example, a tweet that includes an image is more likely to receive 150% more retweets than those without (Buffer). Therefore you want to ensure that the majority, if not all, of your tweets contain an image in order to get the most engagement.
The image could be the classic Twitter card pulled straight from the website link included in the tweet, or you could start to design your own images that could be slightly more eye-catching and stop someone scrolling past.
Another great way to engage is by tagging relevant barristers in social posts. If you have a barrister that is active on social media, and you are promoting a news item related to them, tagging them in the post is a great and really easy way to expand the reach and engagement of the post.
Get Promoting Internally
If you are trying to actively increase the engagement on your social platforms and website to help build a strong online presence, then a good place to start is by promoting your content internally.
An easy way to start is by putting together a weekly (for example) internal newsletter that contains links to each of the key social posts that have been posted that week. This gives you the opportunity to ask barristers and staff to help promote these items by simply sharing, liking or retweeting the content. This simple gesture will dramatically include the reach of the social posts by reaching the barristers’ audiences too.
Review Your Competition
One of the most important things when it comes to building a strong online presence is looking at your competitors and identifying areas that they do well in. For example, if they are ranking above you for a specific keyword term (e.g. Health & Safety Barristers), you would want to look at their page of content and see what keywords you can pull out and how you can improve the structure of your own practice area pages.
It is also worth having a scan through your competitors’ social pages and seeing how they interact on them and the types of content they produce. This can give you some good ideas into how you can develop your own social content and strategy.
