The traditional source of business for most law firms is referrals but a new source is emerging quickly and that is the internet. The internet is a great source of getting qualified prospects for law firms.

In addition to turning to friends and family for help people also turn to the internet for help. They search online for people facing similar situations and what they did to get out of it.

There is huge potential here and law firms who stand out prominently in local searches will stand to gain a lot of business.

I say local searches because that’s what makes the difference between getting a qualified prospect and just a search engine visitor. An Atlanta lawyer is really interested in getting calls from people who are based in Atlanta and nearby regions. It is very unlikely that a Chicago resident will hire a firm in Atlanta for their needs.

This is actually a good thing because it is much easier for your law firm to rank higher in local searches than it is for general generic searches.

Let me explain with some examples:

The phrase “bankruptcy attorneys in Atlanta”, “bankruptcy attorney in Atlanta”, “bankruptcy lawyers in Atlanta”, “bankruptcy lawyer in Atlanta” are used about a 1000 times in a month as Google searches.

If you are a law firm that deals in those matters wouldn’t it be great if every time someone searched these phrases, your website appears on top of the results?

The truth of the matter is optimizing a website to appear on the front page for qualified prospects can be done efficiently given time and effort.

There are several benefits of doing this.

1. Qualified prospects: A specialist will let you know which phrases your potential clients are searching on and will optimize your website accordingly. That means a lot of people that reach your website are likely to convert to customers. You won’t get a large number of search engine visitors who just leave the website in a matter of seconds. This is a more targeted approach.
2. Cost Effective: Optimizing a website for keywords and getting people to land on it is a much cheaper option than having a series of TV ads run during late night TV, and will give the same result over time.
3. Long Term Strategy: Having an online presence is really important in order to do well over time. The majority of your prospects are moving to the web so it is really important that you go where your customers are.

Traditional forms of advertising like television, yellow pages, radio shows are not as effective as they once were longer because that medium is seeing a decline in usage. Most people are migrating to the internet and that’s where you should be if you want to take your law firm internet marketing to the next level in 2010.