More and more of your potential clients are online, and unless you make a comprehensive online marketing strategy, you are going to lose out to your competitors. Let’s face it – the ads for your law firm on your local channel won’t take you as far as they used to in the 20th century.

The internet has changed how people make buying decisions, and that includes hiring bankruptcy law firms as well. It is not enough for people to see ads on TV; they want to find out more about you, engage with you, and communicate with you before committing their time and money. The internet is a great tool for that, and let me list out five things that you can do to make the most of it.

Engage in Search Engine Optimization (SEO): SEO is an activity that makes your website or blog more optimized for search engines, so that your pages rank higher when users search for Atlanta bankruptcy law firms on Google, Bing or Yahoo! You have hundreds of competitors and just having a website for your Atlanta law firm doesn’t mean a lot these days. You have to ensure that it does well in search engines as well so that it shows up on the first page when people search for your services.

Blogging: Blogging allows you to talk about things that are happening in your business, and lets people hear your voice, and also get exposed to similar cases that you are working on in real time. You can talk a little bit about your personal life as well, and that makes you a very real person, and sometimes your readers feel that they know you and are much more likely to hire the services of your Atlanta law firm.

Video Marketing: For those of you familiar with advertising on local television, video marketing will come quite naturally and you’ll love it. The key difference here is that you will get a lot more than 30 seconds to relay your message and your video will contain some practical tips or advice to people who are struggling with bankruptcy in Atlanta. By giving them some advice they can use, you will be establishing your authority and someone they can trust.

Social Media: You might feel that social media tools like Twitter, FaceBook, YouTube etc. are for children, but with 500 million users on FaceBook, and many more on other social media networks, almost everyone is on at least one social network these days. Isn’t it natural then that you go where your potential customers are?

Email Marketing: Even with the rise of social media tools, email is still king. Several studies have proven that people tend to pay a lot more attention to emails that come in their mailbox when compared with Tweets or FaceBook messages, so in that sense an email campaign with regular emails shot off to people who are looking for bankruptcy lawyers in Atlanta yields rich dividends.

Having a comprehensive online marketing strategy can do wonders for your Atlanta bankruptcy law firm, and has become indispensable, as more and more people look to the internet to make their buying decisions.

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.