It’s time to scope out the competition in order to set yourself apart. You need to figure out a way to effectively and efficiently stand out from the increasingly crowded marketplace of trial lawyers. The best first step you can do is to search the keywords for attorneys in your area. The best part is that it’s not that difficult to stand out if you do this right. Lawyers are, in many ways, the ultimate copycats. If they see that an argument works, they’ll use it.
If they see that a marketing strategy is working to drum up business for a competitor, they will jump all over it to utilize it for themselves. That’s how you can stand out. Don’t be a lemming and fall victim to merely falling in line with everyone else in your area competing for the same leads, using the same keywords and driving the price of pay-per-click through the roof. So how do you put this into action? You should craft an actionable call to action that’s relevant to those searching for your services, one that gets them to act immediately and contact you.
Then, look at your competitors’ ad extensions — if they’re using them at all — and craft better ones that utilize location, your call to action, site link. Drive traffic they are missing directly to your own site. Finally, and potentially most importantly, accentuate the positive by emphasizing what it is that sets you apart from your competitors. Use your reputation, your services, whatever unique offering you have, to make an internet searcher choose you over the next guy.
Don’t over-monitor the competition, wasting hours (lost billable hours, what could be worse?) obsessively trying to figure out the marketing strategy of all of the other lawyers in your area. Just figure out where they’re focusing their efforts and then make your ads better than theirs. Then, after a little time elapses, go check out how they are now copying you, and implement some changes to differentiate yourself again. Do not fall into the copycat trap. Drive traffic to your site, convert those clicks into clients, and then let your competition copy you.