Traditionally, lawyers and law firms had to rely on word-of-mouth marketing and referrals to bring in new clients to their practice. This is no longer the case today. If you want your law firm to succeed, you need to utilize the power of Google. In particular, you need to maximize the power of Google lawyer reviews.
Discover how online reviews play a role in your overall marketing strategy and ways in which you can leverage its power to gain more clients for your practice.
How to Leverage Google Lawyer Reviews
Google reviews can be a very powerful tool for all businesses, including lawyers and law firms. Online reviews are utilized by businesses in order to build their reputation online and to boost their credibility.
When potential clients use Google or social media to look for the best attorneys in the area (and in a specific niche), they turn to reviews to assess their options. They might look at your website for information about what you can offer and reading reviews from previous clients can give them the reassurance that they have found a trusted and reliable attorney or law firm.
Google and other search engines provide a convenient avenue for them to look for online reviews. It is an important step that prospective clients take before hiring an attorney. This way, they know what to expect when they hire an attorney for a job. Reading online reviews is similar to getting a referral from your friends or family. Reading about the experience of others provides them an insight into your expertise and what it is like to work with your law firm.
So, how do you leverage the power of Google reviews for lawyers and law firms?
Here are some of the ways that you can capitalize on Google reviews for law firms so you can boost your marketing efforts online.
- Get more reviews. If you have your law firm listed on Google but you have no reviews to show for it, this can be bad for your law firm. When people search online and they see your listing without any reviews, it can give them a bad impression about your firm – that you’re either a fraud or inexperienced. Focus on getting reviews first so you can optimize your ability to boost your online reputation.
- Share your Google reviews to other platforms. If you received a positive review from a client, let more prospective clients know about it. Seeing these reviews will give them more confidence about working with your firm.
- Respond to your positive reviews. Show your genuine and honest appreciation for the clients who have written positive things about your firm. Use it as an opportunity to establish a relationship with them.
Tips to Get Google Reviews for Lawyers
The more online reviews you get, the better it is to help improve your stock online. The next question that lawyers and law firms might ask is this: how do I get more reviews online?
The first tip is to collect reviews from former clients. If you’ve completed legal work for a client, you can send them a note or an email asking for a review. There is an art to asking for reviews from your clients and if possible, do this with someone whom you’ve worked with for a long time. You can even share the link to your Google My Business (GMB) listing when asking for a review to make the process that much easier.
Try to seek as many reviews across various platforms whenever possible. You should strive to get reviews on your Google business listing, on Facebook, or other social media. If you provide exceptional service to your clients, then asking them for reviews should not be an issue – some will even volunteer to write you a review.
In your effort to get more reviews for your firm online, never ever pay someone to write it for you. You should not ask your employees to write a review either. You want to keep the reviews authentic and real. Paying for reviews is against Google’s policy and it can create a negative reputation for your practice. The risk is simply not worth the potential gain for this strategy.
Managing Reputation Online for Law Firms
Once you start seeing reviews come in for your firm on Google, you need to monitor them. Google reviews carry a lot of weight on the clients’ part because they use it as a tool to assess the reputation of a law firm. Google is also well aware of the impact the reviews have towards the decision of clients to hire an attorney or law firm.
Even if you strive to deliver the best quality service to your clients, not all experiences are positive. If you find yourself at the receiving end of a negative review, don’t despair. Sure, negative reviews can lower your overall rating on Google. But look at it as an opportunity to identify areas that need improvement.
In fact, getting a few negative reviews (as long as the issues are minor and isolated) can actually help ensure the authenticity of your positive reviews. But you can’t just leave negative reviews be – you have to do something about it.
Here are some of the steps that you need to do when you get negative reviews to help manage your online reputation:
- Respond to negative reviews. The worst thing you can do is to ignore negative reviews and act like they don’t exist.
- When you respond to a negative review, address the issue. What was the problem? Why did they feel negatively about the service? Express sincerity in your effort to rectify the problem and use this as a learning opportunity so you can improve your service.
- Drown bad reviews. As mentioned above, you can’t expect to have positive reviews all the time. Make sure you drown these negative reviews with an overwhelming amount of positive reviews about your law firm.
In Summary
The best and most proven way to get more clients for your law firm is to offer exceptional service. This is also the secret to getting positive Google lawyer reviews that can boost your reputation online. The more positive reviews you can get, the higher the rating on Google. In fact, it can be a crucial factor to help you rank higher in organic search results.
